Tag Archives: industrial news

Health

Starting a Family? Company Benefits Favor IVF Over Adoption

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Sarah Mahalchick and her future husband talked on one of their first dates about wanting to adopt. There were lots of children out there who needed parents, they told each other from the start.

But when they were ready to expand their family, they opted for fertility treatments, including in vitro fertilization. It seemed to make sense: Ms. Mahalchick’s employer would pay for a large chunk of the treatments through her health insurance; it offered almost no help on adoption.

Fertility benefits are becoming almost trendy at blue-chip companies, with more firms offering to help with the costs of IVF and egg freezing. But in many cases, companies that offer fertility benefits give no financial assistance to employees who want to adopt, and when they do their adoption benefits are often much less generous.

Estimates on how many companies offer fertility or adoption benefits are fuzzy. Most employers give neither. But the gap is clear.

The Society for Human Resource Management estimates that as of 2018, 27% of employers offered some form of infertility coverage and 11% offered adoption assistance. FertilityIQ, a website that offers courses and other information on family building, regularly scours benefit disclosures from thousands of employers. In a report released Saturday, it calculates that only one in five companies that offer fertility coverage also offer adoption assistance.

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Business

15 CEOs Reflect on Their Pandemic Year and the Lessons They’ve Learned

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Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Chris Nassetta worked from home in Arlington, Va., with his wife, six daughters and two dogs for two weeks before returning to the hotel chain’s nearly empty headquarters for the rest of the past year. Sharmistha Dubey has been leading Match Group Inc. from her dining room table near Dallas. Herman Miller ’s Andi Owen has her dog Finn to keep her company while working from her home office in Grand Rapids, Mich. Moderna Inc. CEO Stéphane Bancel relishes twice-daily 30-minute walks between his home in Boston and the vaccine maker’s Cambridge offices, where he resumed working in August, so he can crystallize his priorities and reflect on the day. The Wall Street Journal photographed them and 11 other business leaders in their pandemic office spaces as they discussed the past year and what’s to come.

More than a year after the coronavirus upended the way we work, the business leaders said they have found that more communication, flexibility and transparency have been crucial in staying connected to their employees.

Heads of companies across sectors including finance, hospitality and technology spoke from their current workspaces about what they’ve learned from the largely remote year, what challenges they faced and what changes they plan to leave in place during the next phase of work.

Brad Karp, chairman of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, predicted his schedule will remain less hectic after the pandemic is over: “Personally, I can’t see myself reflexively flying cross-country for an hour-long presentation or meeting.”

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Business

Inside Archegos’s Epic Meltdown – WSJ

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Bill Hwang was in trouble.

On Thursday of last week, the firm managing the former hedge-fund trader’s wealth arranged a conference call with executives at some of the largest investment banks in the world. The urgent topic: mounting losses at Mr. Hwang’s family office, Archegos Capital Management, from a handful of large bets on major stocks.

Because the wagers had been made in part with so-called total-return swaps—investments made by banks on behalf of clients for a fee—they had obscured Mr. Hwang’s large exposure to several companies.

Archegos shocked its lenders when it told them the size of its portfolio and how little cash it was holding, said people familiar with the call—not the least because they were all now facing billions of dollars in potential losses themselves.

Now Wall Street is sifting through the aftermath of the biggest single-firm meltdown since the financial crisis. Mr. Hwang alone lost approximately $8 billion in 10 days, a person familiar with the matter said, in what traders and investors say was one of the fastest losses of such a large sum they had ever seen.

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Business

OPEC, Allies Agree to Boost Output, Betting on Demand Rebound

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OPEC and an alliance of other top oil producers agreed to boost their collective production by more than two million barrels a day over coming months, betting on resurgent demand as they and the rest of the world assess the economic consequences of the pandemic’s trajectory.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and a group of other big producers led by Russia agreed to boost output in May by 350,000 barrels a day, and by the same amount again in June, according to delegates. They agreed to then increase output by another 450,000 barrels a day in July. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, agreed to start easing separate, unilateral cuts of one million barrels a day that it put in place earlier this year. It plans to end those cuts altogether by the end of July, delegates said.

