Regulation and Deregulation of Industry

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    Biden Administration Clamps Down on China’s Access to Chip Technology

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    The White House issued sweeping restrictions on selling semiconductors and chip-making equipment to China, an attempt to curb the country’s access to critical technologies.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Friday announced sweeping new limits on the sale of semiconductor technology to China, a step aimed at crippling Beijing’s access to critical technologies that are needed for everything from supercomputing to guiding weapons.The moves are the clearest sign yet that a dangerous standoff between the world’s two major superpowers is increasingly playing out in the technological sphere, with the United States trying to establish a stranglehold on advanced computing and semiconductor technology that is essential to China’s military and economic ambitions.The package of restrictions, which was released by the Commerce Department, is designed in large part to slow the progress of Chinese military programs, which use supercomputing to model nuclear blasts, guide hypersonic weapons and establish advanced networks for surveilling dissidents and minorities, among other activities.Alan Estevez, the under secretary of commerce for industry and security, said his bureau was working to prevent China’s military, intelligence and security services from acquiring sensitive technologies with military applications.“The threat environment is always changing, and we are updating our policies today to make sure we’re addressing the challenges posed by the P.R.C. while we continue our outreach and coordination with allies and partners,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.Technology experts said the rules appeared to impose the broadest export controls issued in a decade. While similar to the Trump administration’s crackdown on the telecom giant Huawei, the new rules are far wider in scope, affecting dozens of Chinese firms. And unlike the Trump administration’s approach — which was viewed as aggressive but scattershot — the rules appear to establish a more comprehensive policy that will stop cutting-edge exports to a range of Chinese technology companies and cut off China’s nascent ability to produce advanced chips itself.“It is an aggressive approach by the U.S. government to start to really impair the capability of China to indigenously develop certain of these critical technologies,” said Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at Center for a New American Security, a think tank.Companies will no longer be allowed to supply advanced computing chips, chip-making equipment and other products to China unless they receive a special license. Most of those licenses will be denied, though certain shipments to facilities operated by U.S. companies or allied countries will be evaluated case by case, a senior administration official said in a briefing Thursday.It remains to be seen whether the Chinese government will take action in response. Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at Yale Law School who studies technology policy in China, said the new rules could push Beijing to impose restrictions on American companies or firms from other countries that comply with U.S. rules but still want to maintain operations in China.“The question is: Would this new package cross a red line to trigger a response that we haven’t seen before?” she said. “A lot of people are anticipating it will. I think we’ll have to wait and see.”More on the Relations Between Asia and the U.S.Taiwan: American officials are intensifying efforts to build a giant stockpile of weapons in Taiwan in case China blockades the island as a prelude to an attempted invasion, according to current and former officials.North Korea: Pyongyang fired an intermediate range ballistic missile over Japan for the first time since 2017, when Kim Jong-un seemed intent on escalating conflict with Washington. But the international landscape has changed considerably since then.A Broad Partnership: The United States and 14 Pacific Island nations signed an agreement at a summit in Washington, putting climate change, economic growth and stronger security ties at the center of an American push to counter Chinese influence.South Korea: President Yoon Suk Yeol has aligned his country more closely with the United States, but there are limits to how far he can go without angering China or provoking North Korea.The measures come at a particularly sensitive moment for Beijing. Chinese leaders will hold a major political meeting beginning Oct. 16, where leader Xi Jinping is expected to secure a third leadership term, becoming the country’s longest-ruling leader since Mao Zedong.Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said the United States was trying “to use its technological prowess as an advantage to hobble and suppress the development of emerging markets and developing countries.”“The U.S. probably hopes that China and the rest of the developing world will forever stay at the lower end of the industrial chain,” he added.The Chinese government has invested heavily in building up its semiconductor industry, but it still lags behind the United States, Taiwan and South Korea in its ability to produce the most advanced chips. In other fields, like artificial intelligence, China is no longer significantly behind the United States, but those technologies mostly rely on advanced chips that are designed or fabricated by non-Chinese firms.Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, said some of China’s most advanced supercomputers depended on chips made by California-based Intel or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which uses U.S. technology in its production process and so would be subject to the new rules.The restrictions limit U.S. exports of high-tech chips called graphic processing units, which are used to power artificial intelligence applications, and place broad limits on chips destined for supercomputers in China. The rules also bar U.S.-based companies that make the equipment used to manufacture advanced logic and memory chips from selling that machinery to China without a license.Perhaps most significant, the Biden administration also imposed broad international restrictions that will prohibit companies anywhere in the world from selling chips used in artificial intelligence and supercomputing in China if they are made with U.S. technology, software or machinery. The restrictions used what is known as the foreign direct product rule, which was last deployed by former President Donald J. Trump to cripple Huawei.Another foreign direct product rule bans a broader range of products made outside the United States with American technology from being sent to 28 Chinese companies that have been placed on an “entity list” over national security concerns.Those companies include Beijing Sensetime Technology Development, a unit of a major Chinese artificial intelligence company, SenseTime. Also included are Dahua Technology, Higon, iFLYTEK, Megvii Technology, Sugon, Tianjian Phytium Information Technology, Sunway Microelectronics and Yitu Technologies, as well as a variety of labs and research institutions linked to universities and the Chinese government.In a briefing with reporters, senior administration officials said the measures would be limited to the most advanced chips and not have a broad commercial impact on private Chinese businesses. But they conceded that the limits could become more restrictive over time, given that technology will begin to outpace the advanced technological standards spelled out in the rules.Industry executives say many Chinese industries that rely on artificial intelligence and advanced algorithms power those abilities with American graphic processing units, which will now be restricted. Those include companies working with technologies like autonomous driving and gene sequencing, as well as the artificial intelligence company SenseTime and ByteDance, the Chinese internet company that owns TikTok.New limits on sales of chip-making equipment are also expected to clamp down on the operations of China’s homegrown chip makers, including Semiconductor Manufacturing International, Yangtze Memory Technologies and ChangXin Memory Technologies.The actual impact of the restrictions will hinge on how the policy is carried out. For most of the measures, the Commerce Department has the discretion to grant companies special licenses to continue selling the restricted products to China, though it said most would be denied.Some Republican lawmakers and China hawks have criticized the department for being too willing to issue such licenses, allowing U.S. companies to continue selling sensitive technology to China even when national security may be at stake.“If you want to stop it, you can just stop it,” said Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “When you create a licensing requirement, you are announcing to the world: We don’t want to stop it. We are just pretending.”With its vast ecosystem of factories, China continues to be a huge and lucrative market for U.S. chip exports. The tiny technologies are crucial to the smartphones, laptops, coffee makers, cars and other goods that Chinese factories pump out for domestic consumption and export to the world.Many American companies have long argued that their sales to China are an important source of revenue that allows them to reinvest in research and development and retain a competitive edge.But doing business with China has become much more fraught in the last few years, as the tensions between the United States and China have morphed into a cold war competition. The Chinese government has sought to blur the line between its defense sector and private industry, drawing on Chinese firms that specialize in fields including artificial intelligence, big data, aerospace technologies and quantum computing to fuel the country’s military modernization.Chinese military drills aimed at intimidating Taiwan, and China’s alignment with Moscow after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have strengthened the case for technology regulation.Still, industry executives and some analysts argue that cutting China off from foreign chips will accelerate Beijing’s push to develop them itself and cause U.S. companies to lose out to foreign competitors, unless other countries also impose similar restrictions.The Semiconductor Industry Association said Friday that it was assessing the impact of the export controls on the industry and working with companies to ensure compliance.“We understand the goal of ensuring national security and urge the U.S. government to implement the rules in a targeted way — and in collaboration with international partners — to help level the playing field and mitigate unintended harm to U.S. innovation,” it said in a statement.In remarks last month, the Biden administration signaled that it would get tougher on technology regulation. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said the U.S. government’s previous approach, of trying to stay a few generations ahead of competitors, was no longer sufficient.“Given the foundational nature of certain technologies, such as advanced logic and memory chips, we must maintain as large of a lead as possible,” he said.Kevin Wolf, a partner at Akin Gump who led export control efforts during the Obama administration, said the move was “a fundamental shift in the use of export controls” to address broader national security objectives. Since the Cold War, most countries had used export controls more narrowly, focusing on regulating specific items that were necessary to produce or deploy weapons.Mr. Wolf said the new measures were likely to be highly effective in the short and medium term. “How effective they will be over the long term will be a function of whether allies ultimately agree to impose similar controls,” he added.Edward Wong More

