Tag Archives: Jobs

AI, Robots, and where the workforce is headed

Important Takeaways:

  • What Is Going To Happen To Our Society As AI And Robots Take Most Of Our Jobs?
  • For years we have been warned that AI and robots would revolutionize the workforce, and now that day has officially arrived.
  • For example, Amazon has been using various types of simple robots to perform certain tasks for years, and now highly sophisticated humanoid robots are being deployed right alongside normal human workers…
  • Designed by Agility Robotics, which Amazon has invested in as part of its Industrial Innovation Fund, Digit is only the latest of a string of warehouse robots the company has introduced over the last several years. However, most of the other warehouse robots have been cart-shaped or robotic arms, not humanoid like Digit.
    • Digit costs about $10 to $12 an hour to operate right now, based on its price and lifespan, but the company predicts that cost to drop to $2 to $3 an hour plus overhead software costs as production ramps up, Agility Robotics CEO Damion Shelton told Bloomberg.
    • So this trend is only going to accelerate during the years ahead.
  • In fact, Goldman Sachs is projecting that AI could take as many as 300 million full-time jobs during the years ahead, and most of them will be white collar jobs…
    • As many as 300 million full-time jobs around the world could be automated in some way by the newest wave of artificial intelligence that has spawned platforms like ChatGPT, according to Goldman Sachs economists.
    • They predicted in a report Sunday that 18% of work globally could be computerized, with the effects felt more deeply in advanced economies than emerging markets.
    • That’s partly because white-collar workers are seen to be more at risk than manual laborers. Administrative workers and lawyers are expected to be most affected, the economists said, compared to the “little effect” seen on physically demanding or outdoor occupations, such as construction and repair work.
  • On Friday, the BLS told us that the Establishment Survey indicated that the U.S. economy added 216,000 jobs last month, but historically the Household Survey has been much more accurate, and it showed that the U.S. economy actually lost 683,000 jobs last month…
  • And as I shared with my paid subscribers a few days ago, the BLS report also showed that the number of full-time jobs in the U.S. dropped by 1.531 million during the month of December…
  • Meanwhile, bankruptcies are surging all over the country.
  • In fact, the number of bankruptcy filings in the United States in 2023 was 18 percent higher than it was in 2022…
  • But what we are experiencing at this moment is not even worth comparing to what is coming.

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2023 Bleakest year in Banking; maybe 2024 should read “Abandon all hope ye who enter here”

Chart-Banks-cut-jobs

Important Takeaways:

  • Banks Terminate 60,000 Workers In One Of The Bleakest Years For The Industry Since 2008
  • The collapse of three US regional banks – First Republic Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank – marked some of the largest failures in the banking system since 2008. Central banks contained the “mini-crisis” earlier this year with forced interventions and the mega-merger of Credit Suisse and UBS. Despite the interventions, global banks still axed the most jobs since the global financial crisis.
  • A new report from the Financial Times shows twenty of the world’s largest banks slashed 61,905 jobs in 2023, a move to protect profit margins in a period of high interest rates amid a slump in dealmaking and equity and debt sales. This compared with the 140,000 lost during the GFC of 2007-08.
  • “There is no stability, no investment, no growth in most banks — and there are likely to be more job cuts,” said Lee Thacker, owner of financial services headhunting firm Silvermine Partners.

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Yellow, the 99 year old trucking firm, struggling under the weight of debt prepares for bankruptcy

Yellow Trucking

Important Takeaways:

  • Trucking giant Yellow shuts down: The 99-year-old company which has almost 30,000 staff and 12,000 big-rigs ceases operations immediately – despite $700M COVID bailout
  • Trucking giant Yellow collapsed on Sunday, ceasing operations immediately and leaving some 30,000 workers without jobs.
  • The closure is the biggest in terms of jobs and revenue in the U.S. trucking industry, according to The Wall Street Journal – which first reported its shutdown.
  • The company, which received $700 million in federal COVID relief funds in 2020, is preparing to file for bankruptcy and is in talks to sell off all or parts of the business.
  • The nearly 100-year-old firm is known for its competitive pricing and has more than 12,000 trucks shipping freight across the US for brands including Walmart and Home Depot.
  • But in recent years it has struggled under the weight of debt and had a highly contentious relationship with the Teamsters union: on Sunday, each side blamed the other.

