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...

The Federal Aviation Administration is looking into Boeing’s corporate culture, which an agency official said “appears to hamper” Boeing employees responsible for providing oversight, raising safety concerns and otherwise representing the agency’s interests.

In a letter to the company last week, the official, Ian Won, said that the F.A.A.’s review was based on a recent survey of a few dozen of the 1,400 Boeing employees who work on the agency’s behalf through a program called Organization Designation Authorization. Boeing’s structure appears “to provide a strong influence” over how those employees are appointed, managed and allowed to work, he said, providing “ample opportunity for interference rather than independence.”

“These concerns require an objective review and further fact finding,” Mr. Won wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The F.A.A. review was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

The agency’s reliance on...

This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. Here is a collection of past columns.

There’s an expression about the personal-information-grubbing practices of free digital services that sell ads, including Facebook and weather apps: If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product.

But sometimes you can pay for a product and be the product.

Common Sense Media, a nonprofit advocacy group for children and families, published a report this week that found that most of America’s popular streaming services and TV streaming gadgets such as Netflix, Roku and Disney+ failed to meet the group’s minimum requirements for privacy and security practices. The lone exception was Apple.

We’ve become accustomed to the corporate arms race to track our every mouse click and credit card swipe. But what’s surprising from the group's report is that streaming entertainment products for which people pay out of their pockets have some of the same data habits of sites like...

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...

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.

Growing up in Louisville, Ky., Eden Bridgeman Sklenar leafed through issues of Ebony and Jet at the beauty salon, where she would go with her mother every week to get her hair styled in tight curls.

It was the ’90s, when Whitney Houston, Nelson Mandela, Colin Powell, Michael Jordan, Tupac Shakur and Oprah Winfrey made the covers of the two leading chroniclers of Black life and culture.

“If you were ever wanting to know what was happening with African American culture, all you had to do was pick up an Ebony or Jet and flip through the pages,” Ms. Sklenar said in an interview.

Now, as the chairwoman of the new parent company of Ebony and Jet, she has taken a leading role in the revival of a storied publication. Ms. Sklenar has installed Michele Thornton Ghee, formerly an executive at BET Networks and CNN, as the company’s chief executive; Marielle Bobo, a former fashion director of Essence magazine, is Ebony’s new editor in chief. The publication will add more...

The Federal Aviation Administration is looking into Boeing’s corporate culture, which an agency official said “appears to hamper” Boeing employees responsible for providing oversight, raising safety concerns and otherwise representing the agency’s interests.

In a letter to the company last week, the official, Ian Won, said that the F.A.A.’s review was based on a recent survey of a few dozen of the 1,400 Boeing employees who work on the agency’s behalf through a program called Organization Designation Authorization. Boeing’s structure appears “to provide a strong influence” over how those employees are appointed, managed and allowed to work, he said, providing “ample opportunity for interference rather than independence.”

“These concerns require an objective review and further fact finding,” Mr. Won wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The F.A.A. review was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

The agency’s reliance on...

“Many companies have made the decision to mandate vaccines for some or all of their employees, and we applaud their decision,” the Business Roundtable, a lobby group, said Monday in a statement. “We also encourage policymakers, including at the state and local levels, to support — not impede — companies’ ability to make such a decision.”

More public sector employers are introducing mandates, easing the way for private employers to make similar moves. New York said it would require all 148,000 employees of the city’s Education Department to be vaccinated. The Pentagon is demanding that its 1.4 million service members receive the shot by the middle of next month.

Some of the latest corporate mandates:

“Many companies have made the decision to mandate vaccines for some or all of their employees, and we applaud their decision,” the Business Roundtable, a lobby group, said Monday in a statement. “We also encourage policymakers, including at the state and local levels, to support — not impede — companies’ ability to make such a decision.”

More public sector employers are introducing mandates, easing the way for private employers to make similar moves. New York said it would require all 148,000 employees of the city’s Education Department to be vaccinated. The Pentagon is demanding that its 1.4 million service members receive the shot by the middle of next month.

Some of the latest corporate mandates:

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 — Before the pandemic, Roya Joseph’s days at the office were defined by interaction. She looked forward to casual conversations with co-workers, mentorship sessions with managers and periodic, freewheeling chats — known as “teatime” — in the office kitchen.

All that was swept away when Ms. Joseph, a water engineer for Black & Veatch, an engineering firm, was sent home from her Walnut Creek, Calif., office along with the rest of her colleagues as the coronavirus began spreading through the United States last year. She jumped at the opportunity to return when her office reopened to some employees in June.

But two weeks ago, the rug was pulled out from under her again. Black & Veatch shut its offices as virus cases rose nationwide, driven by the contagious Delta variant.

“It’s depressing,” Ms. Joseph, 32, said. “I feel like we’re being pushed back to that isolation bubble. I feel like, mentally, I’m not ready to face that again.”

“Many companies have made the decision to mandate vaccines for some or all of their employees, and we applaud their decision,” the Business Roundtable, a lobby group, said Monday in a statement. “We also encourage policymakers, including at the state and local levels, to support — not impede — companies’ ability to make such a decision.”

More public sector employers are introducing mandates, easing the way for private employers to make similar moves. New York said it would require all 148,000 employees of the city’s Education Department to be vaccinated. The Pentagon is demanding that its 1.4 million service members receive the shot by the middle of next month.

Some of the latest corporate mandates:

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.

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 Baldinini 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...

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...

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...

Growing up in Louisville, Ky., Eden Bridgeman Sklenar leafed through issues of Ebony and Jet at the beauty salon, where she would go with her mother every week to get her hair styled in tight curls.

It was the ’90s, when Whitney Houston, Nelson Mandela, Colin Powell, Michael Jordan, Tupac Shakur and Oprah Winfrey made the covers of the two leading chroniclers of Black life and culture.

“If you were ever wanting to know what was happening with African American culture, all you had to do was pick up an Ebony or Jet and flip through the pages,” Ms. Sklenar said in an interview.

Now, as the chairwoman of the new parent company of Ebony and Jet, she has taken a leading role in the revival of a storied publication. Ms. Sklenar has installed Michele Thornton Ghee, formerly an executive at BET Networks and CNN, as the company’s chief executive; Marielle Bobo, a former fashion director of Essence magazine, is Ebony’s new editor in chief. The publication will add more...

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.

Emboldened by a California election victory that maintained the independence of their drivers last year, gig economy companies like Uber and Lyft have in recent months accelerated a push for what they call a “third way” of working, a classification of independent gig workers who receive limited benefits without gaining employee status.

But that plan was upended on Friday evening by a California judge who ruled that the ballot initiative backed by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and other so-called gig economy companies violated the state’s Constitution. It was a potential setback for the companies and a victory for labor organizers and drivers who argue they are being treated unfairly.

Here is an explanation of this long-simmering fight and what happens next: