A jury has awarded nearly $17 million to a former Ford engineer who sued the automaker for discrimination because he says two supervisors repeatedly berated and criticized him for his Arab background and accent.

The Detroit Free Press reports that a federal jury in Michigan ruled March 28 that Faisal Khalaf was subjected to workplace discrimination and retaliation after he reported the abuse. Khalaf was born in Lebanon.

The jury awarded Khalaf $15 million in punitive damages, $1.7 million in retirement and pension losses, and $100,000 for emotional distress for the actions of Ford supervisors Bennie Fowler and Jay Zhou.

A Ford representative says the company disagrees with the verdict and is pursuing options to get it “corrected.”

Ford has been criticized for workplace discrimination before, including in a December New York Times investigation into sexual harassment at two Chicago plants.
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The possible closure of a major coastal tourism magnet in the Philippines for environmental cleanup will hurt business, but for a cause that helps everyone longer term, experts say.

President Rodrigo Duterte said via the presidential website in March he would place Boracay Island under a “state of calamity.” The island may be shut down for two to 12 months, Philippine media reports say, citing other statements from Duterte and cabinet members.

The government is “addressing wastewater issues through an improved sewerage system,” the country’s environment minister Roy Cimatu said in a March 27 statement.

Boracay, a 10.3-square-kilometer feature in the central Philippines, has been compared to Bali and other Asian beach resort hot spots. Its main white sand beach runs four kilometers, paralleled by a strip of at least 100 hotels.

“The Philippines has been very aggressive in its campaign to attract tourists… and Boracay is actually the No. 1 selling point of the tourism business in the Philippines,” said Maria Ela Atienza, political science professor at University of the Philippines Diliman.

“So it will really be a big blow to the tourism industry and we don’t know what will happen to these industries depending on Boracay, if they will continue if they can return to operation,” Atienza said.

Fear of closure

Government agencies have not finalized any closure of Boracay Island but dropped enough hints to prompt flight and hotel cancellations, analysts and operators report. Domestic media say arrivals in March were normal but expected a fall for this month.

Tourists who read “negative news” about Boracay are cancelling mid-year reservations, said a manager with Boracay Pito Huts, a 10-year-old group of villas for tourist groups on the island. Villa staff people may be asked to “take a vacation” if bookings don’t pick up, she said.

“As a preparation, of course we have to tighten our belts,” said the manager, who did not want to be named. “We are in the toilet. For June bookings or June tourists it’s nothing. That’s how we got affected.”

The Boracay Foundation, a business association with an environmental focus, declined comment for this report. A Department of Tourism representative said her office could make no statements on the possible closure.

Suspension of business would hurt a network of common Filipinos who sell souvenirs, prepare meals or drive tourists around the island, Atienza added.

Boracay generated $1.076 billion in tourism receipts last year, the local provincial tourism office said, as cited by the Philippine Information Agency, an increase of about 15 percent over 2016. Tourism was 8.6 percent of the Philippine GDP in 2016.

People and waste

Boracay has an ideal capacity of about half a million tourists per year, compared to its 2017 total of 2 million, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources said in an online video. More than 300,000 tourists reached the island in January and February this year, it said.

Travelers often visit Boracay during the northern hemisphere winter to escape the cold in spots such as China, Russia and South Korea.

The island should review its “carrying capacity,” said Alicia Lustica, a coastal ecosystems cluster head with a department research Center. “We need also to assist also the volume of waste that has been generated and likewise how people are doing their activities on Boracay Island,” Lustica said in the video.

Sewage became an issue because some resorts treat their own inadequately or dump it into the sea, the domestic news website BusinessMirror.com said in January. It cites overbuilding and inadequate infrastructure as additional problems for Boracay.

The nongovernmental organization Global Coral Reef Alliance said more than 10 years ago sewage “from uncontrolled development” was hurting Boracay’s coral and fisheries.

The environment ministry also plans to do a “massive replanting” of trees on Boracay, the minister said in the March 27 statement.

Boracay renewal

A temporary closure would let Boracay clean itself up to become better for tourists, said Jonathan Ravelas, chief market strategist with Banco de Oro UniBank in Metro Manila.

“It’s going to hurt us, but I think moving forward we will probably see a lot of pent-up demand for Boracay — just like in any business a temporary renovation — and I think that’s how you should probably see what’s happening in Boracay,” he said.

Travelers would rather see a cleaner island, he added. Today Boracay-bound tourists must pay an environmental impact fee at a boat pier before stepping onto the island.

A cleaner Boracay would motivate other Philippine beach resort areas to protect their environments before they too face shutdown, Ravelas said. “You need the one example, and everybody will follow,” he said.

