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The effects of inflation and high gas prices are hitting hourly workers hard, a new survey finds, Yahoo!Finance reported. Eighty-one percent of these workers report that higher gas costs have cut into their ability to pay for other things. Seventy-seven percent say that financial stress is impacting their health — and 22% report turning to payday loans this year to bridge the gaps. The most recent data from the American Automobile Association finds prices just under $5 a gallon across the U.S. Respondents to the survey report that the overall inflationary environment has led to struggles to pay a wide range of daily expenses like groceries, gas, utilities, and rent. The data comes from a new Harris Poll released this week commissioned by DailyPay and Funding Our Future, an alliance of organizations dedicated to making a secure retirement possible for all Americans that is a partner of Yahoo Finance. This survey was conducted in May of 2,032 U.S. adults, 654 of whom reported being hourly workers.

U.S. public pension funds don’t have nearly enough money to pay for all their obligations to future retirees. A growing number are adopting a risky solution: investing borrowed money, the Wall Street Journal reported. As both stock and bond markets struggle, it’s a precarious gamble. More than 100 state, city, county and other governments borrowed for their pension funds last year, twice the highest number that did so in any prior year, according to a Municipal Market Analytics analysis of Bloomberg data. Nearly $13 billion of these pension obligation bonds were sold last year, which is more than in the prior five years combined. The Teacher Retirement System of Texas, the U.S.’s fifth-largest public pension fund, began leveraging its investment portfolio in 2019. Next month, the largest U.S. public-worker fund, the roughly $440 billion California Public Employees’ Retirement System, known as Calpers, will add leverage for the first time in its 90-year history. While most pension funds still avoid investing borrowed money, the use of leverage is spreading faster than ever. Just four years ago, none of the five largest pension funds used leverage. Investing with borrowed money can juice returns when markets are rising, but make losses more severe in a down market. This year’s steep slump in financial markets will test the funds’ strategy. It’s too soon to tell how the magnified bets are playing out in the current market, as funds won’t report second-quarter returns until later in the summer. In the first quarter, public pension funds as a whole returned a median minus 4%, according to data from the Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service released last month. A portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds — not what funds use — returned minus 5.55% in the quarter, Wilshire said.

A major U.S. industrial baker filed for chapter 11, facing rising costs for labor and materials and preparing to sell itself out of bankruptcy to investors and insiders that include its current CEO and private-equity backer, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Gold Standard Baking filed for chapter 11 with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., on Wednesday with more than $140 million in funded debt, some of which has been in default since 2020, court papers show. Chief Restructuring Officer John Young Jr. said in court papers the company lost $15 million in revenue and several historic customers after a 2017 Internal Revenue Service investigation cited about 230 of the company’s employees for lacking proper documentation. “As a result, these employees, many of whom had years of experience and were highly skilled, had to be transitioned from the business,” Mr. Young said in a declaration. Labor constraints worsened nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic as worker scarcity became a fixture of the U.S. economy. Chicago-based Gold Standard was no exception, Mr. Young said. Higher costs for raw materials, such as flour and fats, along with rising expenses for aging machinery maintenance added more financial challenges, according to his declaration.

For almost nine months, the musicians of the San Antonio Symphony were on strike, resisting steep cuts proposed by management that they said would destroy the ensemble. As the dispute dragged on, much of the 2021-22 season was canceled, the players found part-time jobs and mediators tried to negotiate a compromise to save the 83-year-old orchestra. The impasse came to an end on Thursday with the announcement that the symphony had decided to file for bankruptcy and dissolve, the New York Times reported. The symphony’s board, which had argued that maintaining a large orchestra had grown too costly, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, said that it did not see a path forward. “With deep regret,” the board said in a statement, “the board of directors of the Symphony Society of San Antonio announces the dissolution of the San Antonio Symphony.” The board said the musicians’ demands to preserve jobs and pay would require “agreeing to a budget that is millions of dollars in excess of what the symphony can afford.” The decision will make San Antonio, with a population of 1.5 million, the largest American city without a major orchestra. Many of the orchestra’s players were caught off guard by the announcement and said they were disheartened that a compromise could not be reached. Since the strike began in late September, some have been working as substitutes in other orchestras, including in Boston, New York, Dallas and Nashville.

Armstrong Flooring Inc. asked a Delaware bankruptcy court to allow it to reject current union contracts and stop paying retiree health and life insurance benefits, Lancaster Online reported. Under the proposals, contracts with the United Steelworkers and International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers would cease when a sale is consummated, when Armstrong Flooring stops operating a plant, or its financing ends, whichever comes first. The retiree benefits would end at the conclusion of the sale process if no buyer wanted to assume them. The unions and a nonunion retiree committee, once it is formed, would maintain rights to argue the matter in court. Unions have until June 15 to file objections to ending the contract. Armstrong Flooring requested a June 22 hearing on the union contracts and retiree health and life insurance benefits. That falls on the same day as a hearing about the sale of its North American assets. Bids are due June 14 and an auction, if needed, is set for June 16. Bids for the company’s assets in Australia and China are due June 23. The motions are not a surprise because the company indicated it would seek to end retiree benefits when it filed for chapter 11 protection in May. 

Rock Hill, S.C., Mayor John Gettys spoke out for the first time since the Carolina Panthers terminated agreements to build a training facility in Rock Hill and David Tepper’s GT Real Estate subsequently filed for bankruptcy, accusing Tepper of filing bankruptcy to avoid paying contractors for their work on the project. In early March, Tepper Sports and Entertainment, another one of David Tepper’s companies, said it was pausing the Rock Hill project because the city of Rock Hill did not hold up its end of the bargain in the deal. WCNC Charlotte later discovered the city failed to secure $225 million in bonds to pay for roads, sidewalks and other public infrastructure on the site. Gettys denies any wrongdoing by the city. In a statement released in April, the city of Rock Hill said that it “met all obligations required under the agreements.” “With the Panthers, the owner filed for bankruptcy in order to get away from paying his general contractors that they got to move down to this area, which is what it is,” Gettys said on Thursday. GT Real Estate owes creditors millions of dollars. Among them is York County, with a claim of $21 million, as well as Mascaro/Barton Malow, a joint venture construction management group over the site project, with a $26 million claim. On the filing paperwork, the city of Rock Hill is listed as a creditor for just over $100 in unpaid utility payments. 

The white-hot demand for U.S. workers cooled a bit in April, though the number of unfilled jobs remains high and companies are still desperate to hire more people, the Associated Press reported. Employers advertised 11.4 million jobs at the end of April, the Labor Department said Wednesday, down from nearly 11.9 million in March, the highest level on records that date back more than 20 years. At that level, there are nearly two job openings for every unemployed person. That’s a sharp reversal from the historic pattern: Before the pandemic, there were always more unemployed people than available jobs. The number of people quitting their jobs remained near record highs at 4.4 million in April, mostly unchanged from the previous month. Nearly all of those who quit do so to take another job, typically for higher pay. The historically high number of unfilled jobs and the number of people quitting has forced employers to pay more to attract and keep staff. Those trends are driving solid wage gains for America’s workers, particularly those that switch jobs.

Demand for workers remained robust in the spring, according to private-sector estimates, a sign that employers face still-stiff competition in a tight labor market, the Wall Street Journal reported. Employers had 11.4 million job openings through late May, according to estimates from jobs site Indeed. That would be only a slight decrease from the government’s estimate of 11.5 million job openings in March, the highest since records began in 2000. The Labor Department later today will release April figures for job openings and the number of people who quit their jobs. Economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal estimated the report will show there were 11.4 million openings in April. The number of times workers quit their jobs also reached a record high of 4.5 million in March.