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Atlas Health Care Linen Services said that it will not close its Grider Street facility or lay off any of its roughly 150 workers, despite filing for chapter 11 protection last month and filing a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification with the state, the Buffalo News reported. The Buffalo-based company, which does business as Clarus Linen Systems, is in the process of selling off three underperforming plants in South Carolina and Georgia. The bankruptcy filing was a condition of the sale, said Ron Teplitsky, Atlas's chief restructuring officer. The bankruptcy will also help strengthen the company's locations in Syracuse, Albany and on Grider Street, which "have traditionally been profitable," he said. Atlas cleans and distributes sheets and uniforms to hospitals and nursing homes. Workers at its New York plants are represented by the Rochester Regional Joint Board Local 51 and International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 17-175.

Once the Marsh Supermarkets chain began to falter a few years ago, its owner, a private-equity firm, began selling off the vast retail empire, piece by piece, according to a Washington Post analysis. The company sold more than 100 convenience stores, then pharmacies, and closed some of the 115 grocery stores, having previously auctioned off their real estate. Then, in May 2017, the company announced the closure of the remaining 44 stores and filed for bankruptcy. While the sell-off allowed Sun Capital and its investors to recover their money and then some, the company entered bankruptcy leaving unpaid more than $80 million in debts to workers’ severance and pensions. For Sun Capital, this process of buying companies, seeking profits and leaving pensions unpaid is a familiar one. Over the past 10 years, it has taken five companies into bankruptcy while leaving behind debts of about $280 million owed to employee pensions.

One of the biggest unresolved labor issues facing employers in the new year is how federal regulators will determine the scope of “joint employment” business relationships, circumstances where one company can be held responsible for the workers of another, the National Law Journal reported. Joint-employer disputes have kicked up significant litigation, fueled federal legislative proposals, and driven a sharp wedge between management-side lawyers and attorneys for workers’ rights. The issues touch on who’s responsible for contract workers and employees of franchises. And the landscape potentially just got a lot muddier. A divided federal appeals court in Washington issued a ruling Friday in the case Browning-Ferris Industries v. National Labor Relations Board that said the Obama-era board’s expanded, worker-friendly standard wasn’t unlawful. Judges Patricia Millett and Robert Wilkins delivered a win for employees, but it comes as the Trump administration’s new leaders at the board are aiming to undo the current rules and enforce a more business-friendly approach. The dissenting judge said the court should have waited for the NLRB to finish its administrative process.

Seattle beauty company Julep is laying off 102 employees as it gets set to shut down its local nail parlors and Seattle headquarters, the Seattle Times reported. The moves come after Julep’s parent company, New York-based Glansaol, filed for bankruptcy protection last week. Glansaol CEO Nancy Bernardini said yesterday that Julep will continue selling its makeup online and in stores such as Nordstrom and Ulta. Julep’s operations will be combined with Glansaol’s other two beauty brands — Laura Geller and Clark’s Botanicals — and the companies will be run from Glansaol’s New York offices, she said. Julep employees were given two months notice of the layoffs, Bernardini said, and several will be offered jobs in the New York offices. Julep’s office in Seattle will close in mid-February.

U.S. filings for unemployment benefits decreased for the third time in four weeks, hovering near an almost five- decade low that reflects a robust job market, Bloomberg News reported. Jobless claims fell by 1,000 to 216,000 in the week ended Dec. 22, matching the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists and following a revised reading of 217,000 for the prior week, Labor Department figures showed today. The four-week average, a less-volatile measure, fell to a six-week low.

Bankers meeting to discuss financing for Sears Holdings Corp.’s impending bankruptcy erupted in disbelief when a headline crossed their smartphone screens. A breaking news report said that the bankers, gathered on Oct. 11 at the Manhattan offices of law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges, were pushing to liquidate the American retail icon instead of saving it with a new loan, Bloomberg News reported. The implications were clear, according to people familiar with the meeting: Keep Sears alive, or you’ll be publicly blamed for the 50,000 job losses that would come with its demise. As far as the bankers knew, the report wasn’t true, sources said. But even today, as they face a deadline in two weeks to extend more loans, the bankers can’t escape factoring in the social cost of their decision. In private meetings, representatives for Sears and related businesses have repeated the message, according to the sources. It’s also come up in Sears public comments and former Chief Executive Officer Eddie Lampert’s Dec. 6 bid to buy the company. Robert Riecker, the retail chain’s chief financial officer, made the same point on the day of the company’s October bankruptcy filing.

MetLife Inc. will pay a $1 million fine to Massachusetts in its first regulatory settlement after the insurer failed to pay 13,500 people their pension benefits, the Wall Street Journal reported. The big New York insurer disclosed almost exactly one year ago that it had failed to adequately search for beneficiaries of private-sector pension plans for which it had taken on responsibility. Instead, it designated the people as “permanently unresponsive” after a couple of unanswered letters and booked as profit the money that should have been paid out. Some retirees were owed money from as far back as the 1990s, with amounts averaging less than $150 a month. Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William F. Galvin said in an interview that the fine follows a probe covering hundreds of retirees in the state. A MetLife spokeswoman on Tuesday said that the insurer “self-identified and self-reported” the problem to regulators and overhauled its search process for locating beneficiaries. It has said it is paying interest to beneficiaries on their overdue money. MetLife said that it is continuing to cooperate with an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, an examination by New York’s Department of Financial Services and some other inquiries.

Cryptocurrency companies are laying off employees in an effort to survive the nascent market’s biggest selloff to date, the Wall Street Journal reported. Blockchain venture firm ConsenSys said Thursday that it would cut 13 percent of its staff, days after announcing an overhaul of its business model. Steemit, a firm that runs a blockchain-based social network, last week laid off 70 percent of it staff, citing the crypto selloff. A number of smaller firms that raised money during the manic 2017 cryptocurrency rally have retrenched sharply or quietly closed.