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Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh speaks during a news conference at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2021.

Erin Scott | Reuters

There has been a lot of talk about looming layoffs, and by some recent surveying, as many as half of large employers are thinking about labor cost cuts as the economy slows. But U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Marty Walsh doesn’t see the recent job gains reversing, according to an interview at CNBC’s Work Summit on Tuesday.

“I still think that we’re going to have job gains as we move into the end of this year, early next year. A lot of people are still looking at different jobs,” he told CNBC’s Kayla Tausche at the virtual event. “We saw a lot of moving around over this last course of the year. People leaving jobs, getting better jobs, and I’m not convinced yet that we’re headed towards that.”

For the Federal Reserve, some level of higher unemployment is necessary to cool an economy that has been bedeviled by persistent inflation. Unemployment, at 3.5% now, went down in the last monthly nonfarm payrolls report. The Fed is targeting unemployment of 4.4% as a result of its policy and higher interest rates.

“We definitely have to bring down inflationary pressures,” Walsh said at the CNBC Work Summit, but he added that the way to do it isn’t layoffs.

A House inquiry released on Tuesday found that the 12 largest employers in the nation including Walmart and Disney laid off more than 100,000 workers in the most recent recession during the pandemic.

Walsh said in a slower economy, the federal government’s infrastructure act will support job growth in sectors including transportation. “Those monies are there. … if we did have a downturn in the economy, those jobs will keep people working through a difficult time.”

In the battle against inflation, Walsh said moving people up the income ladder is a better way of helping Americans make ends meet than laying them off.

“I think there’s a way to do that by creating good opportunities for people so they have opportunities to get into the middle class, and not enough people in America are working in those jobs, quite honestly. … I think there’s a lot of Americans out there right now that have gone through the last two years, a lot of concern in the pandemic, they were working in a job maybe making minimum wage, maybe they had two or three jobs. Really I think the best way to describe what is a middle class job is a job you can work, one job, get good pay, so you don’t have to work two and three jobs to support your family.”

From a policy perspective, Walsh expressed disbelief that a higher federal minimum wage remains a contentious issue on Capitol Hill.

“It shocks me that there are members in the building behind me, if you can’t see the building behind me it’s the Capitol, that think that families can raise their family on $7-plus, on the minimum wage in this country,” he said.

But Walsh conceded that legislation to increase the minimum wage, which was held up in the Senate, has an uncertain future ahead of the midterm elections.

Here are a few of the other major policy issues the Labor Secretary weighed in on at the CNBC Work Summit.

Lack of immigration reform is a ‘catastrophe’ in the making

Amid one of the tightest labor markets in history, Walsh said the political parties’ approach to immigration — “getting immigration all tied up” — is among the most consequential mistakes the nation can make in labor policy.

“One party is showing pictures of the border and meanwhile if you talk to businesses that support those congressional folks, they’re saying we need immigration reform,” Walsh said. “Every place I’ve gone in the country and talked to every major business, every small business, every single one of them is saying we need immigration reform. We need comprehensive immigration reform. They want to create a pathway for citizenship into our country, and they want to create better pathways for visas in our country.”

The demographic data on the U.S. working age population is concerning, with baby boomer retirements expected to accelerate in the years ahead, compounded by a peak being reached in high school graduates by 2025, limiting both the total size of the next generation labor pool and the transfer of knowledge between the generations of workers.

“We need a bipartisan fix here,” Walsh said. “I’ll tell you right now if we don’t solve immigration … we’re talking about worrying about recessions, we’re talking about inflation. I think we’re going to have a bigger catastrophe if we don’t get more workers into our society and we do that by immigration.”

Won’t say whether Uber and Lyft are in crosshairs of new gig economy rulemaking

A proposed DoL rule on independent contractors hit the shares of gig economy companies including Uber and Lyft a few weeks ago. The rulemaking is still in review and seeking public comments, and some Wall Street pundits don’t expect it to have a significant impact on the rideshare companies.

