Investments and Business

For the staff of the Michigan State University dining halls, serving roughly 27,000 students each semester has never been a picnic. But these days, the job involves an even bigger challenge: One in six of those students has an allergy or other dietary restriction. Just five years ago, it was one in eight.In the lead-up to this fall term, Kelsey Patterson, the school’s registered dietitian, responded to messages from 300 parents and students about dietary strictures that included life-threatening allergies and a host of special diets based on health, environmental, religious or personal concernsTo deal with allergies alone, two dining…

Dockworkers at ports along the West Coast have ratified a new contract, securing a sweeping agreement set to last six years and expected to ease tensions after cargo shipments were diverted to other regions.The contract between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association, which operates the terminals, covers 22,000 dockworkers at 29 ports from Los Angeles to Seattle.The contract was approved by 75 percent of members who voted, the union said late Thursday. Details of the agreement were not released publicly, and the union declined to comment. Unionized workers at the ports have average salaries in…

Majestic vistas, burbling brooks and sanguine festival goers are the hallmarks of the Telluride Film Festival, a showcase for the most prestigious films of the year. But no amount of natural beauty can overcome the low-level of anxiety that coursed through this mountain town over Labor Day weekend. With dual strikes raging in Hollywood — the writers’ strike just hit four months — no one wants to appear out of step with these unprecedented times.“It was hell getting here,” Julie Huntsinger, the executive director of the Telluride Film Festival, said in an interview. “There was just so much anxiety and…

The United States labor market is starting to look a lot like its old self — the one that existed before the pandemic.The Federal Reserve’s interest rate increases have chilled investment, high-flying industries have returned to earth, and workers are staying put in their jobs rather than jumping for higher pay.Employers added 187,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department reported Friday, and the previous two months’ figures were revised downward. That brings the three-month average to 150,000 — a marked slowdown from the 200,000 achieved for 29 consecutive months before that, and slightly lower than the average pace of 163,000…

When Country Garden, the biggest developer in China’s increasingly troubled real estate sector, published its annual report in April, the cover design exuded hope: a phoenix spreading its wings.The company said the image showed that China’s economy was “back on track” and that this year would see “growth soaring to new heights.”That was wishful thinking.Shortly after the report’s release, China’s nascent economic recovery lost steam and an already sluggish real estate market started to collapse. At Country Garden, presales of unfinished apartments, a crucial indicator of future revenue, plunged more than 50 percent in June and July, twice the rate…

One reason the August employment report wasn’t stronger: Television and movie production has largely halted since a deadlock in contract negotiations between major studios and unions that represent screenwriters and actors.The motion picture and sound recording industry subtracted 16,800 jobs in August. That’s not a huge share of its approximately 438,000-person work force, but it underestimates the total impact of the labor stoppages, given how much spending power the film industry creates in Los Angeles specifically.The shutdown started when 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike in May. In the second quarter alone, according to Los…

On a recent morning, Ángel Ortiz Rodríguez was slumped on a sofa in his apartment in Granada, in southern Spain, a tangle of breathing tubes protruding from his nose. Since Mr. Ortiz had a heart attack a few years ago, his life has depended on an electronic breathing machine.But his neighborhood regularly loses power several times a day, forcing his wife, Rosa Martin Piñedo, to keep an oxygen cylinder as a backup. “We can’t really rely on electricity here,” she said.Daily blackouts plague the 25,000 inhabitants in this poor district of northern Granada. Food rots in refrigerators and phone batteries…

When a chant slamming President Biden spread from a NASCAR race to T-shirts and bumper stickers across red America two years ago, the White House pulled off perhaps its savviest messaging feat to date. Biden aides and allies repackaged the “Let’s Go Brandon” insult and morphed it into “Dark Brandon,” a celebratory meme casting Mr. Biden as some sort of omnipotent mastermind.Now, the White House and the Biden campaign is several weeks into another appropriation play — but it isn’t going nearly as well. Aides in July announced that the president would run for re-election on the virtues of “Bidenomics,”…

The researchers of the remote-work study believe cultural norms are also at play in return-to-work levels. Plenty of American workers said they felt comfortable asking their managers for more flexibility, or even telling them that they would quit without it.When Laura Zimm, a public defender in Duluth, Minn., was called back to the office last year, she immediately came down with Covid. She worked from home during and after her sickness, and eventually decided with her manager that she would stay permanently remote, which Ms. Zimm preferred and which gave her manager more flexibility with office space.At Microsoft, the return-to-office…