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    Economists Nervously Eye the Bank of England’s Market Rescue

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    The Bank of England stepped in to save a critical market this week. Economists say it was necessary but also worry about the precedent.When the Bank of England announced last week that it would buy bonds in unlimited quantities in an effort to stabilize the market for U.K. government debt, economists agreed it was probably a necessary move to prevent a cataclysmic financial crisis.They also worried it could set a dangerous precedent.Central banks defend the financial stability of the nations in which they operate. In an era of highly leveraged and deeply interconnected markets, that means that they sometimes have to buy bonds or backstop lending to prevent a problem in one area from spiraling into a crisis that threatens the entire financial system.But that backstop role also means that if a government does something to generate a major shock, politicians can be fairly confident that the local central bank will step in to stem the fallout.Some economists say that is essentially what happened in the United Kingdom. Liz Truss, the new prime minister, proposed a huge package of tax cuts and spending during a period of already high inflation, when standard economic theory suggests governments should do the opposite. Markets reacted forcefully: Yields on long-term government debt shot up, and the value of the British pound fell sharply relative to the dollar and other major currencies.The Bank of England announced that it would buy long-term government debt “on whatever scale is necessary” to prevent a full-blown financial crisis. The move was particularly striking because the bank had been poised to begin selling its bond holdings — a plan that is now postponed — and has been raising interest rates in a bid to bring down inflation.Economists broadly agreed that the bank’s decision was the right one. The rapid rise in interest rates sent shock waves through financial markets and upended a typically sleepy corner of the pension fund industry, which, left unaddressed, could have carried severe consequences for millions of workers and retirees, destabilizing the country’s entire financial system.“You saw very substantial market dislocation,” said Lawrence H. Summers, a former U.S. Treasury Secretary who is now at Harvard. “It’s a recognized role of central banks to respond to that.”To some economists, that was exactly the problem: By shielding the U.K. government from the full consequences of its actions — both preventing citizens from feeling the painful aftereffects and keeping government borrowing costs from shooting higher — the policy demonstrated that central bankers stand ready to clean up messy fallout. That could make it easier for elected leaders around the world to take similar risks in the future.Those concerns eased somewhat on Monday when Ms. Truss partly backed down, reversing plans to abolish the top income tax rate of 45 percent on high earners.But she appears poised to go forward with the rest of her proposed tax cuts and spending programs, putting the Bank of England in a delicate spot.Rising Inflation in BritainInflation Slows Slightly: Consumer prices are still rising at about the fastest pace in 40 years, despite a small drop to 9.9 percent in August.Interest Rates: On Sept. 22, the Bank of England raised its key rate by another half a percentage point, to 2.25 percent, as it tries to keep high inflation from becoming embedded in the nation’s economy.Mortgage Market: The uptick in interest rates roiled Britain’s mortgage market, leaving many homeowners calculating their potential future mortgage payments with alarm.Investor Worries: The financial markets have been grumbling with unease about Britain’s economic outlook. The government plan to freeze energy bills and cut taxes is not easing concerns.The “partial U-turn” from Ms. Truss “still leaves the Bank of England with a set of near-impossible choices,” analysts at Evercore ISI wrote in a note to clients. “The only way to alleviate this is for the government to take much bigger steps to restore credibility — but there is little sign this is imminent.”There’s a reason that the interplay between monetary policy and politics in the United Kingdom is garnering so much attention. Central banks have for decades closely guarded their independence from politics. They set their policies to either stoke the economy or to slow it down based on what was necessary to achieve their goals — in most cases, low and stable inflation — free from the control of elected officials.The logic behind that insulation is simple. If central bankers had to listen to politicians, they might let price increases get out of control in exchange for faster short-term growth that would help the party in power.Now, that independence is being tested, and not just in the United Kingdom. Central banks around the world are raising interest rates to try to fight inflation, resulting in slower growth and making it harder for governments to borrow and spend. That is likely to lead to tension — if not outright conflict — between central bankers and elected leaders.It is already beginning. A United Nations agency on Monday warned that the Federal Reserve risked a global recession and significant harm in developing countries, for instance. But the United Kingdom’s example is stark because the elected government is carrying out policy that works against what the nation’s central bank is trying to achieve.