The US unemployment rate fell slightly to 3.5%. That matches a 50-year low also reached in September of this year.
The report shows a continuation of the strong labor market of recent years. It marks the 21st straight month that the unemployment rate has been at or below 4%, a level generally considered to represent full employment. And thanks to the strong labor market, workers have been able to make some progress on wages, which are up 3.1% over the last 12 months. Wage increases have averaged 3% or greater every month since August 2018.
The manufacturing sector added 54,000 jobs in November, offsetting a decline in October related to nearly 50,000 General Motors workers who were then on strike.
But the job increases were widespread across the US economy. Health care had a big gain, up 45,000, as did the leisure and hospitality industry, which also added 45,000 jobs.
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The U.S. created 266,000 new jobs in November, marking the biggest gain since the first month of the year and signaling the labor market remains quite robust even though the economy has slowed. The increase in new jobs easily topped the 180,000 MarketWatch forecast, helped by the end of the GM auto-workers strike. That added roughly 50,000 jobs to the payrolls number. The unemployment rate slipped to 3.5% from 3.6% and matched a 50-year low. The average wage paid to American workers rose 7 cents, or 0.2%, to $28.29 an hour. The 12-month rate of hourly wage gains slipped to 3.1% from 3.2%. Hours worked each week were flat at 34.4 hours. The government revised the increase in new jobs in October to 156,000 from 128,000. September's gain was raised to 193,000 from 180,000.
Uber is set to lose just over $1 billion from its market cap after the ride-sharing company said that roughly 6,000 sexual assault cases took place in its cars over the last two years.
At 5 a.m. in New York, Uber's stock fell 2.2% in premarket trading.
That translates to about $1.1. billion off a market cap of $48.9 billion.
In a tweet, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said: "Doing the right thing means counting, confronting, and taking action to end sexual assault."
Uber is set to lose just over $1 billion from its market cap after the ride-sharing company said that roughly 6,000 sexual assault cases took place in the company's cars over the last two years.
Uber's stock fell 2.2% in premarket trading at about 5 a.m. in New York, equivalent to about $1.1. billion of its market cap from Thursday's close of $48.9 billion.
The unicorn tech firm released a report on its website on Thursday detailing the number of sexual assaults, car crashes, and murders that took place in 2017 and 2018 in the US.
It said that during those two years 2.3 billion trips were taken in its cars over the two years and in just 2018, 58 people had been killed in car crashes, while nine were murdered.
The number of sexual assault cases numbered 2,936 in 2017 and 3,045 in 2018 or 5981 over the two years.
In a tweet, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said: "Doing the right thing means counting, confronting, and taking action to end sexual assault. My heart is with every survivor of this all-too-pervasive crime. Our work will never be done, but we take an important step forward today."
He added: "In the long run, we will be a better company for taking this step today — because I firmly believe that companies who are open, accountable, and unafraid are ultimately the companies that succeed. "
Energy ministers from some of the world's largest oil producers will attempt to ratify a deeper round of output cuts on Friday.
OPEC and non-OPEC partners, sometimes referred to as OPEC+, have gathered in Vienna, Austria to decide the next phase of their oil production policy.
Led by Saudi Arabia, the 14-member group agreed in principle on Thursday to cut production by an additional 500,000 barrels per day (b/d) through to the end of March 2020, according to CNBC sources. This level of output curbs is much larger than many had expected.
OPEC will now request the approval of non-OPEC allies, including Russia, in a bid to prop up oil prices.
Ahead of a meeting with non-OPEC allies, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh struck an upbeat tone.
"Everything is going ahead well," Zanganeh told CNBC's Brian Sullivan outside the OPEC headquarters on Friday morning. He predicted the energy alliance would be able to announce a deal "during the coming hours."
International benchmark Brent crude traded at $63.53 on Friday morning, up around 0.2%, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) stood at $58.47, little changed from the previous session.
Oil prices have rallied in recent trading sessions, amid intensifying speculation of deeper-than-anticipated production cuts. However, Brent crude futures remain around 15% lower when compared to an April peak, with WTI down almost 12% over the same period.
"It is fair to say that this agreement has left market players with mixed feelings," Stephen Brennock, oil analyst at PVM Oil Associates, said in a research note published Friday.
"On the one hand, the extent of these extra supply curbs surprised to the upside. On the other hand, there is concern that there was no mention of an extension to cuts beyond the current March 2020 deadline."
Contentious meeting
It was initially unclear whether a preliminary meeting of OPEC members had secured a deal.
The group announced it had canceled its customary press conference on Thursday, following an acrimonious meeting that ran late into the evening.
"I think it sets us up for a tough day of negotiations," Cornelia Meyer, CEO of Meyer Resources, told CNBC's Dan Murphy in Vienna on Friday.
"Now, the question is: How much OPEC (and) how much non-OPEC?" Meyer said, referring to how OPEC+ might try to split the cuts between each producer.
Saudi Arabia, which has been producing less than it agreed to, has been adamant that those overproducing — such as Iraq and Nigeria — must comply with their quota.
OPEC+ has reduced output by 1.2 million b/d since the beginning of the year. The current deal, which runs through to March 2020, replaced a previous round of production cuts that began in January 2017.
The energy alliance was prompted to act after global oil prices tumbled in mid-2014 due to an oversupply, but U.S. shale producers are not a part of the deal and shale oil supply has grown exponentially.
The U.S. is now the world's largest oil producer hitting 12.3 million b/d in 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, up from 11 million b/d in 2018. It produces more oil than Saudi Arabia and Russia now, although there are signs that production growth is slowing in the States.
