Only 6 percent of board seats at Japanese companies are held by women. After years of unkept promises, these businesses are now facing pressure both at home and abroad to diversify.

The investment company Nuveen has spent $120 million renovating its office tower at 730 Third Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, overhauling the lobby, devoting the second floor to amenities and refurbishing a 22nd-floor terrace.

And the finishing touch? Two beehives on a seventh-floor terrace.

Following the latest trend in office perks, Nuveen hired a beekeeper to teach tenants about their tiny new neighbors and harvest honey for them to take home.

“In conversations with tenants, I get more questions about that than anything else,” said Brian Wallick, Nuveen’s director of New York office and life science investments.

Office workers who were sent home during pandemic lockdowns often sought refuge in nature, tending to houseplants, setting up bird feeders and sitting outdoors with their laptops. Now, as companies try to coax skittish employees back to the office and building owners compete for tenants when vacancy rates are soaring, many have hit on the idea of...

The new agreement contains many of the hallmarks of the original, including the ability to subject retailers to legal action if their factories fail to meet labor safety standards; shared responsibility for governance between suppliers and brands; safety committee training and monitoring overseen by the Bangladeshi-based RMG Sustainability Council; and an independent complaints mechanism.

Brands also committed to expanding the new accord to at least one other country beyond Bangladesh. The agreement is valid for 26 months.

“We are extremely encouraged by this new agreement, which preserves key obligations from the original accord and which will hopefully ensure credibility and accountability at a critical time for the Bangladeshi garment industry,” said Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global union, a Swiss-based federation of unions across 150 countries and a signatory of the agreements.

The Swedish retailer H&M was the first brand to confirm...

Delta Air Lines is intensifying pressure on employees to get vaccinated with a series of increasingly burdensome requirements over the coming weeks and months, though it stopped short of the mandates that other airlines and businesses have put in place.

In a letter to employees on Wednesday, the carrier’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, said those who had not been vaccinated would immediately be required to wear masks indoors. Starting on Sept. 12, they will also have to take weekly coronavirus tests.

On Sept. 30, unvaccinated workers will lose pay protection for employees who test positive for the virus and miss work while having to quarantine. Finally, starting on Nov. 1, any employee who remains unvaccinated will have to pay an additional $200 per month to remain on the company’s health care plan.

“This surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision to not vaccinate is creating for our company,” Mr. Bastian said. “In recent weeks since...

Delta Air Lines is intensifying pressure on employees to get vaccinated with a series of increasingly burdensome requirements over the coming weeks and months, though it stopped short of the mandates that other airlines and businesses have put in place.

In a letter to employees on Wednesday, the carrier’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, said that those who have not been vaccinated will immediately be required to wear masks indoors. Starting on Sept. 12, they will also have to take weekly coronavirus tests.

On Sept. 30, unvaccinated workers will lose pay protection for employees who test positive for the virus and miss work while having to quarantine. Finally, starting on Nov. 1, any employee who remains unvaccinated will have to pay an additional $200 per month to remain on the company’s health care plan.

“This surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision to not vaccinate is creating for our company,” Mr. Bastian said. “In recent weeks...

Delta Air Lines is intensifying pressure on employees to get vaccinated with a series of increasingly burdensome requirements over the coming weeks and months, though it stopped short of the mandates that other airlines and businesses have put in place.

In a letter to employees on Wednesday, the carrier’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, said those who had not been vaccinated would immediately be required to wear masks indoors. Starting on Sept. 12, they will also have to take weekly coronavirus tests.

On Sept. 30, unvaccinated workers will lose pay protection for employees who test positive for the virus and miss work while having to quarantine. Finally, starting on Nov. 1, any employee who remains unvaccinated will have to pay an additional $200 per month to remain on the company’s health care plan.

“This surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision to not vaccinate is creating for our company,” Mr. Bastian said. “In recent weeks since...

Delta Air Lines is intensifying pressure on employees to get vaccinated with a series of increasingly burdensome requirements over the coming weeks and months, though it stopped short of the mandates that other airlines and businesses have put in place.

In a letter to employees on Wednesday, the carrier’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, said that those who have not been vaccinated will immediately be required to wear masks indoors. Starting on Sept. 12, they will also have to take weekly coronavirus tests.

