Most Recent Posts

The Labor Department's latest report shows employers created 223,000 jobs in April and the unemployment rate went down another notch to 5.4 percent.

So, yay!

But study the wage figures in Friday's report — and your "yay" turns to "meh."

Workers got raises of just 0.1 percent in April. Over the past year, wages advanced only 2.2 percent, a pace that amounts to treading water for most families. The average work week has stalled at 34.5 hours, unchanged from the previous month — and from a year ago.

So workers aren't getting longer hours or fatter raises, even though the private sector has added 12.3 million jobs over 62 straight months, the longest streak on record.

Both President Obama and labor leaders want to end this long period of wage stagnation. But they are locked in a bitter dispute over whether a proposed trade deal would help or hurt workers' wallets.

On Friday, just hours after the jobs data were released, Obama visited the Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., to talk up the advantages of completing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.

It's All Politics

Would Lower Shoe Tariffs Actually Encourage American Jobs?

The Two-Way

223,000 Jobs Added In April; Unemployment Rate Dips To 5.4 Percent

It's All Politics

Obama Laces Up To Tout Asian Trade Deal At Nike

Business

Japan's Abe Pushes The Pacific Trade Deal Onto Center Stage

He says that if Congress were to expand trade among the U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim nations, it would help the sportswear giant create more high-paying jobs for Americans. "Let's just do it," Obama told the Nike gathering.

Nike says that under the TPP's terms, Americans would pay much less in tariffs on footwear. As a result of those savings, the company would be able to move forward with plans to develop advanced manufacturing facilities in the United States, which in turn would create 10,000 good jobs.

In a phone interview Friday, Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said that's exactly what the president wants to see — more high-paying jobs resulting from the opening of new markets and lowering of tariffs.

Moreover, Obama wants the TPP to force Asian nations to raise labor standards, which then would "give U.S. companies less incentive to ship jobs overseas," Furman said.

"There's no doubt that the process of globalization has created a lot of opportunities for American companies, but it also created challenges for American workers," he said. "The TPP is designed precisely to better manage the process of globalization" to help U.S. workers export more, and face less wage competition from Asian workers.

Many labor and environmental leaders aren't buying those arguments. They say Nike has long been a leader in outsourcing factory jobs, and lacks credibility on employment issues.

"The Nike brand was built by outsourcing manufacturing to sweatshops in Asia," said Murshed Zaheed, deputy political director at CREDO, a group opposed to TPP. "President Obama should listen to his party's base, and stop pushing this titanic job-killing corporate power grab."

While Obama and many Democrats may disagree over the impact of this trade deal, there is little argument that the labor market could still use some help. Economists generally described April's employment growth as "solid," but also noted that March's original count of 126,000 net new jobs added was revised downward, to just 85,000.

Doug Handler, the chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight, said the latest report shows "an economy that is now growing at moderate rate [but] not as good as in mid-2014."

The Obama administration wants to strap a booster rocket onto the labor market. It cannot count on getting more economic stimulus from the Republican-controlled Congress, and it's impossible to get more monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve, which already has cut interest rates to extreme lows — and is considering when to raise them.

So that leaves exports as the best tool available to create more jobs, the argument goes.

"If you're opposed to these smart, progressive trade deals, then that means you must be satisfied with the status quo," Obama said at the Nike event. "And the status quo hasn't been working for our workers."

He said the TPP could make the labor market much better and that if it couldn't, "I would not be fighting for it."

Lori Wallach, director Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, was not buying his pitch, or Nike's: "Under this unrealistic best-case scenario of an additional 10,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs, less than 2 percent of the more than 1 million workers who make Nike's products would be U.S. workers."

Wages

employment report

Jobs

trade agreement

Nike

The Nike Corporation says the lower tariffs promised by a proposed Asia-Pacific trade deal would allow it to speed up development of advanced manufacturing, supporting up to 10,000 domestic jobs over the next decade.

