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  • Who is Shou Zi Chew? Mounting scrutiny on TikTok could put new spotlight on its CEO | CNN Business

    Who is Shou Zi Chew? Mounting scrutiny on TikTok could put new spotlight on its CEO | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    When TikTok was the title sponsor last summer for Vidcon, an annual convention for the creators and brands that make up a key part of the short-form video app’s audience and business, it was Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas who got on stage for the industry keynote event.

    Months later, when TikTok was grilled by Congress over privacy and security concerns, Pappas was the TikTok executive in the hot seat fielding questions.

    But while Pappas has arguably been the public face of the company for much of the past few tumultuous years, she has done so while acting as TikTok’s second-in-command. The person who has actually served as the CEO of one of the most popular apps on the planet for nearly two years is a longtime tech finance executive named Shou Zi Chew, based thousands of miles away from Washington, in Singapore.

    In Silicon Valley, it’s common for tech CEOs to be household names and the faces of the company’s they lead. Mark Zuckerberg is synonymous with Facebook and Jack Dorsey was the bearded face of Twitter, before Elon Musk acquired it. But Chew, who took over as TikTok CEO in April 2021, has largely stayed out of the spotlight at a time when the app he leads can’t seem to avoid it.

    After averting a threat of a ban in 2020, TikTok has increasingly found itself under scrutiny from state and federal lawmakers in the United States over concerns about its ties to China through its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, as well as over fears that it could have a harmful impact on younger users.

    Some US lawmakers have once again renewed calls to ban the app outright, while the Biden administration is still said to be negotiating with TikTok over a deal to let it continue to operate in the United States. Meanwhile, officials in the European Union have also begun toughening their rhetoric toward TikTok.

    That could put greater pressure on Chew. Already, he has had to respond to pointed letters from US senators, and just last week he made the rounds in Brussels to meet with EU officials. At the same time, Chew, who previously was CFO of ByteDance, is reportedly constrained in how much control he has over TikTok and how much power rests with its parent company.

    In a rare interview at the New York Times DealBook summit in late November, Chew was asked whether he worked “at the behest of the folks at ByteDance and therefore at the behest of the Chinese government.” In response, he said, “I am responsible for all the strategic decisions at TikTok.”

    Shou Zi Chew, chief executive officer of TikTok Inc., speaks during the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022.

    But he added that ByteDance is “organized the way you would expect an internet company to be organized,” featuring global investors and a board of shareholder and employee representatives. “I am responsible for the decisions at TikTok,” Chew re-emphasized, “but, ultimately, I have to be responsible to the shareholders and to the board as well.”

    TikTok did not make Chew available for this story or respond to requests for comment.

    In interviews, Chew has described himself as a a 40-year-old father of two who likes to golf and read books on theoretical physics. But it’s his national origin that TikTok seems to like to highlight most.

    In a letter to US lawmakers in June, TikTok appeared to try and distance itself from ByteDance’ reach and said it was led by “its own global CEO, Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean based in Singapore.”

    It’s not the first time TikTok has played up the nationality of its CEO. In 2020, as it faced growing pressure from the Trump administration, TikTok repeatedly defended itself against critics by touting its “American CEO,” Kevin Mayer, a former executive at one of the most iconic US companies, Disney.

    Mayer held the chief executive position at TikTok for just three months before stepping down. Pappas, an Australian based in Los Angeles with experience at other big US tech platforms like Google’s YouTube, then served as interim global head of TikTok for less than a year.

    Then Chew took over as CEO.

    “I think they brought him in specifically because, frankly, he’s not a Chinese national, and Singapore traditionally straddles the fence of these worlds,” said Ivan Kanapathy, a former director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia on the White House’s National Security Council staff and current senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “And they’re quite good at it, geopolitically.”

    “Ultimately, I don’t think it’s going to be enough for Washington,” Kanapathy added of Chew’s Singaporean origin offering comfort to lawmakers concerned about China’s reach over TikTok. “For now, I don’t think it makes much of a difference because at the end of the day, he still answers to ByteDance, and so there’s only so much he can do.”

    After completing his mandatory military service in Singapore, Chew attended university in London before graduating with an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2010. He was exposed to Silicon Valley while at Harvard, after he interned one summer at a “startup” that “was called Facebook,” as he put it in an alumni spotlight.

    He eventually went on to become the CFO of Chinese tech giant Xiaomi, which he helped take public in 2018.

    In 2013, he led a group that became one of ByteDance’s earliest investors. In an interview with business magnate David Rubenstein, Chew said he stayed in contact with the ByteDance team throughout his career and they eventually reached out to offer him the CFO position. He took over as CEO of TikTok in April 2021, with Pappas named COO.

