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Millions of Americans stopped working from home in 2022, with the number of employers reporting some teleworking falling to near pre-pandemic levels, according to a Labor Department report released this past week, The Hill reported. About 72 percent of private-sector establishments reported little to no telework among employees in August to September 2022, compared to about 60 percent from July to September of 2021. Before the COVID-19 pandemic transformed the American workplace, some 76.7 percent of employers reported little to no telework among employees. The percent of employers reporting that all of their employees were teleworking did not see significant change in 2022, at about 11 percent compared to about 10 percent in 2021. The percent of establishments reporting that some of their employees were working from home dropped in 2022. About 16 percent reported that they had some employees working from home, compared to about 30 percent in 2021.

Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. isn’t paying severance to employees at stores across the U.S. that it has recently said will close, according to current and former staff members, a sign the retailer is trying to save cash to stabilize its floundering business, Bloomberg News reported. Bed Bath & Beyond executives told staffers around early February that they are rolling out an additional round of store closings and informed workers at those locations that they wouldn’t receive severance, according to internal correspondence and documents seen by Bloomberg News, along with the current and former employees. Bed Bath & Beyond has offered to make a lump-sum payment to some higher-level employees who stay through closing, including $2,000 for store managers and $1,500 for assistant store managers, according to some of the current staff members and an internal company document. Those payments, though, would likely never materialize if the retailer were to file for bankruptcy protection in the interim. Workers’ unpaid checks become unsecured claims in a bankruptcy scenario, taking a back seat in repayment priority to other debts owed by the company.

American women are staging a return to the workforce that is helping propel the economy in the face of high inflation and rising interest rates, the Wall Street Journal reported. Women have gained more jobs than men for four straight months, including in January’s hiring surge, pushing them to hold more than 49.8% of all nonfarm jobs. Female workers last edged higher than men on U.S. payrolls in late 2019, before the pandemic sent nearly 12 million women out of jobs, compared with 10 million men. The onset of COVID-19 and social-distancing measures in early 2020 struck female-dominated jobs in services that require close personal contact, such as housekeepers, nurses and daycare instructors. Many mothers in white-collar jobs also left the workforce to care for their children after schools moved to remote instruction. Even as job opportunities grew a year later, nearly 1.5 million fewer mothers were actively in the labor force in March 2021 than in February 2020 amid child-care disruptions and health concerns. Some economists feared women would face challenges re-entering the longer they were out of work. Those worries are abating. Women are rejoining the labor force and filling service-sector jobs, as they shake off the effects of pandemic disruptions and the sector goes on a hiring spree. Virtual schooling, daycare closures and fear of COVID-19 are subsiding. Other factors, such as the lure of higher pay, adoption of remote work and financial pressures, are spurring more women to seek jobs.

Global supply chains have "returned to normal," the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said yesterday, with pressures dropping to the lowest since before the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into procurement networks worldwide and created shortages for everything from microchips to motor vehicles, Reuters reported. In a development that could also point to softening inflation, the New York Fed said its monthly Global Supply Chain Index fell to a reading of negative 0.26 in February, down from a revised 0.94 seen in January. The negative turn for February — which indicates pressures are below the index's historic norm dating from 1998 — was the first since August 2019. The index's recent downshifts from a record high in December 2021 "suggest that global supply chain conditions have returned to normal after experiencing temporary setbacks around the turn of the year," the bank said. The New York Fed observation dovetails with other recent business surveys showing the bottlenecks that have dogged the global economy for roughly three years have finally been unplugged, with the latest improvements occurring after China ended its COVID restrictions at the end of last year. A measure of supplier delivery times from S&P Global was the most improved in February since 2009.