CVS, the largest U.S. drugstore chain by revenue, plans in March to cut or shift hours at about two-thirds of its roughly 9,000 U.S. locations. Walmart plans to reduce pharmacy hours by closing at 7 p.m. instead of 9 p.m. at most of its roughly 4,600 stores by March.
Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.
previously said it was operating thousands of stores on reduced hours because of staffing shortages. Combined, the three chains operate some 24,000 retail pharmacies across the U.S.
Walmart last year raised pay for pharmacy technicians.
Photo:
Ryan David Brown for The Wall Street Journal
Earlier in the pandemic, CVS and Walgreens struggled to meet demand for Covid shots and vaccines. The chains cut hours and, in some cases, closed pharmacies for entire weekends. Walmart, which sells a wider variety of goods, cut overall store hours, in part, to cope with Covid-related labor shortages and make time to restock empty shelves as demand for basics such as toilet paper surged.
CVS, in a recent notice to field leaders, said most of its reduced hours will be during times when there is low patient demand or when a store has only one pharmacist on site, which the company said is a “top pain point,” for its pharmacists.
CVS said in a statement it periodically reviews pharmacy operating hours as part of the normal course of business to ensure stores are open during high-demand times. “By adjusting hours in select stores this spring, we ensure our pharmacy teams are available to serve patients when they’re most needed,” the company said, adding that customers who encounter a closed pharmacy can seek help at a nearby location.
At Walmart, the shorter hours offer pharmacy workers a better work-life balance and best serve customers in the hours they are most likely to visit the pharmacy, said a company spokeswoman. “This change is a direct result of feedback from our pharmacy associates and listening to our customers,” she said. Some Walmart pharmacies already close before 9 p.m., which will become standard across the country after the change.
An online community message board for Holliston, Mass., a small town about 30 miles outside Boston, was populated with messages last month from locals venting about the unpredictable hours of the CVS in town, said resident Audra Friend, who does digital communications for a nonprofit. Ms. Friend said she struggled for a week in November to refill a prescription for a rescue inhaler at the store because the pharmacy was sporadically closed.
“I would go in, and there was a note on the door saying, ‘Sorry, pharmacy closed,’” said Ms. Friend, who switched her prescriptions to a 24-hour CVS about 5 miles away. She said it would be better to have consistently shorter hours if that meant fewer unexpected closures. “At least that way we’re not just showing up at CVS to find out the pharmacist isn’t there,” she said.
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A CVS spokeswoman said that in recent weeks the Holliston store has had no unexpected closures.
The drugstore chains have been working to stop an exodus of pharmacy staff by offering such perks as bonuses, higher pay and guaranteed lunch breaks. Pharmacists were already in short supply before the pandemic, and consumer demand for Covid-19 shots and tests put additional strains on pharmacy operations. Walgreens recently said staffing problems persist and remain a drag on revenue.
Retail pharmacies, which benefited from a bump in sales and profits during the pandemic, are now reworking their business models as demand for Covid tests and vaccines decline and generic-drug sales generate smaller profits.
CVS and Walgreens are closing hundreds of U.S. stores and launching new healthcare offerings as they try to transform themselves into providers of a range of medical services, from diagnostic testing to primary care.
This past summer, Walgreens was offering bonuses up to $75,000 to attract pharmacists, while CVS is working to develop a system in which pharmacists could perform more tasks remotely. The median annual pay for pharmacists was nearly $129,000 in 2021, according to Labor Department data, which also projected slower-than-average employment growth in the profession through 2031.
In the past year, the chains have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into recruiting more pharmacists and technicians but staffing up has proven difficult. Pharmacists remain overworked, pharmacy-chain executives have acknowledged, and fewer people are attending pharmacy schools. The number of pharmacy-school applicants has dropped by more than one-third from its peak a decade ago, according to the Pharmacy College Application Service, a centralized pharmacy-school application service.
Meanwhile, many pharmacists who aren’t quitting the field are leaving drugstores to work in hospitals or with other employers.
Walmart raised wages for U.S. pharmacy technicians in the past year, bringing average pay to more than $20 an hour. Walmart said it planned to raise the minimum wage for all U.S. hourly workers in its stores and warehouses to $14 next month, from $12.
CVS and Walgreens last year raised their minimum wages to $15 an hour.
Write to Sharon Terlep at sharon.terlep@wsj.com and Sarah Nassauer at Sarah.Nassauer@wsj.com
move to purge Twitter Inc. employees who don’t embrace his vision has led to a wave of departures among policy and safety-issue staffers around the globe, sparking questions from regulators in key jurisdictions about the site’s continued compliance efforts.
Scrutiny has been particularly close in Europe, where officials have in recent years assumed a greater role in regulating big tech companies.
Staff departures in recent days include dozens of people spread across units such as government policy, legal affairs and Twitter’s “trust and safety” division, which is responsible for functions like drafting content-moderation rules, according to current and former employees, postings on social media and emails sent to work addresses of people who had worked at Twitter that recently bounced back.They have left from hubs including Dublin, Singapore and San Francisco.
Many of the departures follow Mr. Musk’s ultimatum late last week that staffers pledge to work long hours and be “extremely hardcore” or take a buyout. Hundreds or more employees declined to commit to what Mr. Musk has called Twitter 2.0 and were locked out of company systems. That comes after layoffs in early November that cut roughly half of the company’s staff.
Twitter conducted another round of job cuts affecting engineers late Wednesday, before the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., people familiar with the matter said. The exact scope couldn’t be immediately learned, though some of the people estimated dozens of employees were let go.
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Twitter sent fired engineers an email saying their code wasn’t satisfactory and offering four weeks of severance, some of the people said. Some other engineers received an email warning them to improve their performance to keep their jobs, the people said.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said this week it was asking Twitter whether it still had sufficient staff to assure compliance with the European Union’s privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. The company last week told the Irish data regulator that it did, but is still reviewing the impact of the staff departures, a spokesman for the Irish regulator said.
He said Twitter has appointed an interim chief data protection officer, an obligation under the GDPR, after the departure of Damien Kieran, who had served in the role but left shortly after the first round of layoffs.
In France, meanwhile, the country’s communications regulator said it sent a letter last Friday asking that Twitter explain by this week whether it has sufficient personnel on staff to moderate hate speech deemed illegal under French law—under which Twitter could face legal orders and fines.