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Railroad Strike would take huge toll on the Supply Chain

Revelations 18:23 ‘For the merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.’

Important Takeaways:

  • Brace for Economic Shockwaves and Empty Shelves as Railroad Strike and New Energy Spike Could Hit Hard
  • More than 100,000 railroad workers are threatening to walk off their jobs this week over worker pay, health care, and other issues.
  • Unions are now negotiating with the nation’s biggest freight railroads, including Union Pacific, CSX, Norfolk Southern, BNSF, and Kansas City Southern, and have announced eight of the 13 tentative agreements needed to avert a strike.
  • The deals that have been announced so far have closely followed the Presidential Emergency Board’s recommendations that called for 24% raises over five years, $5,000 in bonuses and one additional paid leave day a year. But the two biggest unions representing conductors and engineers have been holding out because they want the railroads to go beyond those recommendations and address some of their concerns about strict attendance policies and working conditions.
  • If a deal is not made, then passenger service, supply chains, and jobs could be affected, costing the economy an estimated $2 billion per day.
  • Bloomberg explains the impact on the supply chain would be huge because trains transport 28% of all U.S. freight.

Read the original article by clicking here.

Trudeau invokes emergency powers threatening to take their licenses

Proverbs 22:8 “Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity, and the rod of his fury will fail.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Trudeau Goes ‘Totalitarian’, Threatens to Freeze Truckers’ Bank Accounts and Destroy Their Jobs
  • Trudeau invoked emergency powers, allowing the government to seize cars and trucks, suspend their insurance, and even freeze truckers’ personal and corporate bank accounts.
  • Trudeau threatened truckers saying, “You don’t want to end up losing your license, end up with a criminal record, which will impact your job, your livelihood, even your ability to travel internationally, including to the U.S.”
  • The Canadian Civil Liberties Association said the government had not met the standard for invoking the Emergencies Act. Reuter’s reports the Act is only intended to deal with threats to “sovereignty, security and territorial integrity.”
  • Heather Wilson, co-founder of the U.S.-based crowd-funding site GiveSendGo is fighting back. “This is probably going to be the fight of my life,” Wilson told Faithwire News. “We’re going to continue to fight for freedom. This is absolutely insane that governments think they can step in and trample on people’s God-given rights.”

Read the original article by clicking here.

Amazon plans to add 10,000 jobs in Bellevue, Washington

(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc is planning to create 10,000 more jobs in the next few years in Bellevue, Washington, the e-commerce giant said on Friday.

The company has been setting up new offices across U.S. cities on the back of a meteoric rise in its business, thanks to a surge in online orders during coronavirus-induced lockdowns.

Amazon had earlier said it would create 15,000 jobs in Bellevue, located 10 miles from its Seattle headquarters.

In April and May, Amazon hired for 175,000 jobs ranging from warehouse staff to delivery drivers to keep up with the demand.

(Reporting by Nilanjana Basu in Bengaluru)

Powell: Jobs recovery faces ‘long tail’ of a couple of years

(Reuters) – Despite “a lot of strength in the economy,” millions of U.S. workers displaced from restaurant, travel, and similar jobs will struggle to find new employment and need steady support from the government, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said on Thursday, warning a full jobs recovery could take years.

“There is a particular part of the economy which involves getting people together and feeding them, flying them around the country, having them sleep in hotels, entertaining them,” Powell said in online remarks to the Fed’s annual economic symposium. “That part of the economy will find it very difficult to recover…That is millions of people who are going to struggle to find work. We need to stay with those people….We are looking at long tail of probably a couple of years at least.”

(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

COVID-19 pandemic plunges working world into crisis: ILO

GENEVA (Reuters) – Global leaders called for a comprehensive approach to counter the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, which International Labor Organization chief Guy Ryder said on Wednesday had plunged the world of work into “unprecedented crisis”.