On Sept. 30, unvaccinated workers will lose pay protection for employees who test positive for the virus and miss work while having to quarantine. Finally, starting on Nov. 1, any employee who remains unvaccinated will have to pay an additional $200 per month to remain on the company’s health care plan.

“This surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision to not vaccinate is creating for our company,” Mr. Bastian said. “In recent weeks...

It’s a strategy that’s almost guaranteed to produce skimpy profits, and banks are not thrilled to be doing it, analysts say. But they have little choice.

“Widget companies make widgets, and banks make loans,” said Jason Goldberg, a bank analyst at Barclays in New York. “This is what they do. It is what they want to do.”

By putting their customers’ deposits into investments such as loans or securities, like Treasury bonds, banks make the money needed to pay interest on those deposits and pocket a profit. When the economy is growing — like now — banks usually have no problem finding borrowers as consumers make big purchases and businesses expand. These loans provide better returns than Treasury bonds, which are usually reserved for times of uncertainty because banks will accept their lower rate of return in place of a risky loan.

The job of a banker, an old joke goes, can be summed up by the 3-6-3 rule: Gather deposits at 3 percent, lend them out at 6 percent and be on the golf course by 3 p.m. These days, banks pay next to nothing in interest, yet they are awash in deposits. They also offer loans at rock-bottom rates, yet see little demand from borrowers. What are they doing with the money instead? Bingeing on bonds, The Times’s Matt Phillips reports.

(And as for golf? Tee times have been harder to get lately, so that may be the only part of the joke that still has some truth to it.)

U.S. banks bought a record $150 billion in Treasury bonds last quarter, hugely expanding their holdings relative to the new loans they have written. When the economy is growing, like now, banks usually have no problem finding borrowers: These loans provide banks with higher returns than parking their money in low-yielding government bonds. But with loan demand remaining sluggish, lenders are reluctantly buying...

SAN FRANCISCO — When Alice Zhang set out in 2018 to raise funding for her drug discovery start-up, investors kept asking her about Theranos, the blood testing start-up led by the entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes that had collapsed in scandal.

Others asked, too. At a Stanford University event, the organizers wanted Ms. Zhang to talk about Theranos. One adviser told her that when her start-up came up in conversation, people responded by cracking jokes about Ms. Holmes.

Ms. Zhang was initially confused. Her start-up, Verge Genomics, uses artificial intelligence to aid the discovery of therapeutic drugs. That was completely different from Theranos’s business of marketing blood testing machines as a diagnostic tool. Ms. Holmes had also been accused of criminal fraud. Ms. Zhang had not.

The Siete Family Foods website, like most company websites, showcases its founders. But it also highlights almost all of the company’s 98 employees, featuring childhood photos and “two truths and a lie” for each person. The full staff would be listed, but Siete is growing too fast to keep up: It has added more than 30 employees during the pandemic, including three earlier this month.

Visitors have to decide if Veronica Garza, who founded the grain-free packaged foods brand with her brother, Miguel, and mother, Aida, is lying about being the lead singer in a band, running three marathons or vomiting during a national cheerleading competition. (She didn’t run the marathons.)

The company wants its customers to know the team and for the team to know one another as if they were family. Which is fitting, considering that much of the staff before the pandemic was Garza family, including parents, siblings and in-laws.

“We’re a family first, family second, business...

Unionized workers who make Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, Newtons and other Nabisco snacks are on strike in five states over what they say are unfair demands for concessions in contract negotiations.

Members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union in Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Oregon and Virginia have rejected management’s call for changes in shift lengths and overtime rules. The workers are also calling for the restoration of a pension plan, which Nabisco’s owner, Mondelez International, replaced in 2018 with a 401(k) program after a contract impasse.

“We want our pension back. We earned that,” Mike Burlingham, vice president of Local 364 in Portland, Ore., said in an interview. “This is a good job, where people plan for retirement. If the company could have their way, that would be gone and it wouldn’t be a job worth fighting for at all.” The union put the number of striking workers at more than 1,000.

The previous contract expired in...

Imagine you are hunting online for a pair of square-toed slides from Bottega Veneta, one of the most-hyped luxury brands of the moment. A new season pair can cost more than $550 from the brand’s website, an old-guard department store like Neiman Marcus or a newer e-commerce player like Net-a-Porter.

