Jaguar Land Rover to cut 2,000 jobs globally: company

LONDRES, UNITED KINGDOM - Jaguar Land Rover on Wednesday said that it planned to lay off around 2,000 staff in the next financial year.

The largest car manufacturer in Britain, owned by India's Tata Motors, said in a statement: "We anticipate a net reduction of around 2,000 people from our global salaried workforce in the next financial year."

Jaguar Land Rover has almost 40,000 employees worldwide, according to its 2019-20 annual report. 

It had announced Monday that the Jaguar brand would produce only electric vehicles by 2025 and that Land Rover would have its first fully-electric vehicle in 2024.

The car maker said it would invest £2.5 billion ($3.5 billion, 2.9 billion euros) annually under its 'Reimagine' plan, which aims for its supply chain and operations to become carbon neutral by 2039. 

It had said this plan would also involve substantially reducing its non-manufacturing operations.

The radical overhaul comes under new chief executive Thierry Bollore, who joined in September.

The statement released Wednesday said that a "full review of the Jaguar Land Rover organization is already underway".

It said the organization had already started to brief salaried staff on the job cuts, which do not affect manufacturing staff paid by the hour.

Jaguar Land Rover has plants in the West Midlands area of England as well as facilities in Slovakia, India, China and Brazil.

Its owner Tata Motors is part of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group.

Agence France-Presse

UK newspaper publisher to cut 550 jobs on virus fallout

LONDON, United Kingdom -- Reach, publisher of UK newspapers Daily Mirror and Daily Express, plans to axe about 550 jobs as the coronavirus forces readers online and slashes advertising revenues, it said Tuesday.

"Structural change in the media sector has accelerated during the pandemic and this has resulted in increased adoption of our digital products," Reach chief executive Jim Mullen said in a statement.

"However, due to reduced advertising demand, we have not seen commensurate increases in digital revenue."

Reach said the company plans a reduction in headcount of about 550 staff, or 12 percent of its workforce -- as it looks to make annual cost savings of £35 million ($43 million).

The company, which owns also a number of UK regional newspapers, said the restructuring would cost the group £20 million.

"Editorial will move to a more centralised structure bringing together national and regional teams across print and digital to significantly increase efficiency and remove duplication while maintaining the strong editorial identity of our news brands," Reach said. 

The company will also have "fewer locations and a simpler management structure", the statement said.

Reach added that its revenue slumped 27.5 percent in the second quarter, "impacted by reductions in circulation and advertising".

Agence France-Presse

Pilots, once in short supply, now losing jobs

Joshua Weinstein always wanted to be an airline pilot, but the industry was in crisis when he started college in 2002, so he became a middle school teacher instead.

He loved that job, but after a decade of flying in his free time at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, Weinstein began hearing more about a looming pilot shortage and left the classroom in 2018 to pursue his dream. It worked: In January, he started training to fly for ExpressJet, which operates regional flights for United Airlines. But the coronavirus pandemic, which devastated the airline business, could thin the ranks of pilots by the thousands and has already put the nascent careers of people like Weinstein on hold.

“The worst part right now is that the only thing we know is that nobody knows anything,” he said. “There’s uncertainty. We just don’t know what happens next.”

For years, flight schools, airlines and experts encouraged people like Weinstein to become pilots. They promised young recruits a job that was lucrative and secure because thousands of pilots in their late 50s and early 60s would retire in the coming years and demand for travel would continue growing. The profession is still stacked with older aviators, but airlines are expected to make deep cuts in the coming months, and the pilots most at risk are those who are just starting out.

While air travel has recovered somewhat, it is still only about one-fourth of what it was last year, according to airport security data. Most experts say the recovery will be slow and uneven because of a patchwork of travel bans and the unpredictable nature of the pandemic. The recent surge in coronavirus infections has already forced some governors to delay reopening their state economies and to shut down bars and other businesses. If cases continue to increase, as some public health experts fear, air travel could become a lot less appealing. 

To prepare for that uncertain future, the largest airlines in the US are stockpiling billions of dollars in cash. If ticket sales do not recover soon, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United have said they could resort to job cuts as soon as Oct. 1, the first day when airlines are free to eliminate jobs and reduce hours under a stimulus law that Congress approved in March.

Airlines could lay off, furlough or reduce the hours of tens of thousands of pilots, cuts that would disproportionately fall on those who have less union seniority and training. Major airlines have already stopped hiring pilots after posting hundreds of openings in the first quarter of the year, according to Future & Active Pilot Advisors, a consulting firm.

Several companies are offering buyout packages to avoid deeper cuts later. Southwest has acknowledged in discussions with its pilots union that the airline is likely overstaffed by more than 1,000 pilots. The company is offering several years of partial pay and benefits to those who agree to leave the company temporarily or permanently. Delta warned last week that it could furlough nearly 2,600 pilots and is offering early-retirement packages.

Some pilots said the turmoil was nerve-racking, but those who have been in the profession for a while have come to expect it.

“You kind of know going in that aviation has high highs and low lows,” said Lisa Archibald, 41, a Delta pilot and volunteer with the airline’s pilot union, the Delta Master Executive Council. “You do it because you love what you do.”

Like Weinstein, Archibald arrived at the job by way of a detour. After graduating from Purdue University’s School of Aviation and Transportation Technology, she was hired to fly at American Eagle, which American Airlines owns. But the job started days before the 2001 terrorist attacks, and she was furloughed after just a few weeks.

About a year later, Archibald found a job piloting corporate jets, which she did for 15 years. She joined Delta in May 2017.

Unsurprisingly, pilots are passionate about the profession. That is why they spend years in grueling training programs, trying to rack up the minimum flight hours and credentials needed to become airline pilots, at a cost of up to $100,000, not including the price of a college degree.

Weinstein, 36, estimates that he easily spent between $50,000 and $70,000 on flight training, offset by what he earned working at the flight school and teaching middle school in New Jersey over a decade. At ExpressJet, first-year pilots earn a minimum $36,000 a year.
Whatever the outcome, Weinstein said, all that effort has been worth it.

“I have something to show for it because I did make it to the airlines and I did get hired and I did achieve that dream,” he said. “And so part of me says not to regret a single moment of it, because I put my mind to something and I did it.”

