A new KPMG survey of 300 C-suite and senior leaders finds that executives are investing heavily in AI and technology while neglecting workforce training, limiting their ability to adapt to disruption.
Executives are nearly twice as likely to increase investment in new technology as to invest in employee training.
57% of leaders cite improving performance and efficiency as a top priority, but fewer than 10% say workforce training programs are a primary objective.
Only 25% of leaders have introduced programs designed to build adaptability skills; just 9% identify increased psychological safety as a behavior their organization changed in the past year.
Leaders who did increase workforce investment were more likely to report outsized revenue growth: 37% said revenue rose 20% or more over the past three years, versus 25% of business leaders overall.
KPMG warns that AI and technology adoption require change management, and firms that don't build employee skills alongside new tools “often struggle to realize their full value.”
Read more via HR Dive and KPMG
A survey of more than 5,000 euro-area firms found that AI is currently a net job creator, but researchers warn the picture could change.
AI-intensive firms are 4% more likely to hire and nearly 2% more likely to grow headcount than non-AI firms.
The hiring effect is driven by firms using AI for R&D; those using AI primarily to cut costs show negative hiring trends.
Gains are concentrated at smaller companies; AI's impact on large enterprise employment has been neutral so far.
Only 15% of firms cite cost reduction as their AI rationale, suggesting most European organizations are positioning AI as a problem-solving tool rather than a headcount reducer.
Researchers caution the findings reflect near-term data, before production processes have been transformed, and note that many German companies expect AI-related job cuts over a five-year horizon.
Read more via HR Executive
A “stealth manufacturing revival” is underway, but it isn't creating the blue-collar jobs that reshoring advocates have promised, according to a new McKinsey Global Institute analysis.
Since January 2025, manufacturing production rose 2.3% and shipments climbed 4.2%, even as factory jobs fell by roughly 100,000 workers, or about 0.6%.
The sectors driving growth, primarily AI-linked industries like semiconductors, data center infrastructure, and aerospace, are benefiting from surging demand rather than tariffs, and are complementing imports rather than replacing them.
Domestic production of computer and electronic products rose 7.7% last year. Imports in the same sector rose 40.5%.
Industries where tariffs were most aggressively applied tell a different story: domestic motor vehicle output dropped 3%, and furniture output fell 3%, even as imports in both sectors declined.
Read more via The Wall Street Journal
Labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards argues that the American labor market's current weakness isn't just a cyclical problem, it's a structural one, driven by decades of growing employer concentration that has slowed worker mobility even in ostensibly healthy economies.
A measure of hiring and quitting activity, the Labor Market Tightness Index, shows a decline in conditions as dramatic as, or worse than, a typical recession, with wage growth following a parallel fall.
Long-term unemployment, the share of the unemployed searching for at least 26 weeks, has trended upward since 1970 across both good and bad economies. Even during the tight labor market of 2022, one in five workers was long-term unemployed. Today it's one in four.
A recent study identified employer concentration and non-compete agreements as key explanations for four decades of stalled wage growth.
Edwards argues that the slow churn of a recession labor market has become "something of a permanent feature," and that addressing employer concentration would do more for workers than waiting for an official recession declaration.
Read more via Bloomberg Opinion
CEO plans for headcount growth are softening, as geopolitical uncertainty and questions about AI's role in the workforce temper expansion intentions, according to new Vistage data.
Just over half of CEOs said they plan to increase headcount in the year ahead, down from 57% in Q4 2025. Another 14% said they will delay hiring or hold roles open as they balance expenses and revenue expectations.
About a third of CEOs said they are weighing how to incorporate AI into hiring.
20% of CEOs said they assess AI skills in the interview process, and a similar share said they are prioritizing AI upskilling for existing workers.
About 40% of CEOs said they don't factor AI into hiring at all.
Vistage's chief research officer noted that CEOs entered 2026 prepared for growth and a more stable economy, but "the unanticipated Iran War has left CEOs once again facing an uncertain future."
Read more via HR Dive and Vistage
For the first time in recent years, inflation is on the verge of erasing Americans' pay growth entirely, with low- and middle-income workers feeling the squeeze most acutely.
Prices rose 3.3% annually in March, edging toward the 3.5% yearly growth in average hourly earnings. A 0.9% month-over-month price spike in March pushed real average hourly pay into negative territory, with workers netting $0.07 less per hour than the month prior.
The pain is uneven: high-income households saw after-tax wage growth of 5.6% in March compared to a year prior, while low- and middle-income households saw gains of 1% and 2%, respectively, according to Bank of America Institute.
Oxford Economics warns that the "mounting hit to consumers' real incomes from the energy price shock" will contribute to weaker consumer spending in the first half of the year, with a further oil price surge or stock market correction risking an outright spending decline.
Inflation is almost eating up the entirety of Americans' wage gains already."
Read more via Yahoo Finance
The first official deportation statistics released under the Trump administration show ICE removed 442,637 people between October 2024 and September 2025, about 171,000 more than the prior fiscal year but far below the administration's stated target of one million deportations annually.
