Fiat Chrysler to invest over $1 billion in Ram Truck plant

Trump Says He Scrapped London Trip Over Obama’s Embassy Deal

President Donald Trump said he wouldn't visit London next month to open a new U.S. embassy because his predecessor, Barack Obama, made a “bad deal” selling the previous site.

Driver Pay: Making the Grade

Throwing money at a problem isn't always the solution. But if you need to find and keep long-haul truck drivers in today's competitive job market, how much to increase their pay — in one form or another — has to be a key tactical consideration.

Boosting driver pay has long been avoided or at least downplayed by many long-haul fleets bedeviled by the twin demons of a driver shortage and high turnover — not surprising, as no business ever finds it easy to roll back pay hikes.

Hence many fleets have done everything but outright increase pay to recruit and retain drivers. Instead, these operations have focused more on providing new equipment spec'ed for driver comfort; implementing as many driver-friendly operational tweaks as possible, such as promising “no-touch freight” and more time at home, and offering generous healthcare and retirement benefits. These fleets may have also upped pay, but typically only through various incentive and bonus offerings, rather than dishing out straight-up increases in mileage-based or hourly pay rates.

But those approaches are increasingly seen as not good enough. Not with a U.S. economy that is by nearly all measures booming, after having escaped the doldrums that constrained it after the Great Recession. Now, the country's reinvigorated economic engine is forcefully impacting the driver market with a one-two punch: Just when there are more desirable job opportunities available in years for high school graduates, demand for drivers is being driven up and up by a sizzling freight market.

The Labor Department's December jobs report bears this out. Employers added 228,000 jobs in November, which kept the unemployment rate at 4.1% — the lowest it's been since 2000. And employers have now added jobs every month for 86 months in a row. The upshot is not many people are still looking for work. And that ...Read the rest of this story

Commentary: The E-Commerce Road has its Ups and Downs

Deborah Lockridge

My personal experience with e-commerce this year was frustrating — and it started even before Black Friday.

In mid-November, an order from a clothing store never arrived at our house; apparently it was delivered to the wrong address, somehow “refused” and sent back to the shipper.

In December, I got a postcard from UPS notifying me that they were holding an item someone had sent to my P.O. box. Luckily, I called rather than traipsing over to the UPS facility — they had returned it to the sender only two days after the date on the postcard because they didn't have enough room.

Numerous gifts we ordered through Amazon Prime were late. One apparently was lost in limbo between UPS and the Post Office, so we re-ordered it — only to get a notice that it, too, was delayed.

So I wasn't surprised to read, a week before Christmas, that UPS was experiencing shipping delays due to the surge in online shopping.

UPS drivers aren't happy about the workload, with the Teamsters complaining that this is the third year in a row UPS has underestimated demand. I've seen postal drivers operating unsafely, obviously in a hurry to get those deliveries done.

In short, “the peak e-commerce season is stretching the limits of the nation's freight and package handling capabilities,” as the transportation analysts at Stifel put it.

FedEx, on the other hand, reportedly is handling the surge better. In reporting an 11% gain in net profit for the quarter ending Nov. 30, Chairman and CEO Fred Smith said the company handled this year's peak season because of its close work with shippers to project demand.

Nevertheless, as Bloomberg notes, “deliveries to homes are more costly and complicated than taking goods to business sites.” UPS and FedEx are looking for solutions, from charging more for customers ...Read the rest of this story

You can now rent a Kodak-branded bitcoin-mining rig — but you'll have to hand over half of the profits you make (KODK)

The camera company Kodak is partnering with a company to get into bitcoin mining. Kodak's stock soared more than 100% on Tuesday after it announced it would launch a cryptocurrency. Kodak, the once iconic camera company, is licensing its brand to Spotlite, which builds computers designed to mine bitcoin, for a new line of bitcoin-mining machines that they plan to rent to the public for thousands of dollars.

What to Expect From General Motors Company in 2018

Here's how GM will follow up its eventful 2017.

California mudslides happened as cellphone alerts went out

Many Californians in the area hit hardest by this week's deadly mudslides did not heed warnings for hours and days by emergency officials encouraging them to evacuate their homes — and then received cellphone alerts of imminent slides when the massive streams of debris were already heading toward them or had already hit their neighborhoods.