The fallout from The New York Times’ allegations of sexual assault against Cesar Chavez was swift and wide-ranging. Now, some in the industry are hoping the revelations about the late farm labor leader open doors for systemic changes, including reforms aimed at advancing the rights of women farmworkers.

‘It creates an opportunity for those without scruples’

The sexual abuse claims, largely made by Chavez’s co-labor leader, Dolores Huerta, represent a massive fall from grace for a beloved figure in the Latino community, one so cherished that former President Joe Biden even placed a bronze bust of Chavez in the Oval Office in 2021. The allegations “raise a difficult question: How do you reckon with the man without losing the movement?” said KCRA-TV Stockton.

Some are concerned that the focus on Chavez could “leave today’s farmworkers more vulnerable,” farmworker advocate Luis Magaña said to KCRA, since people will be paying less attention to the bigger picture and more on the specifics of Chavez's allegations. The current system, which Magaña says can elicit violence against these workers, “creates an opportunity for those without scruples” to “freely commit some type of abuse, such as not paying them.” Magaña worked alongside Chavez in the early days of the movement but believes the cause must “continue beyond the man.” The time to have a conversation about this issue of sexual abuse among farmworkers documented in the Times exposé is “overdue.”

The farm labor movement itself was “always about the people — the thousands who marched, organized and fought for fair wages and dignity,” Magaña said to KCRA. Many are now trying to reconcile the revelations about Chavez with modern changes. Union organizers, for example, are “trying to push forward the farmworker movement and continue the work that many women, not just Chavez, spearheaded,” said The 19th. This includes “investing resources and support to improve the culture that has protected perpetrators in organizing spaces over victims.”

‘Engage and support our community’

Huerta, now 95, insists that her allegations against Chavez should not downplay the victories made by labor unions. Farmworker labor movements have “always been bigger and far more important than any one individual,” she said in a statement. Chavez’s actions “do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people. We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever.”

And many say that the current advocacy for women’s rights in the fields, regardless of Chavez, doesn’t go far enough. Do women “feel safe at work? It’s not just the labor movement,” said Olga Miranda, the president of SEIU Local 87, a union for San Francisco service workers, to The San Francisco Standard. There are “assholes everywhere.” The floodgates will open because of the allegations, as there are women who will “stand up and speak out and say, ‘I’m not gonna take your shit.’ Watch out for that force.”

The discourse should shift from “one man to the conditions farmworkers still face today, including a reality many say has long gone unheard: sexual violence against women in the fields,” said KCRA. Many women in these environments, Magaña said to KCRA, “stay silent, not for a cause but out of the need to survive.”

British businesses are to be offered a £3,000 state bonus for hiring a young person who has been out of work for six months as the number of economically inactive young people nears one million.

Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said it was part of the government’s plans to “back Britain’s young people” after youth unemployment hit its highest level in more than a decade.

How bad is it?

According to the Office for National Statistics’ latest labour market overview, 14% of Britons aged 18 to 24 were unemployed in the final quarter of 2025, compared with 12.7% in the same period in 2024.

This growth has largely been driven by young people who are “economically inactive”, meaning those who are out of work and not seeking it. The most recent data from the ONS says the number of young people not in employment, education or training (Neet) between October and December 2025 reached 957,000, up from around 800,000 in 2019.

Why is it so hard to find work?

For many of those not in employment or training, “the challenge is not so much a lack of skills or visibility as the dearth of openings in a stagnating labour market”, said the Financial Times. “Young people say they lack work experience and something to talk about to employers,” said Sareena Bains, chief executive of charity Movement to Work. “Those opportunities are becoming few and far between.”

The tough labour landscape has been made worse by the roll-out of AI, which threatens to erase many entry-level jobs.

Business groups have also criticised the government’s decision to raise employer’s national insurance contributions and the youth minimum wage, as well as changes to workers’ rights, all of which could make companies less inclined to take a risk on a newcomer to the workforce over an experienced worker. In February, Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, told the Commons Treasury Committee that changes around tax and the national living wage have had a “particular effect on those aged 16 to 18, and 18 to 21”.

Having analysed the effects of setting minimum wage rates by age, Alan Manning from LSE concluded that the evidence is “too weak” to blame youth unemployment on the minimum wage.

What else is to blame?

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has identified a “toxic cocktail” of “rising employment taxes, perverse incentives to claim benefits and a broken migration system”. The think tank’s Wasted Youth report found that businesses are turning to non-EU migrants while a growing number of young Britons are claiming benefits.

Health is another major factor. The share of Neet young people who report having a health condition that limits their ability to work rose from 26% in 2015 to 44% in 2025 – a 70% increase, according to The Health Foundation. This “mirrors trends among young people generally”, said the think tank. “Regardless of whether they are in work or education, 16–24-year-olds today are much more likely to report having a work-limiting health condition than they were in the past”. This increase is “driven primarily by mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions”.

What is being done?

As well as the £3,000 incentive for firms to hire young people out of work for six months, the government has also announced small and medium-sized businesses will get a £2,000 bonus if they take on a young apprentice, and jobs with training subsidised by the state are to be expanded to 22- to 24-year-olds.

Current policies to help Neet young people and expand apprenticeships were “not stacking up to the scale of the challenge”, Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning & Work Institute, told the FT.

A more radical proposal, backed by former home secretary David Blunkett and former chancellor Jeremy Hunt, is a Future Workforce Credit, a £670 million effective tax cut for employers hiring Neets that would cover 30% of their salary. CSJ modelling based on similar interventions suggests the approach would get 120,000 young people into jobs while saving £765 million in tax and welfare spending.

Ministers may delay plans to equalise the minimum wage for all ages, as promised in the Labour manifesto. Keir Starmer today insisted the government will stick to its pledge but he didn’t commit to a timeline for the change.

The government’s aim is to bridge the minimum-wage age gap, so that 18- to 20-year-olds are paid the same hourly rate as older people. But it’s facing strong pushback from business groups, who say this would make it too expensive to hire young people.

Rising youth unemployment has become an increasingly pressing issue: one in six 18- to 24-year-olds are without a job, the highest level in just over a decade, according to Office for National Statistics figures released yesterday. The national unemployment rate is 5.2%, higher than it’s been for five years.

What did the commentators say?

The government already announced an increase in the minimum wage for younger workers in last year’s Budget and there are fears that raising levels further would “result in businesses cutting the number of younger workers they employ”, said Oliver Wright in The Times.

“Labour has been its own worst enemy,” said the Financial Times’ editorial board. While global economic uncertainty, advances in AI and higher interest rates have all played a part in cooling the job market, “own goals” by the government, especially on national insurance contributions, are “adding insult to injury”. Britain’s latest jobs numbers, with “losses concentrated” in “sectors that disproportionately employ the young” look “grim” for a “party that prides itself on serving ‘working people’”.

Let’s not forget how AI is affecting the job market for young people, said City A.M.’s Saskia Koopman. “Hiring freezes” have now “overtaken mass layoffs”, making it difficult to get a foot on the employment ladder. If hiring – particularly in “AI-exposed areas” – continues to “stall”, the current “cyclical cooling could turn into something more persistent”.

It is particularly young men who are “bearing the brunt” of our “slumping job market”: “19% of men aged 16 to 24 are now unemployed, the highest rate since 2014”, said Tim Wallace in The Telegraph. For women of the same age, it's 13.1%. Hiring downturns, which always “fall hardest on the young”, also tend to affect the private sector, where men are more likely to work, more than the “female-dominated public sector”.

“The time has come for the brutal truth,” said Chloe Combi in The Independent. “Young people are being, and have been, failed.” Something has gone “profoundly wrong”, and it’s not young people’s fault: that lies “with the generations before them that created this no-hope landscape”. If changes aren’t made to give young people “a fighting chance”, they are in “serious danger” of being a lost generation.

What next?

In April, the minimum wage increases announced in the Budget will come into effect, raising the hourly rate for 18- to 20-year-olds from £10 to £10.85, and taking the National Living Wage for over-21s to £12.71.

Whether the government delays its promised age-band equalisation or not, it needs to act in other ways to help young people, said Combi in The Independent. We should be “pooling money into professional training and learning programmes”, which “would be an investment on so many levels”. Young people also desperately need a “sense of community” after the “catastrophic” Covid years: “affordable sports clubs” and “youth clubs” would help re-ignite “IRL socialising” and get the young “invested in the world around them”.

With layoffs hitting global industries across their workforces, companies are claiming a new culprit: the rise of artificial intelligence. Numerous brands, including major tech corporations like Amazon, have pointed to AI as the reason for the most recent wave of job cuts. But some labor analysts claim that blaming AI is simply a way for these companies to avoid taking responsibility when they downsize.

What did the commentators say?

Even as companies have been “blaming the promise of productivity with artificial intelligence for their decisions,” there is “uneven evidence that the promised cost-savings from AI are actually worth what companies are putting into it,” said NBC News. This has left some people “questioning whether AI could be serving as a fig leaf for companies that are laying off employees for old-fashioned reasons,” such as a company’s poor financial performance.

It is “much easier for a company to say, ‘We are laying workers off because we’re realizing AI-related efficiencies’ than to say, ‘We’re laying people off because we’re not that profitable or bloated, or facing a slowing economic environment, etc,’” David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said to NBC. Even if AI wasn’t the reason for a particular layoff, companies would “be wise to attribute the credit/blame to AI.”

The most notable example of this is Amazon, which has announced a new wave of 14,000 job cuts. This “came just a few months after CEO Andrew Jassy said the rollout of AI technology was likely to spell job cuts,” said Al Jazeera. But while experts are skeptical, AI “may be” at fault for the Amazon cuts. This “latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force,” Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst, said to Reuters.

Despite these changes at Amazon, many people have “voiced skepticism that recent high-profile layoffs are a telling sign of the technology's effect on employment,” said BBC News. There is a “real tendency, because everyone is so freaked out about the possible impact of AI on the labor market moving forward, to overreact to individual company announcements,” Martha Gimbel, the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale University, said to the BBC.

What next?

Whether AI is truly at fault or not, there’s no question that the technology is replacing certain jobs. In July 2025, Microsoft released a research paper outlining 40 occupations the company thinks could be outsourced to AI. At the top of the list were interpreters and translators, followed by historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, writers and customer service representatives. The job that Microsoft felt was the safest from AI was a phlebotomist, followed by nursing assistants, waste removal workers, painters, embalmers and plant operators.

Understanding the “effects of AI on the economy” will become “one of society’s most important” efforts, the paper said. This has especially been true in the “last several years,” as “generative AI has come to the fore as the next candidate general purpose technology, capable of improving or speeding up tasks as varied as medical diagnosis and software development.” Its extensive reach has already been “reflected in the astounding rate of AI adoption.”

They call it the Great Freeze. That’s how some analysts describe the U.S. job market recently — a “low-hire, low-fire” environment where workers who have jobs are not losing them but finding a new job is difficult. But a thaw may be coming.

A “slew” of “large-scale layoffs” may be a sign that the labor market is “starting to tip over,” said Axios. Amazon announced it will slash 14,000 jobs, UPS said it was cutting 48,000 positions, and Paramount said it was laying off 1,000 workers. The unemployment rate had hovered around 4% for more than a year, but that “apparent stability” has concealed “change beneath the surface.” Now, companies appear ready to “take advantage of the potential of AI to transform work.” This could mean fewer jobs for humans.

The massive layoffs suggest the job market’s “current state of suspension has changed for the worse,” said MarketWatch. While companies are still comfortably profitable, they are waiting on the “dust to settle” from tariff negotiations, the government shutdown and the corporate adoption of AI. Amazon’s layoffs could be the tipping point. “We may see others join the fray,” said John Challenger, the CEO of career-services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

What did the commentators say?

The job market “could get ugly,” Dan DeFrancesco said at Business Insider. “About 20 more Amazon-sized layoffs” would upend the labor market. That scenario is “not out of the realm of possibility” because “companies are known to follow the lead of their bigger peers.” Meta’s 2022 layoff of 11,000 workers led to a much larger wave of tech sector job cuts. American companies have recently been in a “holding pattern,” but if they start to let workers go without replacing them, the “somewhat resilient job market could start to show some real cracks.”

“The labor market is undeniably going through a transition,” Adam Hardy said at Money. Young workers are “canaries in the coal mine” since they are often the first to feel job market instability, and “young workers and recent college grads aren’t doing so well” at the moment. AI is often blamed, but there are other factors. Right now, there are “more graduates than there are jobs that require grads.” That’s a challenge that predates the rise of AI by “several years.”

What next?

The Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a quarter point this week to “shore up the softening job market,” said NPR. On top of private sector layoffs, the federal government has already cut about 100,000 jobs this year. American employment “may well be shrinking already,” Fed Governor Christopher Waller said earlier in October.

Bad news for the job market might be good news for graduate programs. “Applications are on the rise” at law schools and MBA programs, said Fortune, with law school applications up 3% over last year. Gen-Z job seekers are buying “more time to figure out what’s next” instead of “facing the bleak job market head-on.”

Amid a difficult job market, many have resorted to “job hugging,” or “holding onto their jobs for dear life” even if they aren’t progressing in their careers or lack motivation, said consulting firm Korn Ferry. The lack of higher career aspirations is a result of the poor job market that has made people uncertain about their employment futures.

Background

It is no secret that the job market has not been promising recently. The revised data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the U.S. job market was “much weaker in 2024 and early this year than originally reported, adding to concerns about the health of the nation’s economy,” said The Associated Press. “Employers added 911,000 fewer jobs than originally reported in the year that ended in March 2025.”

Overall, the “economy has been in a low-hire, low-fire equilibrium,” said The Atlantic. This has extended to almost all sectors aside from health care. The “amount of time a worker has spent looking for a job has climbed to an average of 10 weeks, meaning that Americans are spending two weeks longer on the job market than they were a few years ago.” Many are unable to find jobs altogether.

The latest

In a job market without many new jobs or potential for upward mobility, job hugging naturally occurs. Given the “activity that happened post-Covid and then some of these constant layoffs, people are waiting and sitting in seats and hoping that they have more stability,” said Stacy DeCesaro, a managing consultant at Korn Ferry, to Fortune. A July 2025 report found that a majority of employees plan to remain in their current jobs for at least the next six months. This trend aligns with quiet quitting and quiet vacationing, as many are not necessarily engaged in their jobs and are more concerned about not having one. “They don’t seem happy, they don’t give 100% — and they don’t quit,” said The Wall Street Journal.

However, job hugging does not just apply to those who are only trying to keep a job. “The phrase ‘job hugging’ just kind of coined itself, because of the reluctance of especially top performers to leave where they’re currently at,” DeCesaro said to Insider. In many cases, workers who have outgrown their current roles are “sitting in the wrong seat at this time in their careers and clinging to it because of market fear,” said Forbes.

The reaction

“The process of getting a job has become a late-capitalist nightmare,” said The Atlantic. This has led many people to feel that they must remain in their current jobs and not seek out new opportunities. “When people were moving during the Great Resignation, that allowed others to get promoted, perhaps ahead of schedule and have a stretch job,” said Alan Guarino, the vice chairman of Korn Ferry, to the Journal. “Now people can’t move up and they potentially get demotivated because of the lack of opportunity.”

This can be bad for both employers and employees as “go-getters hankering for promotions might lose out if mediocre co-workers refuse to vacate the next rung on the corporate ladder,” said the Journal. There is also less room for new grads to be hired. However, it could also be an opportunity. “Great teammates are not leaving for external jobs every couple years," said Korn Ferry, “which means firms can develop those talents and create more internal career paths.”

Schools and companies are teaching Gen Z how to talk on the phone because young people lack the confidence to make professional calls.

"Telephobia", or an anxiety around making and receiving phone calls, is a growing issue, with a study by comparison site Uswitch concluding that a quarter of people aged 18 to 34 never actually answer when they're called.

'Literally screaming'

School coaching was offered ahead of A-level results last month, when students who didn't meet their predicted grades would be "forced" to speak to university admissions officers, said The Independent.

But that isn't the first time youngsters have been offered phone coaching. The Daily Mail reported in March that Gen Z staff at a leading UK finance firm were being "trained to speak over the phone" because "young workers are too scared to talk on their devices".

Posting on TikTok, Gen Zers have shared their absolute terror over phone calls, saying they "literally scream" when their phone rings and that unexpected phone calls are an "invasion" of their "personal space".

It stems from a fear of the unknown, said Liz Baxter, a careers advisor at Nottingham College, on CNBC. When their phone rings, young people think: "I don’t know who's on the end of it. I don't know how to deal with it". Gen Z are also "concerned with how they sound on calls" because, unlike video meetings, they've "no visual feedback to confirm how they're doing".

In a viral tweet last month, a recruiter said that when she calls Gen Z applicants at an agreed time, they often wait for her to speak first, instead of saying "hello". Replies to her tweet suggested that many shared this "alarming etiquette", said Business Insider.

This is sometimes because they guard against spam callers, who don't start until they hear someone say "hello", but also, some young people believe that if you're the one who's calling, you should initiate the conversation.