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The staff departures come as Twitter holds talks with the EU about the bloc’s new social-media law, dubbed the Digital Services Act, which will apply tougher rules on bigger platforms like Twitter by the middle of next year.
Didier Reynders,
the EU’s justice commissioner, is slated to attend a previously scheduled meeting with Twitter executives in Ireland on Thursday. He plans to ask about the company’s ability to comply with the law and to meet its commitments on data protection and tackling online hate speech, according to an EU official familiar with the trip.
Věra Jourová, a vice president of the EU’s executive arm, said she was concerned about reports of the firing of vast amounts of Twitter staff in Europe. “European laws continue to apply to Twitter, regardless of who is the owner,” she said.
Mr. Musk has said that he would follow the laws of the countries where Twitter operates and that it “cannot become a free-for-all hellscape.”
Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Late Wednesday, Mr. Musk tweeted that the number of views of tweets he described as “hate speech” had fallen below levels seen before a spike in such views in late October. “Congrats to the Twitter team!” Mr. Musk wrote.
Some of the people who either departed or declined to sign on to Twitter 2.0 appear to include Sinead McSweeney, the company’s Ireland-based vice president of global policy and philanthropy, who led government relations and compliance initiatives with regulations worldwide, as well as the two remaining staffers in Twitter’s Brussels office.
Ms. McSweeney and the two Brussels employees declined to comment, but emails to their work addresses started bouncing back undeliverable in recent days according to checks by The Wall Street Journal. Four other Brussels-based employees were earlier this month told they were being laid off, according to social-media posts and people familiar with the matter.
Twenty Air Street, London, the home of Twitter’s U.K. office.
Photo:
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Damien Viel, Twitter’s country manager for France, was also among a wave of staffers who posted publicly this week that they had left the company. He declined to comment when reached by the Journal.
At least some of the departures occurred in teams that reported to
Yoel Roth,
Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, who resigned earlier this month. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Mr. Roth said he resigned because Mr. Musk made it clear that he alone would make decisions on policy and the platform’s rules and that he had little use for those at the company who were advising him on those issues.
The team included Ilana Rosenzweig, who worked as Twitter’s senior director and head of international trust and safety. She has left the company, according to her LinkedIn profile. Based in Singapore, Ms. Rosenzweig led Twitter’s trust and safety teams across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, along with Japan and other Asia-Pacific countries, according to her profile.
“I decided not to agree to Twitter 2.0,” Keith Yet, a Twitter trust and safety worker based in Singapore, wrote on LinkedIn on Monday. Mr. Yet worked on child sexual exploitation issues and handling legal escalations from Japan and other countries, according to his LinkedIn profile. Attempts to reach Ms. Rosenzweig and Mr. Yet were unsuccessful.
The departures come amid a wave of new tech regulation, particularly in Europe. The Digital Services Act, which will by the middle of next year require tech companies like Twitter with more than 45 million users in the EU to maintain robust systems for removing content that European national governments deem to be illegal.
The layoff announcements just keep coming. As interest rates continue to climb and earnings slump, WSJ’s Dion Rabouin explains why we can expect to see a bigger wave of layoffs in the near future. Illustration: Elizabeth Smelov
The act also requires these companies to reduce risks associated with content that regulators consider harmful or hateful. It mandates regular outside audits of the companies’ processes and threatens noncompliance fines of up to 6% of a company’s annual revenue.
Political leaders had warned that Mr. Musk’s Twitter would have to comply with EU rules. “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” tweeted the EU’s commissioner for the internal market,
Thierry Breton,
hours after Mr. Musk completed his Twitter deal in late October tweeting, “the bird is free.”
A spokesman for the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said this week that it had active contacts with the company regarding the regulation and tackling disinformation and illegal hate speech, but declined to comment on the substance of Twitter’s compliance plans.
Activists and researchers are also concerned that the departures could undermine Twitter’s ability to block state-backed information operations aimed at spreading propaganda and harassing adversaries. The wave of departures “raises questions about how Twitter will moderate tweets and comments in a professional and neutral manner,” said Patrick Poon, an activist turned scholar at Japan’s Meiji University, who analyzes free speech.
—Liza Lin, Alexa Corse and Sarah E. Needleman contributed to this article.
Write to Sam Schechner at Sam.Schechner@wsj.com, Kim Mackrael at kim.mackrael@wsj.com and Newley Purnell at newley.purnell@wsj.com
first week at Twitter Inc., he flouted much of the advice management gurus have dished out for decades.
The billionaire’s swift actions stand in contrast to those of many new leaders, who often use the first 90 days to meet with employees, listen to concerns and assess how to improve a company’s products before embarking on strategy shifts, executives and corporate advisers say.
“At a minimum, this is an untraditional approach,” said
Joel Peterson,
the former chairman of
JetBlue Airways Corp.
, who has served on dozens of corporate boards and advised chief executives across industries. “It’s iconoclastic, it’s unusual, it’s not what everybody would do—but I don’t really fault him for it.”
Sweeping layoffs at Twitter have eliminated roughly half of the company’s workforce.
Photo:
Leonardo Munoz/VIEWPress/Getty Images
Mr. Musk—who once described himself to The Wall Street Journal as a “nano manager” steeped in the smallest details—appears to be employing many of the management tactics he deployed in building his other companies,
Tesla Inc.
and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., executives and advisers say. Those include a hands-on obsession over product decisions, a distaste for corporate structures and a focus on speed. Tesla is now the world’s most-valuable car company, and SpaceX is the world’s busiest rocket-launch operation.
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Management specialists have long said that the first few months of an executive’s tenure are critical, a time when corporate chiefs can plot their agenda and begin to reset a corporate culture. Well-known books on the subject, such as “You’re in Charge—Now What?” say that new leaders should strike a balance, setting expectations internally and shaping their management team, while learning about the organization, too.
Peter Crist,
chairman of Crist Kolder Associates, an executive-search firm, said new leaders typically spend the initial months looking to understand the talent within a company, learning employees’ strengths and weaknesses before making changes to staffing.
“Normally, a CEO from the outside coming in isn’t going to wipe the slate clean on the first day,” Mr. Crist said, adding that swift personnel changes can create uncertainty for the workers that remain. “There has to be both a stabilization of the enterprise model and importantly a stabilization of the talent, and it’s got to get done relatively soon,” he said.
Mr. Musk is hardly the first corporate iconoclast. He is also more than familiar with Twitter, having more than 100 million followers.
