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A Fed governor says the latest inflation data reaffirms the case for big rate increases.

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A Fed governor says the latest inflation data reaffirms the case for big rate increases.

Christopher J. Waller, one of many Federal Reserve’s governors in Washington, stated on Wednesday that current financial information means that the central financial institution ought to increase rates of interest by greater than common in Might, and doubtlessly in June and July as nicely.

“The info has are available precisely to assist that kind of coverage motion, if the committee decides to take action,” Mr. Waller stated throughout a CNBC interview on Wednesday, including that the information could justify “probably extra in June and July.”

Fed officers have coalesced round the necessity to “expeditiously” return coverage to a impartial setting, one through which borrowing prices are neither stoking financial progress nor slowing it a lot that unemployment rises, as inflation stays stubbornly speedy. Mr. Waller and different officers have made a case for making massive fee will increase to hurry up the method, following the Fed’s determination to extend charges by 1 / 4 of a proportion level in March.

Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, has signaled that a big fee enhance is up for debate, and minutes from the central financial institution’s final assembly confirmed that “many” officers would have favored a big enhance in March if it hadn’t been for uncertainty created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Waller urged that although inflation is likely to be touching a peak — information this week confirmed it rising on the quickest tempo since 1981, because the struggle in Ukraine drove fuel costs larger and exacerbated already-rapid value will increase — it remained “very excessive,” and the Fed was going to wish to maintain working to scale back it.

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It’s most likely the case that “that is just about the height — it’s going to begin coming down,” Mr. Waller stated, including that he had forecast value will increase slowing all through the second a part of the yr as a part of the financial projections he submitted on the Fed’s March assembly. “We’re already seeing some oil costs retreating again.”

However Mr. Waller stated it was vital to elevate charges as much as, and even above, impartial to deliver down inflation.

“Proper now, our essential concern is getting these costs down, and we will try this with out inflicting a recession,” he stated.

Markets have closely penciled in massive fee will increase in Might and June, and buyers had marked up the percentages of a giant transfer in July over current weeks.

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Is California government considering oil refinery takeovers? Yes, it is

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Is California government considering oil refinery takeovers? Yes, it is

Russia. China. Venezuela. Iran. More than a dozen countries make gasoline at state-owned refineries.

Could California be next on the list?

California policymakers are considering state ownership of one or more oil refineries, one item on a list of options presented by the California Energy Commission to ensure steady gas supplies as oil companies pull back from the refinery business in the state.

“The state recognizes that they’re on a pathway to more refinery closures,” said Skip York, chief energy strategist at energy consultant Turner Mason & Co. The risk to consumers and the state’s economy, he said, is gasoline supply disappearing faster than consumer demand, resulting in fuel shortages, higher prices and severe logistical challenges.

Gasoline demand is falling in California, albeit slowly, for two reasons: more efficient gasoline engines, and the increasing number of electric vehicles on the road. Gasoline consumption in California peaked in 2005 and fell 15% through 2023, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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Electric vehicles, including plug-in hybrids, now represent about 25% of annual new car sales. By state mandate, new sales of gasoline cars and light trucks will be banned starting in model year 2035.

The drop in demand is causing fundamental strategic shifts among the state’s major oil refiners: Chevron, Marathon, Phillips 66, PBF Energy and Valero.

Already, two California refineries have ceased producing gasoline to make biodiesel fuel for use in heavy-duty trucks, a cleaner-fuel alternative that enjoys rich state subsidies. More worrisome, the Phillips 66 refinery complex in Wilmington, just outside Los Angeles, plans to close down permanently by year’s end.

That leaves eight major refineries in California capable of producing gasoline. The closure of any one would create serious gasoline supply issues, industry analysts say. But both Chevron and Valero are contemplating permanent refinery closures.

The implications? “Demand will decline gradually,” York said, “but supply will fall out in chunks.” What’s unknown is how many refineries will close, and how soon, and how that will affect supply and demand.

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That puts the state in a tough position, according to York. “Even if you had perfect foresight, it would be hard to get the timing right.”

A state refinery takeover seems like a radical idea, but the fact that it’s being considered demonstrates the seriousness of the supply issue.

It’s one of several option laid out by the California Energy Commission, which is fulfilling a legislative order to find ways to ensure “a reliable supply of affordable and safe transportation fuels in California.”

The options list is disparate: Ship in more gasoline from Asia; regulate refineries on the order of electric utilities; cap profit margins; and many more.

The list was due to be transformed into a formal transition plan by Dec. 31, 2024, but six weeks later no plan has been issued. Therefore, it’s not yet clear what the state response will be if another refinery announces a shutdown this year or next.

