WSJ What’s News - More Americans Need Multiple Jobs to Get By

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

P.M. Edition for Aug. 30. Workers with two jobs say there aren’t enough hours in the day to stay afloat. Joe Barrett explains. And Sune Rasmussen discusses how drug-related violence is a growing threat in Western Europe. Plus, Goldman Sachs is set to lay off more than 1,300 employees. Tracie Hunte hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's 4 a.m. and you're sucking baby snot through a tube because she's congested. If you love her that much, love her enough to make sure she's buckled in the right car seat. Find out more at nhtsa.gov slash the right seat. Brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Ad Council. More Americans say they need multiple jobs just to get by. And drug gangs are bringing ruthless violence to some of Western Europe's safest societies. This is stuff that you normally heard about in Italy in the early 90s with the mafia there. But now that kind of violence which was seen as more of a remote threat in the rest of

Europe has now become more of a sort of reality. Plus, a new report says Columbia University failed to stop hate and violence against Jews on campus. Plus, a new report says Columbia University failed to stop hate and violence against Jews on campus. It's Friday, August 30th. I'm Tracy Hunt for the Wall Street Journal. This is a PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.

More and more Americans are taking on second jobs just to make ends meet. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 5.3% of people were working more than one job in July this year. That's a notch up from the previous month and a significant increase from the pandemic low of 4%. While the economy boasts a growing job market, essentials like rent and insurance are also going up. Wall Street Journal National Affairs correspondent Joe Barrett is here to tell us more about what that means for the average American. Hi, Joe. Hi.

What are these numbers telling us about the job market right now? Well, it means there's more people under stress with inflation. They're looking for some way to pick up extra cash. But at the same time, it's a little easier to get a second job these days. A lot of people work from home and so classically, you worked at the office and then you had to find a second job, you had to get between those two places. Now you could work from home and then go to your second job and it's just one less obstacle to getting a job. And then there's also all these ride share apps and other things like that that make it easier to pick up extra work. One of the things that was surprising is that

when the labor market started to show signs of softness in July, the number of people with two jobs actually ticked up. So there's, you know, a sense out there that even if the labor market continues to soften, there could still be plenty of people who are working two jobs just because these trends don't go away overnight. And who are the people more likely to have more than one job? It's typically people at the lower end of the economic income scale. You know, they're just not making enough money to pay for the basics. Minorities are a little bit overrepresented and then people like if you were divorced or had some other financial setback, you're more likely to end up with a second job.

Sometimes younger people are trying to branch out their experiences or just get a job that'll pay the rent so they could end up with two jobs as well. Jo Barrett is a national affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. We can exclusively report that Goldman Sachs plans to cut more than 1,300 employees from its global workforce. The cuts come as part of an annual review process to cull low performers. That's according to people familiar with the matter. Those sources say the bank will likely cut between 3 and 4 percent of its workforce.

That could mean between 1,300 and 1,800 people, given that Goldman employed more than 45,000 people as of late last year. The cuts are expected across the bank's various divisions, with some teams impacted more than others. According to one of the sources, layoffs have already started and will continue through the fall. The layoffs come after an abysmal bonus season for employees who worked on fewer deals in 2023. The Fed's preferred inflation gauge held steady in July. The Personal Consumption Expenditure's

Price Index, or PCE, rose 2.5% from a year earlier. That was in line with expectations by economists pulled by the Wall Street Journal. The Core Index, which doesn't include volatile food and energy prices, held at 2.6% in July from a year ago. Fed policymakers are expected to start cutting rates when they meet next month. In U.S. markets, today's inflation data led traders to slightly temper their expectations for how much the Fed will cut interest rates over the next several months. Stocks finished the month on a high note, surging late after flirting with declines over much of the session.

For the day, the S&P 500 rose 1%, the Dow added 0.6% or roughly 228 points, while the Nasdaq advanced 1.1%. All three notched monthly gains. US stock markets will be closed on Monday for Labor Day. Many school districts around the country are banning cell phones in classrooms. Is your district one of them? What's your reaction and what questions do you have about what this means for your kids? Send a voice memo to wnpod at wsj.com or leave a voicemail with your name and location at 212-416-4328. We might use it in the show. Coming up, European law enforcement authorities say drug-related violence in Western Europe has reached unprecedented levels. That's after the break. It's 4 a.m. and you're sucking baby snot through a tube because she's congested.