Twitter Purchased by Elon Musk: A Timeline of How It Happened
On top of that, he is acquiring a company that for years lagged behind its rivals in attracting users and generating revenue, and the industry broadly is facing a slowdown in growth and other challenges that have slashed the valuations of companies such as
Facebook
owner Meta Platforms Inc.
Some of Mr. Musk’s early actions struck corporate veterans as routine. He spent part of his week meeting with advertisers on video calls and in other settings, aiming to reassure customers that the platform remained a safe place for brands, the Journal reported. Several large advertisers, including
General Mills Inc.
and
Pfizer Inc.,
temporarily paused their advertising. Mr. Musk tweeted on Friday that Twitter had experienced a massive drop in revenue, which he said was due to “activist groups pressuring advertisers.”
Hubert Joly,
former CEO of retailer
Best Buy Co.
, said listening tours with customers and employees can be helpful in the initial period of engineering a turnaround. When Mr. Joly took the reins of Best Buy in 2012, he spent days in retail stores observing customer behavior and holding pizza meetings with staffers. In those gatherings, he asked three questions to employees: “‘What’s working? What’s not working? What do you need?’” Mr. Joly said.
Elon Musk has purchased Twitter, ending a monthslong saga over whether or not he would go through with his offer to acquire the social media platform. WSJ takes an inside look at the tweets, texts and filings to see exactly how the battle played out. Illustration: Jordan Kranse
Mr. Joly said that while he wanted to act fast, he resisted the temptation to quickly close stores or cut head count, as some proposed, or to immediately impose his ideas on the organization without understanding the existing dynamics. “My job was easy: Show up, ask these questions, listen carefully, take notes, and do what I was told because they had all of the answers,” he said of employees.
Mr. Musk has solicited feedback from some Twitter users, including prominent ones. He asked the author Stephen King whether he would consider paying a price of $8 a month to have his account verified. Members of Mr. Musk’s team also polled Twitter users about a subscription feature.
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Twitter on Saturday said it has begun rolling out software updates to charge users $7.99 a month for its Twitter Blue subscription service, up from $4.99 currently. Subscribers get their accounts verified, a service that has been free and offers a blue check mark to notable accounts.
Mr. Musk has said in the past that he believes CEOs err when they allocate too much of their schedule to meetings, rather than focusing on refining a product. “Spend less time on finance, spend less time in conference rooms, less time on PowerPoint and more time just trying to make your product as amazing as possible,” he said in a Journal interview in 2020.
During an executive’s first few days at a company, though, leaders can become overwhelmed, advisers say. Some say it is important to focus on key strategic decisions, assemble a team and then delegate.
At an investment forum in New York on Friday, Mr. Musk said that after buying Twitter, he is now working 120 hours a week instead of his typical 70 or 80 hours. Still, he expected that to eventually change. “Once Twitter’s set on the right path, it’ll be much easier to manage than SpaceX or Tesla,” Mr. Musk said.
Group is scrambling to contain a weekslong Covid-19 outbreak at an iPhone factory in central China, trying to appease frightened and frustrated workers during a crucial period for smartphone orders.
In Foxconn’s main Zhengzhou facility, the world’s biggest assembly site for
Apple Inc.’s
AAPL 7.56%
iPhones, hundreds of thousands of workers have been placed under a closed-loop system for almost two weeks. They are largely shut off from the outside world, allowed only to move between their dorms or homes and the production lines.
Many said they have been confined to their quarters for days and that distribution of food and other essentials has been chaotic. Many others say they are too scared to carry on working because of the risk of getting infected.
Foxconn on Wednesday denied what it said were online rumors that 20,000 cases had been detected at the site and said that for “the small number of employees affected by the pandemic,” it is providing necessary supplies.
“A sudden outbreak disrupted our normal life,” Foxconn said Friday in a post to its workers on
WeChat,
a social-media platform. “An orderly progress in both pandemic prevention and output depends on the efforts of all staff,” it said. It outlined plans to ensure proper food supplies and mental well-being support and pledged to respond to workers’ concerns.
Asked about the workers’ details of the situation at the site, Foxconn didn’t respond. Earlier when asked about the situation, the company referred to its Wednesday statement as well as to its Friday post on WeChat.
Covid-19 lockdowns, corruption crackdowns and more have put China’s economy on a potential crash course. WSJ’s Dion Rabouin explains how China’s economic downturn could harm the U.S. and the rest of the world. Illustration: David Fang
“It’s too dangerous to go to work,” a 21-year-old worker who has been confined to his dorm told The Wall Street Journal, saying that he was skeptical about the company’s claim that there was a low level of infections at the plant.
The disruption at Foxconn is the latest example of the economic and societal toll from China’s rigid pandemic control policies—which include swift and sweeping lockdowns, mass testing and compulsory quarantines to crush the virus whenever it appears. While Beijing says the virus is too potent to allow any easing of its zero-Covid policy, businesses must convince their employees that there is little risk coming to work when there are signs of an outbreak.
Zhengzhou’s flare-up—95 cases recorded in the city the past four days—began in early October, after people returned from other parts of the country from a one-week national holiday. At the first signs of Covid in the city, officials locked down some districts and began rounds of mass testing to stamp out the virus before it gained a foothold among Zhengzhou’s 12.7 million residents. As a major employer, Foxconn joined the campaign.
When more infections emerged at Foxconn midmonth, the company sought to maintain output by creating a “bubble” around its operations to lower the risk of exposure, a practice now common among major manufacturers in China to continue their business during a local outbreak.
Foxconn says it employs as many as 300,000 workers in Zhengzhou. Analysts estimate that the company produces half or more of Apple’s smartphones in the city, making it vital for delivering iPhones to consumers, including for the coming winter holiday season when demand for the handsets typically spikes.
Foxconn, in its statement on Wednesday, said that production at the site is “relatively stable” and that it is sticking to its operating outlook for the current quarter as the impact from the outbreak is controllable. It is set to report quarterly results Nov. 10.
Apple, in its quarterly earnings release Thursday, didn’t mention Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant. Its chief financial officer said that supply is constrained for the new iPhone 14 Pro models due to strong demand.
Apple didn’t respond to requests for comment about conditions at the Foxconn plant.
Some workers interviewed by the Journal said many colleagues had refused to go back to the production lines. Others had simply left, they said, sometimes abandoning their belongings.
On Sunday, a state-run newspaper in Henan published official notices from various parts of the province welcoming their people to return, with quarantine protocols laid out.
