Electric vehicle maker Rivian saw its shares dip Friday after the Irvine-based company cut its production targets amid ongoing supply issues.

Citing a shortage of a component used to build its electric pickups, sport utility vehicles and vans, Rivian said production could drop as much as 18% this year at its lone U.S. assembly plant.

Rivian did not specify the part that is in low supply but noted that the shortage has become more acute in recent weeks.

The company now forecasts its full-year production will be between 47,000 and 49,000 vehicles, down from an earlier estimate of 57,000. During the most recent quarter, Rivian produced 13,157 vehicles and delivered 10,018, falling short of analysts’ expectations.

Shares of Rivian ended the day at $10.44, down 3.2%. The company’s stock has been battered since the start of the year, falling by more than 50% amid underwhelming financial reports. In the second quarter this year, Rivian posted a net loss of $1.46 billion compared with a loss of about $1.12 billion during the same period a year earlier. The company is scheduled to announce its third-quarter earnings next month.

Rivian received a lifeline in June when Volkswagen agreed to a massive investment in the company that is expected to total $5 billion. Rivan has nonetheless continued to struggle in the face of dropping demand for electric vehicles and other supply chain issues that forced the company to pause its production of commercial vans for Amazon.com in August.

Early this year, the automaker announced a 10% cut in its workforce that sent stocks plummeting 25% in one day. The pool of interested wealthy buyers who don’t already own an electric vehicle is shrinking, analysts said, while the broader market weighs the advantages and feasibility of switching to electric.

The average car buyer is not likely to be able to afford a Rivian vehicle, and concerns remain about charging infrastructure and the distance vehicles can drive on a single charge. Rivian’s R1T electric pickup truck starts at around $70,000; its R1S SUV starts at nearly $75,000.

With sleek design and outdoorsy features, Rivian’s vehicles garnered much attention from analysts and attracted investors such as Amazon and Volkswagen. The company exceeded expectations during its initial public offering of stock in 2021, ending its first day of trading valued at nearly $88 billion.

The production issues announced this week could get in the way of Rivian’s goal of achieving positive gross profits by the fourth quarter of this year. According to analysts, the company’s gross margins are expected to remain in negative territory in the final three months of 2024.

In April 2022, a Starbucks barista and union organizer was invited to meet with the company’s upper management in Long Beach. During the meeting, the employee raised several concerns, including charges of unfair labor practices the company faced.

Howard Schultz, who had just begun his third stint as the company’s chief executive, became irritated and shot back: “If you’re not happy at Starbucks, you can go work for another company.”

Now, the National Labor Relations Board has found that Schultz acted unlawfully by inviting an employee to quit after they raised issues related to unionization.

The board’s decision, issued Oct. 2, ordered Starbucks to cease and desist from implying employees could be fired for engaging in protected activities such as union organizing. The company must also post a notice of employee rights at all of the Long Beach stores from which employees attended the meeting with Schultz.

In its decision, the board wrote that it has “long held unlawful employers’ statements that employees dissatisfied with working conditions should quit rather than try to improve them through union activity.”

Starbucks did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the NLRB’s Long Beach decision, which comes as the coffee chain has changed its stance on unionization efforts.

Until this year, the company had ardently resisted the campaign to organize its workers, which began in 2021. Federal labor regulators found Starbucks repeatedly violated labor laws by disciplining and firing workers involved in unionizing activity, shutting down stores and stalling contract negotiations.

But in February the company announced it had agreed with the union behind the campaign, Starbucks Workers United, to streamline negotiations on contracts and take a more neutral approach when workers at unionized stores took steps to organize.

Earlier this week, the unionization drive reached a milestone, when a store in Washington became the 500th U.S. location to unionize. Starbucks Workers United has credited the company’s new posture for a wave of some 100 Starbucks stores that have unionized since March.

“We’re happy to see the NLRB continue to stand up for workers and our legal right to organize. At the same time, we’re focused on the future and are proud to be charting a new path with the company,” Michelle Eisen, national organizing committee co-chair at Starbucks Workers United and a barista at a Buffalo, N.Y., store, said in an emailed statement about the decision on Schultz’s comment.

Starbucks spokesperson Phil Gee said the company disagreed with the decision, and that sessions such as the one held with baristas in Long Beach and other locations across the country aimed to gather input from workers.

“Our focus continues to be on training and supporting our managers to ensure respect of our partners’ rights to organize and on progressing negotiations towards ratified store contracts this year,” Gee said in emailed statement Friday.

Beyond charges from federal regulators and other fallout from its earlier anti-union approach, the company is grappling with a change in leadership, softening demand, boycotts over its perceived support for Israel, pressures from activist investors and criticism that it has strayed far from its roots with menus of overly complicated items that take too long to serve. Sales in North American stores dipped 2%, and sales in the rest of the world dipped 7%, the company reported in July.

Schultz stepped down last year and in August the company named a new chief executive, Brian Niccol, to replace Schultz’s successor. Niccol has said he’ll stick with the company’s new position on unions.

“I deeply respect the right of partners to choose, through a fair and democratic process, to be represented by a union,” Niccol wrote in a letter addressed to union members and posted on the company’s website last week. “I am committed to making sure we engage constructively and in good faith with the union and the partners it represents.”