The agreement Thursday between the two groups, together called OPEC+, was a compromise between Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s de facto leader, and Russia. Saudi Arabia had sought to maintain cuts, skeptical of a quick return in oil demand during the pandemic. Russia, meanwhile, has said the world already needs more oil to feed resurgent economies in many regions.

The decision is another sharp swerve in OPEC’s zigzag oil strategy over the past year, underscoring the difficulty among forecasters in the group—and elsewhere—to call the start of a sustained global recovery from the pandemic.

Ahead of the meeting between the two groups, Saudi Arabia had initially backed plans to keep production unchanged, delegates said. The decision to hike output “was a complete U-turn,” one of them said. Throughout the pandemic, the group has appeared to shift sharply from optimism to pessimism over the prospects of a post-pandemic economic recovery—and a strong rebound in oil demand. Saudi Arabia has pushed to stay cautious, while Russia has been eager to lift output.

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World

Suez Canal Opens, but Shipping Will Be Snarled for Months

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The bridge of the oil tanker Navig8 Aronaldo erupted in cheers after Capt. Malik Naushad told his crew to prepare to weigh anchor midnight Tuesday and start their voyage out of the Suez Canal, where they had been stuck for six days by the grounding of the Ever Given.

Back at the German offices of Jan Held, whose family firm has three different ships stuck at Suez, the mood wasn’t as jubilant. Watching a live feed of the Ever Given move off the bank, Mr. Held knew that uncorking the biggest traffic jam in global shipping in recent years could take a long time to resolve, and set off a scramble for berths and clear routes.

“You see a lot of bizarre things in shipping,” said Mr. Held, a former ship’s captain himself and co-owner of Held Bereederungs GmbH & Co KG, based in the north German city of Haren. “But with this, you knew it would have repercussions around the world.”

Late Tuesday, ships were again moving through the Suez Canal, a day after engineers freed the Ever Given, a 1,300-foot container ship, and cleared the waterway for global traffic. Osama Rabie, chairman of the Suez Canal Authority, which runs the 120-mile shipping route, said at a press conference that 113 ships had crossed in both directions since the route reopened late Monday, and another 95 are expected to pass through in the evening, up from the typical 50 or so daily passages. 

Egyptian officials say the logjam will be cleared in three to four days. Shipping executives say it will take days longer. Leth Agencies, a ship’s services provider in the Suez, said 352 vessels are still awaiting transit.

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Business

Goldman, Morgan Stanley Limit Losses With Fast Sale of Archegos Assets

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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley were quick to move large blocks of assets before other large banks that traded with Archegos Capital Management, as the scale of the hedge fund’s losses became apparent, according to people with knowledge of the transactions. The strategy helped limit the U.S. firms’ losses in last week’s epic stock liquidation, they said.

Losses at Archegos, run by former Tiger Asia manager Bill Hwang, have triggered the liquidation in excess of $30 billion in value. Banks were continuing to sell blocks of stocks linked to Archegos Monday, traders said.

“This is a challenging time for the family office of Archegos Capital Management, our partners and employees. All plans are being discussed as Mr. Hwang and the team determine the best path forward,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement Monday evening.

Archegos took big, concentrated positions in companies and held some positions in a mix of stock and swaps. Swaps are a common arrangement in which a trader gets access to the returns generated by a portfolio of shares or other assets in exchange for a fee.

Losses threatened to spill over into the so-called prime brokerage businesses that have been handling the firm’s trading. The group of large Wall Street banks includes Goldman, Morgan, Credit Suisse Group AG, Nomura Holdings Inc., UBS Group AG and Deutsche Bank AG , said people familiar with the firm’s trading.

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Business

Friday’s jobs report will be released to a closed stock market—that’s only occurred 12 times since 1980

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Good Friday is next week and markets will be closed as per usual. However, what will be unusual is that the closure of financial exchanges in the U.S., and some other parts of the world, comes as the government is slated to release a key report on employment in the middle of a pandemic.

Why is the stock market closed while federal data are being released? That is because Good Friday, this year on April 2, isn’t a federal holiday.