Over the weekend, videos geotagged near the Foxconn site went viral on China’s social-media platforms, recording groups of people walking on highways or through farm fields carrying suitcases and backpacks. Other footage showed makeshift stations set up by local residents offering bottles of water in front of handwritten signs to support migrant Foxconn workers leaving for home.
Foxconn said in a statement Sunday that the situation is coming under control with help from authorities. The company said it is organizing transportation for workers who wish to return home and is coordinating production capacity with its plants elsewhere to minimize disruption. There is no shortage of medical supplies or daily necessities at the facility, it said.
Earlier on Friday, the company had posted a video on WeChat urging people to return to work. “The company needs people,” said a woman’s voice over footage of workers stepping off a bus. “If nobody comes to work, how can the company run?”
Another Foxconn employee said most of his dozen-strong team of night-shift workers had either been taken to a quarantine facility or had refused to return to work. Every night, he said, he saw workers covered in protective gear waiting to be taken away by bus.
“I don’t know who around me is a positive case,” said the worker, who has been confined to his dorm for a few days. “I’d be better off staying in the dorm.”
With so many stuck inside their quarters, sent to quarantine centers or simply absent from work, the pace of production at some assembly lines has slowed, two of the workers said.
Foxconn has created incentives to maintain production, according to Friday’s company notice.
Anyone turning up for work will get free meals and a daily bonus, it said. Those turning up every working day from Oct. 26 to Nov. 11 will get an award of 1,500 yuan, or about $200.
The 21-year-old employee who spoke to the Journal and who worked on an assembly line making an older iPhone version, said he had been confined to his quarters since Oct. 17, along with thousands of others.
Over the following days, meal deliveries were delayed and garbage was left unattended in the hallways, piling up on the ground floor as more dorms were locked down, he said.
A daughter of one worker said her mother was placed in the same dorm as some who tested positive. Some other workers made similar complaints.
Around 10 days ago, almost 300 employees from Foxconn suppliers were asked to move out of their dormitories and sleep in the factory, one of them said.
In photos he shared with the Journal, people slept on bedding and pillows placed on metal bed frames, under white fluorescent lights suspended from the hangar-like roof. Hygiene has become a problem, he said. Still, he said he isn’t supposed to leave the plant—and has nowhere to go if he did.
“Where can I go? Barriers are everywhere,” he said. “There are people manning every checkpoint.”
Business and the Pandemic
Write to Wenxin Fan at Wenxin.Fan@wsj.com and Selina Cheng at selina.cheng@wsj.com
fired several Twitter Inc. executives after completing his takeover of the company, according to people familiar with the matter, capping an unusual corporate battle and setting up one of the world’s most influential social-media platforms for potentially broad change.
Mr. Musk fired Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal after the deal closed, the people said. Mr. Musk also fired Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top legal and policy executive, and Sean Edgett, general counsel. Spokespeople for Twitter didn’t comment.
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WSJ Financial Editor Charles Forelle sits down with Alexa Corse, WSJ reporter covering Twitter, at 1 p.m. ET Oct. 28 to discuss Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. What does the future hold for the platform? And what does this deal mean for Mr. Musk’s business empire?
Hours after those actions, Mr. Musk tweeted: “the bird is freed” in a seeming reference to Twitter, which has a blue bird as its logo.
Mr. Musk first agreed to buy Twitter in April for $44 billion, then threatened to walk away from the deal, before reversing course this month and committing to see through the acquisition. He previously indicated unhappiness with some of the top ranks at Twitter, at one point responding to a tweet from Mr. Agrawal with a poop emoji. He also used the site to mock Ms. Gadde, the top legal boss, tweeting an image overlaid with text that repeated allegations Twitter had a left-wing political bias.
It wasn’t immediately clear who would step into the top positions left vacant by Thursday’s exits. CNBC earlier reported the departures of Mr. Agrawal and Mr. Segal.
The deal, in which Twitter will again become a private company, adds to Mr. Musk’s expansive business reach, which includes running
Tesla Inc.,
the world’s most-valuable car company, and rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, among other endeavors. Mr. Musk, who had become Twitter’s largest individual shareholder, previously said he would pay for the acquisition mostly with cash, some contributed by co-investors, and $13 billion in debt.
There were signs this week indicating that Mr. Musk was moving closer to acquiring the social-media platform by Friday’s 5 p.m. deadline. Banks started sending money backing the deal, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Musk also has changed his Twitter bio to “Chief Twit,” showed himself walking into the San Francisco headquarters of the social-media platform, and issued a statement on Twitter explaining his vision for the site to advertisers.
Closing the deal ends a monthslong saga of whether Mr. Musk would or wouldn’t purchase the company. The acquisition also puts one of the world’s most prominent social-media platforms under the control of the world’s richest person, with implications for the future of online discourse.
A self-described free-speech absolutist, Mr. Musk has pledged to limit content moderation in favor of emphasizing free speech. However, that approach risks causing conflicts with some advertisers, politicians and users who would prefer a more-moderated platform.
Elon Musk completed the deal for Twitter a day before a court-imposed deadline.
In a message to advertisers on Twitter on Thursday, Mr. Musk said he was buying the company to “have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.” He said Twitter “cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!”
Mr. Musk said the platform must be “warm and welcoming to all” and suggested Twitter could let people “choose your desired experience according to your preferences, just as you can choose, for example, to see movies or play videogames ranging from all ages to mature.”
Mr. Musk’s decision to go through with the Twitter takeover came two weeks before a trial in Delaware was set to begin over the stalled deal. The judge presiding over the legal clash agreed to pause the litigation, granting a request by Mr. Musk for more time to complete the takeover. The judge gave Mr. Musk until Oct. 28 to follow through with his offer, or said she would schedule a November trial.
Mr. Musk offered in April to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share—higher than the company was valued at the time. In the months since the deal was struck, Twitter has faced efforts by Mr. Musk to abandon the deal, a whistleblower complaint in which Twitter’s former head of security accused the company of security and privacy problems, and unsuccessful talks to negotiate a lower price with Mr. Musk.
The New York Stock Exchange has suspended Twitter shares from trading, starting Friday. The stock closed Thursday at $53.70.
Mr. Musk’s takeover leaves big questions over the future of the platform, including how he might revamp its business model and how he might implement changes he has proposed for the way it polices content.
Like other social-media companies, Twitter heavily relies on digital advertising and has faced headwinds in recent months due to broad economic uncertainty. It will also be saddled with billions in debt as a result of the deal, and payments on those loans will add costs for a company that has posted a loss in eight of its past 10 fiscal years.
