Business

Southwest pilots’ labor union asked to be released from federal mediation for a new contract.
The union and the airline have been unable to come to agreements on pay, work rules and other aspects, the union said.
A strike is not imminent, and the two sides could still reach a deal in the coming months.

A Southwest Airlines Co. plane takes off as representatives and pilots from the Southwest Airlines Pilots’ Association (SWAPA) demonstrate outside Chicago Midway International Airport (MDW) in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., on Wednesday, May 18, 2016.
Daniel Acker / Bloomberg / Getty Images

Southwest Airlines pilots’ union said Thursday it sought to be released from federal mediation for a new labor contract, laying the groundwork for a potential strike as talks with the carrier haven’t yet yielded an agreement.
The airline and union, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, have been in contract talks for more than three years and negotiations have been tense. The Dallas-based carrier’s pilots voted to authorize the union to call a possible strike last month, a poll that the union called on the heels of a holiday meltdown at the end of last year.

“Regrettably, I must inform you that SWAPA and Southwest have been unable to meaningfully resolve numerous important, outstanding issues, and that further mediation will likely not result in any additional agreements between the parties,” Jody R. Reven, the negotiating committee’s chairman, wrote to the National Mediation Board on Thursday, according to a letter seen by CNBC.
The union said Southwest has refused to engage “in substantive discussions or offer ratifiable proposals” on issues like better pay, work rules, quality-of-life improvements and fatigue mitigation, according to a letter the union sent to the National Mediation Board.
Southwest’s vice president, labor relations, Adam Carlisle, said in a statement that the company disagrees with the need to be released from mediation.
“We’ve continued meeting regularly with SWAPA and, in fact, made an industry-leading compensation proposal and scheduling adjustments to address workplace quality-of-life issues for our Pilots,” he said. “We feel confident that mediation will continue driving us even closer to a final agreement that will benefit both our Pilots and Southwest Airlines.”
Pilot strikes in the U.S. are extremely rare, and the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association’s request does not mean that one is imminent because of procedures in U.S. labor law. The last major U.S. passenger airline strike in the country was at Spirit Airlines in 2010.
There are several so-called cooling off periods should the National Mediation Board declare an impasse between Southwest and its pilots’ union. Those last 30 days apiece, giving time for a potential agreement. More

Only one-third of the 1 million adults in the U.S. who tested positive for hepatitis C between 2013 and 2022 have been cured, according to a CDC report published Thursday.
Hepatitis C is often referred to as the silent killer because the initial infection has few to no symptoms.
Health insurance restrictions and the high cost of oral antiviral treatments, at up to $24,000 per patient, are preventing people from getting cured, health officials said.

Hepatitis C virus
BSIP | UIG | Getty Images

The overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. who have tested positive for hepatitis C have not been cured due to the high cost of oral antiviral treatments and obstacles imposed by insurance plans, federal health officials said on Thursday.
Hepatitis C is often referred to as the silent killer because the initial infection has few to no symptoms. Overtime, however, the virus can cause liver damage, liver cancer, liver failure and ultimately death.

The virus is spread through contact with an infected person’s blood, primarily through sharing needles and other equipment used to inject drugs.
Breakthrough oral antiviral treatments made by Gilead Sciences and Abbvie have been on the U.S. market for nearly a decade now. These pills, taken once a day for eight to 12 weeks, cure more than 95% of hepatitis C cases.
Despite the availability of these medications, only one-third of the 1 million adults in the U.S. who tested positive for hepatitis C between 2013 and 2022 have been cured, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Thursday. Health officials estimate up to another million people in the U.S. are infected but don’t know they have the virus.
Hepatitis C contributed to the deaths of nearly 15,000 people in 2020, according to the CDC.
“Thousands of people are dying every year in our country, and many more are suffering from an infection that has been curable for more than 10 years,” Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC division that specializes in HIV and viral hepatitis, told reporters on a call Thursday.

