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Job openings saw an unexpected rise for the month of April. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, available jobs rose by 191,000 from the previous month to nearly 7.4 million. The increase was higher than the 7.1 million jobs FactSet economists had anticipated for the time period. The percentage of unemployed workers dropped from 1.03% to 1%, and hiring rose by 169,000 to 5.6 million. Federal job openings are up Somewhat surprisingly, given the Department of Government Efficiencys mass layoffs, federal job openings also rose. In March, there were 121,000 federal jobs open. In April, that number was up to 134,000. Federal layoffs also fell to 4,000 from 8,000 in March. That was down from a staggering 19,000 in February. While DOGE cut at least 280,000 jobs during President Trump’s first several months in office, according to recent estimates from Yahoo Finance, thousands more likely lost jobs indirectly due to cuts to federal funding. The Trump administration has cut billions in funding to national parks, disease research, national security, and more. Aprils uptick in federal job openings could be at least partially due to the fact that several federal departments scrambled to hire employees back after conducting mass layoffs. An uncertain moment for workers In spite of an increase in job openings more generally, layoffs also rose, jumping to 1.79 millionan increase of 196,000. And the number of people leaving their jobs by choice, a good predictor of worker confidence, fell by 150,000 to 3.2 million, showing workers may be becoming weary about their ability to find new employment. Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics, told Reuters that the latest report is a sign that companies are retaining employees while awaiting the impact of new Trump-era policies. Once companies are more certain that bad times are coming, they will start to shed workers.” Weinberg continued, However, the economy is still near full employment. We suspect companies are still hoarding workers until they are very, very sure about an economic downturn.
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E-Commerce
Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Companys workplace advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer your biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: Is it okay to lie (a little) on your résumé? A: I would hope that the answer to this question is obvious, but perhaps not. Lying in some form, whether its inflating your job title or experience, exaggerating your skills, or fudging employment or graduation dates is way more common than you might think. In fact, a 2023 ResumeLab survey found that 70% of job applicants have lied on their résumés.For the record let me be clear, lying on your résuméno matter how big or small the lie is or what its aboutis never, ever, ever a good idea. Like ever. Just because everyone else is doing it doesnt mean you should. The risk just isnt worth it. Very few things arent discoverable from a quick search and in most industries professional networks can be small and paths are bound to cross. For example if you lie about your employment dates or role in a certain company, your potential employer can easily find out the truth and, no matter how impressive you are, you have broken their trust and ruined any future employment chances with that company.Even if your lies arent discovered during the hiring process, they can haunt you later on. Did you list skills that you dont really have? Did you say that you know a software system or tool that you arent really that familiar with? Those mistruths will come back to bite you as soon as youre on the job. All lies come to light eventually and even if they dont, youll have to remember them and stay on top of the cover-up for your entire tenure. But really, lying isnt necessary. Here are a few legitimate ways to redo your résumé in honest ways that will smooth over the things you might be tempted to lie about. Explain the gaps in your career history I gave this advice when addressing if your résumé needs to be one page: Hardly anyone has a linear career path and you arent fooling anyone by glossing over a year or more. If you freelanced, cared for family, or volunteered during times you weren’t traditionally employed, that all counts. In other words, rather than changing or omitting dates, address your career gaps either on your résumé or in your cover letter and frame them as strengths. Show off your accomplishments Instead of inflating your past job titles, talk up what youve done, the impact youve made, and who youve worked with. This is something Fast Company contributor and résumé expert Donna Svei calls affiliative branding. Heres the example she gives for how it works: An early-career client I once worked with wanted a specific job but couldnt land an interview. We analyzed the posting and saw that the job involved working with well-known artists. My client had that impressive experience but hadnt mentioned it in their résumé. We wrote a bullet that named a few of the top artists they had worked for (affiliative branding) and described my clients wins. They got the job three weeks later. Cut the irrelevant information and make whats there is persuasive I got into this in my advice on what to cut from your résumé. Sometimes in the quest to sound impressive, candidates clutter up their résumés with a bunch of unneeded hyperbole that isnt an honest representation of their skills or experience. Trim all of that junk and replace it with facts that are presented in a persuasive way. Svei recommends checking that those facts are presented in a positive light. When a fact is described negatively, I ask myself, ‘can I reframe this as a positive?’ It might be as simple as changing ‘reduced turnover to 10%,’ to ‘increased team retention to 90%,’ she says. Here’s more about lying on résumés: How to spot a lie on a candidates résumé 5 ways to make your résumé more impressive without lying 400 hiring managers reveal when its okay to lie on your résumé