Twitter will be saddled with billions of dollars in debt as a result of the deal.
Photo:
Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated Press
The deal turned into a wild business drama with little precedent. Mr. Musk moved to buy Twitter in April. After signing a merger agreement, however, he accused the company of misrepresenting the prevalence of fake and spam accounts on its platform, which Twitter denied.
He formally tried to abandon the deal in July, prompting Twitter to sue him to enforce the original merger agreement. Mr. Musk countersued.
In early October, Mr. Musk suddenly abandoned his legal battle with Twitter, with little public explanation. After his reversal, he tweeted that “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” He previously suggested he could create a social-media platform named X.com if he didn’t buy Twitter.
Eric Talley, a law professor at Columbia University, said after the most recent about-face that several factors were piling up against Mr. Musk, including rulings from the court denying some of Mr. Musk’s discovery requests. Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, who was overseeing the case in Delaware, had called some of his data requests “absurdly broad.”
“He has spent months with various attempts to figure out ways out of this deal,” Mr. Talley said. “All those windows had started to close and some of them closed completely.”
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top legal executive, whom Elon Musk mocked on the site, is among the ousted executives.
Photo:
Martina Albertazzi/Bloomberg News
Mr. Musk’s specific plans for the company remain unclear. He could return Twitter to public ownership after just a few years, the Journal previously reported.
By taking Twitter private, the billionaire entrepreneur likely can take more risks to jump-start the company’s business. “It’s going to be bumpy,” said Youssef Squali, lead internet analyst at Truist Securities. “He can take it away for a couple of years, really kind of re-engineer the whole thing,” Mr. Squali said.
Mr. Musk has suggested he wants to shift Twitter away from its advertising-heavy business model to other forms of revenue, including a greater emphasis on subscriptions. Advertising accounted for more than 90% of Twitter’s revenue in the second quarter of this year.
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He said he would allow former President Donald Trump back on the platform, though Mr. Trump has said he doesn’t intend to return to it. Twitter banned Mr. Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, citing what the company called the risk of further incitement of violence.
“Twitter is obviously not going to be turned into some right wing nuthouse. Aiming to be as broadly inclusive as possible,” Mr. Musk said in a message that was among a trove released as part of the legal battle.
The prospect of Mr. Musk taking over Twitter, as well as the subsequent uncertainty over the deal, roiled many Twitter employees. Twitter has told employees that they will hear from Mr. Musk on Friday, according to an internal note reviewed by the Journal.
Three weeks after antigovernment protests erupted across Iran—sparked by the death of a woman detained for allegedly violating the country’s strict Islamic dress code—the movement has proved more durable than previous challenges to Tehran’s leaders and could pose a continuing threat.
Students across the country rallied outside universities on Sunday, chanting slogans including “death to the dictator,” and schoolgirls marched in the streets of Tehran waving their veils in the air, a gesture that has become a central expression of dissent. The governor of Kurdistan province on Sunday ordered universities closed, likely to avoid more protests. Stores across the country stayed closed as part of a widening strike of shopkeepers.
The demonstrations are unlikely to topple the government, at least in the short term, activists and political analysts said. But the deep disaffection they represent and the fact that they target a key pillar of the Islamic Republic and its foundational ideology make them a significant test.
Since the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman taken into custody by Iran’s morality police in September, protesters who initially focused on women’s rights have broadened their aims, calling for more freedom in life and politics and the ouster of the country’s Islamic leadership.
At the heart of the protests is the Islamic head covering, or hijab, which has been mandatory for Iranian women since 1983, four years after the Islamic revolution that brought the Islamic clerics to power.
“This moment is significant because it has unleashed the potential for longer-lasting civil disobedience,” said Narges Bajoghli, a Johns Hopkins University anthropologist who studies Iran. “Given that half the population must veil, this issue cuts across class, ethnicity and social position.”
Protests broke out in Iran in 2009 against the result of the country’s election.
Photo:
Ben Curtis/Associated Press
Mass protests in the streets of big cities—dispersed by the authorities with force—have given way to sporadic but frequent and widespread demonstrations involving women removing their headscarves. It is a type of everyday resistance that is difficult for authorities to stop.
The spontaneous, unpredictable nature of the movement creates a form of whack-a-mole for security forces who are already stretched thin in Tehran and beyond, while images of pro-government toughs using force against unveiled schoolgirls is amplifying public anger.
The hijab is central to the Islamic Republic’s raison d’être. It is the most visible symbol of adherence to its ultraconservative interpretation of Islam, in which women’s dignity must be protected by modest clothing. And it is a political tool to control half of the population in the public sphere.
The movement has upended the Iranian authorities’ playbook for suppressing protests. Tehran has used violence to put down previous uprisings, even as other Middle Eastern governments tumbled. Iranian leaders have managed to consolidate their hold on power and go back to business as usual.
Previous mass protests were rooted in allegations of election fraud or economic hardship, and never captured the support of enough Iranians to overwhelm the government or force it to make significant concessions.
The latest protests have unprecedented support from Iranians across class, gender and age, and come after years of economic hardship that has driven millions of Iranians into desperation.
Protesters in Tehran chant slogans during a demonstration over the death of a woman who was detained by the morality police.
Photo:
Associated Press
Universities and schools have become the most recent hotbeds of opposition, with girls as young as high-school age and preteens removing headscarves and telling Education Ministry officials and paramilitary commanders to “get lost.”
Artists have jumped in with work that supports civil disobedience. Last week, an anonymous artist poured red paint in famous fountains in Tehran in a work he called “Tehran Drowned in Blood,” according to photos and footage posted by activist network 1500tasvir.
“Baraye,” a song composed from tweets about Iranian women’s struggle for freedom by singer Shervin Hajipour, has become an anthem of the uprising.
Iranian public-opinion surveys are often unreliable. But the number of people espousing staunch support for the Islamic Republic appears to be shrinking.
According to a poll in March by Gamaan, an independent research group based in the Netherlands, 18% of Iranians want to preserve the values and ideals of the Islamic Revolution. The survey involved about 17,000 respondents living in Iran. A 2020 study by the group found 72% of Iranians opposed mandatory veiling.
The crackdown by security forces on demonstrators has fueled more public anger. Dozens have been killed, including at least three teenage girls whose faces have become rallying images of the movement. On Saturday, state television was hacked by a group of activists who posted the pictures of the three girls during a live broadcast, and projected onto the screen an image of Supreme Leader
Ali Khamenei
in flames.
