NEW YORK (AP) — As Americans start to go out and update their wardrobes, jeans giant Levi Strauss & Co. is enjoying a resurgence in denim.

That has helped the company upgrade its fiscal first-half outlook and has pushed shares of Levi’s about 30% higher so far this year.

Still, the San Francisco-based company, like many others, faces lots of uncertainty in the coming months as labor shortages and rising cotton prices add costs. The company is also confronting a raging pandemic in many areas outside of the U.S. International business accounts for more than 50% of its $4.45 billion in annual sales. In Europe, about 30% of its stores are still closed.

Levi’s CEO Chip Bergh, however, believes the 168-year-old company, which sells in more than 100 countries and operates 1,000 stores, is stronger coming out of the pandemic. It has used the health crisis as an opportunity to double down on investments that were first laid out when Levi’s returned to the public market in 2019, Bergh said. That included diversifying beyond denim to tops, expanding online and selling more directly to the consumer. In fact, the company’s first ever app that Levi’s launched in late 2019 in North America has resonated well during the health crisis.

The Associated Press recently interviewed Bergh in a wide-ranging interview. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q. What did the pandemic teach you?

A. When the pandemic happened very, very early on, we declared that we were going to emerge a stronger company. In Mandarin, the word crisis is also the same word for opportunity, and crisis creates opportunity. So we saw this as an opportunity to reshape our P&L (profit and loss), to double down on the investments in areas where we knew consumers were going to be going during the pandemic, to accelerate our business online, to build new capabilities online.

Q. What are the big fashion trends?

A. We are seeing the beginning of a new denim cycle. During the pandemic, consumers went much more casual. Obviously, they were working from home. Everybody was Zooming. And so it was mid-chest up and who knows what they were wearing below their waist. It could have been pajamas or sweat pants. But jeans maintained its share of apparel during the spring, the pandemic lockdown period. And now we’re seeing a resurgence of denim as people are coming out of lockdown.

Q. What else is driving people to update their wardrobe?

A. The number of people who are in a new size is pretty staggering. Some people gained weight during the pandemic, and many people lost weight. But both on the men’s side of the business and women’s side. More than 25% of consumers have a new size today. And then they’re taking a look at what are the trends, and this new looser fit that we led early on in the pandemic is definitely taking hold. And our competitors have copied it.

Q. What about inflationary pressures?

A. We are seeing the inflationary headwinds, particularly in cotton, but also in distribution, logistics costs. Labor costs are going up around the world, as well. We’re very confident about our P&L for this fiscal year because almost everything is locked in at this point, and we’ve taken pricing early in the year.

Q. Is Levi’s having difficulties finding workers?

A. There’s no question that labor is challenging right now. We’re Levi’s, and we’re an aspirational company for a lot of people to work for. And so we’re in pretty good shape in retail. And we are considering right now what we have to do with our wage rates going forward because it is both in retail and our distribution centers. Candidly, we have folks that are right around the corner from Amazon distribution centers and Amazon is not afraid to pay $20 an hour at some of these DCs (distribution centers).

Q. Why is Levi’s expanding its direct-to-consumer business?

A. When I joined the company 10 years ago, our total direct to consumer business was 21%. Last year, we finished the year at almost 40%, and our ambition is to get above 50% in the coming few years. DTC is important to us because we’re able to have that direct connection with the consumer — there’s no middleman.

Q. How did the pandemic accelerate Levi’s move to show virtual copies of designs to buyers?

A. The pandemic compressed what might have happened in 10 years into 12 or 15 or 18 months. Thankfully, we were already on this journey of digitizing our go—to-market experience. We’ve developed what we call photo-real 3D and now 5D denim samples that look like they’re real, but they’re actually digital. They’re not digital photos. They’re digital drawings essentially of product. And because of the pandemic, we were able to sell off of a….digital tablet.

Q. Levi’s has a history of taking a stand on issue like guns and climate issues. Most recently, Levi’s has been very focused on voter rights.

