Marketplace Stories

A 30 percent tariff on solar panels imported from China will help U.S. manufacturers, but even with ramped-up production those companies won’t be able to meet domestic demand. Solar power companies will still use lots of imported panels, and pay up to a billion dollars in tariffs this year, by one estimate.

The Department of Labor has a new rule it wants to get on the books that would change the way restaurants treat tips. It’s called the tip-pooling rule, and would let workers in the back of the house, like dishwashers and prep cooks, share the tips made by the servers in the front of the […]

The next round of negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement officially begins tomorrow in Montreal. It’s the sixth of seven rounds, and the stakes are high. Now that the government is back open, the United States will have a full roster of negotiators at the talks. They’ll be trying once again to hammer […]

President Donald Trump has backed proposals to cut legal immigration by up to half. For companies that employ many immigrants, that could mean it will be harder for them to find workers to fill jobs, especially as the economy nears full employment.  Click the audio player above to hear the full story. 

The news that didn't quite make the headlines. This week: using pink lights to deter criminals, an interspecies iPad game you can play with your cat, Google replacing ringtones with ads.

A 4 percent revenue hike is not big news for many companies. But for century-plus firm IBM it’s the first in half a decade, and could signal that its focus on cloud computing is paying off. Click the audio player above to hear the full story.