    As CEO of TikTok, “I’m most focused on trust building,” Chew told Rubenstein. “We are a young company and I think trust is something that we have to earn, through actions.”

    Chew doesn’t tweet and has a private, but verified, Instagram account with zero posts. He has shared a handful of videos on TikTok, mostly short clips of his travels and visits to various TikTok offices. But despite running one of the most popular apps on the planet, Chew largely keeps his own life private.

    In some ways, it can be a refreshing break from certain US tech executives who can’t seem to help tweeting their every thought. But it might also stem from cultural differences that come from leading a massive tech company with a Chinese parent company, according to Matthew Quint, the director of the center on global brand leadership at Columbia Business School. While Chew is not a Chinese national, Quint noted Chinese tech companies and leaders that have drawn too much attention to themselves have faced tough government crackdowns.

    Even if Chew does become more of a public figure and attempt to go on a charm offensive, it may not matter much for TikTok’s future in the United States. Ultimately, Quint said, “I don’t think the CEO of TikTok has much relevance at all” for US lawmakers scrutinizing its ties to China.

    “We’ve seen a rotating group, many of whom are not born-Chinese nationals, and that has not swayed the pressure around TikTok from a regulatory, national security perspective over the course of the last 18 months or so,” Quint said.

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  • How Big Tech’s pandemic bubble burst | CNN Business

    How Big Tech’s pandemic bubble burst | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    In January 2021, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke in lofty terms about how the first year of the pandemic had sparked a staggering shift toward online services, benefiting his company in the process. “What we have witnessed over the past year is the dawn of a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry,” he said.

    Two years later, the situation appears much more stark. This week, Microsoft said it planned to lay off 10,000 employees as businesses rethink their pandemic-era digital spending and confront broader economic uncertainty. Microsoft’s customers, Nadella said, are now trying “to do more with less.”

    Microsoft isn’t the only company experiencing such a dramatic reversal. Days later, Google-parent company Alphabet followed suit, saying it plans to cut around 12,000 jobs, amounting to more than 6% of its staff.

    Over the past three months, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook-parent Meta have announced plans to cut more than 50,000 employees from their collective ranks, a stunning reversal from the early days of the pandemic when the tech giants were growing rapidly to meet surging demand from countless households living, shopping and working online. At the time, many tech leaders seemed to expect that growth to continue unabated.

    By September of 2022, Amazon

    (AMZN)     had more than doubled its corporate staff compared to the same month in 2019, hiring more than half a million additional workers and vastly expanding its warehouse footprint. Meta nearly doubled its headcount between March 2020 and September of last year. Microsoft

    (MSFT)     and Google

    (GOOGL GOOGLE)     also hired thousands of additional workers, as did other tech firms like Salesforce

    (CRM)    , Snap

    (SNAP)     and Twitter, all of which have announced layoffs in recent weeks, too.

    But many of those same leaders appear to have misjudged just how much growth spurred by the pandemic would continue once people returned to their offline lives.

    In recent months, higher interest rates, inflation and recession fears causing a pullback in advertising and consumer spending have all weighed on tech companies’ profits and share prices. Wall Street analysts now project single-digit revenue growth during the all-important December quarter for Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and declines for Meta and Apple, when they report earnings in the coming weeks, according to Refinitiv estimates.

    The recent cuts in most cases amount to a relatively small percentage of each company’s overall headcount, essentially erasing the last year of gains for some but leaving them with tens or in some cases hundreds of thousands of remaining workers. But it nonetheless upends the lives of many workers now left to search for new jobs after their employers exit a period of seemingly limitless growth.

    “They went from being on top of the world to having to make some really tough decisions,” said Scott Kessler, global sector lead for technology, media and telecommunications at investment firm Third Bridge. “To see this dramatic reversal of fortunes… it’s not just the magnitude of these moves but the speed that they’ve played out. You’ve seen companies make the wrong strategic decisions at the wrong times.”

    Apple

    (AAPL)     remains an outlier as the one major tech company that has yet to announce layoffs, although the iPhone maker has reportedly instituted a hiring freeze of all areas except research and development. Apple

    (AAPL)     grew its staff by 20% from 2019 through last year, markedly less than some of its peers.

    “They’ve taken a more seemingly thoughtful approach to hiring and overall managing the company,” Kessler said.