It’s a fairly rare occurrence for the government to release a major piece of data as market participants aren’t able to react to it.

And it is only happened 12 times since 1980, according to Dow Jones Market Data, with the last time occurring on 2015, and before that it happened on 2012 and 2010.

Year Dates that nonfarm-payrolls have been released on Good Friday
1980 April 4
1983 April 1
1985 April 5
1988 April 1
1994 April 1
1996 April 5
1999 April 2
2007 April 6
2010 April 2
2012 April 6
2015 April 3
2021 April 2 (scheduled)
Source: Dow Jones Market Data

The jobs report is arguably the granddaddy of economic reports, outside of GDP, but its significance has been amplified by the pandemic, particularly as market participants seek more evidence on the magnitude of the rebound a year into one of the worst public health crisis in a century.

The latest jobs report will come as investors are unclear about the degree to which the labor market and/or the economy could fully recover, or even overheat, potentially compelling the Federal Reserve to act quickly to tamp down out-of-check inflation, with vaccine rollouts and some $1.9 trillion in fresh fiscal aid have helping to buttress the economy.

Fed boss Jerome Powell has tried to pacify jittery markets by emphasizing that the central bank will adopt a go-slow approach to normalizing policy, which itself is forecast to be years away.

National Securities chief market strategist Art Hogan told MarketWatch that it may be a good thing that the jobs report comes as the market is closed.

“Having the weekend to digest this news and calibrate what this means for the economic expansion, that may be a good thing for the market,” Hogan said.

A year ago, U.S. nonfarm payrolls fell by 663,000 in March, while the unemployment rate jumped to a 26-year high of 8.5% from 8.1%.

The 2021 jobs report for March is expected to show a gain of 655,000 based on some estimates, after payrolls data showed that unemployment fell to 6.2% as 379,000 jobs were added in February, marking the biggest such gain in four months.

Some time to pause for financial markets may be warranted, Hogan says, because the economy still has a long way to go to achieve a healthy recovery.

“We still have maybe nine million people out of the labor force. We are going to need some blockbuster levels to get to pre-pandemic levels,” the analyst said, estimating that the economy would have to average some 750,000 jobs a month to achieve post-COVID levels.

“It would take us two years, so we really need to start ratcheting up those numbers,” he said.

On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
+1.39%,
the S&P 500 index
SPX,
+1.66%,
the Nasdaq Composite Index
COMP,
+1.24%
and the small-capitalization Russell 2000 index
RUT,
+1.76%
finished sharply higher, following a choppy week of trading that ended with a late-session flourish.

To be sure, it will be hard to say how robust trading action might be on the Monday after Good Friday, because a number of global exchanges will be closed in observance of Easter Monday.

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Business

ThredUp’s Stock Jumps 30% in Market Debut

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Shares of ThredUp Inc. opened 30% above the listing price in their market debut Friday, an early sign that investors continue to be bullish on online secondhand retail.

The Oakland, Calif.-based retailer’s stock began trading at $18.25, after being set at $14, which was the high end of its previously announced range. At the listing price, ThredUp, which sold 12 million shares, raised $168 million at a valuation of about $1.3 billion.

ThredUp will use the proceeds to expand the business, including adding new categories, and make new investments in the company’s operating platform and technology, co-founder and Chief Executive James Reinhart said in an interview Friday. The initial public offering is “just another validation of the market opportunity, and ThredUp plays in the biggest, fattest part of the market at our price point,” he said.

ThredUp, which sells women’s and children’s apparel, posted $186 million in revenue last year, a 14% jump from the previous year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company lost $48 million last year, compared with a loss of $38 million in 2019.

The company said it had 1.2 million active buyers at the end of last year, up 24% from the previous year. On average, those shoppers visited ThredUp six times a month and placed 3.2 orders in the year. The company defines active buyers as customers who have made at least one purchase in the past 12 months. “Customers are continuing to be engaged on our platform and continue to shop at higher rates,” Mr. Reinhart said. “I think it shows remarkable resilience.”

