Local Business and Economic Development
Photo: Gene Marrano
A Roanoke business is quietly expanding — opening locations in larger Virginia metro areas while remaining centered in the Star City. Jason and Carolyn Kiser opened the Blue Cow Ice Cream Company five years ago this week at the former HITS ice cream shop along Walnut Avenue near the Roanoke River Greenway. Its success led to thoughts of expansion, and two years later, a second Blue Cow opened in Virginia Beach. Last year, the Kisers opened a third on the fringe of downtown Fredericksburg, and next month, a fourth Blue Cow will open inside a former Starbucks outside Richmond. The company makes all its ice cream in a building along Williamson Road, one big enough to handle any future plans. Blue Cow promises craft ice cream with some unusual flavors, and Kiser says plans are very much in place to continue its growth — perhaps even more this year alone. WFIR’s Evan Jones has more:
A county in the Roanoke Valley is asking for 
The “Experience Conference” is back in-person for 2022, a full-day conference at Hotel Roanoke on June 13, where attendees are invited to collaborate, socialize, learn and grow professionally.
Here’s a link for more info/registration
Hear the complete in-studio with Taylor Johnson from the Roanoke Regional Partnership about Experience Conference and talent attraction below:
NEW YORK (AP) — Workers at a Target store in Christiansburg, Virginia, filed paperwork Tuesday with federal labor regulators to hold a union election, joining a wave of union organizing at other retailers around the country.
Workers at the store, which employs about 100, are seeing their pay not keeping pace with surging costs for basics like food and rent, said Adam Ryan, who has been working at the Christiansburg store for five years and founded Target Workers Unite in 2019. He also noted employees feel like they are having to do too many tasks, from filling online orders to unloading trucks.
“The cost of living is going up and their pay isn’t meeting that,” said Ryan, 34, who filed the petition with the National Labor Relations Board. “That is causing a lot of anxiety and stress. People are stretched too thin. They need more support and compensation.”
He said the filing was sparked by veteran workers at the Christiansburg store organizing a petition in April demanding additional pay.
Ryan said he collected more than 30 authorization cards from workers at the store, about 30% of the staff, enough to meet the threshold mandated by NLRB, although the signatures still need to be reviewed. Ryan said he is hoping for other stores to join in, noting that Target workers are watching labor organizing at other companies. The Minneapolis-based company has about 350,000 employees.
Target said in statement Tuesday that it is committed to listening to its workers and creating an environment of mutual trust.
“We want all team members to be better off for working at Target,” the company said. Target cited industry leading starting hourly wages of $15 to $24, expanded health care benefits, personalized scheduling and opportunities for career growth. It said it raised the starting wage at its Christiansburg store last fall and increased wages for longer-tenured workers.
The Target workers filing comes as nearly 60 Starbucks locations around the country have voted to unionize.
The fledgling Amazon Labor Union scored a victory last month at an Amazon warehouse on New York City’s Staten Island, becoming the first U.S. Amazon warehouse to be unionized. But Amazon workers in a later election in a nearby facility rejected a union bid.
Meanwhile, the final outcome of a separate union election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, is still up in the air with several hundred outstanding challenged ballots hanging in the balance. Hearings to review those ballots are expected to begin in the coming weeks.
(AP) Boeing Co., a leading defense contractor and one of the world’s two dominant manufacturers of airline planes, is expected to move its headquarters from Chicago to the Washington, D.C., area, – Arlington specifically – according to two people familiar with the matter. The decision could be announced as soon as later Thursday, according to one of the people. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly before Boeing’s announcement. Boeing did not immediately comment.
The decision was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. A move to Arlington, Virginia, would put Boeing executives close to officials for their key customer, the Pentagon, and the Federal Aviation Administration, which certifies Boeing passenger planes. Boeing’s roots are in the Seattle area, and it has assembly plants in Washington state and South Carolina. The company moved its headquarters to Chicago in 2001 after an unusually public search that also considered Dallas and Denver.
US Senator Mark Warner has commented on Boeing’s planned move if its headquarters to Arlington, saying that “for well over a year, I’ve been making my case to Boeing senior leadership that Virginia would be a great place for its headquarters.” Warner also said in a statement today he found out about that planned move from Chicago late last year.
