The first major railroad merger in North America in two decades is heading into the hands of antitrust regulators. Canadian Pacific Railway and Kansas City Southern agreed to a roughly $27 billion deal to combine their businesses, the WSJ’s Dave Sebastian reports, now that Canadian National Railway said it would drop its lucrative but more troubled offer for the American freight hauler. Canadian National will get a total of $1.4 billion in fees to end its takeover effort and the back-and-forth drama in the bidding to take in Kansas City Southern. Canadian Pacific plans to file a merger application in mid-October to the Surface Transportation Board, and CEO Keith Creel expects regulatory reviews to be completed by the end of 2022. The carriers don’t anticipate the antitrust issues that have sidetracked other merger efforts to come up with the regulator, as the two railroad networks don’t overlap.

Organized labor’s effort to unionize workers at Amazon warehouses is moving to Canada. The WSJ's Paul Vieira reports that the Canadian arm of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters is asking labor regulators in the province of Alberta to certify a union for workers at an Amazon warehouse in the town of Nisku, just south of Edmonton. The move follows Amazon’s defeat of a union drive at a warehouse in Alabama earlier this year after 71% of employees who cast a vote rejected representation. The labor push in Canada is the latest sign of the growing attention warehouse labor is getting as surging e-commerce demand and costly disruptions in supply chains raise the profile of logistics operations. Amazon has an aggressive hiring strategy ahead of the holidays, with plans to add 15,000 full-time and part-time employees across Canada and to hike wages alongside the addition of 125,000 seasonal workers in the U.S. this year.

Metals markets are in turmoil, adding new hurdles to U.S. manufacturers looking to increase their output. Steel and aluminum prices have reached their highest levels in years, the WSJ’s Austen Hufford reports, providing a big boost for suppliers and headaches for manufacturers as they try to push production lines to meet strong demand. Factories increasingly are accepting nonstandard metal sizes, bulking up supply-chain teams to source more raw materials, raising their own prices and turning to imports. The impact is flowing through to producers of consumer goods ranging from Campbell Soup to car makers. A government measure tracking the price of steel and iron nearly doubled in August from last year, the biggest increase in records dating to the 1920s. Manufacturers and trade groups say steel prices are rising because of high demand for manufactured goods while tariffs on imported steel contribute to the strains on American manufacturers.
 

Walmart is working with Ford and Argo AI to test an autonomous-vehicle delivery service in three U.S. cities. (WSJ)

Zara owner Inditex expects e-commerce to account for 25% of sales this fiscal year, up from 14% before the pandemic. (WSJ)

DoorDash is suing New York City over a law that would require food-delivery companies to share more data with restaurants. (WSJ)

The chip shortage is pushing auto makers to abandon lean-inventory principles to stockpile critical semiconductors. (Nikkei Asia)

Workhorse Group withdrew its legal challenge to a U.S. Postal Service award of a multibillion-dollar contract for electric postal delivery vehicles to Oshkosh Defense. (Reuters)

Household goods supplier Procter & Gamble plans to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions across its operations and supply chain by 2040. (CNN)

Mediterranean Shipping Co. is working to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. (Financial Times)

Alphaliner says secondary shipping markets are being left short of capacity as container lines rush vessels to high-demand major trade lanes. (The Loadstar)

A.P. Moller-Maersk is buying fashion-focused Portuguese e-commerce logistics startup Huub. (Splash 247)

DP World will spend $400 million to build a fourth berth at its London Gateway container terminal. (Lloyd’s List)

Costco will build a 1.1 million-square-foot, $160 million distribution center in Tumwater, Wash. (Business Journals)

DHL plans to spend $300 million on technology and facilities​ at its e-commerce unit to improve its ties with the USPS network. (Multichannel Merchant)

Cowen upgraded major U.S. truckload carriers on an outlook for strong pricing into next year. (Dow Jones Newswires)

Iron and steel shipments from Europe through the St. Lawrence Seaway nearly doubled over the first five months of the shipping season. (Dow Jones Newswires)

Supply-chain technology integration provider Stord raised $90 million in a Series D funding round at a post-money valuation of $1.125 billion. (TechCrunch)

Softbank-owned SB Logistics is making progress on a “lights-out” distribution center outside Tokyo that would have no human workers. (Modern Materials Handling)

Paul Page is editor of WSJ Logistics Report. Write to him at paul.page@wsj.com.

Follow the WSJ Logistics Report team: @PaulPage, @jensmithWSJ, and @pdberger. and @LydsOneal. Follow the WSJ Logistics Report on Twitter at @WSJLogistics.