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Business

WeWork Agrees to SPAC Deal That Would Take Startup Public

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WeWork has agreed to merge with a special-purpose acquisition company, according to people familiar with the matter, in a deal that would take the shared-office provider public nearly two years after its high-profile failure to launch a traditional IPO.

The planned merger with the BowX Acquisition Corp. SPAC would value WeWork at $9 billion including debt, the people said. WeWork would also raise $1.3 billion, including $800 million in a so-called private investment in public equity, or PIPE, from Insight Partners, funds managed by Starwood Capital Group, Fidelity Management and others, the people said.

In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that WeWork was in talks to combine with BowX.

WeWork is a big player in the market for flexible office space. It signs long-term leases with landlords, then after renovating a space and furnishing it, subleases small offices or even whole buildings to tenants for as little as a month at a time. Should the merger close in the coming months as expected, it would cap what has been a long and bumpy road toward a listing for WeWork.

The company is taking advantage of a torrent of new SPACs to accomplish what it failed to pull off in 2019, when public investors rejected the money-losing company and its visionary yet erratic leader, Adam Neumann, who subsequently resigned as chairman and CEO. Further hit by the coronavirus pandemic, which has emptied out offices throughout the country, WeWork has closed locations, renegotiated leases and cut thousands of jobs in a bid to slash expenses.

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Business

Tesla must rehire fired worker and Elon Musk must delete anti-union tweet, NLRB rules

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The National Labor Relations Board on Thursday ordered Tesla Inc. to reinstate an employee it fired in 2017 and said Chief Executive Elon Musk must remove a three-year-old tweet urging against unionizing.

The NLRB in Washington, D.C., agreed with a 2019 ruling by an NLRB judge in California, who found that the electric-car maker violated labor laws related to unionization efforts at its Fremont, Calif., plant.

Tesla
TSLA,
+1.61%
must offer to reinstate Richard Ortiz to his former job as a production associate within 14 days, as well as give him back pay and benefits. The company must also compensate him for any resulting tax consequences, according to the ruling.

Tesla said in filings that Ortiz was fired for lying during an investigation into a Facebook post about union activity at the company.

Margo Feinberg, an attorney with Schwartz, Steinsapir, Dohrmann & Sommers who was retained by the United Auto Workers on behalf of Ortiz, told MarketWatch on Thursday that as far as she knows, Ortiz had wanted to return to work at Tesla.

The decision in the Tesla case, first reported by Bloomberg News, comes as the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, or HR 482, was passed by the House earlier this month. The legislation — which would give workers new protections when they seek to unionize and penalize companies that violate workers’ rights — is expected to be taken up by the Senate.

See: PRO Act, called ‘most important labor legislation in several generations,’ passes House

“If this was OSHA, there would be fines,” Feinberg said. “The NLRB ruling is not enough, but it’s an important message.”

“Ultimately, we need reform,” she added, saying the PRO Act would provide for injunctive relief and damages in a case like this.

The UAW echoed that sentiment.

“While we celebrate the justice in today’s ruling, it nevertheless highlights the substantial flaws in U.S. labor law,” said UAW Vice President Cindy Estrada in a statement. “Here is a company that clearly broke the law and yet it is three years down the road before these workers achieved a modicum of justice.”

As for the tweet by Musk that must be taken down, the NLRB deemed it to be threatening. In 2018, as the UAW continued to try to organize Tesla employees, the Tesla CEO tweeted: “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare.”

Tesla must also delete a warning from the file of another employee who was disciplined when he interacted with Ortiz about union-related activity, the NLRB said in its Thursday ruling. The company was additionally ordered to rescind rules barring employees from distributing union-related literature during non-work hours and from wearing union insignia, and threatening, disciplining or terminating an employee over union activity. In addition, Tesla must post a notice at its plant that it was found to have violated labor law.

The company must also delete language from a confidentiality agreement it asks employees to sign that they cannot talk to the media, because labor law “protects employees when they speak with the media about working conditions, labor disputes or other terms and conditions of employment.”

The company, which has reportedly dissolved its public relations team, has not returned a request for comment.

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