Chamber Members:
We’ll hopefully have a little more information to share on yesterday’s big announcement when the second round of the Business Interruption Grant opens tomorrow. Until then, today’s update has some general information on the economy, workforce funds, test supplies, landlords, and staying focused.
*Daily Coronavirus update brought to you by Silver Cross Hospital
Fed Warnings on Economy
The Federal Reserve this week will hold its last policymaking meeting before the elections as the central bank’s calls for further coronavirus relief fail to shake Congress out of a deepening stalemate.
Close coordination between bank officials and lawmakers helped dampen the initial blow of the pandemic in March, but Fed leaders have since become increasingly alarmed at the lack of progress toward another rescue package.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and top bank officials have warned that a failure to bridge those divides could be catastrophic for millions of already struggling Americans and harmful to the long-term recovery from the coronavirus recession.
While the Fed is not expected to announce any major policy changes after its two-day meeting wraps up on Wednesday afternoon, Powell will likely face questions during a subsequent press conference about how much more the bank can do to support the economy while Congress is mired in partisan bickering.
Will County Portion of Workforce Funds
Will County has been awarded $825,000 in economic recovery grants to train and hire workers to fill high-demand positions and assist local disaster relief programs. The money – totaling $16.6 million for the state – comes to the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Security (DCEO) from the National Dislocated Worker Program.
The state distributed the funds to 12 Local Workforce Innovation Areas including locally our Workforce Investment Board and Workforce Services Division to expand education and training opportunities throughout Illinois. DCEO will partner with local workforce agency partners to assist with filling high-need, temporary roles to help mitigate COVID-19 in communities, including contact tracers, COVID-19 protocol workers, building sanitization workers, temperature screeners, and food preparation and distribution workers.
Training and hiring for new workforce programs are expected to begin this fall. Local workforce agencies will prioritize applicants who have been laid off or otherwise lost their jobs during the COVID-19 crisis at the time of their application. A full list of available training and hiring opportunities is available on Get Hired Illinois.
Feds ‘commandeered’ COVID-19 testing supplies ordered by Loyola and Illinois State to detect virus on campus, Sen. Dick Durbin says
At least two Illinois colleges that ordered COVID-19 testing materials from the federal government didn’t receive the supplies because they were abruptly reallocated, curtailing the schools’ ability to provide in-person classes and maintain campus safety, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin said at a news conference.
Durbin said Loyola University Chicago and Illinois State University were expecting COVID-19 testing kits and equipment from the manufacturer Quidel this summer, but the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services redirected the materials to other entities under the Defense Production Act, a form of executive power.
At colleges, however, frequent testing of students and faculty has proved itself key. The ability to perform a large number of tests and get results quickly can help schools identify clusters on campus and salvage in-person learning before a broader outbreak. Not all colleges are requiring asymptomatic students to be tested.
THE LANDLORDS’ LAMENT
The White House’s move to ban evictions across the country during the pandemic is having an unintended side-effect: It’s threatening the livelihood of millions of landlords.
The sweeping order effectively requires landlords to subsidize distressed tenants’ housing through the end of the year or face criminal penalties and hefty fines. That’s a tall order for the country’s 8 million independent landlords – most of whom lease a unit here or there on property they own without the financial backing of professional management companies.
More than 22 million rental units, a little over half the rental housing in the country, are in single-family buildings with between one and four units, according to data compiled by the Urban Institute. And most of those buildings have a mortgage — meaning the property owners themselves still need to make their own monthly payments.
Most of the units are owned by mom-and-pop landlords, many of whom invested in property to save for retirement. Now they’re dealing with a dramatic drop in income, facing the prospect of either trying to sell their property or going into debt to meet financial obligations including mortgage and insurance payments, property taxes, utilities, and maintenance costs. If enough landlords can no longer make those payments, it would threaten everything from the school budgets funded by property taxes to the stability of the $11 trillion U.S. mortgage market itself.
Six months into the crisis, millions of tenants can no longer meet their rent — and the situation is only getting worse. Tenants already owe some $25 billion in back rent and will owe nearly $70 billion by the end of the year, according to an estimate last month by Moody’s Analytics.
President Trump’s announcement offered no rental assistance for tenants, meaning that when the order expires on Dec. 31, they’re still on the hook for months of back rent. And it offered no relief for landlords either.
