Good morning. Companies have long used employee nondisclosure agreements to protect proprietary information. Now, regulators are trying to ensure that clauses in those agreements don’t also serve to inhibit whistleblowers from reporting potential corporate wrongdoing.

In recent months, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has taken a number of actions against companies whose various employment contracts have language that might hold employees back from reporting misconduct to regulators.

• Watershed fine: A watershed moment came in September, when the SEC fined hedge fund D.E. Shaw $10 million. Now, some companies are taking a second look at the confidentiality provisions and nondisparagement clauses in their various employment contracts. In particular, they are trying to determine whether the language might be seen as squelching whistleblower tips.
   
• Important source: Whistleblower information, particularly from corporate insiders, has become a key source for the SEC, which can then monitor events in real time and police the market, Gurbir Grewal, the SEC’s enforcement division chief, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. Companies should "go update their policies and their trainings," Grewal said.
   
• Recent crackdown: Besides D.E. Shaw, the SEC also fined two other companies in September over employment agreements and separation releases freighted with language that might dissuade whistleblowers from coming forward. CBRE Group was fined $375,000, while Monolith Resources, a privately owned company, agreed to pay a penalty of $225,000.

Supreme Court weighs Purdue Pharma’s $6 billion opioid settlement.

Supreme Court justices wrestled Monday with the uncomfortable bargain struck between most victims of the opioid crisis and the Sackler family, whose Purdue Pharma promoted the addictive painkiller OxyContin: providing timely compensation for survivors in exchange for granting the wealthy family immunity from future civil lawsuits.

A settlement before a bankruptcy judge would see the Sacklers pay $6 billion to individual victims and state governments in exchange for eliminating potential liability for additional claims, such as fraud—even though they, unlike Purdue, haven’t sought bankruptcy protection. But some victims didn’t settle, and at Monday’s arguments, a Justice Department attorney told the court that federal law didn’t permit settlements that forbid creditors from seeking assets that weren’t protected in bankruptcy proceedings.

GM’s Cruise ordered to testify about October incident.

General Motors’ Cruise has been ordered to testify before the California Public Utilities Commission over allegedly misleading comments it gave to regulators about an incident in October in which a pedestrian was hit.

The CPUC said the self-driving car company omitted critical information about the safety of its vehicles regarding the incident. A woman was hit by a human-driven car and thrown into the path of a driverless Cruise vehicle, which collided with the pedestrian and dragged the person about 20 feet. Cruise could face a fine of up to $1.5 million.

• A U.S. appeals court has sided with Intel, vacating a roughly $2.2 billion patent-infringement verdict won by VLSI Technology, which argues that some technology in Intel’s microprocessors infringe on VLSI’s patents.
   
• U.S. regulators and standard setters are taking a closer look at cash-flow statements, particularly how such corporate disclosures may lag behind other financial statements in terms of usefulness for investors and the quality of the information that companies provide.
   
• A group representing more than 80 media outlets in Spain filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms, saying the Facebook and Instagram owner hadn’t complied with European data-protection laws that require users’ consent before their data are used for advertising profiling.
   
• Carbon trading is opening up a loophole in the Paris Climate Accord.

For labor unions, 2023 was the year of the strike—and big victories.

The country has experienced a surge in strikes unlike anything in recent memory. According to Cornell ILR’s Labor Action Tracker, as of Oct. 31, there were 354 strikes in 2023 involving roughly 492,000 workers—nearly eight times the number of workers involved in strikes for the same period in 2021 and nearly four times the number for the same period in 2022.

Not only were there more strikes, they led to historic companywide and industrywide bargaining victories with some of the nation’s largest and most powerful corporations—United Parcel Service, Kaiser Permanente, Hollywood, the big three auto companies, and hotels and casinos in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Detroit.

• Israeli troops and Hamas fighters are locked in some of their fiercest fighting of the two-month-old war.
   
• Developers in Florida are rolling out new homes built with wooden frames, undaunted by the risk that wood can be less reliable than other materials for withstanding hurricane-force winds. A sharp decrease in lumber prices from a record high in 2021, coupled with a much shorter build time, makes wood an appealing option.
   
• The U.S. will be unable to continue providing more weapons and equipment to Ukraine if Congress doesn’t approve additional funding by the end of the year, the White House said. Officials in the U.S. and Europe increasingly fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin will be able to outlast the political will of Western countries to continue aiding Ukraine.

• Spotify is preparing to lay off 17% of its workforce or about 1,500 employees, as the company accelerates its profitability push.
   
• Prominent pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow said she was exiling herself in Canada after getting her passport back from police in return for taking a patriotic trip to China, an exchange that sheds light on Hong Kong’s efforts to re-educate political opponents.
   
• Over the past four years, a contentious conversation has played out in the world of design: What is the future of work, and what should it actually look like?
   
• A former senior U.S. diplomat who served in U.S. embassies across Latin America was accused of spying for Cuba’s intelligence service for decades in one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting security breaches of the U.S. government, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Monday.
   
• WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich, detained for 250 days, is still bringing his friends together.

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