Tennessee jobless rate falls to a 26-month low
Unemployment in Tennessee fell in January to its lowest level since before the pandemic slowed the economy two years ago. The Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development said Thursday the state’s jobless rate at the start of 2022 declined to 3.5% – the lowest monthly rate since November 2019 and a half percentage point below the comparable U.S. unemployment rate of 4% in January.
Tennessee employers created 3,000 more nonfarm jobs between December and January. The largest increases occurred in the retail trade sector, followed by the professional and business services sector, and the durable goods manufacturing sector.
Over the year, nonfarm employment increased by 110,400 jobs. The largest increases took place in the leisure and hospitality sector, the trade, transportation, and utilities sector, and the professional and business services sector.
Tennessee’s unemployment rate has fallen steadily since it peaked at 15.9% in April 2020 at the worst of the recent economic downturn.
Musk invites auto union to hold an organizing vote
Elon Musk is inviting the United Auto Workers union to hold an organizing vote at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California.
On Twitter, Musk wrote that he invited the union to hold a vote at its convenience, and that Tesla would do nothing to stop it.
The union wouldn’t comment Thursday, but spokesperson Brian Rothenberg pointed out that Tesla is fighting a U.S. National Labor Relations Board ruling from last year that found the company and Musk engaged in unfair labor practices in 2018, partly because of his tweets.
The labor practices involved a union effort to organize the 10,000-worker Fremont plant.
Delivery robots pulled from 2 U.S. campuses
Two U.S. university campuses are losing their food-delivery robots for now because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Grubhub said Thursday that it is ending its partnership with Russian tech company Yandex and pulling 100 Yandex-made food-delivery robots from the campuses of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.
Chicago-based Grubhub said it is working with both campuses to find alternatives. Grubhub had been using the robots to deliver food on campus at Ohio State since August. The company launched robot delivery at the University of Arizona last November.
Stocks, oil prices decline Thursday
Stocks fell and oil prices eased back Thursday after another bumpy day of trading on Wall Street as markets remained anxious about the broader impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Major indexes veered up and down for much of the day before a late-day slide pushed them into the red. The S&P 500 shed a 0.7% gain to close 0.5% lower, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.3%. The Nasdaq composite fell 1.6%, weighed down by technology stocks, which accounted for a big share of the market’s decline. The pullback left the indexes on pace for weekly losses.
Bond yields mostly were mostly steady. The yield on the 10-year Treasury slipped to 1.85% from 1.86% late Wednesday.
Stocks rallied a day earlier after Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said he favored a modest interest rate increase at the Fed’s policy meeting in two weeks, bringing relief to investors who had feared he would back more aggressive moves to fight inflation.
“We’ve gotten a lot of clarity on what the Fed plans to do,” said Liz Young, chief investment strategist at SoFi. “But we’ve got this overhanging cloud of the geopolitical risk and oil prices still pressuring sentiment a little bit.”
The S&P 500 fell 23.05 points to 4,363.49. The Dow slid 96.69 points to 33,794.66. The Nasdaq dropped 214.07 points to 13,537.94.
– Compiled by Dave Flessner