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Video: Port Workers Go on Strike

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Video: Port Workers Go on Strike

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Port Workers Go on Strike

The president of the International Longshoremen’s Association said the workers were “making history” by walking off the job for the first time in nearly 50 years.

“I.L.A.! I.L.A.!” “You’re making history here because we’re doing one thing. We are fighting for our families and we are fighting for the rights so that we have a right to get a piece of that money that they got so much of. And we’re going to do it. We’re going to walk away with a great contract. God bless us all.” “I.L.A.!” “All the way!” “I.L.A.!” “All the way!”

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U.S. job growth outperforms expectations as hiring resurges and unemployment drops

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U.S. job growth outperforms expectations as hiring resurges and unemployment drops

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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Sonos tries to get its groove back after upsetting loyal customers

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Sonos tries to get its groove back after upsetting loyal customers

Heath Evans really needed his Sonos speakers to work.

He and his wife counted on one of the three wireless devices he owned to play lullabies to help put their baby daughter to sleep.

So, in May, when Sonos released a new controller app that was so riddled with problems he couldn’t get the speakers to work, Evans was angry.

“We just need reliable music that plays lullabies while we’ve got a screaming baby trying to go to sleep,” said Evans, a 40-year-old entrepreneur in Australia who had received the speakers from his wife last year for his birthday.

Fed up with the time Sonos has taken to fully fix the app, the family has given up on trying to use the devices, which cost about $1,300. They’ve turned instead to a cheap speaker to stream music for their daughter’s bedtime.

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Evans is among a legion of unhappy customers who are upset with Santa Barbara-based Sonos. Today, the company is still trying to mitigate the fallout from the app debacle and salvage its reputation as a powerhouse in the audio industry offering an array of portable, high-quality wireless speakers. The hit to Sonos’ brand has swung the door open for rivals such as Amazon, Bose, Apple and other tech giants that make smart speakers to capture more of the business’ customers.

“Sonos knows it is on precarious ground because while it has built up customer goodwill, it plays in a highly competitive space,” said Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at research firm Forrester in an email.

Over its more than 20 years, the publicly traded company has weathered tough times before, including the 2008 financial crisis. But its latest misstep is a multimillion-dollar blunder that has forced it to delay the launch of new products and lower sales projections for the pivotal final months of the year when they otherwise would be looking to capitalize on a holiday sales boost.

Sonos said it’s spending $20 million to $30 million to fix the app and provide more customer support — an emergency investment it hopes will win back the trust of customers and steady its financial footing. In the last six months, the company’s stock, which ended trading Thursday at $11.58, has fallen 39%. In the quarter ending June 29, it reported $397 million in revenue, a 6% increase over the same period last year, and $3.7 million in net income.

This week, the company outlined a plan to make sure it doesn’t have similar failures in the future, including improvements to how it tests products before they’re released, the appointment of a “quality ombudsperson,” creation of a customer advisory board, and extending its warranty for certain items, such as its home theater and plug-in speaker products. Executives agreed to forgo their annual bonuses for 2025 unless their turnaround plan succeeds.

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“There are many wonderful brands that have made missteps, have gone out and apologized to fix things and won back the trust of their customers,” said Eddie Lazarus, Sonos’ chief strategy officer. “We’re going to be the next one in that line.”

Sonos was founded in 2002 by a group of entrepreneurs who set out to build something that is commonplace today but pioneering at the time: a wireless audio system that would enable people to play music over the internet anywhere in their home. They were working years before the start of popular streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora, as well as the launch of the iPhone.

In January 2005, the company released the ZP100, a device with a remote control that allowed people to stream music through their computers. The product garnered positive reviews including from Walt Mossberg, a tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal, who called the Sonos music streaming system “easily the best music-streaming product I have seen and tested.”

As in many startups, Sonos executives were worried about competitors . The first song played publicly on the ZP100 was the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” a tune engineers could relate to as they hustled to improve the quality of the device before its release.