'Personal space'

But, it's not just the younger generation dodging calls who have "killed the phone call", said The Independent. A 47-year-old woman said she "would never call a person randomly out of the blue, just like I wouldn't knock on their front door unannounced – it's just not respectful of their personal space or time".

Up to 63% of UK adults have experienced phone fear, according to a study in 2020, by cloud-based contact agency Natterbox, and 26% said they would only ever make a call in the case of an emergency. In May, a survey by the Buffalo Trace Distillery found that a third of British adults "panic" when their phone rings unexpectedly.

So phone training could be a "sensible way" to deal with this "growing trend", said Huffington Post and "honestly", most of us could do with a "refresher on how to talk to one another a little better".

Employees have been taking more "quiet vacations" over the past year. And this trend, when someone goes on a trip but concurrently presents the illusion of being online and working, is likely an indicator of a larger problem with workplace culture in which employees are afraid of slacking off or being seen as lazy.

What's the data?

Approximately 41% of employees have taken a quiet vacation in 2025, according to a survey conducted by Resume Builder. Of those who have quiet vacationed, "3% have taken just one quiet vacation, 48% two to three and 28% four to five." Also, "about 11% have taken six to seven secret vacation days and 4% have taken 10 days or more."

The trend began last summer, with many taking summer vacations on the sly. "Employees utilize various methods like scheduling emails in advance or setting auto-responders to create the illusion of being present while they're actually on vacation," Tawny Lott Rodriguez, the director of human resources at the private school Rowland Hall in Salt Lake City, said to U.S. News & World Report. The concept has similarities to the "quiet quitting" trend, where employees check out of their jobs but refuse to quit.

Quiet vacationing arose because the "boundaries between work and personal time have blurred with the rise of remote work, which has given more people the flexibility to do their jobs from far-flung locales," said The Wall Street Journal. However, the approach is "often counterproductive," as "you're neither getting a truly restorative break from work, nor being that productive." There is also, of course, the risk of getting caught.

Why are people quiet vacationing?

The rise of quiet vacationing is a canary in the coal mine for corporate work culture. "This isn't just people being sneaky," said Marais Bester, a senior consultant at SHL, to Forbes. It's instead an indication that "many don't feel safe or supported enough to take a proper break." So they find "workarounds, jiggling their mouse to stay 'active,' turning video off on calls, answering just enough emails to look busy." The problem is the missed-deadline potential and boundless "tasks to complete upon return" along with "facing repercussions if discovered," said U.S. News & World Report. These are ways that "taking a quiet vacation can backfire."

Many employees also have limited amounts of paid time off, so they are reluctant to use it. The blurred lines between leisure time and work time have put pressure on employees in general. "All of this comes from a fear of looking like they're slacking off," said Fortune.

Employers should be more intentional about setting boundaries between work and free time. If employers want people to "show up fully engaged, creative and resilient," they need to stop "rewarding burnout" and start "valuing recovery," said Bester. "Rested people do better work. It really is that simple."

Jobseekers who manage to land interviews are increasingly facing a new hurdle: being interviewed not by an HR manager but a robot.

You might worry that artificial intelligence is "coming for your job", but it might also be "coming for your job interviewer", said The New York Times.

'Paradoxically humanising'

Although some aspects of job searches, such as screening CVs and scheduling meetings, have become "increasingly automated over time", the interview had "long seemed to be the part of the process that most needed a human touch", said The New York Times. But now AI is "encroaching upon even that domain".

AI interviewers can be a "godsend" for middle managers, said Fortune. The tech can help save time in first-round calls, allowing human interviewers more time to have "more meaningful conversations" with applicants in the next round.

Like it or not, this is a "new reality" that jobseekers "will have to put up with no matter what", said Futurism, because the industry sees it as a "way to free up time for overworked hiring managers", particularly for "high-volume hiring" in areas such as customer service.

This might seem like a dehumanising development, but supporters insist that the opposite is true. "It's really paradoxical" but "in a lot of ways", this offers a "much more humanising experience", Arsham Ghahramani, co-founder of Ribbon, a company that produced an AI interviewer, told The New York Times. AI can screen the avalanche of applications and then "ask questions that are really tailored to you".

'Added indignity'

Yet many jobseekers view AI interviewers as "another hurdle in the intense hunt" for work, said Fortune. Some told the outlet that they're "confused, intrigued, or straight-up dejected" when "robotic, faceless bots" join interview calls. This is an "added indignity" and a "red flag for company culture", they said.

Many said they're "swearing off" interviews conducted in this way, because AI interviewers make them feel so "unappreciated" they'd prefer to miss potential job opportunities, and they reason that the company's culture "can't be great" if human bosses won't interview them.

However, "not all AI interviewers are created equal", said Fortune: there are "monotonous, robotic-voiced bots with pictures of strange feminised avatars", but some produce a "faceless bot" with a "more natural-sounding voice". And, unlike humans, AI interviewers can focus on "relevant signals" while "ignoring irrelevant signals" including those "linked to social class, demographic status, and any information likely to decrease fairness", said Forbes.

Google has set out its next steps in developing artificial intelligence which could eventually be able to complete real-world tasks at the same level as humans.

The tech giant's DeepMind AI division is working towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical level of AI that can carry out tasks autonomously. To do this, DeepMind is using a new "world model", Genie 3, a simulated environment that can help train AI agents like robots with realistic replicas of situations and environments.

The company said it expected Genie 3 to play a "critical role as we push toward AGI" and the prospect of AI taking on more real-world jobs. AGI is often "viewed through the prism of potentially eliminating white-collar jobs", said The Guardian, and changing the workforce as we know it.

How far away is AGI?

The AI market is increasingly competitive, with tech companies in a race to achieve AGI. OpenAI and Meta are among the biggest companies openly pushing the development of AGI, the latter assembling a taskforce for what it is calling "personal superintelligence", which CEO Mark Zuckerberg said was "now in sight".

When AGI will actually be achieved is unclear, however. Google has suggested it could arrive at the start of the 2030s, while other experts predict it will be the second half of this century.

The differing predictions are because there is "no universally accepted definition of AGI", and tech firms are using "different benchmarks to measure whether they’ve achieved their own definition of AGI", said BuiltIn.

There is agreement, though, that it will eventually happen and have a significant impact on jobs, with companies like Amazon already suggesting it will cut its workforce as AI provides more and more "efficiency gains".

What kind of jobs are most at risk?

A report from Microsoft shed some light on the kind of jobs that may disappear as AGI develops, suggesting that "knowledge work" – jobs in "computer and mathematical, and office and administrative support" – will be the main ones under threat. It also said that sales work where the main part of the role is "providing and communicating information" could be replaced by AI.

The report listed 40 roles that are most likely to be affected by AI, with five including interpreters and translators, historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, and writers and authors. Jobs least at risk were also outlined, which include largely manual occupations such as dredge operators, bridge and lock tenders, water treatment plant and system operators, and foundry mould and coremakers.

The rise of AI will also create other jobs to assist it, like engineers who manage the AI and the data it uses to function.

Is it already happening?

Some data suggests that AI has already been responsible for job losses, mostly in the technology industry. According to a report by US outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas, since 2023 there have been 27,000 job cuts in the US directly linked to AI.

But other data suggests that AI has yet to begin taking over "entry-level jobs in knowledge-intensive industries", said The Economist. Unemployment among US graduates who take these kinds of jobs remains low, while the "share of employment in white-collar work has risen very slightly", despite these being the kind of jobs touted to be taken over by AI.

Relatively stable low unemployment and steady wage growth data also suggest AI is yet to seriously bite in the jobs market. This could be because companies are yet to adopt AI for "serious work", and if they do use AI, they do not necessarily cut jobs, instead "AI may simply help a worker do their job faster, rather than making them redundant."

The government has announced plans for a "nationwide blitz" on those working illegally in the UK.

With the number of people arriving in small boats from France up by more than 50% on the same period last year, the issue is "seen by ministers as an area of political vulnerability, one being exploited by Reform UK and the Conservatives", said The Guardian.

How many people are we talking about?

Accurately calculating the number of people living and working illegally in the UK is, not surprisingly, challenging.

The Home Office does not publish official estimates but residual modelling by the Pew Research Center puts the number of people living in the UK illegally between 800,000 and 1.2 million. That is "one in 100 of the population", Conservative peer Baroness McIntosh told a migration debate in the House of Lords last year – "more than in any other European country".

In the last year, 7,130 people were arrested on suspicion of working illegally, according to the Home Office, an increase of 50% on the previous year.

Based on these figures, the best guess is that the UK's illicit workforce numbers in the hundreds of thousands at any one time.

How do they get work?

"On the face of it, Britain's rules appear as strict as those on the continent," said The Times. Migrants awaiting asylum cannot work for a year and even then only in a few specific sectors experiencing staffing shortages. All employers have to check their worker's documents and can be fined up to £60,000 if found to have employed someone illegally.

But Britain also has a much larger informal labour market than many other European countries. Rights to work checks only apply to employees, not for the self-employed or agency workers in the gig economy, which has experienced rapid growth in recent years.

There are reports that asylum seekers "can rent legitimate delivery-driver accounts within hours of arriving in the country – skipping employment legality checks", said Sky News. Such loopholes create an "incentive for those wanting to risk their lives coming to the UK illegally".

Sectors that rely on subcontracting and agency workers, like construction, care work and hospitality, are also believed to employ a large number of illegal workers.

What's being done?

The Home Office has said its crackdown will be a "major operation", based around "strategic, intel-driven" enforcement teams and focused on the gig economy, particularly on delivery riders.

At the same time, Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat have said they will increase the use of facial verification checks for riders after the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, posted a widely shared video of delivery bikes packed together outside an asylum hotel near Heathrow.

The government could also adopt a stricter enforcement approach as seen on the continent. While raids on employers in the UK are mainly done in response to tip-offs, in France, for example, authorities conduct random inspections and stop people on the street or at train stations to request their papers.

Labour is also exploring the idea of introducing digital ID cards in the UK as a means of cracking down on illegal immigration. Britain and Ireland are the only European countries without an ID card system, and "critics argue" that that "has made it attractive to migrants as it is easier to live and work illegally", said The Times.

A study has found that it takes between 100 and 200 applications to receive a job offer these days. So why would anyone apply for a role, get through the interviews, land the post, but then… never turn up?

The trend, known as "career catfishing", is a curious new office shift that sheds light on how younger people feel about the treatment they go through during the recruitment process.

Professional ghosting

Catfishing, where someone pretends to be someone else online, is a "well-known" practice in the dating world, said Forbes, and one sometimes used by financial con artists, too.

Now, the "same concept" has "quietly slipped" into the jobs market, said RTE, and it's pretty simple: "you apply for a job, you land a job, accept the offer" and then disappear before your first day.

A survey found that 34% of Gen Z jobseekers have indulged in this form of professional ghosting, but they're not the only ones: 24% of millennials, 11% of Gen X and 7% of boomers have also done it.

"What’s happening with Gen Z and their approach to work is pure chaos", Yakov Filippenko, CEO and founder of recruitment website Intch told Personnel Today. And because "work itself" has "turned into a meme", Gen Z "treats it that way".

The prominence of Gen Z among career catfishing statistics may offer a "negative view" of younger jobseekers, making people think they "lack professionalism" and "dismiss conventional employment norms", said RTE. But they also offer a "snapshot" of the "frustration" young people face in finding jobs.

Long and dispiriting 

Recruitment has become a "labyrinthine, opaque and time-consuming" process, said The Guardian. In the course of a "long and dispiriting" recruitment format, applicants may have "got a better offer" or "simply changed their minds".

They don't feel they "owe prospective employers anything" because they feel they've been "treated very badly by them".

The complexity of finding a job is partly because a significant number of positions being advertised don't exist – they're "ghost jobs", or openings posted by companies to make it appear they're recruiting and "therefore growing". Or they're sometimes posted to "keep their present employees on their toes".

In a mirror of career catfishing by job applicants, there's a swing known as "professional ghosting", when companies put hopefuls through "multiple interviews", sometimes even making job offers, before "abruptly ending all communication".

If these trends collide, it sounds like the future might see "ghost employees for ghost jobs".

Each generation thinks they have it harder than the one that went before. But as the latest crop of university students prepare to graduate, the class of 2025 may well be right.

"Yes, we've heard it all before", said The Telegraph's employment editor Lucy Burton, who entered the job market in the aftermath of the financial crisis, "but this time, it really could be the worst summer ever to graduate".

The impact of AI

The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the wider job market is already undeniable.

Last year, the International Monetary Fund said it believed AI would impact nearly 40% of all jobs, while analysis by the Tony Blair Institute found technology could displace up to 275,000 private sector roles a year in the UK alone, rising to up to three million by 2050.

A commonly held belief about the "forthcoming AI jobs-pocalypse" is that it will disproportionately affect recent graduates, said The Economist. "The explanation runs that they typically do entry-level jobs in knowledge-intensive industries – such as paralegal work or making slides in a management consultancy. It is exactly this sort of task that AI can do well".

A recent survey of executives on LinkedIn appears to bear this out. More than 60% said AI will eventually take on some of the tasks currently assigned to entry-level employees, especially more mundane and manual roles.

In all, UK-entry level jobs are down by nearly a third since the release of ChatGPT three years ago, according to research by job search site Adzuna.

Fewer jobs available

"Not only is there the rise of AI to contend with, but the list of other problems appears endless", said Burton. In the UK, specifically, these range from "higher employment costs, a workers' rights revolution and a whole cohort of older staff who just aren't budging".

Recent increases to employer national insurance contributions (NICs) and the national minimum wage have forced many employers to cut entry-level opportunities. At the same time, new workers' rights legislation will introduce the right to unfair dismissal claims from day one, reducing the risk appetite of employers to take a punt on a younger, inexperienced hire.

This comes on top of an already competitive jobs market. Citing data from the Institute of Student Employers the BBC said there were an average of 140 applications received for each available UK graduate job in 2024. This was the highest number of applications for 30 years – and a more than 50% rise from 2023.

This suggests that young people are "bearing the brunt of a protracted slowdown in the UK labour market, as employers hang on to existing staff but hold off hiring", said the Financial Times.

Devalue degrees

"The worry", said the FT, "is that a cyclical slowdown in the wider UK labour market could be masking a more lasting decline in the value of a degree."

Some graduates are even being rejected for jobs in supermarkets or warehouses, "not because they're unqualified, but because they’re seen as overqualified, too risky or surplus to requirements", said The Independent.

"In terms of the UK economy, this isn't just a problem of job shortages. It signals a deeper breakdown in the social contract – the long-held promise that education leads to opportunity. And it exposes how the connection between learning and labour is coming undone".

Researchers have claimed that Gen Z drink less, don't have much sex but are particularly interested in astrology. Now these teens and 20-somethings face a new accusation – that they don't know how to behave in the workplace.

Bosses in San Francisco are hiring etiquette coaches to teach young workers about everything from eye contact to personal hygiene.

Sweaty and skimpy

Employers complain that Gen Z workers "want to be promoted after only a few months, treat the office like their bedroom, show up in sweats or skimpy office-siren fits, FaceTime friends from their desks, and ghost their managers", said The San Francisco Standard.

Some Gen Z workers leave food packaging on staff room tables, expecting cleaners to throw them away, and don't shower or change their clothes very often, said one boss. Other young staff didn't know how to ask their manager questions politely or how to make eye contact.

Often, the problems begin before the worker is even hired. In a survey of 1,000 employers last year, one in eight said a Gen Z candidate had brought their mum or dad to a job interview. And a study by Resume Builder last year found companies complaining that Gen Z candidates at interviews didn't dress appropriately (58%), made unreasonable salary demands (42%), and didn’t seem very interested or engaged (33%).

Once they're hired, the researchers found that Gen Z workers behave in an entitled way (60%) and are "too difficult to manage" (26%).

Soft skills

Some firms in San Francisco have come up with a novel solution to the Gen Z problem: appointing etiquette experts to coach young employees in basic workplace manners.

One etiquette coach, Rosalinda Randall, said enquiries have risen by 50% over the last two months. Bosses "didn't want to deal with it, so they hired me", she said. Randall has given workshops on everything from how to make eye contact to where to stick your name tag and "how to ask for – not demand, things from your boss".

Another coach, Melissa Franks, has been "flooded" with requests for help, particularly from employers who feel like they're being "challenged by their young colleagues". She said she encouraged bosses to think of such "pushback" as "youthful curiosity" rather than "insubordination".

Jenny Simmons, global head of onboarding and employee learning at Salesforce, has "revamped the company's processes for new workers to beef up the training of soft skills". There are now classes on "presentation, emotional intelligence and Slack etiquette".

But all this is just a "new thing" for companies to "waste money on", said Gizmodo. It's hard to believe that Gen Z is "any better or any worse than any other generation of American worker".

