All of the major freight railroads have said they are committed to resolving this key issue that nearly led to a strike in last years bitter contract talks. But most of those railroads which include CSX, Union Pacific, BNSF, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Kansas City are still negotiating with a number of their unions.

Most of the sick time deals, including the one Norfolk Southern announced for yardmasters Monday, provide four days of paid sick time and give workers the option to convert three days of personal leave time into sick days. The conductors and engineers who endure the most unpredictable schedules while operating the trains have been getting five days of paid sick leave with the option to convert two leave days into sick time.

So all of these deals provide up to seven days of paid sick time, and the railroads promised to pay workers for any unused sick time at the end of each year.

Last fall, the railroads refused to add paid sick time to the deal they had already been negotiating for several years, but they relented this year after intense pressure from the public and several key lawmakers including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Rail workers were forced to accept a five-year deal that provided 24% raises and $5,000 in bonuses after Congress blocked their ability to strike because of fears of an economic catastrophe, but that agreement didnt address their quality-of-life concerns.

About 300 workers are covered by this latest Norfolk Southern agreement. Jeremy Ferguson, president of the Transportation Division of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers union that represents the Norfolk Southern yardmasters and conductors nationwide, praised the progress that has been made.

This agreement will provide our hardworking yardmasters the time they need and deserve to take care of their personal wellbeing, Ferguson said.

A separate larger agreement between SMART-TD and Norfolk Southern that also addresses schedule concerns for conductors was ratified Friday.

Following national labor negotiations, we committed to address quality of life issues for our craft railroaders. With todays agreement, we make good on that promise, said Norfolk Southern President and CEO Alan Shaw.

Norfolk Southern and the other major railroads tout the progress they have made so far, but officials with the Transportation Trades Department the AFL-CIO labor coalition that includes all the rail unions said much work remains to address workers concerns.

For months, railroads have been at the table individually with their unions to find a path forward on the quality-of-life matters that came into the spotlight during the rounds final days. Today, railroads have new paid sick leave agreements in place to cover the majority of the unionized rail workforce, said Ian Jefferies, who leads the Association of American Railroads trade group. Additionally, multiple railroads have secured deals to give operating craft employees greater scheduling predictability.

Microsoft 365 outage and problem reports peaked at almost 18,000 shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern Monday morning, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Reports have appeared to decline since then.

Most of the reports expressed issues with Outlook. Many users of Microsofts emailing platform shared frustration on social media, with some noting they were unable to sign into or load their accounts.

The company said that it was investigating an issue with accessing Outlook on the web in a Twitter thread posted on its Microsoft 365 Status account and added that a downstream impact was also identified for Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

Microsoft 365 Status later said it had halted an ongoing deployment and are monitoring services to see if that provides relief to the environment. By around 12:30 p.m. ET, the company said it had reverted the update and was seeing service improvement.

But since then, the economy has remained surprisingly resilient even amid consistent headwinds. The unemployment rate stuck near pre-pandemic lows at 3.7% in May and GDP jumped 1.1% in the first quarter. The stock market is also on fire after a dismal 2022, with the S&P 500 rising more than 12% year-to-date as investors flock to A.I. plays.

Still, despite the recent positive news, Deutsche Banks top minds continue to believe a recession is inevitable after the Federal Reserves historic policy shift.

The U.S. is on track for its first genuine policy-led boom-bust cycle in four decades, induced by a significant increase in the money supply over 2020-21, unleashing high inflation and an aggressive policy response, Deutsche Banks head of global economics and thematic research, Jim Reid, and chief economist, David Folkerts-Landau, wrote in a Monday research note. The next stage is the U.S. recession that we were the first to forecast early last year.

For more than a decade after the Global Financial Crisis, Fed officials sought to boost economic growth by holding interest rates near-zero and instituting a policy called quantitative easing (QE)where they would buy government bonds and mortgage-backed securities in order to increase the money supply and spur lending and investment in the economy. When the pandemic hit, they doubled down on these so-called easy money policies to help prevent an economic disaster. But Reid and Folkerts-Landau argue that this move set the U.S. up for a disastrous spell of inflation and a boom-bust cycle.

The easy money policies of the Fed, along with broken supply chains and stimulus programs, helped exacerbate the rise of inflation in 2021, according to Deutsche Bank, and forced Fed officials to raise interest rates from near zero to a range between 5% and 5.25% over the past 15 months. Reid and Folkerts-Landau argue consumers and businesses are struggling to cope with the rising borrowing costs that have come with these aggressive rate hikes.

After 10-15 years of zero/negative rates and near continuous QE, businesses, consumers and investors are a long way from fully adjusting to the recent rate shock, they wrote, arguing more financial accidents like what happened with U.S. regional banks in March, when Silicon Valley Bank and several others collapsed, remain a big risk as interest rates rise.

The pair explained that another financial accident would lead to a further reduction in lending and crush the animal spirits of investors that have been lifted by A.I. of late, thereby accelerating a recession and market downturn. The renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes coined the term animal spirits in 1936 to describe how investors and consumers are often driven by emotion rather than logic, particularly in the near term, which can lead them to be spooked by bad economic data.

Reid and Folkerts-Landau also believe the Fed could be forced to raise interest rates up to  three more times in order to fight core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices. The Feds favorite gauge of core inflation, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index, rose 0.4% from March to April, much higher than the 0.1% rise the previous month. And year over year, prices were up 4.4% in April, compared to 4.2% in March.

Core inflation is proving too high for comfort and recessionary conditions may be the only way of returning it to target, they wrote.

While some investment banks now argue that the strong labor market will prevent a major recession from hitting the U.S. economy, Folkerts-Landau and Reid pointed out that the financial models many banks use to predict recessions arent always reliablewhich means consumers and investors should be on guard.

The problem with predicting recessions is that model-based forecasts rarely predict them in advance, they wrote. On the rare occasions where recessions are predicted, mild downturns tend to be the worst that models can generate. So if we do get a hard landing, dont expect models to predict it in advance.