Food and agricultural products supplier Cargill plans to eliminate about 8,000 jobs, or 5% of its global workforce, joining firms in multiple industries aiming to reduce expenses in response to slowing consumer and corporate demand.

About 475 in-person and remote positions will be cut at the company’s headquarters in Minnetonka, Minnesota, according to regional news reports and state notification filings. Cargill, among the world’s largest private companies, said jobs cuts are part of larger plans to trim expenses and reorganize operations over the next six years as it responds to revenue and profit declines.

“To strengthen Cargill’s impact, we must realign our talent and resources to align with our strategy,” the company said in a statement Tuesday. “Unfortunately, that means reducing our global workforce by approximately 5%.”

CoStar data showed Cargill employs approximately 160,000 at about 200 locations worldwide, occupying around 18 million square feet of industrial and office space. Earlier this year, the company leased more than 80,000 square feet of office space in midtown Atlanta for a new research hub focused on deploying artificial intelligence in its operations.

Cargill is a major supplier of food ingredients and agricultural commodities such as grains and animal feeds. It recently topped Forbes’ annual list of the nation’s largest private companies for the fourth straight year with fiscal 2024 revenue of $160 billion, down 10% from the prior year. 

One week after matching a post-pandemic peak, large U.S. cities averaged 40.6% of pre-pandemic office attendance for the week ended Nov. 27 as workers prepared for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, according to Kastle Systems.

The 10-city average in the security technology firm’s latest tracking data was down sharply from 53% in the prior week, when the average matched a post-pandemic peak last reached in late January. The latest pre-holiday figure was the lowest average posted since the week ended July 10 in Kastle’s "Back to Work Barometer," which has hovered around 50% for much of the past year.

Based on anonymous keycard data from Kastle’s office property clients, none of the barometer cities reached 50% of pre-pandemic traffic in the latest report. But Texan cities again topped the list for attendance, with Austin at 48.9%, Houston at 48.3% and Dallas at 47.9%.

They were followed by New York at 41.5%, Chicago at 40.2%, Los Angeles at 39.6%, and Washington, D.C., at 37.3%. 

Construction was among industries posting a drop in job openings in the latest Labor Department data, even though overall U.S. openings increased in what remains a strong employment climate despite slowed hiring.

The government Tuesday said construction firms had 249,000 job openings on the last business day of October, down 9,000 from the prior month and marking a decline of 164,000, or nearly 40%, from a year earlier. Construction trade groups have pointed to generally strong hiring during the past year, though some firms are struggling to fill certain jobs that require specialized skills, and contractor staffing in some real estate categories has slowed along with consumer and developer demand.

“There’s reason to suspect that election uncertainty, combined with the expectation that borrowing costs will decline over the next several quarters, delayed staffing decisions over the past few months,” Anirban Basu, chief economist for the Associated Builders and Contractors trade group, said in a statement. The group said openings are expected to rise through the early months of 2025.

Labor Department numbers showed total U.S. job openings at 7.7 million at the end of October, up slightly from 7.4 million a month earlier but down from 8.7 million a year earlier. Hirings and separations — including resignations and layoffs — each totaled about 5.3 million, on par with month-earlier and year-earlier levels.

Analysts at Oxford Economics said the latest jobs data sent mixed signals ahead of the Federal Reserve’s next rate-setting meeting scheduled for Dec. 17-18, which the research firm projected will result in another quarter-percent cut in the Fed’s key borrowing rate. October’s level of resignations remained consistent with slowing wage growth, helping to keep overall U.S. inflation in check, according to Matthew Martin, an Oxford senior economist.