As for Gen Z workers themselves, they "see things differently" to their bosses, said The San Francisco Standard. From their perspective, millennial and Gen X managers have "no work-life balance" and don't offer it to their staff. They're "still waiting for that work-life balance they promised us", said one on X.

The arrival of summer always brings an influx of freshly minted college graduates into the job market. This year is different: Artificial intelligence is unsettling the career paths of young grads looking for their first professional work.

AI could "upend entry-level work" for new college grads by automating jobs "previously performed by low-level employees" like legal assistants or early career computer programmers, said ABC News. Some of those jobs will simply disappear, while others will change in significant ways. But it does suggest the "career ladder is being broken," said University of Pennsylvania professor Lynn Wu. It's already a rough time for young professionals: The jobless rate for recent grads is 5.8%, the highest since 2021.

How bad is it for college grads?

Not good. It's not just the unemployment rate, but also the "underemployment" rate — 41.2% of new grads are working jobs that don't require their degrees, said NBC News. That's up nearly a full percentage point from a year ago. Internship postings are down 11% from last year. The job market for young professionals is "pretty frozen," said Allison Shrivastava, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab. Some of that is due to President Donald Trump's trade wars. Businesses and workers are "both kind of deer-in-headlights, not sure what to do."

And it may get worse. AI could "wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs" in the next few years, said Axios. The warning of a "white-collar bloodbath" came from Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, "one of the world's most powerful creators of artificial intelligence." Most Americans are "unaware that this is about to happen," said Amodei. Trump adviser Steve Bannon said the issue will be a major issue in the 2028 presidential election. Entry-level jobs are "going to be eviscerated," he said.

What happened to 'learn to code?'

Until recently, that was the conventional advice to young people wanting to ensure their long-term viability in the marketplace. No more. AI is "prompting technology companies to hire fewer recent college graduates," said USA Today. Overall, tech companies are "hiring about half the software developers they used to" because AI is "handling basic software development tasks." Microsoft, which just underwent a round of layoffs, says 30% of its code is written by artificial intelligence.

Is there any reason for optimism?

Optimists say the job market will be reshaped but not destroyed, per CNBC. When an industrial revolution comes along, there are "more jobs created than lost," said Carol Stubbings, an executive with PwC professional services firm. The types of jobs and skills needed to do them will change, however, which means "workers need to be prepared to take them."

That may not help recent grads. The problem for companies is that replacing entry-level workers with AI could lead them to "underinvest in job training, mentorship and other programs" that help new professionals, said Kevin Roose at The New York Times. Businesses will be hurt when the workers they do hire are "unprepared for more senior roles later on."

Gen Z "don't want to show up" to the office, according to JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon. Alan Sugar has voiced similar complaints, claiming younger employees "just want to sit at home". They are far from the only commentators to suggest that young workers have become attached to remote working and actively resist coming into the office.

But recent research has found, contrary to the stereotypes, Gen Z employees "crave the connection and routine" of in-person work, said the Financial Times, and they're actually "leading the charge back to the office".

'Touching base'

Gen-Z employees go into the office more than any other age group, according to a study from property company JLL. They average three days a week, one more than the national average of two.

Separate research found that 45% of 20-29-year-olds were full-time in an office and were the only age group to say they worked more productively that way. Further analysis suggested that while 35% of Gen X want remote-first roles, this figure falls to 24% for Gen Z.

That makes sense, Pam Lindsay-Dunn, chief operating officer of recruitment company Hays, told The i Paper. When people are "learning the job", they "enjoy touching base", "meeting people" and "being part of a culture".

While it's true that Gen Z employees "expect a healthy balance" between their "professional lives" and their "personal pursuits", Mark Dixon, founder and chief executive of office group IWG, told the Financial Times, they're also "incredibly hard working" people.

'Generational disparities'

Every time a new generation "ages into the work world", the "sky always seems to be falling", and there's "much hand-wringing from their elders", said Alison Green on Slate. Millennials were supposedly "overly entitled participation trophy–chasers" and Gen X–ers were "disaffected slackers", but in "my experience as a manager", such generational generalisations are "usually BS".

It is true, some junior staff are reluctant to commute but their reservations are often financial. A survey of Gen Z workers by Deloitte found that 21% believed "being required on-site full time or on some days has negatively impacted them in a financial sense".

“Why would I, as a young person with student debt, say goodbye to around a quarter of my salary just on trains and the occasional coffee?” a 23-year-old finance worker asked the Financial Times.

Going into the office feels pointless for some younger colleagues because of the discrepancy in attendance between them and older workers, who are more likely to have caring responsibilities that make hybrid or remote working more attractive.

"Generational disparities" create "challenges" for managers, said the paper. They have to "balance competing demands for flexibility from older workers" with younger peers' "desire to learn and meet colleagues".

Some of the UK's leading companies are still using personality tests when they recruit staff, despite government advice that they make finding jobs harder for neurodivergent people.

These tests are "locking autistic people out of jobs", said the Big Issue, and charities believe they are discriminatory.

Significant barriers

Personality tests, sometimes known as psychometric tests, aim to "determine if a worker will fit into a company's culture", said Huck, as well as "how they will respond to their employer's directions".

The tests are used by some of Britain's leading retailers, including Morrisons and John Lewis, but they make job applications "near impossible" for people with autism, said the Big Issue.

A government review has found that only three in 10 working-age autistic people are in work, compared with around five in 10 for all disabled people and eight in 10 for non-disabled people.

A study in Sage Journals found that one reason for the higher unemployment rate among autistic people may be that hiring processes are "inaccessible" for them, and a study on PubMed found that pre-employment personality tests "prey on several features of autism in an unfair way".

The London Autism Group Charity told the Big Issue that the tests "present significant barriers for autistic applicants" while Ambitious about Autism said "many highly qualified autistic people" have been "unable to find work" because of the "prevalence" of the tests.

Although it's illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities, personality tests can be used "to sidestep the law", said Accessibility.com. The tests "often screen for so many autism characteristics" that they "come just short of outright asking a person if they're autistic".

Personality tests are a "recipe for discrimination" against people with disabilities, wrote Henry Claypool for NBC News, and it's "junk science" to assume that people's "self-reported moods or confidence accurately correlate to their future job performance".

Human complexities 

Companies in the UK are legally required to offer "reasonable adjustments" for people with additional needs during the hiring process, said Huck, and they may be offered "extra time, screen-reading software, or other provisions".

John Lewis said it made interview questions publicly available online to help applicants prepare, while Morrisons is introducing a new online assessment which it says "will have far greater functionality" to support all applicants, "including those that are neurodivergent”.

But completely "opting out of a personality test" is "rarely permitted", said Huck, and the tests have "great potential for harm" when used to decide the fate of a worker who is looking for employment and an income, because "people are far more complex than a quiz", and "it's about time that modern recruitment processes reflect that".

Five Thai nationals held by Hamas were released last week, meaning nearly all the Thai hostages seized during the attack on 7 October have now been freed.

These hostages were part of a community of tens of thousands of Thai agricultural labourers working in Israel, where they can earn up to five times more than they can at home – but not without running a number of risks.

Strategic recruitment of workers

Thai workers started arriving in Israel during the late 1980s. Previously, Israel had "relied heavily" on labour from Palestinian workers but it started "bringing in large numbers of migrant workers" after the start of the Palestinian uprising known as the first Intifada, said AP.

In the face of the Palestinian violence, it was a "strategic decision" to replace Palestinian workers with migrant ones, so Israel "wouldn't have this dependence", research anthropologist Matan Kaminer told Nikkei Asia.

By 1992, there were thousands of Thai agricultural "trainees" and "volunteers" in Israel, according to Kaminer. They are almost all male, and generally come from poorer areas of Thailand, especially the northeast.

The main driver for these men to seek work in Israel is that they can earn significantly more than they can in Thailand. Working on Israeli farms, Thais can pocket around $1,000 USD (£800) per month, compared to less than $200 (£160) at home. But wages are still low by Israeli standards, and the workers face other serious issues.

Unsafe working conditions

In 2020, a report from the workers' rights NGO Kav LaOved found that 83% of Thais in Israel were paid below the legal minimum wage, that many did not receive legally assured entitlements, and that they faced unsafe working conditions and lack of access to medical care.

"Similar issues" were reported by Human Rights Watch in 2015 and, in 2022 , a US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report described "the treatment of some Thai workers in Israel's agricultural sector as forced labour", said the Financial Times.

Things got much more serious on and after 7 October, when 40 Thai nationals were killed by Hamas, and 54 were taken hostage – "almost a quarter of the total of 220 captives". Most of the hostages were released in November 2024. After the release of five more last week and the reported death of two, it's thought only one remains captive.

In the aftermath of 7 October, some 7,000 Thais returned home, "primarily on Thai government evacuation flights", said AP. In the face of this new labour shortage, Israel's agriculture ministry announced new incentives, including extended work visas and pay bonuses of about $500 (£400) a month.

The perks promise is working: during 2024, Thailand's Labour Ministry granted 3,966 Thais permission to work in Israel. And last week, the Thai ambassador to Israel announced that there are now more than 38,000 Thai workers in the country, said AP.

India's notoriously intense workplace culture is under renewed scrutiny after the death of a young woman at a leading accounting firm.

Anna Sebastian Perayil, a 26-year-old accountant, died four months after joining the India offices of Ernst & Young (EY). Her mother wrote to the EY India chairman blaming her daughter's death on the "overwhelming work pressure", in a letter that went viral.

Relentless demands

Anita Augustine alleged that her daughter had experienced "anxiety and sleeplessness" soon after joining EY, struggling with the "workload, new environment and long hours".

"She was trying to prove herself in a new environment, and in doing so, she pushed herself beyond her limits," the email said. Augustine added that her daughter's experience "sheds light on a work culture" that "seems to glorify overwork while neglecting the very human beings behind the roles".

The "relentless demands and the pressure to meet unrealistic expectations" are "not sustainable, and they cost us the life of a young woman with so much potential", added Augustine.

The official cause of Perayil's death is still unclear. But Perayil's father believes his daughter died of a combination of conditions including work stress and insomnia.

"Anna was unable to sleep on most days and couldn't eat on time," he told The News Minute. "After a whole night of work, she would have to wake up at 7.30 the next morning and repeat the same cycle."

EY told Business Insider that it was "taking the family's correspondence with utmost seriousness and humility", and called Perayil's death an "irreparable loss".

High pressure

Fourteen-hour work days, meetings during holidays, and no overtime. To some, this may sound like a job from hell. But for many employees in India, it's standard office life.

India has one of the toughest work cultures in the world. In 2022, according to the most recently available data from the International Labour Organization, the average employee in India worked 46.7 hours a week, compared to about 36 in the UK.

Not only are employees in India working long hours, but many are also doing it under intense pressure. "The pressure is very, very high," Jennifer Hephzibah, a senior HR professional in India, told Business Insider, because "if you don't deliver", you "either lose your bonus, or you lose your job" and "it doesn't matter what you're going through otherwise".

A Boston Consulting Group survey of 11,000 workers in eight countries in October 2023 found that 58% of Indian respondents reported feeling burned out – the highest share of any of the countries, including the US (50%), the UK (47%), and Japan (37%).

Last autumn the co-founder of Infosys, Narayana Murthy, suggested that young Indians should work 70-hour weeks to boost the economy, telling The Record that India's work productivity is "one of the lowest in the world".

But Chandrasekhar Sripada, a professor at the Indian School of Business, said that things should move in the other direction, telling the BBC that Scandinavian countries "have already created much gentler working environments, so there are models for India to follow" and "all it needs is willpower".

The government has been accused of prioritising unions over pensioners after it announced a £100 million pay deal with train drivers.

Pensioners are "being deprived of the winter fuel allowance, taxpayers are facing tax hikes and passengers are facing higher fares", Helen Whately, the shadow transport secretary, told The Times – "all as a result of this government's choice to put the unions first".

Transport

The government believes that the pay deal with train drivers' union Aslef – worth about £9,000 to the average member – is "ultimately better value" for taxpayers than allowing strikes that have cost the railways £850 million in lost revenue to "drag on", said The Times.

Drivers at London North Eastern Railway (LNER) still intend to carry out a series of strikes in September, October and November, but this is a "separate" action relating to a "breakdown in industrial relations" with the operator, said the BBC.

The government deal could have a "knock-on effect" with other rail unions, which have made clear they expect to be offered the same terms given to train drivers, said The Times. Negotiations will resume this week with the RMT union, which represents workers such as guards, station staff and signallers.

Elsewhere, 650 passport control staff will strike at Heathrow airport from 31 August to 3 September, raising the prospect of "misery" for travellers flying over the last weekend of the summer holidays, said The Telegraph. Border Force employees are said to be "unhappy with changes to rosters and shift patterns".

Doctors and nurses

Last month, the new government announced a deal with junior doctors for a 22% pay rise to end industrial action, following negotiations between the health secretary, Wes Streeting, and BMA leaders. But the Daily Express claimed that "rotating and newly qualified" junior doctors plan to launch more pay strikes next April.

Senior doctors in England ended their pay dispute with the government this April, when consultants belonging to two major trade unions backed a deal that saw some receive a pay increase of nearly 20% for the financial year 2023-24.

Meanwhile, thousands of nurses in the RCN union have until September to vote on whether to accept the government's proposed 5.5% pay award. It would be a "mistake" to accept it, said Socialist Worker, because such a "marginal gain will do nothing to improve the recruitment crisis, short staffing and overwork that nurses endure now".

Teachers

Teaching unions said that more school strikes in England are "now unlikely" after they welcomed the government's offer of a 5.5% pay rise from September. The offer, which is being funded by an additional £1.2 billion from the government, is a "welcome step in the right direction", the National Education Union told the BBC.

The calmer rhetoric came after Britain's biggest teaching union had earlier warned Keir Starmer that strikes are almost "inevitable" unless the government agreed to pay rises.

Local government

"Two of the three unions representing local government workers have rejected this year's pay offer and are considering strike action," said the Local Government Chronicle.

After ministers promised other public sector workers pay rises, the Local Government Association told the LGC that it will "continue to make the case" for additional funding to enable higher pay for local government staff.

A ballot on further strike action will open on 4 September and close on 16 October.

Rubbish collection 

Unions have suspended planned strike action by waste workers in Scotland after a new pay offer from council leaders. The proposed deal would usher in a 3.6% increase for all grades of staff, with a rise of £1,292 for the lowest paid, equivalent to 5.63%.

Edinburgh breathed a sigh of relief at the news as the city "faced a repeat" of strikes seen during the Edinburgh Festival in 2022, said The Guardian. Then there were "mounds of uncollected bin bags, overflowing recycling bins and unsightly food-covered pavements".

But bin workers in Birmingham could go on strike if the council goes ahead with plans to cut their roles and pay by thousands of pounds a year, said Birmingham Live. The restructuring plans would "downgrade" the role of the city's 150 waste recycling and collection officers, cutting their pay by an average of £8,000 per year.

The workplace has moved on from a "post-lockdown era of frenzied change" dubbed the "Great Resignation" and entered a "decidedly more cautious and staid" period – the "Big Stay".

Employees are now "prioritising employment stability over new horizons", said Helen Coffey in The Independent. But what is behind this new trend and what does it mean for employees and employers?

'Openly embittered'

In the UK, the proportion of people leaving their jobs voluntarily fell from 3.6% in the first quarter of 2021 to 2.3% in the same period of 2024. Across the pond, the quit rate reached 3% per month at the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022, but it's now fallen to 2.2% in the first quarter of 2024.

Anthony Klotz, a professor of organisational behaviour at UCL School of Management, told Coffey that after the first lockdown, high levels of "burnout", more remote work opportunities, pandemic "epiphanies" as people had "big existential thoughts about life", and a "backlog" of resignations led to a huge shake-up across all industries and demographics.

But now, employees are "hunkering down and remaining in their current jobs for more extended periods of time", said Jack Kelly in Forbes, because in a "changing economic landscape", employers have "greater leverage".

In the face of an "uncertain economic outlook", British workers are "fearful of rocking the boat", said Tom Howard in The Times. People are becoming "increasingly reluctant" to move jobs "for fear of being the last in and first out if things go wrong".

The "Great Stay" is leading to a new trend of "resenteeism", said The Guardian, which is "when you hate your job, but stay in it even though you should probably leave". This has created an "openly embittered and miserable" workforce, it added.

'Canny companies'

But it's not all bad news for workers, said Metro, because the "Great Stay" is also "all about sticking around in a secure role with good pay, benefits and conditions". Now, what "ticks the boxes" for employee satisfaction are "things like commuting contributions, a stipend towards skills development, or bonuses that are linked to performance".

What workers want in 2024 is "job stability with a side of genuinely useful benefits". "Canny" companies know this is and are "happy to step up" and offer good pay, benefits and flexibility to workers. So "if this is what matters most to you", then it's "no wonder that staying put is the defining workplace trend right now".

"Should you stay or should you go?" wonders Coffey. "That's up to you," but "either way, you don’t have to settle for stagnation".

Record numbers of people are leaving New Zealand as the cost of living crisis is being compounded by limited job opportunities.