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E-Commerce
Wells Fargo was released from a punitive, seven-year-long $1.95 trillion cap on its assets on Tuesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve lifted the regulatory measure, allowing the bank to pursue unimpeded growth. The move handed a major victory to CEO Charlie Scharf, who has been cleaning up the bank since taking the top job in 2019, and sent the bank’s shares up 2.7% in after-hours trading as investors anticipated that the bank can now expand. Wells has said it wants to grow in areas such as credit cards, wealth management and commercial banking. “It will be a significant bump for the stock in the near term and also paves the way for long-term growth as they don’t have to manage their business around the asset cap now,” said Brian Mulberry, client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment Management, which holds Wells Fargo stock. The Fed imposed the unprecedented restriction in 2018 following years of high-profile missteps at the bank, including a far-ranging scandal in which employees opened millions of unauthorized accounts for customers. But the Fed said in a statement that the bank had made “substantial progress” in addressing its deficiencies, including improving its governance and risk-management programs, and completing a third-party review of its overhaul. The Fed board voted unanimously to lift the restriction, which was the first time the central bank had directly ordered a bank to stop growing in order to address widespread shortcomings. “This marks the end of a painful period for Wells Fargo, and also serves as a reminder for financial institutions to be sure customer interests are always aligned with growth goals,” said Stephen Biggar, banking analyst at Argus Research in New York. The decision is a major step in the bank’s longstanding efforts to repair the damage from scandals that erupted in 2016, drawing public criticism and billions of dollars in fines. Scharf called the move a “pivotal milestone.” “We are a different and far stronger company today because of the work weve done,” he said in a statement, adding that all full-time bank employees will receive a $2,000 award to commemorate the accomplishment. JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon praised Scharf, once his protege and a former executive at the bank. “Charlie and his team deserve a lot of credithaving worked extremely hard to resolve the companys heritage issues,” he said. MAJOR SHIFT While the bank still faces some additional oversight from the Fed as part of the 2018 order, the removal of the asset cap marks a major shift for the nation’s fourth-largest lender, after the scandals ousted multiple executives as regulators piled fines and restrictions on the bank for its wrongdoing. “This . . . removes a major regulatory overhang,” said Mac Sykes, portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds in New York. “It provides them a reputational boost which is helpful, provides more and different capital allocation opportunities and allows them to grow their balance sheet.” The bank came under regulatory scrutiny for years after scandal erupted in 2016, which revealed the bank also charged unnecessary mortgage fees and forced drivers to buy car insurance they did not need, often to meet sales goals. It paid billions in penalties and was also slapped with lawsuits from customers and shareholders. Before Scharf was hired as CEO, two former chief executives left in the wake of the controversy. The bank became a major focus of criticism in Washington as well, with numerous lawmakers calling for executives to be removed and for the bank possibly to be broken up. The lender cleared numerous consent orders this year, and over a dozen since 2019. Regulators impose consent orders, or public enforcement actions that are often accompanied by fines. The orders instruct banks to fix problems in a timely way. In 2024, Democratic U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren warned the Fed not to remove the cap until the bank had fixed its risk and compliance issues. “The Feds decision to lift Wells Fargos asset cap and declare victory despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is an outrageous giveaway to one of Wall Streets most derelict banks,” she said on Tuesday. Scharf said last year the asset cap was curtailing the bank’s ability to take in more corporate deposits and expand its trading business at a time when peers have grown. The bank has been managing its wholesale deposits and markets businesses carefully to comply with the cap, and those are areas it would expect to expand when the restrictions are lifted, Scharf told analysts in October. The assets of Wells Fargo peer JPMorgan Chase swelled by nearly $2 trillion since the start of 2018, while those of Bank of America and PNC Financial added about $1 trillion and nearly $200 billion, respectively. Some saw the Fed’s action as good for the overall market. “Whenever you have a situation where stress is reduced or taken away from the system, especially for one of the largest banks in the country, that bodes well for the market and for the economy,” said Adam Sarhan, chief executive of 50 Park Investments in New York. Pete Schroeder and Nupur Anand, Reuters
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E-Commerce