    Tech CEOs, from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, have blamed themselves for over-hiring early on in the pandemic and misreading how a surge in demand for their products would cool once Covid-19 restrictions eased. Pichai on Friday also took the blame for Alphabet’s cuts, and said he plans to return the company’s focus to its core business and “highest priorities.”

    “The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here,” Pichai said in an email to employees that was posted to the company’s website Friday.

    Notably, however, none of the Big Tech company CEOs now overseeing layoffs appear to have been hit with any change to their compensation or title.

    The tech layoff announcements are likely to continue into the upcoming earnings season, Kessler said, amid ongoing economic warning signs. And even companies that might not yet be feeling the pain may follow their peers’ lead in trimming their workforces.

    “I think there is an element of [some companies saying], ‘We might not see this right now but all these other big companies, these companies that we compete with, that we know, that we respect, are taking these kinds of actions, so maybe we should be thinking and acting accordingly,” Kessler said.

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  • This prominent pastor says Christian nationalism is ‘a form of heresy’ | CNN

    This prominent pastor says Christian nationalism is ‘a form of heresy’ | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Left vs. right. Woke vs. the unwoke. Red State Jesus vs. Blue State Jesus.

    There are some leaders who see faith and politics strictly as an either/or competition: You win by turning out your side and crushing the opposition.

    But the Rev. William J. Barber II, who has been called “the closest person we have to MLK” in contemporary America, has refined a third mode of activism called “fusion politics.” It creates political coalitions that often transcend the conservative vs. progressive binary.

    Barber, a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, says a coalition of the “rejected stones” of America—the poor, immigrants, working-class whites, religious minorities, people of color and members of the LGBTQ community can transform the country because they share a common enemy.

    “The same forces demonizing immigrants are also attacking low-wage workers,” the North Carolina pastor said in an interview several years ago. “The same politicians denying living wages are also suppressing the vote; the same people who want less of us to vote are also denying the evidence of the climate crisis and refusing to act now; the same people who are willing to destroy the Earth are willing to deny tens of millions of Americans access to health care.”

    Barber’s fusion politics has helped transform the 59-year-old pastor into one of the country’s most prominent activist and speakers. As co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, he has helped lead one of the nation’s most sustained and visible anti-poverty efforts.

    He electrified the crowd at the 2016 Democratic National Convention with a speech that one commentator called a “drop the mic” moment. And at a time when both political parties have been accused of ignoring the working class, Barber routinely organizes and marches with groups such as fast-food workers and union members.

    “There is a sleeping giant in America,” Barber told CNN. “Poor and low-wealth folks now make up 30% of the electorate in every state and over 40% of the electorate in every state where the margin of victory for the presidency was less than 3%. If you could just get that many poor and low-wealth people to vote, they could fundamentally shift every election in the country.”

    Starting this month, Barber will take his fusion politics to the Ivy League. Yale Divinity School has announced he’ll be the founding director of its new Center for Public Theology and Public Policy. In that role, Barber says he hopes to train a new generation of leaders who will be comfortable “creating a just society both in the academy and in the streets.”

    Though he’s stepping down as pastor of the North Carolina church where he has served for 30 years, Barber says he is not retiring from activism. He remains president of Repairers of the Breach, a nonprofit that promotes moral fusion politics.

    Barber recently spoke to CNN about his faith and activism and why he opposes White Christian nationalism, a movement that insists the US was founded as a Christian nation and seeks to erase the separation of church and state.

    Barber’s answers were edited for brevity and clarity.

    You’ve talked about poverty as a moral issue and said the US cannot tolerate record levels of inequality. But some extreme levels of poverty have always existed in this country. Why is it so urgent to face those problems now, and why should someone who isn’t poor care?

    Doctor King used to say America has a high blood pressure of creeds, but an anemia of deeds. In every generation we’ve had to have a moment to focus on the urgency of the right now. We will never be able to fix our democracy until we fully face these issues. We will constantly ebb and flow out of recessions because inequality hurts us all.

    Joseph Stiglitz (the Nobel Prize-winning economist) talks about this in his book “The Price of Inequality,” and says that it costs us more as a nation for these inequalities to exist than it would for us to fix them.

    Look at how much it costs us to not have a living (minimum) wage. There was a group of Nobel Peace Prize-winning economists two years ago that debunked the notion that paying people a living wage (the federal minimum wage in the US is $7.25 an hour) would hurt business. They said it’s not true.

    Homeless veterans are housed in 30 tents on a sidewalk along busy San Vicente Boulevard outside the Veteran's Administration campus in Los Angeles on April 22, 2021.

    Well, President Roosevelt said that in the 1930s. He said that any corporation that didn’t pay people a living wage didn’t deserve to be an American corporation.

