Lodge introduces first color-enamel Dutch ovens and other business news | Chattanooga Times Free Press

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Lodge launches first color enamel cookware

Lodge Cast Iron, the South Pittsburg, Tennessee-based cast iron cookware maker, unveiled its new USA Enamel collection on Tuesday with a new collection of Dutch ovens featuring three unique colors.

Each of the new Dutch Ovens includes broad handles and a just-right knob. Inspired by the heyday of American mid-century product design, the USA Enamel collection takes cues from everything from vintage guitars to classic cars.

“Two years ago, we celebrated our 125th anniversary, and with USA Enamel, we are paying homage to our long-standing history, while championing the spirit of continued innovation,” Mike Otterman, CEO of Lodge Cast Iron, said in an announcement of the new Dutch Oven line. “It’s an honor to now launch this collection which is the first-ever color enamel cookware collection made in the USA, cast and perfected in our hometown of South Pittsburg.”

The new collection of Dutch ovens features three colors that are unique to USA Enamel, available in four sizes, including Cherry On Top, Cloud Nine and Smooth Sailing.

Gig workers may be able to unionize

A U.S. labor board ruling on Tuesday laid the groundwork for drivers from Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. and other gig workers to formally unionize — a still difficult but potentially transformative task.

In a ruling concerning workers at the Atlanta Opera, the National Labor Relations Board’s Democratic majority voted to make it easier for workers to prove they’re employees rather than independent contractors, granting them the right to organize.

“Applying this clear standard will ensure that workers who seek to organize or exercise their rights under the National Labor Relations Act are not improperly excluded from its protections,” NLRB Chairman Lauren McFerran said in a statement.

While the decision directly involves hair and makeup workers at the opera, it also changes the precedent for who should be considered an employee at companies throughout the economy. The new ruling is likely to embolden workers at companies like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash Inc. to pursue cases, arguing they are also employees with union rights.

Gig company executives have argued that the flexibility they offer workers and the prices they offer consumers depend on their ability to keep classifying their workers as non-employees.

Reddit groups protest new data usage charge

Thousands of Reddit discussion forums have gone dark this week to protest a new policy that will charge some third-party apps to access data on the site, leading to worries about content moderation and accessibility.

More than 8,000 subreddits were dark as of Tuesday afternoon, according to a tracker and live Twitch stream of the boycott. Participants ranged from small forums to large communities with tens of millions of subscribers — including the r/funny, r/music and r/todayilearned pages seen on the online discussion site.

“Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself),” other subreddits wrote in posts seen on the platform’s homepage.

The new fees are part of broader changes to Reddit’s API, or application programming interface, that the company announced recently.

Organizers of the blackout, which began Monday, say Reddit’s changes threaten to end key ways of historically customizing the platform — which relies heavily on the work of volunteer moderators. Subreddit “mods” often use tools outside of the official app to keep their forums free of spam and hateful content, for example, as well as improve accessibility.

Reddit, a subsidiary of New York-based Advance Publications, says supporting large, high-usage third-party developers to access its data is too expensive. The company also notes that the new fees will only apply to eligible apps that require high usage limits, and the majority of API users will not have to pay for access.

AWS outage causes websites to go dark

Amazon’s cloud computing unit Amazon Web Services experienced an outage on Tuesday, affecting publishers that suddenly found themselves unable to operate their sites.

The company said on its website that the root cause of the issue was tied to a function called AWS Lambda, which lets customers run code for different types of applications.

Roughly two hours after customers began experiencing errors, the company posted on its AWS status page that many of the affected AWS services were “fully recovered” and it was continuing to recover the rest.

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