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      Southwest Layoffs Will Take 15% of Its Work Force

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      The company said the cuts, the first round of broad layoffs in the airline’s 53-year history, would affect mostly corporate employees.Southwest Airlines on Monday announced plans to cut 15 percent of its work force, the first round of broad layoffs in the airline’s 53-year history.The company said it planned to cut about 1,750 jobs, with the cuts mostly focused on corporate positions. The layoffs will include 11 senior leaders with titles of vice president or higher, the airline said. Most of the cuts will be carried out by the end of June.In a statement, Southwest’s chief executive, Bob Jordan, called the decision “unprecedented.”“We are at a pivotal moment as we transform Southwest Airlines into a leaner, faster and more agile organization,” he said. “I arrived at this decision thoughtfully and carefully, knowing how hard it will be to say goodbye to colleagues who have been a significant part of our Southwest culture and accomplishments.”Mr. Jordan’s own job was under threat last year after the hedge fund Elliott Management amassed an approximately 10 percent stake in the airline and began to push for widespread change, including Mr. Jordan’s ouster. Elliott had accused Mr. Jordan and the airline’s board of complacency and failing to control costs, eroding profit margins that were once the envy of the industry.In response, Mr. Jordan laid out a three-year plan to make sweeping changes, including dropping the airline’s seat-yourself policy in favor of assigned seating, adding seats with extra legroom and introducing red-eye flights — the first of which began last week — to make more use of its planes.Southwest also agreed to add board members recommended by the investment firm, and Elliott ultimately dropped its demand for Mr. Jordan’s departure.The job cuts announced on Monday will save Southwest about $210 million this calendar year and $300 million next year, the airline said. But those figures do not include a one-time cost of $60 million to $80 million to pay out severance and other benefits to laid-off workers.Southwest had an unrivaled 47-year streak of annual profits until 2020, when it lost money along with the rest of the industry during the Covid pandemic. It has reported profits each year since and remains the only one of the four largest U.S. airlines to have never filed for bankruptcy protection, though its costs have outpaced those of some of its peers.Still, the airline, which offers only limited international flights, is a behemoth: Southwest carries more passengers and operates more flights in the United States than any other carrier. The airline is also beloved by fliers, who have routinely given its economy class the highest customer satisfaction scores of any carrier, according to J.D. Power, a market research firm. More

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      Utah Bans Collective Bargaining for Public Workers

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      Utah joined two other states in prohibiting collective bargaining for teachers, police officers and other public employees in a move that was seen as a possible blow to the country’s labor movement.A new law signed by Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah prohibits unions from negotiating wages and other terms for teachers, firefighters, police officers and all other public employees, joining just two other states that have banned collective bargaining in the public sector.The law, which goes into effect on July 1, could have broader implications for the country’s labor movement, experts said. Its signing comes weeks after the new presidential administration effectively paralyzed — at least temporarily — the federal agency responsible for protecting workers’ rights as part of a broader crackdown on federal spending and regulations.The bill, which was passed by a Republican-controlled Legislature, was signed on Friday by the Republican governor over the pleas of unions representing employees across the public sector, who protested at rallies and spoke in opposition during debate on the Legislature floor.Federal law protects the collective bargaining rights of workers in the private sector, but determining labor law for public employees is up to the states.That’s why bargaining rights for public employees vary by state, with some offering stronger protections for workers and unions and others restricting the kinds of workers who can unionize. In Texas, for example, only police and firefighters can collectively bargain. But only two states, North Carolina and South Carolina, had banned collective bargaining outright.“It’s at the extreme end of the spectrum to have banned it for all,” said Sharon Block, the executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Men in Caring Jobs Will Make Society More Equal