In a "significant exodus", the year to April 2024 saw a net migration loss of 56,500 citizens, up 12,000 from the previous record, said Firstpost. With fewer people arriving in New Zealand, there are fears of a brain drain and skills shortage.

'Grim picture'

Many young New Zealanders opt to go travelling overseas and the recent surge in the number of people leaving the country can partly be explained by a backlog caused by people delaying their plans due to the Covid pandemic.

But although this sort of travelling is considered a "rite of passage", much of the "record flow" is due to the "growing attraction" of working in Australia, said The Guardian. And experts worry that a "grim economic picture" means "departing Kiwis" may never come back.

With New Zealand experiencing a second recession in less than two years, employers in neighbouring Australia are trying to lure New Zealanders with offers of higher pay and better working conditions.

Half of the New Zealanders who left recently have moved to Australia. Brad Olsen, principal economist at Infometrics, said this "suggests a greater number of people and families are looking for opportunities and making a more permanent move".

'Goodbye dinners'

Kirsty Frame said she left New Zealand in 2023 aged 24 after it "just felt like bad news after bad news" in the country. She had already noticed the growth in departures, remembering that "it was goodbye dinner after goodbye dinner, leaving drinks after leaving drinks".

After arriving in Melbourne she found a higher-paying job and a flat with lower rent. She "could be happy here for a long time", she told The Guardian, and she thinks she will be there "for the long run".

Maia Vieregg, a 26-year-old geologist, has found the transition harder. She left New Zealand after becoming "cynical and hopeless" about its future as she struggled to find work and the progressive government lost power.

She found a well-paying job a couple of hours north of Sydney but she's finding Australia difficult to adjust to, as she finds it more materialistic than New Zealand, which is "a quite down-to-earth place". She plans to return home at some stage.

But as New Zealand languishes in recession, the exodus could continue. Tehseen Islam, Stats NZ's population indicators manager, said that "changes in migration are typically due to a combination of factors" including the "relative economic and labour market conditions between New Zealand and the rest of the world".

Meanwhile, there are fewer people arriving. Although the net migration gain in New Zealand remains "historically high", it "shows a declining trend", said Firstpost. In the year to April 2024, New Zealand gained 98,500 migrants, down from 106,000 in the year to March.

More people leaving and fewer arriving: these twin trends could worsen New Zealand's skill shortage, David Cooper, director of immigration firm Malcolm Pacific, told The Guardian.

The record numbers of Kiwis leaving "are not the desperate and dateless". They're "young, skilled people" and "it's hard to attract the highly skilled people we need to replace the ones leaving".

Becoming an astronaut is a dream for people young and old, with recent polling suggesting that two-thirds of British children want to work in space.

That dream is becoming a reality for Belfast-born Rosemary Coogan, who finally got her "astronaut wings" last month, said the Daily Mail. The 33-year-old astrophysicist is the UK's third-ever astronaut, following in the footsteps of Helen Sharman and Tim Peake.

Some astronauts have a much longer wait before blasting into space than Coogan is likely to face. Last weekend, Ed Dwight finally fulfilled that ambition at the age of 90, more than 60 years after he was chosen by then US president John F. Kennedy to become the country's first Black astronaut. Nasa ultimately did not select Dwight for a mission, but he is now the oldest person to go to space, following a 10-minute flight on Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin capsule.

Although few have to wait as long as Dwight, the path to becoming a professional astronaut is always long.

'Tremendous responsibility' 

By the time professional astronauts reach space, they generally have at least a decade of professional and educational experience in technical fields. It then takes about two years to qualify for space and several more years of mission training.

Candidates need to be between 27 and 37 years old and fluent in English. Russian is spoken with English on the International Space Station, so a basic grasp of that language is also a definite plus.

Hopefuls need a degree and a postgraduate qualification in a relevant subject such as science, engineering or aeronautics, and "you'll have an advantage if you're a pilot with at least 1,000 hours of flying experience in a high-performance aircraft like a fighter jet", said the National Careers Service.

A strong character is important too, because astronauts have to "bear tremendous responsibility while in orbit", said the European Space Agency, and because it is "a challenge to live in a confined space for long periods with other people".

Other helpful characteristics are "an ability to adapt quickly to changing situations" and "mature judgement", as well, of course, as a willingness "to spend long periods away from home".

'Pressure chambers'

Most agencies require a newly selected individual to pass a series of basic tests across two to three years of training before qualifying as an astronaut.

Coogan was trained in technical skills including spacecraft systems, flight engineering, robotics and life-support systems. She took part in winter survival training in the "snowy mountains of the Spanish Pyrenees" and "experienced the effects of hypoxia first-hand in a pressure chamber", said gov.uk, enabling her to "recognise symptoms and respond accordingly" in low-oxygen environments in case of an air leak or reduced pressure in a spacecraft.

Graduating from astronaut basic training was "an incredibly moving moment for me", said Coogan. "From dreaming about space to now being one step closer to reaching it", she said she felt "filled with gratitude and determination to make the most of this extraordinary opportunity". 

Coogan visited Nasa's facilities in the US, where she took part in scuba diving for spacewalk training underwater in a 12-metre-deep Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory and spent time in a replica of the International Space Station, where astronauts can perform underwater simulations of spacewalks.

"Even after that", said Space, astronauts "may spend years or decades on the ground", waiting for a slot to open on a rocket mission. They are kept busy, however, with "supporting other space missions, working on spacecraft development" and other agency tasks.

Since the Second World War, they have been "serving as the largely unmentioned glue holding middle-class families together", but now the au pair industry has "collapsed", according to a report.

A double blow of Brexit and a minimum wage ruling have "ruined the tradition of exchanging bed and board for help with the kids", said The Sunday Times, and a leading trade body has waved the white flag and shut its doors.

'Fatal setback'

The "mutually beneficial arrangement" has "existed in Europe since the end of the Second World War", said the paper, recalling when domestic servants had "all but disappeared" and a "newly liberated cohort of young women, keen to expand their cultural boundaries, rose to meet the demand".

Au pairs would work short stays of between three and 12 months, often attending a language school, with their board and lodgings covered by the host family, said the BBC. There were between 60,000 and 90,000 au pairs in Britain before it left the European Union, but that number had halved by 2022, said The Telegraph.

The arrangement was "dealt a crushing blow by Brexit and the barriers that came with it", said The Sunday Times. With the end of free movement of labour from the European Union, the UK government did not provide an entry route specifically for au pairs.

Then, earlier this month, there was another, "possibly fatal", setback, when the government announced that even live-in workers would "henceforth" be entitled to earn the minimum wage, it added.

Previously, the guidance from the Home Office suggested that au pairs should earn "pocket money" of about £90 a week in exchange for being treated as a member of the family and helping out around the house.

But now, anyone employing an au pair under 21 for the basic 25 weekly hours, even with a live-in allowance applied, will have to pay £145.07 a week, rising to £330.47 for an au pair aged over 21 working 35 hours a week.

The consequences could be wide ranging, because rising costs are "driving intelligent women out of the workplace and back into their homes", Jo Twumasi-Ankra, a fundraiser at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and mother to three girls, who has used au pairs, told the paper.

'New slavery'

In the wake of these developments, the British Au Pair Agencies Association (BAPAA) announced its closure on Facebook and there are fears that the longstanding arrangement has had its day.

Back in 2020, chairwoman Jamie Shackell told the BBC that "families have said they might have to give up work and claim benefits because they cannot afford to have a nanny". She said the group was "flummoxed by it all" because au pairs are "not a financial strain on the UK state".

A petition calling for a "new youth visa" has gathered 60,000 signatures and it's possible that the Treasury will look into a "fix" for au pairs, because the situation is "so dire", with Britain's childcare costs among the highest in the world, said The Sunday Times.

But not everyone sees such a halo above the head of the au pair arrangement. In 2002, it was described by The Guardian as the "dirty secret of Britain's middle classes".

Asking if au pairing was "the new slavery", it said "horror stories" are commonplace. Maggie Dyer, director of the London Au Pair and Nanny Agency, said au pairs are "so vulnerable" as "if they lose their job they have nowhere to live, so they often will be far too frightened to complain if they are being maltreated".

Jokes about husbands having affairs with au pairs and nannies have been around almost as long as au pairs themselves, and one scorned wife told the Daily Mail about the "heart shredding betrayal" of the experience.

Calls for a three-day weekend have grown after studies found that workers were less stressed and just as productive during a four-day working week.

For many Britons, Friday has become a "skive day" as workers continue a habit from the pandemic by "slacking" on the fifth day of the week, said The Times. 

But how likely is an official three-day weekend, and how was the two-day weekend won in the first place?

How did the weekend begin?

In 19th-century Britain, few were expected to work on Sundays, but many skilled, essentially self-employed workers who had produced their quota of goods would take Monday off "to recover from Saturday night and the previous day's excesses," said Brad Beaven, professor of Social and Cultural History at the University of Portsmouth, writing for The Conversation.

By the middle of the century, taking a "Saint Monday" was a popular practice in Britain, named to mimic the religious saint's day holidays – although it was in fact "an entirely secular practice, instigated by workers to provide an extended break in the working week". But this trend dented productivity, so many factory owners decided to make Saturday a half-day.

Religious leaders also supported the drift towards a weekend. Writing in the Coventry Herald newspaper in 1862, Reverend George Heaviside argued that a weekend would allow for a refreshed workforce and greater attendance at church on Sundays. Religious bodies argued that a break on Saturday would improve working-class "mental and moral culture", said The Conversation.

Trade unions also wanted to secure a formalised break in the working week that did not rely on the unofficial customs such as "Saint Mondays". Their push for the creation of the weekend is "still cited as a proud achievement in trade union history", said Beaven. Campaign groups such as the Early Closing Association lobbied the government to keep Saturday afternoons free for leisure time for workers in return for a full day's work on Monday.

But the full two-day weekend "only arrived in 1933", and "largely by accident", said The Times, when John Boot, grandson of the founder of the Boots chemist chain, opened a new factory which became so productive that it produced a "huge surplus" of stock.

Rather than "lay workers off during the Great Depression", Boot decided to grant them Saturdays off instead, with no deduction in pay. His experiment went well and workers "reported themselves happier and healthier".

On Monday mornings Boot had a workforce which was invigorated, and ready to work, after having more time for leisure and family activities. He kept the arrangement going and the weekend soon spread and became the "industry standard".

Across the Atlantic, by the mid-19th century, it was common for workers to "log 70-hour, six-day workweeks" in "newly mechanised factories", said Morning Brew. American workers "began to protest long work hours and poor working conditions that infringed upon their rights". 

But change was also slow to come in the US. Henry Ford became one of the first employers to adopt a five-day, 40-hour week at his Ford Motor Company plants in 1926. It was only then that the weekend arrived in the US.

Will there be a three-day weekend?

Since the 1960s, "there has been talk of the weekend being extended to make it almost as long as the working week", said the BBC. Three- or four-day weeks "have been a dream for many" who believe advances in technology make it possible for people to complete their work in less time.

The Covid pandemic also increased calls for the weekend to be extended as so many of us worked from home. For many, Friday was a day to relax during the pandemic  and bosses are now "struggling to change that habit", said The Times.

Studies back this pattern up. A management consultancy that records tap-ins and tap-outs at 150 offices across the country found that occupancy is now around 50% on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, with Mondays at 30% and Fridays at just 20%. "Welcome to TGIF Britain," said the paper. 

Between June and December 2022 Will Stronge, co-founder of the consultancy Autonomy, helped to run a four-day week pilot involving 61 companies and 2,900 workers. It found that 56 of the companies are continuing the experiment, because their employees reported less stress, anxiety and burnout, and were just as productive.  

There was a "small uptick in intensity on their working days", Stronge told The Times, but knowing they had the extra day off meant they did more with less. 

There has also been political support for a shorter working week: during the 2019 general election campaign, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour said it would aim to introduce a 32-hour full-time working week, with no loss of pay, within 10 years.

In an essay published in 1930, the influential economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within 100 years, most people would be working no more than 15 hours a week. With six years of that century left, further significant shifts in working patterns seem inevitable.

Jeremy Hunt has vowed to "make work pay" by boosting the minimum wage and cracking down on benefit claimants who refuse to look for a job.

Setting out a series of changes to the welfare system, the chancellor will use his speech at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester today to announce that the National Living Wage will rise to "at least" £11 an hour from next April, providing a pay rise to two million people. Hunt will also argue that the welfare safety net is "a social contract that depends on fairness to those in work alongside compassion to those who are not".

The government will review the way benefits sanctions work. "It is a fundamental matter of fairness," he is expected to say. "Those who won't even look for work do not deserve the same benefits as people trying hard to do the right thing."

'More radical approach'

Hunt will use his keynote speech to "declare war on 100,000 work-shy benefit claimants", the Daily Mail reported. The full details of how the benefits regime will be made tougher are still being hammered out and will be unveiled in the chancellor's autumn statement next month. 

According to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), there are currently around 5.2 million Britons on out-of-work benefits – a figure that soared during the pandemic and has not yet returned to pre-2020 levels.

Few Conservatives will argue against tougher sanctions for benefits claimants but Hunt "could and should go far further", said Ross Clark in The Spectator. 

Clark suggested a "more radical approach" would be to abolish unemployment benefits altogether and instead offer anyone who wants it three days a week guaranteed work at the National Living Wage. The government's opponents would deride it as "US-style workfare", Clark argued, but "forcing people to turn up and do some work in return for their keep would ensure that they remain in the practice of employment".

Fair, financially responsible or politically motivated?

The measures are driven by spending pressures on the welfare budget, one Whitehall source suggested to The Guardian, and presented as reforms to get benefit claimants back into work. 

Indeed, some leading Tories are "keen to bring down the benefits bill, partly with a major drive to reduce the numbers of economically inactive, and also by encouraging more over 50s back into the workplace", added Politico's London Playbook.

Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride will also use his speech to conference today to unveil plans for a crackdown on "deadbeat dads" who refuse to make maintenance payments for their children.

The Conservatives are also trying to "create a dividing line with Labour" ahead of the general election, said The Times.

The focus on benefits has "echoes of the policy promoted by David Cameron and George Osborne", said The Telegraph. "Their framing of the Tories as being on the side of 'workers not shirkers' helped win the 2015 general election," said the paper.

Amid the clamour for tax cuts – not least from the former PM Liz Truss – the development minister, Andrew Mitchell, warned that this should not be done "on the backs of the poorest", said The Guardian.

"We need to be very clear that we have very properly protected throughout the last 13 years of Conservative government the most vulnerable by maintaining and in some cases increasing the value of their benefits" he said. "That's the right thing for any government to do in any civilised society."

Although for decades he was greeted by cries of “on your bike” wherever he went, Norman Tebbit never told anyone to get on a bike, said John Elledge in The New Statesman. He merely recalled, at the Tory conference in 1981, that during the Depression, his father had pedalled around the country in search of work. It was a clever story, designed to suggest that an unemployment problem created by structural forces (partly of his government’s making) was the result of individual inertia.

Now, 41 years on, the Tories are playing a similar trick – only this time, they really are suggesting that people should get on their bikes.

On a visit to the HQ of Deliveroo last week, Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Minister, opined that the food delivery firm offered “great opportunities” that older economically inactive workers “might not otherwise have thought of”. Such jobs, he added, could also “help with fitness”.

‘Stride won’t be jumping on a bike’

To be fair to Stride, his idea addresses two real problems: older people struggling to make ends meet in a cost-of-living crisis, and a labour market crying out for workers. But is it any kind of solution?

One thing we do know, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent, is that when Stride, 61, leaves public service, he won’t be jumping on a bike with an insulated rucksack on his back. He will have a choice of directorships to supplement his index-linked pension. And you do wonder how many older people would cope with Deliveroo jobs, said Harry Wallop in The Times. I did a stint for the firm in 2016. The pay wasn’t terrible (it worked out at £11.20 an hour), but the work was unreliable (shifts were limited) and physically demanding: cycling in traffic in the rain, sometimes climbing eight flights of stairs to deliver an order, is not easy.

‘Half a taxpayer better than none’

Delivery work won’t suit everyone, said Jenny Hjul on Reaction. But the fact remains that our economic prosperity depends on people working, and currently, 3,547,000 people aged 50 to 64 are economically inactive (27% of that age group). Of those, 1.6 million are long-term sick – 20% more than three years ago. Of the rest, some will be well off and not wanting paid work, but research has found that half of those who dropped out during the pandemic are struggling financially.

These people may be ready to “unretire”, said The Times: but to persuade them in large numbers will require there to be the right kinds of job. Firms will have to offer older workers flexible terms and a degree of respect. The Government, too, needs to be inventive. It might, say, devise tax incentives for people to stay in work or return to lower-paid work. “Half a taxpayer is better than none.”

Rishi Sunak has put AI at the top of his agenda when he meets with President Biden later this week.

At his first White House talks with the US President, “he is expected to plug London as the venue for a new international body to regulate AI”, reported The Daily Telegraph.

