A mere 65% of companies in the US plan to hold office parties this holiday season, according to a report recently released by a reputed HR consulting firm. Attributing this to the menace of the #metoo movement that is sweeping the corporate world, it said that companies are increasingly growing weary of any possibility of an untoward incident at such parties. This number comes close to the holiday season of 2009, where only 62% of the companies had any office festivities, and that was largely due to the Great Recession. Guidelines from several organizations for office party goers include “no touching” even while dancing and “no after-party” with any staff member.
They promised more jobs when Sprint and T-Mobile joined hands in a merger, but they might be the harbinger of lower wages for retail workers in the industry. The proposed merger may bring down the wages of retail workers by 1-3% says a study. The said study is done by a non-profit and non-partisan group, the Economy Policy Institute and says the wages can decline to the extent of 7%. To add to the woes, workers who are not a part of any of the two companies like the retail employees and distributors of competitors AT&T and Verizon will face the heat.
.jpg "WOMEN HAVE TO WAIT FOR TWO CENTURIES TO EARN AS MUCH AS MEN")
For all the advocates of equal opportunities workplace there is good news, World Economic Forum says that gender pay parity is just another 202 years away. The overall gender disparity score has seen a marginal improvement of 0.1 percent across health, work, education, and politics. It will be 108 years to reach overall gender parity. A wait of two centuries is a long haul and the great pay divide that exists today is the culprit. Iceland retained its Numero Uno position in gender parity 10th year in the running. Experts feel that the upcoming Artificial Intelligent sector may see another gender disparity struggle.
.jpg "COME NEW YEAR JAGUAR LAND ROVER WILL SLIM DOWN ITS WORKFORCE BY CUTTING 5,000 JOBS")
The ax is all set to swing on thousands of Jaguar Land Rover employees at Britain’s biggest carmaker plans to usher the New Year by job cuts. The move comes in the wake of a falling sales in China and the threat of Brexit. The Indian conglomerate Tata-owned company already parted with 1000 employees in Solihull plant and will continue to cut more after its 90 million pound loss in the quarter ending in September. The estimates say that there will be 5000 job losses as a short-term measure to fuel its 1 billion pound cost cutting that is a part of 2.5 billion pound saving plan.
If you are a tech startup and a woman who plans to get into the growing tech industry of Europe then the odds are pretty much against you. 93% of the times venture capital firms invested in startups they had an all-man founding team and this data refuses to budge for over six years now. Europe’s nascent tech industry is taking one leaf from Silicon Valley that it should avoid the best. Skype co-founder and Atomico CEO Niklas Zennstrom has a hopeful view of the situation and says that in the wake of #MeToo movement, tech companies are forced to introspect and a young industry like theirs have the advantage of being proactive and starting it at the right foot when it comes to gender diversity.
Uber Technologies gave a thumbs up to the British Government’s decision to go with the gig economy business model. The expected thumbs down came from unions. Jason Moyer-Lee. General Secretary the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain who was not happy with the decision said, “Exploited workers in this country are sick of press releases, rhetoric and self-congratulatory government announcements.” The union won cases against Uber on worker rights and lost to Deliveroo. Uber seemed upbeat and welcomed “clarity from the government…” stating further that the riders’ rights shall be preserved. The government also went ahead with the scrapping of ‘Swedish Derogation’ that allows gig workers and agencies to be paid under par with regular employees.
Israel is facing a shortage of tech workers and given that the country is hoping to ride the tech wave to economic growth, there is concern amongst the ranks. The Start-Up Nation Central along with Israel Innovation Authority in its report mentions that the number of high-tech workers has grown in the past 5 years, but their percentage in labor force remains the same. Tech promises to be a high-income avenue for employees with 280,000 professionals in 2017 getting double the national wage average, an up from 240,000 in 2013. But they are just 8% of the working population decreases from 10% in 2010. The sector has 15,300 open positions and the fact that this sector is 45% of Israel’s export adds to the concern. Experts feel that the untapped Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jews are the answer along with foreign-bound development centers.
.jpg "STARTUP FOUNDER SAYS AI WILL CREATE MORE JOBS THAN TAKE AWAY")
Joseph Rogers, the founder of AI-based startup WorkDone, recently rebuffed the fears and claims of Artificial Intelligence eliminating jobs of the human race and push us towards a dystopian future. Rogers stated that AI software of the present and future would add more high-value jobs to the global workforce than what they take away. Referencing a Deloitte survey, he said that over the last one and a half century, automation and robots have created more jobs than they have taken. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, repetitive tasks will be automated which are not fulfilling, paving the way for a richer work experience
.jpg "LINKEDIN PUBLISHES EMERGING JOBS FOR 2018, BLOCKCHAIN TOPS LIST")
The world’s largest online professional network recently published its job trend analysis for the current year. LinkedIn’s Emerging Jobs List, the much-anticipated intelligence report from its Economic Graph and Insights section, listed Blockchain as the top jobs of the year. This was closely followed by machine learning, application sales, and medical/pharmaceutical sales. The report also stated that the competition for highly skilled workers would intensify greatly going into 2019. Overall growth in a specific domain remained in favor of artificial intelligence, with more than six out of 15 emerging job roles belonging to this skillset. Software engineering remained the top job title.
.jpg "EMPLOYED AND STALLED- 60% AMERICANS DIDN'T GET A PAY HIKE IN 2018")
The global volatility given the ongoing trade war between the two largest economies in the world, coupled with the vast number of redundancies due to the increased use of AI to automate job functions caused more harm to the common man than global leaders in 2018. According to the findings by personal finance site Bankrate in its study conducted on more than 1,000 professionals, more than half, 62%, to be precise, of American workers didn’t get a pay raise over the last 12 months. The number of Americans who saw a career growth in terms of moving into a new job was even more dismal, at a mere 6%.