“One always worries that actions like these can affect incentives going forward,” said Karen Dynan, a Harvard economist who served as a top official in the Treasury Department under President Obama. “It’s basic economics: People respond to incentives, and fiscal policymakers are people.”Part of the issue is that it is hard for central bankers to single-mindedly focus on controlling inflation in an era when financial markets are fragile and susceptible to disruption — including disruptions caused by elected governments.Before 2008, the Fed had never used mass long-term bond purchases to calm markets in its modern era. It has now used them twice in the span of 12 years. In addition to last week’s moves, the Bank of England also turned to mass bond purchases to calm markets in 2020.Bank of England officials have stressed that the policies they announced last week are a temporary response to an immediate crisis. The bank plans to buy long-dated bonds for less than two weeks and says it will not hold them longer than necessary. The Treasury, not the bank, will be responsible for any financial losses. The bank said it remained committed to fighting inflation, and some economists have speculated that it could raise rates even more aggressively in light of the government’s growth-stoking policies.If the bank is able to hold to that plan, it could mitigate economists’ concerns about the longer-run risks of the program. If interest rates rise again and it gets more expensive for the government to borrow, Ms. Truss will still need to grapple with the costs of her proposed programs, just without facing an imminent financial crisis.But some economists warn that the Bank of England may find the situation harder to extricate itself from than it hopes. It may turn out that the bank needs to keep buying bonds longer than expected, or that it cannot sell them without threatening another crisis. That could have the unintentional side effect of giving the British government a helping hand — and it could demonstrate that it is hard for a big central bank to remove support from its economy when the elected government wants to do the opposite.Liz Truss, Britain’s prime minister, will still need to grapple with the costs of her proposed programs, but she won’t be facing an imminent financial crisis because of the Bank of England’s actions.Alberto Pezzali/Associated PressMs. Truss’s policies — particularly before her partial reversal on Monday — would work directly against the bank’s efforts to cool growth, stoking demand through lower taxes and increased spending. The rapid rise in bond yields last week suggested that investors expected inflation to rise even further.Under ordinary circumstances, these conditions would lead the Bank of England to do even more to bring down the inflation it had already been fighting, raising interest rates more quickly or selling more of its bond holdings. Some analysts early last week expected the bank to announce an emergency rate increase. Instead, the brewing financial crisis forced the bank to do, in effect, the opposite, lowering borrowing costs by buying bonds.While lowering rates and stoking the economy was not the point — just a side effect — some economists warn that those actions risk setting a dangerous precedent in which central banks can only tighten policy to control inflation if their national governments cooperate and do not roil markets in a way that threatens financial stability. That situation puts politicians more in the driver’s seat when it comes to making economic policy.Guillaume Plantin, a French economist who has studied the interplay between central banks and governments, likened the dynamic to a game of chicken: To avoid a financial crisis, either Ms. Truss had to abandon her tax-cut plans, or the Bank of England had to set aside, at least temporarily, its efforts to raise borrowing costs. The result: “The Bank of England had to chicken out,” he said.Policymakers have known for decades that when the government steps in to rescue private companies or individuals, it can encourage them to repeat the same risky behavior in the future, a situation known as “moral hazard.” But in the private sector, there are steps governments can take to offset those risks — regulating banks to reduce the risk of collapse, for example, or wiping out shareholders if the government does need to step in to help.It is less clear what monetary policymakers can do to prevent the government itself from taking advantage of the safety net a central bank provides.“There is a moral hazard here: You are protecting some people from the full consequences of their actions,” said Donald Kohn, a former Fed vice chair and a former member of the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee, who agreed that it is necessary to intervene to prevent market dysfunction. “If you think about the entities that benefited from this, one was the chancellor of the Exchequer, the government.”Some forecasters have warned that other central banks might have to pull back on their own efforts to fight inflation to avoid destabilizing financial markets. Some investors are speculating that the Fed will have to end its policy of shrinking government bond holdings early or risk stirring market turmoil, for instance.Not all of those scenarios would necessarily raise the same concerns. In the United States, the Biden administration and the Fed are both focused on fighting inflation, so any reversal by the central bank would probably not look like bowing to pressure from the elected government.Still, the common thread is that financial stability issues could become a hurdle in the fight against inflation — especially where governments do not decide to go along with the push to rein in prices. And how worrying the British precedent proves will depend on whether the Bank of England is capable of backing away from bond buying quickly.“Is this just an exigent moment that they needed to respond to, or does it give the fiscal authority room to be irresponsible?” said Paul McCulley, an economist and the former managing director at the investment firm PIMCO. “The question is who blinks.”Joe Rennison More