A. We’re really focused on trying to support the federal legislation that’s working its way through Congress right now. Then, we’re focused on a couple of states where we have pretty meaningful employee populations. So Texas, Florida, Kentucky, where we have sizable employee operations. We’re also funding nonprofit organizations that are doing really good work to also combat this legislation at the local level.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans are broadly supportive of President Joe Biden’s early handling of the coronavirus pandemic, a new poll finds, and approval of his stewardship of the economy has ticked up following passage of a sprawling $1.9 trillion relief bill.

But Americans are more critical of Biden’s early approach to some of the hot-button issues that are moving to the forefront, including guns and immigration, according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The president has outlined goals for tackling both issues but has made clear that they are not his immediate legislative priorities.

“I’m going to deal with all those problems. The question is the priorities as they come and land on my plate,” Biden said in a news conference last week.

Biden’s early weeks in office have made it abundantly clear that his top priority is curtailing the pandemic: urging Americans to take precautionary measures to slow the spread of COVID-19, prioritizing the rollout of vaccines and pushing the relief bill through Congress in a party line vote. Vaccine distribution has soared since Biden took office, with more than 96 million Americans having received at least one dose.

Americans have responded favorably to the president’s approach, with 73% approving of his handling of the pandemic. That includes about half of Republicans, a rarity given how divided Americans have been along party lines on many key issues in recent years.

Gwen Medley, a nurse from Galveston, Texas, who has been administering vaccines in her state, is among them. The 66-year-old Republican is critical of Biden on a range of other issues, including immigration, but said the president is doing a “pretty good job” on the pandemic so far — in part, she says, because of vaccine efforts he inherited from the Trump administration.

“Trump got the ball rolling, and Biden is continuing to push that ball,” Medley said.

Notably, Biden’s approval rating on the economy has ticked up slightly since passage of the relief bill, which included direct payments to millions of Americans and aid to schools and state and local governments. Sixty percent of Americans now say they approve of Biden’s handling of the economy, compared with 55% a month ago.

Overall, Biden’s job approval sits at a healthy 61% as he enters his third month in office, according to the AP-NORC survey. That’s well above the approval ratings for his predecessor, Donald Trump, at this same point in his presidency. Trump’s overall approval rating never topped 50% in an AP-NORC survey.

Biden and his advisers contend that despite the litany of issues facing the country, he will be judged foremost on his handling of the pandemic, now in its second year. The virus has killed more than 550,000 people in the U.S., and even with vaccines more accessible, some states are experiencing a surge in cases as new variants take hold.

“Our work is far from over,” Biden said this week as he implored states to keep mask mandates and other restrictions in place. “The war against COVID-19 is far from won. This is deadly serious.”

Much of Biden’s efforts have been in sharp contrast to Trump, who emphasized the need to keep businesses open and the U.S. economy humming, even if that meant flouting public health guidelines for controlling the pandemic. Biden has flipped that approach, but also tried to supplement the economy through the legislation he signed into law in early March.

No Republicans in Congress voted for the measure, with some arguing that it unnecessarily added to the federal budget deficit at a time when the economy was already moving in a more positive direction.

Americans are split over Biden’s handling of the deficit, with 48% saying they approve and 50% saying they disapprove. The majority of Democrats — 77% — approve, while the majority of Republicans — 83% — disapprove.

Biden faces a similar partisan divide on gun policy and immigration, two issues that have quickly disrupted Biden’s carefully laid plans for his opening months in office.

On gun policy, 45% say they back Biden’s approach, while 52% disapprove. The survey was conducted after a pair of deadly mass shootings, one in Atlanta that killed eight people, including six Asian Americans, and another at a grocery store in Colorado that left 10 people dead. Biden has said he’s considering executive actions to tighten gun restrictions, but has also said he believes “rational” legislation could pass the narrowly divided Senate.

He’s called on the Senate, in particular, to pass measures already approved by the House that would expand background checks, though he’s putting his own political muscle first into a $2 trillion infrastructure package the White House unveiled this week.

Biden is also confronting mounting concerns along the U.S.-Mexico border, where the number of families and migrant children arriving is on the rise. Republicans have blamed the increases on Biden’s swift rollback of some of Trump’s most aggressive immigration deterrent policies, moves the White House has warned should not be viewed as an open invitation to cross the border.