“Let’s be clear: it’s not a choice between health or jobs and the economy. They are interlinked: we will either win on all fronts or fail on all fronts,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told an ILO summit that will be addressed by dozens of heads of state and government via recorded messages.

World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the summit the world had a special duty to protect the millions of healthcare workers at the front line of the crisis and suffering increasing cases of infection and death.

“Together we have a duty to protect those who protect us,” he said.

The outlook for the global labor market in the second half of 2020 is “highly uncertain” and the forecast recovery will not be enough for employment to return to pre-pandemic levels this year, the ILO said last week.

The U.N. agency said the fall in global working hours was “significantly worse than previously estimated” in the first half of the year.

(Reporting by Emma Farge and Michael Shields; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Lantern-waving Hong Kong protesters take to hills, as leader pledges housing reform

By Jessie Pang and Lukas Job

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters took to the hills to form flashlight-carrying human chains on Friday, using the colorful Mid-Autumn Festival as a backdrop to the latest in more than three months of sometimes violent unrest.

The peaceful protests, on a day when families traditionally gather to gaze at the moon and eat mooncakes while children swing colorful lanterns from the end of sticks, came after Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam promised to focus on housing and jobs to try to end the turmoil.

Lam, who said she caused “unforgivable havoc” by igniting the crisis and would quit if she had the choice, said in a Facebook post her government would increase the supply of housing in the Chinese-ruled city.

“Housing and people’s livelihoods are the main priorities,” Lam said. “The government will add to housing supply measures which will be continuously put in place and not missed.”

Hong Kong has some of the world’s most expensive real estate and many young people say the city’s housing policy is unfair, benefiting the rich while forcing the less well-off to live with their parents or rent “shoe box” apartments at exorbitant prices.

Sun Hung Kai Properties, which reported its earnings on Thursday, said the current unrest was a wake-up call to both the government and private companies to build more housing.

Financial Secretary Paul Chan told reporters a new vacancy tax aims to push developers to launch completed apartments on to the market as soon as possible.

As darkness fell on Friday night, protesters armed with flashlights, mobile phones and lanterns gathered at Victoria Peak and Lion Rock.

They lined the path running along the north face of the Peak, looking across the harbor to Lion Rock in the distance, with mainland China beyond.

Protesters gathered in their hundreds across the territory, singing and chanting, in contrast to the violence of many previous weekends when police have responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon.

“Today, there’s not many here because we have an event in every district, and because this area is not a residential area, it’s a working area full of offices,” said protester Jason Liu in the Admiralty district of government offices and hotels.

The spark for the protests was a now-withdrawn extradition bill and concerns that Beijing is eroding civil liberties, but many young protesters are also angry at sky-high living costs and a lack of job prospects.

The demonstrations started in June in response to a bill that would have allowed people to be sent to mainland China for trial in Communist Party-controlled courts, but have broadened into calls for greater democracy.

The former British colony returned to China in 1997 under a “one country, two systems” formula that guarantees freedoms not enjoyed on the mainland – including a much-cherished independent legal system.

At lunch on Friday, hundreds of pro-Beijing supporters packed into a shopping mall waving China flags and singing the Chinese national anthem.

Sit-ins at shopping malls are also planned over the weekend.

Activists also plan to gather outside the British consulate on Sunday to demand that China honors the Sino-British Joint Declaration that was signed in 1984, laying out Hong Kong’s post-1997 future.

China says Hong Kong is now its internal affair. It denies meddling in Hong Kong and has accused the United States, Britain and others of fomenting the unrest.

Britain says it has a legal responsibility to ensure China abides by its obligations under the Joint Declaration.

Hong Kong is facing its first recession in a decade as a result of the unrest. A surge in migration applications suggests more locals are making plans to leave.

China has called on its biggest state firms to take a more active role in Hong Kong, including stepping up investment and asserting more control over companies.

Multiple Hong Kong events and conferences have been canceled and the number of visitors plunged 40 percent in August. The city’s premier women’s tennis event scheduled for October has been postponed.

