Louis Bloomsfield inspects the kegs of beer at his brewery in north London, eagerly awaiting June, when he will get an extra day off every week.

The 36-year-old brewer plans to use the time to get involved in charity work, start a long-overdue course in particle physics and spend more time with family.

He and colleagues at the Pressure Drop brewery are taking part in a six-month trial of a four-day working week, with 3,000 others from 60 U.K. companies.

The pilot — touted as the world’s biggest so far — aims to help companies shorten their working hours without cutting salaries or sacrificing revenues.

Similar trials have also taken place in Spain, Iceland, the United States and Canada. Australia and New Zealand are scheduled to start theirs in August.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a program manager at 4 Day Week Global, the campaign group behind the trial, said it will give firms “more time” to work through challenges, experiment with new practices and gather data.

Smaller organizations should find it easier to adapt, as they can make big changes more readily, he told AFP.

Pressure Drop, based in Tottenham Hale, is hoping the experiment will not only improve their employees’ productivity but also their well-being.

At the same time, it will reduce their carbon footprint.

The Royal Society of Biology, another participant in the trial, says it wants to give employees “more autonomy over their time and working patterns.”

Both hope a shorter working week could help them retain employees, at a time when U.K. businesses are confronted with severe staff shortages, and job vacancies hitting a record 1.3 million.

Not all rosy

Pressure Drop brewery’s co-founder Sam Smith said the new way of working would be a learning process.

“It will be difficult for a company like us which needs to be kept running all the time, but that’s what we will experiment with in this trial,” he said.

Smith is mulling giving different days off in the week to his employees and deploying them into two teams to keep the brewery functioning throughout.

When Unilever trialed a shorter working week for its 81 employees in New Zealand, it was able to do so only because no manufacturing takes place in its Auckland office and all staff work in sales or marketing.

The service industry plays a huge role in the UK economy, contributing 80% to the country’s GDP.

A shorter working week is therefore easier to adopt, said Jonathan Boys, a labor economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

But for sectors such as retail, food and beverage, health care and education, it’s more problematic.

Boys said the biggest challenge will be how to measure productivity, especially in an economy where a lot of work is qualitative, as opposed to that in a factory.

Indeed, since salaries will stay the same in this trial, for a company to not lose out, employees will have to be as productive in four days as they are five.

Yet Aidan Harper, author of The Case for a Four Day Week, said countries working fewer hours tend to have higher productivity.

“Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands work fewer hours than the U.K., yet have higher levels of productivity,” he told AFP.

“Within Europe, Greece works more hours than anyone, and yet have the lowest levels of productivity.”

‘Hiring superpower’

Employees in the U.K. work roughly 36.5 hours every week, against counterparts in Greece who clock in upward of 40 hours, according to database company Statista.

Phil McParlane, founder of Glasgow-based recruitment company 4dayweek.io, says offering a shorter workweek is a win-win, and even calls it “a hiring superpower.”

His company only advertises four-day week and flexible jobs.

They have seen the number of companies looking to hire through the platform rise from 30 to 120 in the past two years, as many workers reconsidered their priorities and work-life balance in the pandemic.
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Програма релокації в Україні була започаткована через російське вторгнення для захисту промислових потужностей підприємств всіх форм власності
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«Навмисне морити мирних жителів голодом як знаряддя ведення війни є воєнним злочином»
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More than 12 million immigrants moved through Ellis Island, a primary U.S. federal immigration station in New York, between 1892 and 1954. The assimilation of these newcomers into the great U.S. “melting pot” in their pursuit of the American dream is a key part of the nation’s story.

Many Americans have come to idealize those early immigrants, mostly Europeans, as somehow more desirable than today’s immigrants, who primarily hail from Latin America and Asia and are more likely to be viewed by some as slow to assimilate, potential criminals, a financial drain on the system, and as stealing jobs from the American-born.

Economic historians Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky are using cutting-edge data collection and analytics to separate immigrant fact from fiction while comparing modern-day migrants to those who came to America a century ago.

