Investments and Business

Related media - Related media Workers who have helped lead the organizing said the development had surprised them. “It still feels pretty surreal right now,” said Michelle Eisen, a longtime barista at a Starbucks in Buffalo that was the first company-owned store to unionize during the current campaign. “There has not been a single call I’ve been on today where either I wasn’t crying or everyone else wasn’t crying.” If a framework is agreed to and quickly leads to contracts, experts said, it could be a major development in labor relations in corporate America, where companies like Amazon and Apple…

Connected media - Linked media “There’s a lot that goes into moving these safely and properly,” said Angeline Beltsos, chief executive physician at Kindbody, which has 35 clinics across the country and provides fertility benefit coverage for employers, including Walmart. Will my health insurance cover the cost to move my embryos if I can no longer get I.V.F. in my home state? Maybe. Some coverage could be broad enough to pay for the transport of embryos. “It is likely that employees working for large employers have some kind of coverage,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, the chief executive officer of Purchaser Business…

Connected media - Related media Though Apple had not unveiled its car to consumers, the product had for many years been one of Silicon Valley’s worst-kept secrets because it was being tested on public roads. The cancellation is a rare move by Apple, which typically doesn’t shelve such public and high-profile projects. The company has struggled in recent years to find new avenues for growth as its all-important iPhone has saturated the market and people are upgrading their phones less frequently than they used to. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has publicly hinted that Apple was interested in entering the…

Connected media - Associated media Innovation on wheels Has Apple really crashed the car? The tech giant has killed its electric vehicle project as it pivots to artificial intelligence, prompting many observers to declare the venture a major failure for the company. Here’s a contrarian thought: That critique misses a wider point about how Apple innovates, because the company has used the project to power a whole ecosystem of products and services that have been unmitigated successes. Apple invested billions to build a self-driving car. Reports emerged about the secret effort, code-named Project Titan, in 2014, and the company has…

William Whitworth, who wrote revealing profiles in The New Yorker giving voice to his idiomatic subjects and polished the prose of some of the nation’s celebrated writers as its associate editor before transplanting that magazine’s painstaking standards to The Atlantic, where he was editor in chief for 20 years, died on Friday in Conway, Ark., near Little Rock. He was 87.His daughter, Katherine Whitworth Stewart, announced the death. She said he was being treated after several falls and operations in a hospital.As a young college graduate, Mr. Whitworth forsook a promising career as a jazz trumpeter to do a different…

If the economy is slowing down, nobody told the labor market.Employers added 275,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported Friday, in another month that exceeded expectations even as the unemployment rate rose.It was the third straight month of seasonally adjusted gains above 200,000, and the 38th consecutive month of growth — fresh evidence that four years after going into pandemic shutdowns, America’s jobs engine still has plenty of steam.“We’ve been expecting a slowdown in the labor market, a more material loosening in conditions, but we’re just not seeing that,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief economist at High Frequency Economics.Previously reported…

Washington lawmakers introduced a bill this week calling for TikTok to cut ties with its Chinese parent company or face a ban in the United States. When many users opened the popular app on Thursday, the company greeted them with a message to oppose the legislation, prompting a flood of phone calls to several Capitol Hill offices.“Stop a TikTok shutdown,” the message on the app read. It included a button for people to call their representatives, saying: “Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO.”By noon, the phone lines for members of Congress were…

Economic vibes don’t necessarily predict electoral outcomes, though, and this campaign is different in many ways from those in the past. “We’re kind of in an unprecedented situation where we’re weighing two incumbents,” said Joanne Hsu, who runs the Michigan survey.Anthony Rice, a 54-year-old Democrat in eastern Indiana, and pretty much everyone he knows, he said, are doing well right now. Gas prices are down, jobs are plentiful, and Mr. Rice, a unionized dump-truck driver, is benefiting directly from the infrastructure law that Mr. Biden signed in 2021. Yet few people in the deep-red part of the country where he…

Apple on Monday was fined 1.8 billion euros ($1.95 billion) by European Union regulators for thwarting competition among music streaming rivals, a severe punishment levied against the tech giant in a long-simmering battle over the powerful role it plays as gatekeeper of the App Store.The penalty, announced by the E.U. antitrust regulator, is the culmination of a five-year investigation set in motion by one of its biggest rivals, Spotify. Regulators said Apple illegally used its App Store dominance to box out rivals.“For a decade, Apple abused its dominant position in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps through…

When Shawn Fain, the United Automobile Workers president, unveiled the deal that ended six weeks of strikes at Ford Motor in the fall, he framed it as part of a longer campaign. Next, he declared, would be the task of organizing nonunion plants across the country.“One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” he said at the time. “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be with the Big Three. It will be the Big Five or Big Six.”Four months later, the first…