Labor

In advance of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the proposed T-Mobile-Sprint merger, the Communications Workers of America called on the companies to commit to protecting workers' rights and not eliminating jobs, and threatened to oppose the deal if they won't make that commitment. CWA conceded that the CEO of T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom, Tim Höttges, has said that the merger will create and repatriate jobs. But it wants that in a "binding" form at the Federal Communications Commission, which is vetting the deal along with the Department of Justice.

Tech companies know that they have a race problem. But their efforts to address it have so far yielded little. Facebook Inc. says that 3 percent of its U.S. workforce is black, up from 2 percent in 2014, while black workers in technical roles stagnated at 1 percent. Only 2 percent of Google's workers are black, a figure that has remained static for the past three years. The Alphabet inc unit's efforts to increase that have sparked an internal backlash, with one former employee suing because of perceived discrimination against white and male candidates. Among 8 of the largest U.S.

On both sides of the Atlantic, interest in news is high. The daily dramas of the Trump administration and the rollercoaster of the Brexit negotiations have fuelled sales of online subscriptions to US and UK newspapers grappling with the transition from print to a predominantly digital business model. The picture is bleaker for local newspapers. In the US there has been a hollowing out of a once-mighty sector.

President Donald Trump blasted TBS over comedian Samantha Bee’s recent use of a vulgar slur to describe first daughter Ivanka Trump.  In an early morning tweet, President Trump questioned why Bee hasn’t been fired for calling his daughter a “feckless c—.” “Why aren’t they firing no talent Samantha Bee for the horrible language used on her low ratings show?” he tweeted. “A total double standard but that’s O.K., we are Winning, and will be doing so for a long time to come!”

For the next several weeks, until her daughter Pippa goes to day care as a slightly older baby, she will join Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter on the fifth floor, either in a gray bouncy seat behind a desk or nestled in a wrap attached to her mother’s chest. It was the imperfect but best solution for Commissioner Slaughter, whose appointment in March to serve as an FTC commissioner just happened to coincide with the birth of her third child. 

Very few Americans have enjoyed steadily rising pay beyond inflation over the last couple of decades, a shift from prior years in which the working and middle classes enjoyed broad-based wage gains as the economy expanded. Now, executives of big US companies suggest that the days of most people getting a pay raise are over, and that they also plan to reduce their work forces further. John Stephens, chief financial officer at AT&T, said 20% of the company's employees are call-center workers. He said he doesn't need that many.

The Trump administration said it is going ahead with actions to crack down on Chinese trade practices by June 30. The White House says President Trump is planning further export controls against China to counter Chinese intellectual property theft, including tariffs on Chinese tech exports believed to contain stolen American intellectual property.

Seattle (WA) levied an annual tax of about $50 million on big companies recently to help solve the city's homeless problem. The tax was watered down from the original proposal but it was controversial and pitted the city against its most powerful corporate resident, Amazon.com. Now the action moves to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area.

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) has filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board against AT&T and Nexstar Media Group after the companies failed to provide information sought by the union about how the businesses planned to use their savings from the corporate tax cuts in the Republican tax law. “Like so many companies, AT&T promised that it would use savings from the tax bill to create good, family-supporting U.S. jobs,” said Lisa Bolton, vice president of CWA Telecommunications and Technologies.

Fox News and its parent company 21st Century Fox said they have reached settlements with 18 former employees of the news channel who had filed lawsuits that included allegations of racial and gender discrimination.