The New York Times Company

Google rescinds offers to thousands of contract workers

OAKLAND, Calif. — Google, facing an advertising slump caused by the pandemic, has rescinded offers to several thousand people who had agreed to work at the company as temporary and contract workers.

“We’re slowing our pace of hiring and investment, and are not bringing on as many new starters as we had planned at the beginning of the year,” Google said in an email to contracting agencies last week that was seen by The New York Times. The company told the firms that it “will not be moving forward to onboard” the people that the agencies had recruited to work at Google.

The move affected more than 2,000 people globally who had signed offers with the agencies to be a contract or temp worker, according to three people familiar with the decision, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publicly on the matter.

Google employs more than 130,000 contractors and temp workers, a shadow workforce that outnumbers its 123,000 full-time employees. Google’s full-time staff are rewarded with high salaries and generous perks, but temps and contractors often receive less pay, fewer benefits and do not have the same protections, even though they work alongside full timers.

The coronavirus crisis has underscored that disparity. Google announced in April that it was extending its employee paid leave policy to 14 weeks from 8 weeks for caretakers, including parents looking after children whose schools are closed. For employees working from home, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent company Alphabet, said Tuesday that they could spend $1,000 for equipment and furniture like standing desks and ergonomic chairs.

Many of the contract and temp candidates who had agreed to work at Google before the pandemic took hold in the United States were let go without any severance or financial compensation. This came after weeks of uncertainty as Google repeatedly postponed their start dates during which time they were not paid by Google or the staffing agencies.

Some of the would-be contractors left stable, full-time jobs once they received an employment offer at Google and are now searching for work in a difficult labor market. Some, who are Americans, said the rescinded offers have complicated and, in some cases, delayed their ability to receive unemployment benefits because they left their last jobs voluntarily, according to several of the workers facing this dilemma.

In mid-April, Pichai told employees in a memo that the company planned to “significantly” slow the pace of hiring this year, with the exception of several strategic areas. A company spokeswoman said at the time that Google intended to bring on the people who it had already hired but who had not started.

But this did not seem to apply to contractors or temp workers for Google and Alphabet, which has a market capitalization of near $1 trillion. It made $6.8 billion in profit in the first three months of 2020, despite what it called “a significant and sudden slowdown” in advertising.

“If these people were promised jobs at Alphabet, which is worth a trillion dollars, it seems like the company has a responsibility to take them on,” said Ben Gwin, who works as a data analyst in a Google office for HCL America, a contracting agency. “It’s not like Google can’t afford it.”

Gwin led a unionization effort for contract technical workers at Google’s offices in Pittsburgh last year.

“As we’ve publicly indicated, we’re slowing our pace of hiring and investment, and as a result are not bringing on as many new people — full time and temporary — as we’d planned at the beginning of the year,” said Alex Krasov, a Google spokeswoman.

Ruth Porat, chief financial officer for Alphabet, told analysts last month that the company was cutting expenses by not hiring as many new employees as initially projected. She did not address contract or temp workers.

Google has taken some steps to help its temp and contract workers. In March, the company said it would extend the assignments of temp workers whose jobs were scheduled to end from March 20 to May 15 by 60 days.

The company also said it would continue to pay contract workers affected by office closures such as people who serve food in the company’s cafeterias. And it established a fund to allow contingent workers to take paid sick leave if they exhibit coronavirus symptoms or cannot come to work because they are quarantined.

Like many technology companies, Google depends on a large number of temps, vendors and contractors to perform a wide variety of jobs, including cafeteria workers, maintenance workers, recruiters, content moderators and software testers. For the company, these workers cost less than full-time employees, and Google has no long-term obligation to them, making it easy to hire them or eliminate their positions.

Last year, 10 Democratic senators called on Google to convert its temporary and contract workers to full-time employees, saying the company should stop its “anti-worker practices” and treat all of its workers equally.

Google pays staffing companies to find the workers and provide them with salaries and benefits as their employer. But Google interviews prospective candidates and signs off on hiring, deciding where they work, what they do and when to fire them.

When Google pulled the offers to prospective workers, the company told the staffing companies, which included firms like Accenture, Cognizant and Adecco, that “we’ll look to you to have the conversations with the individuals who won’t be onboarded.” Google said it was “hopeful” that the “agencies will be able to find other assignments” for the candidates.

It was not immediately clear which countries were most affected in the decision, but some of the workers are in the United States, India and the Philippines. This was the second wave of rescinded job offers for temps and contract workers. Google had pulled offers for several dozen temp workers in April.

Joli Holland was one of the candidates whose job offers was rescinded in mid-April. She was working as a lead teller at Wells Fargo when Adecco contacted her about a recruiter position working at Google in Mountain View, California. After a few rounds of interviews, she was offered the position with a start date of March 23.

She was hopeful that she would get her foot in the door with a temporary job and land a full-time position at Google. Before she gave her two-week notice to Wells Fargo, she checked with Adecco about whether the job at Google was safe given the growing concerns about the coronavirus. Holland said she was assured that everything “should be fine.”

Another candidate whose offer was rescinded expressed similar concerns to another recruiter at Adecco. This person, who asked not to be identified because they still wanted to work at Google and were worried about being blacklisted for speaking out, said the recruiter said “Google always does the right thing, so I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Mary Beth Waddill, a spokeswoman for Adecco, said the company did not intend to mislead anyone about their career prospects, “especially given the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our standard practice is to advise in writing that placement on assignment is not guaranteed.”

A few days before Holland was set to start, she was told that her start date at Google would be pushed back to April 6. Then it was postponed to April 13 and again to April 20, a Monday. On the Friday before she was set to begin her job, Holland said she was told that the company was rescinding all temp worker offers. She did not receive any money while she waited to start at Google, nor did she get any severance.

“I’m disappointed, because not a lot of people are hiring right now,” she said. She had not filed for unemployment because she left her last job voluntarily. Still, Holland said she still hoped to work for Google because it would still be a great opportunity.

“I am disappointed, but it hasn’t completely soured me on the company,” she said. “I’d still like to work there.”

-Daisuke Wakabayashi, The New York Times-

US suffers biggest job losses in history amid coronavirus

With shops and factories closed nationwide due to the coronavirus pandemic, nearly all of the jobs created in the US economy in the last decade were wiped out in a single month.

