With a six-year contract set to expire Tuesday, West Coast shippers and the dockworkers union continue to negotiate a new waterfront labor contract. Both sides insist that they want to keep ports running smoothly, even if they have to keep talking after t

Stocks tumbled Tuesday as a troubling reading on wholesale inflation underscored the drag of high energy prices on the economy. Investors, also growing anxious again about banks' credit woes, sent the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 100 point

Steven Mufson and Neil Irwin A soaring jobless rate, an unprecedented jump in oil prices and a sliding dollar sent tremors through financial markets Friday and cast fresh doubt on how soon the U.S. economy would be able to break out of a pattern of feeble

General Motors Corp. posted a $15.5 billion second-quarter loss Friday, the third-worst quarterly performance in the company's nearly 100-year history.

NEW YORK It's something small-business owners dread: having to tell employees they're being laid off. It's inescapable in a weak economy, or as a company changes the way it does business, that some workers must be let go. There's probably no way for a