Business

When officials from many of the world’s biggest oil-producing countries meet on Sunday, their menu of options for managing the market may be limited.Over the past two years, the group known as OPEC Plus has agreed to a succession of cuts to oil output. The oil producers’ assumption has been that these trims would be temporary, but they have begun to take on an air of permanence as prices have been relatively subdued. Any relaxation of cuts would risk sinking prices in what looks like a soft market, analysts say.It is a frustrating situation for oil producers like Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, which could pump additional crude, bolstering their budgets. “That’s where the discomfort for some members comes,” said Richard Bronze, head of geopolitics at Energy Aspects, a research firm. “Ho...

As artificial intelligence programs shake up the office, potentially making millions of jobs obsolete, one group of perpetually stressed workers seems especially vulnerable.These employees analyze new markets and discern trends, both tasks a computer could do more efficiently. They spend much of their time communicating with colleagues, a laborious activity that is being automated with voice and image generators. Sometimes they must make difficult decisions — and who is better at being dispassionate than a machine?Finally, these jobs are very well paid, which means the cost savings of eliminating them is considerable.The chief executive is increasingly imperiled by A.I., just like the writer of news releases and the customer service representative. Dark factories, which are entirely automa...

Last year, two unions representing workers at three large automakers and UPS negotiated new labor contracts that included big raises and other gains. Leaders of the unions — the United Automobile Workers and the Teamsters — hoped the wins would help them organize workers across their industry.The U.A.W. won one vote to unionize a Volkswagen factory in Tennessee last month and lost one this month at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama. The Teamsters have made even less progress at UPS’s big nonunion rivals in the delivery business, Amazon and FedEx.Polling shows that public support for unions is the highest it has been in decades. But labor experts said structural forces would make it hard for labor groups to increase their membership, which is the lowest it has been as a percentage of the ...

Top finance officials from the world’s advanced economies moved toward an agreement on Saturday over how to use Russia’s frozen central bank assets to aid Ukraine and warned against China’s dumping of cheap exports into their markets, aiming to marshal their economic might to tackle twin crises.The embrace of more ambitious sanctions and protectionism came as finance ministers from the Group of 7 nations gathered for three days of meetings in Stresa, Italy. The proposals under consideration could deepen the divide between the alliance of wealthy Western economies and Russia, China and their allies, worsening a global fragmentation that has worried economists.Efforts by the Group of 7 to influence the two powerful adversaries have had limited success in recent years, but rich countries are ...

A game-changing proposal The other shoe has dropped for the N.C.A.A.: That college sports association just agreed to a $2.8 billion class-action settlement that, if approved by a judge in California, would pay student athletes after a century of deeming them amateurs.It would be the latest step in the N.C.A.A. and its member institutions allowing athletes to make money from sports programs that have made millions for their schools. But experts worry that this latest shift will still create losers — especially schools that don’t have big football or basketball programs.The proposed settlement has several components:Athletes would be entitled to $2.8 billion in damages over a 10-year period. It’s essentially back pay for name, image and licensing revenue they would have been entitled to befo...

Federal Reserve officials were wary about the recent lack of progress on inflation and remained willing to lift interest rates if conditions made it necessary as of their two-day meeting that ended on May 1.Minutes from the gathering, released Wednesday, showed that “many” officials expressed uncertainty about how much today’s interest-rate setting — 5.3 percent, up sharply from near zero in early 2022 — was weighing on the economy.Officials have been clear that they expect to leave interest rates unchanged for now, hoping that they are tapping the brakes on economic growth enough to quash inflation over time. And central bankers have repeatedly emphasized that they expect the next move on interest rates to be a reduction, not an increase.But policymakers have stopped short of ruling out a...