Duterte called Boracay a “cesspool” and ordered his government to fix problems in six months, the presidential office website says. The state of calamity, Duterte said, would let the government offer aid to people facing business losses.
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China announced Wednesday it plans to impose tariffs on $50 billion worth of U.S. goods in response to a similar package announced by the United States.

The Chinese measures would boost tariffs by 25 percent on 106 U.S. products, including soybeans, aircraft and cars.

China’s commerce ministry responded with its own measures less than 11 hours after the U.S. issued a proposed list of Chinese goods. The ministry said the question of when the measures will go into effect will depend on when the U.S. tariffs become active.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to impose $50 billion in increased tariffs on Chinese products last month, and on Tuesday the U.S. Trade Representative released a proposed list of 1,300 goods including aerospace, medical and information technology products.

Subject to public review

That list will be subject to a public review process scheduled to run until late May.

“The total value of imports subject to the tariff increases is commensurate with an economic analysis of the harm caused by China’s unreasonable technology policies to the U.S. economy,” the USTR said.

The United States has accused China of pressuring foreign companies to hand over technology.

China’s Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen said Wednesday that accusation is groundless, and that while China wants to resolve the trade dispute through dialogue, if the United States continues the fight then China will too.

Unlike the U.S. list, which includes many obscure industrial goods, China’s list targets cotton, frozen beef, soybeans and other agricultural products that are produced in states from Iowa to Texas that favored Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

The U.S.-China dispute has fueled concern it could stymie a global economic recovery if other countries raise their own import barriers.

The prospect of a trade war between the world’s two largest economies has also worried stock market investors.  U.S. markets were set to open lower Wednesday.

Trump, however, dismissed the notion of a U.S.-China trade war on Wednesday, tweeting that previous U.S. administrations weakened the country’s ability to defend itself on trade matters.   

“We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the U.S. Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion. We cannot let this continue!”

Despite Trump’s claims, U.S. government figures show the U.S. had a $375 billion trade deficit with China at the end of 2017.
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Five years ago, Filipina farmer Marivic Dubria would buy Nescafe sachets to serve visitors because she was embarrassed by the quality of the coffee she grew next to her main vegetable crops.

Life was tough for her family in Mindanao, the second largest island in the Philippines, as they struggled to earn $1,000 a year from their produce, with their coffee beans fetching only 20 cents per kilo from local traders.

But Dubria is now one of hundreds of farmers nationwide who are brewing up a storm with training from Coffee For Peace (CfP) – a social enterprise striving to boost growers’ profits, protect the environment and foster peace between communities.

Having learned how to grow, harvest and process high-quality Arabica beans at a time when global demand for coffee is soaring – it is set to hit a record high this year – Dubria exports her crop to buyers as far away as Seattle for at least $5 per kilo.

“But it’s not all about the money – it’s about taking responsibility for the environment and other communities,” Dubria told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in her home on Mount Apo while brewing a pot of thick, aromatic, treacle-like coffee.

Beyond helping coffee growers get a better deal, CfP aims to encourage dialogue between communities, with tensions ranging from colonial-era conflict between native Muslims and Christian settlers to land and resource disputes between ethnic groups.

The Philippines is battling to restore order to troubled Mindanao, where militant groups have pledged allegiance to Islamic State, and five decades of communist insurgency and separatist bombings have displaced at least 2 million people.

By bringing people together through trade, businesses with a social mission can help build peace, industry experts say.

“Social enterprise presents an emerging pathway or approach to conflict resolution,” said Angel Flores, East Asia business head at the British Council, which backs companies seeking to help people, invest in the environment and tackle social ills. “Being inclusive, participatory and prioritizing community benefit over personal agendas enhances the social fabric from a place of distrust to … confidence and mutual understanding.”

“Farmerpreneurs”

CfP was set up in 2008 on the conflict-hit southern island of Mindanao, after its founders stopped Christian and Muslim neighbors going to war over the ownership of a rice field.

The men were invited to put down their guns and talk over coffee, a tradition which quickly spread across the region.

CfP offers a three-year scheme to train farmers to produce coffee while encouraging native and settler communities and various tribes to harvest and process the beans together.

While the social enterprise buys the farmers’ beans above market value — selling them on to local coffee shops and exporting as far as Canada — communities can sell to any buyer, but are encouraged to demand higher prices.

“We don’t treat them as suppliers or just part of the chain — they are farmerpreneurs,” said CfP senior vice president Twinkle Bautista.

“The aim is to unite the settlers and indigenous people to teach each other, share techniques and tools … and harmony,” she added. “Our product is peace — coffee is just the tool.”

For Kagawad Abe and his indigenous community, setting up a processing center through CfP has brought them closer to the Christian settlers — who work with them to process their beans.

“It has also brought women together, and given them a chance to work independently … to contribute to the tribe,” he said.