“Every family, to some extent, has been harassed by the state,” said Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, a former Iranian lawmaker now based in the U.S. as executive director of the Nonviolent Initiative for Democracy, a pro-democracy activist group. “This dissatisfaction and anger has been there, beneath the skin of society, for a number of years.”
Protesters near a rally in Tehran in 2009.
Photo:
/Associated Press
Adding to the uncertainty of the leadership, there have long been rumors of the declining health of 83-year-old Mr. Khamenei, who has been in power since 1989. Were he to die, the forced shuffle of power would likely embolden protesters further and potentially create cracks in the leadership.
Protesters have responded to government violence by adapting. Many have sought refuge inside universities or taken to rooftops to chant slogans such as “Death to the dictator.” Others prepare for clashes with law enforcement.
“We are no longer frightened,” said a protester in Tehran who had been beaten by members of the Basij militia during a recent rally for not covering her hair.
When preparing for a protest, the woman said she wears dark clothing, removes her jewelry, covers her tattoos and dons a surgical mask. She said she packs extra clothes, water, a lighter and vinegar in case she and fellow demonstrators are hit with tear gas or worse.
“I don’t usually take my phone with me, and if I do, I make sure to delete all the information that would cause trouble for me,” she said.
The Islamic Republic has clashed with the population in the streets numerous times since its inception in 1979, and with increased frequency.
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Student protests in 1999 and the Green Movement in 2009, which protested against alleged vote rigging, as well as demonstrations in 2017 and 2019 against the government’s economic policies, all mostly called for reforms within the existing system. Now, Iranians are calling for a wholesale overthrow of the Islamic Republic.
The current movement has no designated leaders and no coordinating body. That is both a strength and a potential weakness, said Mohammad Ali Kadivar, associate professor at Boston College and an expert on pro-democracy movements in Iran.
The leaderless nature makes it difficult for the government to decapitate the movement. The arrest in 2011 of opposition leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi practically ended the Green Movement. But it also makes the movement less agile in making tactical changes, and if the government at a later stage wants to negotiate, it needs leaders to do that with, Mr. Kadivar said.
The real strength of the movement lies in its inclusion of marginalized groups, Mr. Kadivar said. Ms. Amini, whose death sparked the protests three weeks ago, was a Sunni-Muslim Kurdish woman in a majority Shia country. “Everything about her identity was marginalized,” he said. “The leadership of women is new, and the cross-ethnic solidarity wasn’t there before.”
Unions of bus drivers, oil workers and teachers have in the past gone on strike in protest against poor economic conditions, and if they coordinate efforts, they could dramatically shift the balance of power, said Roham Alvandi, an associate professor at the London School of Economics with expertise in Iranian history.
“The question is if they can translate these protests into something like a general strike,” Mr. Alvandi said, adding that the uprising is still in its early days. “If they can, then I think this is pretty much the end of this regime.”
So far, the unions aren’t known to have coordinated large-scale action.
Protesters are also younger than they ever have been. In recent days, footage has emerged of Iranian children and high-school students confronting government officials and stomping on pictures of Mr. Khamenei and his predecessor,
Ruhollah Khomeini.
“The Islamic Republic is going to have a hard time governing this generation,” Mr. Kadivar said.
Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com
Melvin Capital plans to close its funds and return the cash to its investors, capping a stunning reversal for a firm that lost big on the surge in meme stocks last year and on wagers on growth stocks this year.
In a letter to investors that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal,
Gabe Plotkin,
Melvin’s founder, wrote that he reached his decision after conferring with Melvin’s board of directors during a monthslong process of reassessing his business.
“The past 17 months has been an incredibly trying time for the firm and you, our investors,” he wrote. “I have given everything I could, but more recently that has not been enough to deliver the returns you should expect. I now recognize that I need to step away from managing external capital.”
Asset bubbles are easy enough to define, but not so simple to identify. WSJ’s Gunjan Banerji explains what bubbles are exactly, how they form and what happens when they burst. Illustration: Jacob Reynolds for The Wall Street Journal
Melvin had been, until last year, one of the top-performing hedge funds—its track record of about 30% a year after fees before 2021 was among the best on Wall Street. It was especially known for its prowess in shorting, or betting against, stocks. In 2015, gains from Melvin’s shorts made up two-thirds of the fund’s 67% returns before fees. Mr. Plotkin bought a minority stake in the National Basketball Association’s Charlotte Hornets, plus a $44 million oceanfront mansion in Miami Beach.
But Melvin’s short positions blew up in January 2021 when individual investors on online forums such as Reddit’s WallStreetBets banded together to push up prices of shares, like those of
GameStop Corp.
, that Melvin was betting against. At the worst point that month, Melvin, which managed $12.5 billion at the start of last year, was hemorrhaging more than $1 billion a day.
While Melvin had made up some of those losses by the end of the year, its focus on fast-growing companies dealt it further setbacks this year as investors soured on such stocks in the face of rising interest rates. Stock pickers also have blamed losses this year on macroeconomic factors like inflation and the war in Ukraine that have hit the market, instead of companies’ own fundamentals. Melvin’s losses widened.
Melvin this year through April had lost 23%, on top of a 39.3% loss in 2021—a huge hole investors expected could take years to make up if Mr. Plotkin didn’t shut down in the interim. Since its start, it has averaged an 11.9% return.
Still, several investors on Wednesday said they were surprised by the decision.
Melvin’s executives as recently as last week had been asking clients for their thoughts on what new fee arrangements seemed fair to them and to Melvin, people familiar with the firm said. Mr. Plotkin in April tried to do away with Melvin’s so-called high-water mark, a standard industry arrangement in which hedge funds don’t collect performance fees until their clients are made whole from prior investment losses. The proposal was part of a broader restructuring effort meant in part to retain and motivate his team, but it met with resistance.
Some investors were so incensed by the proposal they said they planned to redeem all their money at the first opportunity. Mr. Plotkin withdrew his plan days later and apologized to investors, saying he would consult with all of Melvin’s clients as the firm worked to figure out a new path forward.
Investors had been sharing various proposals they thought would be fair, including one by which Mr. Plotkin would keep the current terms until the end of the year and then implement a modified high-water mark that would have let Melvin collect lower performance fees, people familiar with the firm said.