Walsh wouldn’t even say if they are a target of the rulemaking.

“We haven’t necessarily said what companies are affected by it, and what businesses are affected by it. What we’re looking at is people that are employees that are working for companies that are being taken advantage of as independent contractors. We want to end that,” Walsh said.

New gig economy rules look like 'gut punch' for Uber and Lyft, says Dan Ives

He did mention a few of the jobs that would likely be covered, and one of those does overlap with the Uber, Lyft and DoorDash business models. “We have plenty of businesses in this country, like dishwashers and delivery drivers in areas like that, where people are working for a business that other employees in that business are employees, and they’re labeling them as independent contractors. So we’re going to look at this. We’re in the rulemaking process now. We’re taking in the comments now, and we’ll see when the comments come in what the final rule looks like.”

Walsh added that the idea an independent contractor want to retain their flexibility doesn’t wash with him. “Flexibility is not an excuse … pay somebody as an employee. You can’t use that as an excuse.” 

Unionization will finally gain in 2023, 2024

Walsh, a union-book carrier, said that the public support for unions should be matched by actual gains in union ranks in the next two years. The most recent survey available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that labor jobs decreased by more than 240,000 in 2021, even as U.S. public support for unionization has surged and major brands including Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks face a rising tide of unionization at stores and in operations like warehouses, albeit still on the margins as far as total numbers of workers they employ.

“I don’t have the number of 2022, but 2021 was a unique year,” Walsh said. “The numbers went down in a lot of ways because companies’ unions weren’t organizing, number one, and number two, we had a pandemic and a lot of people retired, left their business or they retired. Those jobs weren’t backfilled by companies. … It’s like 65%, 70% of Americans still looking favorably upon unions … the highest in 50 years. I don’t think you’ll see the benefit of that organizing until probably 2023, 2024.”

Other recent polling has found that public support for unions is higher than union member support for their own labor organizations.

Biden’s broken promise on child care

President Biden promised on the campaign trail to do more on child care; promised to include it in the infrastructure act; promised to include it in a second act after dropping it from the core infrastructure package; and then it was dropped from that back-up plan.

Walsh said the government has to make good on that promise for families and workers in the child-care sector.

“Childcare is a basic necessity to get millions of women back into the workforce on a full-time basis,” he said.

The recent Women in the Workplace study from McKinsey and LeanIn.org finds that women are still opting out of the workforce in large numbers, a reversal of labor market gains that began during the pandemic.

“Child care has not been addressed by this country or by most states in this country for the last 50 years. The cost is too high for the average family and we can’t retain the workers in those industries. We lost a lot of workers in the childcare industry because they’re paying them minimum wage or a little bit above minimum wage,” Walsh said, referring to estimates that 100,000 workers left the sector during the pandemic.

“We have to respect them and pay them better wages. Anyone watching today that has kids in child care, you know, you’re paying 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% of your salary for child care,” he said. “A lot of families have made the decision [that], ‘We don’t want to have two people working, one person will maybe stay home, work part time and make up those costs,’ so that issue has to be resolved. It’s not just an economic issue. It’s a human rights issue in our country to get good child care,” he added.

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Apple has its best week since July 2020 after White House visit

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Apple has its best week since July 2020 after White House visit

U.S. President Donald Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook shake hands on the day they present Apple’s announcement of a $100 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 6, 2025.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

Apple shares rose 13% this week, its largest weekly gain in more than five years, after CEO Tim Cook appeared with President Donald Trump in the White House on Wednesday.

Shares of the iPhone maker rose 4% to close at $229.35 per share on Friday for the company’s largest weekly gain since July 2020. The week’s move added over $400 billion to Apple’s market cap, which now sits at $3.4 trillion.

Apple is the third-most valuable company, behind Nvidia and Microsoft and ahead of Alphabet and Amazon.

