Halloween may be over, but the October jobs report is giving us a belated scare.

Employers added just 12,000 jobs in October according to the newest employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, marking the lowest payroll gain since December 2020, when jobs declined by 140,000.

October’s low employment gain was partially impacted by the ongoing Boeing machinists strike and hurricanes Helene and Milton. But it also continues the trend of a continually cooling labor market.

“This report is full of all kinds of blips and problems and issues due to the storms and strikes, but it actually is consistent with the big picture and is a labor market that has been slowing and narrowing,” Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s chief economist, told HR Brew.

Keep reading here.—PM

From a widespread worker strike, to falling share prices, and some planes that whistleblowers claim could “break apart,” Boeing can’t seem to get back on track. Now, its new CEO has disbanded its DE&I team, Bloomberg reported.

Sara Liang Bowen, who led DE&I at Boeing since 2019, has left the company. The rest of the team will be absorbed by another HR department. The move comes as CEO Kelly Ortberg, who joined in August, tries to cut costs, with plans to reduce headcount by 10%.

Conservative activists including Robby Starbuck and Elon Musk have blamed DE&I for Boeing’s problems. Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, believes the company’s efforts to diversify its suppliers have resulted in safety issues, requesting that Boeing share the details of its DE&I efforts with a Texas court as part of an investigation into its manufacturing practices.

Boeing claimed that, despite disbanding its DE&I team, inclusion efforts will continue. However, it appears to have walked back its pledge to have 20% Black representation by 2025, and has been leaning into language often used by anti-DE&I activists.

Keep reading here.—KP

Boeing and the leadership of its striking union have reached a deal to end the costly work stoppage that has brought plane production to a virtual standstill. However, the Wall Street Journal reported that the contract doesn’t include one of the workers’ key demands: the revival of a traditional pension plan that was frozen over a decade ago. Boeing’s failure to meet that condition resulted in the 33,000 striking members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers rejecting the company’s second offer late last month, the Associated Press reported.

A resurrection seems unlikely. The company said the issue was a nonstarter. “There is no scenario where the company reactivates a defined-benefit pension for this or any other population,” Boeing said in a statement. “They’re prohibitively expensive, and that’s why virtually all private employers have transitioned away from them to defined-contribution plans.”

Reinstating the pension could cost Boeing more than $1.6 billion a year, Bank of America analysts estimated. In the 1980s, about 40% of US private sector workers had a pension plan. That number has fallen to 10%, Jake Rosenfeld, chairman of the sociology department at Washington University-St. Louis, told the AP.

However, John Lowell, a partner at October Three, a consulting firm, said that some employers are offering pensions known as cash balance plans that differ from the traditional defined benefit plans that were popular years ago.

Keep reading here.—TA