    I don’t think that American society as a democracy can stand much more. We’re moving toward 50% of all Americans being poor and low wealth. It’s unnecessary.

    We say in our founding documents that every politician swears to promote the general welfare of all people. You’re not promoting the general welfare of all people when you can get elected and go to Congress and get free health care but then sit in Congress and block the people who elected you from having the same thing.

    We say equal protection under the law is fundamental. Well, there’s nothing equal about corporations getting all kinds of tax breaks and all kinds of ways to make more and more money, while the average worker makes 300% less than the CEOs.

    WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 06: Supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump pray outside the U.S. Capitol January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. Congress will hold a joint session today to ratify President-elect Joe Biden's 306-232 Electoral College win over President Donald Trump. A group of Republican senators have said they will reject the Electoral College votes of several states unless Congress appoints a commission to audit the election results. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

    Marjorie Taylor Greene calls herself a ‘nationalist.’ This is what that means

    Some people cite the scripture where Jesus says, “The poor you always have with you” to argue that poverty is inevitable, and that trying to end it is a hopeless cause.

    Every time they say that, they are misquoting Jesus. Because that’s not what Jesus meant or said. He was saying, yeah, the poor are going to be with you always, because he was quoting from Deuteronomy [15:11]. The rest of that scripture says the poor will always be with you because of your greed — I’m paraphrasing it, but that’s the meaning of it. The poor will always be with you is a critique of our unwillingness to address poverty.

    To have this level of inequality existing is a violation of our deepest moral, constitutional and religious values. It’s morally inconsistent, morally indefensible, and economically insane. Why would you not want to lift 55 to 60 million people out of poverty if you could by paying them a basic living wage? Why would you not want that amount of resources coming to people and then coming back into the economy?

    Thousands of people march through through downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, in what organizers describe as a

    I want to ask you about Christian nationalism. What’s wrong with saying God loves America and that the country should be built on Christian values?

    God doesn’t say it. That’s what’s wrong with it. The scriptures says God loves all people and that if a nation is going to embrace Christian values, then we got to know what those values are. And those values certainly aren’t anti-gay, against people who may have had an abortion, pro-tax cut, pro one party and pro-gun. There’s nowhere in the scriptures where you see Jesus lifting that up.

    Jesus said the Gospel is about good news to the poor, healing to the brokenhearted, welcoming all people, caring for the least of these: the immigrant, the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned. Christian nationalism attempts to sanctify oppression and not liberation. It attempts to sanctify lies and not truth. At best, it’s a form of theological malpractice. At worst, it’s a form of heresy.

    When you have some people calling themselves Christian nationalists, you never hear them say, “Jesus said this.” They say, “I’m a Christian, and I say it.” But that’s not good enough. If it doesn’t line up with the founder, then it’s flawed.

    Are you an evangelical?

    I’m very much an evangelical. I tell folks that I’m a conservative, liberal, evangelical Christian. And what that means is I believe in Jesus, not to the exclusion of other faith traditions because my founder said that “I have others who are not of this fold.” I believe that love, truth, mercy, grace and justice are fundamental to a life of faith. And for me to be evangelical means to start where Jesus started.

    The word “evangel” is good news. When Jesus used that phase it was in his first sermon, which was a public policy sermon. He said it in the face of Caesar, where Caesar had hurt and exploited the poor. He said it right in the ghetto of Nazareth, where people said, “nothing good could come out of Nazareth.” He said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news” — evangel —”to the poor.” That’s what evangelicalism is to Jesus. That’s the kind of evangelicalism that I embrace.

    You’ve had health challenges over the years. How do you keep going year after year and keep yourself from being burned out?

    I read the Bible one time, specifically looking to see if I could find any person in scripture that God used in a major way that did not have some physical challenge. And I couldn’t find it. That helped me get over any pity party.

    You know, Moses couldn’t talk. Ezekiel had strange post-traumatic syndrome types of emotional issues. Jeremiah was crying all the time from his struggles with depression. Paul had a physical thorn in the flesh. Jesus was acquainted with sorrow.

    Police keep watch as The Rev. William Barber and other activists demonstrate during a rally in support of voting rights legislation in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington on June 23, 2021.

    Then then I looked down through history, and I couldn’t find anybody. Harriet Tubman had epileptic-type fits. Martin Luther King was stabbed before he did the March on Washington and had a breathing disorder after that.

    During covid, I thought deeply about death and mortality. I have some immune deficiencies and challenges. I’ve battled this ankylosing spondylitis for now 40-plus years. At any time, it could shut my body down.