But what if you chose to buy from Cettire, a website offering discounts of up to 30 percent on the latest fashion styles? You would be a player in the multibillion-dollar luxury “gray” market, a fast-growing sales sector that has historically operated out of sight of most Western consumers. However, with the arrival in recent years of companies like Baltini in Italy, Italist in the United States and Cettire, which listed on the Australian Stock Exchange at the end of 2020, gray sales have been ending up in millions of digital shopping baskets.

Unlike the illegal counterfeit goods often found on the black market, the gray market sells authentic luxury products — but at a...

Imagine you are hunting online for a pair of square-toed slides from Bottega Veneta, one of the most-hyped luxury brands of the moment. A new season pair can cost more than $550 from the brand’s website, an old-guard department store like Neiman Marcus or a newer e-commerce player like Net-a-Porter.

But what if you chose to buy from Cettire, a website offering discounts of up to 30 percent on the latest fashion styles? You would be a player in the multibillion-dollar luxury “gray” market, a fast-growing sales sector that has historically operated out of sight of most Western consumers. However, with the arrival in recent years of companies like Baltini in Italy, Italist in the United States and Cettire, which listed on the Australian Stock Exchange at the end of 2020, gray sales have been ending up in millions of digital shopping baskets.

Unlike the illegal counterfeit goods often found on the black market, the gray market sells authentic luxury products — but at a...

The Siete Family Foods website, like most company websites, showcases its founders. But it also highlights almost all of the company’s 98 employees, featuring childhood photos and “two truths and a lie” for each person. The full staff would be listed, but Siete is growing too fast to keep up: It has added more than 30 employees during the pandemic, including three earlier this month.

Visitors have to decide if Veronica Garza, who founded the grain-free packaged foods brand with her brother, Miguel, and mother, Aida, is lying about being the lead singer in a band, running three marathons or vomiting during a national cheerleading competition. (She didn’t run the marathons.)

The company wants its customers to know the team and for the team to know one another as if they were family. Which is fitting, considering that much of the staff before the pandemic was Garza family, including parents, siblings and in-laws.

“We’re a family first, family second, business...

Unionized workers who make Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, Newtons and other Nabisco snacks are on strike in five states over what they say are unfair demands for concessions in contract negotiations.

Members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union in Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Oregon and Virginia have rejected management’s call for changes in shift lengths and overtime rules. The workers are also calling for the restoration of a pension plan, which Nabisco’s owner, Mondelez International, replaced in 2018 with a 401(k) program after a contract impasse.

“We want our pension back. We earned that,” Mike Burlingham, vice president of Local 364 in Portland, Ore., said in an interview. “This is a good job, where people plan for retirement. If the company could have their way, that would be gone and it wouldn’t be a job worth fighting for at all.” The union put the number of striking workers at more than 1,000.

The previous contract expired in...

Airbnb and its charitable arm, Airbnb.org, said on Tuesday that the company intended to provide free temporary housing globally for 20,000 refugees fleeing the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan.

As American and European governments race to evacuate tens of thousands of people, the property rental company called the displacement and resettlement of refugees a “significant humanitarian crisis.”

The cost of the accommodations will be covered with money from Airbnb and its chief executive, Brian Chesky, as well as contributions from the Airbnb.org Refugee Fund, which was begun in June with the goal of raising $25 million. The organization is working with resettlement agencies and offered to support federal and state governments.

“The displacement and resettlement of Afghan refugees in the U.S. and elsewhere is one of the biggest humanitarian crises of our time. We feel a responsibility to step up,” Mr. Chesky said on Twitter.

The Siete Family Foods website, like most company websites, showcases its founders. But it also highlights almost all of the company’s 98 employees, featuring childhood photos and “two truths and a lie” for each person. The full staff would be listed, but Siete is growing too fast to keep up: It has added more than 30 employees during the pandemic, including three earlier this month.

Visitors have to decide if Veronica Garza, who founded the grain-free packaged foods brand with her brother, Miguel, and mother, Aida, is lying about being the lead singer in a band, running three marathons or vomiting during a national cheerleading competition. (She didn’t run the marathons.)

The company wants its customers to know the team and for the team to know one another as if they were family. Which is fitting, considering that much of the staff before the pandemic was Garza family, including parents, siblings and in-laws.

“We’re a family first, family second, business...

Imagine you are hunting online for a pair of square-toed slides from Bottega Veneta, one of the most-hyped luxury brands of the moment. A new season pair can cost more than $550 from the brand’s website, an old-guard department store like Neiman Marcus or a newer e-commerce player like Net-a-Porter.