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    Labor Board Proposes to Increase Legal Exposure for Franchised Chains

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    Federal labor regulators on Tuesday proposed a rule that would make more companies legally liable for labor law violations committed by their contractors or franchisees.Under the proposal, which governs when a company is considered a so-called joint employer, the National Labor Relations Board could hold a company like McDonald’s liable if one of its franchisees fired workers who tried to unionize, even if the parent company exercised only indirect control over the workers. Indirect control can include requiring the franchisee to use software that locks in certain scheduling practices and setting limits on what the workers can be paid.Under the current approach, adopted in 2020, when the board had a majority of Republican appointees, the parent company could be held liable for such labor law violations only if it exerted direct control over the franchisee’s employees — such as directly determining their schedules and pay.The joint-employer rule also determines whether the parent company must bargain with employees of a contractor or franchisee if those employees unionize.Employees and unions generally prefer to bargain with the parent company and to hold it accountable for labor law violations because the parent typically has more power than the contractor or franchisee to change workplace policies and make concessions.“In an economy where employment relationships are increasingly complex, the board must ensure that its legal rules for deciding which employers should engage in collective bargaining serve the goals of the National Labor Relations Act,” Lauren McFerran, the chairwoman of the board, which has a Democratic majority, said in a statement.The legal threshold for triggering a joint-employer relationship under labor law has changed frequently in recent years, depending on the political composition of the labor board. In 2015, a board led by Democrats changed the standard from “direct and immediate” control to indirect control.As a result of that shift, parent companies could also be considered joint employers of workers hired by a contractor or franchisee if the parent had the right to control certain working conditions — like firing or disciplining workers — even if it didn’t act on that right.Under President Donald J. Trump, the board moved to undo that change. The Republican-led board not only restored the standard of direct and immediate control, it also required that the control exercised by the parent be “substantial,” making it even more difficult to deem a parent company a joint employer.The franchise business model has faced rising pressure. On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said he had signed a bill creating a council to regulate labor practices in the fast food industry. The council has the power to raise the minimum wage for the industry in California to $22 an hour next year, compared with a statewide minimum of $15.50, and to issue health and safety standards to protect workers.The fast food industry strongly opposed the measure, arguing that it would raise costs for employers and prices for consumers. More

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    California Senate Passes Bill to Regulate Fast-Food Industry

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    If signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the measure would create a state council to establish minimum pay and safety conditions on an industrywide basis.The California State Senate passed a bill on Monday that could transform the way the service sector is regulated by creating a council to set wages and improve working conditions for fast-food workers.The measure, known as A.B. 257, passed by a vote of 21 to 12. The State Assembly had already approved a version of the measure, and it now requires the approval of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has not indicated whether he will sign it. The bill was vehemently opposed by the fast-food industry.The bill could herald an important step toward sectoral bargaining, in which workers and employers negotiate compensation and working conditions on an industrywide basis, as opposed to enterprise bargaining, in which workers negotiate with individual companies at individual locations.“In my view, it’s one of the most significant pieces of state employment legislation that’s passed in a long time,” said Kate Andrias, a labor law expert at Columbia University. “It gives workers a formal seat at the table with employers to set standards across the industry that’s not limited to setting minimum wages.”While sectoral bargaining is common in Europe, it is rare in the United States, though certain industries, like auto manufacturing, have arrangements that approximate it. The California bill wouldn’t bring true sectoral bargaining — which involves workers negotiating directly with employers, instead of a government entity setting broad standards — but incorporates crucial elements of the model.The bill would set up a 10-member council that would include worker and employer representatives and two state officials, and that would review pay and safety standards across the restaurant industry.The council could issue health, safety and anti-discrimination regulations and set an industrywide minimum wage. The legislation caps the figure at $22 an hour next year, when the statewide minimum wage will be $15.50. The bill also requires annual cost-of-living adjustments for any new wage floor beginning in 2024.Restaurant chains with at least 100 locations nationwide would come under the council’s jurisdiction — including companies like Starbucks that own and operate their stores as well as franchisees of large companies like McDonald’s. Hundreds of thousands of workers in the state would be affected.The council would shut down after six years but could be reconvened by the Legislature.Mary Kay Henry, the president of the nearly two-million-member Service Employees International Union, which pushed for the legislation, said it was critical because of the challenges that workers have faced when trying to change policies by unionizing store by store.“The stores get closed or the franchise owner sells or the multinational pulls the lease for the real estate,” Ms. Henry said. Franchise industry officials say it is extremely rare to close a store in response to a union campaign. Starbucks recently closed several corporate-owned stores across the country where workers had unionized or were trying to unionize, citing safety concerns like crime, though the company also closed a number of nonunion stores for the same stated reasons. Industry officials argue that the bill will raise labor costs, and therefore menu prices, when inflation is already a widespread concern. A recent report by the Center for Economic Forecasting and Development at the University of California, Riverside, estimated that employers would pass along about one-third of any increase in labor compensation to consumers.“We are pulling the fire alarm in all states to wake our members up about what’s going on in California,” said Matthew Haller, the president of the International Franchise Association, an industry group that opposes the bill. “We are concerned about other states — the multiplier effect of something like this.”Ingrid Vilorio, who works at a Jack in the Box franchise near Oakland, Calif., and who pressed legislators to back the bill during several trips to Sacramento, the state capital, said she believed the measure would lead to improvements in safety — for example, through rules that require employers to quickly repair or replace broken equipment like grills and fryers, which can cause burns.Ms. Vilorio said she also hoped the council would crack down on problems like sexual harassment, wage theft and denial of paid sick leave. She said she and her co-workers went on strike last year to demand masks, hand sanitizer and the Covid-19 sick pay they were entitled to receive. Jack in the Box did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Haller said state agencies were already authorized to crack down on employers who violate laws governing the payment of wages, safety, discrimination and harassment.“The state has the existing tools at its disposal,” Mr. Haller said. “They should be more fully funded rather than put a punitive target on a subsection of a sector.”Mr. Haller and other opponents have cited a critique by the state’s Department of Finance arguing that the bill “could lead to a fragmented regulatory and legal environment for employers” and “exacerbate existing delays” in enforcement by increasing the burden on agencies that oversee existing rules. The bill does not provide additional funding for enforcement agencies.David Weil, who under President Barack Obama oversaw the agency that enforces the federal minimum wage, said that, while funding is critical for labor regulators, the new council could benefit a broad swath of workers even without additional funding. For example, he said, raising the minimum wage for fast-food workers could increase wages for workers in other sectors, like retail, that compete with fast-food restaurants for labor.But Dr. Weil agreed that creating new standards in the fast-food industry could end up drawing resources away from the enforcement of labor and employment laws in other industries where workers may be equally vulnerable.Opponents managed to secure a number of concessions in the State Senate, such as preventing the council from creating sick-leave or paid-time-off benefits, or rules that restrict scheduling.The Senate also eliminated a so-called joint liability provision, which would have allowed regulators to hold parent companies like McDonald’s liable for violations by franchise owners. More

