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Solid US hiring lowers unemployment rate in latest sign of a still-sturdy job market

File - Mechanic David Stoliaruk works on the engine of a car at IC Auto in Philadelphia, May 2, 2023. On Friday, the U.S. government issues its November jobs report. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

File - Mechanic David Stoliaruk works on the engine of a car at IC Auto in Philadelphia, May 2, 2023. On Friday, the U.S. government issues its November jobs report. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

File - Nicole Lipa prepares a drink at a Starbucks location, June 28, 2023, in Seattle. On Friday, the U.S. government issues its November jobs report. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson, File)

Workers apply sheathing to the exterior of a new multifamily residential building, Friday, Nov. 3, 2023, in the East Boston neighborhood of Boston. On Friday, the U.S. government issues its November jobs report. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

File - Social worker Lupita Armijo-Garcia works at her desk in the Ottawa County, Mich., Department of Public Health office, Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2023, in Holland, Mich. On Friday, the U.S. government issues its November jobs report. (AP Photo/Kristen Norman, File)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. employers added a healthy 199,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell , fresh signs that the economy could achieve an elusive “soft landing,” in which inflation would return to the Federal Reserve’s 2% target without causing a steep recession.

Friday’s report from the Labor Department showed that the unemployment rate dropped from 3.9% to 3.7%, not far above a five-decade low of 3.4% in April. The jobless rate has now remained below 4% for nearly two years, the longest such streak since the late 1960s.

Last month’s job gain was inflated by the return of about 40,000 formerly striking auto workers and actors, who were not at work in October but were back on the job in November.

The latest jobs report and other recent data portray an economy and a labor market that, while still sturdy, are downshifting back to pre-pandemic norms. Businesses are hiring but are less desperate to fill huge numbers of jobs . More Americans have come off the sidelines to look for work, and immigration has jumped this year.

As a result, employers are finding it easier to hire, with fewer complaints of worker shortages and less pressure to aggressively raise pay, which can fuel inflation.

FILE - A customer browses televisions at a Best Buy store on Black Friday, Friday, Nov. 24, 2023, in Charlotte, N.C. Inflation gradually loosened its grip on Wall Street and the economy in 2023, raising hopes for a gentler Federal Reserve and solid gains for the market next year. (AP Photo/Erik Verduzco, File)

“What we wanted was a strong but moderating labor market, and that’s what we saw in the November report,” said Robert Frick, an economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union.

A cooling job market is also just what the Fed was hoping to achieve as it sought to slow the economy and inflation with its rapid interest rate hikes in the past year and a half. Hiring has averaged just over 200,000 a month in the past three months, down from an average of about 320,000 in the same period last year.

And most of last month’s job gains were concentrated in just a few sectors. The health care industry — doctors’ offices and hospitals — added 93,000 jobs in November. Hotels and restaurants added 40,000, and governments 49,000, accounting for nearly all the job growth. By contrast, retailers, shipping and warehousing companies, and temporary help agencies all cut jobs.

Still, last month’s hiring gain raised the proportion of Americans who are employed to 60.5%, the highest level since the pandemic struck, though it remains below the pre-COVID level of 61.1%.

In the meantime, wages are growing at a slower but still-healthy pace. In November, average hourly pay rose 4% from a year earlier, matching the previous month’s figure, which was the smallest since June 2021. Still, average pay is now growing faster than inflation, which should support consumer spending.

And layoffs remain low, according to government data, despite job cuts at such companies as Panera Bread, a restaurant chain , and Spotify , the music streaming platform, which cited higher interest rates as a reason it had to cut about 1,500 jobs globally.

Becky Frankiewicz, president of the staffing giant Manpower Group North America, said more employers are moving workers they may not need in one part of the company to another division rather than laying them off. Many companies still recall the difficulty they had finding workers during the pandemic and want to hold onto staff.

“Everything we see continues to point to a slow glide into a cooler labor market,” she said.

Aaron Seyedian, owner of a small cleaning company based in Takoma Park, Maryland, says his business is still growing and hiring. He has enough demand to add five workers to his 30-person staff.

Seyedian’s company, “Well-Paid Maids,” has just raised its starting pay from $23 to $24 an hour. He said he hasn’t had any trouble finding people to hire.

“From my perspective,” Seyedian said, “the economy is still strong, and people still want to spend money.”

For the Fed, Friday’s jobs report won’t likely alter the near-certainty that it will keep interest rates unchanged for the third straight time when it meets next week. The central bank has raised its key rate 11 times since March 2022, from near zero to roughly 5.4%. The result has been much more expensive mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and business borrowing.

Most economists and Wall Street traders think the Fed’s next move will be to cut rates, though the strength in Friday’s jobs report could lead the central bank to keep rates at a peak for a longer period. Before the jobs report, Wall Street traders foresaw a 55% likelihood that the Fed would cut rates at its March meeting, according to the CME FedWatch , tool. Now, they don’t expect the first cut until May.

Guy Berger, former principal economist at the career website LinkedIn, said the job market’s resilience means the Fed can keep rates high to fight inflation without worrying so much about triggering a recession.

“If we’re not cooling, what’s the rush?” to cut rates, Berger said.

Many of the most recent economic figures have pointed toward a potential soft landing. Companies are advertising fewer job openings , and Americans are switching jobs less often than they did a year ago, trends that typically slow wage growth and inflation pressures.

Most economists expect growth to slow and inflation will continue to decline. The economy is expected to expand at just a 1.5% annual rate in the final three months of this year, down from a scorching 5.2% pace in the July-September quarter . Cooler growth should help bring down inflation while still supporting a modest pace of hiring.

Inflation has tumbled from a peak of 9.1% in June 2022 to just 3.2% last month . And according to a different inflation measure that the Fed prefers, prices rose at just a 2.5% annual rate in the past six months — not far above the central bank’s 2% target.

Christopher Waller, a key Fed official who typically favors higher rates, buoyed the markets’ expectations last week for rate hikes when he suggested that if inflation kept falling, the Fed could cut rates as early as spring.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell, though, pushed back against such speculation last Friday , when he said it was “premature to conclude” that the Fed has raised its benchmark rate high enough to quell inflation. And it was too soon, he added, to “speculate” about when the Fed might cut rates.

But Powell also said interest rates are “well into” restrictive territory, meaning that they’re clearly constraining growth. Many analysts took that remark as a signal that the Fed is done raising rates.

recent jobs report

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recent jobs report

Key takeaways

  • The Bureau of Statistics (BLS) reported that the U.S. economy added 353,000 jobs in January 2024, well ahead of expectations and outpacing 2023’s average monthly gains of 255,000.
  • The data also included upward revisions to the jobs gained in November and December.
  • Jobs growth spread across diverse industries, with solid gains in areas like health care, education, manufacturing and retail speaking to broader economic resilience.
  • While the blockbuster report raised questions about the timing of interest rate cuts, Federal Reserve (Fed) Chair Jerome Powell suggested that policymakers are not overly concerned about persistent labor market strength provided inflation continues to moderate.

Contributors

Luke Conway

Senior Associate, J.P. Morgan Wealth Management

Surprisingly strong start to 2024

The U.S. labor market added 353,000 jobs in January 2024, nearly doubling economists’ forecasts and topping December 2023’s upwardly revised gains of 333,000. 1 The upside surprise in jobs gains at the onset of the year may be tied to adjustments made to account for seasonal factors.

Elyse Ausenbaugh, Global Investment Strategist at J.P. Morgan Wealth Management, noted the unexpected performance and strong wage growth.

“The January jobs report blew expectations out of the water with payroll adds of 353k (vs. expectations of 185k), big positive revisions to prior months’ data and strong wage growth,” said Ausenbaugh.

Even so, the upswing in hiring in January suggests that the labor market remains remarkably resilient despite the impact of higher interest rates. The blowout jobs gains could be a key data point as the Federal Reserve ponders the right time to begin rate cuts.