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      In her prescient 2012 book, “The End of Men,” my friend Hanna Rosin described a modern American dynamic between archetypes that she called “Plastic Woman” and “Cardboard Man.” These comic book characters represented American women who made miraculous social progress in the 20th century and American men who stalled out. That’s because women in the past 60 years or so have been able to be infinitely flexible and responsive to structural economic changes and men remained rigid planks. This hasn’t just caused a shift in the job market, it’s caused a shift in the marriage market, too. If men aren’t breadwinners, and they’re not caregivers, either — what are they for?Rosin explains that Plastic Woman went “from barely working at all to working only until she got married to working while married and then working with children, even babies. If a space opens up for her to make more money than her husband, she grabs it.” By contrast, Cardboard Man “hardly changes at all. A century can go by and his lifestyle and ambitions remain largely the same. There are many professions that have gone from all-male to female, and almost none that have gone the other way.”She added that a man’s sense of himself is often tied to having a traditionally masculine, physical job in construction, utility work or some kind of manufacturing. “They could move more quickly into new roles now open to them — college graduate, nurse, teacher, full-time father — but for some reason, they hesitate.”A lot of Rosin’s book still rings true 12 years later. Though on the campaign trail both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris promised to bring back those old-school, manly jobs, as Rebecca Patterson pointed out in an Opinion guest essay in October, manufacturing jobs are long gone and they’re not returning. “Even if every estimated open role is filled, the total employed in manufacturing would still be about three million short of its 1979 peak, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data,” Patterson noted.Which is why I was so pleased to see that Cardboard Man may be softening up, even as the political posturing around him may not have shifted. According to Harriet Torry in The Wall Street Journal, “The number of male registered nurses in the U.S. has nearly tripled since the early 2000s,” going “from about 140,000 in 2000 to about 400,000 in 2023.” In health care, wage and market growth exceed the national average, and people still need emergency surgeries even in recessions, CNN’s Bryan Mena notes. Health care jobs are particularly vital in rural parts of the country, where hospitals may be among the largest employers in the area.Torry describes men who are moving into traditionally female jobs (or the “pink collar” sector) as rational economic actors who are dealing with the job market as it is, rather than as they wish it might be. “Many of the manufacturing jobs that are being moved overseas, replaced by automation or phased out of the American economy were mostly filled by men. As a result, other occupations traditionally dominated by women are now gaining a larger share of men, including elementary and middle schoolteachers and customer service representatives,” Torry writes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Children Worked Dangerous Shifts at Iowa Slaughterhouse, Inquiry Finds

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      Qvest Sanitation was ordered to pay nearly $172,000 after the Labor Department found it had employed 11 children to clean equipment on overnight shifts at a pork processing plant in Sioux City, Iowa.An Oklahoma-based cleaning company has been fined nearly $172,000 after federal investigators found that it had hired nearly a dozen children to work dangerous overnight shifts at an Iowa slaughterhouse.The 11 children were hired by Qvest Sanitation of Guymon, Okla., to work at a pork processing plant in Sioux City, Iowa, operated by Seaboard Triumph Foods, the Labor Department said. The children used corrosive cleaners to wash equipment, including head splitters, jaw pullers, band saws and neck clippers, the department said last week.The department did not say how old the children were when they were working in the plant.Adam Greer, Qvest’s vice president of operations, said in a statement that the company had not been able to confirm the allegations because the Labor Department “has declined to provide us with any names or specific information related to the alleged violations.”“In spite of this, Qvest has not only fully cooperated with the Department of Labor but is and has been committed to strengthening our onboarding process,” he said.It was the second time this year that a company that had been hired to clean the Seaboard Triumph Foods plant in Sioux City had been the target of enforcement action by the Labor Department.In May, a Tennessee-based company, Fayette Janitorial Service, was ordered to pay $649,000 in civil penalties after an investigation found that it had hired at least two dozen children as young as 13 to work overnight shifts cleaning equipment at Seaboard’s Sioux City plant and a Perdue Farms plant on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Nine of those children worked at the Seaboard plant, the Labor Department said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Volkswagen Unions Begin Short Strikes and Threaten More