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    Starbucks Illegally Denied Raises to Union Members, Labor Board Says

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    Federal labor regulators have accused Starbucks of illegally discriminating against unionized employees by denying them wage and benefit increases that the company put in place for nonunion employees.In a complaint on Wednesday, a regional office of the National Labor Relations Board accused the company of breaking the law when its chief executive, Howard Schultz, “promised increased wages and benefits at U.S. stores if its employees rejected the union as their bargaining representative,” and when it withheld raises and benefits from unionized workers.The labor board is seeking, among other things, that affected employees be made whole for the denial of benefits and wage increases. It is also asking that Mr. Schultz read a notice to all employees informing them that some had been unlawfully denied benefits and pay increases and explaining their rights under federal labor law. Alternatively, a board official could read this material to employees in Mr. Schultz’s presence.The labor board’s case is scheduled for a hearing on Oct. 25 before an administrative law judge, unless Starbucks settles with the agency beforehand. Starbucks could appeal any ruling by an administrative judge to the full board.In a statement, Starbucks said that it was required under federal law to negotiate changes in wages and benefits with the union and that it was therefore not allowed to make such changes unilaterally, as it can in nonunion stores. “Wage and benefits are ‘mandatory’ subjects of the collective bargaining process,” the statement said.Workers United, the union representing the company’s newly organized workers, said the complaint affirmed its contention that Starbucks was discouraging union activity.“He claims to run a ‘different kind of company,’ yet in reality, Howard Schultz is simply a billionaire bully who is doing everything he can to crush workers’ rights,” Maggie Carter, a worker who helped unionize her store in Knoxville, Tenn., said in a statement.More than 225 out of roughly 9,000 corporate-owned Starbucks locations in the United States have voted to unionize since last fall.Mr. Schultz began indicating that the company would roll out new benefits, but only for nonunion workers, shortly after he began his third tour as the company’s chief executive in April.The next month, the company announced a series of new benefits — including additional career development opportunities, better tipping options and more sick time — but only for stores that hadn’t unionized or weren’t in the process of unionizing. The benefits were to begin in the coming months.The company unveiled wage increases as well, some of which had already been announced and which the company said would apply to all workers. But other increases were new and would apply only to nonunion workers.For example, according to Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesman, all employees stood to benefit from a companywide $15-an-hour minimum wage, but nonunion workers hired by May 2 would get a 3 percent raise if that proved higher than $15.The wage policy appears to have sown confusion, with some employees briefly receiving a pay increase that was then withdrawn. Colin Cochran, a worker at a store near Buffalo that initially voted to unionize and then voted against the union in a rerun election decided this month, provided pay stubs showing that his $16.28 hourly wage had increased to $16.77 the first week of August, when Starbucks began the pay increases nationwide. But Mr. Cochran’s pay stub for the second week of August showed his hourly pay dropping back to $16.28. (The union is challenging the election loss at this store.)Mr. Borges said that the reversion to the previous wage had resulted from an inadvertent error and that unionized stores would get wage increases in September.Workers involved in union campaigns at other Starbucks locations said the denial of pay and benefit increases to unionized stores had slowed their organizing efforts.Kylah Clay, a Starbucks worker in Boston who helped organize several stores in the area, said inquiries from employees at other stores who were interested in unionizing had dropped off substantially not long after the company’s pay and benefits announcement in May. But they picked up recently after the pay and many benefit changes took effect, she said. More

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    Pace of Climate Change Sends Economists Back to Drawing Board

