| | | | | | | Presented By Google | | | | Axios AM | | By Mike Allen ·Jan 26, 2022 | | 🐪 Good Wednesday morning. Smart Brevity™ count: 1,191 words ... 4½ minutes. Edited by Zachary Basu. ⚡ Situational awareness: A second NYPD officer died after being shot in Harlem. Officer Wilbert Mora, 27, died four days after he and Officer Jason Rivera, 22, were shot responding to a domestic disturbance. Get the latest. | | | | | | 1 big thing: 4-day dud |  Data: Indeed.com. Chart: Axios Visuals The four-day workweek is nowhere close to becoming the norm, despite a flurry of media coverage and intense interest from worker bees worldwide, Emily Peck writes for Axios Markets. - Why it matters: With the pandemic throwing work-family dynamics into chaos, professionals burning out and the labor market favoring employees, there's demand for experiments.
In a bid to attract talent, tech startup Bolt and Japan-based Panasonic recently announced four-day weeks. - Starting in April, 35 companies in the U.S. and Canada, including Kickstarter, a few nonprofits and an RV manufacturer, will test shorter weeks with help from 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit founded in New Zealand in 2018.
Reality check: Each time a company does this, it gets a lot of attention — but overall, the needle isn't moving. - In January, there were just 1,700 job postings advertising four-day work weeks for every million listed on Indeed.com.
- "There are not a lot of clients looking to do this," Bill Schaninger, senior partner at McKinsey, tells Axios.
How it works: The idea is to work fewer hours, for the same amount of money, without losing productivity — making everyone happier. (Like in Iceland!) - Remote work makes this more possible. Whereas socializing in-office had benefits and could be fun, let's be real: Zoom yoga sessions and happy hours are lame.
- Companies pulling this off say the key is fewer meetings, less email and Slack — and more shared work schedules on Trello and Airtable.
👀 Trend to watch: Other firms are simply offering more days off. Twitter is doing a "day of rest" every month. 💰 Sign up for Axios Markets. |     | | | | | | 2. Surprising COVID side effect: Soaring trade deficit |  Source: Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis. Chart: Axios Visuals While inflation and jobs dominate headlines, a big shift is taking place in the underpinnings of the world economy: The U.S. trade deficit is soaring, Axios chief economic correspondent Neil Irwin writes. - Americans' spending on imported physical goods has gone through the roof, while exports are growing slowly, making the U.S. the world's consumer of last resort.
Why it matters: High trade deficits let us buy more stuff during the pandemic. The flip side is the higher U.S. government debt that helped fund the surge in spending — much of it held by overseas investors. Through the first 11 months of 2021, Americans imported $290 billion more in goods than in the same period of 2019. - Meanwhile, exports of goods rose slowly — up only $86 billion. Exports of services plunged as international travel collapsed.
- The result: An overall trade deficit 48% higher than 2019, and on track for a record (by dollar amount) for 2021.
Flashback: President Trump made reducing the trade deficit a central goal, with limited results. Read more from Neil in tomorrow's issue of the weekly Axios Capital. | | | | | | | | 3. Commercial-property sales set record | | Downtown Austin during the Food + Wine Festival in November. Photo: Rick Kern/Getty Images U.S. commercial-property sales totaled a record $809 billion in 2021 — nearly double 2020's total, and shattering the previous record of $600 billion in 2019, The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription). - Why it matters: Investors are seizing on ways the "pandemic is reordering how Americans live, work and play."
"Real-estate buyers loaded up on warehouses, which serve as fulfillment centers for the e-commerce boom," The Journal explains. - "They bought apartment buildings to capitalize on record high rents. They paid up for resorts and vacation-oriented hotels that benefited from the resurgence in travel to leisure destinations."