At the White House on Wednesday, Cook appeared with Trump to announce Apple’s plans to spend $100 billion on American companies and American parts over the next four years.

Apple’s plans to buy more American chips pleased Trump, who said during the public meeting that because the company was building in the U.S., it would be exempt from future tariffs that could double the price of imported chips.

Investors had worried that some of Trump’s tariffs could substantially hurt Apple’s profitability. Apple warned in July that it expected over $1 billion in tariff costs in the current quarter, assuming no changes.

“Apple and Tim Cook delivered a masterclass in managing uncertainty after months and months of overhang relative to the potential challenges the company could face from tariffs,” JP Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee wrote on Wednesday. He has an overweight rating on Apple’s stock.

Cook’s successful White House meeting also comes two weeks after Apple reported June quarter earnings in which overall revenue jumped 10% and iPhone sales grew by 13%.

WATCH: Santoli’s Last Word: Apple helps drive S&P higher

Santoli's Last Word: Apple helps drive S&P higher

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Tesla Robotaxi scores permit to run ride-hailing service in Texas

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Tesla Robotaxi scores permit to run ride-hailing service in Texas

In an aerial view, the Tesla headquarters is seen in Austin, Texas, on July 24, 2025.

Brandon Bell | Getty Images

Tesla has been granted a permit to run a ride-hailing business in Texas, allowing the electric vehicle maker to compete against companies including Uber and Lyft.

Tesla Robotaxi LLC is licensed to operate a “transportation network company” until August 6, 2026, according to a listing on the website of the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, or TDLR. The permit was issued this week.

Elon Musk’s EV company has been running a limited ride-hailing service for invited riders in Austin since late June. The select few passengers have mostly been social media influencers and analysts, including many who generate income by posting Tesla fan content on platforms like X and YouTube.

The Austin fleet consists of Model Y vehicles equipped with Tesla’s latest partially automated driving systems. The company has been operating the cars with a valet, or human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat tasked with intervening if there are issues with the ride. The vehicles are also remotely supervised by employees in an operations center.

Musk, who has characterized himself as “pathologically optimistic,” said on Tesla’s earnings call last month that he believes Tesla could serve half of the U.S. population by the end of 2025 with autonomous ride-hailing services.

The Texas permit is the first to enable Tesla to run a “transportation network company.” TDLR said Friday that this kind of permit lets Tesla operate a ride-hailing business anywhere in the state, including with “automated motor vehicles,” and doesn’t require Tesla to keep a human safety driver or valet on board.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

As CNBC previously reported, Tesla robotaxis were captured on camera disobeying traffic rules in and around Austin after the company started its pilot program. None of the known incidents have been reported as causing injury or serious property damage, though they have drawn federal scrutiny.

Elon Musk confirms plan for Tesla robotaxis in Austin, Texas next month

In one incident, Tesla content creator Joe Tegtmeyer reported that his robotaxi failed to stop for a train crossing signal and lowering gate-arm, requiring a Tesla employee on board to intervene. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has discussed this incident with Tesla, a spokesperson for the regulator told CNBC by email.

Texas has historically been more permissive of autonomous vehicle testing and operations on public roads than have other states.

A new law signed by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott goes into effect this year that will require AV makers to get approval from the state before starting driverless operations. The new law also gives the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles the authority to revoke permits if AV companies and their cars aren’t complying with safety standards.

Tesla’s AV efforts have faced a number of challenges across the country, including federal probes, product liability lawsuits and recalls following injurious or damaging collisions that occurred while drivers were using the company’s Autopilot and FSD (Full Self-Driving) systems.

A jury in a federal court in Miami last week determined that Tesla should hold 33% of the liability for a fatal Autopilot-involved collision.

And the California DMV has sued Tesla, accusing it of false advertising around its driver assistance systems. Tesla owners manuals say the Autopilot and FSD features in their cars are “hands on” systems that require a driver ready to steer or brake at any time. But Tesla and Musk have shared statements through the years saying that a Tesla can “drive itself.”