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    Economists have been examining the impact of climate change for almost as long as it’s been known to science.In the 1970s, the Yale economist William Nordhaus began constructing a model meant to gauge the effect of warming on economic growth. The work, first published in 1992, gave rise to a field of scholarship assessing the cost to society of each ton of emitted carbon offset by the benefits of cheap power — and thus how much it was worth paying to avert it.Dr. Nordhaus became a leading voice for a nationwide carbon tax that would discourage the use of fossil fuels and propel a transition toward more sustainable forms of energy. It remained the preferred choice of economists and business interests for decades. And in 2018, Dr. Nordhaus was honored with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.But as President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act with its $392 billion in climate-related subsidies, one thing became very clear: The nation’s biggest initiative to address climate change is built on a different foundation from the one Dr. Nordhaus proposed.Rather than imposing a tax, the legislation offers tax credits, loans and grants — technology-specific carrots that have historically been seen as less efficient than the stick of penalizing carbon emissions more broadly.The outcome reflects a larger trend in public policy, one that is prompting economists to ponder why the profession was so focused on a solution that ultimately went nowhere in Congress — and how economists could be more useful as the damage from extreme weather mounts.A central shift in thinking, many say, is that climate change has moved faster than foreseen, and in less predictable ways, raising the urgency of government intervention. In addition, technologies like solar panels and batteries are cheap and abundant enough to enable a fuller shift away from fossil fuels, rather than slightly decreasing their use.Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University, worked on developing carbon pricing methods at the Department of Energy. He thinks the relentless focus on prices, with little attention paid to direct investments, lasted too long.“There was an idealization and simplification of the problem that started in the economics literature,” Dr. Kopp said. “And things that start out in the economics literature have half-lives in the applied policy world that are longer than the time period during which they’re the frontier of the field.”Carbon taxes and emissions trading systems have been instituted in many places, such as Denmark and California. But a federal measure in the United States, setting a cap on carbon emissions and letting companies trade their allotments, failed in 2010.What’s in the Inflation Reduction ActCard 1 of 8What’s in the Inflation Reduction ActA substantive legislation. More

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    Who’s to Blame for a Factory Shutdown: A Company, or California?