The magic of an archive often has to do with discoveryof an idea that never made it out of a sketchbook, the behind-the-scenes lore only a handful of confidantes are privy to, and the mundane items that time transforms into holy grails. Now, the field of modern design has a new archive to salivate over, courtesy of MillerKnoll. Composed of over one million objects and held in a 12,000-square-foot facility at MillerKnolls headquarters in Western Michigan, the archive includes visible storage; a reading room for researchers; and an exhibition space. There, visitors can spy everything from the streamlined objects Gilbert Rohde designed for the 1933 Worlds Fair to prototypes of the Eames Action Office and pattern-drenched postmodernist chairs by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. Its a whos-who list of modern design history, all under one roof. But the archivedesigned in collaboration with the New York-based consultancy Standard Issueis more than a repository for historic artifacts; its something that can help develop new ideas and tell untold stories. The great excitement for me is not one particular item, not one particular narrative; but the endless opportunity that it presents to make more connections, says Ben Watson, the chief creative and product officer at MillerKnoll. The Story of Modern Design History has been an important part of the individual brands that comprise MillerKnoll, which includes Herman Miller, Knoll, Design Within Reach, Hay, and Muuto, among others. In silos, they told a company-specific story; all together the collection represents the myriad narratives that shaped how modern furniture became a business, from ambitious ideas to the nuts and bolts of how objects actually get made. MillerKnoll Director of Archives and Brand Heritage Amy Auscherman and Chief Creative and Product Officer Ben Watson [Photo: courtesy MillerKnoll] You really get this encyclopedic look at furniture through the lens of these American design brands, says Amy Auscherman, the director of Archives and Brand Heritage at MillerKnoll. What makes the MillerKnoll archive unique, or maybe even more illustrative of the history of design, is we have the finished object, but we also have the correspondence internally with the product development team and the suppliers that outlines why certain decisions got made or why they didnt. Institutions like MoMA or Cooper Hewitt or the Library of Congress might have marketing material, but they dont have board minutes and business files. A significant impetus for the new archive was Herman Millers 2021 purchase of Knoll for $1.8 billion. At the time, the contract furniture industry was reeling from the pandemic. According to a report in Business of Home, Knoll experienced a mass cancellation of orders and forecasted that it would run out of cash. After the acquisition, the publicly traded company changed its name to MillerKnoll, with Herman Miller shareholders owning 78% of the company and Knoll shareholders owning 22%. Since then, MillerKnoll has been integrating Knoll into the business. The companys sales grew between 2021 and 2023, but dropped 11.2% in 2024. [Photo: Nicholas Calcott for MillerKnoll] To Auscherman, who was Herman Millers archivist before the acquisition, getting an inside look at what another giant in the business of American modernism collected felt like a dream come true, she says. Knolls collectionwhich accounts for about half of the MillerKnoll archivewas spread across a few locations: marketing and communications documentation plus KnollTextiles objects lived in its former office in Midtown; most of the furniture was kept in a distribution warehouse in East Greenville, Pennsylvania, where the brand was headquartered and had a museum. [Photo: Nicholas Calcott for MillerKnoll] Among the rare materials in the Knoll collection? The material assemblages Florence Knoll created for Knoll Planning Unit clients; Harry Bertoia sculptures including his bronze screens, Sonambients, and dandelions; and a rare Isamu Noguchi Cylinder No. 9 lamp, a design he made before his Akari series. Knoll acquired the Italian furniture company Gavinawhich produced works by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Carlo and Tobia Scarpa, Cini Boeri, and Mario Bellini, and owned the rights to Marcel Breuers Cesca chairin 1968 and so some of the most important European modernist designs are part of the archive, too. [Photo: Nicholas Calcott for MillerKnoll] The expanded range of materials helps deepen the story of modern furniture. A personal mission of mine, and my colleagues, is to widen the canon of design history, Auscherman says. So taking that opportunity to sort of use the space to talk about the Eames splint, but also talk about how Gae Aulenti made aluminum extrusion furniture and was taking architecture and turning it into furniture. The archives inaugural exhibition, Manufacturing Modern, brings together some of the greatest hits from Herman Miller and Knoll to demonstrate the spirit of experimentation and innovation that they possessed, from the molded contours of the Eames Lounge chair and Eero Saarinen Womb chair (both shaped by the designers participation in MoMAs 1941 Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition and exhibition) to the bent tubular steel in the Marcel Breuer Cesca chairs. [Photo: Nicholas Calcott for MillerKnoll] A Working Archive Visible storage, organized chronologically, accounts for a significant part of the archive. Through this, visitors are able to see a timeline of how innovations like foam unlocked new formal expressions or how designers experimented with modular seating through the decades. While the new archive is certainly bait for historians and fans of modern design, it also serves as an important touchpoint for contemporary designers working with MillerKnoll who will visit the archive as they develop new products. [Photo: Nicholas Calcott for MillerKnoll] We can both see and be inspired by how those before us solved problems materially, formally, and visually, Watson says. All those things are possible sources of inspiration and learning. You can, instead of repeating mistakes, hopefully go farther, or start with those things and go into new dimensions that weren’t possible or