An unprecedented 20.5 million jobs were destroyed in April in the world's largest economy, the biggest amount ever recorded, the Labor Department said in a report released Friday, the first to capture the impact of a full month of the lockdowns.

That drove the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent from 4.4 percent in March -- the highest level since the Great Depression of the last century.

The United States is home to the world's largest and deadliest coronavirus outbreak, with more than 75,000 fatalities and 1.2 million cases reported as of Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The economic damage from the lockdowns to contain the virus has been swift and stunning, despite nearly $3 trillion in financial aid approved by Congress, and there is growing fear that the temporary layoffs will become permanent since some companies won't survive.

Taken together, 21.4 million jobs were destroyed in March and April, nearly equal to the 23 million positions created during the economy's long expansion from February 2010 to February 2020.

All major industry sectors felt the pain.

Leisure and hospitality was the first sector hit and the one bearing the brunt of the impact of the lockdowns, shedding 7.7 million jobs, while manufacturing eliminated 1.3 million positions.

Those two sectors alone added up to more than the 8.6 million total jobs lost in the two years of the global financial crisis.

As bad as the data was, the real picture likely is much worse. The Labor Department noted the unemployment rate would have been closer to 20 percent, but some workers were misclassified as employed when they actually had been laid off because of COVID-19.

- Not a good future -

The pandemic has caused many employees to leave the workforce altogether, while others have been forced from full-time jobs into part-time work.

The measure of the labor force as a share of the total population sunk to 51.3 percent, its lowest in history, meaning nearly half of working-age Americans are not employed.

Minorities were hit particularly hard: African American unemployment spiked to 16.7 percent from 6.7 percent in March, while the rate for Hispanics was 18.9 percent, more than triple last month.

President Donald Trump said Friday the numbers were expected, and promised: "I'll bring it back."

"I think it's going to come back blazing," he told reporters on the economy.

But 57-year-old Sandra Mahesh, who recently lost her job in Maryland and had her unemployment benefits cut off, is not hopeful.

"I don't see a good future with America right now," she told AFP.

While Trump proclaimed on Fox News earlier Friday that "even the Democrats aren't blaming me" for the job losses, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden lambasted him for his handling of the crisis.

"Donald Trump utterly failed to prepare for this pandemic and delayed in taking the necessary steps to safeguard our nation against the near-worst-case economic scenario we are now living," Biden said in a statement.

- Low-wage destruction -

Echoing the fears of many economists over the fates of small businesses, Biden said, "A lot of them won't open again because they do not have a cushion due to three years of Trump's policies that reward the biggest companies."

The report showed average wages rose, but economists say that is merely another sign of catastrophe.

"In April, the job losses were disproportionately concentrated in relatively low-wage sectors like leisure and recreation," Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics said in an analysis.

A University of Chicago study based on the huge ADP private payrolls database found that low-wage workers saw employment decline by 35 percent, a rate three times as high as the nine percent decline seen by top earners.

Job losses at the bottom of the wage scale account for one third of the total decline, the authors found.

"The beginning of this likely 'Pandemic Recession' is unprecedented," co-author John Grigsby said on Twitter.

"Labor market declines (are) concentrated among low-income workers and small firms, precisely those that are unlikely to have savings to smooth over shock."

Agence France-Presse

Canada loses most jobs ever due to pandemic; unemployment hits 13%

Canada shed three million jobs in the last two months due to the coronavirus lockdown, causing the unemployment rate to shoot up to 13 percent in April, the government reported Friday.

That rate more than doubled, following a relatively small increase the previous month when restrictions started to be put in place, its statistical agency said.

The new rate is second only to the 13.1 percent observed during a recession in 1982, but lower than analysts had forecast.

Statistics Canada said the figure would have been much higher had it included a large number of people who wanted to work but could not job-hunt "presumably due to ongoing business closures and very limited opportunities to find new work." 

Many also worked fewer hours, the agency said.

All of this has led to 6.7 million Canadians applying for unemployment benefits or government aid, and just over one in five Canadian households reporting difficulties meeting financial obligations.

- 'Nothing to cheer about' -

Although worst-case projections failed to materialize, "when you're rounding the number of jobs lost to the nearest million, there's nothing to cheer about," commented CIBC analyst Avery Shenfeld.

The employment declines over the past two months were observed in all provinces, but Quebec -- which has recorded the highest number of COVID-19 infections and fatalities -- led all of them with 821,000 jobs lost.

Employment also dropped sharply in Canada's three largest cities -- Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

Youths aged 15-24, recent immigrants, low-wage workers and those with the least job security -- temporary or non-unionized, for example -- suffered the most job losses.

Statistics Canada noted, however, that most of the newly unemployed were temporarily laid off, meaning they could return to work when restrictions are lifted.

In March, it said, almost all job losses were observed in the services sector, whereas the following month goods-producing industries saw proportionally larger losses, led by construction and manufacturing.

Within the services sector, employment losses continued, led by wholesale and retail trade, and accommodation and food services.

Some sectors managed to avoid the carnage. Utilities, public administration, and finance, insurance and real estate, for example, were "relatively less affected by the COVID-19 economic shutdown," said Statistics Canada.

Large firms and institutions appeared to have been able to keep workers on the job better than small businesses.

An additional 3.3 million Canadians also worked from home.

After previous downturns, services jobs returned "relatively quickly," or within four months, to pre-downturn levels.

Workers in goods-producing industries were not as lucky, with recoveries from recessions in 1981-1982 and 1990-1992, and the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, taking more than six and 10 years, respectively.

This time, said Statistic Canada, "as economic activity resumes industry by industry following the COVID-19 economic shutdown, the time required for recovery will be a critical question."

Agence France-Presse

General Electric to cut 10,000 aviation jobs

NEW YORK - General Electric said Monday it would cut an additional 10,000 jobs from its aviation sector as the coronavirus pandemic decimates the industry, forcing companies to cancel orders.

The cuts will be a mix of voluntary departures and layoffs and come after an initial wave of 2,600 job cuts in March, GE said in a statement.

The company aims to reduce its aviation employment base by 25 percent, or some 13,000 employees.