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California is known as a “gasoline island” lacking the kind of multistate logistics network through most of the continental U.S. that can help alleviate supply shocks. No pipelines exist to feed gasoline in from other states. Ocean shipments from the refinery-rich Gulf States are restricted by an antiquated federal law known as the Jones Act. Gasoline imports add up to only 8% of California supply. The other 92% is nearly all produced at California refineries.

Further complicating matters: the special blends of gasoline required in California. Those required formulations have gone a long way toward reducing air pollution. But they also drive up gasoline prices and raise the risk of shortages, because little such gasoline is produced outside California.

The Western States Petroleum Assn. lobby group warns that state involvement in refinery ownership or management would be difficult.

“This is a very complex and hard business to run,” the group said in a statement. “There are commercial barriers and technical barriers that take a comprehensive and holistic understanding of the industry, and how it works.”

Asked about the potential for state-owned refineries, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office referred questions to the state energy commission but issued a statement saying California is “is engaged in meaningful and thoughtful policy work to successfully manage our transition away from fossil fuels over the next 20 years, not overnight.”

In a statement, the energy commission acknowledged that “there are many challenges to overcome” with a state-owned refinery, “including the high cost to purchase and operate, the skilled labor and expertise necessary to manage refinery operations, and how the refinery would fit into the state’s transition away from petroleum fuels.”

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James Gallagher, the Assembly Republican leader from Yuba City, says California isn’t moving quickly enough to address potential gasoline shortages.

“We’re starting to lose refineries because we’ve made it so expensive and impossible to operate in California,” he said. “Now, after we’ve chased them off, we’re talking about taking them over to ensure there’s some supply. We’re moving toward price controls and government takeover of industries. That’s never worked very well in the history of the world.”

State Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones (R-Santee) agreed: “The state has no business being in the oil refinery business,” he said.

Their Democratic counterparts, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) and Senate Majority Leader President pro Tempore Mike McGuire (D-Sonoma), declined to be interviewed.

Talk of further refinery closures over the next couple of years is heating up. In a conference call with investors last year, shortly after the Phillips 66 announcement, Valero Chief Executive Lane Riggs responded to concerns about the company closing either of its two California refineries.

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“All options are on the table,” he said. “Clearly, the California regulatory environment is putting pressure on operators out there and how they might think about going forward with their operations.”

Chevron, a California company since 1879, last year announced that it was moving its headquarters to Texas. The company has considered ceasing production at one or both of its California refineries, the Wall Street Journal recently reported, which Chevron confirmed in a statement to The Times.

“Recent California policies, like banning the sale of new internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035, the potential tax/penalty on refinery profits and the potential new minimum storage requirement are all headwinds to our business and erode our confidence going forward,” Andy Walz, Chevron’s president of downstream, midstream and chemicals, said in the statement.

Jones said while he’s not sure the state-owned refinery option is a serious proposal, it’s on the options list, and the looming supply issue is real. “I’m not sure all Californians have grasped the impending urgency of the situation,” he said.

“I think what we probably need is to build another refinery here in the state,” Jones said. Otherwise, when refineries close, gasoline demand would have to be met by gasoline imports, mostly by ship, from Asia.

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“People freak out about the environmental impacts of crude oil shipments,” Jones said. “But no one’s freaking out about the environmental impacts of gasoline imports.”

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Amazon Union Push Falls Short at North Carolina Warehouse

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Amazon Union Push Falls Short at North Carolina Warehouse

Amazon workers voted overwhelmingly against a bid to unionize their North Carolina warehouse, the National Labor Relations Board said on Saturday, the latest setback in labor organizing efforts at the e-commerce giant.

Workers at the RDU1 fulfillment center in Garner, outside of Raleigh, voted 2,447 to 829 against unionizing with Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment, or CAUSE, an upstart union founded by warehouse workers in 2022.

Organizers at the warehouse, which employs more than 4,000 people, sought starting wages of $30 an hour. The current pay range is about $18 to $24, Amazon said. The union also demanded longer lunch breaks and increased vacation time.

In a statement, leaders of CAUSE said the election outcome was the result of Amazon’s “relentless and illegal efforts to intimidate us.” They did not say whether they would challenge the outcome, but vowed to keep trying to organize.

Eileen Hards, a spokeswoman for Amazon, wrote: “We’re glad that our team in Garner was able to have their voices heard, and that they chose to keep a direct relationship with Amazon.”

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Leading up to the election, the worker-led union filed charges with the labor relations board accusing Amazon of interfering with employees’ protected union activity. The company gave preferential treatment to workers who did not support the union, according to the charges filed by CAUSE. Amazon also unfairly fired the co-founder of the union one week before workers filed for a union election in December, CAUSE said in a filing.