Appearing on the podcast “How I Built This with Guy Raz” this year, one of the founders, John MacFarlane, recalled the pressure he and others felt to unveil their first product in time for the holiday season — a goal they ultimately missed. Releasing the ZP100 before it was ready would have “killed the company,” he said.

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“You had to have a great positive first experience if you’re going to build the brand on word of mouth,” MacFarlane said.

The challenge of striking a balance between moving fast and having a good product is still a challenge that Sonos and other tech companies have grappled with throughout their history. Apple faced backlash from its customers in 2012 when it released a Maps app that contained inaccurate driving directions, Chatterjee said. But Sonos is in a “trickier” spot because the app is part of what makes the company’s audio system function seamlessly for the 15 million households that use its products globally.

“Without that seamlessness, there is no ease of use, and without the ease of use, the company cannot command its premium price with consumers or its premium position in the market,” he said.

Sonos Chief Executive Patrick Spence has acknowledged that the company has let down its customers. He told investors in August after Sonos released its quarterly earnings that the company had to rebuild the app to address “performance and reliability issues” and position the company for growth as the company expands “into new categories and move ambitiously outside of the home.” Sonos released its first pair of headphones in June.

For some Sonos customers like Evans, Sonos’ response has been “tone deaf,” underscoring the trust the company still needs to win back.

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“Why on earth would I care about a quality ombudsman? I’m a guy sitting in Melbourne nursing a baby in Australia with a speaker that doesn’t work,” he said.

Despite looking at the possibility of bringing back the previous version of the Sonos app, Lazarus said the company ruled it out because there were a lot of “technical concerns.” While the company has said it’s reintroduced many of the features from the old version of the app that were missing in the new one, he acknowledged the company still has work to do. He couldn’t say when the app will be completely fixed.

Other customers have found workarounds to still stream their music from their Sonos speakers even if the app doesn’t work.

Fearing issues with the rollout of the new app, 32-year-old product designer Matthew Mocniak said, he disabled his Sonos system from automatically updating the app but the solution worked only temporarily.

Mocniak, who lives in North Carolina and has spent more than $2,000 on Sonos speakers, said he’s able to stream music through Apple’s Airplay feature.

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As someone who works in the tech industry, Mocniak knows rebuilding software can be harder than it looks. “It’s very easy to promise certain features or certain deadlines,” he said. “It’s also easy to forget that there are people responsible for that stuff on the other side.”

Ben Brown, a 49-year-old creative director in the United Kingdom, said his Sonos app still says his speakers are not connected. Instead, he’s been using Amazon’s Alexa assistant to play music on the speakers.

Brown, who also purchased multiple Sonos speakers for his home, said he was so frustrated that he felt the urge to throw the Sonos Roam portable speaker in the sea while on vacation.

“I would never have done it, really, but that’s how angry it makes you,” he said. “It’s those moments where you just want to take a speaker outside, eat some dinner and listen to some music.”

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Visa, Google, JetBlue: A Guide to a New Era of Antitrust Action

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Visa, Google, JetBlue: A Guide to a New Era of Antitrust Action
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The Justice Department accuses Visa of unfairly stifling competition in debit cards, claiming the company has maintained a monopoly by imposing or threatening to impose higher fees on merchants that also use other payment networks.

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President Biden’s top antitrust enforcers have promised to sue monopolies and block big mergers — a cornerstone of the administration’s economic agenda to restore competition to the economy.

Below are 15 major cases brought by the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission since late 2020 (including cases against Google and Meta initially filed during the Trump administration just before Mr. Biden took office).

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The government has won several but not all the cases. And with only a few months remaining for the current administration, the number of suits is climbing, as regulators go after dominant companies in tech, pharmaceuticals, finance and even groceries.

  1. In a lawsuit, the D.O.J. said that more than 60 percent of debit transactions in the United States run on Visa’s network, allowing it to charge over $7 billion in fees each year for processing those transactions. Government lawyers argued that Visa penalizes its customers when they try to use competing services and that it has built a monopoly around payment processing.