The austerity program, which will affect all geographic zones, is reflective of the rough time the entire aviation sector is going through.

Boeing announced last week that it was cutting 16,000 jobs, about 10 percent of its workforce, in civilian aircraft manufacturing. 

It also heavily reduced production of its long-haul 787 and 777/777X planes. The company has yet to announce a date when it will resume assembly of its flagship 737 MAX aircraft. Airbus has similarly reduced production.

GE is directly affected by these decisions, as it makes plane engines for Boeing and Airbus.

Global air traffic is expected to fall 80 percent during the second quarter compared to February, GE said in a letter to 52,000 employees.

"To protect our business, we have responded with difficult cost-cutting actions over the last two months," CEO David Joyce said in the letter.

"Unfortunately, more is required as we scale the business to the realities of our commercial market."

The job cuts are part of a $3 billion savings plan that will be implemented this year.

In addition, half of the employees in charge of aviation maintenance and repairs are out of work for 3 months.

Hiring has also been frozen and bonuses canceled.

GE, which makes aircraft engines in a joint venture with the French company Safran, CFM, saw revenue fall by 8 percent to $20.52 billion in the first quarter.

The aviation division's revenue plunged 13 percent to $6.9 billion, while its orders were down 14 percent.

The group, which warned at the end of April that the worst was yet to come, has not sought the financial aid that US President Donald Trump has promised to companies in order to protect jobs.

Agence France-Presse

Work from home, travel curbs: World's employers adapt to coronavirus

SAN FRANCISCO — At Facebook on Thursday, the questions from spooked employees came thick and fast.

The evening before, the social network had disclosed that a contractor in one of its Seattle offices had been diagnosed with the coronavirus and had said that all employees in that city should work from home until March 31.

Other Facebook employees, some of whom had recently traveled for work, soon began asking their managers and one another: Who was the contractor? Had that person been near them? And what did that mean for their work?

That same alarm has now spread through other companies around the world, despite escalating efforts by many of the firms to deal with disruptions from the coronavirus outbreak that started in China. Microsoft, Amazon, Ford Motor, CNN, Citigroup and Twitter have put employees through work-from-home drills, dusted off emergency-response plans and implemented increasingly stringent safety measures to protect their workers.

Even so, the coronavirus has moved faster than their preparations. Amazon said this week that two employees in Europe, who had been in Milan, were infected with the virus and that one employee at its Seattle headquarters had also tested positive for it. HSBC said on Thursday that an employee at its global headquarters in London had been diagnosed with the coronavirus. And AT&T said a retail employee at one of its stores in San Diego had also tested positive.

The challenges faced by workplaces have become a new front in the battle over the coronavirus, which has spawned more than 90,000 cases and more than 3,000 deaths around the world. While factories in China had already been closed by the outbreak and are now just ramping back up, global white-collar companies have rarely grappled with this scale of disruption — or the level of fear that has gripped workers.

“No one has a playbook for this,” said Dan Levin, who runs a small company outside Chicago, Cain Millwork, which makes furniture and wall paneling. He said he was planning to have some of his office employees work from home.

Many corporate memos, including those from HSBC and Facebook, now mention deep cleaning of office spaces and self-quarantining. Face-to-face job interviews have been all but banned by some firms, in favor of interviews conducted by teleconference.

At Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, near a cluster of coronavirus cases, employees swapped stories this week about the outbreak in internal chat rooms. In one online conversation on Wednesday, which was reviewed by The New York Times, a Microsoft employee wrote of a rumor that someone at headquarters had been infected.

“Could it be true?” he wrote. “FWIW,” he noted, the corporate emails telling employees to work from home “don’t mention that NO Microsoft employees had been infected.”

Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s chief spokesman, said the company was not aware of any verified cases in its workforce. He said Microsoft had tried to communicate clearly to its employees that “we are using the advice being given from local officials and public health officials.”

Inside Amazon, while some workers emailed each other about whether masks provide effective protection, many were scrambling to deal with business problems caused by the virus, according to four employees who were not authorized to speak publicly. Those included whether Amazon will have enough products to offer for Prime Day, its summer sale event, or have enough drivers to handle a surge in online grocery orders as the virus spreads.

The depth of employee anxiety has forced senior executives to take calming measures. Uber sent out a memo to staff on Wednesday saying it had formed an internal task force to handle its response to the virus, according to a copy viewed by The Times.

The ride-hailing company urged employees to have empathy for one another, to make “data-driven decisions” and restrict all nonessential travel until April. Uber added that it was working with an epidemiology consultant for further guidance.

“Much of this situation is new — not only for Uber, but for the world,” Andrew MacDonald, a senior vice president at Uber, wrote in the memo. “We won’t get everything right from the start.”

At its headquarters in Mountain View, California, Google also increased the amount of hand sanitizer available to employees, putting it in conference rooms and kitchen areas.

Other companies have tightened their travel restrictions. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase have said senior managers must approve international business trips. Walmart said on Thursday that employees could travel internationally only for “business-critical trips” and that it was limiting their travel to conferences and trade shows within the United States. And at CNN, the chief executive officer has begun personally vetting all intercontinental travel.

How companies have altered their response to the coronavirus over time has been evident with Twitter. On Sunday, the San Francisco social media company said it was suspending all nonessential travel for employees. A day later, it encouraged all of its employees — it has just over 5,000 — to work from home if they were able to.

Then on Thursday, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, appeared at a financial conference in San Francisco and said he was rethinking a plan he had formulated to work remotely from Africa for 3 to 6 months this year.

“Everything happening in the world, particularly with coronavirus, I have to reconsider what’s going on and what that means for me and for our company,” said Dorsey, who is also facing a challenge from activist investors.

The measures that companies are taking in response to the virus may shift workplace behavior over the long term. Telecommuting, which has been in and out of favor for decades, may become more ingrained. The use of digital tools for remote collaboration may also rise.

Yet in the near term, having workers stay home could be devastating for some smaller businesses. Robert Luft, who runs a company in Cincinnati that installs technology in health care facilities and distribution centers, said an outbreak that prevented his technicians from showing up to work would put his business in a precarious situation.

“If it’s unsafe for people to have them on site, that definitely impacts my business,” Luft said. “Unfortunately there isn’t any type of contingency plan.”