Organizers also called off the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Matilda the Musical”, due to run from Sept. 20 to Oct. 20.

Police on Tuesday set up an “anti-violence hotline” on which people could call in giving intelligence on planned unrest.

On Friday they announced it had been shut down because of “different opinions”.

(Reporting by Twinnie Siu, Clare Jim, Noah Sin, Marius Zaharia, Poppy McPherson, Lukas Job, Amr Abdallah and Farah Master; Writing by Nick Macfie; Editing by Giles Elgood and Alex Richardson)

U.S. weekly jobless claims fall; labor market strong

FILE PHOTO: People wait in line to attend TechFair LA, a technology job fair, in Los Angeles, California, U.S., January 26, 2017. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

By Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The number of Americans filing applications for unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell last week, suggesting the labor market remains strong even as the economy is slowing.

The jobless claims report from the Labor Department on Thursday, however, does not fully account for the impact of the recent escalation in the bitter trade war between the United States and China, which has led to an inversion of the U.S. Treasury yield curve and raised the risk of a recession.

Worries about the trade war’s impact on the U.S. economic expansion, the longest on record, prompted the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates last week for the first time since 2008. Financial markets have fully priced in another rate cut next month.

Expectations for a 50-basis-point cut at the Fed’s Sept. 17-18 policy meeting have also risen.

“Initial claims have been sending a reasonably upbeat message about conditions in the labor market,” said Daniel Silver, an economist at JPMorgan in New York. “Today’s report likely doesn’t contain much information about the period since the recent escalations in trade tensions.”

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits declined 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 209,000 for the week ended Aug. 3, the Labor Department said. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims would be unchanged at 215,000 in the latest week.

“The message of the unemployment claims data into early August is that layoff activity remained subdued and the labor market is still tight,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics in New York. “Though equity market volatility and low bond yields are driving pessimism about the economic outlook … we would have to see initial claims sustain a rise to the 250,000 level to become concerned about recession.”

U.S. stocks were trading higher as unexpectedly better Chinese data and a steadying of the yuan provided some comfort to investors rattled by the rise in U.S.-China trade tensions. Prices of U.S. Treasuries fell while the dollar <.DXY> was slightly stronger against a basket of currencies.

INVENTORY ACCUMULATION SLOWING Last week’s drop in claims pushed them to the lower end of their 193,000-244,000 range for this year. The four-week moving average of initial claims, considered a better measure of labor market trends as it irons out week-to-week volatility, edged up 250 to 212,250 last week.

While hiring has slowed, the pace of job gains remains well above the roughly 100,000 needed per month to keep up with growth in the working-age population.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 164,000 jobs in July, down from 193,000 in June. Job growth over the last three months averaged 140,000 per month, the lowest in nearly two years, compared to 223,000 in 2018. The moderation in employment growth partly reflects a shortage of workers.

“While net employment growth depends on gross hiring as well as the pace of layoffs, and the trend in payrolls gains may have moderated a bit, major weakening in employment growth is invariably associated with an uptrend in claims,” said Jim O’Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in White Plains, New York.

The economy grew at a 2.1% annualized rate in the second quarter, slowing from the first quarter’s brisk 3.1% pace. Growth is seen below a 2.0% rate in the July-September quarter.

Slower economic growth was also underscored by a separate report from the Commerce Department on Thursday showing wholesale inventories unchanged in June instead of rising 0.2% as estimated last month.

The component of wholesale inventories that goes into the calculation of gross domestic product edged up 0.1% in June.

While inventories increased further in the second quarter, the pace of accumulation was slower than early in the year. Some of that slowdown reflects a surge in consumer spending in the second quarter.

Businesses are also carefully managing stock levels as the economy’s outlook continues to darken amid the escalation in trade tensions between the United States and China, which has roiled financial markets.

Inventories subtracted 0.86 percentage point from GDP growth in the second quarter.

Sales at wholesalers dropped 0.3% in June after falling 0.6% in May. At June’s sales pace it would take wholesalers 1.36 months to clear shelves, unchanged from May.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Paul Simao)