Amazon denied any election interference. Employees have the choice of whether to join a union, and the company talks “openly, candidly and respectfully” about unionization, Ms. Hards said before the vote. She said the CAUSE co-founder had been fired for “repeated misconduct that included making derogatory and racist comments to his co-workers.”

Addressing demands voiced by the union, Ms. Hards said the company already offered safe workplaces, competitive pay, industry-leading benefits and consistent scheduling. The CAUSE union, she added, “has no experience representing workers or their interests.”

On top of what they characterized as resistance from the company, organizers at the warehouse faced an environment in the South that has historically been hostile to unions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership in North Carolina last year was 2.4 percent, the lowest rate in the country and far below the national average of 9.9 percent.

Amazon has aggressively fended off union campaigns and stalled the bargaining process in multiple segments of its business, including warehouses, delivery operations and grocery stores.

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In 2022, workers at a Staten Island warehouse in New York voted to form Amazon’s first union in the United States; it is now affiliated with the Teamsters union. Amazon has challenged the election outcome in court, and has refused to recognize the union or bargain with it. Delivery drivers, who work for third-party package delivery companies serving Amazon, have also mounted campaigns with the Teamsters.

The Trump administration’s moves at the labor relations board since the inauguration — including the replacement of the general counsel appointed in the Biden administration, who was considered friendly to labor — could further embolden employers to clamp down on organizing and refuse to bargain, labor law experts said.

Workers at a Philadelphia location of Whole Foods Market voted in January to affiliate with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, establishing the first union beachhead at the Amazon-owned grocery chain. In a filing with the labor board challenging the election, the company cited President Trump’s firing of a Democratic board member, which stripped the board of a quorum necessary to issue decisions.

In January, Amazon said that it was closing its warehouse and logistics operations in the Canadian province of Quebec, where unions had gained a foothold among some Amazon workers, and that it would lay off 1,700 employees.

The North Carolina election is not the first unsuccessful union bid among Amazon warehouse workers. In 2021, workers at a warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., voted against unionizing, but labor officials later ruled that Amazon had illegally influenced the election. Workers voted a second time in 2022, but the outcome was too close to call, prompting a labor judge to order a third election. That vote has yet to be held, and Amazon has denied wrongdoing.

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“Ultimately, the biggest thing that we’re fighting for is dignity,” Italo Medelius-Marsano, a member of the CAUSE organizing committee who works at the RDU1 ship dock, said before the vote. “We’re making sure Amazon knows that we are human beings,” he said, citing the movement’s catch phrase: “I am not a robot.”

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Google and Meta used to champion DEI efforts. Why Big Tech is pulling back

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Google and Meta used to champion DEI efforts. Why Big Tech is pulling back

More than a decade ago, outcries about the lack of diversity in the tech industry reverberated across major Silicon Valley companies from Facebook to Google.

Women and minorities spoke out about feeling out of place in male-dominated professions, civil rights activists urged businesses to do more and tech workers like Tracy Chou, who was a software engineer at Pinterest at the time, pushed companies to release diversity data.

“There was already some movement in that direction, at least a feeling like we should do this,” said Chou, who wrote a viral Medium post in 2013 about the lack of female engineers. “What I happened to crystallize was a line of thinking that really resonated with the more data-driven side of the industry.”

For diversity advocates like Chou, the tide has now turned. Facing more political pressure and legal risks during President Trump’s second administration, tech companies that previously championed diversity including Google, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) and Amazon are scaling back, scrapping or rethinking their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts.

It’s part of a broader retrenchment across the business community. About 20% of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 100 have retreated from DEI commitments since Trump was elected, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. Those include Target Corp., McDonald’s Corp. and Disney.

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Trump and Elon Musk, who spent more than $200 million to help elect the president to a second term, have been vocal critics of DEI programs. In a fact sheet about Trump’s executive order, the White House said many corporations use DEI as “an excuse for biased and unlawful employment practices,” sending a message to businesses that they could get sued. Companies such as Google and Amazon also contract with federal agencies.

“They’re reading the room, especially with Trump and Elon running the country,” said Chou, now the chief executive of Block Party, a tool that helps users combat online harassment.

Corporate pledges to fight racism including from Musk’s company Tesla heightened after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, sparking massive protests against police brutality.

But legal threats emerged in 2023 after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions. As tech companies cut thousands of jobs, the massive cuts also hit DEI teams.

Spending on DEI roles at S&P 500 companies started to fall in 2022 as mass layoffs swept the tech industry, data from Revelio Labs show. In November 2024, these businesses spent an estimated $1.3 billion on DEI roles, down 10% compared to the same month in 2022.

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From December 2022 to December 2024, tech companies including Google’s parent company Alphabet, Netflix and Amazon spent less on roles that promoted diversity and inclusion.