At Facebook, the company has been working on contingency plans for the impact of the coronavirus since January. Executives have tried to walk the line of hewing closely to advice from public health officials while trying not to cause a panic among employees, two Facebook employees said.

The social network quickly canceled its participation in a half-dozen events — from its annual F8 developer conference to its presence at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas — and has worked to use its products to help health experts study the spread of the virus. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in a post this week the company was giving unlimited free Facebook ads to the World Health Organization to distribute information to users.

When one of its contractors was diagnosed with the virus on Wednesday, Facebook shut down two of its four offices in the greater Seattle area — in Bellevue and Redmond — for a deep cleaning, according to two employees.

An Amazon employee who was later diagnosed with the virus had also separately visited one of Facebook’s Seattle offices last month, prompting fresh concerns among employees. Facebook said it carried out “targeted deep cleaning and enhanced sanitation measures” at the office building that the Amazon employee had visited.

The company has also tried to keep its 44,000 employees sticking to business as usual. On Wednesday, it held a training session for managers on how to supervise teams of remote workers, the two employees said. And the social network was staying on course with a weekly question-and-answer session led by Zuckerberg on Thursday, which would be live streamed from Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

2020 The New York Times Company

Twitter staff told to work from home over virus fears

SAN FRANCISCO -- Twitter staff across the world were asked to work from home starting Monday in an effort to stop the spread of the deadly new coronavirus epidemic. 

The outbreak has spread across the world since emerging in central China late last year, killing more than 3,100 people, infecting over 90,000, and prompting a wave of travel restrictions. 

The social media platform's decision to ask its staff to avoid the office follows similar requests by governments in virus hotspots.

"We are strongly encouraging all employees globally to work from home if they're able," Twitter human resources chief Jennifer Christie said in a Monday blog post. 

"Our goal is to lower the probability of the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus for us -- and the world around us."

Working from home will be mandatory for employees at the company's South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan offices, Christie said.

South Korea has recorded nearly 5,000 confirmed COVID-19 infections -- the largest number outside mainland China -- along with 28 deaths. More than half of the cases have been linked to the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a secretive religious group often described as a cult.

Japan's government has urged the closure of schools nationwide and employers to give their staff permission to work remotely. 

Most civil servants in Hong Kong returned to work on Monday after they were asked to work from home for a month. The financial hub has recorded 100 cases of the infection. 

Twitter had already announced the suspension of "non-critical" business travel and events last week. 

Agence France-Presse

Emirates airline asks staff to take one month unpaid leave over coronavirus

DUBAI -- Major international airline Emirates is asking staff to take unpaid leave for up to a month at a time due to the rapidly spreading coronavirus that has led to flight cancellations around the world.

Emirates has cancelled flights to Iran, Bahrain and to most of China because of the virus, and countries around the world have placed strict restrictions on entry of foreigners.

The airline has more resources than it needs as a result of cutting frequencies or cancelling flights to some destinations, said Chief Operating Officer Adel al-Redha in a statement on Tuesday.

"Considering the availability of additional resources and the fact that many employees want to utilize their leave, we have provided our employees the option to avail leave or apply for voluntary unpaid leave for up to one month at a time," he said.


Emirates Group, the state-owned holding company that counts the airline among its assets, has asked staff to consider taking paid and unpaid leave as it seeks to manage a "measurable slowdown" in its business, Reuters reported on Sunday, citing an internal company email.

The group had more than 100,000 employees, including more than 21,000 cabin crew and 4,000 pilots, at the end of March 2019, the end of its last financial year.

Major concerts and events in the United Arab Emirates, an air transit center that includes tourism and business hub Dubai, have been cancelled or postponed as the coronavirus spreads in the Gulf.

The airline industry's largest global body IATA on Monday urged Middle Eastern governments to provide support to airlines as they try to manage the impact of the outbreak.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Internet sector contributes $2.1 trillion to US economy: industry group

WASHINGTON - The rapidly growing internet sector accounted for $2.1 trillion of the US economy in 2018, or about 10 percent of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP), an industry group said on Thursday.

The Internet Association, a group representing Amazon.com Inc, Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc, Twitter Inc, Uber Technology Inc and many other firms, released its estimate as the tech sector has come under increasing criticism, with some lawmakers calling for the breakup of major firms and renewed antitrust scrutiny.

The study says the internet sector represents the fourth largest sector of the US economy, behind real estate, government and manufacturing.

Last year, manufacturing accounted for about $2.3 trillion in US GDP.

The study found that the internet sector has nearly 6 million direct jobs, which accounts for 4 percent of US jobs, while US internet firms spent $64 billion in capital expenditures. The study also found the internet sector indirectly supports another 13 million jobs.

In 2015, the Internet Association estimated the sector was responsible for an estimated $966.2 billion, or 6 percent GDP in 2014.

The US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in April estimated the "digital economy" accounted for 6.9 percent of the 2017 US GDP, or $1.35 trillion, in 2017, placing it in seventh place overall. That definition includes digital-enabling infrastructure, e-commerce transactions, and digital media but does not include ride-sharing services and other goods and services connected to the "sharing" economy.

The Internet Association study used Census, BEA, and SEC government data from 2018 to estimate the internet sector's contributions to the American economy. The group's chief economist, Christopher Hooton said the internet industry is "creating jobs in every sector of the economy" and said the new analysis more accurately captures the internet's economic impact.

The BEA study notes that employees working in the US digital economy earned $132,223 in average compensation in 2017, compared to $68,506 per worker for the total US economy.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

LinkedIn stays 'professional' to repel social media venom

MANILA -- Twitter helps the powerful discover their worst selves and leaves everyone else vulnerable. Facebook brings people together only to subject them to marketing and manipulation. Our social feeds aren’t ready for the 2020 election. None of them are even ready for today. In recent months, they have faced serious scrutiny from Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike.

Except one. Is there anything the rest of the internet can learn from LinkedIn?

The site arrived in 2003 as an alternative to job-listing databases and steadily established itself as the professional sector of the social web. Like other networks, LinkedIn was, in its early years, a place to keep up with the people and institutions you had connected with there. In 2010, with the success of Twitter and Facebook’s social feeds as a backdrop, the service carved out its own space for sharing news and life updates. By 2016, when it was purchased by Microsoft, LinkedIn had affirmed its dual identity: It was a networking site for hiring and getting hired, but also a place for “professionals” (i.e. anyone with a LinkedIn account) to share links and thoughts, or what they thought other people might want to read and hear.

