The United States honored its nearly 160 million workers Monday, the annual Labor Day celebration that unofficially marks the end of summer and gives families a last chance for get-togethers with friends and relatives the day before the school year starts in some communities if it hasn’t already begun. 

The national holiday, officially proclaimed in 1894, was born as a tribute to American workers who often faced harsh conditions in the late 19th century – 12-hour days, seven days a week, with low pay for physically demanding work. Now, backyard barbecues, a few parades and a day of relaxation mark the holiday.  

While labor disputes over working conditions and pay are still common in the U.S., such as current labor negotiations over expiring contracts for 146,000 auto workers, many labor conflicts have evolved into disputes that fit the times, and they are not just about workers’ pay.  

Some businesses are feuding with their white-collar employees over whether they should be required to return full-time or at least part-time to their workplaces after they worked almost entirely from home for more than three years because of the coronavirus pandemic. Other disputes have emerged over the budding use of artificial intelligence, how it affects the work product and whether employees might lose their jobs because of the use of it. 

The unionized U.S. workforce has been declining for years, but still totals more than 14 million workers. Democrats rely on it for steady political support in elections, although a segment of more conservative workers in some factory towns has switched political allegiances to Republicans even as their union leaders still mostly support Democratic politicians.   

Democratic President Joe Biden, who often calls himself the most pro-union president in U.S. history, headed Monday to the eastern city of Philadelphia for its annual Tri-State Labor Day Parade. He spoke about the importance of unions in U.S. labor history and how the American economy, the world’s biggest, has recovered from the initial devastating effects of the pandemic. 

“This Labor Day we’re celebrating jobs, good-paying jobs; jobs you can raise a family on, union jobs,” Biden told the crowd.

National polling shows Biden, running for reelection in 2024, struggling to gain the confidence of voters for his handling of the economy. He has adopted the term “Bidenomics,” which critics intended as an epithet for his presidency, as a favorable campaign commendation. 

During Biden’s 2½ years in office, the economy has added more than 13 million new jobs, more than during any other presidency in the same time frame, although some were replacement slots to fill vacancies lost in the pandemic.  

Biden said Friday, “As we head into Labor Day, we ought to take a step back and take note of the fact that America is now in one of the strongest job-creating periods in our history.”  

The Labor Department reported Friday that employers added 187,000 jobs in August, less than in some prior months but still a healthy number in the face of rising interest rates imposed by the Federal Reserve, the country’s central bank. 

The U.S. unemployment rate rose from 3.5% to 3.8%, the highest level since February 2022 but still near a five-decade low. Economists, however, said the jobless rate was higher for an encouraging reason: Another 736,000 people began looking for work in August, a sign they felt they could find a job even if they did not immediately get hired.   

The Labor Department only counts people who are actively looking for a job as unemployed, so that accounted for the higher jobless rate.  

Biden has used executive declarations to promote worker union organizing, applauded unionization efforts at the giant shopping website Amazon and authorized federal funding to aid union members’ pensions. Last week, the Biden administration proposed a new rule that would make 3.6 million more U.S. workers eligible for overtime pay, the most generous such increase in decades.  

In campaign stops, Biden has praised union workers helping to build bridges and repair deteriorating infrastructure as part of the bipartisan $1.1 trillion public works package Congress passed in 2021. 

“Unions raise standards across the workforce and industries, pushing up wages and strengthening benefits for everyone,” Biden said Friday. “You’ve heard me say many times: Wall Street didn’t build America. The middle-class built America, and unions built the middle class.” 

Some of the information in this report came from The Associated Press.

The Labor Department only counts people who are actively looking for a job as unemployed, so that accounted for the higher jobless rate.

Biden has used executive declarations to promote worker union organizing, applauded unionization efforts at the giant shopping website Amazon and has authorized federal funding to aid union members’ pensions. Last week, the Biden administration proposed a new rule that would make 3.6 million more U.S. workers eligible for overtime pay, the most generous such increase in decades.

In campaign stops, Biden has praised union workers helping to build bridges and repair deteriorating infrastructure as part of the bipartisan $1.1 trillion public works package Congress passed in 2021.

“Unions raise standards across the workforce and industries, pushing up wages and strengthening benefits for everyone,” Biden said Friday. “You’ve heard me say many times: Wall Street didn’t build America. The middle-class built America, and unions built the middle class.”

Some of the information in this report came from The Associated Press.
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Naval vessels from the Philippines and United States conducted a joint sail through parts of the South China Sea lying within the Southeast Asian nation’s exclusive economic zone, Manila’s military said on Monday.

It was the first time the Philippines and Washington have carried out a joint sail in waters west of Palawan island, the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ Western Command said.