During this period, Tesla’s DEI spending was down by 84% and Meta’s DEI spending declined by 53%, according to Revelio Labs, which analyzes data from various sources including online profiles on sites like LinkedIn or Jobcase.

Tech companies have pointed to legal risks in internal memos about why they’re rethinking how they approach their DEI programs.

“They wanted to keep President Trump on their good side, because they don’t want to deal with any legal ramifications from the federal government,” said Jared Slater, partner at Ervin Cohen & Jessup.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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Meta’s Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, a former Trump critic who also said previously that improving diversity in tech is important, has in recent months aligned himself with the president and talked about the benefits of “masculine energy.” The company told its employees in an internal memo that the legal and policy landscape surrounding DEI changed and pointed to Supreme Court decisions.

“The term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others,” said Janelle Gale, Meta’s head of human resources, in an internal memo.

The company said it wanted to serve everyone and would no longer use its “diversity slate approach” in which hiring managers consider candidates from underrepresented backgrounds when interviewing for an open role.

Meta also ended representation goals for women and minorities, a program to source supplies from diverse-owned businesses and scrapped its DEI teams. Maxine Williams, Meta’s chief diversity officer, became the vice president of accessibility and engagement.

Websites for Meta’s unconscious bias training and TechPrep, a resource hub for underrepresented people and their parents to learn about computer science, are no longer online.

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Meta declined to comment but confirmed the memo, first published by Axios.

Google said this month it was reevaluating its DEI programs “following recent court decisions and executive orders on this topic.” The company said it would no longer set hiring targets tied to improving diversity after previously setting a goal of increasing by 30% the proportion of “leadership representation of underrepresented groups” by 2025.

And Amazon told its employees that it’s “winding down” certain programs after evaluating their “effectiveness, impact and ROI [return on investment]” but didn’t specify which ones.

In a December memo to employees reviewed by The Times, the company’s Vice President of inclusive experiences and technology Candi Castleberry told employees that the company is focused on “programs with proven outcomes” while also aiming to “foster a more truly inclusive culture.” Amazon shared the memo.

Amazon Studios — which announced a series of ambitious inclusion goals in June 2021 — also has been making changes. Last September, the Culver City-based studio removed a public-facing inclusion playbook from its website along with a goal that films or series with three or more people in above-line roles such as directors and producers included at least 30% women and 30% members of an underrepresented group.

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“We’ve said from the beginning that our efforts to ensure diverse and inclusive storytelling would be fluid and change over time,” Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said in a statement. He added that the company strives to “tell the very best stories, while empowering diverse voices in our storytelling wherever possible.”

Meanwhile, some tech companies such as Apple are fighting back against anti-DEI proposals from conservative shareholders. The National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank, is asking that Apple consider ending its DEI programs, policies, departments and goals.

“The risks to the company’s bottom line stem from potentially getting sued by individuals for discrimination, potentially getting legal action from the government for violating civil rights law, and then the market backlash,” said Stefan Padfield, executive director of the center’s Free Enterprise Project.

Apple recommended that shareholders reject the proposal at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Feb. 25.

Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment, but the company said in a document to shareholders that the anti-DEI proposal was “unnecessary” partly because its board and management oversee legal and regulatory risks.

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Netflix has remained committed to DEI after Trump’s executive order, stating in its annual report that a “major focus” is “fostering a work environment that is culturally diverse, inclusive and equitable” because it wants more people and cultures to see themselves reflected on screen.

The Los Gatos-based streaming giant said in its annual report released in January that it educates its recruiters on how to hire more inclusively.

A Netflix spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“What we need to do in this moment in time is to stand up, to speak up, to be strategic and to keep moving forward,” said Vernā Myers, former Netflix vice president of inclusion strategy and founder of the Vernā Myers Co., a consultancy on diversity, equity and inclusion. “We can’t allow this kind of bullying to make us so fearful that we are paralyzed and that we draw back from our core values.”

The backlash against DEI is not only affecting workplace culture, but nonprofits focused on recruiting more women and minorities into the tech industry.

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Last year, Women Who Code, a nonprofit that got its start in California, closed because of a lack of funding. AnitaB.org, which brings together women in tech at its annual Grace Hopper Celebration, cut its workforce in 2024 and pointed to a downturn in corporate DEI investments.

Some diversity advocates like Freada Kapor Klein, co-chair of the Kapor Center, question whether some tech companies ever took DEI that seriously.

Tech giants seemed more open to diversity efforts in times of talent shortages because it helps open up a pool of potential hires, she said. Now they’re rolling back DEI efforts amid layoffs and a political climate in which Republicans hold more power.

“It is now fashionable to be anti-DEI. It’s now fashionable to talk about masculine energy. It’s now fashionable … to align oneself with MAGA interests,” she said. “So you have to kind of ask, what is it that people actually, really and truly believe?”

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