If you love her that much, love her enough to make sure she's buckled in the right car seat. Find out more at NHTSA.gov slash the right seat. Brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Ad Council. European countries like Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands once considered some of the world's safest societies are experiencing rising levels of violent organized crime due to the drug trade. According to European authorities, several EU countries are now home to unprecedented levels of drug market-related violence, including killings, torture, kidnappings, and intimidation. A report from the EU's law enforcement arm and its drug agency identified 821 serious criminal networks active in the EU with more than 25,000 members. Security correspondent Sunay Rasmussen

has been covering the story for the Wall Street Journal and he joins us now. Hi Sunay. Hi. So first of all, how did we get here? This has been a development that's been on the way for decades now, but I think an important turn happened in the early to mid 2000s when the cocaine trade pivoted to a certain extent from the US to Europe. Europe is now believed by many to be the largest cocaine market in the world. And in 2019, cocaine seizures in Europe exceeded those in North America for the first time,

according to the UN. And that brought with it growing levels of violence as well. It involves organized crime groups from all around the world, from the Middle East, from South America, Africa, all sort of coalescing in Europe. Which countries are most affected by this violence? So the first countries that are affected in the chain of the global chain of the drug trade are

countries like Belgium and the Netherlands, the home to two of the most important and biggest ports in Europe, Russodam in the Netherlands and Bruges in Belgium. And because these ports are among the largest in Europe, that's also where a lot of the drugs come through. Sweden has also seen a dramatic increase in drug-related violence. It has historically been a very safe country, but now it has the highest gun murder rate per capita in all of Europe, two and a half times higher than the average in Europe authorities there say.

A lot of the guns come from the Balkans. Because of the war in former Yugoslavia, there was a lot of sort of surplus weapons that went into the rest of Europe. And they're worried that the same thing is gonna happen when the war in Ukraine winds down. What are European authorities doing to curtail this violence?

Honestly, European authorities seem to be scrambling a little bit to keep up with this violence. They are cooperating, of course, to a certain extent internationally, but each country that's facing these issues are taking their own precautions. In Sweden, the government called the military to help out police in the streets when the violence last year spiked to unprecedented levels. There's also politicians in the Netherlands who want to change the prison system. For this story, I spoke to one MP who is kind of at the forefront of this fight.

And what he wants to do is to introduce a prison system in the Netherlands, similar to the one you have in Italy, for example, where you can lock up mafia bosses and almost completely isolate them from their families outside and even their lawyers and really severely restrict their ability to communicate with anyone else, both in person and via phone calls. And he says he's willing to go as far as is permissible by European human rights law. That was Suneh Rasmussen, a security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. We're exclusively reporting that a Columbia University faculty task force says the school should do more to protect Jewish students from threats, attacks, and harassment on campus.

The report says Jewish students at Columbia University were threatened, attacked, shunned, and harassed on campus last school year, and many faculty refuse to believe their complaints or act to stop the problem. The task force recommends biased training for faculty, residential assistants, and staff about anti-Semitism. It also proposes a new definition of anti-Semitism, which would include celebrating violence against Jews or Israelis, or discriminating against them based on their ties to Israel. If adopted, it could create new avenues to discipline pro-Palestinian protesters.

People who oppose Israel's policies and its invasion of Gaza say the criticism is based on politics, not prejudice. What is the most important thing to do to protect Israel? The criticism is based on politics, not prejudice. So-called credit builder cards from companies like Chime Financial and Credit Sesame allow customers to boost their credit score without borrowing or paying back money. Wall Street Journal banking reporter Gina Heave told the Your Money Briefing podcast how these cards are different from traditional credit cards and why they've come under scrutiny. The big twist with these kinds of cards is that the customer does not actually borrow or pay any money back like with a normal credit card.

They actually operate a lot like a debit card where a customer just buys something and on the back end it's reflected as credit. These come through fintechs that often partner with banks to make these transactions happen. For decades credit scores have very much had one purpose and that is to predict willingness and ability that a consumer is going to repay a loan and with these sorts of cards there is no loan being taken out and it's still affecting that score. Regulators haven't said a ton about these products yet because remember they're not administered by banks

themselves. But we do know that regulators have been taking a deeper look at fintechs in general and how they partner with banks. So I guess that could change. And you can hear more about this in today's Your Money Briefing podcast. And that's what's the news for this week. Today's show is produced by Pierre Bienneme. I'm Tracy Hunt. Our AM host is Luke Vargas. Additional support this week from Anthony Bansi and Francesca Fontana.

Michael Lavelle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producers are Tali Arbel, Michael Cosmides, and Christina Raqqa. Aisha Al-Muslim is our development producer. Scott Salloway and Chris Zinsley are our deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. And before we go, heads up,

we'll be taking a break from our usual weekend programming. And we'll also be off on Monday for Labor Day in the United States. We'll be back with a new show on Tuesday morning. Thanks for listening.