The display of cooperation between the U.S. and Philippines comes at a time of heightened tension between Manila and Beijing, which claims much of the South China Sea.

The Philippine Navy’s guided-missile frigate BRP Jose Rizal and the US Navy Alrleigh Burke-class guided missile-destroyer USS Ralph Johnson participated in the joint sail, during which ships practice manoeuvring near other vessels. 

“This event aims to provide an opportunity for the Philippine Navy and the U.S. Indo-Pacific Navy to test and refine existing maritime doctrine,” the Western Command said in a statement.

Manila has repeatedly complained against what it described as China’s “aggressive” actions in the South China Sea, including the use of a water cannon by its coast guard against a Philippines vessel engaged in a resupply mission on Aug. 5.

China has built militarised, manmade islands in the South China Sea and its claim of historic sovereignty overlaps with the exclusive economic zones of the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia.

The Philippines won an international arbitration award against China in 2016, after a tribunal said Beijing’s sweeping claim to sovereignty over most of the South China Sea had no legal basis.
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Four astronauts returned to Earth early Monday after a six-month stay at the International Space Station.

Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Atlantic off the Florida coast.

Returning were NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, Russia’s Andrei Fedyaev and the United Arab Emirates’ Sultan al-Neyadi, the first person from the Arab world to spend an extended time in orbit.

Before departing the space station, they said they were craving hot showers, steaming cups of coffee and the ocean air since arriving in March. Their homecoming was delayed a day because of poor weather at the splashdown locations, but in the end, provided a spectacular middle-of-the-night show as the capsule streaked through the sky over Cape Canaveral toward a splashdown near Jacksonville.

The astronauts said it was incredible to be back. “You’ve got a roomful of happy people here,” SpaceX Mission Control radioed.

SpaceX launched their replacements over a week ago.

Another crew switch will occur later this month with the long-awaited homecoming of two Russians and one American who have been up there an entire year. Their stay was doubled after their Soyuz capsule leaked all of its coolant and a new craft had to be launched.

Between crew swaps, the space station is home to seven astronauts.
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As the U.S. government built its latest stretch of border wall, Mexico made a statement of its own by laying remains of the Berlin Wall a few steps away.

The 3-ton pockmarked, gray concrete slab sits between a bullring, a lighthouse and the border wall, which extends into the Pacific Ocean.

“May this be a lesson to build a society that knocks down walls and builds bridges,” reads the inscription below the towering Cold War relic, attributed to Tijuana Mayor Montserrat Caballero and titled, “A World Without Walls.”

For Caballero, like many of Tijuana’s 2 million residents, the U.S. wall is personal and political, a part of the city’s fabric and a fact of life. She considers herself a migrant, having moved from Oaxaca in southern Mexico when she was 2 years old with her mother, who fled “the vicious cycle of poverty, physical abuse and illiteracy.”

The installation opened Aug. 13 at a ceremony with Caballero and Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s former foreign secretary who is now a leading presidential candidate.

Caballero, 41, is married to an Iranian man who became a U.S. citizen and lives in the United States. She and their 9-year-old son used to cross the border between Tijuana and San Diego.

Since June, Caballero has lived in a military barracks in Tijuana, saying she acted on credible threats against her brought to her attention by U.S. intelligence officials and a recommendation by Mexico’s federal government. Weeks earlier, her bodyguard survived an assassination attempt.

Caballero said that she doesn’t know who wants to kill her but suspects payback for having seized arms from violent criminals who plague her city. “Someone is probably upset with me,” she said in her spacious City Hall office.

Shards of the Berlin Wall scattered worldwide after it crumbled in 1989, with collectors putting them in hotels, schools, transit stations and parks. Marcos Cline, who makes commercials and other digital productions in Los Angeles, needed a home for his artifact and found an ally in Tijuana’s mayor.

“Why in Tijuana?” Caballero said. “How many families have shed blood, labor and their lives to get past the wall? The social and political conflict is different than the Berlin Wall, but it’s a wall at the end of the day. And a wall is always a sphinx that divides and bloodies nations.”

President Joe Biden issued an executive order his first day in office to halt wall construction, ending a signature effort by his predecessor, Donald Trump. But his administration has moved ahead with small, already-contracted projects, including replacing a two-layered wall in San Diego standing 5.5 meters (18 feet) high with one rising 9.1 meters (30 feet) and stretching 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) to the ocean.

The wall slices through Friendship Park, a cross-border site inaugurated by then-U.S. first lady Pat Nixon in 1971 to symbolize binational ties. For decades, families separated by immigration status met through barbed wire and, later, a chain-link fence. It is a cherished, festive destination for tourists and residents in Mexico.