The announcement comes as President Obama visits Nike headquarters to promote the trade deal, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP. Critics have questioned the Beaverton, Ore. backdrop, noting that Nike currently manufactures virtually all of its shoes and apparel in low-wage countries such as Vietnam.

"Footwear tariff relief would allow Nike to accelerate development of new advanced manufacturing methods and a domestic supply chain to support U.S. based manufacturing," the company said in a statement.

U.S. companies and consumers paid $2.7 billion dollars in tariffs on shoes last year, according to the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America, an industry trade group. Of that total, only about $460 million would be subject to relief under the trade deal. China, the number one source of America shoe imports, is not part of the agreement, though it could conceivably join in the future.

The shoe tariff reduction under the Trans-Pacific Partnership would only cover some countries where American shoes are produced. China, the number one producer for the U.S. is not covered by the current TPP proposal. Nike, Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America hide caption

itoggle caption Nike, Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America

The potential tariff relief on shoes from countries that are part of the deal represents a fraction of Nike's profit last year of $2.7 billion, on sales of $28 billion. (A company spokesman declined to say what fraction of total U.S. shoe tariffs are for Nike shoes.)

"U.S. manufacturing would allow Nike to deliver product faster to market, create innovative performance footwear, provide customized solutions for consumers, and advance sustainability goals," the company said in its statement.

"This advanced manufacturing model is expected to lead to the creation of up to 10,000 manufacturing and engineering jobs in addition to thousands of construction jobs and up to 40,000 indirect supply chain and service jobs in the United States over the next decade."

Critics of the trade deal were not impressed. "Just last year alone Nike cut half the number of American manufacturing jobs it now says it would create over a decade if TPP is enacted," said Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. "Nike's job creation claim mimics the broken job creation promises that multinational corporations have used to push for past controversial trade pacts, only to turn around and offshore U.S. jobs after the pacts took effect."

Nike employs 26,000 people in the U.S. A million more work in the overseas contract factories that supply the company's products.

In its most recent sustainability report, Nike noted that nearly a third of those factories fall short of its own labor improvement targets, with wages and work hours the biggest complaints. Obama says one goal of the trade deal is to raise labor standards throughout the participating countries.

Many companies reward their most loyal customers with incentives, discounts and freebies. But in car insurance, the opposite can actually happen. A driver can be punished with a higher premium just for being loyal to the company.

It's called price optimization, and it happens to lots of people all the time. A driver could have no history of accidents but all of a sudden their car insurance goes up.

Justin Mulholland is a financial adviser whose company manages money for people at the University of Michigan. He owns a Ford Focus, a Buick LeSabre and a Chevy Venture. He got a pretty good rate from the insurance company he chose. And for two years, all was well.

Then he received a notice that his premium was going up. The increase "was pretty substantial — it was about $100 a year," Mulholland says.

A guy who helps people manage their money most likely pays attention to his own as well.

"I got on the phone with another friend of mine who sells insurance and he got me a deal with Cincinnati Insurance that brought it down to what it was before, and it's stayed there ever since," Mulholland says.

"They'll give you a discount for loyalty. But, they'll give you a 10 percent discount after they've raised your rate 25 percent."

- Bob Hunter, Consumer Federation of America

Mulholland's lack of loyalty in the face of a premium increase means he's less likely to be snared by the insurance practice called price optimization.

"Well, it's really profit maximization," says Bob Hunter, with the Consumer Federation of America. He says insurance companies can buy software that compiles an astonishing amount of data on everyone who buys almost anything, anywhere.

"They have all the information on what you buy at your grocery store. How many apples, how many beers, how many steaks," he says. "They have all the information on your house. They have incredible amounts of information on are you staying with Direct TV when Verizon is cheaper."

A sophisticated algorithm crunches that data and spits out an index showing how sensitive a customer is to price increases. Only the insurance company knows the index. Clients may see a loyalty discount on their premiums but Hunter says it may not be what it seems.

All Tech Considered

Weighing Privacy Vs. Rewards Of Letting Insurers Track Your Fitness

The Two-Way

John Hancock Hopes You'll Trade Activity Data For Insurance Discounts

All Tech Considered

Your Car Won't Start. Did You Make The Loan Payment?