Today, a Facebook-style news feed, complete with like, comment and share buttons, is often the first thing users see when they open LinkedIn. The company’s internal editorial team, which writes and curates business content, has a staff of 65. They’re flanked by a massive slate of influencers — business leaders, subject-area experts and marketing gurus — who post regularly, the most popular of whom have millions of followers apiece.

At the end of 2018, the company said that, in one day, “over 2 million posts, videos and articles course through the LinkedIn feed.” Now LinkedIn claims to have more than 645 million users, 180 million of them residing in North America. Last year, it produced more than $5.3 billion in revenue for Microsoft. (For scale, that’s about one-tenth the revenue of Facebook Inc., about half of Instagram’s and almost twice Twitter’s.)

Considering its size and social footprint, LinkedIn has been a notably minor character in major narratives about the hazards of social media. The site hasn’t proved especially useful for mainstreaming disinformation, for example, nor is it an obvious staging ground for organized harassment campaigns. It is unique among its social media peers in that it has not spent the last five years in a state of wrenching crisis.

And perhaps even more importantly, LinkedIn is not, in the popular imagination, a force for radicalization, a threat to democracy, a haven for predators, an environment that encourages mob behavior, or even a meeting place for pot stirrers.

“You talk on LinkedIn the same way you talk in the office,” said Dan Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief. “There are certain boundaries around what is acceptable.” Criticism of other users’ posts, he said, tends to be measured — “there’s a certain range in the voice,” he said — and users will often make the platform’s numerous implicit norms explicit, when they feel it’s necessary. “If you read the comments,” Roth said, “when someone goes out of bounds, you have other members saying, ‘Hey, bring this back.’”

“This is something that your boss sees, your future boss, people you want to work with in the future,” Roth said. “It’s as close to your permanent record as you can get.”

In the context of social media, this may sound slightly menacing. In the context of the modern office, it’s perfectly familiar.

“We bring implicit theories, or rules, to how we behave at work,” said Amy C. Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied workplace communication. These ideas about how to speak and behave in an office can be valuable but also mistaken, and sometimes individually and institutionally counterproductive. (A workplace where nobody speaks up is a workplace where little will change.) “Everyone at work has two jobs, and the other is the job of looking good,” she said. “These rules are largely oriented toward the second job.”

Scaling job two — looking good at work — up to a social network creates a new sort of venue: a non-office office, with thousands of bosses, none of them yours, all of them potentially watching.

The overwhelming incentive, as a job seeker, is toward caution. Likewise, there is little reason, as a boss, to tangle with especially difficult subjects. LinkedIn is plainly not a place to organize a union. Its mission is to mediate and facilitate a fundamentally unequal process. Topics that can be risky for rank-and-file workers to bring up in an office, such as pay inequality, diversity or workplace harassment, tend to unfold on LinkedIn in the manner of an event organized by human resources.

“These kinds of sensitive conversations will start from people at the top of companies,” Roth said, citing the announcement of Nielsen’s chief executive, David Kenny, that he would assume the additional title of chief diversity officer as an example. “When it’s a CEO talking about it, you can speak in a more authoritative way.”

Nicholas Thompson, editor-in-chief of Wired, is what you might call a LinkedIn power user. He publishes a daily video about technology to his more than 1.3 million followers on the site. Spicier material? He saves that for Twitter.

“It’s much harder to be a dissident on LinkedIn, or to spread awareness about autocracy,” Thompson said. Business stories do well, as do posts about his own work and the media industry in general. Gun violence? Not so much. “You don’t want to post an Andy Borowitz cartoon,” Thompson, formerly an editor at The New Yorker, said. “People respond badly.”

Thompson also estimates that his American followers on LinkedIn are more evenly distributed along the political spectrum, compared with his followings on Twitter or Facebook, where they tilt liberal. But, he said, “filter bubbles aren’t as strong, in part because people aren’t posting as much about politics.” The 2020 field of candidates is doing plenty of hiring on LinkedIn, but don’t expect campaigning there. Political ads are banned on the platform. In 2017, the last year outside analytics firms could track such things, Forbes.com was the most popular source of news posted to the site, according to NewsWhip. (The majority of posts tend to deal in the genres of self-help, motivation and marketing.) Of the top 10 stories of the second half of 2017, nine were explicitly about work, and one was about a solar farm in China that is shaped like a panda.

“The risk on Facebook is becoming too toxic,” Thompson said. “The risk on LinkedIn is becoming too cheesy.”

As a platform that depends on its users to be careful and calculated in their self expression, LinkedIn proposes and exemplifies a brutally honest vision for social media. Sure, the platform studiously avoids “politics,” but the ideology of corporate America seeps out through its every user notification. There is no illusion of a level playing field — it’s a service that works better if you pay for it.

Like Facebook and Twitter, it’s a private space that is ultimately subject to the desires of its owners and their customers. Unlike Facebook and Twitter — and perhaps more like the workplace you report to every day — it never pretended to be anything else.

LinkedIn was never meant to “connect the world,” at least not without a caveat and a reason: it was built to connect “the world's professionals,” and specifically “to make them more productive and successful.” Any debate about “free speech” on LinkedIn has to square with the fact that it’s a place where you have to pay to message people with whom you aren’t already connected. If Facebook or Instagram sent a notification every time you looked at another’s user’s profile, it would be a scandal; on LinkedIn, it’s a core feature of the platform. On other social media platforms, users might be careful in case employers see evidence of their lives outside of work. The identities performed on LinkedIn are contrived with employers in mind.

“There are hundreds of thousands of bosses, and tens of millions of people who want to please these bosses,” said John Hickey, who started using LinkedIn when he began working in advertising and now runs @BestofLinkedIn, a Twitter account that pokes fun at the site’s culture. “It’s insulated circles of people patting each other on the back, and it goes around and around and around.”

