Business

Southwest Airlines is apologizing to thousands of customers whose flights were disrupted after Christmas by offering them frequent flyer points worth hundreds of dollars. “I’ll stay with Southwest,” said Justin Bass, a Southwest passenger from Baltimore. More than a week after Southwest canceled 15,000 flights, leaving tens of thousands of passengers in the lurch, the airline has come up with a new way to say, “We’re sorry” in an e-mail from the CEO himself.

The long-anticipated deal to move CFG Bank’s headquarters to Baltimore Peninsula has been finalized. The bank will move into 97,000 square feet of space at 2455 House St. by the end of the year, officials said Wednesday morning. Details of the CFG lease deal first surfaced in mid-September, even as negotiations remained ongoing for the anchor tenant of the seven-story, red-brick tower. House Street will be the new name for the street formerly known as Banner Street, a spokesperson for the development said.

A group of video game testers has formed Microsoft’s first labor union in the U.S., which will also be the largest in the video game industry. The Communications Workers of America said Tuesday that a majority of about 300 quality-assurance workers at Microsoft video game subsidiary ZeniMax Studios has voted to join the union. Microsoft already told the CWA it would accept the formation of the union at its Maryland-based video game subsidiary, fulfilling a promise it made to try to build public support for its $68.7 billion acquisition of another big game company, Activision Blizzard. Microsoft bought ZeniMax for $7.5 billion in 2021, giving the Xbox-maker control of ZeniMax’s well-known game publishing division Bethesda Softworks and popular game franchises such as The Elder Scrolls, Doom and Fallout.

A member of M&T’s board of directors has stepped down from the board after being promoted to president and CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Calvin Butler, of Baltimore, left the board Dec. 31, the same day he took the top spot at Exelon Corp. Exelon is a Chicago-based energy company with about $36.5 billion in annual revenue and 18,000 employees. It operates electric utilities in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. He has been an executive with the company for 14 years. Butler was promoted from chief operating officer to president in October. Less than a month later, the company announced he would be the next CEO.

It’s a good week for Novavax. The Gaithersburg vaccine maker has earned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation to make its protein-based shot available as a booster to adults in the U.S., the last hurdle required before people can use it beyond a primary series. The CDC said late Wednesday that its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, greenlit the decision — which gives initially vaccinated adults the choice to get Novavax’s jab as a booster instead of the updated Omicron-specific shots from Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna.

The Labor Department has proposed a rule that would make it easier for delivery drivers, janitors, construction workers and other independent contractors to be considered employees, granting them access to benefits and federal labor protections. The proposal would overturn a Trump-era move and restore Obama-era standards for determining whether workers qualify as employees or independent contractors.