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Bloomberg
14 hours ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
BOE's Breeden Believes UK Labor Market Loosening: Sunday Times
Bank of England's Sarah Breeden believes the UK labor market is loosening, while she sees 'waves of disinflation' continuing, according to an interview the central bank deputy governor for financial stability gave to Sunday Times. Breeden said workers' ability to ask for higher wages and companies' capacity to pay more by increasing prices are both decreasing, the newspaper reported.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The labor market is worse than than it appears: Chart of the Week
A string of jobs reports has told a similar story for months now, if you look at the headline numbers. It's a simple narrative: The labor market has cooled significantly over the past several years, but remains overall resilient from a broader slowdown. By subscribing, you are agreeing to Yahoo's Terms and Privacy Policy Next week, the May jobs report is expected to bring more of the same headlines, as it's anticipated to show the US labor market added 130,000 jobs with the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.2%. More resiliency. But the story of job hunting in America has been far more bifurcated, masked by these broad figures. Behind the solid headline numbers is a hiring rate hovering near a decade low. So too is the rate at which Americans are quitting their jobs. As Fed Chair Jerome Powell put it on Jan 29, "It's a low hiring environment. So if you have a job, it's all good. But if you have to find a job, [the] hiring rates have come down." It's yet another tale of two economies, and one that's hammering a specific group: recent college grads. With the labor market stuck in neutral, the millions of students who walked off the campus quad for the final time this month are facing a challenging situation. The three-month moving average of the unemployment rate for recent graduates aged 22 to 27 currently sits at roughly 5.3%, well above the national average of 4.2%, per Oxford Economics. As our Chart of the Week shows, this is a historic anomaly. "It's a first sign of hitting a point where the labor market is at kind of a breaking point," Indeed economist Cory Stahle told Yahoo Finance. "Things overall are still solid, but the fact that we're seeing pockets like these younger workers starting to get hit harder is clearly very concerning." The story of these workers, why they aren't finding jobs, and whether or not they eventually will is at the crux of the current US labor market conundrum. "Right now, we're on a trend where we're facing a lot of headwinds," Stahle said. "The labor market is strong, but my prediction right now is some of these headwinds are going to start catching up to us." Big Tech's "efficiency" push has been a key driver of the recent graduate job-hunting slump. Recent research from Apollo Global Management's chief economist Torsten Sløk shows that employment in the Magnificent Seven tech cohort had increased at 13% or higher from 2011 to 2021. In the past three years, employment gains for the group were only around 3% in any given year. And these are the big, wealthy companies that are still growing and driving S&P 500 earnings. (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance is owned by Apollo Global Management.) This means fewer tech job openings for a generation of college students who have been increasingly majoring in areas like computer science. Job postings on Indeed's platform for software development jobs are down about 40% from February 2020, per Stahle. A far cry from the "learn to code" era. Add in that the broader labor market had already been cooling, many expect President Trump's tariffs to weigh on economic growth, and artificial intelligence is beginning to fill entry-level positions, and Oxford Economics US senior economist Matthew Martin described a "perfect storm" that's keeping college grads on the labor market sidelines. "There's just such a smaller pool of jobs to actually compete for, which means a lot of these recent grads are unfortunately staying unemployed as soon as they enter the labor force," Martin told Yahoo Finance. Martin added that the data isn't large enough to ominously change his economic forecast. But it is one of the dynamics under the surface that has economists predicting the likely path for the unemployment rate from here isn't lower. Josh Schafer is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X @_joshschafer. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
New York Times
2 days ago
- Business
- New York Times
Don't Call It a Side Hustle. These Americans Are ‘Polyworking.'
