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A now-hiring sign is posted at Chase Bank in downtown Phoenix on Feb. 21, 2023. Economists say the churn of people moving between jobs is driving up wages.

For Arizona residents, the job market has tilted in favor of job seekers in a way rarely seen - but there are reasons for workers to be concerned that wages are not keeping up with costs. Read more»

A worker demonstrates her skills last month at the Chicago Women in Trades facility. Illinois was one of the top 10 states for union representation last year, at 13.9% of workers, more than 2.5 times Arizona’s rate of 5.4%, despite slow gains in the state.

After bottoming out at 4% in 2017, labor union membership in Arizona has been slowly rising, but it is still well behind levels of previous years and only about half of the national average. Read more»

The Biden administration said this week that Arizona, and the rest of the U.S., are benefiting from a robust economy, with low unemployment and rising wages. Critics say that may be true, but it ignores record high gas prices and soaring inflation that is hitting people when they shop for food, clothes – or just about anything else.

Despite rising inflation and high gas prices, White House officials insisted this week that Arizona is sharing in the nation’s “robust” economic recovery, with low unemployment, and expanding wages in the state. Read more»

Chinese universities produce more Ph.D.s in science, engineering, technology and math; by 2025, China will be turning out nearly twice as many graduates with doctorates in those fields than American universities will.

A sharp decline in the number of Americans going to college - down nearly a million since the start of the pandemic and by nearly 3 million over the last decade - could alter American society for the worse, even as economic rivals such as China vastly increase university enrollment. Read more»

Pima County employees will have up to 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave after the Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 on Tuesday to expand the benefit. The change will cost the county about $1.2 million annually. Read more»

Surging gas prices were a main culprit behing some of the highest inflation in the last 40 years, according to new federal data. And the 9.7% overall increase in the Valley – where gas rose 67.2% over the year – was higher than the national consumer price index increase of 7% for the year.

Consumer prices rose by an average of 7% in U.S. cities last year, the steepest rise in decades, and they grew even faster in the Phoenix metro area, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Read more»

High annual quit rates mean many workers are not satisfied with their job’s pay, benefits or working conditions.

The so-called Great Resignation was one of the top stories of 2021 as “record” numbers of workers reportedly quit their jobs - but it isn’t quite as great as it seems, since large numbers of U.S. workers have been quitting for years. Read more»

Jason Clement is vice president of the Aetna One Advocate program. Clement was born with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare genetic disorder where the retina gradually breaks down over many years. He only has 3% of his vision remaining.

Many people living with disabilities struggle to find professional opportunities, but the increase in remote work, prompted by office closures during the pandemic, has the potential to improve the employment rates for millions of people living with a disability. Read more»

Job growth was experienced in almost every area of the economy as the employment picture continued to improve in Arizona, including the construction sector which grew a scant 1.3% over the last year. The biggest increases were in leisure and hospitality jobs, which grew 17.6% as the sector bounced back from pandemic shutdowns, helping drive the drop in unemployment.

Arizona’s unemployment rate continued its steady decline in October, falling to 5.2%, down a full percentage point from just two months earlier and almost one-third of the state’s pandemic high, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Read more»

Despite a stubbornly high unemployment rate of 6.1% in April — representing 9.8 million people who say they are actively looking for work — many employers are reporting that they can’t find people to hire, and economists disagree whether a too-generous unemployment supplement is the cause. Read more»

Servicemembers line up at a job fair in Florida in this 2015 photo – a sight rarely seen in 2020, when COVID-19 made most such job fairs virtual events.

An employment program for veterans that began in the days after 9/11 paid off last year when the COVID-19 pandemic rattled employment for vets in the state and across the country, but witnesses said there is still room for improvement in government programs that are supposed to help soldiers transition from military to civilian life. Read more»

Diane Wilson with pellets.

Tiny plastic pellets, have escaped into waterways by the countless billions as a result of failures by the plastics industry, not consumers. Read more»

The unemployment rate in Arizona fell sharply in May, reversing the spike in joblessness caused by COVID-19 closures. Despite that, the jobless rate of 8.9% was still the highest in almost nine years, and twice as high as it was just three months earlier.

Arizona posted one of the sharpest unemployment drops in the country in May, falling from a historic high of 13.4% in April to 8.9% last month, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Read more»

Some 87,000 new unemployment claims were filed in the week ending May 23, bringing the total number of jobless claims since the COVID-19 pandemic started to more than 740,000. Read more»

A historical photo: Trump in 2011.

The number of unfilled job openings is now greater than the number of unemployed people for the first time on record, but records only go back 18 years. Despite what some GOP spinmeisters would have you believe, “history” didn’t start in December of 2000. Read more»

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