couldn’t be imagined previously. [Photo: Nicholas Calcott for MillerKnoll] And these stories resonate well with the people who buy furniture, too. If youve looked at the furniture landscape recently, reissues and archival designs seem to be more popular than ever, from CB2s Design Legends series to Ikeas revivals of highly coveted vintage items. Herman Millers New Mexico collectionwhich included a chair inspired by a seat that Ray Eames gave Georgia O’Keeffe and a replica of an Alexander Girard table from the 1950s that wasnt widely producedsold out in two hours. With the archive, MillerKnoll is leveraging its competitive edge: over a centurys worth of history. I believe that today’s consumers are very design savvy and also that they can sniff out when stories are authentic and legitimate, and if objects have their reason for being, Watson says. The approach for all the brands at MillerKnoll is not to chase after trends or make products that are fashion driven for seasonal splash; the only reason they should be reborn is to solve a problem that’s real today, not to have some jive marketing story or to be an exercise in nostalgia. [Photo: Nicholas Calcott for MillerKnoll] Making Design More Accessible The MillerKnoll archive is open by appointment to researchers and will offer some ticketed public vsiting opportunities through Cranbrook University, where many MillerKnoll designers studied, and through Docomomo, a modernist preservation organization. Recently Auscherman hosted a group of fifth graders from a local school who were working on a class project on designing chairs. One of them, perhaps inspired by the Saarinen Tulip collection, sketched a flower and called it their own tulip chair. That was super fun to get to do, Auscherman says. This is a space for inspiration and making design accessible to people.
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E-Commerce
Europe and the United States are meeting in Paris to negotiate a settlement of a tense tariff spat with global economic ramifications between two global economic powerhouses.The European Union’s top trade negotiator, Maro¹ ©efèoviè, met Wednesday with his American counterpart, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, on the sidelines of a meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.“We’re advancing in the right direction at pace,” ©efèoviè said at a news conference. He said ongoing technical meetings between EU and U.S. negotiators in Washington would be soon followed by a video conference between himself and Greer to then “assess the progress and charter the way forward.”Brussels and Washington are unlikely to reach a substantive trade agreement in Paris. The issues dividing them are too difficult to resolve quickly.President Donald Trump regularly fumes about America’s persistent trade deficit with the European Union, which was a record $161 billion last year, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.Trump blames the gap between what the U.S. sells and what it buys from Europe on unfair trade practices and often singles out for criticism the EU’s 10% tax on imported cars. America’s was 2.5% until Trump raised it to 25% in April. The EU has argued its purchases of U.S. services, especially in the technology sector, all but overcome the deficit.After the Trump administration’s surprise tariffs last week on steel rattled global markets and complicated the ongoing, wider tariff negotiations between Brussels and Washington, the EU on Monday said it is preparing “countermeasures” against the U.S.The EU has offered the U.S. a “zero for zero” deal in which both sides end tariffs on industrial goods, including autos. Trump has rejected that idea, but EU officials say it’s still on the table.The EU could buy more liquefied natural gas and defense items from the U.S., and lower duties on cars, but it isn’t likely to budge on calls to scrap the value added tax, which is akin to a sales tax, or open up the EU to American beef.“We still have a few weeks to have this discussion and negotiation,” French Trade Minister Laurent Saint-Martin said in Paris on Wednesday ahead of the OECD meeting. “If the discussion and negotiation do not succeed, Europe is capable of having countermeasures on American products and services as well.”Greta Peisch, who was general counsel for the U.S. trade representative in the Biden administration, said the zero-for-zero proposal could provide a way to make progress if the Trump administration “is looking for a reason not to impose tariffs on the EU.”But Peisch, now a partner at the Wiley Rein law firm, wondered: “How motivated is the U.S. to come to a deal with the EU?” Trump, after all, has longstanding grievances and complaints about EU trade practices.One target of his ire is the value-added tax, similar to U.S. state sales taxes.Trump and his advisers consider VATs unfair protectionism because they are levied on U.S. products. But VATs are set at a national level, not by the EU, and apply to domestic and imported products alike, so they have not traditionally been considered a trade barrier. There is little chance governments will overhaul their tax systems to appease Trump.Likewise, the Europeans are likely to balk at U.S. demands to scrap food and safety regulations that Washington views as trade barriers. These include bans on hormone-raised beef, chlorinated chicken and genetically modified foods.“When you start talking about chickens or GMOs or automobile safety standards, you’re talking about the ways countries choose to regulate their economies,” Peisch said. “We think that’s protectionist. They think it’s keeping their citizens healthy . . . It’s been a sore point for 60 years.” McNeil reported from Barcelona and Wiseman reported from Washington, D.C. Catherine Gaschka, Sam McNeil and Paul Wiseman, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
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