7-Eleven owner appoints 1st foreign CEO

Fighting off a takeover by a Canadian rival, the Japanese parent company of 7-Eleven announced a major business shake-up Thursday that included the appointment of its first foreign-born chief executive.

Seven & i Holdings said Stephen Dacus, 64, a member of the company’s board of directors and longtime retail executive from the U.S., would take on the role in May. It also said it planned to hold an initial public offering of its U.S. convenience store business, which operates more than 13,000 7-Eleven branches.

The moves are the company’s latest attempt to prevent itself from being acquired by the retail group Alimentation Couche-Tard, the Canadian owner of the Circle K convenience store chain. That company has offered about $47 billion for control of Seven & i, the largest foreign-led bid for a Japanese company.

Japan’s corporate landscape, which in many ways resisted change for decades, is beginning to shift in the face of an influx of attention from foreign investors. The reshuffling at Seven & i, whose convenience stores are so ubiquitous in Japan that they are considered part of the national infrastructure, is the latest example of that transformation.

151,000 jobs added in February

U.S. employers added 151,000 jobs last month, but the outlook is cloudy as President Donald Trump threatens a trade war, purges the federal workforce and promises to deport millions of immigrants.

The Labor Department reported Friday that hiring was up from a revised 125,000 in January. Economists had expected 160,000 new jobs last month.

The unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.1% as the number jobless Americans rose by 203,000.

Employment rose in health care, finance and transportation and warehousing. The federal government shed 10,000 jobs, the most since June 2022, though economists don’t expect Trump’s federal layoffs to have much of an impact until the March jobs report. Restaurants and bars cut nearly 28,000 jobs last month on top of a loss of almost 30,000 in January.

Sarah House, a senior economist at Wells Fargo, expects hiring to slow and unemployment to creep higher as Trump continues to cut spending on programs and slash the federal workforce.

agency nixes TSA bargaining agreement

The Department of Homeland Security said Friday that it is ending the collective bargaining agreement with the tens of thousands of front-line employees at the Transportation Security Administration, marking a major effort to dismantle union protections under the Trump administration.

The TSA union called it on “unprovoked attack” and vowed to fight it.

The department criticized the union whose staffers are responsible for keeping weapons off airplanes and protecting air travel. Officials said that poor performers were being allowed to stay on the job and that the agreement was hindering the ability of the organization “to safeguard our transportation systems and keep Americans safe” — an assessment that faced immediate pushback from a top Democrat in Congress and the union.

The American Federation of Government Employees is the union representing the TSA workers. The federation and TSA’s then-administrator, David Pekoske, signed the CBA in May. It came amid a push by Homeland Security to improve the pay of front-line workers, which has historically lagged behind other government employees.

Compiled from New York Times and Associated Press reports.