Hot spots: Florida, Austin and other Sun Belt locations. - Manhattan, usually topping the sales list, was 9th last year.
| | | | | | | | A message from Google | | Google advises on open source software security at White House summit | | |  | | | | Google is working with the Administration and others to build a long-term and sustainable plan for securing open source software. As part of Google's $10B cyber security commitment, Google is providing $100M to support third party foundations like the Open Source Security Foundation. Learn more. | | | | | | 4. Nurses join gig economy |  | | | Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios | | | | Amid a nationwide nursing shortage and burnout crisis, tech companies say they could be part of the solution by allowing nurses to essentially join the gig economy, Axios health care editor Tina Reed writes. - Why it matters: Demand is accelerating for tools to help hospitals more efficiently fill shifts and offer exhausted workers more flexibility.
Lots of money is flowing into these models: - Nurse staffing app connectRN raised $76 million in VC cash last month, and TrustedHealth raised $149 million in November.
- Last year, ShiftMed raised $45 million, Nomad netted $63 million and CareRev completed a $50 million Series A funding round.
Share this story. | | | | | | | | 5. Mary Barra charts "path toward U.S. EV leadership" | | GM CEO Mary Barra speaks in Lansing yesterday. Photo: Paul Sancya/AP GM is making the largest investment in company history in its home state of Michigan, with plans to spend $7 billion to convert a factory to make electric pickups and to build a new battery cell plant, AP reports. - Why it matters: GM is rolling the dice on Americans converting from internal combustion engines to battery power.
The moves — announced yesterday in Lansing, the state capital — will create up to 4,000 jobs, and keep another 1,000 already employed at an underutilized assembly plant north of Detroit. - CEO Mary Barra said the investment will make Michigan "the epicenter of the electric vehicle industry."
Keep reading. | | | | | | | | 6. Third Way: "Big Lie" could become "Big Coup" | | Third Way, the center-left think tank, is urging fellow Democrats to respond to the Capitol riot with "the size, scope, and seriousness of a presidential campaign," co-founder Matt Bennett tells me. - "For the first time in U.S. history, a party must mount two parallel presidential campaigns: one to win the election, and the other to prevent its theft," Bennett said, calling this "a Paul Revere moment."
Why it matters: Democrats are offering "democracy protection candidates" in this year's midterms as a counterpoint to the GOP's "election integrity" push. In a blueprint shared first with Axios, Third Way calls on Dems to "do all we can to find and defend nonpartisan election workers." - "We must provide them with physical protection (from law enforcement and others) if they are threatened or harassed," the group says. "We must offer legal representation."
Go deeper: "There have been a lot of long-form magazine and academic pieces on the threat to our democracy," Bennett adds. "We wanted to lay out a cohesive story in an easy-to-follow format. Our model was Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth,' albeit without the subsequent Nobel Prize or Oscar." | | | | | | | | 7. 🎧 What we're listening to: "Axios Today" in Miami |  | | | Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photos: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Christian Torres/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images | | | | Most Haitian migrants enter the U.S. by land. But a growing number are attempting the dangerous trip by sea, "Axios Today" podcast host Niala Boodhoo and producer Nuria Marquez Martinez report from Miami. - In the past three months, three large boats with Haitian migrants landed in Key Largo, Fla. It's the first time in over two years that boats have evaded the Coast Guard.
- The most recent was a 60-foot vessel crammed with 176 people — with no lifesaving equipment or navigational lights.
The big picture: The U.S.-Mexico border gets the attention, but South Florida has been its own border town for decades. - Listen here to hear what advocates have to say to President Biden.
| | | | | | | | 8. 📷 Parting shot | | Photo: Nacho Doce/Reuters Drone's-eye view of a municipal basketball court in Balaguer, Spain — painted in tribute to the late basketball legend Kobe Bryant. | | | | | | | | A message from Google | | Google is training 100,000 Americans for jobs in cybersecurity | | |  | | | | Data Privacy Week is an international effort to empower individuals and businesses to respect privacy, safeguard data, and enable trust. To help grow the cybersecurity field, Google is training 100,000 Americans for vital jobs in data privacy and security. Learn more. | | | | 📬 Was my email forwarded to you? Join the conversation: Sign up here for your own personal copy of Axios AM and Axios PM. |  | Bring the strength of Smart Brevity® to your team — more effective communications, powered by Axios HQ. | | | |
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