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      Workers at nine of the automaker’s German factories walked off their jobs for several hours, and warned they would escalate the action if their demands went unmet.Volkswagen workers across Germany escalated their labor dispute with management by walking off their jobs for several hours on Monday, and their union threatened longer strikes if their demands were not met.The automaker is in the middle of labor negotiations with IG Metall, the union representing most of its workers, as the company tries to reduce costs in an effort to return it to profitability. Volkswagen is seeking 10-percent wage cuts and threatening to close factories in Germany, the first such move in its 87-year history.Thousands of workers at nine of the company’s plants in Germany, as well as several other subsidiaries that are covered under a wage agreement with the automaker, staged two-hour strikes on Monday, demanding that Volkswagen guarantee their jobs and keep its factories open.IG Metall has threatened to start longer walkouts, or open-ended strikes, unless it is able to reach an agreement with Volkswagen managers.“If necessary, this will be the toughest collective-bargaining battle Volkswagen has ever seen,” said Thorsten Gröger, the chief negotiator and district manager for the union. “Volkswagen will have to decide at the negotiating table how long and how intense this dispute has to be.”The labor battle, the company’s first involving strikes since 2018, comes as Volkswagen, Germany’s leading automaker, faces slowing demand for its cars in Europe and Asia, as well as increased competition from Chinese automakers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Los inmigrantes en todo EE. UU. se preparan para las medidas de Trump

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      La promesa del presidente electo de llevar a cabo deportaciones masivas ha empujado a los inmigrantes a buscar medidas de protección y asesoramiento.El presidente electo Donald Trump ha prometido reducir drásticamente la inmigración, tanto legal como ilegal, y aumentar las deportaciones desde el primer día.Los inmigrantes se apresuran a adelantarse a la ofensiva.Los residentes nacidos en el extranjero han estado saturando las líneas telefónicas de los abogados de inmigración. Están abarrotando las reuniones informativas organizadas por organizaciones sin fines de lucro. Y están tomando todas las medidas posibles para protegerse de las medidas radicales que Trump ha prometido emprender tras su toma de posesión el 20 de enero.“Gente que debería estar asustada está viniendo, y gente que está bien con una green card se está apresurando a venir”, dijo Inna Simakovsky, abogada de inmigración en Columbus, Ohio, quien añadió que su equipo se ha visto desbordado por las consultas. “Todo el mundo tiene miedo”, dijo.Las personas con tarjeta de residencia permanente, o green card, quieren convertirse en ciudadanos lo antes posible. Las personas que tienen un estatus legal precario o entraron ilegalmente en el país se apresuran a solicitar asilo, porque incluso si la petición es débil, tener un caso pendiente los protegería —con los protocolos actuales— de la deportación. Las personas que tienen una relación con algún ciudadano estadounidense están tramitando su matrimonio con rapidez, lo que les da derecho a solicitar la green card.En total, hay unos 13 millones de personas con residencia legal permanente. Y se calcula que había 11,3 millones de personas indocumentadas en 2022, la última cifra disponible.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Picks Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer for Labor Secretary

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      Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a first-term Republican representative from Oregon who narrowly lost her House seat this month, was chosen on Friday to serve as labor secretary in the coming Trump administration.“Lori has worked tirelessly with both business and labor to build America’s work force, and support the hardworking men and women of America,” President-elect Donald J. Trump said in a statement.A moderate from a swing district that includes parts of Portland, Ms. Chavez-DeRemer, 56, is not a major figure in American labor politics. But she was one of only a few House Republicans to support major pro-union legislation, and she split her district’s union endorsements with her Democratic opponent, Janelle Bynum, earning nods from ironworkers, firefighters and local Teamsters.When the House speaker, Mike Johnson, spoke at a Chavez-DeRemer rally in October, he said, “She’s got more labor union endorsements than any Republican I’ve ever seen in my life.”Labor leaders criticized Mr. Trump’s policies during his first term as president, and at one point in the race this year, he praised Elon Musk for a willingness to fire workers who go on strike. But Mr. Trump also proposed ending taxes on tips and overtime, and many rank-and-file union members embraced his pro-tariffs economic agenda.After Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s defeat this month, the president of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien, urged Mr. Trump to consider her for the labor secretary role, Politico reported. On Friday, Mr. O’Brien praised her selection, posting a photograph on X of himself standing with Mr. Trump and Ms. Chavez-DeRemer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More