At an arts festival in 2005, David “The Human Cannonball” Smith Jr. flashed his passport in Tijuana as he lowered himself into a barrel and was shot over the wall, landing on a net on the beach with U.S. border agents nearby. In 2019, artist Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana covered the Tijuana side of the wall with paintings of adults who moved to the U.S. illegally as young children and were deported. Visitors who held up their phones to bar codes were taken to a website that voiced their first-person narratives.

Cline said he was turned away at the White House when he tried delivering the Berlin Wall relic to Trump and then trucked it across the country to find a suitable home. He said the piece has found “its second life” at the Tijuana park alongside the colorful paintings on the border wall that express views on politics and immigration.

The U.S. government has gradually restricted park access from San Diego over the last 15 years in a state park that once allowed cross-border yoga classes, religious services and music festivals. After lengthy consideration, the Biden administration agreed to keep the wall at 5.5 meters (18 feet) for a small section where some access will be allowed.

Dan Watman of Friends of Friendship Park, which advocates for cross-border park access, said the 18.3-meter (60-foot) section that will remain at the lower height is only a token gesture. “The park on the Mexican side has become sort of a one-sided party,” he said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that it anticipates replacing the “deteriorated” two-layer barrier by November and that the higher one under construction “will provide much needed improvements.”

The Berlin Wall installation has gotten rave reviews from visitors. Lydia Vanasse, who works in the financial sector in San Diego and lives in Tijuana, said the relic took her back to her 20s when the Soviet empire fell, and Germans were suddenly allowed to move freely.

“San Diego and Tijuana are sister cities,” she said. “The wall separates us, but we are united in many ways. It would be better if there wasn’t a wall.”
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The United States will continue to sell semi-conductor computer chips to China but not its most powerful ones “that China wants for its military,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Sunday.

The U.S. is “never going to sell our most powerful [artificial intelligence] chips” to China, Raimondo told CNN’s “State of the Union” show.

Raimondo, who met in Beijing recently with Chinese officials on a range of U.S.-Chinese business and trade issues, recapped her sometimes contentious discussions in a string of talk show interviews.

Raimondo said she told Chinese officials that she knew Beijing had hacked her email in advance of her late August trip.

“They did hack me, which was unappreciated, to say the least,” she told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

On CNN, she said, “They suggested that they didn’t know about it and they suggested that it wasn’t intentional. But I think it was important that I put it on the table and let them know and let them know that it’s hard to build trust when you have actions like that.”

Raimondo said she told Chinese officials they were making it more difficult for American companies to do business there.

“I was very clear with China that we need to — patience is wearing thin among American business,” Raimondo told CBS’s “Face the Nation” show. “They need and deserve a predictable environment and a level playing field. And hopefully China will heed that message so we can have a stable growing commercial relationship.”

While the United States and China maintain more than $700 billion in annual trade, escalating tensions in recent years have made it more challenging for U.S. firms to operate in China.

Raimondo said U.S. firms face unexplained large fines, raids on businesses and changes to a counterespionage law.

Raimondo said that as China’s economy has slowed in recent months, its government has “become more arbitrary in the way they administer regulations; the economy is quite challenged.”

“I brought up many of our grievances on behalf of our national security concerns, concerns of U.S. labor, concerns of U.S. business. Didn’t pull any punches,” she told NBC. “It’s a complicated relationship. There’s no doubt about it. We are in a fierce competition with China at every level.”

The United States and China are the world’s two biggest economies.

“All of that being said, we have to manage this competition,” she said. “Conflict is in no one’s interest. We need to manage the competition responsibly. That’s good for America. That’s good for the world.”

“And in that respect, I think our commercial relationship, which is very large and growing, and underpins hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs, our commercial relationship, if stable, can be kind of a ballast for the entire relationship,” she said. “And anything we do that can create stability is, in fact, good for the American people.”

Chinese Premier Li Qiang told Raimondo during her trip that “sound economic relations and trade cooperation will not only be beneficial to our two countries, but to the whole world.”

As it stands now, the U.S. imports much of its semiconductor chips used in the manufacture of high-tech products from Taiwan, the self-governed territory that China considers a wayward province. Beijing has never ruled out the use of military force to take full control and Washington has been supplying Taiwan with military weaponry to defend itself against any prospect of an invasion.

Raimondo said the U.S. is on track by the end of the decade to “have a large, deep, best-in-the-world semiconductor ecosystem…. We already lead the world in design of semiconductors. You can see that with the AI chips. We lead the world in software.”

But she added, “We need to get back into the business of actually manufacturing leading-edge chips here and packaging leading edge chips here. And yes, we will, by the end of this decade, have regained prominence and have that deep ecosystem, including research and development, here in the U.S.”

Nike Ching contributed to this report. Some information was provided by Reuters.
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