Ahead of the trip, the PM’s spokesperson said: “Obviously we are not complacent about the potential risks of AI. Equally, it does present significant opportunities for the people of the UK.”

The meeting comes as industry experts warn that generative AI systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT could lead to “significant disruption” and affect roughly 300 million full-time jobs worldwide.

This is according to Goldman Sachs research, which found “two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation”. The chatbot “may be more powerful than we ever imagined”, Insider added, while New Atlas described OpenAI’s text-generating tool as an “ominous preview of a looming tidal wave of AI systems”.

This chimes with OpenAI’s own findings that 80% of the US workforce could be affected, with the “influence [spanning] all wage levels, with higher-income jobs potentially facing greater exposure”.

Despite the potential disruption, “there are still things AI isn’t capable of”, countered the BBC, which includes “tasks that involve distinctly human qualities, like emotional intelligence and outside-the-box thinking”.

The Week takes a look at the jobs most and least at risk of being replaced by AI.

Three jobs most at risk from AI

1. Media roles

Roles in the media industry “across the board” are at risk because “AI is able to read, write and understand text-based data”, Anu Madgavkar, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute told Insider.

Systems like ChatGPT might also be able to execute tasks like reporting “more efficiently than humans”, said economist Paul Krugman, writing for The New York Times. The industry is also “already beginning to experiment” with AI-generated content, Insider added, citing CNET and Buzzfeed as examples.

2. Teaching

ChatGPT has already been used “to help students cheat on their essays”, said Insider, but teachers “should also be thinking about their job security”, according to Pengcheng Shi, an associate dean in the department of computing and information sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Although generative AI “has bugs and inaccuracies”, he said, “you just need to train” the underlying model, he told The New York Post.

3. Legal administration

Legal workers are also one of the most likely to be affected, the Goldman Sachs report said, “because the number of jobs in legal services is relatively small and have already been highly exposed to AI”, an author of the study, Manan Raj, told Insider.

Paralegals and legal assistants “are responsible for consuming large amounts of information, synthesising what they learned, then making it digestible”. The information they process is “quite amenable to generative AI”, added Madgavkar.

Three jobs least at risk from AI

1. Medical practitioners

Although “mundane administrative tasks” in healthcare can be automated, said Forbes, “most adults want to hear about their health from a human”, said David Dranove, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, to Kellogg Insight.

One “insulated category” comprises “jobs that require sophisticated interpersonal relationships”, said author Martin Ford to BBC Worklife. Nursing is an example, and those who occupy such roles need “a very deep understanding of people”, he added.

“There’s a need for compassion in communication that AI is unable to contribute,” Dranove added.

2. Skilled trade jobs

Another category relatively safe from the influence of AI is “skilled trades jobs” including people like electricians, plumbers, welders, and other roles, said Ford to CBS News. These are jobs in which “you have a need for lots of dexterity and mobility and unpredictable environments”.

These jobs are “probably the hardest of anything to automate”, he added to BBC Worklife, also telling CBS News: “We need a very, very sophisticated science fiction-level robot to do what an electrician does.”

3. Creative roles

Although generative AI is centred around generating content like text and imagery, Ford told BBC Worklife that people in the creative industries aren’t doing “formulaic work or just rearranging things”. Instead, they are “genuinely coming up with new ideas and building something new”, with AI unable to replicate this trait.

Although some creative roles like graphic design and visual art “may be among the first to go”, there’s “security” in alternative kinds of creativity, he added, especially “people whose job is coming up with a new legal strategy or business strategy”.

Amazon workers in the UK are set go on strike for the first time in the company’s history as the relationship between Big Tech and its employees enters a new era.

Almost a quarter of the total 1,400 staff at the US company’s distribution centre in Coventry are expected to walk out on 25 January in a dispute over pay. The GMB said members of the union who voted in favour of industrial action have “shown they’re willing to put themselves on the line to fighting for what’s right”.

Urging Amazon to increase its UK workers’ wages, GMB senior organiser Amanda Gearing added that “people working for one of the most valuable companies in the world shouldn’t have to threaten strike action just to win a wage they can live on”.

Why are Amazon workers striking?

Amazon has long been “hostile” to trade unions, said retail tech news site Charged, “making it tough to organise a formal protest against the company’s offer of a 50p per hour pay rise which was put on the table last year”.

The GMB “has agitated on the sidelines at Amazon for a decade with little to show for it”, said The Times’s retail correspondent Sam Chambers. But the union began organising a formal strike after workers in Coventry and several other Amazon distribution centres staged an impromptu walkout last August.

Amazon has insisted that this month’s planned strike will not impact customers. However, it could set the stage for “broader disruption”, according to Chambers, who reported that the GMB was “close” to balloting for strike action at the online retailer’s vast distribution centre at Tillbury Docks in Essex.

The unrest in the UK “mirrors similar action in the US, where Amazon workers in New York created their own labour union last year”, he added.

The planned Coventry walkout also “comes at a time of wider industrial unrest”, said Sky News’s business reporter James Sillars, as the cost-of-living crisis drives workers nationwide to the picket lines.

What about staff at other tech firms?

This may the start of difficult year for the once all-powerful tech giants.

The new head of the Trades Union Congress, Paul Nowak, told Politico that Elon Musk’s controversial takeover of Twitter is sending the platform’s workers into the arms of trade unions. Musk is “a perfect recruitment tool” for the trade union movement​,​​​​​​ said Nowak, who claimed that since the October takeover, one of the TUC’s 48 affiliates, Prospect, “has seen its membership in Twitter go up tenfold”.

In recent years, said the site, unions have also “ramped up their activity in another part of the tech world: the gig economy”. As well as industrial action at Amazon, food delivery service Deliveroo has signed agreements with unions, and some Apple stores have voted for union recognition.

Uber workers are also taking industrial action. Last week, hundreds of Uber drivers gathered outside the company’s headquarters in downtown New York as part of a 24-hour national strike in response to the ride-hailing app’s move to sue New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) for approving a raise and fare hike.

Will 2023 be a turning point for Big Tech?

Big Tech firms are facing challenges of another kind too. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was fined almost €400m last week after EU regulators ruled that the company’s legal basis for its advertising model was invalid.

According to Politico’s tech reporter Vincent Manancourt, the challenge to this data-fuelled model poses an “existential threat” to Meta, which is “still smarting from a drop-off in revenue, mass layoffs and a costly pivot to the metaverse”.

Combined with “the dramatic, multidimensional implosion” of Meta and the “nuclear train wreck” of Musk’s Twitter, wrote author Brian Merchant for The Atlantic, the “momentous labour uprising” against Amazon in the US meant that 2022 “wasn’t just an unusually disastrous year for America’s biggest tech companies”. It was also “a reckoning”.

“Ruled by monopolies, marred by toxicity, and overly reliant on precarious labour, Silicon Valley looks like it’s finally run hard up into its limits,” Merchant added.

And with UK workers also taking on Big Tech, “how these companies respond to this troubled new era will have major repercussions”.

The parallels between the 1970s and 2020s have been made so often it has almost become orthodoxy. Rampant inflation, a global energy crisis and a wave of strikes make it easy to see why.

As the UK enters a second “winter of discontent” the Tories are looking to history once again to see how they can turn the current series of crises to their advantage.

Rishi Sunak has sought to channel his inner Margaret Thatcher by vowing to get tough on striking public sector workers, threatening union bosses that if they fail to call off their Christmas strikes, he will introduce new laws that restrict their ability to take industrial action.

What did the newspapers say?

What many people, including a large proportion of Conservatives, forget is that Thatcher did not initially take a hard line in response to union demands.

“Thatcher was an ideologue who claimed the backlash against the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978-79 represented a ‘sea change’ in public opinion and a mandate to ‘clip the wings’ of trade unions,” said The Guardian. “But she was also a pragmatist who in 1979 gave public sector workers a 25% pay rise – roughly double the rate of inflation and more than the 19% received by private sector workers – to avert a second successive ‘winter of discontent’.”

It was not until she had won a huge second mandate from the British people in 1983 that she felt strong enough politically to take on the unions, coming to a head during the miners’ strike of 1984-85.

“Put simply, she had a plan and a theory: that the UK could stay coal-free longer than British miners could stay solvent,” said the Financial Times. The pay settlement she agreed in 1981 “was a much better deal for the miners than for her government, in part to be able to come back and have the fight on her own terms later”, said the FT, using the intervening time to build up the UK’s coal supplies.

The Spectator argued that “when Thatcher took on the unions, she did so with overwhelming public backing and only fought battles she had carefully prepared for”.

“Equally importantly,” said the FT, “she didn’t treat each and every strike as if it were one and the same. She settled on some disputes and fought on against others.”

“Sunak’s mooted legislation has inevitably invited comparisons to [Thatcher’s] implacable approach to industrial relations,” said The Spectator, but he has failed to learn these two fundamental lessons.

A third factor is time. “The really glaring difference between then and now is that, across all sectors, the unions in the Seventies had far more leeway,” wrote Phil Tinline for UnHerd. He compared a 1977 poll in The Sun, which suggested 80% of the public thought “union leaders have ‘a lot’ of power and influence in governing the country”, with one conducted last summer by Ipsos, which found only 9% of the British public thought workers had too much power.

“That long period of industrial calm, when for decades strikes became almost unknown in this country, seems to have left the Conservative government – already riven with political divisions – unable to think and act strategically against collective action by hundreds of thousands of determined public sector workers,” said James Meadway, director of the Progressive Economy Forum, on openDemocracy.

“The Tories, instead, have made a bad situation for themselves appreciably worse through thoughtless belligerence,” he added.

What next?

Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday said history teaches us that governments succeed against unions by being more “flexible” not less, and by making sure they carry the public with them in any stand-off.

Asking “what sort of government gets into a public brawl with people who are universally liked and respected?” he argued that “just as we pay the police generously in return for not striking, it’s plain that governments should do the same for nurses”. Sunak spent billions of pounds “madly pumping money into all our pockets to support the Great Shutdown and Panic. Now, when finding extra money would make sense, Prime Minister Sunak poses as Mr Prudent.”

The Guardian added: “Sunak’s tribute act prefers ideological posturing to practical solutions: proposing new anti-strike laws that the Lords won’t pass as he has no electoral mandate to enact them; and doubling down on pay restraint for key workers.” Instead, argued the paper, the PM “should emulate Thatcher’s realism and offer inflation-proof pay awards to bring industrial action to an end”.

In the 1980s strong unions protected workers for as long as they could in the face of deindustrialisation that saw factories and mines close and industries move overseas.

“Now the public sector faces a government not only unwilling to increase their pay, but unclear on where the money comes from,” said The New Statesman. “Margaret Thatcher staked her political life on being stronger than the unions and won. The winter will show whether Rishi Sunak can do the same.”

Keir Starmer has said the UK must end its economic dependence on migrant labour, setting his party on a collision course with those who argue more immigration is needed to help grow the economy out of recession.

Addressing business leaders at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) conference in Birmingham today, the Labour leader said that while “migration is part of our national story – always has been, always will be” the “days when low pay and cheap labour are part of the British way on growth must end”.

With the UK’s economic woes being at least partly attributed to labour shortages, the director-general of the CBI, Tony Danker, yesterday called for a new deal on immigration. Danker said that the UK doesn’t “have the people we need” and it was “unrealistic” to think labour shortages could be solved by automation. He called for fixed-term visas to fill labour shortages and urged the government to be “practical” about immigration.

What did the newspapers say?

The Telegraph called Starmer’s speech a “significant intervention” and “an attempt to quash any suggestion that the Labour leader would emulate Sir Tony Blair’s looser approach to immigration if he reaches Downing Street”.

The Labour leader is beginning “to flesh out what Labour’s immigration policy will look like at the next election”, said The Times, as he tries “to distinguish between his leadership and the party’s previous support for freedom of movement”.

While neither main party wishes to revisit the debate around Brexit, it nevertheless remains a significant factor in Britain’s current economic predicament. Sky News reported that “Brexit stopped many foreign workers being able to easily work in the UK and companies are struggling to recruit – especially in industries such as hospitality which has relied heavily on European staff in recent years. Despite four quarterly falls this year, overall vacancies remain high at more than 1.2 million,” said the broadcaster.

Businesses may be calling for immigration rules to be relaxed so they can bring in more overseas workers, “a much bigger issue for the public finances is whether the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) updates assumptions on population growth that underpins its borrowing forecasts”, said the Financial Times.

In March, the OBR predicted that because of Brexit, net migration to the UK would settle at an annual rate of just 129,000, well below its historic average. However, data released since then suggests that immigration has rebounded from its post-pandemic slump to much higher levels than originally forecast.

“Higher immigration would not necessarily change GDP per capita,” said the FT, “but it could make a big difference to the OBR’s forecasts for the public finances” – perhaps by as much as £5bn a year.

“Delays and uncertainty in business immigration cases have a tangible impact on the economy,” argued Eduardo Reyes in The Law Society Gazette, but “the big uncertainty in immigration is, as always, around policy and political interference. Over time the application of immigration policy, experience shows, is never truly arms-length or independent”.

What next?

With both Starmer and Rishi Sunak distancing themselves from any serious relaxation of immigration rules, especially the return to freedom of movement through closer economic ties to the EU, the options for both parties are limited.

Sunak has dismissed reports he could pursue a “Swiss-style” Brexit deal and said public confidence in the immigration system must be restored before calls from business leaders for more work visas can be answered. He has vowed to expand visa schemes for entrepreneurs and “highly skilled people” as part of a plan for Britain to be a “beacon for the world’s best and brightest”.

While Starmer has promised to be “pragmatic” when dealing with labour shortages, he has reiterated Labour’s support for a points-based immigration system and said that any expansion in visa schemes will come with “new conditions for business”. These would include a plan for improving the skills and training of the domestic workforce and spending more on new technology to ensure they wean themselves off their reliance on migrants to fill vacancies.

While the message “echoes that adopted by successive Tory prime ministers”, including Johnson and now Sunak, reported The Telegraph, Starmer in contrast “has so far declined to call for the overall immigration figures to be brought down”.

“It’s not yet clear whether Labour’s plans would reduce immigration,” said The New Statesman but “for now, however, Labour is attacking the government both for the economic pain of Brexit and its failure to manage immigration. That’s a much more aggressive strategy than merely criticising the government over the technicalities of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and links directly to the issues that motivated people to vote for Brexit in the first place. It could well prove fruitful.”

With immigration once again returning to the top of the political agenda, how each party approaches the issue and ties it to a wider plan to get the economy back on track, could go a long way to deciding how they fare at the next election.

“Quiet quitting” by staff putting in the bare minimum to keep their jobs has been in the spotlight recently, but new research suggests “quiet firing” is also becoming a common trend.

The less well-recognised phenomenon of quiet firing is essentially being mistreated or given the “cold shoulder” by your employer, according to Rolling Stone analyst Jacob Mathison. Whether staff are accused of “underperforming or being a bad cultural fit”, wrote Alex Christian for the BBC, employers are finding a variety of reasons to “nudge workers out the door”.

Yet a survey by law firm Irwin Mitchell of more than 2,400 people found that 90% were unaware of quiet firing and the warning signs. This lack of awareness “poses serious concerns”, said the company, which reported that quiet firing was “most noticeable amongst women”. And 25% of all respondents in Greater London said they have “experienced someone making their life uncomfortable, encouraging them to leave” at work.

How to recognise quiet firing

The reasons why quiet firing happens can be “complex”, wrote Christian for the BBC. But employers “often don’t want to expose themselves to risk or conflict” by directly trying to sack someone and instead “follow the path of least resistance”.

Along with “withdrawing support” from an employee, other warning signs include:

• Unexpected changes – three in ten of the people surveyed by Irwin Mitchell said they had “experienced unexpected role or responsibility changes”. Being set “unreasonable performance targets”, or “important job responsibilities” being reassigned or handed to other staff, falls into this category of quiet firing, said the Harvard Business Review.
• Being underworked or overworked – staff who are consistently handed “dull, meaningless, and awful tasks” may be quiet firing targets, wrote Tim Reitsma, co-founder of online publication People Managing People, for Sky News. Conversely, a boss who “often reshuffles your priorities, adds additional tasks, cancels, or schedules unnecessary meetings” may be “overburdening you on purpose”, Reitsma added.
• Lack of input from bosses – ignoring requests for or repeatedly cancelling one-to-one meetings can be “a manager’s way of saying they’re not willing to invest time with you”, work burnout expert Cara de Lange told Metro. A company that values an employee will “invest more time” and ensure they are “adequately supported”, she said.
• Achievements overlooked– a boss who “doesn’t explain clearly why your co-workers are getting pay rises while you're not” is also a “red flag”, said Reitsma on Sky News. Others are never being considered for promotion or having bosses who “dangle the possibility” of a step up “without it ever coming to fruition”.

What rights do workers have?