Mr. Plotkin wrote in the letter, “I have worked tirelessly for 20 years to try to be the best I could be and to build and lead an exceptional team of professionals…Being a steward of your capital requires an unrelenting focus. I am proud of what our team has accomplished since 2007.”
He wrote he expected to return nearly all of his clients’ money by late July. Firmwide, Melvin managed $7.8 billion as of April.
Molson Coors Beverage Co. learned some lessons after bringing corporate employees back to their offices in October. Color-coded wristbands can help colleagues signal their openness to a hug. It’s important to schedule 10 minutes of travel time between meetings. And it’s tough to get some people into meeting rooms with masks if they can join a video call without a mask from their desk.
The company, which makes Coors Light and Miller Lite beer, closed its corporate offices in March 2020 when Covid-19 emerged, sending thousands of employees home. Early this year, the brewer began planning for their return.
The most difficult decision, Chief Executive
Gavin Hattersley
said, was adopting a vaccine mandate for 2,200 corporate employees in the U.S. The company did so in August, a month before President Biden announced a vaccine directive for companies with more than 100 employees. The White House’s policy is now temporarily blocked by a federal appeals court.
The CEO said he believed Molson’s vaccine mandate was crucial for making employees feel safe enough to return to the office but worried staff would quit. “How many folk would leave?” he said in a recent interview. “We just didn’t have the answer to that.”
In the end, few did. Less than 1% of U.S. corporate staff left the company, either because of the vaccine requirement or because of the mandatory return to offices, Molson said.
Red, yellow and green wristbands indicating comfort level with physical contact are worn by employees in the company pub. Green represents a hug or high-five; yellow represents an elbow bump.
What Molson and many other companies are discovering is that returning to an office isn’t one event. It requires a series of decisions, some of which have to be revisited to keep pace with new developments. Many are still grappling with when and how to bring workers back as the emergence of the Omicron variant prompts new travel restrictions and some delays in office reopenings.
Molson recently told the U.S. corporate staff the company will require vaccine boosters, a decision that was under way before the variant became widely known. Molson hasn’t changed its U.S. office or travel policies because of Omicron. But employees who returned in November to Molson’s U.K. office in Burton-Upon-Trent, England, will be working remotely again starting Monday under the U.K.’s latest work-from-home order.
‘You couldn’t communicate too much’
Molson, based in Chicago, has 17,000 employees around the world. In March 2020, when the brewer sent its corporate staff home, the company’s leaders hoped they would be able to celebrate the reopening of their offices that year by the Fourth of July. Molson’s manufacturing employees continued to work at its breweries throughout the pandemic with social-distancing protocols and other Covid-19 safety measures. The corporate staff, meanwhile, worked from home for more than 18 months.
Mr. Hattersley wanted to bring his corporate employees back five days a week. But through employee surveys, virtual chats with the CEO and other employee forums, Molson heard from workers who said they valued the flexibility of working from home. On top of that, many were afraid that returning to the office wasn’t safe. Others had concerns about securing child care and handling unexpected school closures.
The Molson leadership team early this year discussed a four-day-a-week plan, then settled on a schedule of three mandatory days a week in the North America offices. All corporate employees in the U.S. and Canada would have to report to their office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. With everyone in the office on the same days, colleagues could more effectively meet and collaborate in person, the company’s leaders reasoned.
“I like people being together and this time last year, I would have probably thought we’d be back five days a week,” said Mr. Hattersley, 59, a South Africa native who joined the company in 2002 and became CEO in 2019. “But the world has moved on from that process. And as a leadership team, as a company, we moved along with it. That just wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t what our people needed and it wasn’t where the world is.”
Samantha Wolkowicz walks through the halls of the Coors office. Masks are required in shared spaces.
Communicating that plan—and explaining it—became Molson’s next big challenge. The company realized that employees with children needed a long lead time to prepare for new work and child care routines. So Molson told its U.S. staff in April about the three-day-a-week plan, and set a Sept. 7 reopening date for the U.S. offices. About 800 staff in North America would be reporting to offices where they had never worked before.
Molson distributed detailed memos on the reopening plans, tipsheets for hybrid working, guides to its offices and answers to questions that employees submitted by email. Mr. Hattersley hosted monthly sessions in which he answered questions in a virtual chat room.
“You actually couldn’t communicate too much,” he said. “You can’t just assume that people are going to understand what your rationale is.”
Employees wanted to know whether going back to the office would put them or their families at risk. Many had children who weren’t yet eligible for vaccination.
To address those concerns, Mr. Hattersley in August decided to adopt a vaccine mandate for all 2,200 U.S. corporate employees with the exception of about 35 unionized clerical staff, and pushed back the reopening date to October to allow time for employees to be fully vaccinated. Most unionized clerical workers were vaccinated; others would have to be tested weekly for Covid-19. All new U.S. hires, including in the breweries, would have to be vaccinated, as would visitors to Molson’s U.S. offices.
Coors employees working at cubicles aren’t required to wear masks.
Some employees were upset by the announcement. Others welcomed the vaccine mandate but worried about the safety—or length—of their commutes on public transportation.
Some parents with babies and toddlers said they would have preferred a schedule with just two mandatory days in the office so they could spend more time at home. Sara Welch Goucher, an e-commerce director in the Chicago office, was one of them. During the day, a caregiver watches her nearly 1-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son in their home in Wheaton, Ill. Mrs. Goucher said her commute to downtown has increased to 90 minutes from 70 before the pandemic because trains on her route are running less frequently now.
“I got used to seeing my children in little moments between meetings,” said Mrs. Goucher, who is 35 and has worked at the company for three-and-a-half years. “But I do want some time in the office. It gives me a different kind of energy.”
Coffee, doughnuts and beer
In interviews with more than a dozen workers and executives, employees said they were excited to see their colleagues in person again. The team planning the U.S. office return decided against a party atmosphere for the first day back and went low key, said Jackie Heard, a human-resources executive who helped lead the effort. Gone was the idea of a barbecue and music. Instead, the company offered free coffee and doughnuts when employees arrived.
Workers found welcome packs with hand sanitizer, stress balls and handwritten notecards on their desks. Company leaders greeted people throughout the first day. Members of the IT team also circulated, ready to help as people struggled to connect to Wi-Fi networks and printers.
In the marketing department at the company’s Chicago headquarters, staff could pick up a wrist band in green, yellow or red to indicate when they were open to a hug or high-five, or preferred an elbow bump or a wave. Molson’s U.K. office offered green, yellow and red lanyards for the same purpose.