Successful children

“One big surprise was how well the children of immigrants are doing, and how (children of) immigrants from nearly every sending country are more upwardly mobile than the children of the U.S.-born. And how that stays constant over 100 years, regardless of the sending country,” says Abramitzky, a professor of economics at Stanford University.

The reason many children of immigrants do better than their American-born counterparts can come down to location, said Boustan, a professor of economics at Princeton University.

“They’re locating in very dynamic cities with a lot of good job opportunities, and that’s helping set up their kids for success,” Boustan says. “We find that the children of the internal migrants — the U.S.-born families that move somewhere else — actually look a lot like the children of immigrants. And so, what’s really happening is that immigrants are willing to move to good places, and a lot of U.S.-born families stay in the location where they were born.

Another less-apparent advantage for children of immigrants in low-paying jobs, is that their parents might have college degrees and professional skills honed in their home countries that they cannot apply in the U.S., but they instill a drive for education and professional success in their children.

The data suggests that the children of today’s immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Mexico or Guatemala who grew up in relatively poor families are doing just as well as the children of Norwegian, German and Italian immigrants of the past. Like them, they are more likely than the children of equally poor U.S.-born parents to make it into the middle class or beyond.

The duo’s findings are laid out in their book, “Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success.”

Disputing existing narratives

The data also dispels the notion that today’s immigrants are a financial burden, Boustan said.

“Even if immigrant parents are low paid, their children are able to move up very quickly into higher paid, more productive jobs,” she says. “So, at this timescale of a generation, we see that immigrants are able to pay more into the system than they take out.”

Abramitzky and Boustan extrapolated that today’s immigrants assimilate as quickly as immigrants did a century ago. They used markers like learning English, living outside an ethnic neighborhood, intermarriage and giving children American-sounding names to conclude that today’s immigrants are no more likely than past immigrants to retain their native culture.

Anti-immigrant forces often point to crime as a reason to limit immigration or build a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. However, the data shows immigrants today are less likely to be arrested and imprisoned for a crime than people born in the United States.

Job thieves?

Do immigrants steal jobs and reduce the wages of U.S.-born workers? The data suggests immigrants fill gaps at the opposite ends of the labor market, where there is a lot of demand but not enough workers to fill those roles, according to Boustan.

“These days, immigrants bring a set of skills that are not very widespread in the U.S. today,” Boustan says. “Many immigrants are very highly skilled Ph.D. scientists, tech workers, and those skills often create more jobs than take away jobs.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum, uneducated, poorer immigrants tend to work in manual positions like construction, agriculture and landscaping or in service professions such as helping the elderly or providing child care.

“People who are at the lower tail of the income distribution are doing the kinds of jobs that are hard to find U.S.-born workers to do,” Abramitzky says. “Immigrants and the U.S.-born workers are not perfect substitutes to one another.”

A 2020 Pew Research poll suggests that Americans on both ends of the political spectrum generally agree that immigrants — both the undocumented and those in the U.S. legally — mostly work in jobs that U.S. citizens don’t want.

But Harvard professor George Borjas, a labor economist specializing in immigration issues, says the influx of immigrants can hurt the prospects of the working poor.

People in low-wage jobs that require limited education face significant competition from immigrants, according to Borjas, who writes that an increase in the pool of low-skilled workers drives a drop in overall earnings.

The immigrants themselves, and business owners who use immigrant labor, are the biggest winners from an influx of immigration, he says.

In their book, Abramitzky and Boustan point out that strict immigrant quotas in the 1920s did not result in higher wages for U.S. manufacturing workers, even though immigration had dropped by “hundreds of thousands.”

The co-authors hope lawmakers will examine the data before crafting future immigration laws and policies.

“That immigrants are upwardly mobile from nearly every sending country, regardless of where they come from, suggests that there are more similarities than differences in the immigrant experiences, despite the huge change in sending countries,” Abramitzky says.