The market’s reaction seen in yields and equities seemed to reflect the unexpected move.

“The knee-jerk market reaction of Treasury yields jumping higher and equity market futures paring their gains suggested investors might think that the labor market remains too hot for comfort,” said Ausenbaugh. “The surge in average hourly earnings growth from 4.1% to 4.5% could stoke concerns about a resurgence in demand-driven inflation, but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions that this payrolls report is a bad thing for the outlook.”

The latest data included upward revisions to the labor market growth recorded in the previous two months, increasing jobs gains for November and December a combined 126,000 above previously reported levels. Following these revisions, payroll growth averaged 255,000 per month in 2023, placing January’s gains well above the growth reported in the prior year. 2

The unemployment rate held steady at 3.7% – the third consecutive month that it has come in at that level. The labor force participation rate also remained stable in January at 62.5%, while the employment-population ratio was little changed at 60.2%. 3

Wage growth ticked higher in January, as average hourly earnings jumped 0.6%, outpacing the 0.4% monthly gains reported in November and December. Including January’s gains, wages have increased 4.5% over the past 12 months. 4

Persistent wage growth could indicate continued inflationary pressures, as increased labor costs may be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. This is one area that policymakers might be watching as the Fed mulls the path forward on monetary policy.

“A low unemployment rate and strong job gains are welcome news given that households fuel roughly 70% of U.S. GDP,” said Ausenbaugh. “As for the transmission to inflation, a decline in average weekly hours worked offsets the surge in average hourly earnings growth – you can multiply the two to get average weekly earnings, which grew at a much more modest 2.97% year-over-year (down from 4.01% last month).”

Industry breakdown

Payroll gains in January were distributed across many areas of the economy. Professional and business services led the way, with 74,000 jobs added in January marking a sharp increase over the monthly average gains of 14,000 reported in 2023. Health care job additions of 70,000 also outpaced the last year’s average gains of 58,000 per month. 5

Perhaps more notably, several industries where payroll growth was subdued in 2023 saw significant additions in the first month of the new year. This included retail trade, which added 45,000 jobs in January after showing little net growth since the early part of last year. 6

While gains in retail could relate to seasonal factors, manufacturing payrolls also grew by 25,000 in January after limited net gains in 2023. 7

Employment in the information industry also ticked higher, with 15,000 jobs added in January. This includes an additional 12,000 jobs in the motion picture and sound recording, an area that continues to recover following the resolution of labor disputes last year. 8

The fact that labor market growth was diffuse – not just confined to typical areas like health care and government but extending to industries like manufacturing and information – speaks to broader strength in the economy.

A few other sectors, including construction along with leisure and hospitality, saw only minimal changes in employment in January. Meanwhile, the mining, quarrying, and oil and gas sector shed 5,000 jobs, with losses concentrated in support activities for mining. 9

Rate implications

January’s surprisingly strong employment data came fresh on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s latest decision to maintain benchmark interest rates at the current range of 5.25% to 5.5%. 10 This marked the fourth straight meeting that the central bank has opted to hold rates steady following an aggressive series of hikes between March 2022 and July 2023 aimed at staunching inflation. 11

With it appearing likely that rates have reached their peak for this hiking cycle, markets have focused their attention on the potential for rate cuts in 2024. Policymakers often turn to labor market data as an indicator of economic strength and the impact that higher rates are having on economic activity. From this perspective, the unexpectedly high pace of hiring in January could weigh on the central bank’s decision on when to adopt a less restrictive monetary stance.

The Fed’s statement said that it “does not expect it will be appropriate to reduce the target range until it has gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2%.” 12 In other words, Fed officials are seeking confirmational evidence showing the durability of recent declines in inflation before they begin to lower interest rates.

Along these lines, Fed Chair Jerome Powell insisted during his post-meeting press conference that the central bank would be “data-dependent” as policymakers watch for continuing signs that inflation has been successfully subdued. 13

“Let’s not forget the message from the Fed earlier this week,” said Ausenbaugh. “A weaker labor market is not a prerequisite for rate cuts; they just need to see inflation continue to come down. Other pieces of recent data – from the latest Employment Cost Index showing its lowest year-over-year change since 2021 and the Core PCE inflation gauge running at a 1.9% annualized pace over the past six months – suggest that we’re trending in that direction.”

The expectation-shattering January jobs print may not fit the bill for confirming a sustained triumph over inflation, but, as Ausenbaugh notes, Powell did suggest that a slowdown in growth and weakness in the labor market may not be an inevitable part of the story moving forward.

“I think, at this point, we want to see strong growth. We want to see a strong labor market. We're not looking for a weaker labor market,” Powell explained. “We're looking for inflation to continue to come down, as it has been coming down for the last six months.” 14

Based on these comments, the strong jobs data may not deter the Fed from launching the widely anticipated easing cycle later this year. However, it remains to be seen how the resilient labor market could weigh on the timing and extent of potential rate cuts.

“All in all, we think this spells good news for the prospects of a soft landing in the U.S.,” noted Ausenbaugh. “Rate cuts are coming in 2024, perhaps just a few months later than the market was expecting.”

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “The Employment Situation—January 2024.”

Federal Reserve. “Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement.”

Federal Reserve. “Open Market Operations.”

Federal Reserve. “Transcript of Chair Powell’s Press Conference, January 31, 2024.”

recent jobs report

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What will Fed chair say about interest rates? Key economy news you need to know this week.

recent jobs report

For months, stock markets have been buoyed by hopes that slowing inflation would prompt the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates sharply this year.

That wave of optimism has been tempered by some caution due to signs of stronger inflation in recent weeks. Investors and economists are still looking for the Fed to lower rates, though perhaps a bit later and less dramatically than anticipated.

Economic developments this week should help clarify what has become a cloudier 2024 outlook.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell will testify before Congress and could provide a more specific timeline for rate cuts.

And reports on job openings, service sector activity and February employment growth will shed light on whether the economy and labor market are cooling enough to help lower inflation from about 3% to the Fed’s 2% goal.

Is the crucial services sector growing faster than manufacturing?

30,000-foot-view : While factory activity has contracted for nearly 1½ years, the much larger service sector has expanded for 13 straight months. That’s largely because Americans have shifted their purchases from goods to services, such as dining out and traveling, since the pandemic has faded.

On Monday , the Institute for Supply Management is expected to announce that its service sector index showed growth again last month but at a moderately slower pace, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg.

You should care because : The service sector makes up about 80% of the economy and the Fed is hoping it continues to expand without getting so hot that it drives up prices sharply.

One thing to watch: In January, an index of prices that service companies paid for materials and services jumped to the highest level since February 2023. That likely reflected temporary disruptions at the Panama and Suez canals that have delayed shipping, says economist Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics.   

Fortunately, services prices are mostly tied to employee wage growth, which generally has been slowing, he says.

Are there more or less job opportunities?

30,000-foot-view : Since hitting a record 12 million in March 2022, job openings have trended lower but they’ve been volatile from month to month. In December, openings rose to 9 million from 8.9 million, still above the pre-pandemic average of about 7 million.

On Tuesday , the Labor Department is expected to report that openings dipped to 8.8 million, according to estimates by Nomura, an economic research firm.  And new hires and the number of people quitting jobs were likely stable at about 5.6 million and 3.4 million, respectively – at or below pre-COVID levels, Nomura says.

You should care because : Openings, hires and quits skyrocketed a couple of years ago as pandemic-related labor shortages left employers struggling to fill record vacancies and workers job-hopped for higher wages. A continued easing of that frenzy would boost confidence that pay increases, which feed into inflation, keep moderating.  

How soon will the Fed lower interest rates?

30,000-foot-view : Fed Chair Jerome Powell has said the Fed wants to see evidence of a more sustained fall in inflation toward the Fed’s 2% target and likely won't reduce its key interest rate in March. More recently, other Fed officials have said they’re in no rush to chop rates and economists have pushed back their forecasts for the first rate cut to June or later. A futures market that had projected six cuts this year has pared back its estimate to four.

