The United Steelworkers of America said Friday it has reached a tentative agreement with creditors of Cleveland-based LTV Steel on labor contract concessions the bankrupt company contended were necessary to remain in operation. The deal meets LTV's restructuring needs while ''preserving the jobs and income of our active members and the standard of living of our current and future retirees,'' said David McCall, chair of the USW's negotiating committee. Details would not be disclosed until union members were briefed, the USW said. LTV spokesman Mark Tomasch refused to confirm the agreement. LTV, which been under bankruptcy protection since December, is the nation's third-largest integrated steel maker. LTV has said it must reduce annual costs by $800 million, and that one-third of that savings will have to be achieved through labor costs. Separately, General Motors said Friday it will stop buying steel from LTV by yearend as it reduces suppliers.
FreeMarkets Inc. is offering employees the ability to exchange stock options with exercise prices of more than $20 for new options with exercise prices based on the stock's closing price six months after they are exchanged. 'Many of our outstanding options ... have exercise prices that are significantly higher than the current market price of our common stock' the company said in an SEC filing Friday. 'We are concerned that ... these options are not creating a meaningful long-term performance incentive.' FreeMarkets stock closed Friday at $19.75. The company sold stock at $48 per share in a December 1999 initial public offering. It ended trading on its first day at $280 a share. Employees have until Aug. 3 to decide whether to participate. As of June 29, about 2.9 million options are eligible to be exchanged.
Embattled music software company Napster Inc. remained shut down Friday, five days after the company began blocking what little free music was being swapped. Napster recently disabled access to its old song-trading software, reacting to a legal loss to the music industry earlier this year. The old software allowed unfettered and free access to tens of thousands of copyrighted songs. The company's new software doesn't allow users to swap music unprotected by copyrights. Napster spokeswoman Jill Mango said that this week's outage is not related to Napster's plan to charge users. The subscription service will begin sometime this summer, she said.
Microsoft Corp. said about a third of the users of its MSN Instant Messenger program are facing a fourth day of delays in logging on and still can't find their ''buddy lists'' on the service. Instant messages are short electronic mails exchanged in conversation-like fashion. The largest software maker blamed the problem on a hardware failure, and expected to fully restore service and buddy lists late Friday without losing any data. Microsoft is competing for instant-messaging users with AOL Time Warner Inc., which has more customers for such services.
FirstEnergy Corp. faces a Monday deadline to reach a settlement in New Jersey with critics of its $10.7 billion acquisition of GPU Inc., owner of Pennsylvania's largest and New Jersey's second-largest utility. The parties will meet with New Jersey Administrative Law Judge Louis McAfoos Monday to report on the talks. If a settlement isn't reached, the judge could extend negotiations or suggest terms for completing the acquisition. Regulators in Pennsylvania approved the buyout June 14.
From staff reports, The Associated Press, Dow Jones, Knight-Ridder and Bloomberg News.