“We see that immigrants are doing just as well as immigrants in the past. …Designing the policy (while) having in mind that immigrants aren’t able to assimilate and integrate, is misinformed.”
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The U.S. economy shrank in the first three months of the year even though consumers and businesses kept spending at a solid pace, the government reported Thursday in a slight downgrade of its previous estimate for the January-March quarter.

Last quarter’s drop in the U.S. gross domestic product — the broadest gauge of economic output — does not likely signal the start of a recession. The contraction was caused, in part, by a wider trade gap: The nation spent more on imports than other countries did on U.S. exports. The trade gap slashed first-quarter GDP by 3.2 percentage points.

And a slower restocking of goods in stores and warehouses, which had built up their inventories in the previous quarter for the 2021 holiday shopping season, knocked nearly 1.1 percentage points off the January-March GDP.

Analysts say the economy has likely resumed growing in the current April-June quarter.

The Commerce Department estimated that the economy contracted at a 1.5% annual pace from January through March, a slight downward revision from its first estimate of 1.4%, which it issued last month. It was the first drop in GDP since the second quarter of 2020 — in the depths of the COVID-19 recession — and followed a robust 6.9% expansion in the final three months of 2021.

The nation remains stuck in the painful grip of high inflation, which has caused particularly severe hardships for lower-income households, many of them people of color. Though many U.S. workers have been receiving sizable pay raises, their wages in most cases haven’t kept pace with inflation. In April, consumer prices jumped 8.3% from a year earlier, just below the fastest such rise in four decades, set one month earlier.

High inflation is also posing a political threat to President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress as midterm elections draw near. A poll this month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Research found that Biden’s approval rating has reached the lowest point of his presidency — just 39% of adults approve of his performance — with inflation a frequently cited contributing factor.

Still, by most measures, the economy as a whole remains healthy, though likely weakening. Consumer spending — the heart of the economy — is still solid: It grew at a 3.1% annual pace from January through March. Business investment in equipment, software and other items that are intended to improve productivity rose at a healthy 6.8% annual rate last quarter.

And a strong job market is giving people the money and confidence to spend. Employers have added more than 400,000 jobs for 12 straight months, and the unemployment rate is near a half-century low. Businesses are advertising so many jobs that there are now roughly two openings, on average, for every unemployed American.

The economy is widely believed to have resumed its growth in the current quarter: In a survey released this month, 34 economists told the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that they expect GDP to grow at a 2.3% annual pace from April through June and 2.5% for all of 2022. Still, their forecast marked a sharp drop from the 4.2% growth estimate for the current quarter in the Philadelphia Fed’s previous survey in February.

Considerable uncertainties, though, are clouding the outlook for the U.S. and global economies. Russia’s war against Ukraine has disrupted trade in energy, grains and other commodities and driven fuel and food prices dramatically higher. China’s draconian COVID-19 crackdown has also slowed growth in the world’s second-biggest economy and worsened global supply chain bottlenecks. The Federal Reserve has begun aggressively raising interest rates to fight the fastest inflation the United States has suffered since the early 1980s.

The Fed is banking on its ability to engineer a so-called soft landing: Raising borrowing rates enough to slow growth and cool inflation without causing a recession. Many economists, though, are skeptical that the central bank can pull it off. More than half the economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics foresee at least a 25% probability that the U.S. economy will sink into recession within a year.

“While we still expect the Fed to steer the economy toward a soft landing, downside risks to the economy and the probability of a recession are increasing,” economists Lydia Boussour and Kathy Bostjancic of Oxford Economics cautioned Thursday in a research note.

“A more aggressive pace of Fed rate hikes, a tightening in financial conditions, the ongoing war in Ukraine and China’s zero-Covid strategy increase the risk of a hard landing in 2023,” they added.

In the meantime, higher borrowing rates appear to be slowing at least one crucial sector of the economy — the housing market. Last month, sales of both existing homes and new homes showed signs of faltering, worsened by sharply higher home prices and a shrunken supply of properties for sale.
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Це – виробники мінеральних добрив та кормових добавок
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