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J.C. Penney Co. Inc. said yesterday that it would cut about 1,000 jobs and shutter 152 stores as the U.S. department store chain looks to emerge from chapter 11 protection and the COVID-19 crisis, Reuters reported. The layoffs would impact corporate, field management, and international roles and eligible departing employees would receive a severance package. The company is also in talks with its landlords regarding store closures. Penney filed for bankruptcy protection in May, with plans to explore a possible sale, joining a spate of brick-and-mortar retailers to crumble under the pressure brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. On Tuesday, Calvin Klein owner PVH Corp. also announced a reduction in the number of office employees.

The White House and Senate Republicans are developing plans to prod schools to reopen by attaching incentives or conditions to tens of billions of dollars of new aid as part of the next coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said yesterday. The deliberations come as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) prepares to unveil legislation next week that would serve as the GOP’s opening offer for negotiations on what could be Congress’s last major coronavirus spending bill before the November elections. Republican officials familiar with the negotiations said the bill may include somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion for elementary and secondary schools, with one person familiar with the talks saying the target was about $70 billion. Negotiators are looking at $20 billion to $30 billion for higher education, GOP officials said. The officials cautioned that the sums were fluid and that no final decisions had been made. McConnell has said repeatedly that education spending — along with health care and jobs — is going to be a central theme of the next coronavirus bill.

American Airlines said yesterday that it is sending 25,000 notices of potential furloughs to frontline workers and warned that demand for air travel is slowing again as COVID-19 cases increase and states re-establish quarantine restrictions, Reuters reported. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires companies to provide 60 days’ notice of potential layoffs or furloughs. In a memo to employees released on Wednesday, American said the notices are tied to the overstaffing it expects in October when U.S. government payroll assistance expires. American, with more than 130,000 employees in 2019, had already warned that furloughs would be hard to avoid as pandemic-hit revenue remains more sluggish than the airline had hoped. Among different work groups, warnings are being sent to 2,500 pilots or about 18 percent of the total, nearly 10,000 flight attendants or 37 percent of the total, and 3,200 mechanics or 22 percent of the total. Overall, American expects to be overstaffed by about 20,000 in the fall, but hopes to reduce the actual number of furloughs through enhanced leave and early-departure programs it has rolled out alongside unions, Chief Executive Doug Parker and President Robert Isom said in the memo.

General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. are continuing to struggle with keeping workers on the job as coronavirus cases surge nationwide, forcing the auto-making giants to cut shifts, hire new workers and transfer others to fill vacant roles, the Wall Street Journal reported. The absences are hampering efforts to recover from the economic havoc wreaked by the pandemic and return to normal production levels after a nearly two-month shutdown this spring. A GM assembly plant in Wentzville, Mo., that has been running three shifts to restock the company’s depleted supply of midsize pickups is cutting one of the shifts to better cope with worker absences, the company said. The plant, normally staffed with around 3,800 hourly workers split across the three shifts, will temporarily eliminate the third one next week. Instead, the company will try to use workers from that shift to fill absences along the assembly line in the first two, the company said. Ford also has been contending with an increase in absences among the 12,500 or so hourly workers split across its two assembly plants in Louisville, Ky., according to the company.

Four months into the worst recession since the Great Depression, tens of thousands of workers across the country have filed for jobless claims but have yet to receive payments, the Washington Post reported. The issue has spilled back into public view in recent weeks, as thousands of frustrated workers awaiting payments have camped out, sometimes overnight, in front of unemployment offices in states like Oklahoma, Alabama and Kentucky. The ongoing delays are the result of a confluence of crises, experts say. A flood of new jobless applications — about 50 million — has overwhelmed state unemployment offices over the past four months. The agencies themselves are hampered by years of neglect. They rely on reduced staffs and badly outdated technology after years of budget cuts, often at the behest of business groups and Republican legislatures. Issues with fraud and user confusion over the new rules and filing process have further bogged down the process.