Quiet firing “carries key risks for employers”, said legal firm Farrer & Co. The employer may face a “potential constructive unfair dismissal claim”, or a claim for “harassment or other discrimination” if the behaviour relates to a “protected characteristic”. If the employee experiences mental health issues as a result of “a hostile environment” at work, they could also bring a personal injury claim.

However, workers who think they are being “quiet fired” may find it difficult to “meet the criteria for constructive dismissal”, wrote Eve Livingston, author of Make Bosses Pay: Why We Need Unions, for i-D. And that is something “bosses are all too aware of”.

Many “employers make a calculation that the likelihood of a successful claim is so low that breaking the law is still worth it”, according to Livingston.

Whether or not targeted staff take the legal route, keeping records of employer behaviour can be useful, said Metro’s lifestyle editor Ellen Scott. Keep a work diary or journal to make a “note of exactly what’s happening” and “point to these specific examples when you’re ready to talk to your manager”, Scott advised. If necessary, push for a one-to-one meeting, she added, because “you have a right to be able to communicate your concerns”.

“Ultimately”, wrote Christian for the BBC, “quiet firing is the avoidance of difficult emotions.” Tackling the issue “requires better-resourced managers, greater HR support and the acceptance that workplace confrontation is sometimes best”.

The government has confirmed plans to set minimum service levels during industrial action and allow rail, fire, ambulance and other key public sector bosses to sack employees who refuse to work during strikes.

Under new legislation announced by ministers on Thursday, the government will reserve the power to impose a minimum standard of service on employees working in public health, education and at nuclear plants. Unions which fail to allow for these minimum service levels during strikes could be sued by employers for damages.

Grant Shapps, the business secretary, said the government had a duty to “protect life and livelihoods”, as well as “the freedom to strike”. Minimum service levels would “restore the balance between those seeking to strike and protecting the public from disproportionate disruption” during public sector strikes, he said.

The measures will “not resolve the current wave of strikes”, said the BBC, and critics have accused Rishi Sunak of “silly posturing and game playing” rather than attempting to solve the crisis.

‘More far-reaching measures’ dropped

Government sources have suggested that some of the most hardline proposals included in the original anti-strike bill drawn up by Jacob Rees-Mogg will be dropped from the new legislation.

According to The Times, Sunak vetoed “measures that would have increased the threshold for strike ballots, doubled the notice for industrial action from two weeks to a month and banned ambulance workers from striking”.

No. 10 is reportedly concerned that the House of Lords might still delay the legislation, potentially pushing the entire strike law back until after the next general election.

Under parliamentary convention, the Lords can delay proposals not included in a party’s election manifesto. As transport strikes were the only type of industrial action featured in the Conservative Party’s 2019 manifesto pledge to introduce minimum service levels, the new law is likely to “face significant opposition” in the Lords, said the BBC.

The proposed legislation – which will apply in England, Scotland and Wales – is expected to be published next week. MPs are expected to debate it the following week.

‘Silly posturing’

The “anti-trade union legislation”, as The Guardian described it, has sparked a “furious backlash”. Paul Nowak, the Trades Union Congress (TUC)’s general secretary, said the proposals were “an attack on working people” which trade unions “will fight... every step of the way”.

Unions have claimed that the law breaches human rights legislation and threatened legal action against the government. “Yet again, Rishi Sunak abdicates his responsibility as a leader,” said Unite’s general secretary Sharon Graham in a statement. “Instead of silly posturing and game playing, he should step up to the plate, act as a leader and start negotiating to resolve the crises his government has created.”

Mick Whelan, the general secretary of Aslef, the trade union for train drivers, pointed out that bosses can already fire employees who strike for more than six weeks. In a statement, he said that many European countries have had minimum service levels in place for years but “they have never been enacted because they don't work”.

Labour leader Keir Starmer has pledged to repeal the legislation if his party wins the next general election. His deputy, Angela Rayner, accused Sunak of “wasting time on shoddy hurdles that even his own transport secretary admits won't work”.

Liz Truss is refusing to say whether benefits will rise in line with inflation as her government looks to make billions of pounds in savings to pay for controversial tax cuts.

Speaking at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, the prime minister told the BBC that “we have to be fiscally responsible” and reduce the national debt.

Although disability benefits and carer’s allowance “must increase in line with inflation by law”, said the broadcaster, “no decision has yet been made on whether a rise will be linked to prices or wages” for working-age benefits such as Universal Credit.

‘New front in Tory infighting’

Speculation about Truss’s economic plans has been mounting after Treasury Secretary Chris Philp said last week that a commitment by Rishi Sunak to uprate benefits in line with inflation was “under consideration”.

Both the former chancellor and Boris Johnson vowed to increase benefit and pension payments next April in line with this September’s Consumer Prices Index measure of inflation, “which is currently 9.9%, subject to a review by the work and pensions secretary”, the BBC reported.

Raising benefits in line with wages instead could save an estimated £5bn, amid reports that government departments have been asked to set out plans for “efficiency savings”.

According to the i news site, experts have calculated that the policy shift “would amount to a cut of four percentage points and cost the average low-income working family with two children more than £1,000 a year”.

The possible move risks another row within the Tory party and cabinet as Truss faces unrest following the disastrous fallout from last month’s mini budget. The benefits battle “looks set to be the new front in Tory infighting”, said The Telegraph, which reported “unease at the top of government, with some cabinet ministers understood to believe that refusing to increase benefits by inflation is a ‘non-starter’”.

Former Tory leadership contender Penny Mordaunt told Times Radio this morning that increasing benefits in line with inflation “makes sense”.

“We want to make sure that people are looked after and that people can pay their bills,” the Commons leader said. We are not about trying to help people with one hand and take away with another.”

An unnamed cabinet minister told The Times that pushing ahead with a curb to benefits would be “mad” and “politically unsustainable” as households across the UK struggle with the cost of living.

But another told the paper that increasing benefits at a rate higher than wages are increasing would be “unfair”. Allies of Truss reportedly asked: “How can it be right that someone who gets up at 6am and works hard all day is seeing their pay go up by 5% or so and someone who is not working and is on benefits gets a 10% rise?”

Weighing up priorities

Despite the threat of a Tory revolt, No. 10 “is preparing to question whether it is fair for people on benefits to get inflation-linked rises while scores of workers get real-terms pay cuts”, said The Telegraph. Record-low levels of unemployment in Britain is also “leading to calls for more to be done to incentivise people to take jobs”, the paper added.

The Times reported that “some in government believe Truss’s U-turn on scrapping the 45p rate of tax will make it easier to impose real-terms cuts in benefits”.

“In an effort to mitigate a backlash,” the paper continued, “some are seeking to link any Universal Credit squeeze to the £650 cost-of-living payments being given to eight million households claiming the benefit this winter.”

But Work and Pension Secretary Chloe Smith was “thought to be resisting this line of argument and is warning against attempts to see the welfare budget as an easy source of savings”. She told the Tory conference yesterday that “protecting the most vulnerable is a vital priority for me and this government”.

The Treasury is understood not to have yet made formal suggestions” to Smith’s department, said The Times, and the minister stressed that “she would not make a decision for at least two weeks”, until the inflation data for last month has been reviewed.

A four-day week with no loss of pay could help ease the cost-of-living crisis by slashing workers’ childcare and commuting costs, a left-wing think-tank has argued.

Independent research organisation Autonomy calculated that a worker with a child aged under two would save £1,440 year in childcare on average, and £340 on travel if they cut their weekly commutes by a day. Director of research Will Stronge told The Guardian that a four-day week “could play a crucial role in supporting workers to make ends meet” with UK inflation at a 40-year high.

Stronge also argued that a shorter working week could boost productivity and the “wellbeing of workers”. But while more than 3,300 staff at 70 UK companies are working four-day weeks after signing up for a six-month trial, launched in June, critics claim the shift could have various costs.

1. Pro: greater productivity

The UK trial currently taking place has indicated that productivity can actually be improved when staff work fewer hours.

At the halfway point of the trial, 41 of the 73 companies taking part responded to a survey. “The majority of firms said it is working well for their business, while 95% said productivity had stayed the same or improved during the shorter week,” said the BBC.

More than four-fifths of the companies who responded “said they would keep the four-day week policy going after the trial ends”, the broadcaster added.

This backs up a finding in 2019. Back then Microsoft Japan gave its 2,300-strong workforce five Fridays off in a row without cutting pay and found that productivity “increased by 39.9% compared with August 2018”, Business Insider reported.

2. Con: longer hours

Some employers have questioned whether certain roles can realistically be performed over just four days per week. The Wellcome Trust ditched plans in 2019 to trial a four-day week for the research foundation’s 800 staff on the grounds that it would be too “operationally complex”.

“In reality,” said Breathe on the HR platform’s blog, “most employees on a four-day week will most likely be expected to work the same 40-hour weeks, but in four days instead of five”. And extending shifts “could have a significant effect on your employees’ stress levels and therefore their overall well-being and productivity”.

3. Pro: better for childcare

Research carried out this year by parenting organisations Pregnant Then Screwed and Mumsnet found that “43% of mums said the cost of childcare has made them consider leaving their job and 40% said they have had to work fewer hours than they would like because of childcare costs”.

In the survey of almost 27,000 parents, more than 60% said childcare costs are now as much or more than their rent or mortgage payments.

A four-day week could allow for fairer sharing of childcare between men and women. Parents of young children won’t have to pay for so many hours of childcare and, according to Female First, they would be able to “spend more quality time with their kids”.

4. Con: team management

Line managers sometimes find that managing multiple teams on a four-day work week can be challenging “because the days employees take off are scattered, making it hard to set up team meetings and manage projects,” said a report for The Adecco Group.

There will be “knock-on effects on the rest of the team if everyone is just shifting their meeting times to one less day a week, or worse, if people are taking different days off from each other,” Constance Hadley, a Questrom School of Business lecturer in management and organisations, told BU Today.

5. Pro: cut carbon footprint

Countries with shorter working hours typically “have a smaller carbon footprint”, said Change, because trimming the working week means that workers don’t need to commute as much and large office buildings are only in use four days a week.

More than half of UK workers drive themselves to work. But research carried out by the University of Reading in 2019 found that working four days a week instead of five “could decrease the number of miles driven by employees travelling to work by 558 million each week”, Forbes reported.

Overall, the site suggested, a four-day week “could shrink the U.K.’s carbon footprint by 127 million tonnes per year by 2025”, which would represent “a reduction of 21.3% from 2020”.

6. Con: only short-term gain

“It’s true that employees who worked four days a week were happier with their autonomy, personal worth and job security than those who worked a five-day work week,” said People Hum, “but when employees were polled again after 25 months, nearly all admitted that the improvements had vanished.”

If an organisation introduces the four-day working week, employee morale will undoubtedly rise, it added, but levels of morale will “gradually return to pre-4-day workweek levels after the ‘newness’ wears off”.

“Over the past six months, Britain’s unemployment figures have arguably been the economy’s saving grace,” said Kate Andrews in The Spectator. Headline unemployment has been at near-record lows, “keeping at bay the last factor that often ushers in dreaded ‘stagflation’”. And although the “extremely tight” labour market has been causing havoc for employers, the latest June update shows it is “loosening slightly” – the number of job vacancies appears to have peaked.

But all this is secondary to the “wage horror” playing out. The latest data from the Office for National Statistics reveals that real wages have suffered “their sharpest fall on record”. Workers are getting pay rises – the 4.7% increase in regular weekly pay between April and June is the highest seen in over a decade. “But what would be seen as meaningful hikes in normal times stand no chance of keeping pace with inflation” (now running at 10.1% and forecast to reach 13% this year). When even pay rises “aren’t preventing workers from feeling worse off”, ministers have every reason to be worried.

There are two ways of viewing the latest jobs figures, said Larry Elliott in The Guardian: glass half full, or empty. Ministers take the former view: Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi notes that the 3.8% unemployment rate “has rarely been lower in decades” and that “the economy continued to create net new jobs” in the quarter to June. And “with job vacancies still at near-record levels”, the labour market looks in good shape to withstand the forecast recession.

The half-empty view, by contrast, points to the slower pace of employment growth and the record gap between pay and inflation. Samuel Tombs of Pantheon Macroeconomics warns that demand for labour is stabilising just as the supply of workers is picking up.

The bottom line, said Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph, is that “the post-Brexit labour market is a malfunctioning mess”. True, factors such as the growing number of over-50s who have stopped working for good have contributed to “the greatest employment crisis in decades”. But Brexit remains “the elephant in the room”. The big question for the next PM “is whether to adopt a more liberal stance on migration in an attempt to get things moving”. In a Tory Party hopelessly divided on immigration, “that is not an easy [question] to answer”.

The labour market is likely to ease further as the economy softens, said Andrew Atkinson and Celia Bergin on Bloomberg. The looming slowdown will force more people to re-enter the workforce while reducing demand for new workers. While wage inflation remains rampant in a few sectors, the bargaining power of employees will be weakened

For years now, hustle culture has dominated conversations about the workplace. High productivity and the monetisation of every minute have been held up as the benchmark for career success, with burnout merely a by-product of the daily grind.

But pushback against the pitiful work-life balance and long hours which are so often associated with hustle-culture mentality has been growing under a movement known on social media as “quiet quitting”.

In recent weeks, TikTok posts about workers doing the bare minimum to complete their tasks, leaving the office bang on time and muting notifications or emails after-hours – otherwise known as “quiet quitting” or “ghost quitting” – have gone viral.

“You’re not outright quitting your job but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond,” explained the user @zkchillin. “You’re still performing your duties but you’re no longer subscribing to the hustle culture and mentality that work has to be your life. The reality is it’s not and your worth as a person is not defined by your productive output.”

Likely stems from China

The concept of “quiet quitting”, or mentally checking out from work, is believed to have stemmed from #TangPing, a now-censored Chinese hashtag meaning “lying flat”, which was introduced in opposition to the country’s pressurised work culture.

A post by a user on the Chinese discussion forum Tieba, which has since been deleted, explained that “lying flat” is a “wise movement”. “Only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things,” the user added, reported the BBC last year. When the term was posted on Sina Weibo, another popular site, it quickly became a “buzzword”.

Searches for the hashtag #TangPing have since been banned on Sina Weibo “in an apparent effort by censors to prevent people seeing the scale of the new trend”, added the BBC.

Linked to job satisfaction

Experts have suggested that the “quiet quitting” trend is connected to poor job satisfaction. Global research group Gallup’s recently published State of the Global Workplace report found that just 9% of UK workers feel enthused by their work and workplace, compared to 16% in Germany and 33% in Romania.

The movement follows reports of a national “great resignation”, thought to have been sparked by the pandemic, with people adapting to new ways of working during lockdowns and beginning to reevaluate their careers as a result.

PWC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, which was carried out in March, found that more than one in five workers around the world plan to quit their jobs in 2022.

“If the ‘great resignation’ has taught employers anything, it’s to not take their workers for granted,” read the report. “Yet many companies risk doing exactly that – whether it’s by not paying close enough attention to skilled workers who are at elevated risk of quitting, by failing to support workers who seek personal fulfilment and meaning at work.”

Experts issue warnings

Career experts have warned workers interested in “quiet quitting” to take care to not be perceived as “slacking off”, particularly if they have previously “over-extended” themselves.

If your change in behaviour is noticed by your employer then “communication is key”, author and career development practitioner Sue Ellson, from Melbourne, told the Daily Mail.

“At the end of the day, the relationship between employee and employer needs to be one of mutual respect, empathy and commitment,” she said. “The implied ‘rule’ of quiet quitting is that you still get the job done. Don't ever lose sight of the value exchange.”

Given warnings that the UK is heading for a recession, career experts recommend that fed-up workers take “proactive” steps instead of coasting along and risking their job security as a result.

“Speak with your manager. Let the supervisor know how you’re feeling. Share with them that you are feeling demoralised, but would like to find a way to improve the situation. Discuss options to make your job better,” suggested Forbes contributor Jack Kelly.

In an interview with Metro, Jill Cotton, a career trends expert at Glassdoor, offered similar advice. “Before deciding to quietly quit, reflect upon what isn’t fulfilling you and your reasons for making this choice – could whatever is causing your frustration be fixed by simply expressing your concerns to your manager?” she said.

“Whether your work-life balance isn’t right, the salary isn’t meeting your needs, or there’s no support to get the promotion you want, have a conversation with your manager before deciding to disengage from your role.”

People across the world adapted to new ways of working during the pandemic and some began to reevaluate their careers as a result. That’s according to academic Anthony Klotz who, in 2021, predicted that the US was set to see a “great resignation” due to the sudden changes the workforce had experienced as a result of Covid-19.

The associate professor at University College London’s school of management gave four reasons for his theory, explained the Financial Times: “a backlog of pent-up resignations from the first uncertain year of the pandemic”, workers being “burnt out”, individuals having reflected “on how much meaning and contentment exists in their own lives” after being “confronted with death”, and “the unexpected freedom” that millions of workers had while working from home.

“The idea was brave at the time, because it was not reflected in the US workforce data,” said the newspaper. Just weeks later, the figures showed that around four million workers had indeed quit their jobs in April 2021, the highest resignation rate on record. By September, that number had reached 4.4m.