Along with rampant shale supply, faltering demand due to a global economic slowdown, exacerbated by the Sino-U.S. trade war, has once again threatened to unbalance oil supply and demand dynamics.
In addition to recent news of its bizarre issue with segregating bathrooms, Uber has long struggled with keeping its passengers safe, though we only now know the extent of the problem (in the U.S., at least) courtesy of the company’s first study on unsafe incidents involving the ridesharing service.
According to Thursday’s report, which only covered U.S. rides between 2017 and 2018, last year alone Uber received 3,045 reports of sexual assaults during trips with another nine people murdered and 58 killed in crashes. The numbers from 2017 tell a nearly identical story. Uber said it used an intentionally broad definition of sexual assault that ranges from nonconsensual kissing of any “nonsexual body part” to attempted rape and rape, with the majority of documented incidents involving unwanted touching of a “sexual body part,” i.e. a person’s mouth or genitalia.
Though previous investigations have already shed plenty of light on how pervasive reports of sexual assault and other violent acts involving the service are, Uber’s transparency marks some of the first official numbers on the subject, as no police department or government body currently tracks crimes specifically related to ridesharing services. Competitors like Lyft haven’t shared comparable figures either.
“We don’t believe corporate secrecy will make anyone safer,” Uber states in the report’s executive summary.
In reminders diligently peppered throughout the study, the company reiterates that these incidents represent a small fraction of the total 2.3 billion Uber rides completed in the U.S. during that same period, and that of the nearly 4 million trips taken every day using the service, 99.9 percent end with no reported safety incidents.
Even still, Uber’s chief legal officer and a leading force behind the report, Tony West, called the findings “jarring and hard to digest” in an interview with the New York Times. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi also expressed his sentiments on Twitter for the victims of these thousands of documented incidents.
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“My heart is with every survivor of this all-too-pervasive crime. Our work will never be done, but we take an important step forward today,” he tweeted Thursday.
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And apparently people booking a ride aren’t the only ones at risk. “Drivers are victims, too,” the company wrote in its executive summary. While 92 percent of reported rape victims were passengers, drivers and riders both reported other types of sexual assaults such as unwanted kissing and touching at similar rates, Uber said. And of the 19 murders Uber documented during that two-year period, seven of the victims were drivers while eight were passengers (the company refers to the remaining four as “third-parties” such as nearby bystanders).
With this report (and a promise to keep releasing these stats every two years from now on), Uber appears to be making good on last year’s promise that the company’s “getting serious about safety”. Since then, Uber’s implemented several new security features such as an in-app emergency button that silently shares your location and trip details with 911, an option to share your ride information with a trusted third-party so they can know you’ve arrived safely, and an ID check feature that makes drivers prove with a selfie that they are who their account says they are. The company’s also purportedly tripled the size of its safety team to 300 employees since 2017, which I can assume was in part made possible by its several recent rounds of lay-offs that gutted other departments such as marketing and engineering.
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Uber’s also apparently been beefing up its screening requirements for who’s allowed to drive for the company in the first place. According to Uber, more than 40,000 drivers have been kicked from the service after it implemented a system that continuously screens drivers for any possible recent criminal offenses. Uber’s background checks disqualify anyone with a felony conviction in the last seven years, though in the case of certain violent felonies like sexual assault, kidnapping, and murder, there’s no such time period limit. During the two-year period studied in Uber’s safety report, the company said its screening process filtered out more than a million prospective drivers who failed to pass these checks.
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Along with today’s report, the company noted its currently researching ways to create a black-list of banned drivers in addition to several other new safety measures planned for 2020. According to the Times’ report, West also said Uber plans to share information with competing ridesharing companies about possibly dangerous drivers that passengers have reported, though he didn’t go into detail.
Admittedly, the bar is ridiculously low for any safety features Uber comes up with. After all, this is the company that marketed a phony “Safe Rides Fee” to scam passengers out of billions. All Uber has to do is avoid shamelessly profiting off its shady reputation.
"Voluntarily publishing a report that discusses these difficult safety issues is not easy," said Tony West, chief legal officer at Uber.
"Most companies don't talk about issues like sexual violence because doing so risks inviting negative headlines and public criticism. But we feel it's time for a new approach."
The company told the BBC there were currently no concrete plans to release safety reports for any non-US markets.
This is a hugely significant document that for the first time details the extent to which the gig economy puts people in harm's way.
Uber described it as a complex project that was two years in the making, with much of that time spent auditing the data ensure to accuracy.
It should be noted that, knowing it would provoke grim headlines, the firm opted to release this data voluntarily.
The firm has committed to releasing the report every two years.
Now that Uber has proven it can produce this data in a digestible form, it must keep doing so at regular intervals and, eventually, for all its markets around the world.
That's not an easy undertaking, but the company can afford it.
Continual publication of the report would bring focus and urgency: is Uber's record on safety getting better or worse? Why might that be? Are certain regions safer than others? What can we learn from that?
Attention must also turn to the other gig economy firms out there. Lyft - which is facing a lawsuit over sexual assault filed just this week - has no excuses now that its bigger rival has acted.
Uber said 3,045 sexual assault reports were made in 2018 compared with 2,936 in 2017.
Last year, 1.3 billion trips were completed in the US, up from one billion in 2017.
The head of the US National Sexual Violence Resource Center, Karen Baker, welcomed the report, saying it "provides an opportunity to shed light on how this information-sharing emboldens our work for a safer future".
Passenger safety, in particular sexual violence, have been major challenges for Uber and its US rival Lyft, as well as China's Didi.