Josh McDonald, a Coors Light marketing manager who took a new position and relocated during the pandemic from Florida to Chicago, chose a green wristband. He had never met his teammates in person.
“The funniest thing is the jubilation of seeing someone that you’ve been communicating with for a year and a half through [
Microsoft
] Teams, like, in 3-D,” said Mr. McDonald, 35, who has worked at the company for four years. “There was a lot of soft-stepping” as colleagues gauged whether to go in for a hug.
“I’m a hugger but I didn’t want to invade somebody’s bubble,” he said.
Susan Waldman, 56, a global business process owner in Molson’s global business services department, was eager to see her colleagues again and the vaccine mandate made her feel safer about the reopening, she said. But she was disappointed the mandate didn’t cover Molson’s brewery workers or clerical staff. “I feel like everyone needs to do their part,” she said.
Molson said the breweries allowed for social distancing in a way that its offices didn’t, and that the brewery workers had demonstrated that they could keep working safely during the pandemic.
Back in an office for the first time in more than a year and a half, employees had to learn all over again some of the tricks and habits of office life. Among them: Don’t forget your cellphone charger or your office ID badge. They also discovered that they needed to schedule 10 minutes between in-person meetings to walk from one to the next.
Employees can remove masks to drink at the company pub in the late afternoon.
The company is asking employees to use office days for in-person collaboration and remote days for focused, individual work. Working from home is optional on Wednesdays and Fridays, and so far most employees are doing just that, the company said. The company has distributed guides for supervisors on managing hybrid work, and has instructed them to intervene if they see anyone being excluded from a meeting or a decision because he or she isn’t physically present. Mr. Hattersley generally works from home on Wednesdays and Fridays to set an example, Molson said.
One hiccup is that many employees are conducting meetings by videoconference at their desks, where they can remove their masks, rather than gathering in conference rooms, where they must wear masks.
“We can do a better job at that,” said Ms. Heard, the human resources executive. “Encouraging people to get out of their offices and having interactions is going to be important for us.”
Sarah Irizarry, a 30-year-old marketing manager in the Chicago office, is wrestling with those requirements. Sitting in a conference room for a video meeting with a marketing agency while wearing masks presents a “double barrier,” she said. Mrs. Irizarry said she preferred to sit at her desk without a mask for those meetings and was trying to schedule them on her days at home.
Most Molson workers embraced the company’s new approach to office life. One sign is the level of activity inside pubs in the Chicago and Milwaukee offices. They now buzz in the late afternoons as colleagues catch up with one another over beers.
Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com
Hidden inside the newest smartphones are more than a thousand tiny bits of ceramic to control the flow of electricity. Inside an electric vehicle, there are more than 10,000.
They are called MLCCs, for multilayer ceramic capacitors, and the surge of Covid-19 infections across East Asia is raising the risk that factories won’t be able to make enough of them.
Murata Manufacturing Co. of Kyoto, Japan, the biggest MLCC maker, closed a major factory for the final week of August because of a virus outbreak. Japan’s Taiyo Yuden Co. , another major maker, said in August that it suspended some operations at its factory in Malaysia because of employee infections.
“MLCC supply will remain very tight,” said Forrest Chen, an analyst at Taiwan-based research firm TrendForce.
The world has seen this year how a shortage of normally little-noticed components can hit the global supply chain. Global makers of cars and electronics have shut down factory lines and missed potential sales because they don’t have enough semiconductors.
Good Friday is next week and markets will be closed as per usual. However, what will be unusual is that the closure of financial exchanges in the U.S., and some other parts of the world, comes as the government is slated to release a key report on employment in the middle of a pandemic.
Why is the stock market closed while federal data are being released? That is because Good Friday, this year on April 2, isn’t a federal holiday.
It’s a fairly rare occurrence for the government to release a major piece of data as market participants aren’t able to react to it.
And it is only happened 12 times since 1980, according to Dow Jones Market Data, with the last time occurring on 2015, and before that it happened on 2012 and 2010.
Year
Dates that nonfarm-payrolls have been released on Good Friday
1980
April 4
1983
April 1
1985
April 5
1988
April 1
1994
April 1
1996
April 5
1999
April 2
2007
April 6
2010
April 2
2012
April 6
2015
April 3
2021
April 2 (scheduled)
Source: Dow Jones Market Data
The jobs report is arguably the granddaddy of economic reports, outside of GDP, but its significance has been amplified by the pandemic, particularly as market participants seek more evidence on the magnitude of the rebound a year into one of the worst public health crisis in a century.
The latest jobs report will come as investors are unclear about the degree to which the labor market and/or the economy could fully recover, or even overheat, potentially compelling the Federal Reserve to act quickly to tamp down out-of-check inflation, with vaccine rollouts and some $1.9 trillion in fresh fiscal aid have helping to buttress the economy.
Fed boss Jerome Powell has tried to pacify jittery markets by emphasizing that the central bank will adopt a go-slow approach to normalizing policy, which itself is forecast to be years away.
National Securities chief market strategist Art Hogan told MarketWatch that it may be a good thing that the jobs report comes as the market is closed.
“Having the weekend to digest this news and calibrate what this means for the economic expansion, that may be a good thing for the market,” Hogan said.
A year ago, U.S. nonfarm payrolls fell by 663,000 in March, while the unemployment rate jumped to a 26-year high of 8.5% from 8.1%.
The 2021 jobs report for March is expected to show a gain of 655,000 based on some estimates, after payrolls data showed that unemployment fell to 6.2% as 379,000 jobs were added in February, marking the biggest such gain in four months.
Some time to pause for financial markets may be warranted, Hogan says, because the economy still has a long way to go to achieve a healthy recovery.
“We still have maybe nine million people out of the labor force. We are going to need some blockbuster levels to get to pre-pandemic levels,” the analyst said, estimating that the economy would have to average some 750,000 jobs a month to achieve post-COVID levels.
“It would take us two years, so we really need to start ratcheting up those numbers,” he said.
On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
+1.39%,
the S&P 500 index
SPX,
+1.66%,
the Nasdaq Composite Index
COMP,
+1.24%
and the small-capitalization Russell 2000 index
RUT,
+1.76%
finished sharply higher, following a choppy week of trading that ended with a late-session flourish.
To be sure, it will be hard to say how robust trading action might be on the Monday after Good Friday, because a number of global exchanges will be closed in observance of Easter Monday.