Since 2016, Musk has been promising that Tesla would soon be able to turn all of its existing EVs into fully autonomous vehicles with a simple, over-the-air software update. In 2019, he said the company would put 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020, a claim that helped him raise $2 billion at the time from institutional investors.

Those promises never materialized and, in the robotaxi market, Tesla lags way behind competitors like Alphabet’s Waymo in the U.S. and Baidu’s Apollo Go in China.

Tesla shares are down 18% this year, by far the worst performance among tech’s megacaps.

WATCH: What we saw at Tesla’s robotaxi launch in Texas

We went to Texas for Tesla's robotaxi launch. Here's what we saw

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Trade Desk tanks almost 40% on CFO departure, tariff concerns and competition from Amazon

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Trade Desk tanks almost 40% on CFO departure, tariff concerns and competition from Amazon

Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk.

Scott Mlyn | CNBC

Shares of The Trade Desk plummeted almost 40% on Friday and headed for their worst day on record after the ad-tech company announced the departure of its CFO and analysts expressed concerns about rising competition from Amazon.

The Trade Desk, which went public in 2016, suffered its steepest prior drop in February, when the shares fell 33% on a revenue miss. In its second-quarter earnings report late Thursday, the company beat expectations on earnings and revenue, but the results failed to impress investors.

The Trade Desk, which specializes in providing technology to companies that want to target users across the web, said finance chief Laura Schenkein is leaving the job and being replaced by Alex Kayyal, who has been working as a partner at Lightspeed Ventures.

While some analysts were uneasy about the sudden change in the top finance role, the bigger concern is Amazon’s growing role in the online ad market, as well as the potential impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on ad spending.

Amazon has emerged as a significant player in the digital advertising market in recent years, and is now third behind Google and Meta. Last week, Amazon reported a 23% increase in ad revenue for the second quarter to $15.7 billion, which beat estimates.

Read more CNBC Amazon coverage

Amazon’s ad business has largely been tied to its own platforms, with brands paying up so they can get discovered on the sprawling marketplace. However, Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP), which allows brands to programmatically place ads across a wider swath of internet properties, is gaining more resonance in the market.

“Amazon is now unlocking access to traditionally exclusive ‘premium’ ad inventory across the open internet, validating the strength of its DSP and suggesting The Trade Desk’s value proposition could erode over time,” Wedbush analysts wrote on Friday.

The Wedbush analysts lowered their rating on The Trade Desk to the equivalent of hold from buy, and cited Amazon’s recent ad integration with Disney as a sign of the company’s aggressiveness.

Executives at The Trade Desk were asked about Amazon on the call, and responded by suggesting that the companies don’t really compete, emphasizing that Amazon is conflicted because it will always prioritize its own properties.

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“A scaled independent DSP like The Trade Desk becomes essential as we help advertisers buy across everything and that we have to do that without conflict or compromise,” CEO Jeff Green said on the call. “It is my understanding that Amazon nearly doubled the supply of Prime Video inventory in the recent months. That creates a number of conflicts.”

For the second quarter, The Trade Desk reported a 19% increase in year-over-year revenue to $694 million, topping the $685 million estimate, according to analysts polled by LSEG. Adjusted earnings per share of 41 cents beat estimates by a penny.

Looking to the third quarter, the Trump administration’s tariffs were also a theme, as the company forecast revenue of at least $717 million, representing growth of 14% at minimum.

“From a macro standpoint, some of the world’s largest brands are absolutely facing pressure and some amount of uncertainty,” Green said. “Some have to respond more than others to tariffs. Many are managing inflation worries and the related pricing that comes with that.”  

With Friday’s slump, The Trade Desk shares are now down 53% for the year, while the S&P 500 is up about 9%. The Trade Desk was added to the S&P 500 in June.

WATCH: Trade Desk shares sink

Trade Desk shares sink on tariff warning

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