Is the UK seeing a great resignation?

While new research by McKinsey and Co indicates that in the US “this record-breaking trend isn’t going to quit any time soon”, said CNBC, the picture in the UK isn’t quite the same.

Writing for the Economics Observatory collective, Professor Jonathan Wadsworth said that he has found “little empirical evidence that resignations, hiring or movement between jobs in the UK are at historical highs”. Analysing data from the Labour Force Survey, which tracks household employment trends, he concluded there has been no sign that UK quit rates have surpassed previous levels, “let alone reached dizzying new heights”.

But workers’ feelings of satisfaction with their current role do appear to have been impacted by the pandemic. Of more than 2,000 respondents in a PwC survey published in May this year, 18% said they were likely to change their job in the next 12 months, with 32% saying they were moderately or slightly likely to. The top three factors for making a job change included pay, wanting fulfilment, and wanting to be themselves at work.

Is the world of work changing?

Time said last year that the pandemic had afforded “a chance to reinvent work” and “bring balance back into our levels to a degree that we haven’t seen at least since the widespread adoption of email and cell phones”.

Management practice professor Lynda Gratton told the London Business School’s Think blog that because people are living longer, they are focusing more on their health. “Rather than experiencing their life journey in those three traditional phases of education, work and retirement, people are starting to see life as a multi-stage voyage. They are hungry for the flexibility to mix and match the stages.”

Gratton has advised that business leaders can “weather the storm” of potential resignations by embracing flexibility about when and where employees’ work, understanding that this is the “beginning of the end for bad jobs” with unsociable hours and low pay, and keeping an eye on what competitors are doing and the benefits that they are offering staff.

The Overview

On this episode of The Overview podcast, The Week asks whether new ways of working will stick around after Covid. What do post-pandemic workers want? And should employees reconsider resigning as the world faces an economic crisis?

With guest experts Professor Wadsworth, Professor Gratton, author of Redesigning Work, and behavioural change coach Gemma Perlin.

Many parts of the UK are currently experiencing a sustained heatwave, with predictions of even hotter temperatures to come.

The Met Office has issued an amber warning for heat for much of the country on Monday when temperatures could reach a sweltering 35C. It said there would need to be “substantial changes in working practices and daily routines” as the soaring heat poses a potential risk to life, said the Daily Mail.

However, stopping work because of temperature extremes is not that simple. Currently there is nothing in UK law that states a maximum (or minimum) working temperature, but the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the national regulator for workplace conditions, says temperatures must be “reasonable” and employers must ensure there is a supply of “clean and fresh air”.

Unions call for change

The Health and Safety Act states that it's an employer’s duty to ensure the welfare of workers. The HSE recommends several practices for keeping workers safe in hot temperatures, including relaxing formal dress codes, moving desks from hot areas, and changing working hours to cooler times of the day.

Unions though are calling for a legally enforceable limit to working temperatures, something the Trades Union Congress (TUC) described a “major omission”. The TUC is calling for a maximum temperature of 30C for regular indoor work and 27C for strenuous work, although it says employers should act to bring down temperatures if they exceed 24C.

The Unite union said outdoor workers are particularly vulnerable and should be monitored much more closely for signs of exhaustion or heatstroke. They should also be given more frequent rest breaks and somewhere shaded to take them, and if possible they should be allowed to work different hours when the temperature isn’t as high.

What would happen if we all stopped working?

A complete down tools by everyone because of the heat would, of course, bring the economy to a shuddering halt.

While there’s no research specifically into what would happen if a legal heat limit stopped many of us from working, similarly to a bank holiday some parts of the economy would benefit and some would lose out.

The Met Office said the impending hot weather will see more people heading to lakes and rivers, as well as the seaside, which presuming those destinations stayed open, could bring a boost to tourism, hospitality and retail services in surrounding areas. The Centre for Economics and Business Research told The Independent in 2020 that bank holidays on average boost retail sales by 15%, but said in a report this year that each bank holiday overall costs the economy £2.3bn, although it conceded that accurately reporting the impact of each one was “difficult”.

Overall, extreme heatwaves have a detrimental effect on economies, wrote Derek Lemoine, associate professor of economics at the University of Arizona, on The Conversation. He said US research shows in general that economic activity falls as temperatures rise. “Workers are less productive when it’s hotter out,” he said. “As temperatures rise, economies will continue to suffer.”

With the terms “mansplaining” and “manspreading” now firmly established in modern language, another new word defining toxic male culture has entered common parlance: “hepeating”.

Defined as being “when a man appropriates your comments or ideas and then is praised for them being his own”, hepeating is a concept “many women” are probably familiar with, said Business Insider’s Lindsay Dodgson.

The phrase – a portmanteau of “he” and “repeating” – first entered public consciousness in 2017, thanks to a tweet by astronomy and physics professor Nicole Gugliucci. She explained that her friend had “coined a word… for when a woman suggests an idea and it’s ignored, but then a guy says [the] same thing and everyone loves it”.

Gugliucci’s tweet swiftly went viral, receiving more than 180,000 likes and 58,000 retweets to date. One Twitter user responded: “I can’t begin to tell you how much this is a thing. [It happened] at least three times this morning alone.”

Grounded in evidence

Evidence backs up the fact that hepeating is a real problem faced by women in the workplace. A study conducted by Stanford University last year, which analysed 468 economics seminars at 33 institutions in the US, found that men are more likely to interrupt women than they are other men.

And a separate study from George Washington University in 2014 found that when men spoke with women, they interrupted 33% more often than when they spoke with other men.

“The men interrupted their female conversational partners 2.1 times during a three minute conversation,” said Forbes. “That number dropped to 1.8 when they spoke to other men.”

Can be harmful

The effect of hepeating, like mansplaining, can be harmful, said the Spanish newspaper El Pais, explaining that the act can impact a woman’s confidence in her own ideas.

Hepeating can “override your perception” to “the point where the woman being diminished in discourse asks herself: ‘Was this idea really mine? Do I have the right to defend it or am I going to look like a bad colleague?’”, said the paper.

But this appropriation of another’s ideas is not something that only men do. “I’m gonna go ahead and coin ‘rewhite’… for every time a person of color says something and is ignored until a white person says it,” said one Twitter user, in response to Gugliucci’s tweet.

How to combat it

There is a way to deal with toxic behaviour in the workplace like hepeating, said Juliet Eilperin in The Washington Post: “amplification” – a technique that was famously used by female staffers in the Obama White House.

These women felt as though they had to “elbow” their way into important meetings and devised a strategy to help them ensure their voices were heard, explained Eilperin. “When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author. This forced the men in the room to recognize the contribution – and denied them the chance to claim the idea as their own.”

Another technique to combat hepeating at work is through “micro-sponsorship” – or the “act of enlisting a few coworkers to advocate for you when you’ve been wronged”, said Harvard public policy professor and behavioural economist Iris Bohnet in a CNBC article.

“Become vigilant about attributing comments to the people who made them first,” she added. “Everyone, men and women, can become a micro-sponsor.”

What next?

Hepeating is not yet in the dictionary, but it’s certainly growing in popularity. According to The Guardian, the term has been introduced into an internal handbook for the staff of Ofqual, the body that regulates qualifications, exams and tests in England.

But not everyone believes it is deserving of a place in our vocabulary. Hepeating is an “ugly new made-up word that’s foolish and devoid of meaning”, said Jeremy Black, a professor of history at the University of Exeter, in an interview with the Daily Mail. “It should play no role in educational advice.”

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

• Spotify
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In this week’s episode, we discuss:

Polygamy

While polygamy is illegal in most cases in India, there is a religious exemption for Muslims and some tribal communities. Now, urged on by women’s rights campaigners, the government wants to do away with that exemption and introduce a Universal Civil Code that would apply the same rules to all citizens regardless of their religion. Under different circumstances this might have been seen as a progressive piece of legislation that would have been welcomed. But is it actually another of Narendra Modi’s political attacks on India’s Muslims.

Industrial fishing

British and French fishermen put on an unusual show of unity this week as they joined forces to protest against industrial fishing techniques that are depleting stocks in the waters around the UK and mainland Europe. Their action follows reports that as much as 35% of all fish caught are wasted before they make it onto the consumer’s plate. How has this situation come to pass, and what can be done to improve it?

Tipping point

This week’s Queen’s speech was expected to include a bill that would force restaurants to distribute all money handed over in tips and service charges to staff rather than holding onto some or all of the money themselves – which the government had described as a “dodgy practice” when it pledged to change the law. But the measure has been quietly dropped. Is now the moment to reassess the way we reward service staff?

Following the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, and with Easter and summer holidays on the horizon, British tourists are getting ready to pack their bags for international travel once again.

When the UK government approved the removal of the remaining measures last month, it meant an end to passenger locator forms and testing requirements for returning citizens and arrivals. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said the changes would mean “greater freedom for travellers” ahead of the Easter break. And the end of Covid rules gives “a much needed boost for the bruised travel industry”, said the i news site.

Consumer confidence in international tourism is “on the up”, said Abta – The Travel Association. According to the association’s research 57% of people have a holiday abroad booked for the next 12 months, up from 44% in October 2021. “These figures are close to levels seen before the pandemic, and it’s clear that confidence to travel is on the rise as restrictions ease.”

Are UK airports ready?

Easter bookings are “almost back to pre-pandemic levels”, Travel Weekly reported. According to data from the Advantage Travel Partnership, departures for the period are down by only 10% compared to Easter 2019 and Spain and Turkey “remain firm favourites among travellers”.

With travel back on the agenda and tourists flocking to airports once again, one big question remains. “Are UK airports actually ready?” asked Matt Blake on The Points Guy. Airlines are “enjoying levels of interest they could only have dreamt of a year ago”, but airports are “struggling to cope with this increase in demand”.

Staff shortages blamed for ‘chaotic scenes’

“Chaotic scenes” have been reported at a number of airports across Britain and Ireland in recent days and some passengers have “even missed flights due to lengthy queues”, Blake added.

The UK’s airports have “been mired in chaos” after staff shortages led to hundreds of cancelled flights and hours-long delays over the weekend, The Independent reported. With 222 flights axed due to staff shortages, easyJet was “one of the worst hit airlines” and a spokesperson said that “as a result of the current high rates of Covid infections across Europe, like all businesses easyJet is experiencing higher than usual levels of employee sickness”. British Airways also cancelled “hundreds of flights” on Saturday and Sunday, with another 90 cancellations so far today.

As the Easter holidays got under way, passengers faced long queues at a number of airports, including Heathrow and Manchester, The Guardian reported. There were “long waits” for check-in at Heathrow, because of Covid checks, high passenger volumes and reported staff shortages.

A spokesperson for Manchester airport apologised to passengers. “As we recover from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, our whole industry is facing staff shortages and recruitment challenges,” the spokesperson said. “As a result we are advising customers that security queues may be longer than usual, and we encourage them to arrive at the earliest time recommended by their airline.”

Problems are ‘not terminal’

Airports have blamed a “cross-industry staffing crisis” for the problems, which have been caused by a “lethal combination” of staff illness and post-pandemic recruitment woes, Blake said. “But the issues, they promise, are not terminal.”

The Daily Express said that “Brexit Britain” is once again “heading for the skies” as airlines and airports offer hundreds of new jobs. Luton Airport has advertised more than 400 new jobs across the board, with multiple roles offered in security, firefighting, hospitality and retail staff.

At Heathrow, the UK’s busiest airport, 12,000 staff will be hired to handle an “expected summer holiday boom”, said The Guardian. John Holland-Kaye, the chief executive of Heathrow, said: “We need to ensure we are geared up to meet peak potential demand this summer.”

Aviation expert John Strickland, of JLS Consulting, said the staff shortages coming out of the pandemic is something which is “going to be more widespread” with airlines because of the number of people who were let go.

A British Airways IT glitch last week saw dozens of flights delayed or cancelled at Heathrow and the disruption caused by the repeated IT meltdowns is being exacerbated by staff shortages, The Independent reported. Strickland told the PA news agency that “once the dominoes start to fall, if your manpower is not up to proper planned establishment then you’re really floundering even more”.

“What does a chief executive have to do to get fired these days,” asked Oliver Shah in The Sunday Times. Peter Hebblethwaite, boss of P&O Ferries, appears to be doing “his damnedest”. He finally admitted before a committee of MPs last week that the company had been legally required to consult unions before laying off 800 seafarers – but “chose not to do so”, and would do the same again. No union, he said by way of justification, could “possibly accept” those mass redundancies. For most corporate leaders, such blatant flouting of the law would be “terminal”. But Hebblethwaite apparently continues to enjoy the support of P&O’s Dubai parent company DP World. And why not? So long as he remains “a convenient human sponge, soaking up outrage”, he remains useful. After that, he too will be tossed aside. If you want to see who’s really responsible, look beyond P&O’s “captain calamity” to his “overlord”, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem.

Hebblethwaite claimed that P&O Ferries wouldn’t be viable unless it replaced its UK crew with foreign agency workers paid as little as £5.15 an hour, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. No doubt he’s correct about the millions P&O has lost amid the pandemic and energy crisis. But this was a “brazen attempt” to claim that protecting a wealthy parent company’s investment was “more important than staying within the law”. Seafarers, meanwhile, have found an “unlikely ally”, said Oliver Gill in The Daily Telegraph. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps not only wants the 800 P&O workers reinstated; he is also determined “to ram through changes that force all ferry operators to pay the minimum wage”, of over £9.50 an hour from April. This would close an employment law loophole that ferry operators have been exploiting for years by being registered abroad.

If nothing else, the P&O debacle has made clear that the law needed an overhaul, said Sarah O’Connor in the FT. The sackings have “given the lie to the narrative” that Britain was “taking back control” after Brexit to create “a high-wage economy” where workers aren’t undercut by low-paid migrants. If Shapps gets his way, “fares will certainly rise”, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. “But there are safety risks in having ships crewed by underpaid staff.” Hebblethwaite has apparently given “a two-fingered salute” to the minister’s demand that P&O’s workers are reinstated. In which case, why not revoke its operating licence? Or threaten the millions in tax breaks that DP World will receive for operating two proposed freeports in London and Southampton. Unless P&O “stops rocking the boat”, ministers should “kick it off” the plan.

P&O Ferries is facing widespread criticism and the prospect of legal action after it sacked 800 seafaring staff yesterday via a video call.

The company, which Labour MP Karl Turner told LBC received £10m from the government in furlough payments during the coronavirus pandemic, is replacing the sacked employees with agency staff, leading some critics to accuse P&O of the controversial practice of “fire and rehire”.

What happened?

P&O Ferries yesterday sacked 800 staff and announced plans to replace them with agency workers. A spokesperson for the company told the Daily Mirror that the firm needed to lay off workers after it lost £100m due to disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the BBC, staff were told in a video call that Thursday was their “final day of employment”. P&O said it would offer “enhanced compensation packages” to all those impacted by the cuts, but no details have been released.

Some ferry workers then refused to leave their ships in protest, before being hauled off the boats by “balaclava-clad security guards”, reported ITV.

“I am extremely concerned and frankly angry at the way workers have been treated by P&O,” said Robert Courts, parliamentary under secretary for transport. TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said P&O’s “secret plan” to sack staff with no notice was “reprehensible”.

Labour MP Turner said the sackings were an “utterly deplorable predatory practice taking full advantage of the gap in the legislation”. Shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh said that images circulating online of staff being marched off ships was “the action of thugs”.

‘Fire and rehire’

The Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, an independent trade union, said that P&O Ferries has encouraged its staff to apply to the agency to continue their employment, effectively meaning they are being asked to reapply for their own jobs in what the union described as an example of “fire and rehire”.

Fire and rehire is a controversial technique in which a company sacks staff before telling them they can apply for their old jobs on less favourable terms. Weetabix, Tesco and British Gas are among the companies to have deployed the tactic in the past, according to The Guardian.

Responding to the sackings, a No. 10 spokesperson said: “We do not agree with the practice of fire and rehire and would be dismayed if this is the outcome they were seeking to achieve.”

Employment lawyer Rustom Tata, chair of legal firm DMH Stallard, told The Telegraph that those describing the P&O row as an example of “fire and rehire” are wrong, adding that staff are being sacked and replaced with agency workers, rather than being offered contracts on worse terms.

The Guardian said that “what P&O is trying to do looks slightly different” to fire and rehire, explaining: “Rather than rehiring staff to their old jobs, it is replacing them with agency workers and saying that sacked staff could, if they wanted, join those agencies.”

Nevertheless, Mark Dickinson, the general secretary of maritime trade union Nautilus International, told Radio 4’s Today programme that the sackings have “ripped the guts out of everybody” and are “clearly illegal”.

P&O Ferries said that the decision to lay-off workers was “tough” but that the business would not be viable without “making swift and significant changes now”. Critics have pointed out that its owner, the Dubai-based DP World, paid a £270m dividend to shareholders in 2020.