Business

Car Insurers Eye Driving Skills To Set Prices

"They'll give you a discount for loyalty," Hunter says. "But, they'll give you a 10 percent discount after they've raised your rate 25 percent."

This can mean as much as a 30 percent rate difference between two drivers with the same risks. Only one's a shopper and one's not.

Rich Piazza, chief actuary for the Louisiana Department of Insurance, says this it's pretty complicated.

"As regulators, we're not always on the cutting edge of these changes in modeling and ratemaking practices, so we have to catch up sometimes," he says.

But unlike Hunter, Piazza's not convinced the practice is widespread. And he's not yet sure that it's wrong. He says insurance companies have many legitimate reasons to raise rates or charge a customer more than the next person. The company's costs go up. Every driver is different, and poses different risks.

"Insurance pricing rating is discriminatory," Piazza says. "It always has been."

But is it fair to discriminate based on a quality totally unrelated to risk? Maryland, Ohio and California say it isn't and have explicitly banned price optimization.

So far only Allstate has disclosed that it uses the price optimization tool. In a statement, the American Insurance Association said "the auto insurance market remains very competitive and consumers have numerous options available to them."

Hunter says even if all people do is suspect they're being price optimized they can still fight back.

"Shopping around will foil price optimization because if you shop around, the insurance company's going say, 'This guy's gonna leave if I raise the price, so let's hold it down.' "

Cars

insurance

In Arabic, haqq is the word for truth.

Last week in the United Arab Emirates, group of Muslim scholars held what they called a "haqqathon" – a hackathon meant to create new ways for Islamic scholars to connect with young Muslims and, by doing so, defuse violent extremists like the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

The competition took place in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi, on the sidelines of the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies. More than 400 Muslim clerical scholars — Sunni, Shiite and others — gathered for the second year to talk about how extremists are hijacking Islam, and what to do about it.

The urgency for something like the haqqathon is clear, because groups like ISIS have had great success recruiting young people on social media.

"We do want to start speaking the same language as our youth," said Zeshan Zafar, the group's executive director. "What is that language, and who are the individuals that need to be part of that whole mix as well. So that's vital for us."

Zafar, working with the Virginia-based business incubator Affinis Labs, helped choose the participants, who included a journalist with the British newspaper The Guardian, a psychologist, an imam who is also an attorney in the U.K., a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry and others.

"I'm hoping that in the channels and the energy that is being created here we'll have something that's very, very relevant, and we actually invest into, incubate until we get an actual end product that is really worthy and ... develops that connection between scholars, all the way down to the grassroots," Zafar said.

Related NPR Stories

Parallels

How The Islamic State Wages Its Propaganda War

Business Incubator Taps Into Muslim-Americans' Entrepreneurial Spirit

4:55

Playlist

Download

Embed

Embed

Islamic State Uses Online Strategies To Get Its Message Out

3:40

Playlist

Download

Embed

Embed

Five teams competed over two and a half days for funding to get their project up and running. The teams had to develop an idea, have their designers and programmers turn it into a running prototype, and then present it to a panel of judges.

One team came up with Marhubba — a website and app that would answer young Muslims' questions about male-female relationships in "the Prophetic way." Team member Waji-hat Ali, a playwright from Pakistan, made the pitch.

"Welcome to Marhubba.com," he said, "where [students] and traditional Islamic scholarship meet to learn about sex, relationships, marriage and intimacy in an honest and relevant manner."

A panel of judges, a global online audience and everyone in the room cast their ballots electronically. Think of it as an American Idol final round meets "countering violent extremism."

The judges chose a winner: Champions of Islam, a social media site where users can upload photos of everyday Muslim heroes.

But they unexpectedly presented a "people's award," to Marhubba, which will also be funded.

That night, the young Muslim entrepreneurs could be found at a celebratory dinner on the hotel rooftop, overlooking the lights of Abu Dhabi, still pitching ideas to one another and making more connections.

Islam