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    VERNON, Calif. — Teresa Robles begins her shift around dawn most days at a pork processing plant in an industrial corridor four miles south of downtown Los Angeles. She spends eight hours on her feet cutting tripe, a repetitive motion that has given her constant joint pain, but also a $17.85-an-hour income that supports her family.So in early June, when whispers began among the 1,800 workers that the facility would soon shut down, Ms. Robles, 57, hoped they were only rumors.“But it was true,” she said somberly at the end of a recent shift, “and now each day inches a little closer to my last day.”  The 436,000-square-foot factory, with roots dating back nearly a century, is scheduled to close early next year. Its Virginia-based owner, Smithfield Foods, says it will be cheaper to supply the region from factories in the Midwest than to continue operations here.“Unfortunately, the escalating costs of doing business in California required this decision,” said Shane Smith, the chief executive of Smithfield, citing utility rates and a voter-approved law regulating how pigs can be housed.Workers and company officials see a larger economic lesson in the impending shutdown. They just differ on what it is. To Ms. Robles, it is evidence that despite years of often perilous work, “we are just disposable to them.” For the meatpacker, it is a case of politics and regulation trumping commerce.The cost of doing business in California is a longtime point of contention. It was cited last year when Tesla, the electric-vehicle maker that has been a Silicon Valley success story, announced that it was moving its headquarters to Texas. “There’s a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area,” said Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, mentioning housing prices and long commutes.As with many economic arguments, this one can take on a partisan hue.Around the time of Tesla’s exit, a report by the conservative-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford University found that California-based companies were leaving at an accelerating rate. In the first six months of last year, 74 headquarters relocated from California, according to the report. In 2020, the report found, 62 companies were known to have relocated.Dee Dee Myers, a senior adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, counters by pointing to California’s continued economic growth.“Every time this narrative comes up, it’s consistently disproven by the facts,” said Ms. Myers, director of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development. The nation’s gross domestic product grew at an annual pace of 2 percent over a five-year period through 2021, according to Ms. Myers’s office, while California’s grew by 3.7 percent. The state is still the country’s tech capital.Still, manufacturing has declined more rapidly in California than in the nation as a whole. Since 1990, the state has lost a third of its factory jobs — it now has roughly 1.3 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — compared with a 28 percent decline nationwide.The Smithfield plant is an icon of California’s industrial heyday. In 1931, Barney and Francis Clougherty, brothers who grew up in Los Angeles and the sons of Irish immigrants, started a meatpacking business that soon settled in Vernon. Their company, later branded as Farmer John, became a household name in Southern California, recognized for producing the beloved Dodger Dog and al pastor that sizzled at backyard cookouts. During World War II, the company supplied rations to U.S. troops in the Pacific.Leo Velasquez, 62, started working at the plant in 1990. He had hoped to stay there until he was ready to retire.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesAlmost 20 years later, Les Grimes, a Hollywood set painter, was commissioned to create a mural at the plant, transforming a bland industrial structure into a pastoral landscape where young children chased cherubic-looking pigs. It became a sightseeing destination.More recently, it has also been a symbol of the state’s social and political turbulence.In explaining Smithfield’s decision to close the plant, Mr. Smith, the chief executive, and other company officials have pointed to a 2018 statewide ballot measure, Proposition 12, which requires that pork sold in the state come from breeding pigs housed in spaces that allow them to move more freely.The measure is not yet being enforced and faces a challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court this fall. If it is not overturned, the law will apply even to meat packed outside the state — the way Smithfield now plans to supply the local market — but company officials say that in any case, its passage reflects a climate inhospitable to pork production in California.Passions have sometimes run high outside the plant as animal rights activists have condemned the confinement and treatment of the pigs being slaughtered inside. Protesters have serenaded and provided water to pigs whose snouts stuck out of slats in arriving trucks.In addition to its objections to Proposition 12, Smithfield maintains that the cost of utilities is nearly four times as high per head to produce pork in California than at the company’s 45 other plants around the country, though it declined to say how it arrived at that estimate.John Grant, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770, which represents Ms. Robles and other workers at the plant, said Smithfield announced the closing just as the sides were to begin negotiating a new contract. “They’re kicking us out with no answers,” said Teresa Robles, who has worked at the factory for four years.Mark Abramson for The New York Times“A total gut punch and, frankly, a shock,” said Mr. Grant, who worked at the plant in the 1970s. He said wage increases were a priority for the union going into negotiations. The company has offered a $7,500 bonus to employees who stay through the closing and has raised the hourly wage, previously $19.10 at the top of the scale, to $23.10. (The rate at the company’s unionized Midwest plants is still a bit higher.)But Mr. Grant said the factory shutdown was an affront to his members, who toiled through the pandemic as essential workers. Smithfield was fined nearly $60,000 by California regulators in 2020 for failing to take adequate measures to protect workers from contracting coronavirus.“After all that the employees have done throughout the pandemic, they’re now all of a sudden going to flee? They’re destroying lives,” said Mr. Grant, adding that the union is working to find new jobs for workers and hopes to help find a buyer for the plant.Karen Chapple, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, said the closing was an example of “the larger trend of deindustrialization” in areas like Los Angeles. “It probably doesn’t make sense to be here from an efficiency perspective,” she said. “It’s the tail end of a long exodus.”Indeed, the number of food manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles County has declined 6 percent since 2017, according to state data.  And as those jobs are shed, workers like Ms. Robles wonder what will come next.More than 80 percent of the employees at the Smithfield plant are Latino — a mix of immigrants and first-generation native-born. Most are older than 50. The security and benefits have kept people in their jobs, union leaders say, but the nature of the labor has made it hard to recruit younger workers who have better alternatives.On a recent overcast morning, the air in Vernon was thick with the smell of ammonia. Workers wearing surgical masks and carrying goggles and helmets walked into the plant. The sound of forklifts hummed beyond a high fence.Massive warehouses line the streets in the area. Some sit vacant; others produce wholesale local baked goods and candies. Mario Melendez, who has worked at the plant for a decade, says he feels betrayed by the company.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesMs. Robles started at the Smithfield plant four years ago. For more than two decades she owned a small business selling produce in downtown Los Angeles. She loved her work, but when her brother died in 2018, she needed money to honor his wish to have his body sent from Southern California to Colima, Mexico, their hometown. She sold the business for a couple of thousand dollars, then started at the factory, making $14 an hour.“I was proud,” she said, recalling the early months at her new job.Ms. Robles is the sole provider for her family. Her husband has several health complications, including surviving a heart attack in recent months, so she now shoulders the $2,000 mortgage payment for their home in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Sometimes her 20-year-old son, who recently started working at the plant, helps with expenses.“But this is my responsibility — it is on me to provide,” she said.Ms. Robles has long recited the Lord’s Prayer every night before bed, and now she often finds herself repeating it throughout the day for strength.“They’re kicking us out with no answers,” she said.Other workers, like Mario Melendez, 67, who has worked at the plant for a decade, shares that unmoored feeling.It’s an honor to know his labor helps feed people across Southern California, he said — especially around the holidays, when the factory’s ribs, ham and hot dogs will be part of people’s celebrations.But the factory is also a place where he contracted coronavirus, which he passed along to his brother, who died of the virus, as did his mother. He was devastated.A truck carrying pigs entering the plant. Animal rights activists have sometimes protested outside.Mark Abramson for The New York Times“A terrible shock,” said Mr. Melendez, who says he feels betrayed by the company.So does Leo Velasquez.He started on the night shift in 1990, making $7 an hour to package and seal bacon. A few years later, he moved to days, working 10-hour shifts.“I’ve given my life to this place,” said Mr. Velasquez, 62.Over the years, his body began to wear down. In 2014, he had shoulder replacement surgery. Still, he had hoped to continue at the factory until he was ready to retire.“That’s not going to happen,” he said. “Where I go from here, I do not know.” More

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    F.T.C. Chair Lina Khan Upends Antitrust Standards by Suing Meta