The Biden administration has asked Congress to approve $11 billion in funding for a national program to eliminate hepatitis C by 2030. Dr. Francis Collins, who is leading the initiative at the White House, said the program will save thousands of lives and pay for itself by reducing health care costs.

CNBC Health & Science

Read CNBC’s latest health coverage:

Health insurance and hepatitis care costs

Health officials said the primary obstacles to treatment are requirements imposed by health insurance plans and the high cost of treatment. The course of pills can cost up to $24,000 per patient.
Dr. Carolyn Wester, who heads the CDC’s viral hepatitis division, said some health insurers require burdensome preauthorization before patients can receive the pills and also limit which health-care providers can prescribe the medications.
Collins, who previously served as director of the National Institutes of Health, said community health centers that treat the uninsured cannot afford the pills for everyone. Only 1 in 4 uninsured adults diagnosed with hepatitis C have been cured, according to the CDC.
Even state Medicaid plans impose burdensome requirements such as evidence of liver disease, sobriety and the involvement of specialists, Collins told reporters on Thursday. The high cost of the drugs has made it difficult for Medicaid to treat everyone who is infected, according to the U.S. Health and Human Services Department.
Under Biden’s proposal, the federal government would pay pharmaceutical companies like Gilead and Abbvie a lump sum for the drugs. The companies would then make the medications available for free to the uninsured, state Medicaid programs, prison systems and people living on Native American reservations.
The proposal is based on a model launched by Louisiana in 2019, in which the state paid Gilead subsidiary Asegua Therapeutics a lump sum for enough drugs over five years to cure nearly all Medicaid patients and people who are incarcerated.
Collins said NIH and the Food and Drug Administration are also working on the approval of a rapid hepatitis C test that would provide a diagnosis in an hour or less. The test would be used to diagnose and treat patients in a single visit, he said. More

Your columnist was in Riyadh in 2016 when Muhammad bin Salman, wearing robes and sandals, announced his Vision 2030, aimed at ending what the crown prince described as the kingdom’s addiction to oil. Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler talked of selling shares in Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, to fund a giant sovereign-wealth fund (SWF), worth $2trn, to invest in diverse non-oil industries. He would be its chairman, benefactor and mastermind. It was heady stuff, even if some of it sounded unhinged in a hidebound autocracy like Saudi Arabia. The most striking thing occurred later when a palace official invited Schumpeter to a café. Young men and women sat without head coverings, flirting openly. The rule-breaking atmosphere was electric. Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

Nothing turns on management theorists more than conflicting incentives. (If the idea of an aroused management theorist has ruined your breakfast, sorry.) They ruminate on financial motives—the adverse impact that individual bonus schemes might have on team collaboration, say. They churn out studies and books on the competing interests of shareholders and the executives who act on their behalf. Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

Christian Bruch always More

Lee kun-hee embarked on a world tour in 1993 to take stock of Samsung, the firm he inherited from his father. Finding its televisions and other electronics languishing on shelves, he decided to remake Samsung’s image. “Change everything but your wife and your children,” he told employees. One thing that didn’t change, according to a ruling by the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (icsid), is the close relationship between such chaebol, family-run conglomerates that form the backbone of South Korea’s economy, and the government.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

