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Farmworkers were leading a five-day, 45-mile (72-kilometer) trek on foot this week from one of the poorest communities in Florida to a mansion-lined, oceanfront town that is one of the richest in an effort to pressure retailers to leverage their purchasing power for better worker pay and working conditions. The farm worker s said they were march ing to highlight the Fair Food Program, which has enlisted companies like McDonald’s, Walmart, Taco Bell and Whole Foods to use their clout with growers to ensure better working conditions and wages for farm worker s. They hoped to use the march to pressure other companies , like Publix, Wendy’s and Kroger, to join the program that started in 2011. The march began Tuesday from the farming community of Pahokee, one of the poorest in Florida, where the median household income is around $30,000. The march’s launching point was a camp where farmworkers were coerced into working for barely any pay by a labor contractor who was convicted and sen...

Washington state on Tuesday kicked off a program aimed at cleaning the environment by forcing companies to pay for how much carbon dioxide they release into the atmosphere.  Washington’s new law, the Climate Commitment Act, requires businesses that emit over 25,000 metric tons of carbon annually to pay for each metric ton in total. The state joins 14 others that have implemented some form of a program that sets declining caps on emissions from companies. Washington’s cap-and-invest program most closely reflects California’s cap-and-trade program, which began in 2013. Many major companies with manufacturing plants and refineries in Washington, including BP, Tyson and Boeing, exceed this threshold, as do the state’s energy companies. The program is estimated to bring in $1 billion annually, with most of that money earmarked for environmental-related programs. “A cap-and-trade program is a way of giving everyone incentive to take the damage of CO2 into account,” said Bill Shobe, a profess...

With inclement winter weather forecast for much of the country this week, New Hampshire resident Laurie Boswell said she can sleep easy because she sent her Californian daughter’s Christmas gift with time to spare during the busy shipping season. “I did all my Christmas ordering early — we don’t like to miss,” said Boswell, 67, who is from Franconia, New Hampshire, but spoke Tuesday from midtown Manhattan in New York. Present procrastinators, Boswell said, who shipped gifts to their loved ones this week may not be so lucky, however. “Regardless of the storm, you could still be in trouble,” she said. “You don’t want any last-minute glitches that could ruin the holidays.” Satish Jindel, the founder and president of ShipMatrix Inc., which tracks the shipping industry and its efficiency, said carriers like Amazon, FedEx, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service will be shipping on average a combined 100 million packages a day this week leading up to Christmas. “That’s a lot of packages moving all ...