Hickey also posts a range of aberrant material — a particularly popular strain, he said, is people attributing business wisdom to their children. (He labels the posts, “Made Up Kid Monday.”) His followers send him more: blustery #MAGA posts met with awkward silence; unprofessional meltdowns; clearly fabricated office stories; misattributed quotes; cringeworthy attempts at flattery. Finally, there are the truly mistaken.

“Some people,” Hickey said, “think LinkedIn is Facebook.”


2019 The New York Times Company

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Deutsche Bank careers end in an envelope, a hug and a cab ride

HONG KONG/LONDON/NEW YORK -- Summoned by HR to be handed a Deutsche Bank envelope, many of its staff across the world then left their desks for the last time on Monday, shown the door by their German employer within hours of a restructuring announcement.

Deutsche Bank confirmed on Sunday that it was closing huge parts of its trading businesses, with staff in its equities division in Sydney and Hong Kong among the first to be told their roles would go.

"If you have a job for me, please let me know," said a banker leaving the Hong Kong office on Monday.

Staff leaving in Hong Kong were holding envelopes with the bank's logo. Three employees took a picture of themselves beside a Deutsche Bank sign outside, hugged and then hailed a taxi.

"They give you this packet and you are out of the building," said one equities trader.

"The equities market is not that great so I may not find a similar job, but I have to deal with it," said another.

At the bank's Wall Street office, staff impacted by the cuts were summoned to the cafeteria to learn of their fate. A notice inside the building's lobby told staff the cafeteria would be closed until 11.30 a.m. EST.

Hundreds of staff were informed during the meetings that their positions were being cut, sources within the bank told Reuters. They also received details of their redundancy packages. One source said staff could be seen saying their goodbyes to colleagues upon leaving the cafeteria.

Speaking outside the bank's office, one employee told Reuters the cuts had been anticipated for weeks.

"People have been planning their next moves but it's a tough market," the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Another employee, who asked not to be named, said the bank held a short meeting in its auditorium at 9.30 a.m. EST to inform staff of the cutbacks. He said he was later handed an envelope informing him of his redundancy. The staffer said he and his colleagues had known the impending cuts were likely for the past couple of weeks.

Deutsche Bank plans to close all of its equity trading business and cut some parts of its fixed income operations, in an overhaul expected to lead to 18,000 job cuts.

Some of those roles will be cut immediately, while some staff will be kept on for longer while they help wind down operations.

A few hours after the Hong Kong staff left, workers were seen leaving Deutsche Bank's office in the City of London, which along with New York is expected to bear the brunt of the cuts, carrying similar envelopes.

"I was terminated this morning, there was a very quick meeting and that was it," said one IT worker, who left while Deutsche Bank chief executive Christian Sewing was inside the building doing a call with the media.

Few staff wanted to speak outside the bank's London office, but trade was picking up at the nearby Balls Brothers pub around lunchtime.

"I got laid off, where else would I go," said a man who had just lost his job in equity sales.

FAR-FLUNG CUTS

The layoffs were going beyond the major financial centers.

A Deutsche Bank employee in Bengaluru told Reuters that he and several colleagues were told first thing that their jobs were going.

"We were informed that our jobs have become redundant and handed over our letters and given approximately a month's salary," he said.

"The mood is pretty hopeless right now, especially (among)people who are single-earners or have big financial burdens such as loans to pay," he added.

Deutsche spokespeople in Hong Kong and London declined to comment on specific details about the number of departures, but said they would try to support people being made redundant.

For those losing their jobs in equities, finding a new one could prove difficult, with the industry still grappling with higher costs from new European regulations on share trading.

"The job market in equities is going to be very tough," said George Kuznetsov head of research and analytics at Coalition, which analyses the investment banking industry.

"Our expectations if for equities sales and trading revenues falling 7-8 percent this year and that of course is going to put a lot of halts into the hiring across most of the brokers".

For Deutsche Bank staff whose jobs are safe for now, there was some relief, but also big doubts about the future.

"The biggest question for us is where do we go from here if we don't offer the whole suite of products? Will clients stick with us or is the game over?" said a Singapore banker who remains in his job.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Deutsche Bank axes whole teams in Asia-Pacific as 18,000 job cuts begin

SYDNEY/HONG KONG -- Whole teams in Deutsche Bank's Asian operations were told their positions were gone on Monday, as the lender began axing 18,000 jobs globally in one of the biggest overhauls to an investment bank since the aftermath of the financial crisis.

The German bank launched the restructuring on Sunday in Europe, outlining a plan that will ultimately cost 7.4 billion euros ($8.31 billion) and see it dramatically scale back its investment bank - a major retreat after years of working to compete as a major force on Wall Street.

As part of the overhaul, the bank will scrap its global equities business and also cut some of its fixed income operations - an area traditionally regarded as one of its strengths.

While the bulk of the 18,000 job losses are widely expected to fall in Europe and the United States, on Monday the cuts also hit offices from Sydney to Hong Kong.

Deutsche Bank gave no geographic breakdown for the job cuts when it announced the plan on Sunday.

Bankers in Sydney seen leaving the lender's offices on Monday confirmed they worked for Deutsche Bank and were being laid off, but declined to give their names as they were due to return later to sign redundancy packages.

One person with knowledge of the bank's operations in Australia said its four-strong equity capital markets team was being let go, but that most of its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) team would not be immediately affected.

Deutsche had some 4,700 staff in Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore, showed fact sheets on its website.

Its investment banking team for the Asia-Pacific region numbered about 300 people before the cuts, and 10 percent to 15 percent will be laid off - almost all in its equity capital markets division, according to a senior Asia banker with direct knowledge of the plans.

In Hong Kong, a group of three upset-looking bank employees took a picture of themselves beside a large Deutsche Bank logo outside the lender's office, hugging each other before hailing a waiting taxi.

One Hong Kong-based equities trader who had been laid off said the mood was "pretty gloomy" as people were called individually to meetings.

"(There are a) couple of rounds of chats with HR and then they give you this packet and you are out of the building," the trader said.

Several workers were seen leaving the offices holding large envelopes with the bank's logo.

"If you have a job for me please let me know. But do not ask questions," said one who confirmed he was employed at Deutsche Bank, but declined to comment further.

A Deutsche Bank spokeswoman declined to comment on specific departures, saying the bank would be communicating directly with employees.

"We understand these changes affect people's lives profoundly and we will do whatever we can to be as responsible and sensitive as possible implementing these changes," she said.