About 80 percent of CfP’s coffee-growing partners are women.

“Just five or so years ago, we didn’t really know each other – but now we are talking and working together,” Abe added.

CfP says business is booming, having tripled sales to at least $46,000 last year from $15,000 in 2012 and won United Nations and regional awards for promoting peace and development.

Although social enterprises in the Philippines have more than tripled in the last decade to 165,000, many are struggling due to limited state support and a lack of funding, said the British Council and the Philippines Social Enterprise Network.

CfP’s success is likely largely due to its unusual mission, said Gerry Higgins, chief executive of Community Enterprise in Scotland (CEIS), Britain’s largest agency to support the sector.

“Coffee for Peace is unusual … there aren’t many social enterprises that recognize that if a community is resilient and sustainable, (then) fewer conflicts will emerge,” Higgins said.

Conquerors of Coffee

By walking farmers through every step of the supply chain, CfP says they no longer see the coffee industry as “a mystery.”

Once dependent on traders and big brands such as Nestle, the world’s biggest coffee maker and producer of Nescafe, farmers can now demand higher prices for better quality beans, CfP said.

Yet winning communities over remains a major challenge.

Some are proud of their traditional methods and reluctant to embrace change, while others are wary of civil society groups and used to instant cash or aid, rather than long-term support.

“We had to convince and convince our people, many times, to move from the traditional to the technical way of doing things,” said Baby Jerlina Owok, chieftain of a native tribe which has seen their coffee beans almost double in value in recent years.

Yet for women such as Owok and Dubria and their coffee cooperatives, the ambitions are much bigger than making money.

Pointing at huge swathes of coffee trees covering the hills, painting once barren land vibrant shades of green, Dubria spoke about planting more to combat deforestation and soil erosion.

Lastly, she said they need to share their prosperity.

“We need to encourage and help other communities to produce quality coffee,” she said. “We want to pull them up — to improve their standard of living — so they can experience what we have.”
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The largest American business lobby group came to the defense of Amazon.com on Tuesday after a multi-day Twitter attack by U.S. President Donald Trump that included unsubstantiated criticism of the world’s biggest online retailer.

The value of Amazon shares held by Jeff Bezos, the online retailer’s chief executive and single largest shareholder, had taken a $10 billion hit in the week since Trump began attacking him and his company on Twitter.

Citing an unspecified report, Trump told reporters at the White House that the company was not paying the U.S. Postal Service a fair rate, and that it was costing U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars and forcing other retailers out of business, and he threatened to raise rates.

Late on Tuesday afternoon, a source familiar with proceedings at the White House said no specific actions addressing Trump’s concerns about Amazon were on the table at the White House at this time, but that could change given Trump’s dissatisfaction with the company.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby group in the country, stepped in on Tuesday to defend Amazon, which is a member.

“It’s inappropriate for government officials to use their position to attack an American company,” Neil Bradley, chief policy officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement, citing the value of the free enterprise system and the rule of law. “The record is clear: deviating from those processes undermines economic growth and job creation.”

It is not the first time Trump, or another U.S. president, has been publicly critical of a company. Trump has previously criticized automakers, Carrier, which is owned by United Technologies and Boeing.

In 2015, then-President Barack Obama criticized office supply company Staples for not embracing the Affordable Care Act, drawing a quick rebuke from Republicans and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Trump has progressively escalated his criticism of Amazon and Bezos, who also privately owns The Washington Post, which has published stories that have angered the president.

Bezos, ranked by Forbes magazine as the world’s richest man with an estimated net worth of $115.6 billion, owns 78.89 million Amazon shares, worth about $110 billion at Tuesday’s market close.

Amazon shares closed up 1.5 percent at $1,392.05. The shares started the day higher but fell as low as $1,355.33 after Trump’s latest Amazon-related tweet. 

Trump has accused Amazon of not paying enough tax, taking advantage of the U.S. postal system and putting small retailers out of business, but he has offered no evidence to back up his criticisms.

“The post office is losing billions of dollars … because it delivers packages for Amazon at a very low rate,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “If you look at the cost that we’re subsidizing, we’re giving a subsidy to Amazon.”

Trump offered no details about the report he cited or how he might charge the company more through USPS.

Amazon also ships packages through providers such as FedEx and United Parcel Service as well as its own experimental shipping service.

Representatives of Amazon and USPS had no comment on Trump’s tweet on Tuesday and could not be immediately reached regarding his latest comments to reporters.
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The Trump administration on Tuesday escalated its aggressive actions on trade by proposing 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports to protest Beijing’s alleged theft of American technology.

 

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued a list targeting 1,300 Chinese products, including industrial robots and telecommunications equipment. The suggested tariffs wouldn’t take effect right away: A public comment period will last until May 11, and a hearing on the tariffs is set for May 15. Companies and consumers will have the opportunity to lobby to have some products taken off the list or have others added.