One in three tenants failed to make their September rent payment on time, according to the latest Apartment List survey. And a little over 25 percent said they had slight or no confidence in their ability to pay their rent this month, according to Census data published Wednesday, with another 22 percent expressing only moderate confidence
Tips to Stay Focused
Are you having a hard time staying focused on work, especially in these high-stress days? Some simple techniques can make a big difference, psychologist Traci Stein explains in a recent Psychology Today post. Give her techniques a try and see how your own focus improves and build them into daily habits to keep that benefit going into the future. You can find the full list here. These are some of her best tips.
1. Take care of your physical needs.
“Of course, the most basic foundation for focusing is to take good care of yourself,” Stein writes. This means getting regular exercise, which has been shown to help you increase focus later on, as well as other cognitive benefits. A few minutes a day of meditation — which Bill Gates does — will also enhance your ability to stay focused.
Beyond that, make sure you’re getting good nutrition which also supports brain function. Most important of all, get plenty of sleep. Sleep has fantastic benefits for both your brain health and your overall health. And when you’re tired, it’s much harder to focus on anything.
2. Plan for your “escape behaviors.”
What are escape behaviors? Stein defines them as “those things you do to alleviate the stress or boredom that crops up whenever you have to work on a specific task or assignment.” They vary from person to person but can include things like mindless snacking (I do that), getting sleepy, checking your email (guilty!), checking social media, or suddenly getting very sleepy.
The key to dealing with escape behaviors is to anticipate them because you know yourself well enough to know which are likely to crop up during any given workday, Stein writes. If you’re liable to get sleepy, try switching to a standing desk for a while (I find upbeat music helps too). And have tea or water on hand because sleepiness is often dehydration in disguise. If you’re liable to snack, prepare a reasonable portion of a healthy snack to keep by your desk for that day. If you’re tempted to read email or check social media, anticipate that by turning off notifications. Consider signing out of your email program while you’re focused on other work, and/or putting your smartphone someplace out of reach.
3. Plan regular breaks.
It’s often difficult to stay fully focused for lengthy periods of time and trying to force yourself to do that will only work against you. So, plan for frequent breaks. One popular approach is to use the Pomodoro Technique, which calls for 25 minutes of focused work followed by a 5-minute break, with at least a 15-minute break every two hours. Or work for 52 minutes and then take a 17-minute break, which one experiment showed is the ideal rhythm for maximum productivity.
Whichever approach you use, it’s important that you don’t skip taking a break once you’ve worked for your allotted time. Those breaks can be a good time to indulge in your escape behaviors, so you don’t feel too deprived when you deny them to yourself during work times.
4. Give binaural beats a try.
“Binaural beat technology is a type of brainwave entrainment that uses auditory tones to shift one’s predominant brainwave state into something more appropriate or relevant to the task at hand,” Stein explains. It works by playing different frequency tones in each ear. “The brain will hear the difference between these tones, rather than hearing each one separately,” she explains.
With your brain listening to the frequency difference between the tones, you can calm and relax your mind with a lower-frequency difference or improve your alertness and focus with a higher-frequency difference.
You can find binaural beats in many places, including YouTube and Spotify. For obvious reasons, you need to listen to binaural beats through a headphone for them to work properly.
5. Forgive yourself for losing focus.
These are stressful times. Most of us are stuck at home more than we’d like to be, and we may be working remotely, sometimes with school-age children around. So, you can’t expect yourself to maintain the same level of focus and productivity that you would in a more normal era — it’s unrealistic and it’s unfair. “Understand that it’s normal to feel fatigued, and scattered, and wish things were different right now,” Stein writes.
However productive or unproductive you are at any given moment, getting angry or upset about it will only make things worse. So, accept the fact that you won’t always live up to your own expectations of focus and productivity. Those expectations were probably unrealistic anyhow.
Instead, praise yourself for whatever level of focus you can maintain, and whatever work you manage able to get done. That will make the workday more pleasant. And being happier may help you get more done.
Stay well,
Joliet Region Chamber of Commerce & Industry Staff and Board of Directors
Mike Paone
Vice President – Government Affairs
Joliet Region Chamber of Commerce & Industry
mpaone@jolietchamber.com
815.727.5371 main
815.727.5373 direct