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    Lina Khan may set off a shift in how Washington regulates competition by filing cases in tech areas before they mature. She faces an uphill climb.WASHINGTON — Early in her tenure as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan declared that she would rein in the power of the largest technology companies in a dramatically new way.“We’re trying to be forward looking, anticipating problems and taking fast action,’’ Ms. Khan said in an interview last month. She promised to focus on “next-generation technologies,” and not just on areas where tech behemoths were already well established.This week, Ms. Khan took her first step toward stopping the tech monopolies of the future when she sued to block a small acquisition by Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, of the virtual-reality fitness start-up Within. The deal was significant for Meta’s development of the so-called metaverse, which is a nascent technology and far from mainstream.In doing so, Ms. Khan upended decades of antitrust standards, potentially setting off a wholesale shift in the way Washington enforces competition across corporate America. At the heart of the F.T.C.’s lawsuit is the idea that regulators can apply antitrust law without waiting for a market to mature to the point where it is clear which companies hold the most power. The F.T.C. said such early action was justified because Meta’s deal would probably eliminate competition in the young virtual-reality market.Since the late 1970s, most federal challenges to mergers have been in large, well-established markets and aim to prevent already clear monopolies. Regulators have mostly rubber-stamped the purchases of start-ups by tech giants, such as Google’s 2006 deal to buy YouTube and Facebook’s 2012 acquisition of Instagram, because those markets were still emerging.As a result, Ms. Khan faces an uphill climb. Regulators have been reluctant to try to stop corporate mergers by relying on the theory that competition and consumers will be harmed in the future. The federal government lost at least two cases that used this strategy in the past decade, including an attempt to block a $1.9 billion merger in 2015 among X-ray sterilization providers that the F.T.C. had predicted would harm future competition in regional markets.The F.T.C.’s lawsuit against Meta in the budding virtual-reality market is a “deliberately experimental case that seeks to extend the boundaries of merger enforcement,” said William Kovacic, a former chair of the agency. “Such cases are certainly harder to win.”The F.T.C.’s action immediately caused a ruckus within antitrust circles and across the tech industry. Silicon Valley tech executives said that moving to block a deal in an embryonic area of technology might stifle innovation and spook technologists from taking bold leaps in new areas.“Regulators predicting future markets is a very, very dangerous precedent and position,” said Aaron Levie, the chief executive of the cloud storage company Box. He warned that venture capitalists and entrepreneurs would become wary of going into new markets if regulators cut off the ability of companies like Meta to buy start-ups.Adam Kovacevich, the president of the trade group Chamber of Progress, which represents Meta, Amazon and Alphabet, also said the lawsuit would have a chilling effect on innovation.Read More on Facebook and MetaA New Name: In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would change its name to Meta, as part of a wider strategy shift toward the so-called metaverse that aims at introducing people to shared virtual worlds.Morphing Into Meta: Mr. Zuckerberg is setting a relentless pace as he leads the company into the next phase. But the pivot  is causing internal disruption and uncertainty.Zuckerberg’s No. 2: In June, Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief financing officer announced she would step down from Meta, depriving Mr. Zuckerberg of his top deputy.Tough Times Ahead: After years of financial strength, the company is now grappling with upheaval in the global economy, a blow to its advertising business and a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit.“This is such an extreme and unfounded reaction to a small deal that many tech industry leaders are already worrying about what an F.T.C. win would mean for start-ups,” he said.For Ms. Khan, winning the lawsuit may be less of a priority than showing it’s possible to file against a tech deal while it is still early. She has said regulators were too cautious in the past about intervening in mergers for fear of harming innovation, allowing a wave of deals between tech giants and start-ups that eventually cemented their dominance.“What we can see is that inaction after inaction after inaction can have severe costs,” she said in an interview with The New York Times and CNBC in January. “And that’s what we’re really trying to reverse.”Ms. Khan declined requests for an interview for this article, and the F.T.C. declined to comment on Thursday.Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, testifying on Capitol Hill in 2019. He has bet the company on the metaverse, a technology frontier.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesMeta said the F.T.C. was applying antitrust law incorrectly. The lawsuit focuses on how the merger with Within would remove competition, but Meta said the agency was ignoring the large number of companies that also had health and fitness apps.“The F.T.C. has no answer to the most basic question — how could Meta’s acquisition of a single fitness app in a dynamic space with many existing and future players possibly harm competition?” Nikhil Shanbhag, Meta’s vice president and associate general counsel, wrote in a blog post.The company added that it hadn’t decided on whether to challenge the lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.The F.T.C. accused Meta of building a virtual reality “empire,” beginning in 2014 with its purchase of Oculus, the maker of the Quest virtual-reality headset. Since then, Meta has acquired around 10 virtual-reality app makers, such as the maker of a Viking combat game, Asgard’s Wrath, and several first-person shooter and sports games.By buying Within and its Supernatural virtual-reality fitness app, the F.T.C. said, Meta wouldn’t create its own app to compete and would scare potential rivals from trying to create alternative apps. That would hobble competition and consumers, the agency said.“This acquisition poses a reasonable probability of eliminating both present and future competition,” according to the lawsuit. “And Meta would be one step closer to its ultimate goal of owning the entire ‘Metaverse.’”Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor of antitrust law at Vanderbilt University, said the F.T.C.’s arguments would face tough scrutiny because Meta and Within did not compete with each other and because the virtual-reality market was fledgling.“The way that merger analysis has stood for at least 40 years is about what kind of head-to-head competition does this merger take out of the picture,” she said.The onus will now be on the agency to convince a judge that its predictions about the metaverse and Meta’s purchase would harm competition.“The burden is on the F.T.C. to show, among other things, reasonable probability that Meta would have entered the V.R.-dedicated fitness apps market, absent its acquisition of Within,” said Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute.If the court dismisses the case, Ms. Khan may have created a precedent that would make it harder to pursue nascent competition cases, antitrust experts cautioned. That could then embolden tech giants to acquire their way into new lines of businesses.“This is a precedential system which goes both ways — if you win or lose — and sends a signal to the market,” Ms. Allensworth said.The F.T.C. is reviewing other tech deals, including Microsoft’s $70 billion acquisition of the gaming company Activision and Amazon’s $3.9 billion merger with One Medical, a national chain of primary care clinics. In addition, the agency has been investigating Amazon on claims of monopoly abuses in its marketplace of third-party sellers.Ms. Khan appears to be prepared for long legal battles with the tech giants even if the cases do not end up going the F.T.C.’s way.In her earlier interview with The Times and CNBC, she said, “Even if it’s not a slam-dunk case, even if there is a risk you might lose, there can be enormous benefits from taking that risk.” More