But what if you chose to buy from Cettire, a website offering discounts of up to 30 percent on the latest fashion styles? You would be a player in the multibillion-dollar luxury “gray” market, a fast-growing sales sector that has historically operated out of sight of most Western consumers. However, with the arrival in recent years of companies like Baltini in Italy, Italist in the United States and Cettire, which listed on the Australian Stock Exchange at the end of 2020, gray sales have been ending up in millions of digital shopping baskets.

Unlike the illegal counterfeit goods often found on the black market, the gray market sells authentic luxury products — but at a...

Unionized workers who make Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, Newtons and other Nabisco snacks are on strike in five states over what they say are unfair demands for concessions in contract negotiations.

Members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union in Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Oregon and Virginia have rejected management’s call for changes in shift lengths and overtime rules. The workers are also calling for the restoration of a pension plan, which Nabisco’s owner, Mondelez International, replaced in 2018 with a 401(k) program after a contract impasse.

“We want our pension back. We earned that,” Mike Burlingham, vice president of Local 364 in Portland, Ore., said in an interview. “This is a good job, where people plan for retirement. If the company could have their way, that would be gone and it wouldn’t be a job worth fighting for at all.” The union put the number of striking workers at more than 1,000.

The previous contract expired in...

TikTok and Shopify, the e-commerce platform, said on Tuesday that they were working together to add the ability for consumers to shop directly in the TikTok app for the first time.

TikTok has largely been known as a video app that provides entertainment and memes. Users have not been able to buy products directly in the app, even though TikTok features many influencers who often talk up clothing, makeup and household products. Instead, users have only been able to buy goods on TikTok through ads on the app.

But under the new partnership, Shopify merchants that participate in a pilot program will be able to add a shopping tab to their profiles and link to products within TikTok posts. Shopify said it expected to expand the feature to all of its merchants this fall.

TikTok joins Instagram and Facebook in offering in-app shopping, part of a larger shift toward what is known as social commerce — buying products directly within a social media platform — as creators...

SAN FRANCISCO — When Alice Zhang set out in 2018 to raise funding for her drug discovery start-up, investors kept asking her about Theranos, the blood testing start-up led by the entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes that had collapsed in scandal.

Others asked, too. At a Stanford University event, the organizers wanted Ms. Zhang to talk about Theranos. One adviser told her that when her start-up came up in conversation, people responded by cracking jokes about Ms. Holmes.

Ms. Zhang was initially confused. Her start-up, Verge Genomics, uses artificial intelligence to aid the discovery of therapeutic drugs. That was completely different from Theranos’s business of marketing blood testing machines as a diagnostic tool. Ms. Holmes had also been accused of criminal fraud. Ms. Zhang had not.

The F.D.A. granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus shots for people 16 and older yesterday, the fastest vaccine approval in the agency’s history. (Although, perhaps, not fast enough.) President Biden seized on the moment. “If you’re a business leader, a nonprofit leader, a state or local leader, who has been waiting for full F.D.A. approval to require vaccinations, I call on you now to do that,” he said. “Require it.”

It gives companies more cover to impose vaccine mandates and industry groups more ground to lobby local authorities. Some states have moved to outlaw vaccine mandates. Arizona’s governor, for example, issued an order outlawing coronavirus vaccination as a requirement for employment. Those actions made it difficult for companies with large national footprints to impose blanket mandates. While some have pushed back, like Norwegian Cruise Line in Florida, most have stayed out of the fray.

“Many companies have made the decision to mandate...

For New York City and its trillion-dollar economy, September was supposed to mark a return to normal, a moment when Broadway theaters reopened, stores and restaurants hummed, and tourists and office workers again filled the streets.

But that long-awaited milestone has been upended by the Delta variant of the coronavirus. One big company after another has postponed plans to come back to Manhattan’s soaring towers. Trade shows have been canceled. Some small businesses have had orders evaporate.

It is a setback for a city that has lagged behind the rest of the country in its economic recovery, with a 10.5 percent unemployment rate that is nearly twice the national average. Now, rather than seeing the fuller rebound it was counting on, New York is facing fresh challenges.

“The Delta variant is a meaningful threat to the city’s recovery,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “This is not going to be easy. It’s going to be a long time before...