TV News LIES

The job market continues to show signs of cooling.

U.S. employers added just 64,000 jobs in November, according to a delayed report from the Labor Department Tuesday, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.6% from 4.4% in September. That's the highest unemployment rate in more than four years.

The jobs report was initially set to come out earlier this month, but the government's ability to monitor the job market was hampered by the six-week federal shutdown.

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/16/nx-s1-5645023/jobs-employment-labor-marketThat delayed job tallies for October and November, both of which were released on Tuesday. The report showed the U.S. saw a net loss of 105,000 jobs in October. That was led by a large drop in the federal workforce, as 162,000 government workers who'd taken buyouts earlier in the year were officially dropped from the payrolls.

Furloughed federal workers were unable to conduct their usual survey of households in October, so the unemployment rate for that month remains unknown.

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Thousands of Starbucks workers are gearing up to vote on whether to go on strike next week. 

The strike authorization vote is set to begin Friday and will remain open for several days, with Starbucks Workers United expected to share results after voting ends. Employees represented by the union have staged two national strikes over the last year, most recently in May to protest Starbucks' new dress code. Thousands of workers also walked off the job in December 2024.

As the voting gets underway, the union is also planning a series of rallies and pickets over the weekend outside Starbucks stores in dozens of U.S. cities.

Starbucks Workers United originated in Buffalo, New York, in 2021 and now represents 12,000 workers in approximately 550 Starbucks cafes across the country.

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Meta will lay off roughly 600 employees within its artificial intelligence unit as the company looks to reduce layers and operate more nimbly, a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.

The company announced the cuts in a memo from its chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, who was hired in June as part of Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. Workers across Meta’s AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other product-related positions will be impacted.

However, the cuts did not impact employees within TBD Labs, which includes many of the top-tier AI hires brought into the social media company this summer, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. Those employees, overseen by Wang, were spared by the layoffs,underscoring Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s bet on his expensive hires versus the legacy employees, the people said.

Within Meta, the AI unit was considered to be bloated, with teams like FAIR and more product-oriented groups often vying for computing resources, the people said. When the company’s new hires joined the company to create Superintelligence Labs, it inherited the oversized Meta AI unit, they said. The layoffs are an attempt by Meta to continue trim the department and further cement Wang’s role in steering the company’s AI strategy.

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Procter & Gamble will cut up to 7,000 jobs, or approximately 6% of its global workforce, in the next two years as the maker of Tide detergent and Pampers diapers wrestles with tariff-related costs and customers who have grown anxious about the economy.

The job cuts, announced at the Deutsche Bank consumer conference in Paris on Thursday, make up about 15% of its current non-manufacturing workforce, said chief financial officer Andre Schulten.

“This restructuring program is an important step toward ensuring our ability to deliver our long-term algorithm over the coming two to three years,” Schulten said. “It does not, however, remove the near-term challenges that we currently face.”

In a series of departures announced in a matter of weeks, the agency’s entire top rung is set to turn over as Brian Quintenz, President Trump’s nominee for CFTC chair, prepares to take the reins.

Commissioners Summer Mersinger and Christy Goldsmith Romero both plan to depart by the end of the week, while fellow Commissioner Kristin Johnson has said she will leave “later this year.”

Acting CFTC Chair Caroline Pham has promised to remain at the agency until Quintenz is confirmed, at which time she too will depart. The commission, which typically has five members, has been short one person since former Chair Rostin Behnam stepped down in January.

The relatively low-profile agency is expected to play a key role in regulating the digital asset market alongside the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

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The Department of Education under President Donald Trump began sending notices to the first of millions of Americans with past-due federal student loans that they will see their wages garnished in just a few months. The news comes the week that the Trump administration begins to send millions of defaulted borrowers into collections.

The garnishments will happen in waves, with the first borrowers seeing the pay deductions in early June. Monday, the Education Department started sending 30-day notices to around 195,000 defaulted borrowers to notify them that they will be subject to the Treasury Offset Program, which collects past-due debts owed to state and federal agencies. Under this program, Treasury can withhold money including tax refunds, wages, Social Security payments, and disability benefits to pay delinquent debt.

Later this summer, "all 5.3 million defaulted borrowers will receive a notice from Treasury that their earnings will be subject to administrative wage garnishment," the department says in its first timeline of the enforcement action.

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