The White House, in turn, has blamed the situation at the border in large part on the conditions it inherited from the Trump administration. In addition to his executive actions, Biden has unveiled a legislative proposal that would provide an eight-year path to citizenship for millions of people currently in the U.S. illegally.

So far, just 42% say they approve of how Biden is handling immigration, and a similar share, 44%, say they approve of how he’s handling border security.

While much of Biden’s early focus has been on domestic matters, foreign policy concerns also loom. The president has a 55% approval rating on foreign policy, putting that issue slightly below his overall job performance. The poll also finds Americans cite the threat to the U.S. from the spread of infectious diseases and the threat from extremist militant groups as among their top concerns, along with China’s influence around the world.

Democrats and Republicans have differing concerns about the greatest threats facing the United States. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to cite the spread of infectious diseases (69% to 47%), extremist militant groups (67% to 51%) and climate change (76% to 22%) as threats to the U.S. They also are slightly more concerned about Russia’s global influence (50% to 42%).

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to be very concerned about the threat posed by illegal immigration (72% to 22%), China’s influence around the world (68% to 44%), the Iranian nuclear program (58% vs 39%), and the North Korean nuclear program (51% to 41%).

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California added 141,000 jobs in February as more than a quarter of a million people returned to the workforce, state officials announced Friday, a reflection of loosening virus restrictions on businesses as more people get vaccinated.

Employment in restaurants and hotels surged by more than 102,000 people, welcome news for an industry hit hard by the on-again, off-again restrictions imposed by the government at the whims of an unpredictable virus.

The state lost 155,400 jobs in December and January when Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a sweeping lockdown amid frightening increases of cases, hospitalizations and deaths. But California gained 91% of those jobs back in a single month, dropping the unemployment rate to 8.5%, according to new data from the California Employment Development Department.

“The California job machine has been turned back on after a dismal two months,” said Sung Won Sohn, a professor of finance and economics at Loyola Marymount University.

But California’s recovery appears to lag the rest of the country. Its unemployment rate is more than 2 percentage points higher than the U.S. as a whole, tying Connecticut for the third highest rate among states behind Hawaii and New York.

California has regained just 39% of the 2.7 million jobs lost in March and April of last year when the bottom fell out of the economy. Meanwhile, Sohn said the U.S. as a whole has regained 56% of jobs lost.

Overall, California had 1.2 million fewer jobs in February than it did a year ago. The state processed more than 108,000 unemployment claims last week, the second week in a row that new claims have surpassed 100,000 after a decline in February.

“Today’s numbers are not consistent with the other employment indicators that we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks,” said Michael Bernick, a former director of the California Employment Development Department now an attorney with Duane Morris. “I think these numbers need to be balanced with, as I say, other employment indicators.”

Still, declines in the numbers of new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations point to improved job numbers in the coming weeks. More than 94% of the state’s population now live in counties free from the state’s most severe virus restrictions.

California has been receiving about 1.8 million vaccine doses per week. But that’s expected to jump to 3 million doses per week by mid April — enough that Newsom announced on Tuesday all adults will be eligible to get the vaccine starting April 15.

“There is a growing confidence that the bottom is definitely behind us,” Sohn said.

But the economic impacts of the pandemic are likely to linger. Close to 1 in 5 workers in California have claimed unemployment benefits for more than six months, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan California Policy Lab at the University of California.

People who are unemployed for long periods of time often have a harder time finding a job. And once they do, they typically earn less than they had been before they were unemployed, said Till von Wachter, professor of economics at UCLA and director of the California Policy Lab.

“You are more likely to take on debt, more likely to cut back on significant consumption the longer you are unemployed,” he said.

Since the pandemic began, more than 45% of workers who were either employed or actively looking for work in February 2020 have claimed unemployment benefits. That figure is even higher for Black workers, with nearly 90% filing for benefits.

“African Americans have applied for unemployment benefits at astounding rates, further evidence of the inequities we must address to ensure a strong, equitable recovery,” California Labor Secretary Julie A. Su and Dee Dee Myers, director of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, said in a joint statement.

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