In congressional testimony on Wednesday and Thursday , Powell will likely echo some Fed officials’ comments that the first rate decrease likely will come “later this year,” Capital Economics wrote in a research note. Don’t despair: The research firm still thinks that probably means mid-June. Powell is slated to testify before the House Financial Services and Senate Banking committees.

You should care because : Lower interest rates mean less expensive borrowing costs for mortgages, cars, credit cards and other loans; a stronger economy; and probably a frothier stock market.

Is the job market getting better?

30,000-foot-view : Job growth has been remarkably strong recently. Employers added 353,000 jobs in January and an average of 255,000 in 2023. That marks a slowdown from 377,000 the previous year but it’s still robust.

On Friday , the Labor Department is expected to announce that 193,000 jobs were added in February, signaling a further slowdown but another healthy gain.  

You should care because : A strong jobs report is still a very good thing but the Fed doesn’t want it to be so vigorous that it pushes up yearly wage growth and inflation. That could delay rate cuts.

Nomura says the recent pickup in payroll gains probably overstates the labor market’s health (after all, it’s based on a survey that gets revised), noting other measures reveal more restrained hiring. Average yearly wage growth jumped to 4.5% in January but that was likely skewed by bad weather that reduced employees’ hours and so pushed up their average pay, Nomura says. It expects a slowdown in pay increases for February.

The economy is roaring. Immigration is a key reason.

Momentum in the job market picked up aggressively over the past year — all while washington is deadlocked on a border deal.

A previous version of this article incorrectly described a Congressional Budget Office projection on the effects of immigration on the economy. The report said the labor force will have grown by 5.2 million people by 2033, not that it had grown by that number in 2023. This article has been corrected.

Immigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economic rebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world.

That momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. And even before that, by the middle of 2022, the foreign-born labor force had grown so fast that it closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Immigrant workers also recovered much faster than native-born workers from the pandemic’s disruptions, and many saw some of the largest wage gains in industries eager to hire. Economists and labor experts say the surge in employment was ultimately key to solving unprecedented gaps in the economy that threatened the country’s ability to recover from prolonged shutdowns.

“Immigration has not slowed. It has just been absolutely astronomical,” said Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “And that’s been instrumental. You can’t grow like this with just the native workforce. It’s not possible.”

Trump vs. Biden on immigration: 12 charts comparing U.S. border security

Yet immigration remains an intensely polarizing issue in American politics. Fresh survey data from Gallup showed Americans now cite immigration as the country’s top problem, surpassing inflation, the economy and issues with government. A record number of migrants have crossed the southern border since President Biden took office, with apprehensions topping 2 million for the second straight year in fiscal 2023, among the highest in U.S. history. Cities like New York, Chicago and Denver have struggled to keep up with busloads of immigrants sent from Texas who are overwhelming local shelters.

Washington is deadlocked on a solution to the crisis. Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats voted down a sweeping $118 billion national security package that included changes to the nation’s asylum system and a way to effectively close the border to most migrants when crossings are particularly high. House Republican leadership called the legislation “dead on arrival,” which seemed all but guaranteed after former president Donald Trump came out strongly in opposition.

recent jobs report

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Opinion polls show that voters widely disapprove of Biden’s handling of the border, and Trump, who is closing in on the Republican nomination, is touting plans for aggressive deportation policies if he wins in November. Republicans have increasingly campaigned on the idea that immigrants have hurt the economy and taken Americans’ jobs. But the economic record largely shows the opposite.

There isn’t much data on how many of the new immigrants in recent years were documented vs. undocumented. But estimates from the Pew Research Center last fall showed that undocumented immigrants made up 22 percent of the total foreign-born U.S. population in 2021. That’s down compared with previous decades: Between 2007 and 2021, the undocumented population fell by 14 percent, Pew found. Meanwhile, the legal immigrant population grew by 29 percent.

Whoever wins the election will take the helm of an economy that immigrant workers are supporting tremendously — and likely will keep powering for years to come.

Senate GOP blocks border deal; future of Ukraine, Israel aid unclear

Fresh estimates from the Congressional Budget Office this month said the U.S. labor force will have grown by 5.2 million people by 2033, thanks especially to net immigration. The economy is projected to grow by $7 trillion more over the next decade than it would have without new influxes of immigrants, according to the CBO.

Alexander Santander, 49, is among those immigrants. Santander trekked for two months with his family, including two young children, from Venezuela to the Texas border last fall to seek asylum. He said it was a “very, very traumatic” journey that involved many nights sleeping on cardboard in the jungle.

For Santander, who is on humanitarian parole as he waits for his asylum case to be processed, the decision to uproot his life in Venezuela, where he worked as an operating room nurse, was difficult but necessary, he said. His family had faced years of food shortages and, more recently, threats for protesting the government.

“Thank God we made it here,” Santander, who now works in manufacturing in Denver, said in Spanish. “We have many more opportunities and already a better quality of life.”

‘The biggest pull’

Research broadly shows that immigration has long helped the U.S. economy grow. But today’s snapshot still represents a stark turnaround from just a short time ago.

The flow of migrants to the United States started slowing during the Trump administration, when officials took hundreds of executive actions designed to restrict migration.

Then the coronavirus hit, restricting border crossings even further. Right before the pandemic, there were about 1.5 million fewer working-age immigrants in the United States than pre-2017 trends would have predicted, according to the San Francisco Fed. By the end of 2021, that shortfall had widened to about 2 million, researchers at the Global Migration Center at the University of California at Davis have shown.

But the economy overall wound up rebounding aggressively from the sudden, widespread closures of 2020, bolstered by historic government stimulus and vaccines that debuted faster than expected.

Labor market grew 353,000 in January, soaring past expectations

The sudden snapback in demand sent inflation soaring. Supply chain issues were a main reason prices rose quickly. But labor shortages posed a problem, too, and economists feared that rising wages — as employers scrambled to find workers — would keep price increases dangerously high.

That’s because the labor force that emerged as the pandemic ebbed was smaller than it had been: Millions of people retired early, stayed home to take over child care or avoid getting sick, or decided to look for new jobs entirely. In the span of a year or so, employers went from having businesses crater to sprinting to hire enough staff to keep restaurants, hotels, retail stores and construction sites going. Wages for the lowest earners rose at the fastest pace.

About the same time, the path was widening for migrants to cross the southern border, particularly as the new Biden administration rolled back Trump-era restrictions.

In normal economic times, some analysts note, new immigrants can drag down wages, especially if employers decide to hire them over native-born workers. Undocumented workers, who don’t have as much leverage to push for higher pay, could lower average wages even more.

But the past few years were extremely abnormal because companies were desperate to hire. Plus, it would be exceedingly difficult for immigration to affect the wages of enormous swaths of the labor force, said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“What it can do is lower the wages of a specific occupation in a specific area, but American workers aren’t stupid. They change jobs. They change what they specialize in,” Nowrasteh said. “So that’s part of the reason why wages don’t go down.”

Experts argue that the strength of the U.S. economy has benefited American workers and foreign-born workers alike. Each group accounts for roughly half of the labor market’s impressive year-over-year growth since January 2023, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis that used three-month rolling averages in labor force participation to account for data volatility.

Who has authority on the border? Biden or Congress? We took your questions.

Particularly for immigrants fleeing poorer countries, the booming U.S. job market and the promise of higher wages continue to be an enormous draw.

“More than any immigration policy per se, the biggest pull for migrants is the strength of the labor market,” said Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, an economics professor at the University of California at Merced. “More than any enforcement policy, any immigration policy, at the end of the day.”

‘A much better job’

Upon arriving in Denver in October, Santander hadn’t acquired a work permit but needed to feed his small children. Even without authorization, he found a job as a roofer for a contractor that ultimately pocketed his earnings, then one cleaning industrial refrigerators on the overnight shift for $12 an hour. Since receiving his work permit in January, Santander has started “a much better job” at a wood accessories manufacturer making $20 an hour.

