Business news for Fri, 21 Dec 2007 & with word unions. 3 news.

Aer Lingus management and unions have made significant progress in agreeing around €10m in cost cuts at the airline, though further negotiations will take place in the New Year.

In the first week of the Writers Guild of America strike, I offered a solution that has been gaining momentum over the past two weeks. "It's time to think out of the box in more ways than one," I wrote on Nov. 9. So here's the solution. Let the advertisers step up and agree to pay a tax on all network television ad expenditures for the next three years, beginning in September 2008, to fund a pool for distribution to writers, actors, directors and related unions. This pool of funds will provide compensation for the writers', directors' and actors' contributions to the digital rights expansion producers need and want, without requiring long -term economic valuation of the new-media marketplace.

One of the battle groups in Wal-Mart's two-year-old public relations war with labor unions is about to undergo a change.