 

The latest U.S. move risks heightening trade tensions with China, which on Monday had slapped taxes on $3 billion in U.S. products in response to earlier U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

 

“China’s going to be compelled to lash back,” warned Philip Levy, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and an economic adviser to President George W. Bush.

 

Indeed, China immediately threatened to retaliate against the new U.S. tariffs, which target the high-tech industries that Beijing has been nurturing, from advanced manufacturing and aerospace to information technology and robotics.

 

Early Wednesday in Beijing, China’s Commerce Ministry said it “strongly condemns and firmly opposes” the proposed U.S. tariffs and warned of retaliatory action.

 

“We will prepare equal measures for U.S. products with the same scale” according to regulations in Chinese trade law, a ministry spokesman said in comments carried by the official Xinhua News Agency.

 

The U.S. sanctions are intended to punish China for deploying strong-arm tactics in its drive to become a global technology power. These include pressuring American companies to share technology to gain access to the Chinese market, forcing U.S. firms to license their technology in China on unfavorable terms and even hacking into U.S. companies’ computers to steal trade secrets.

 

The administration sought to draw up the list of targeted Chinese goods in a way that might limit the impact of the tariffs — a tax on imports — on American consumers while hitting Chinese imports that benefit from Beijing’s sharp-elbowed tech policies. But some critics warned that Americans will end up being hurt.

 

“If you’re hitting $50 billion in trade, you’re inevitably going to hurt somebody, and somebody is going to complain,” said Rod Hunter, a former economic official at the National Security Council and now a partner at Baker & McKenzie LLP.

 

Kathy Bostjancic of Oxford Economics predicted that the tariffs “would have just a marginal impact on the U.S. economy” — unless they spark “a tit-for-tat retaliation that results in a broad-based global trade war.”

 

Representatives of American business, which have complained for years that China has pilfered U.S. technology and discriminated against U.S. companies, were nevertheless critical of the administration’s latest action.

 

“Unilateral tariffs may do more harm than good and do little to address the problems in China’s (intellectual property) and tech transfer policies,” said John Frisbie, president of the U.S.-China Business Council.

 

Even some technology groups that are contending directly with Chinese competition expressed misgivings.

 

“The Trump administration is right to push back against China’s abuse of economic and trade policy,” said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation think tank. But he said the proposed U.S. tariffs “would hurt companies in the U.S. by raising the prices and reducing consumption of the capital equipment they rely on to produce their goods and services.”

 

“The focus should be on things that will create the most leverage over China without raising prices and dampening investment in the kinds of machinery, equipment, and other technology that drives innovation and productivity across the economy,” Atkinson added.

 

At the same time, the United States has become increasingly frustrated with China’s aggressive efforts to overtake American technological supremacy. And many have argued that Washington needed to respond aggressively.

 

“The Chinese are bad trading partners because they steal intellectual property,” said Derek Scissors, a China specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

 

In January, a federal court in Wisconsin convicted a Chinese manufacturer of wind turbines, Sinovel Wind Group, of stealing trade secrets from the American company AMSC and nearly putting it out of business.

 

And in 2014, a Pennsylvania grand jury indicted five officers in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army on charges of hacking into the computers of Westinghouse, US Steel and other major American companies to steal information that would benefit their Chinese competitors.

 

To target China, Trump dusted off a Cold War weapon for trade disputes: Section 301 of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974, which lets the president unilaterally impose tariffs. It was meant for a world in which much of global commerce wasn’t covered by trade agreements. With the arrival in 1995 of the Geneva-based World Trade Organization, Section 301 largely faded from use.

 

Dean Pinkert of the law firm Hughes Hubbard & Reed, found it reassuring that the administration didn’t completely bypass the WTO: As part of its complaint, the U.S. is bringing a WTO case against Chinese licensing policies that put U.S. companies at a disadvantage.

 

China has been urging the United States to seek a negotiated solution and warning that it would retaliate against any trade sanctions. Beijing could counterpunch by targeting American businesses that depend on the Chinese market: Aircraft manufacturer Boeing, for instance, or American soybean farmers, who send nearly 60 percent of their exports to China.

 

Rural America has been especially worried about the risk of a trade war. Farmers are especially vulnerable targets in trade spats because they rely so much on foreign sales.

 

“Beijing right now is trying to motivate US stakeholders to press the Trump Administration to enter into direct negotiations with China and reach a settlement before tariffs are imposed,” the Eurasia Group consultancy said in a research note.

 

“The next couple of weeks will be very interesting,” says Kristin Duncanson, a soybean, corn and hog farmer in Mapleton, Minnesota.
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