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Staffing up for the year-end crush is an annual challenge for retailers. But with unemployment at record lows, this year is shaping up to be an exceptional task, the Wall Street Journal reported. There were 757,000 retail job openings across the country in July, about 100,000 more than the same time a year ago. The number of openings surpassed the number of hires from March through June for the first time in a decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And some big cities, including New York, San Francisco and Seattle, are facing a shortage of workers with retail skills, according to data from LinkedIn. Retailers are responding by starting the push for holiday workers earlier than ever, raising wages and offering extra perks such as profit-sharing and paid time off for part-time associates. They are also hosting recruiting marathons with the goal of hiring thousands of workers in a single day.

A unique bankruptcy dispute concerning Kentucky’s underfunded public pension system won’t be resolved in the federal courts alone, according to a Wall Street Journal commentary. Instead, Kentucky’s highest state court will decide whether employers can use U.S. bankruptcy law to exit the Kentucky Employees Retirement System, a question with enormous consequences for retirees and taxpayers in the Bluegrass State. The dispute concerns Seven Counties Services Inc., a network of mental and behavioral health clinics dating to the 1960s that took over services previously provided by the state. Seven Counties became part of KERS to offer employees, most of whom had worked for the state, an attractive retirement option. As recently as 2000, KERS had all the cash it needed to meet its promises to future retirees. But after years of inadequate contributions by the state, the flagship pension fund for employees who aren’t in hazardous jobs now estimates its assets will cover just 13.6 percent of what it owes retirees, a $27 billion financial hole that weighs heavily on Kentucky’s finances.

New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney is once again pushing to cut pension costs, setting up another standoff with the state’s public-employee unions, the Wall Street Journal reported. He must also sell his pension-overhaul plan to the public and Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat who campaigned on protecting the middle class. Pension and health care costs will eat up nearly a quarter of the state’s $45 billion budget by fiscal year 2023, fueling a $3 billion deficit, according to a recent report from a fiscal task force established by the state Legislature. “We’re broke,” said Sweeney, who supported a 2011 pension overhaul under former Republican Gov. Chris Christie that infuriated public employees. “Just throwing tax dollars at it isn’t going to fix it.” One of the task force’s proposals, which Sweeney is endorsing, would shift new state employees and those with less than five years of service to a hybrid pension and 401(k)-style plan. Another would move public employees to less-expensive health-care plans and require future retirees to pay more for health care.

Sears Holdings Corp. is facing a familiar foe in its bid to sell off the Kenmore appliances brand: the U.S. government body that oversees the pensions for the company’s 100,000 retirees, Reuters reported. Sears Chief Executive Eddie Lampert’s hedge fund, ESL Investments Inc, submitted bids last week of $400 million and $70 million for Kenmore and the department store’s home improvement business, respectively. ESL hopes to have a final agreement as soon as Aug. 24, which would end Sears’ nearly two year search for a buyer. It is unclear if the Sears special committee selling the businesses will accept Lampert’s offer. Lampert’s strategy in bidding for the two businesses is to entice another potential buyer to the table, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Barring that, the goal is to help the 125-year-old department store operator continue to fund its operations as it faces a cash crunch, the source said. But the government agency known as the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) plans to use its right to effectively veto the Kenmore sale in order to negotiate a share of the anticipated proceeds from Sears.

The private equity owners of Toys “R” Us may be taking unprecedented steps toward supporting the company’s former workers, but the lenders that financed its bankruptcy — and ultimate liquidation — are making no such promises, Bloomberg News reported. Angelo Gordon & Co. LP and Solus Alternative Asset Management don’t plan to contribute any more cash to benefit Toys “R” Us employees who were left jobless when the biggest U.S. toy retail chain shut down, according to an Aug. 21 letter reviewed by Bloomberg. The letter from lawyers at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz came in response to two worker advocacy groups who asked the hedge funds last month “to take responsibility by ensuring that Toys “R” Us employees receive the money that they had been counting on.” In court, the defunct chain’s 33,000 workers have been seeking the same treatment as creditors, who customarily are given high priority under the Bankruptcy Code because their services are considered crucial to winding down a company. They’ve been competing for a the shrinking pool of cash left at Toys “R” Us with traditional administrative creditors, who would likely oppose the effort since they’d be less likely to get full payment on their own claims, and there’s already doubt about whether there’s enough to go around even before the workers are considered.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin has appealed a lower court’s June ruling that nullified his pension reform law, and the state’s highest court has agreed to hear his case on Sept. 20, CIO.com reported. Friday, when the governor appealed the Circuit Court’s decision, was the last day he could do so. Bevin’s administration also filed a motion to skip the intermediary Court of Appeals and go right to the top, which the high court agreed to. Bevin said that Kentucky’s public employee retirement system will collapse without the changes. The bill aimed to turn new teachers’ defined benefits pensions into hybrid 401(k)-style plans. It also raised their retirement ages and limited the number of accrued sick days that could be converted toward retirement. The pension reforms were initially tucked into a sewage bill in April, during the last days of this year’s legislative session. Lawmakers passed the measure the next day. Shortly after, the law was contested by Attorney General Andy Beshear, who argued that it violated the state constitution, which he said prevented tinkering with their pensions. He also called the legislative strategy the governor used illegal.

A humming U.S. economy is pushing inflation up to levels that the central bank considers healthy. But there’s a downside: Americans’ paychecks are barely keeping up, the Wall Street Journal reported. Consumer prices rose 2.9 percent over the past year, a rate last exceeded in late 2011, the Labor Department said on Friday. Core prices — those outside of volatile food and energy-related expenses — climbed 2.4 percent, the biggest annual gain since September 2008. The rising cost of things like rent, gasoline and health care is another sign the economy is kicking into a higher gear after years of slower growth. But rising prices are now eating up much of Americans’ wages gains, restraining their ability to spend in the future. For just the second time in four years, average hourly earnings — after inflation — fell over the past 12 months, a separate Labor Department report Friday showed. Workers still came out ahead — barely — but only because they increased the number of hours they worked. Weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, grew 0.1 percent in the past year.

The retirement savings made possible for millions of Americans thanks to automatic enrollment in 401(k)-style plans is proving to be an alluring pool of money for workers to borrow from or cash out when they leave a job, the Wall Street Journal reported. The findings, from academic economists known for their work on retirement-savings plans, answer a question that has long concerned employers that put workers into 401(k) plans and give them the option to drop out, rather than requiring them to sign up on their own: Will auto-enrolled workers treat their 401(k)s like automated-teller machines? The answer, according to the study, is yes — but not to the extent that the workers spend all their gains from auto-enrollment. Within eight years of joining a 401(k) plan, the results indicate that automatically enrolled workers withdraw nearly half of the extra they manage to save, compared with workers left to sign up for the retirement plan on their own. The findings illustrate how difficult it can be to change savings and spending habits. And this tapping or pocketing of retirement funds early, a phenomenon known in the industry as leakage, threatens to reduce the wealth in U.S. retirement accounts by about 25 percent when the lost annual savings are compounded over 30 years, according to a separate analysis by economists at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research.