Niccol penned the remarks in response to a letter signed by hundreds of workers who serve as bargaining delegates from various stores for the union. The workers reached out ahead of a scheduled bargaining session, the first of Niccol’s tenure.

Still, workers’ views on whether to unionize is not unanimous.

As employees at the store in Washington were voting to join the union, workers at a Starbucks in Hollywood on Monday chose not to join. Also on that day, a store in Salt Lake City failed to secure votes needed to win union recognition.

The NLRB has conducted a total of 602 union elections at Starbucks stores, with 102 of them falling short and 500 passing, according to NLRB spokesperson Kayla Blado. In California, 61 stores have held union elections and 41 of them have had their bargaining units recognized by the labor board.

At the Hollywood store, pro-union workers had been optimistic ahead of the vote count, which came out 14 opposed to unionization to 6 favoring it. The workers had reached out to union officials in February, frustrated by problems of chronic understaffing.

Mikey Martinez, a shift supervisor who has worked at the store for more than five years, said he was fearful when he and co-workers began talking about unionizing. But his initial concerns about backlash dissipated after managers held a meeting about a month ago to explain the company’s new, more neutral stance.

It was “really good to be able to speak about it without checking behind our shoulders to see if anyone is listening,” Martinez said.

An unexpectedly large surge in new job creation and a down-tick in unemployment last month was good news for the economy, for the Federal Reserve and for Democratic politicians because it suggested policymakers have managed, thus far, to curb inflation without triggering a recession.

The addition of 254,000 jobs in September, reported by the government Friday, was well above the average 203,000 monthly gains over the past year. It blew past analysts’ expectations and indicated that the economy has more legs than previously thought, despite a worrisome slowdown in hiring over the past summer.

At the same time, the unemployment rate dropped to 4.1% from 4.2% in August.

Employers in an array of industries added to their payrolls, led by eating and drinking businesses, healthcare and government. Construction payrolls rose over the month, as did retail. Manufacturing and transportation and warehousing jobs, however, declined slightly, and there was little change in business services and information, which includes the struggling film industry.

“The report doesn’t single-handedly change the landscape for the economic outlook, but it does provide reassurance that there’s still plenty of life in the jobs market,” said Jim Baird, chief investment officer with Plante Moran Financial Advisors, a major accounting firm based in the Detroit area.

The strong hiring in September, plus a pickup in wage gains to a 4% annual pace — notably faster than the rate of inflation — comes on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s big, half-point reduction in interest rates last month, the first rate cut since 2020. With inflation now seemingly under control, the central bank is focusing on supporting the job market.

After Friday’s report, most analysts say they expect a quarter-point cut at its next meeting in early November. Stocks initially jumped on news of the latest employment numbers, then dropped and rose again in a volatile day on Wall Street.

The monthly jobs report is viewed as the single most important economic indicator. The October report will be released Nov. 1, a few days before the Fed meeting and the national election in which the economy has been a top concern for voters.

The September employment statistics for states won’t be released until later in the month. California’s latest jobless figure was 5.3% in August, the second highest in the nation, although job growth in recent months has been keeping pace with the national rate.

At this late point in the political calendar, new economic reports aren’t likely to sway a lot of voters, who typically have locked up their candidate of choice by the summer. Polls suggest that the lingering effects of inflation have cast a shadow over the economy in the minds of many voters, but the labor market has rarely been as resilient — and that goes for most key battleground states.

Through August, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania all have lower unemployment rates than the country’s 4.2% in August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And their pace of job growth has been as strong if not stronger than the national average.

Wisconsin’s jobless rate was just 2.9% in August, and while Nevada has the highest unemployment in the land, at 5.5%, the state is adding jobs at double the speed of the country. Meanwhile, Michigan’s unemployment and job-growth rates are slightly worse off than for the U.S. as a whole.

“If people are looking at the labor market, I would think they would have to be pretty happy,” said Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, who like other analysts were worried after the jobless rate rose to 4.3% in July from 3.7% at the start of the year. But after Friday’s report, he said, “This is a really low unemployment rate by historical standards, and most of the swing states are doing even better.”

Baker said the job market has been bolstered by federal spending and investments, as well as larger inflows of immigrants, who, while stirring fresh controversies, also have filled many jobs.

The future may be a bit cloudy, with the conflict in the Middle East and uncertainties hanging over the election Nov. 5. Also, the October job numbers could be affected by the devastating effects of Hurricane Helene and the Boeing strike if that persists, even as the suspension of the large-scale picketing by dockworkers removed another potential hit to the employment numbers.

Cory Stahle, economist for Indeed Hiring Lab, said next month’s report may not be so reassuring, reflecting the fluctuation in the data month to month. But “the labor market isn’t on the brink of collapse,” he said, although adding that Fed interest rate cuts may be needed to sustain the momentum.

“Another half-point cut in the interest rate in November is now out of the question; a quarter-point cut is likely,” said Sung Won Sohn, professor of economics and finance at Loyola Marymount University. “The central bank will proceed with a series of small cuts in the interest rate.”