Feds investigate GM Cruise crashes

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating three crashes involving driverless taxis operated by General Motors’s Cruise, just as the autonomous-vehicle division is poised to expand service.

Officials are looking into Cruise vehicles that braked suddenly – resulting in three crashes in which human motorists rear-ended the robotaxi – or cars that unexpectedly pulled over and stopped, according to a NHTSA document posted Friday.

The agency said it’s unknown if there have been accidents related to the second issue.

A spokesperson for Cruise said it’s rare for cars to pull over, and that there have been no accidents when that’s happened.

Cruise is expanding its robotaxi service across San Francisco and preparing to charge for rides in Austin, Texas, and Phoenix.

Cruise’s business is a big piece of GM Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra’s quest to double revenue by 2030.

Baristas reject union membershipBaristas at an experimental Starbucks-Amazon Go store in New York narrowly rejected union membership, the latest setback for the U.S. labor movement.

The workers, who legally work for Starbucks Corp., requested a union election because they said the tie-up between the coffee chain and Amazon.com doubled their workload with no additional pay.

The vote was very close, with 13 voting to join Starbucks Workers United, and 14 voting no, according to a spokesperson for the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections.

The defeat follows successful campaigns at hundreds of Starbucks cafes around the U.S. Amazon workers at a New York warehouse voted earlier this year to join the Amazon Labor Union, but the upstart labor group lost two subsequent contests.

From wire reports