But for the vast majority of migrants who arrive in the United States without prior approval, including asylum seekers and those who come for economic reasons, getting a work permit isn’t easy.

Federal law requires migrants to wait nearly six months to receive a work permit after filing for asylum. Wait times can stretch for additional months because of a backlog in cases. While they wait, many migrants find off-the-books work as day laborers or street vendors, advocates say. Others get jobs using falsified documents, including many teenagers who came into the country as unaccompanied minors.

How a teen’s job violated child labor laws

Still, many migrants miss the year-long window to apply for asylum — a process that can cost thousands of dollars — leaving them with few pathways to work authorization, advocates say. Those who can’t apply for asylum often end up working without official permission in low-wage industries where they are susceptible to exploitation.

That includes many of the migrants coming to the United States to escape economic hardship, which alone does not qualify as a valid reason to seek asylum or qualify for a work permit.

One such worker — who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal due to his immigration status — said he left his remote village in Mexico in 2022 because he had no hope of ever being able to afford to build a house with his income as a civil servant.

He said it was easy to find his current job in Chicago — scouring a tortilla factory on the overnight shift for $16.75 an hour. But the city is vast and hard to navigate without a car, he said.

“My dream is to save enough money to build a house on my land in Mexico to return to,” he said in Spanish. “Then if for some reason I get deported to Mexico, at least I’ll have somewhere that’s mine to live.”

In Dalton, Ga. — known as the “Carpet Capital of the World” — Jan Pourquoi said the entire economy would collapse without immigrant workers. Pourquoi owns a rug company with a warehouse near the city’s railroad tracks and pays $11 an hour for jobs like cutting and sewing door and bathroom mats. He said that he doesn’t question anyone’s paperwork, and that he knows workers will reliably line up at his door looking for openings every morning.

Pourquoi emigrated from Belgium 37 years ago and said he understands his workers’ desire for more job security. But he also said that more needs to be done to stop the flow of immigration at the southern border, and that the government is responsible for opening pathways to citizenship that would make economic security more certain. As for his business, if stricter immigration policies slashed his workforce and he had to raise wages to $15 an hour, he wouldn’t be able to compete against foreign firms with cheaper wholesale prices.

“If I was a poor Mexican, I would be the first one to cross the Rio Grande illegally myself,” he said. “I don’t blame these people. I blame our politicians and our government for letting it happen.”

Nick Miroff contributed to this report.

recent jobs report

January Jobs Report U.S. Job Growth Surges

The labor market added 353,000 jobs in January, far more than expected, in a sign that economic growth remains vigorous.

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Monthly change in jobs

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+353,000 jobs

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+400,000 jobs

Jan. ’23

Jan. ’24

Lydia DePillis

Lydia DePillis

Job market starts 2024 with a bang.

The United States produced an unexpectedly sizable batch of jobs last month, a boon for American workers that shows the labor market retains remarkable strength after three years of expansion.

Employers added 353,000 jobs in January on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7 percent.

The report also put an even shinier gloss on job growth for 2023, including revisions that added more than 100,000 to the figure previously tallied for December. All told, employers added 3.1 million jobs last year, more than the 2.7 million initially reported.

After the loss of 14 percent of the nation’s jobs early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the labor market’s endurance despite aggressive interest rate increases has caught economists off guard.

“I think everyone is surprised at the strength,” said Sara Rutledge, an independent economics consultant. “It’s almost like a ‘pinch me’ scenario.”

Ms. Rutledge helped tabulate the National Association for Business Economics’ latest member survey , which found rising optimism that the country would avoid a recession — matching a turnaround in measures of consumer sentiment as inflation has eased.

January’s crop of added jobs, nearly twice what forecasters had expected, mirrors the similarly surprising strength in gross domestic product measurements for the fourth quarter of 2023. It is also likely to reinforce the Federal Reserve’s patient approach on interest rates, given the risk that increased wages might push prices up faster.

Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, signaled this week that rate cuts would not begin until at least May, citing a desire to see more evidence that inflation is falling back to its target.

Unemployment has been under 4 percent for 24 months

Unemployment rate

recent jobs report

The latest job data prompted a victory lap from Biden administration officials , who highlighted an unemployment rate only a few ticks above a 70-year low.

“The fact that that’s been below 4 percent for two years running now is just a very clear and reliable signal that this is not just a tight labor market, but a reliably and persistently tight labor market,” said Jared Bernstein, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

January’s gains were also broader than has been the case in other recent reports: Professional and business services accelerated to pile on 74,000 jobs, while health care added 70,000. The only major sector to cut workers was mining and logging.

Average hourly earnings also grew swiftly, at 0.6 percent from December.

Still, analysts cautioned against reading too much into the month’s overall gain, given recent volatility in initial survey estimates. Last January, for example, was much stronger than the full-year average. And the latest report contains a few oddities, as well.

The survey window was interrupted by bone-chilling cold and snowstorms, possibly shortening the workweek and raising hourly wages. Also, the addition of so many relatively well-paid white-collar workers may have pulled up the average. Hotels and restaurants, where pay is lower, shed a few thousand jobs.

Agron Nicaj, a U.S. economist at the banking and financial services firm MUFG, noted that job postings had been elevated in professional and business services for the past few months. That may mean January’s surge will be short-lived, especially given the latest report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas that found layoff announcements surged last month after a quiet quarter.

“I wouldn’t expect a reacceleration because of the relationship with the industries that grew this month and the openings,” Mr. Nicaj said. “I think this month reflects a refilling of jobs that they couldn’t fill.”

Year-over-year percentage change in earnings vs. inflation

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AVG. HOURLY

PRICE INDEX

recent jobs report

And yet it’s clear that the new year dawned on what has been an exceptionally good economy for many workers. Wages have been growing faster than their historical rates, and a strong increase in productivity over the last three quarters has helped keep those fatter paychecks from fueling higher prices. The number of open jobs still exceeds the stock of people looking for positions, even as new immigrants and women have joined or rejoined the work force in unexpected numbers.

That trend may continue if higher wages keep bringing people off the sidelines. The number of people not in the labor force who want a job has surged in recent months , to 5.8 million, suggesting that they could jump back in if pay outweighed the cost of child care or a long commute.

Over the past year, most gains have been powered by sectors that either took longer to recover from the pandemic — including hospitality and local governments — or have outsize momentum because of structural factors, such as aging demographics and pent-up demand for housing. Construction firms have kept hiring even in the face of high interest rates, because homeowners with low-rate mortgages are generally staying put, leaving new homes as the only option for would-be buyers .

The education and health sector leads in job gains

Change in jobs in January 2024, by sector

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Education and health

Manufacturing

Leisure and

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Other categories that experienced supersize growth during 2021 and 2022, including transportation, warehousing and information technology, have been falling back to their prepandemic trends. Another handful of sectors, such as retail, have been largely flat.

One of those who jumped from a shrinking sector into a more stable one is Galvin Moore, 33, who worked in information technology for a freight broker until last fall, when he noticed the trucking sector contracting around him.

“It’s not just job security — it’s also the fear that you own career growth becomes limited by the industry,” said Mr. Moore, who is married with three children in a Houston suburb. He left for a position at an oil and gas services firm that is moving into technologies like geothermal energy and carbon capture. “They’re in growth mode, too,” Mr. Moore added, “It’s just a different phase of the cycle.”

The new gig also came with a 40 percent pay increase, which has allowed him to start paying down debt and think about buying a new house. “It’s like night and day,” Mr. Moore said.

Despite the prominent announcements of layoffs at companies like UPS , Google and Microsoft , most employers have been loath to part with workers, worried about being short-staffed if business picks up again. Although the share of workers quitting their jobs has fallen back to normal levels after a surge in 2022, Americans seem comfortable enough with their financial futures to keep spending money.

