Amazon warehouse in Alabama set to begin second union election
During the first union election at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, early last year, organizers largely avoided visiting workers at home because the pandemic was raging and few Americans were vaccinated. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union believed the precaution was prudent even if it made persuading workers harder and may have contributed to the union’s lopsided defeat. But for a so-called rerun election, which runs through March 25, the labor movement is pulling few punches. Several national unions have collectively sent dozens of organizers to Bessemer to rally workers. And organizers and workers have spent months going door to door to build support for the union.
Strong jobs report shows resilient economy despite COVID wave
A record-setting spike in coronavirus cases kept millions of workers at home in January and disrupted businesses from coast to coast. But it couldn’t knock the U.S. job-market recovery off course. Employers added 467,000 jobs in January, seasonally adjusted, the Labor Department said Friday. The report smashed the projections of economists, who had been expecting the wave of coronavirus cases associated with the omicron variant to lead to anemic gains, if not an outright decline in jobs. Instead, employers kept on hiring. At the White House on Friday, President Joe Biden hailed the economy’s “historic” progress. “America’s job machine is going stronger than ever,” he said.
Biden extends solar tariffs, with major caveats
President Joe Biden announced Friday he would extend tariffs on imported solar products first imposed during the Trump administration but would reduce the scope of products affected by the levies, a decision aimed at balancing his goals for bolstering domestic manufacturing with speeding up the transition toward clean energy. The decision will impose a tariff of 14% to 15% for the next four years. But the Biden administration also moved to double the amount of solar cells that can come into the country without facing tariffs, and said it would begin talks with Canada and Mexico to allow them to export their products to the United States duty-free.
Apple change is hammering internet companies
Apple’s vision of a more private web is not necessarily a more profitable one for internet companies that depend on advertising revenue. That lesson was clear Wednesday when Meta, founded as Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg, said privacy features introduced by Apple last year could cost the company $10 billion in lost sales this year. The news, along with increased spending as Meta tries to focus on the new idea of a metaverse, dropped Meta’s stock price more than 26% Thursday. Meta’s warning and its cratering stock price were reminders that even among tech giants, Apple holds extraordinary sway.
Stocks climb as investors weigh surprising jobs report, Amazon earnings
Stocks on Wall Street rose Friday, as an unexpectedly strong jobs report scrambled investors’ expectations for coming interest rate increases and as the latest round of earnings reports offset some fears about declining corporate profits. The S&P 500 climbed half a percent, a day after its steepest one-day drop in nearly a year. The index ended the week with a gain of 1.6%. The Nasdaq composite rose 1.6% on Friday. Economists had cautioned against reading too much into Friday’s report — noting that the data was collected when coronavirus cases reached 800,000 a day, and that quirks in the data might skew the results.
Senators challenge Biden’s pick for bank overseer
Sarah Bloom Raskin’s past statements on climate regulation are stoking heated Republican opposition to her nomination to be the Federal Reserve’s vice chair for supervision. Several Republican lawmakers on the Senate Banking Committee referred to an opinion piece critical of government support for fossil fuel companies that Raskin wrote for The New York Times in 2020. Raskin struck a gentler tone Thursday, rebutting the idea that she would favor using bank supervision to choke off lending to oil and gas companies. She has been nominated alongside Lisa D. Cook and Philip N. Jefferson, economists up for seats on the Fed’s Board of Governors.
Architects at New York firm drop union bid
Less than two months after seeking to form the only union at a prominent U.S. architecture firm, workers at SHoP Architects, in New York, have formally ended their effort. “We never imagined we would have to write this statement, but after a difficult unionizing attempt that was met with a powerful anti-union campaign, we have decided to withdraw our petition,” the group said in a statement Thursday. The organizing campaign was a response to long-simmering tensions in the architecture profession, in which workers often accumulate tens of thousands of dollars in debt in college and graduate school but earn modest salaries while working long hours.
