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Now almost all of Wal-Mart’s 4,700 U.S. stores have a Cash360 machine, making thousands of positions obsolete. Most of the employees in those positions moved into store jobs to improve service, said a Wal-Mart spokesman. More than 500 have left the company. The store accountant displaced last August is now a greeter at the front door, where she still earns $13 an hour. “The role of service and customer-facing associates will always be there,” said Judith McKenna, Wal-Mart’s U.S. chief operating officer. But, she added, “there are interesting developments in technology that mean those roles shift and change over time.” Shopping is moving online, hourly wages are rising and retail profits are shrinking—a formula that pressures retailers, ranging from Wal-Mart to Tiffany & Co., to find technology that can do the rote labor of retail workers or replace them altogether.

China-based businesses have been sinking money into various automotive operations—from glass and tire makers to technology developers and car makers—for several years, reflecting Beijing’s goal of eventually dominating the world’s car business. That effort accelerated during the first half of 2017, with eight overseas deals totaling more than $5.5 billion in Chinese investments, compared with nine investments for all of last year. The list includes the takeover of troubled Japanese air-bag maker Takata Corp. , the purchase of a U.S. flying-car developer and the acquisition of a sizable stake in Silicon Valley’s Tesla Inc. TSLA 1.43% by games and social-media company Tencent Holdings Ltd.

What has been the biggest accomplishment of the Fight for $15 movement?

It’s reaffirmed a very bedrock principle of working people, which is when we join together, we can make the impossible, possible. This bodacious demand, four years ago, for $15 and a union—that people were laughing at, thought was crazy—the $15 part of that has become a standard against which people will debate. I have more people coming up to me than ever before and asking, “When is it going to $20? When are you upping the demand?”

The pace of hiring picked up again in April and the unemployment rate fell to the lowest level in nearly a decade, evidence the U.S. economy is poised for a spring rebound after a lackluster start to the year.

In a last-ditch effort to survive, bankrupt U.S. solar panel maker Suniva Inc. asked the Trump administration Wednesday to impose trade tariffs on all foreign-made solar cells.

Cities and counties from Portland, Maine, to Los Angeles have successfully passed local minimum-wage increases, but recent resistance in seemingly friendly territory suggests a momentum shift. . . Lawmakers in several other states also are pushing back against local minimum-wage increases. At least four municipalities in Cook County, Ill., have opted out of the county government’s move to raise the minimum wage in the Chicago suburbs to $13 an hour by 2020. Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, a Republican, approved legislation in March to roll back higher minimum wages already approved in four counties. In Flagstaff, Ariz., council members just amended a minimum-wage increase approved by voters in November to slow the pace of increases.

The U.S. has long held itself out as a nation driven by entrepreneurs and small businesses. Presidents and politicians still invoke that image, and for generations, it was largely accurate. Today, the U.S. has become something different: a nation of employees working for large companies, often very large ones, Theo Francis writes. Huge companies dominate American economic life well beyond employment. They ring up a disproportionate share of sales for goods and services, both to consumers and to other businesses.

Altogether, these and other merchant-transmission projects could cost upward of $17 billion, plus at least a further $20 billion in wind, solar and hydro projects to fill these lines. There are no federal subsidies available for building transmission lines, though wind farm developers are eligible to tap a U.S. tax credit for building new production.

Employers slowed their pace of hiring in March, but beneath the surface the labor market continued to improve and tighten, leaving the Federal Reserve on course to keep raising short-term interest rates and workers with prospects of better paydays. Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 98,000 in March from the previous month, the Labor Department said Friday, a slowdown from the prior two months. Still, the unemployment rate dropped two-tenths of a percentage point to 4.5% as the number of employed workers grew more quickly than the labor force, pushing the measure to the lowest level since May 2007.

Reservoirs and rivers are overflowing as storms have pounded California this winter, and after years of drought that should be good news. The problem is that misguided environmentalism is wasting the water windfall and failing to store it for a non-rainy day.

Many measures track some form of business optimism, and generally reveal the same trends. But the RSM Index has a novel twist: a new set of questions that track how that optimism is tied up in expectations that President Donald Trump will be able to change the business environment for U.S. firms. The surge in business optimism largely owes to hopes that regulations and taxes will decrease, and that the federal government could invest heavily in the nation’s infrastructure. These views have come in for criticism from those wondering if the new administration will be able to execute on all of its goals. But businesses are already building in different expectations about how much will be accomplished in Washington in coming years.

“In places such as New York and San Francisco, which offer the greatest array of high-paying jobs, rents and home prices have shot up beyond the reach of many young workers. The squeeze has even affected the Bay Area’s amply compensated technology workers, whose salaries often aren’t enough to offset the rapidly rising rents and housing costs. Technology workers who own a home in Seattle, by contrast, can expect to have about $2,000 more of disposable income left over each month after paying housing costs and taxes than those who live in San Francisco, according to a new analysis by Zillow and LinkedIn Corp. released Thursday.”

The latest figures are a marked deceleration from the third quarter’s 3.5% pace, which had been the strongest reading in two years. They are, however, broadly in line with an economy that has, through ups and downs, settled at a roughly 2% growth pace since the recession ended.

Republicans chose the damaging 13 rules based on a conventional reading of the CRA, which allows Congress to override regulations published within 60 legislative days, with simple (50-vote) majorities in both chambers. Yet the more scholars examine the law, which had only been used successfully once before this year, the clearer it is that the CRA gives Congress far more regulatory oversight than previously supposed. . . A third discovery could be the most important. The opening words of the CRA read: “Before a rule can take effect” the federal agency in question must submit a Congressional report. No one has tested the legal limits of this provision, but a fair reading suggests the Trump Administration could declare any rule for which a report has not been submitted to be null and void.

Orders for long-lasting factory goods climbed last month due to purchases of military and civilian aircraft, overshadowing a weak start to 2017 for business investment in new equipment.