Nicholas Bloom News

Trump may be doing more to harm the US economy than to fix it. The labour market remains healthy with a 4.1 per cent unemployment rate and 151,000 jobs added in February, and Trump likes to point to investment commitments by Apple and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to show that he's delivering results. But Friday's employment report also found that the number of people stuck working part-time because of economic circumstances jumped by 460,000 last month. In the leisure and hospitality sectors that reflect consumers having extra money to spend, 16,000 jobs were lost. And the federal government reduced its payrolls by 10,000 in a potential harbinger of the alarm being sounded by the stock market, consumer confidence and other measures of where the economy is headed.

fire employees who don’t come in at least three days every week. This puts middle managers at Amazon, long known for its “churn and burn" approach to managing its workforce, in an impossible position. Sack people who aren’t coming in—but who might be doing a very good job from home and could be difficult to replace—or risk their own futures if they do not boost attendance rates.

unemployment rate fell to 3.5% in July, the Labor Department said Friday. That is just a tick above a half-century low, showing a limited pool from which to hire. Wages grew a historically high 4.4% in July from a year earlier, well above prepandemic rates and another sign of workers’ strong bargaining power.

The pandemic-era trend of working from home remains a key feature of the U.S. job market — and is likely to stay entrenched as a permanent perk for a broad swath of the American workforce, according to labor economists.