RESTART

Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing, who now aims to focus on the bank's more stable revenue streams, said on Sunday that it was the most fundamental transformation of the bank in decades. "This is a restart," he said.

"We are creating a bank that will be more profitable, leaner, more innovative and more resilient," he wrote to staff.

The bank will set up a so-called bad bank to wind-down unwanted assets, with a value of 74 billion euros of risk-weighted assets.

Sewing will now represent the investment bank on the board in a shift that illustrates the division's waning influence.

The CEO had flagged extensive restructuring in May when he promised shareholders "tough cutbacks" to the investment bank. This followed Deutsche's failure to agree a merger with rival Commerzbank AG.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

AI may not take your job, but It could become your boss

When Conor Sprouls, a customer service representative in the call center of insurance giant MetLife talks to a customer over the phone, he keeps one eye on the bottom-right corner of his screen. There, in a little blue box, AI tells him how he’s doing.

Talking too fast? The program flashes an icon of a speedometer, indicating that he should slow down.

Sound sleepy? The software displays an “energy cue,” with a picture of a coffee cup.

Not empathetic enough? A heart icon pops up.

For decades, people have fearfully imagined armies of hyper-efficient robots invading offices and factories, gobbling up jobs once done by humans. But in all of the worry about the potential of artificial intelligence to replace rank-and-file workers, we may have overlooked the possibility it will replace the bosses, too.

Sprouls and the other call center workers at his office in Warwick, Rhode Island, still have plenty of human supervisors. But the software on their screens — made by Cogito, an AI company in Boston — has become a kind of adjunct manager, always watching them. At the end of every call, Sprouls’ Cogito notifications are tallied and added to a statistics dashboard that his supervisor can view. If he hides the Cogito window by minimizing it, the program notifies his supervisor.

Cogito is one of several AI programs used in call centers and other workplaces. The goal, according to Joshua Feast, Cogito’s chief executive, is to make workers more effective by giving them real-time feedback.

“There is variability in human performance,” Feast said. “We can infer from the way people are speaking with each other whether things are going well or not.”

The goal of automation has always been efficiency, but in this new kind of workplace, AI sees humanity itself as the thing to be optimized. Amazon uses complex algorithms to track worker productivity in its fulfillment centers, and can automatically generate the paperwork to fire workers who don’t meet their targets, as The Verge uncovered this year. (Amazon has disputed that it fires workers without human input, saying that managers can intervene in the process.) IBM has used Watson, its AI platform, during employee reviews to predict future performance and claims it has a 96 percent accuracy rate.

Then there are the startups. Cogito, which works with large insurance companies like MetLife and Humana as well as financial and retail firms, says it has 20,000 users. Percolata, a Silicon Valley company that counts Uniqlo and 7-Eleven among its clients, uses in-store sensors to calculate a “true productivity” score for each worker, and rank workers from most to least productive.

Management by algorithm is not a new concept. In the early 20th century, Frederick Winslow Taylor revolutionized the manufacturing world with his “scientific management” theory, which tried to wring inefficiency out of factories by timing and measuring each aspect of a job. More recently, Uber, Lyft and other on-demand platforms have made billions of dollars by outsourcing conventional tasks of human resources — scheduling, payroll, performance reviews — to computers.

But using AI to manage workers in conventional, 9-to-5 jobs has been more controversial. Critics have accused companies of using algorithms for managerial tasks, saying that automated systems can dehumanize and unfairly punish employees. And while it’s clear why executives would want AI that can track everything their workers do, it’s less clear why workers would.

“It is surreal to think that any company could fire their own workers without any human involvement,” Marc Perrone, the president of United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents food and retail workers, said in a statement about Amazon in April.

In the gig economy, management by algorithm has also been a source of tension between workers and the platforms that connect them with customers. This year, drivers for Postmates, DoorDash and other on-demand delivery companies protested a method of calculating their pay, using an algorithm, that put customer tips toward guaranteed minimum wages — a practice that was nearly invisible to drivers, because of the way the platform obscures the details of worker pay.

There were no protests at MetLife’s call center. Instead, the employees I spoke with seemed to view their Cogito software as a mild annoyance at worst. Several said they liked getting pop-up notifications during their calls, although some said they had struggled to figure out how to get the “empathy” notification to stop appearing. (Cogito says the AI analyzes subtle differences in tone between the worker and the caller and encourages the worker to try to mirror the customer’s mood.)

MetLife, which uses the software with 1,500 of its call center employees, says using the app has increased its customer satisfaction by 13 percent.

“It actually changes people’s behavior without them knowing about it,” said Christopher Smith, MetLife’s head of global operations. “It becomes a more human interaction.”

Still, there is a creepy sci-fi vibe to a situation in which AI surveils human workers and tells them how to relate to other humans. And it is reminiscent of the “workplace gamification” trend that swept through corporate America a decade ago, when companies used psychological tricks borrowed from video games, like badges and leader boards, to try to spur workers to perform better.

Phil Libin, the chief executive of All Turtles, an AI startup studio in San Francisco, recoiled in horror when I told him about my call center visit.

“That is a dystopian hellscape,” Libin said. “Why would anyone want to build this world where you’re being judged by an opaque, black-box computer?”

Defenders of workplace AI might argue that these systems are not meant to be overbearing. Instead, they’re meant to make workers better by reminding them to thank the customer, to empathize with the frustrated claimant on Line 1 or to avoid slacking off on the job.

The best argument for workplace AI may be situations in which human bias skews decision-making, such as hiring. Pymetrics, a New York startup, has made inroads in the corporate hiring world by replacing the traditional résumé screening process with an AI program that uses a series of games to test for relevant skills. The algorithms are then analyzed to make sure they are not creating biased hiring outcomes, or favoring one group over another.

“We can tweak data and algorithms until we can remove the bias. We can’t do that with a human being,” said Frida Polli, Pymetrics’ chief executive.

Using AI to correct for human biases is a good thing. But as more AI enters the workplace, executives will have to resist the temptation to use it to tighten their grip on their workers and subject them to constant surveillance and analysis. If that happens, it won’t be the robots staging an uprising.


2019 New York Times News Service

source: news.abs-cbn.com