About 167,000 of those deported, roughly 38%, had criminal records including convictions and pending charges, as the administration has emphasized targeting what it calls the “worst of the worst.”
The administration has also claimed more than two million people have "self-deported," but has not released regular data to support that figure and it is not included in the official report.
Despite setting a goal of one million deportations next year, ICE has asked for less money in fiscal year 2027 than it received in 2026, including cuts of $751 million from detention and removal transportation budgets and $155 million less in officer overtime.
Read more via Axios
A Wall Street Journal analysis of Labor Department data finds wage growth has actually slowed in the blue-collar industries that tend to employ immigrants in lower-skill jobs, and employment in those sectors declined 90,400 year-over-year in February.
Across 41 blue-collar industries that tend to be reliant on immigrants to fill lower-skill roles, hourly earnings rose 3.5% in February, below the 3.8% increase for all workers.
Economists point to the "lump-of-labor fallacy," the mistaken idea that removing workers automatically creates jobs for others. Deportations remove consumers as well as workers.
Wage growth for U.S.-born workers grew 3.9% in 2025, the slowest pace in four years.
The idea that there's a fixed number of jobs … if you remove some workers, there's more jobs for everyone else, that doesn't work. You're removing demand as well as supply."
A new UKG and KPMG report finds that global payroll is widely under-resourced and poorly governed, with large employers losing a significant share of labor spend to preventable errors each year.
Organizations lose between 2% and 4% of total labor spend annually to "payroll leakage," a term the report uses to describe losses from inefficient processes, system limitations, and fraud. For a large employer, a loss of just 1% can amount to as much as $15 million.
38% of companies surveyed reported annual payroll losses of between $1 million and $5 million.
Employee pay represents between 40% and 60% of operating expenses at most large organizations, yet only 33% of respondents reported having 50 or more full-time employees dedicated to payroll.
Despite widespread data collection, fewer than half of employers are tracking the metrics the report identifies as most indicative of leakage.
Read more via UKG and HR Dive
Long COVID-19 will continue to weigh on workforce participation and productivity across wealthy economies for at least the next decade, according to a new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) analysis.
Combined health care costs and workforce impacts, including people leaving the workforce and reduced productivity, could cost OECD economies up to $135 billion annually and reduce economic growth by as much as 0.2%.
Only six OECD countries have formal pathways for treating long COVID-19, leaving most patients and doctors without official guidelines.
The OECD identified training for health care professionals as a priority to improve diagnosis and care.
Read more via Bloomberg, OECD
Concerns about inflation and the future of Social Security and Medicare have pushed retirement confidence to its lowest point in nearly ten years, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute's annual survey.
61% of workers say they are very or somewhat confident in having enough money for a comfortable retirement, down from 67% in 2025 and a recent high of 72% in 2021.
73% of retirees expressed confidence in their finances, down from 78% last year.
41% of retirees say their retirement spending has been higher than expected.
Both workers and retirees cited potential cuts to Social Security and Medicare as a concern; unless Congress acts, both programs are expected to deplete their reserves around the middle of the next decade.
The findings are broadly consistent with the University of Michigan's April consumer sentiment survey, which fell to its lowest level in the poll's 70-plus-year history.
Germany: Investor confidence fell sharply in April, with the ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment dropping to minus 17.2, its lowest reading since December 2022, well below economist expectations of minus 5.0. The decline was driven by surging energy prices following the Middle East conflict: Brent crude is up more than 30% and benchmark gas prices more than 20% since strikes on Iran began in late February. Annual inflation climbed to 2.8% in March, up from 2.0% in February. ZEW President Achim Wambach warned that businesses are concerned about long-term energy supply shortages, which is discouraging investment and undermining the effect of more than $1 trillion in government stimulus pledged last year. (The Wall Street Journal)
Poland: Hiring intentions are softening and layoff plans have hit a nine-year high. Just 13.7% of companies plan to increase headcount in the coming quarter, while 9.8% plan to reduce staff, double the 4.9% that anticipated layoffs a year ago and the highest figure since 2017. Nearly three-quarters of companies expect to maintain current employment levels, though even that share has edged down year over year, according to Gi Group Holding's Labor Market Barometer 2026. (SIA)
Switzerland: Job vacancies edged up 0.7% in Q1 2026 compared to the prior quarter and 0.8% year over year, according to the Adecco Group Swiss Job Market Index. Adecco cautioned that data collection preceded the outbreak of the Middle East conflict, and that the index may present an overly optimistic picture; the KOF Economic Barometer fell 77 points in March. Trade policy uncertainty and geopolitical tensions continue to weigh on export-oriented sectors and the broader investment climate. (SIA)
United Kingdom: The U.K. unemployment rate fell to 4.9% in the three months through February, down from 5.2% the prior period, beating economist expectations. The ONS cautioned that the decline was driven by more people stopping their job search rather than an increase in hiring. Annual wage growth excluding bonuses came in at 3.6%. Economists warn the improvement is unlikely to hold, as rising energy prices tied to the Middle East conflict are expected to squeeze business profits and slow hiring later this year. (The Wall Street Journal)