When working-from-home guidance was lifted at the beginning of last year it heralded the start of “The Great Return” to the office for millions of employees across the UK.

Yet a study of mobile phone activity has found that this anticipated return to city centre workplaces has not yet fully materialised, with many people spending significantly more time in suburbs and small towns.

Analysts Placemake.io and Visitor Insights found that anonymised phone data from more than 500 UK high streets from 2019 to 2022 showed that while city centres have seen a decline, many towns and suburbs have seen an increase in high street footfall. Researchers said the data could be directly linked to the ongoing trend for working from home.

Mark Allan, chief executive of property firm LandSec, told the BBC that the findings chimed with the way offices are currently being used in central London. According to Allan, Tuesdays to Thursdays are incredibly busy in the City of London, but activity on Mondays is only 50-60% of that level, and Fridays are almost as quiet as weekends.

“We’re not going back to how things were pre-Covid,” he said. “We certainly believe there are going to be fewer people in offices for the longer term and we are planning accordingly.”

Workspace provider IWG has seen a similar spike in people using its desks in suburban locations, with people most likely to use its spaces on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, The Guardian reported.

Covid-19 has “changed the way we work” – and the future of work is “hybrid”, said Alanah Mitchell on The Conversation. Spending part of the week at home and the rest at the office is going to be the norm for many employees. Here we look at the pros and cons of the hybrid working model.

1. Pro: greater flexibility

Hybrid operating models are being adopted at an “unprecedented rate”, said Rajiv Sodhi on BusinessToday. No two hybrid work structures are the same and a “new relationship” between the employer and the employee is emerging – “it’s a new social contract”.

Every organisation is coming up with a unique approach to meet its workers’ needs and there’s “model flexibility at all levels”, Sodhi added. Employees want the best of both worlds and work is “no longer tied to a single address”.

By far, the “best option” for employees and employers alike is a flexible-hybrid model, said Grow Remote’s Jenny Darmody on SiliconRepublic. “Under this model, jobs which can be done remotely are advertised without location, which means the employees can live where they choose.”

UK firms could even begin offering staff a four-day working week, the i news site said. This is because millions of Britons have “developed a preference for flexible working” during the pandemic. Employment law specialist Rebecca Thornley-Gibson, a partner at law firm DMH Stallard, said it’s been the “biggest experiment in flexible working we’ve ever seen”.

2. Con: heavy emotional toll

A part-remote, part-office schedule has been hailed as the future of work, said Alex Christian on the BBC. “Yet in this hybrid set-up, some employees have never been so tired.” Some workers were excited about having “the best of both worlds”, but anecdotal evidence revealed that the novelty of hybrid work soon gave way to “hassle and a jarring one-day-in, one-day-out routine”.

Emerging data suggests that hybrid working is “emotionally draining”, Christian reported. According to a study by employee engagement platform Tinypulse, more than 80% of leaders said the set-up was exhausting for employees. Workers also reported that a hybrid model was “more emotionally taxing than fully remote arrangements – and, concerningly, even full-time office-based work”.

3. Pro: multiple cost savings

The benefits of a hybrid model adds up, said Guruprasad Srinivasan, COO of Quess Corp, on The Economic Times. “Employees are closer to family, have better physical and mental health, stronger work relationships, improved productivity, choice of location [and] less time to commute to work.” The hybrid model is also “great for diversity and inclusion” as organisations can tap into a wider talent pool.

A study published in November by Virgin Media O2 Business and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) found that the positive effects of hybrid working could save the NHS more than £4bn per year. An extra 211 million hours spent caring for family and friends “could be unlocked by flexible working” and this would reduce the burden on the health and social care services, the report said. Physical and mental health benefits of hybrid working could reduce incidence of fatal diseases and reduce pressure on healthcare services.

The study also found that an increase in hybrid working could bring 3.8m people previously unable to work back into the workforce and could boost GDP by £48bn annually as part-time workers increase their working hours.

4. Con: weak staff loyalty

“Employers beware”, hybrid work “weakens loyalty”, said Emma Jacobs​​ in the FT. As hybrid becomes the norm and workers spend less time in the office, their attachment to the organisation may diminish. “If workers spend less time together, their social ties will weaken, as will the attachment to an employer.”

As the workplace culture evolves, companies will “continue to experiment and learn new ways to improve the employee experience”, said Rohini Sachitanand, APAC HR leader at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Writing on Human Resources Online she added: “While the tactics and techniques will vary, workers will embrace them if they afford them the flexibility and resources to work inclusively and productively. And that may help breed satisfaction and loyalty, two keys to success in a tight labour market.”

5. Pro: regeneration of small towns

More people spending more time away from big city centres has led to increased activity in smaller towns and suburbs. In Kirkby, Merseyside, for example, the study by Placemake.io found that footfall appears to have increased by 160% over three years, aided by the opening of a supermarket in the town centre and other local regeneration efforts.

Town centres recording the biggest increases in activity include Marlow, with a 33% increase, Glossop also on 33%, Matlock on 32% and Colchester and Buxton both on 26%.

6. Con: impact on new joiners and younger workers

Since the UK economy fully reopened in July last year a record number of job vacancies have been advertised as companies scrambled to meet demand. In the three months to November, UK job vacancies hit an all-time high of 1.219m and the number “continues to increase across most industries”, the Office for National Statistics said in its latest snapshot.

Power in the jobs market has now “shifted from employers to employees”, The Big Issue reported. With job vacancies at record levels, there’s never been a better time to think about making a career change.

Companies are fighting hard to “hold on to their best staff” and many are raising salaries, The Guardian said. According to the 2022 UK Salary Guide by recruitment firm Robert Walters, senior professionals can expect pay increases of up to 25% in the first quarter of 2022 and experienced staff on salaries of £80,000 and above are “already beginning to enjoy rises of £20,000 a year or more”, the paper added. Firms are “under pressure to ramp up pay rates” for existing staff to “prevent them quitting for a rival”.

Speaking to the BBC, Robert Walters’s chief financial officer Alan Bannatyne said staff in many UK industries were quitting for better paid jobs amid soaring demand. There is “fierce competition for talent” and it is “incredibly hard to find the right people”, he said. “Unless something significant happens, 2022 should be even better for staff.”

As firms look to retain talent by raising salaries, Bannatyne said “15% is the minimum” he is seeing, but some companies are increasing salaries “by up to 50%”.

‘Inflation-busting pay rises’

Lawyers could be set for “inflation-busting pay rises” this year as firms “desperately try to hold onto top talent”, The Law Society Gazette said. Pent-up demand and a shortage of staff will see lawyers’ wages rise across the board. Robert Walters revealed it had placed graduate lawyers on starting salaries as high as £150,000.

The “hunt for talent” extends further down the pay scales, The Guardian said. And professional services companies are budgeting for a wage bill increase of between 10% and 15% – the “largest increase seen since 2008 and almost three times the inflation rate”.

Irish salaries set to surge

Workers in Ireland will be offered pay hikes of up to 20% as employers “become locked in bidding wars to attract talent”, The Irish Independent reported. And a shortage of skilled staff in some high-demand sectors means “salaries are set to surge”.

Recruitment agency Morgan McKinley believes a “great resignation” is under way in Ireland and 82% of Irish professionals are considering a career move in the next six to 12 months. According to the Morgan McKinley Irish Salary Guide 2022, there is a lack of competition from international talent and this has been a factor in the upward pressure on wages.

Bosses can be fined for contacting their employees outside working hours by email, text or phone under new laws in Portugual.

The “right to rest” rules, which came into effect on Saturday, have been introduced by Portugal’s Socialist-led government to help improve the nation’s work-life balance as the Covid pandemic forces millions of people to work from home.

In what The New York Times described as “one of the world’s boldest efforts” to regulate remote working, the new law states that “the employer must respect the privacy of the worker”. As well as being banned from contacting off-duty staff except for in emergencies, employers are also required to compensate remote workers for any resulting increase in bills such as electricity and gas.

In an effort to prevent remote workers from feeling isolated, companies are also expected to organise face-to-face meetings at least every two months.

But employees with children up to eight years old have the right to work remotely without seeking prior approval from their bosses.

The new legislation applies to companies with more than ten staff members, and employers may face fines for any violation that constitutes a “serious” offence.

“Remote working has great advantages provided we control the disadvantages,” said Portugal’s minister of labour, solidarity and social security, Ana Mendes Godinho, at Lisbon’s Web Summit earlier this month. “The pandemic accelerated the need to regulate what already needed to be regulated.”

The new legislation could entice more foreign remote workers to Portugal, boosting the country’s economy, she added.

But some industry chiefs have criticised the new laws “for being too hasty a response” to the pandemic, reported the Financial Times. The Confederation of Portuguese Farmers (CAP) said the legislation was an “unreasonable” reaction to the problems caused by Covid-19.

Research firm Gartner estimated in June that 32% of the global workforce would be remote workers by the end of 2021, compared with just 17% in 2019, before the virus hit.

Although the Portuguese push to protect workers’ off-clock hours is among the “boldest” yet, other countries have been modernising their labour laws in recent years.

Staff in countries including France, Spain, Belgium, Slovakia, Italy, the Philippines, Argentina and India “all currently enjoy ‘the right to disconnect’ – or abstain without punishment from working and communicating with their employers during designated rest periods”, wrote Vancouver-based journalist Adrienne Matei in an article for The Guardian asking whether the US might introduce similar laws.

The same question was posed about the UK by Metro in August, when the paper reported that Downing Street was “being encouraged” to introduce such worker rights “from multiple sides”. But “as of yet, the UK government has not indicated plans to make the right to switch off from work outside of normal hours a legal requirement”, the paper said.

Crises often leave an unexpected mark on history, said Derek Thompson in The Atlantic (Washington DC). The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 brought about the invention of the skyscraper; WWII accelerated the development of penicillin and flu vaccines. And Covid-19? To judge by the American workplace today, it would seem to have effected a crucial change in Americans’ attitude to work. During the pandemic, many frontline workers were forced to risk exposure to Covid, to work long hours of overtime and to deal with “cabin-fevered”, rage-filled customers. And now these servers, cooks and clerks, worn out from “suffering non-stop rudeness”, are saying “to hell with this” and jacking in their jobs. Nearly 7% of employees in the “accommodations and food services” sector said sayonara in the month of August alone.

“The Great Resignation”, economists are calling it, said Michael Blackmon on BuzzFeed News (New York). With good reason. A record 4.3 million people left their jobs in August, and four million did so in each of the previous two months. They include everyone from the 30-year-old North Carolina woman, exhausted by rude customers and demeaning bosses (“I’m constantly having the fact that I’m replaceable just shoved in my face”), who has quit three restaurant jobs in the past year, to the 28-year-old San Francisco program manager, disillusioned by the way his career was dominating his life, who chucked in his $100,000 job at a tech start-up. But most “Quits”, as the Bureau of Labour Statistics calls them, are probably rebelling against poverty wages, said Laura Entis on Vox (New York). And their stand is paying off: “Costco, McDonald’s, Amazon, Bank of America, and CVS have all announced plans to raise the starting or average pay for hourly workers”, and the average restaurant and supermarket workers’ wage recently surpassed $15 an hour. For the first time in a long while, workers have some leverage over employers.

“There’s a catch, though,” said Brent Orrell on TheDispatch.com (Washington DC). Most of the Quits are women, many of them pushed out of the workforce after daycare centres closed and schools went remote, leaving them with no care options for their kids. More than ten million job openings aren’t being filled. “Can’t get sheets changed on your hotel bed, or a burger delivered in less than 20 minutes?” It’s all down to lack of staff. And “Big Labor” is making things worse, said The Wall Street Journal. Unions look on the shortages as a chance to flex their muscles. Earlier this month, 10,000 John Deere employees downed tools, having rejected a deal that would have lifted the annual wages of a typical production worker from $60,000 to $72,000. This will only raise prices, make the company less competitive, and put jobs at risk. But the Great Resignation tells us it’s a risk they are willing to take, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. After upending their lives, the pandemic has caused them to reconsider whether it was worth staying in “lousy jobs”. Wages have stagnated; hours are long and unpredictable; holiday is limited; management treats staff without respect. “American workers are insisting on a better deal; it’s in the nation’s interest they get it.”

The Food and Drink Federation has warned of an intensifying “battle for labour” in the run-up to Christmas. Amazon is taking no chances, said The Observer. The online giant is offering generous “signing-up bonuses” of up to £3,000 in its effort to recruit 20,000 temporary staff. The move has been slammed by business groups as “a knockout blow” for smaller outfits. But the incentives are controversial in-house, too. “It leaves workers who have been there for years feeling rather undervalued and underappreciated,” one warehouse worker told the BBC. “They are training people who are making more money than them.”

The problem of Britain’s “missing workers” – the ONS reported a record 1.2 million vacancies last month – is biting hard across sectors, said Tim Wallace and Tom Rees in The Sunday Telegraph. “More than three-quarters of businesses attempting to recruit” have “reported difficulties” according to the British Chambers of Commerce. The latest hot commodity appears to be “bouncers”, said Joanna Partridge in The Guardian. Some estimates suggest nightclubs and other venues are “having to pay security staff about 25% more” than pre-pandemic.

In hospitality, shortages are already hitting the bottom line, said Dominic Walsh in The Times. The restaurant group D&D London (formerly Conran Restaurants) reckons it has lost 10% of revenues. With wages growing at their fastest rate in two decades, and the volume of Google searches for “leave job” up by 50% since the start of the pandemic, “the power balance between workers and firms is shifting”, said Tortoise. That’s bad news for companies, but possibly “a good thing for entrepreneurship”. After collapsing during the pandemic, “the number of self-employed workers is now ticking up, as are the number of new businesses”.

Like it or not, when the vast majority of us picture a person working in the trades – whether that’s an electrician, builder, plumber or locksmith – we are likely to imagine a man in that role.

This is undoubtedly influenced by long-standing stereotypes of men as being more ‘handy’, summoning sepia-toned visions of husbands working in the tool shed while the wife is in the kitchen. And of course, these kinds of careers have been dominated by men for a long time. But things are beginning to shift.

According to Direct Line, there were an estimated 15,000 tradeswomen working in 2009 compared to 33,000 in 2019 – an increase of 120% in ten years. While the industry remains dominated by men, more women are taking up tools. So what is causing these changes?

Shifting needs and expectations

It’s easy to forget how recently women won a place in the workplace at all. Many women during the First and Second World Wars took up jobs to keep economies and industries moving while men were fighting overseas – and then found themselves under pressure to give them up when the fighting ended.

These days, it is largely recognised that a person’s gender should not bar them from any but a very limited and specific set of jobs. There have been high profile pushes to encourage women to enter STEM jobs, and as attitudes continue to shift towards the enshrining of gender parity, there can be fewer excuses as to why women shouldn’t work in the trades.

Covid-19 has underlined the appeal of the industry for many women, with a growing understanding that these roles might offer job security and a source of reliable work in uncertain times. A study by Powered Now found that 21% of women in the UK considered a career in the trades during the first year of the pandemic. It also found that 15% of women who were already working within the trades saw record highs in demand during that time.

Interest is up, and the opportunities seem to be increasing. What’s more, anecdotal evidence suggests that women have some advantages in trades over their male counterparts. According to Local Heroes – an organisation that helps put people in touch with trusted local tradespeople from electricians and plumbers to locksmiths and boiler technicians – female tradespeople report that they stand out from the crowd.

“It’s a bonus to be a girl in the industry – it’s more niche,” said heating engineer Natasha Clark-Withers. “Across the board, it’s not just women who are keen that you’re a woman. People trust me more and think my prices will be more reliable. It’s a great way of standing out – people are more likely to remember ‘Natasha the plumber’ than ‘Bob the plumber’.”

There is evidence that some people are more likely to be comfortable inviting a stranger to do work in their home if they are female – particularly if they are elderly or a woman too. “Single women are often relieved to see I’m a woman,” locksmith Pip Harris told Local Heroes, adding that this is especially the case when they have been locked out of their homes and are in a state of distress.

The ongoing challenges

While the opportunities are increasing, and women seem to be more interested in trades jobs, they still face challenges. We have already established a key challenge: that in the minds of many of us, these roles are still associated predominantly with men.

And it’s not just a case of older generations simply not getting with the times. A Local Heroes survey found that 44% of primary school children believed that working as a tradesperson is a “male job”. One in seven (14%) said that they don’t think a woman can work as a tradesperson because “they aren’t strong enough” or “it’s too dirty”.

Portrayals of women in trades roles in media remain rare, so there is still little to push back against these long-standing stereotypes. Local Heroes is trying to promote the trades for women and change attitudes among kids with its digital children’s book My Mum the Handyman. The story by Ros Asquith is written from the perspective of a young boy about life with his electrician mum, and is intended to give girls a role model to show them that a career in the trades is open to them.

A shift in public perception to seeing “tradesperson” as a gender-neutral role will take time, but growing numbers of women entering the industry is key to helping these changes happen.

To find trusted women in the trades in your area, visit Local Heroes