American technology barons occasionally bemoan the lack in the West of “super-apps”, multifaceted online platforms offering a variety of different services. But the global interest in the business model belies the difficulties facing existing super-apps in Asia.Their recent performance has disappointed (see chart). Collectively, the market capitalisation of Singapore’s Sea and Grab, South Korea’s Coupang and Kakao, Japan’s Rakuten, and the parent company of India’s Paytm has declined by around 60% since the end of 2021. None of the firms is the same; they each make money from a blend of mobile gaming, social media, e-commerce, ride-sharing and financial payments. What they have in common is an aspiration to bundle together a variety of services which complement one another on one app. They had hoped hoping to emulate Chinese companies, such as Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s Alipay, which pioneered the business model.But the newer Asian super-apps have been put under huge pressure by a rapidly changing environment. Funding, which was once cheap and plentiful, has dried up, making ambitious growth plans harder to finance. James Lloyd at Citigroup, a bank, notes that China’s super-apps started with a core of profitable and engaging businesses (e-commerce for Alipay and social media in the case of WeChat), which other services were built around. Outside China, few firms have balanced both significant scale and earnings in a similar way.Kakao, a South Korean firm, most closely fits the bill. Unlike most Asian would-be super-apps, it has been reliably profitable. Yet its share price has declined by 8% this year. Because the company is dominant on its home turf, it is running out of room for further domestic growth. Its ride-hailing arm has a market share in South Korea of as much as 90%, by some estimates. The firm wants to raise the international share of its revenues from 10% today to 30% by 2025—but such global expansion comes at a cost. At other firms the funding squeeze has inspired ambitions for profitability, which inevitably comes at the expense of previous plans for rapid expansion. GoTo, an Indonesian super-app, created from the merger of Gojek, a ride-hailing company, and Tokopedia, an e-commerce firm, was expected to appoint a former banker, Patrick Walujo, as CEO at its shareholder meeting on June 30th, after we published this. Mr Walujo has stressed that his aim is to make the company profitable.One Asian consumer-tech firm has bucked this year’s trend. The share price of Paytm, a would-be Indian super-app based around digital payments, has rallied by around 60%. The stock is still less than half of its all-time high, reached shortly after it floated in November 2021, and the firm has yet to make a profit. Nonetheless, its rising share price may reflect something companies elsewhere in Asia lack: a single, large and growing domestic market to work with. Whether that potential for scale proves enough for a more sustainable future for Paytm has yet to be seen. The idea of a company using a single platform to offer a variety of services to consumers has an intuitive appeal. But after more than a decade of discussion about the coming dominance of super-apps, many of the Asian firms are still struggling to find a balance between size and profitability. With no end in sight to higher funding costs, a speedy recovery for these one-time darlings of tech investors is hard to foresee. ■To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

Polestar has signed a deal with Tesla giving its owners access to Tesla’s Superchargers in North America.
New Polestar vehicles sold in North America will have the Tesla-designed NACS plug standard starting in 2025.
Polestar joins Ford, GM, Rivian and corporate sibling Volvo Cars in the move to the NACS standard.

The Polestar 2, a battery-electric crossover SUV. Polestar owners in North America will have access to Tesla’s charging network starting next year.
Source: Polestar

Swedish electric vehicle maker Polestar said Thursday that it has signed a deal with Tesla that will allow drivers of its EVs to charge at about 12,000 Tesla charging stations in North America starting next year.
New Polestar vehicles sold in North America will come standard with the Tesla-designed North American Charging Standard, or NACS, plug starting in 2025. Owners of existing Polestars will be able to charge at Tesla’s Supercharger stations with an adapter starting in mid-2024.

Polestar’s deal follows an identical one announced by corporate sibling Volvo Cars on Tuesday. Ford Motor, General Motors and Rivian have also announced similar deals with Tesla in recent weeks.
“We salute the pioneering work Tesla has done to speed up the adoption and increase the popularity of electric vehicles, and it’s great to see the Supercharger network being made available in this way,” said CEO Thomas Ingenlath. “This move will greatly increase the rate of EV adoption in a key automotive region.”
Most non-Tesla EVs and charging stations in North America use a plug design called CCS, which stands for Combined Charging System. Recent studies have found that CCS charging networks have much lower reliability than Tesla’s network. Critics have also noted that the CCS fast-charging plug is significantly larger and heavier than the NACS plug, making it difficult for some older or disabled drivers to use.  
Tesla EVs can use CCS chargers with an adapter, but currently only Tesla EVs can use Tesla chargers.
Tesla’s plug design was proprietary until November, when the company published the technical details of its system and made it available to other automakers and makers of EV chargers.
SAE International, an engineering group that publishes standards for the auto industry, said earlier this week that it is in the process of writing public standards for Tesla’s NACS charging plug. More