WORKERS

The Hill - President-elect Donald Trump's plan to cut federal bureaucracy by forcing people to stop working remotely faces a roadblock after a union secured a work from home deal for Social Security Administration (SSA) employees until 2029. The American Federation of Government Employees, a federal employee union that represents 42,000 SSA workers, reached an agreement with the agency to lock in hybrid work protections until 2029, Bloomberg reported, citing a message to its members.

The new deal, signed by SSA Commissioner Martin O'Malley before he resigned last month, will allow workers to "maintain current levels of telework," AFGE chapter president Rich Couture wrote in the message. "This deal will secure not just telework for SSA employees, but will secure staffing levels through prevention of higher attrition, which in turn will secure the ability of the Agency to serve the public."

Wall Street Journal - A big shift is under way in American life: The prospects for working-class and poor white Americans are declining, while they are improving for Black Americans in the same economic tier.That reversal of fortunes was documented in a landmark study published earlier this year by Harvard University researchers. The change in economic mobility the researchers traced—which shrank the amount by which Black Americans’ income lags behind white Americans’ income—occurred between 2005, when many Gen Xers were in their late 20s, and 2019, when many millennials reached the same age.

Axios - More than 1 in 5 workers in some U.S. cities were still clocking in from home last year... Remote and hybrid schedules have made work vs. life an easier equation for many Americans, including busy working parents. Around a quarter of workers in Boulder, Austin and Raleigh were working from home as of 2023. Denver and D.C. are also WFH hotspots. The trend over the last few months has been a slow but steady return to the land of cubicles, water cooler chitchat and harsh fluorescent lighting. Share this story.