Business briefing: Amazon has plans to hire 100,000 workers

Amazon said Monday that it needs to hire 100,000 people across the U.S. to keep up with a crush of orders as the coronavirus spreads and keeps more people at home, shopping online. The online retailer said it will also temporarily raise pay by $2 an hour through the end of April for hourly employees. That includes workers at its warehouses, delivery centers and Whole Foods grocery stores, all of whom make at least $15 an hour. Employees in the United Kingdom and other European countries will get a similar raise. Amazon said this weekend that a surge of orders is putting its operations under pressure. It warned shoppers that it could take longer than the usual two days to get packages. It also said it was sold out of many household cleaning supplies and is working to get more in stock.

Pacific Gas & Electric on Monday won court approval to raise $23 billion to help pay its bills over destructive California wildfires after Gov. Gavin Newsom dropped his opposition to a financing package designed to help the nation's largest utility get out of bankruptcy. The milestone reached during an unusual court hearing held by phone moves PG&E closer to its goal of emerging from one of the most complex bankruptcy cases in U.S. history by June 30. Newsom has said he fears P&E is taking on too much debt to be able to afford an estimated $40 billion in equipment upgrades needed to reduce the chances of its electricity grid igniting destructive wildfires in the future. The utility's outdated system triggered a series of catastrophic wildfires in 2017 and 2018 that killed so many people and burned so many homes and businesses that the company had to file for bankruptcy early last year.

A Chinese company has abandoned its plan to build a massive paper mill in southwestern Arkansas that had already been delayed by trade tensions. Sun Paper told Gov. Asa Hutchinson and economic-development officials in a letter dated Sunday that it would not move forward with its plan to build a mill in Arkadelphia, about 60 miles southwest of Little Rock. The company cited "continued political friction and economic instability," and the coronavirus outbreak as reasons for walking away from the project. The announcement comes after Arkadelphia officials announced that the community was marketing the 1,000-acre site planned for the mill to other potential projects. The $1.8 billion mill was announced in 2016 but has faced uncertainty since then because of trade tensions.

French regulators fined Apple $1.2 billion on Monday for striking deals to keep prices high, in the biggest-ever such sanction by France's Competition Authority. The agency said Apple and top resellers agreed to align prices with Apple's own pricing for its iPads and some other products. The deals did not concern iPhones. Calling the fine "disheartening," Apple defended its operations in a statement saying its "investment and innovation supports over 240,000 jobs across the country."

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