That has led to splurges on services like travel agencies, which saw their revenues sink almost to zero during the worst of the pandemic. While still a few thousand employees shy of 2019 levels, the American Society of Travel Advisors says the Bureau of Labor Statistics data does not reflect a surge of workers who have joined the industry as independent contractors, often working part time to supplement other jobs.

Kareem George, who runs a 10-person agency near Detroit that designs custom vacations, said his bookings were 20 percent above 2019 levels, with clients increasingly asking for luxury experiences like high-end dinners and private tours.

“I think there’s more confidence that they can plan longer term,” said Mr. George, who expects to hire two more people in the year ahead. “So they’re not thinking so much of, ‘I deserve it, I need to do it now,’ but also ‘I can also think about next year and the year after.’”

In the coming months, economists had expected the labor market to become more like its prepandemic self, without the giant job growth that followed the pandemic lockdowns. The latest numbers may call that assessment into question.

Even manufacturing, which has been in a mild recession for about a year, added 23,000 positions. That reflects optimism in the latest purchasing managers index for manufacturing , which jumped unexpectedly last month. Timothy Fiore, the chair of the Institute for Supply Management committee that oversees the survey, said it seemed like the beginning of a turnaround, even if a slow one.

“Now we’re starting to gain altitude,” Mr. Fiore said. “It’s not a fighter pilot gain; it’s a cargo plane gain.”

Jim Tankersley contributed reporting.

J. Edward Moreno

J. Edward Moreno

United Parcel Service joined a slew of tech companies in announcing that it would be reducing its headcount this year. The company said on Tuesday that it would cut 12,000 jobs in an effort to slash costs as wages rise and its package volumes fall.

Transportation and warehousing companies and tech firms went on hiring sprees during the pandemic, but explosion of e-commerce has slowed.“Both industries are also laying off workers now as they realize that some of those pandemic trends didn’t end up playing out how they thought they would,” said Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor.

Joe Rennison

Joe Rennison

Stocks are clinging on to gains, with the S&P 500 up 0.3 percent, after the much hotter-than-expected jobs numbers. Some investors worry that the data will prolong an environment of high interest rates, with the two-year Treasury yield, which is sensitive to interest rate expectations, moving sharply higher.

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The closely watched University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment released this morning rose in January to the highest point since July 2021, suggesting consumers have an increasingly rosy outlook on the economy. The survey also showed that consumer expectations that inflation would continue are easing.

Jim Tankersley

Jim Tankersley

President Biden, quite predictably, celebrated the banner report. “America’s economy is the strongest in the world. Today, we saw more proof,” he said in a statement.

Mr. Biden also continued to acknowledge more work to be done on bringing down costs for consumers, which remains a huge concern for voters.

Jeanna Smialek

Jeanna Smialek

Economists expected a hiring slowdown. So much for that.

Job gains remain rapid, unemployment is near a historic low and wage gains are robust nearly two years into the Federal Reserve’s campaign to cool the economy with higher interest rates — an outcome that has surprised policymakers and economic forecasters alike.

At this time last year, Fed officials were predicting that unemployment would have spiked to 4.6 percent by now. Instead, it stands at 3.7 percent.

Central bankers have for months said that they were hearing anecdotal evidence that the job market had begun to slow down: The Fed’s recent Beige Book summaries of anecdotal reports from around the country have suggested that hiring was slight or even flat in parts of the country. But while hiring cooled somewhat last year, no big fissures have shown through to the actual data.

In fact, there are signs that the labor market is still very solid — something Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, acknowledged this week.

“We’ve had a very strong labor market, and we’ve had inflation coming down,” Mr. Powell said. “So I think whereas a year ago, we were thinking that we needed to see some softening in the economy, that hasn’t been the case. We look at stronger growth — we don’t look at it as a problem.”

Mr. Powell and his colleagues have suggested that the labor market has come back into balance as the supply of workers has recovered, something that has been helped along by a rebound in immigration and a recent jump in labor force participation. The number of job openings in the economy has slowly nudged down.

But few if any economists expected job gains to remain this robust at a time when higher interest rates were expected to meaningfully weigh down the economy. In fact, many forecasters were predicting an outright recession early last year.

The question for the Fed is what it means if the job market not only fails to slow down as anticipated, but actually accelerates again. While one month of data does not make a trend, officials are likely to keep an eye on strong hiring and wage growth.

Mr. Powell said this week that robust growth in and of itself would not worry the Fed — or necessarily prevent them from lowering interest rates this year — so long as inflation continued to come down. But central bankers could become more wary if solid wage gains and a booming economy help to keep consumers spending so much that it gives companies the wherewithal to keep raising prices.

“If there was a real concern that we were getting a re-acceleration, it might get them to pause a little bit,” said Kathy Bostjancic, the chief economist at Nationwide. But for now, “they’re more apt now to respond to a weakening in the labor market than to continued strength.”

Talmon Joseph Smith

Talmon Joseph Smith

Team Biden and its allies, unsurprisingly, are thrilled with this report, as President Biden enters a challenging election year. Bharat Ramamurti, a key economic adviser, and the former deputy director for the National Economic Council, texted this: “Spectacular report across the board. Huge beat in jobs, wages rising robustly, prime-age employment growing. It’s the Energizer Bunny economy.”

This jobs report also shows that the recent good news on productivity may keep coming. Average wages rose more than expected, but the average workweek shrank a bit too. That gives a hint that employers may be finding ways to “do more with less.” That’s not ideal for people who want to work overtime hours. But it does tend to drive productivity — which is generally measured as total output in the economy per hour worked by the labor force.

Ben Casselman

Ben Casselman

Revisions show even stronger job growth in 2023 than first reported.

Job growth was strong in 2023. Revised data makes it look even stronger.

The Labor Department on Friday said that employers added 3.1 million jobs last year, more than the 2.7 million initially reported last month. That makes 2023 the best year for job growth since 1999 — not counting the previous two years, when the labor market was still emerging from its pandemic hole.

The revisions were part of an annual process in which monthly estimates are reconciled with data collected by state agencies that is more accurate but less timely. They don’t change the big picture: Job growth has still slowed since the peak of the post-lockdown rehiring boom, but has remained resilient. But the updated data suggest that the slowdown has been even more gradual than previously believed.

The payroll estimates that the Labor Department releases each month — including the surprisingly strong January report on Friday morning — are based on a survey of about 122,000 employers. Each year, the government revises those estimates to bring them in line with more definitive data collected by states through their unemployment insurance systems.

The adjustments released on Friday incorporated state-level data through last March. Those figures showed that employment was actually lower, by 266,000 jobs, than previously reported, reflecting somewhat slower job growth in 2022.

But Labor Department statisticians also revised the more recent estimates, using what they learned from the state data to improve their models. Those adjustments showed job growth was stronger in 2023.

As in most years, this year’s revisions were relatively small: only about one-tenth of 1 percent of total employment. But revisions in some sectors were meaningful. Retailers added about 63,000 more jobs in 2023 than previously reported, and the leisure and hospitality sector added 92,000 more jobs than in earlier estimates.

Coming into this week, there was a worry that job gains were narrowing to less cyclical sectors like government and health care. Sometimes, that portends weakness in the private sector. The January numbers should leave those worries behind for now as business services, retail and manufacturing all posted solid gains.

The unemployment rate held steady at 3.7 percent in January. We have become so used to these low jobless rates that the news seems routine. But it is impressive by modern standards: The unemployment rate has been below 4 percent for 24 months, an over 50-year record.

Blockbuster Jobs Report Backs Up Fed’s Patience as It Waits to Cut Rates

Federal Reserve officials left interest rates unchanged this week and signaled that their next move was likely to be a cut — but they also suggested that they were in no hurry to make that change. Friday’s jobs data is likely to reinforce their cautious stance.

Employers hired much more rapidly than expected in January, and average hourly earnings climbed 4.5 percent over the year, the fastest pace since September and a reversal after months of cooling.

Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, made it clear during his news conference on Wednesday that the central bank was not bent on keeping interest rates high just to slow down the labor market, but the report suggested that the economy might not be cooling quite as much as policymakers had expected.

Given that continued strength, the Fed is unlikely to feel pressure to cut interest rates at its next meeting on March 19-20 . Policymakers do not want to hold borrowing costs too high for too long and risk a painful recession, but the data suggests that a possible downturn remains very much at bay. Instead of faltering, the job market is booming.

The central bank’s policy rate is now set at 5.25 to 5.5 percent, a level high enough that economists think it will cool the economy as it trickles through financial markets and weighs on mortgage, credit card and business borrowing .

The Fed’s goal in trying to cool the economy is to rein in inflation, and price increases have been receding: Over the past six months, inflation data have been close to normal.

But that has come without much of a broader economic slowdown. Job openings have come down and the housing market slowed in reaction to higher rates, but both hiring and consumer spending have remained surprisingly resilient.

Mr. Powell suggested this week that the Fed would like to see more evidence that inflation was coming under control before it began to cut interest rates and that it was unlikely to have enough data to feel confident in that before the March meeting.

Markets sharply dialed back the chances of a rate cut at that gathering after the January jobs data.

Notably, Mr. Powell said the Fed was willing to be patient — rather than wary and reactive — as it waited for wage growth to slow to normal levels. Some economists think that the relatively quick pace of wage gains could prevent inflation from stabilizing at 2 percent over time, if it continued.

“I think the labor market by many measures is at or near normal, but not totally back to normal,” Mr. Powell said. “Job openings are not quite back to where they were,” and wage increases “are not quite back to where they were.”

He added that wage increases “probably will take a couple of years to get all the way back, and that’s OK.”

The strong January wage number did come in part as employees worked fewer hours — which meant that earnings per hour were measured against a smaller base, potentially inflating them. Given that, the big monthly pop should be taken “with a large grain of salt,” wrote Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights.

But other signs of strength in the report were fairly broad-based.

Given Mr. Powell’s comments — and how much inflation had come down in recent months — Kathy Bostjancic, the chief economist at Nationwide, said the Fed could still proceed with rate cuts this year even with a very strong labor market. She expects a move lower in May or June.

“It seems like inflation is the primary driver,” Ms. Bostjancic said, versus the strength in the fresh jobs numbers. “This should have a very modest impact on the timing — and even the degree — of rate cuts.”

After today’s revisions, employers added more than 3 million jobs in 2023. That makes it the best year for job growth since 1999, not counting the immediately preceding two years (when employment was emerging from its pandemic hole).

One of the most remarkable bits from this jobs report? A jump in average hourly earnings to 4.5 percent on an annual basis. That underlines how “real,” inflation-adjusted, wage gains, which lagged behind price increases for nearly two years, have now been in positive territory over the past several months.

“This is not a report that is commensurate with cutting in March,” said Lauren Goodwin, an economist a chief market strategist at New York Life Investments. Investors’ bets have shifted sharply to the Fed’s first cut to interest rates now coming in May. “We have to take it for what it is," Ms. Goodwin said. “It’s a good report.”

Health care and social assistance again made up a big chunk of job growth, accounting for more than 100,000 of the 353,000 jobs added last month. The public sector was also a big contributor, adding 36,000 jobs.

Some economists have been concerned that job growth has been narrowing, with only a few sectors accounting for a large share of the growth. Those concerns won’t be front and center today given the exceptional overall growth. But they may not go away entirely.

Stocks are slipping and bond yields are shooting higher after an unexpectedly fast pace of hiring in January, coupled with strong wage growth. The numbers are likely to dampen expectations of interest rate cuts coming anytime soon, with the yield on the two-year Treasury bond, which is sensitive to changes in rate expectations, rising sharply.

Well THAT is a surprise. U.S. employers added a whopping 353,000 jobs in January, far more than forecasters were expecting.

Estimates for November and December were also revised up, by a combined 126,000 jobs.

Ahead of the fresh jobs data, stock futures, which give investors the ability to bet on the market ahead of the official start of trading, are rising. It’s been a topsy-turvy week for the market, with the S&P 500 still on course to post it’s fourth consecutive week of gains.

Revisions could show softer job growth in 2023.

Job growth was strong in 2023 — but probably not quite as strong as initially reported.

The Labor Department on Friday will revise its estimate of job growth in 2022 and 2023, part of an annual process in which monthly estimates are reconciled with data collected by state agencies that is more accurate but less timely.

The changes aren’t likely to be huge. Preliminary data released in August indicated that employers added about 25,000 fewer jobs per month in late 2022 and early 2023 than originally believed. That wouldn’t be enough to alter the fundamental picture of a labor market that is gradually slowing but proving surprisingly resilient.

The payroll estimates that the Labor Department releases each month — including the January data that will be released on Friday morning — are based on a survey of about 122,000 employers. Each year, the government revises those estimates to bring them in line with more definitive data collected by states through their unemployment insurance systems.

The adjustments released on Friday will incorporate state-level data through last March. More recent estimates will also be revised because Labor Department statisticians will use what they learned from the state data to improve their models.

The annual revisions are usually small — only about one- or two-tenths of 1 percent of total nonagricultural employment — although they can occasionally be more significant. Revisions can also be larger for individual sectors. The preliminary data released in August, for example, showed that the transportation and warehousing industries cut jobs more quickly than first reported, while retail and wholesale companies added jobs more quickly than believed.

Steve Lohr

Steve Lohr and Tripp Mickle

As the tech industry sheds workers, other sectors pick them up.

In a reordering of the market for tech workers, more job seekers are looking beyond the Big Tech employers to companies in other industries that increasingly offer good opportunities.

Dispersing talent should be welcomed, some analysts say. “If this transition redeploys skilled tech workers to other sectors of the economy, that may very well be a healthy development,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, a technology education and research organization.

After frenzied growth and hiring during the worst of the pandemic, the tech sector is going in reverse. Layoffs, hiring freezes and recruiting slowdowns are the order of the day at a lengthening list of well-known tech companies including Meta, Twitter, Alphabet, Amazon, DoorDash, Lyft, Snap and Stripe, as well as at venture-backed start-ups.

Still, overall tech employment has grown this year, to a record 6.39 million in November, according to government statistics. That was slightly up from the previous month and a 12 percent increase from November 2021.

Today, a majority of tech jobs are at companies outside the tech sector in industries like banking, retail, health care and manufacturing whose operations are increasingly becoming digital. These mainstream companies, unlike their Silicon Valley counterparts, did not go on manic hiring sprees during the pandemic. But they continue to invest in tech skills.

“Nearly every company is going through this — they need tech talent,” said Lori Beer, global chief information officer at JPMorgan Chase.

A ‘cowboy ski town’ where high earners can’t afford a home faces a housing battle

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STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — Despite offering a salary of $167,000, the city of Steamboat Springs can’t find a head of human resources who can afford a place to live in the remote Colorado community surrounded by ranches and famous for training Olympic athletes.

At the Steamboat hospital, doctors willing to pay more than $1 million for a home have been repeatedly outbid by all-cash, out-of-town buyers, and housing costs have caused some positions to go unfilled for more than two years. The local ski resort has been leasing a hotel for its employees to live in as the homes they once rented are increasingly turned into short-term rentals for visitors.

“Houses used to be for employees and hotels for guests. Now houses are for guests and hotels are for employee housing,” said Loryn Duke, director of communications for the Steamboat ski resort. “We have a lot of great staff who are early in their careers or have young families, but they just aren’t able to put down those roots.”

In Steamboat, along with other mountain towns and destination communities across the country, a pandemic-fueled real estate boom driven by remote workers, second-home buyers and short-term rental investors has caused home prices to nearly double. Those prices have shown few signs of easing, despite rising interest rates and a push for remote workers to return to the office, leaving even high-income professionals struggling to find housing in small, rural communities across the country.