    1. The Justice Department accuses Visa of unfairly stifling competition in debit cards, claiming the company has maintained a monopoly by imposing or threatening to impose higher fees on merchants that also use other payment networks.

      Read more ›

  1. The F.T.C. accused three big prescription drug middlemen, known as pharmacy benefits managers, of artificially raising prices for insulin drugs and making it harder for individuals to obtain cheaper options. The legal action targeted CVS Health’s Caremark, Cigna’s Express Scripts and UnitedHealth’s Optum Rx and subsidiaries they’ve created to handle drug negotiations. The three companies collectively control 80 percent of prescriptions in the United States.

    1. The F.T.C. files an administrative complaint, which is not yet public, that seeks to prohibit pharmacy benefit managers from steering patients to drugs that make them more money.

      Read more ›

  1. The F.T.C. sued to block Kroger’s $24.6 billion acquisiton of Albertsons, which, if allowed to proceed, would be the biggest supermarket merger in U.S. history. The companies said the merger would bolster their leverage with suppliers; the government contended that it would drive up prices for shoppers and suppress worker wages.

    1. The hearing, a mini-trial, lasts just over three weeks. The judge in the case has yet to issue a decision.

    2. The trial begins in Oregon, where both grocery companies have a significant presence. The case enters the spotlight as high food prices become a critical focus in the presidential race.

      Read more ›

    3. The F.T.C. and eight states, plus the District of Columbia, sue to block Kroger from acquiring rival supermarket chain Albertsons. They say the deal would most likely result in higher prices for groceries and weakened bargaining power for unionized workers.

      Read more ›

  1. The D.O.J. alleged Google harmed competition over the technology used to place advertising on web sites. The department and eight states said Google acquired rivals through anticompetitive mergers and bullied publishers and advertisers into using the company’s ad technology.

    1. The trial is expected to take about a month. The government has asked for a breakup of the company, requiring Google to sell off some assets.

      Read more ›

    2. The Justice Department and a group of eight states accuse Google of abusing a monopoly over the technology that powers online advertising.

      Read more ›

  1. An F.T.C. lawsuit sought to block Tapestry’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Capri, a blockbuster fashion tie-up to bring together Coach, Kate Spade, Michael Kors and Versace. The suit was a rare move by the agency to block a fashion deal, given that the industry does not suffer from a lack of competition.

    1. A hearing, which effectively serves as a mini-trial, begins over whether the government should put a halt to the deal while the F.T.C. can mount a case against the merger.

    2. The F.T.C. sues to block a merger of two fashion companies, Tapestry and Capri Holdings, that would bring together brands like Coach, Michael Kors and Kate Spade. The agency says the deal could force millions of consumers to pay more for “accessible luxury” accessories — less expensive goods sold by high-end firms — because the combined company would no longer have the incentive to compete on price.

      Read more ›

  1. An antitrust lawsuit filed by the D.O.J. and several states against RealPage, a real estate software company, said its technology enabled landlords to collude to raise rents across the country. It was the first major civil antitrust lawsuit to centrally feature the role of an algorithm in pricing manipulation, D.O.J. officials said.

    1. In its complaint, the Justice Department accuses RealPage of enabling a price-fixing conspiracy that artificially raised rents for millions of people.

      Read more ›

  1. The D.O.J. accused Apple of using a monopoly in the smartphone market to stifle competition and inflate prices for consumers. In its suit, the department said Apple blocked companies from offering apps that competed with Apple versions, including Messages and Wallet.

    1. Apple files a motion to dismiss the case, saying its business decisions didn’t violate antitrust laws. It has argued that those decisions make the iPhone a better experience.

    2. The Justice Department and 16 states, plus the District of Columbia, file a challenge to the reach and influence of Apple, arguing that the company has used anticompetitive tactics to keep customers reliant on their iPhones.

