Water war: An arbitration court ruled this morning that China has no historic title over the waters of the South China Sea and that it has breached the Philippines’ sovereign rights with its actions, infuriating Beijing, which dismissed the case as a farce. Reuters reports that China, which boycotted the hearings at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, vowed again to ignore the ruling and said its armed forces would defend its sovereignty and maritime interests. China’s state-run Xinhua news agency said shortly before the ruling was announced that a Chinese civilian aircraft successfully carried out calibration tests on two new airports in the disputed Spratly Islands. And China’s Defence Ministry announced that a new guided missile destroyer was formally commissioned at a naval base on the southern island province of Hainan, which has responsibility for the South China Sea. Reuters has the full story.
Help wanted: Nearly half of small businesses that tried to fill jobs in the second quarter reported that they had few or zero qualified applicants for those positions, according to the June NFIB Small Business Optimism report. Bloomberg reports that, as a result, 29% of small businesses said they had job openings they were unable to fill, and 15% of owners surveyed said that finding quality labor was their single most-important business problem, which is almost the highest reading of this expansion. Somewhat surprisingly, faced with this labor shortage, only a net 14% of owners indicated that they planned to hike employee pay, with the balance of opinion down slightly from May’s report. The Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker, however, suggests that a tightening labor market is incentivizing employers to raise wages. Bloomberg has the full story.
The bottom line: JPMorgan Chase is giving 18,000 of its lowest paid employees significant raises early next year. As CNNMoney reports, the company says its lowest wage in the U.S. will increase to $12 an hour in February—an 18% increase. The raises will go primarily to bank tellers and other branch personnel. The banking giant says employees in 75 cities will get pay bumps. Pay will be based on the local cost of living, and the raises will bring 90% of the bank’s lowest-paid workers to between $13 to $16.50 an hour. “A pay increase is the right thing to do. Wages for many Americans have gone nowhere for too long,” CEO Jamie Dimon wrote in a column in The New York Times. “Above all, it enables more people to begin to share in the rewards of economic growth.” CNNMoney has the full story.