One out of every five French employees has stated that they have felt the pressure to compromise on their corporate ethics and standards, according to a new survey released by the Institute of Business Ethics. However, the mechanisms to report it has improved, with 33% saying their organizations included some means to report it confidentially. According to a director at the Institute, this trend is being noted all across Europe. The major reasons cited in the ethics compromise phenomenon included pressure for time, adhering to manager orders and being faced with impractical and unrealistic objectives and deadlines. 26% of personnel in managerial positions reported the same plight.
Increasing life expectancy and falling fertility rates are among the major causes that will drive corporate America towards preparing for an aging workforce in less than 15 years, according to publication majors Forbes and the Harvard Business Review. In spite of the trend, most organizations still prefer hiring younger employees and older women face the most severe discrimination in recruitment, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco report. A Deloitte survey this year also showed that one in five organizations view an older workforce as a competitive disadvantage. The persisting biases in hiring are likely to be a cause for concern in the long term.
Google is mostly considered one of the best places to work. For employees. For TVCs (Temps, Vendors, and Contractors), however, it’s a different story. A recent exposé by The Guardian revealed just how much discrimination is really at work at the world’s largest search engine. Employees are restricted from awarding TVCs, inviting them to certain meetings and even providing them with professional development training. Entitled the ABCs of TVCs, the document elucidates the DO’s and DON’T’s of dealing with TVC workers, many of which edge on discrimination. It is worth mentioning that TVCs form the majority of the Google workforce and had staged a walkout on the 1st of November.
Bloomberg Businessweek’s Best B-Schools global ranking is out and just four schools outside the U.S. made it to the top 30. Blame it on geography, but U.S. business schools score high in one area graduates prefer the most – compensation. The U.S. pays M.B.A. graduates more when compared to other countries. To put it in numbers, U.S. schools have 16% more than the Median compensation of students in non-U.S. schools. While foreign applications of U.S. schools are in a slide down mode, an overwhelming number of graduates from U.S. Business Schools get a job within the country. GMAC says that 56% of US employers offer to join bonus to these graduates compared to 36% of Asia-Pacific countries.
Albert Biermann, a German and former BMW executive will take the reins of research and development in Hyundai Motor Group from Yang Woong-Chul and Kwon Moon-sik. He will be the first foreign head of R&D and is a part of a larger executive reshuffle that may very well mark a transition era for South Korea’s second largest family conglomerate. The reshuffle comes up as a strategy to stop a south going profit curve in China and the U.S. market. Many experts feel that the executive shuffle is a sign that Chairman Chung is losing his grip, while the junior Chung is taking over the things at the helm for the conglomerate. While the power game is up for speculations, the market welcomed the reshuffle with a 9% jump that is their highest since Oct. 10.
The imminent promise of public transit woes in the Big Apple following an Amazon promise of setting up a new office for 25,000 employees in the Queens after New York’s wooing of the e-commerce giant may be further than anticipated. Amazon will hire only 700 employees for the new One Court Square office at its Long Island City location. The number is slated to increase by 3000 by 2020 and 25,000 in the next 15 years. Not happy with the deal are some New York politicians who feel that they were shut out from the deal and anticipate a public transit breakdown along with reality price raise in an already expensive locality. Joining the “not happy” brigade are Amazon’s Staten Island employees who recently went public with their unionization efforts.
In what seems like a knee-jerk reaction to the recent steep drop in valuations, cryptocurrency companies, who are also among an increasingly large segment of employment for programmers and analysts, have been announcing layoffs to keep costs under check. Even large names like consensus announced a cut of 13% of its staff and another, Steemit, laid off 70% of its staff last week, citing the currently severely bearish market in cryptos. Although job listings continue to see a subdued growth in the current year, as opposed to the staggering one seen last year, jobseeker interest in the sector has dropped drastically, according to Indeed.
Workplace anniversary awards are the new, new thing among employers in the US and are gaining ground as a critical employee retention tool. According to a recent survey by industry association SHRM, more than 60% of employers are offering rewards upon completion of a work anniversary. Silicon Valley, known widely for its stiff deadlines and intensely competitive work environment, seems to have taken to the five-year reward in particular, with employers like Facebook offering a “recharge” program, a 30 day period of an uninterrupted break to relax. This trend harkens back to the olden days in corporate America where employees would be gifted with a gold watch by some companies in a show of appreciation for their work.
Victorina Morales and Sandra Diaz, women workers who admitted to having submitted false documentation for their employment at the Trump National Golf Club in 2013. Immigration attorney Annabel Romero, representing both women, said that adequate documentation, proof, and testimony were present to implicate the dubious hiring practices of the Trump Organization. The women workers came forward recently citing concerns over a “whole new level of hypocrisy” by Donald Trump’s anti-immigration stance and his rhetoric against undocumented workers. A spokesperson for the Trump Organization has denied any shady hiring practices, stating that the organization was very strict about them.
The hugely popular television show ‘60 minutes’, hitherto having operated independently within the CBS News network, is now being investigated for serious charges of workplace sexual misconduct spanning decades. According to investigator reports, executive producers Jeff Fager and Don Hewitt engaged in certain sexual misconduct and Hewitt had even sexually assaulted a female worker repeatedly over time. CBS has been paying out a settlement since the 90’s to the female worker. Aside from this, former CEO Les Moonves is also being investigated for the same. Moonves has also been charged with obstructing investigations and could face up to $120 million in penalties if found guilty.
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