      Read more ›

  1. Live Nation Entertainment, the concert giant that owns Ticketmaster, stands accused of illegally maintaining a monopoly in the live entertainment industry. The D.O.J. said Ticketmaster provided exclusive ticketing contracts with concert venues, which helped Live Nation shore up its dominance, depriving consumers of better prices and options.

    1. The Justice Department, joined by 29 states and the District of Columbia, accuses Live Nation of leveraging its sprawling empire to dominate the live music industry by locking venues into exclusive ticketing contracts, pressuring artists to use its services and threatening its rivals with financial retribution.

      Read more ›

  1. A merger between JetBlue and Spirit, which would have created the fifth-largest airline in the United States, was blocked by a federal judge after a D.O.J. challenge. Government lawyers argued that smaller, low-cost airlines like Spirit helped reduce fares and that allowing the company to be acquired by JetBlue, which tends to charge higher prices than Spirit, would have hurt consumers.

    1. JetBlue and Spirit announce that they will not seek to overturn a court ruling that blocked their planned $3.8 billion merger.

      Read more ›

    2. In a 109-page ruling siding with the government, the judge in the case says the merger would “likely incentivize JetBlue further to abandon its roots as a maverick, low-cost carrier.”

      Read more ›

    3. The Justice Department files a lawsuit seeking to stop JetBlue Airways from buying Spirit Airlines, arguing that the $3.8 billion deal would reduce competition.

      Read more ›

  1. A lawsuit filed by the F.T.C. and 17 states against Amazon accused the retail behemoth of squeezing merchants and favoring its own competing brands and services over third-party sellers. A trial date is set for 2026.

    1. Amazon asks the court to dismiss the suit, arguing that the F.T.C. failed to identify the harm consumers were experiencing. It says the agency confused “common retail practices” with monopolistic behavior.

    2. The F.T.C. and 17 states sue Amazon, contending its online store and merchant services illegally stifle competition. The lawsuit that raises the possibility of altering the company’s structure.

      Read more ›

  1. The F.T.C. sued to block Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which, if allowed to proceed, would be the largest consumer tech acquisition since AOL bought Time Warner more than two decades ago. The case follows scrutiny of the deal by regulators in Europe. Microsoft makes the consoles and platforms on which Activision’s games are played, and the merger of two companies that don’t directly compete is known as a vertical merger. Cases against vertical mergers have traditionally been difficult to win.

    1. Microsoft says it has closed its deal with Activision Blizzard, signaling that the tech industry’s giants are still free to use their cash hoards to get even bigger.

      Read more ›

    2. In a 53-page decision, a judge says the F.T.C. has failed to show the merger would result in a substantial reduction in competition that would harm consumers.

      Read more ›

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    4. The F.T.C. seeks a preliminary injunction to bar Microsoft from completing the deal before the F.T.C. has the chance to argue the case in its internal court. Microsoft argues a delay would essentially be killing the deal anyway.

      Read more ›

    5. In its suit, the F.T.C. says Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard would harm consumers because Microsoft could use Activision’s blockbuster games like Call of Duty to lure gamers from rivals.

      Read more ›

  1. The Justice Department sought to block a proposed merger between the largest publisher in the United States and a key rival.

    1. In an order, a judge says that the government has demonstrated that the merger might “substantially” harm competition in the market for U.S. publishing rights to anticipated top-selling books.

      Read more ›

  1. The D.O.J. sued to block UnitedHealth Group’s $13 billion acquisition of health technology company Change Healthcare, arguing that a deal would give UnitedHealth sensitive data that it could wield against its competitors in the insurance business.

    1. After a trial over the summer, a judge says in a 58-page memo that UnitedHealth’s incentives to protect customer data as it grows its businesses outweigh motivations to misuse the information.

    2. In a lawsuit, the Justice Department argues UnitedHealth Group’s deal to acquire Change Healthcare, a health technology company, would give the giant insurer access to sensitive data that it could wield against its competitors.

      Read more ›

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