For a growing number of Americans, juggling more than one job, or 'polyworking,' has become just another day at the office. The number of people with multiple full- or part-time jobs climbed to over 8.9 million in March for the first time since 1994, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the phenomenon, before ticking down slightly in April. As a practice, it's not so new. Think 'moonlighting.' But as a term, polyworking (and the similar 'polyemployment') is more recent. It began cropping up in human resources research and in traditional and social media after the Covid-19 pandemic as an upbeat spin on millennial workers' reputation for taking on side hustles, trying to monetize hobbies and eschewing 9-to-5 work. How it's pronounced 'It's a way to take back ownership of work and one's career in a meaningful way, pushing back against the sense that you are identified by one job, one employer,' said Erin Hatton, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo who studies the labor market. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Forbes
3 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Generative AI Is Already Coming For Women's Office Jobs
John Mcaslan And Partners London Office, 79 William Road, London, Nw1, United Kingdom, Architect: ... More John Mcaslan And Partners, 2009, London Office, John Mcaslan And Partners, London, Uk, 2009, Interior Shot Of People Working At Desks In The Open Plan Office (Photo by View Pictures/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) As the economy holds its breath to see what the impact of new economic policies in the current administration, some sectors of the labor market are already facing changes from rapidly increasing technological integration. The advent of ChatGPT and other generative AI has the potential to shift not what jobs grow and shrink, but also how tasks are done within jobs. As consumers, many have experienced the frustrating chat bots instead of customer service, and as teachers, parents, or students, we've seen how these tools can help or harm education. And as workers, we are forced to face how generative AI can adopt different functions of our jobs for better or worse. Aneesh Raman of LinkedIn recently wrote in The New York Times that the adoption of AI is already having impacts on the early career trajectories of young workers entering the labor market after college. Another group of workers appears to already being hit by the adoption of new technologies: women office workers. Recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statisticsreleased last week are shedding light on those early changes and how segregation in the labor market will shape winners and losers. For over one year, there have been striking changes to the Professional and Business Services industry, which includes legal services, accounting, office administration, clerical work, and lots of other jobs that support the operations of companies. Every single month, women's employment has declined in this supersector, while men's employment has fluctuated month-to-month but grown year-over-year. Since April 2024, women have lost a total of 165,000 jobs in this sector while men have gained 134,000 jobs. Change in payroll numbers by industry by gender, April 2024 to April 2025. Some of this stark disparity is explained by which jobs are more likely to be done by women and which are more likely to be done by men even within the same industries. For example, design services, like graphic designers, decreased by 1.2% in April, and women are a slight majority at 59%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is predicting a shrinking of all office and administrative support positions over the next decade. Seventy percent of these jobs are done by women. As women's jobs are displaced, there could be long-term risks to their careers since women are less likely to be reemployed when displaced compared to men. But this is not all a foregone conclusion for women looking into the future of work, or even in the nearer-future of a downturn. Generative AI also has the potential to improve jobs where women have also dominated and where supportive tools provided by these technologies can improve the services provided. For example, in education, teachers can get support with generating lesson plans and exams, giving them time to focus on direct instruction with students. In healthcare, artificial intelligence tools can streamline the management of care that is provided by teams. As my colleague Afet Dundar at the Institute for Women's Policy Research has noted in our In The Lead blog, the potential of generative AI relies on giving people the skills to work productively with AI rather than being replaced by it. And focusing on the industries that can be improved by technological integration, like education and healthcare, gives women opportunities to balance recent losses in other sectors. Women have gained 645,000 jobs in the Education and Health Services industry over the same period. Following the job statistics published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics each month can guide policymakers as well as industry leaders to make sure these employment shifts can benefit us all through better, upskilled jobs providing better services across society.
Bloomberg
5 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Gold Edges Higher After Loss With US Data, Trade Talks in Focus
Gold edged higher after a two-day decline, as the market remained in wait-and-see mode in spite of data showing improving economic sentiment and signs of progress in trade talks. Bullion traded near $3,309 an ounce — following a 1.3% loss on Tuesday — as US consumer confidence rebounded sharply in May from near a five-year low, signaling a more positive outlook for the economy and labor market. The dollar rose after the print, making gold more expensive for most buyers.