“I know that it’s so hard for folks outside of mountain or resort communities to even wrap their heads around, but housing is just so through the roof that unless you’re extremely wealthy, it’s unattainable,” said Margaret Bowes, executive director of the Colorado Association of Ski Towns.

But addressing the problem has created a predicament of its own, dividing residents in a battle over how to provide more housing and who should pay for it.

Local governments and state legislatures, including those in Utah and Virginia , have been at odds over restrictions on short-term rentals like Airbnbs, and ballot initiatives to add taxes to those rentals have had mixed results at the polls. When it comes to building more housing, residents have mounted opposition to some efforts over concerns about everything from traffic congestion to wildlife migration patterns.

In Steamboat, the latest battle lines have been drawn over a 534-acre ranch that the city’s housing authority purchased with a $24 million anonymous donation. Under the current proposal , the housing authority would use state and federal grants and proceeds from a recently passed tax on short-term rentals to build more than 2,200 housing units in phases. Sale and rental of the properties would be restricted to residents who meet a certain income threshold, work locally, and plan to live in the unit full-time.

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“In this environment where there’s always going to be significant amounts of demand, we have to deal with it on the supply side, and our supply side just has not kept up year over year over year over year,” said Jason Peasley, director of the Yampa Valley Housing Authority, which would oversee the development.

The project, called Brown Ranch, has been met with opposition from a group of local residents who have raised concerns about its financing and the impact on traffic and local infrastructure, along with what it could mean for the character of the community.

During a city council meeting in October that stretched into the early-morning hours, dozens of residents spoke for and against the project, with supporters pleading for affordable housing and opponents urging the city to scale back the plans or take more time to study the impact. In the end, a divided city council voted to approve the Brown Ranch plan. But opponents collected more than 1,000 signatures to get the development placed on the ballot on March 26, leaving the final decision up to voters.

Jim Engelken, who has lived in Steamboat since 1979 and previously served on the city council, has been helping organize the opposition. Engelken said he sees a need for more affordable housing but would like to see the development downsized or grow at a slower pace.

“Yes, we need affordable housing, no question,” Engelken said. “It needs to be smaller to start with, it needs to have some ability to generate its own way, its own money.”

He said he is concerned that the city won’t have enough funds for the planned infrastructure, like parks and public transit, and that the projected 6,000 people who will ultimately live at the development — the majority of whom are expected to move there from out of town — will add to traffic congestion and create a need for more water infrastructure.

“It’s an overreach, it’s too big, it’s too much, it’s too expensive, it causes too many problems for the existing city,” said Engelken. “We’re concerned that the infrastructure won’t be in place in this new, large, separate portion of our city, and it will create a second-class neighborhood. That the people living there will be treated like second-class citizens who don’t have access to public transportation or city parks, and we don’t know how many of them are coming from outside.”

With a population of around 13,000, Steamboat has prided itself on its small-town, Western feel. While housing has always been a struggle for entry-level and hourly workers, Steamboat had been viewed as relatively affordable for middle-income professionals compared to other mountain towns, like Vail, Colorado, or Jackson, Wyoming.

“Steamboat has always been known as a cowboy ski town. It’s real authentic,” said Steamboat City Manager Gary Suiter. “And the real estate prices had not gotten crazy like everywhere else. Well, that ended with the pandemic.”

Since 2020, single-family home prices have increased about 80% to $1.8 million on average, and all real estate sales, including condos, increased 64% to $1.1 million, according to data compiled by Jon Wade, a local realtor. For existing homeowners, those rising sale prices have caused property taxes to shoot up, with the average tax assessment up 86%, Wade said.

That’s put homeownership largely out of reach for most people making less than $200,000 a year. And even for those who can afford a home at that price, the competition for housing is so fierce given the low inventory that those without all-cash offers are often losing out, said local realtors.

“We are seeing across all segments of the market even high-paid professionals, they’re turning down jobs because they spend a little time looking at housing costs and they can’t do it,” said Christy Belton, who has been selling real estate in Steamboat for 20 years and whose family has been in the community for five generations.  “The people who are coming here are paying a million dollars for an entry-level house — a totally entry-level, 50-year-old house.”

Steamboat isn’t alone in its struggles. As demand shot up during the pandemic, so did prices in more high-profile destination towns like Aspen, Colorado, and Park City, Utah. With even wealthy homebuyers priced out of those markets, they began looking to more off-the-beaten-path locations.

In Driggs, Idaho, which used to be an affordable-housing refuge for workers in more pricey Jackson Hole, average home prices have also gone up around 80% to $735,000 since the start of the pandemic, according to data from Zillow. Woodstock, New York, has seen prices increase 78% to more than $600,000 on average amid an influx of buyers from New York City. In Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a popular resort community in the Great Smoky Mountains but not one known as a hot housing market, home values have risen more than 80% to an average of $480,000.

Houses dot a hillside in Steamboat Springs, Colo.,

For the city of Steamboat, the high housing costs have caused two job candidates to turn down a position overseeing the town’s human resources and risk management because they were unable to find a place to live despite the six-figure salary, said Suiter. Even Suiter’s daughter and son-in-law, with well-paying jobs and a home in Denver, had to abandon their plans to move to Steamboat after the pandemic because the town he runs had become too expensive for them.

The main hospital for the region, UCHealth Yampa Valley Medical Center, has had positions for mammography technologists go unfilled for more than two years. Even for its highest-paying positions, like doctors and administrators, housing has been a struggle.

“No income earner is immune. Even your top earners with physician pay ranges are sitting in my office saying, ‘I don’t know if I can afford to live here,’” said the hospital’s president, Soniya Fidler.  “I think that probably every week there’s someone who comes back and tells me we lost someone because of housing.”

Sanaya Sturm, the nursing manager at the hospital’s cancer center, is among those hospital employees who have been struggling. When Sturm moved to Steamboat in October 2020, her family of four sold their 3,600-square-foot house in Denver and planned to temporarily live in a 1,500-square-foot rental for $3,350 a month until they found a place to purchase in Steamboat.

At the time she began her search, the average home price was within her budget with the money from the sale of her Denver home and the income from her and her husband, who works remotely as a product manager. But as Sturm began her search for a new home, so did hundreds of out-of-town buyers looking to relocate to Steamboat or buy a second home.

“I can say confidently that I’m now priced out,” said Sturm. “We had the means in the early-2021 price range, but unfortunately I don’t think that’s an option for us right now as things stand with the interest rates and the price of housing.”

Sturm said she was outbid on more than a dozen homes, often by all-cash, out-of-town buyers putting in bids as much as $100,000 over the asking price. She saw one home she was outbid on put up for rent shortly after the sale closed for $7,500 a month.

“It’s really kind of a knife in the gut that’s being turned,” she said.

To address the problem, the hospital has gone into the residential real estate business and is building 42 apartments with rent that will be capped at around 30% of the employee’s income. While the hospital could be spending the money it is investing in housing instead on new patient facilities or updated equipment, Fidler said the hospital has little choice unless it is going to cut back on the services it provides because of a shortage of staff.

“It is hard because we are here to deliver health care, we’re not here to deliver houses. Usually, if we have the dollars to spend, it is on state-of-the-art equipment and upgrading our facilities,” Fidler said. “But we don’t want to have to close services, especially because we can’t staff for it.”

At stake, residents say, isn’t just the fate of their own personal lives or businesses, but the larger character of the community where they says they’re more likely to run into ranchers and Olympic skiers than celebrities or billionaires around town.

“You come downtown and it’s full of normal people, which is one of the primary attractions here. We’re still very authentic,” said Suiter. “That’s one of our biggest threats is that we become so exclusive that we lose our character.”

recent jobs report

Shannon Pettypiece is senior policy reporter for NBC News digital.

New Data Show Massive, Wider-than-Expected Global Gender Gap

Women enjoy just two-thirds of the legal rights that men enjoy.

WASHINGTON, March 4, 2024 —The global gender gap for women in the workplace is far wider than previously thought, a groundbreaking new World Bank Group report shows. When legal differences involving violence and childcare are taken into account, women enjoy fewer than two-thirds the rights of men. No country provides equal opportunity for women—not even the wealthiest economies.

The latest Women, Business, and the Law report offers a comprehensive picture of the obstacles that women face in entering the global workforce and contributing to greater prosperity—for themselves, their families, and their communities. It expands the scope of its analysis, adding two indicators that can be critical in opening up or restricting women’s options: safety from violence and access to childcare services. When those measures are included, women on average enjoy just 64% of the legal protections that men do—far fewer than the previous estimate of 77%.

The gender gap is even wider in practice. For the first time, Women, Business and the Law assesses the gap between legal reforms and actual outcomes for women in 190 economies. The analysis reveals a shocking implementation gap. Although laws on the books imply that women enjoy roughly two-thirds the rights of men, countries on average have established less than 40% of the systems needed for full implementation. For example, 98 economies have enacted legislation mandating equal pay for women for work of equal value. Yet only 35 economies—fewer than one out of every five—have adopted pay-transparency measures or enforcement mechanisms to address the pay gap.

Effective implementation of equal-opportunity laws depends on an adequate supporting framework, including strong enforcement mechanisms, a system for tracking gender-related pay disparities, and the availability of healthcare services for women who survive violence.

“Women have the power to turbocharge the sputtering global economy,” said Indermit Gill, Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics . “Yet, all over the world, discriminatory laws and practices prevent women from working or starting businesses on an equal footing with men. Closing this gap could raise global gross domestic product by more than 20% – essentially doubling the global growth rate over the next decade—but reforms have slowed to a crawl. WBL 2024 identifies what governments can do to accelerate progress toward gender equality in business and the law.”

The implementation gap highlights how much hard work lies ahead even for countries that have been instituting equal-opportunity laws. Togo, for example, has been a standout among Sub-Saharan economies, enacting laws that give women roughly 77% of the rights available to men—more than any other country in the continent. Yet Togo, so far, has established only 27% of systems necessary for full implementation. This rate is average for Sub-Saharan economies.

In 2023, governments were assertive in advancing three categories of legal equal-opportunity reforms—pay, parental rights, and workplace protections. Still, nearly all countries performed poorly in the two categories being tracked for the first time—access to childcare and women’s safety.

The weakness is greatest in women’s safety—where the global average score is just 36, meaning women enjoy barely a third of the needed legal protections against domestic violence, sexual harassment, child marriage and femicide. Although 151 economies have laws in place prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace, just 39 have laws prohibiting it in public spaces. This often prevents women from using public transportation to get to work.

Most countries also score poorly for childcare laws. Women spend an average of 2.4 more hours a day on unpaid care work than men—much of it on the care of children. Expanding access to childcare tends to increase women’s participation in the labor force by about 1 percentage point initially—and the effect more than doubles within five years. Today, only 78 economies—fewer than half—provide some financial or tax support for parents with young children. Only 62 economies—fewer than a third—have quality standards governing childcare services, without which women might think twice about going to work while they have children in their care.

Women also face significant obstacles in other areas. In the area of entrepreneurship, for example, just one in every five economies mandates gender-sensitive criteria for public procurement processes, meaning women are largely cut out of a $10-trillion-a-year economic opportunity. In the area of pay, women earn just 77 cents for every $1 paid to men. The rights gap extends all the way to retirement. In 62 economies, the ages at which men and women can retire are not the same. Women tend to live longer than men, but because they receive lower pay while they work, take time off when they have children, and retire earlier, they end up with smaller pension benefits and greater financial insecurity in old age.

“It is more urgent than ever to accelerate efforts to reform laws and enact public policies that empower women to work and start and grow businesses,” said Tea Trumbic, the report’s lead author . “Today, barely half of women participate in the global workforce, compared with nearly three out of every four men. This is not just unfair—it’s wasteful. Increasing women's economic participation is the key to amplifying their voices and shaping decisions that affect them directly. Countries simply cannot afford to sideline half of their population.”

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'Ghosting' gets more common in the job market: It's not a 'passing fad,' report says

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  • Job seekers and employers are increasingly "ghosting" each other during the hiring process.
  • A hot job market and "circular" behavior have led the practice to become more common in recent years, said career experts.
  • However, ghosting risks reputational harm in the long run, they said.

"Ghosting" isn't just a dating phenomenon: It has grown more common at the workplace, too. And that unreliable behavior risks reputational harm to employers and job seekers , said career experts.

The concept of ghosting — abruptly and unexpectedly ceasing communication with someone (i.e., disappearing) — arose around the mid-2010s as social media and dating apps gained prominence. Merriam-Webster added this new-age definition of "ghost" to the dictionary in 2017.

The practice has become common among both job applicants and employers during the hiring process.

More from Personal Finance: How to get by without a paycheck after a job loss Amid mass layoffs, it's best to take a new approach to job searches Workers are sour on the job market — but it may not be warranted

About 78% of job seekers said they'd ghosted a prospective employer, according to a December report from the job site Indeed , based on a poll conducted in spring 2023. That's up from the prior year, when 68% said they'd gone AWOL during the hiring process sometime over their career.

Roughly 62% of job seekers said they plan to ghost during future job searches, up from 56% in 2022 and 37% in 2019, Indeed found.

But it's not just applicants who disappear: 40% of job seekers said an employer had ghosted them after a second- or third-round interview, up from 30% in 2022.

The data suggests ghosting is "still trending upward" and isn't a "passing fad," according to the Indeed report.

Why job ghosting is becoming more common

It's not as if ghosting is a new phenomenon. There have always been job seekers and employers who've displayed lackluster communication during hiring, said Jill Eubank, senior vice president of business professionals at Randstad, a recruitment firm.

Its prevalence in recent years is likely attributable to a hot job market heading into the Covid-19 pandemic and then exiting it, she said.

Demand for labor surged in early 2021 as the U.S. economy reopened from its pandemic-related doldrums. The unemployment rate has hovered near historic lows for about two years, and layoffs for nearly three years. Job openings — a proxy for businesses' need for workers — hit historic highs in the pandemic era; so did quits , a barometer of workers' ability or willingness to get jobs elsewhere.

Generative AI will make humans more important in the workplace, says Medley's Edith Cooper

While the job market has gradually cooled, it's still strong , Eubank said.

Job candidates likely felt they had abundant choice and a high likelihood of success, and ghosting swelled as a result, she said.

"They feel that they have options: 'I don't have to communicate because I can just go over here [for a job], or I have this other opportunity,'" Eubank said.

Why ghosting has become a feedback loop

About 1 in 6 millennial and Generation Z workers have ghosted a prospective employer during the interview process, primarily because they no longer wanted the job, got another job offer or had a bad interview experience, according to a 2023 poll by the Thriving Center of Psychology, a mental health platform.

Two-thirds — 66% — of workers have "ghosted" employers by accepting a job offer and then retracting it , or disappearing, before their start date, according to a 2019 poll by Randstad.

As a coach, I'd never recommend that a job seeker ghost an employer. Clint Carrens career strategist at Indeed

Additionally, 35% of workers said they'd been ghosted by employers during the interview process, according to the Thriving Center of Psychology.

The problem has morphed into a feedback loop, said Clint Carrens, a career strategist at Indeed's Job Search Academy.

"You've got job seekers feeling employers are getting worse at ghosting," Carrens said. "Many are taking the approach that if employers consider it normal etiquette, then they will also engage in that behavior. It's almost a circular problem."

However, ghosting carries risks for both parties via potential reputational damage, experts said.

"As a coach, I'd never recommend that a job seeker ghost an employer," Carrens said.

Those who do may be "red flagged" by the employer and lose access to a future job opportunity, for example, he said.

Employers may feel ghosting gets them a short-term win by cutting time during the hiring process, but it also hurts their brands in the long run, especially if job seekers speak out about their negative experience online, Carrens added.

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