    During covid, as I kept meeting people, I sat down one day and I said, Lord, why am I still here? I’m not better than these people. I know I’ve been around covid. My doctor said to me if I caught covid I probably would not fare well.

    As I was musing one day, it dawned on me. That’s the wrong question. The question is never, why are you still alive? Why are you still breathing? The question is what are you going to do with the breath you have?

    Because at any given moment, the scripture says we’re a step from death. And so I’ve decided that whatever breath I have, it is too precious to waste on hate, on oppression and on being mean to people. It’s only to be used for the cause of justice.

    John Blake is the author of “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”

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  • Here are the companies that have laid off employees this year — so far | CNN Business

    Here are the companies that have laid off employees this year — so far | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Just this week, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, Microsoft

    (MSFT)     and Vox Media announced layoffs that will affect more than 22,000 workers.

    Their moves follow on the heels of job cuts earlier this month at Amazon, Goldman Sachs and Salesforce. More companies are expected to do the same as firms that aggressively hired over the last two years slam on the brakes, and in many cases shift into reverse.

    The cutbacks are in sharp contrast to 2022, which had the second-highest level of job gains on record, with 4.5 million. But last year’s job numbers began falling as the year went on, with December’s job report showing the lowest monthly gains in two years.

    The highest level of hiring occurred in 2021, when 6.7 million jobs were added. But that came on the heels of the first year of the pandemic, when the US effectively shut down and 9.3 million jobs were lost.

    The current layoffs are across multiple industries, from media firms to Wall Street, but so far are hitting Big Tech especially hard.

    That’s a contrast from job losses during the pandemic, which saw consumers’ buying habits shifting toward e-commerce and other online services during lockdown. Tech firms went on a hiring spree.

    But now, workers are returning to their offices and in-person shopping is bouncing back. Add in the increasing likelihood of a recession, higher interest rates and tepid demand due to rising prices, and tech businesses are slashing their costs.

    January has been filled with headlines announcing job cuts at company after company. Here is a list of layoffs this month – so far.

    Google

    (GOOGL)    ’s parent said Friday it is laying off 12,000 workers across product areas and regions, or 6% of its workforce. Alphabet added 50,000 workers over the past two years as the pandemic created greater demand for its services. But recent recession fears has advertisers pulling back from its core digital ad business.

    “Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in an email to employees. “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”

    The tech behemoth is laying off 10,000 employees, the company said in a securities filing on Wednesday. Globally, Microsoft has 221,000 full-time employees with 122,000 of them based in the US.

    CEO Satya Nadella said during a talk at Davos that “no one can defy gravity” and that Microsoft could not ignore the weaker global economy.

    “We’re living through times of significant change, and as I meet with customers and partners, a few things are clear,” Nadella wrote in a memo. “First, as we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimize their digital spend to do more with less.”

    The publisher of the news and opinion website Vox, tech website The Verge and New York Magazine, announced Friday that it’s cutting 7% of its staff, or about 130 people.

    “We are experiencing and expect more of the same economic and financial pressures that others in the media and tech industries have encountered,” chief executive Jim Bankoff said in a memo.

    Layoffs are also hitting Wall Street hard. The world’s largest asset manager is eliminating 500 jobs, or less than 3% of its workforce.

    Today’s “unprecedented market environment” is a stark contrast from its attitude over the last three years,, when it increased its staff by about 22%. Its last major round of cutbacks was in 2019.

    The bank will lay off up to 3,200 workers this month amid a slump in global dealmaking activity. More than a third of the cuts are expected to be from the firm’s trading and banking units. Goldman Sachs

    (FADXX)     had almost 50,000 employees at the end of last year’s third quarter.

    The crypto brokerage announced in early January that it’s cutting 950 people – almost one in five employees in its workforce. The move comes just a few months after Coinbase laid off 1,100 people.

    Though Bitcoin had a solid start to the new year, crypto companies were slammed by significant drops in prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

    McDonald’s

    (MCD)    , which thrived during the pandemic, is planning on cutting some of its corporate staff, CEO Chris Kempczinski said this month.

    “We will evaluate roles and staffing levels in parts of the organization and there will be difficult discussions and decisions ahead,” Kempszinski said, outlining a plan to “break down internal barriers, grow more innovative and reduce work that doesn’t align with the company’s priorities.”

    The online personalized subscription clothing retailer said it plans to lay off 20% of its salaried staff.

    “We will be losing many talented team members from across the company and I am truly sorry,” Stitch Fix

    (SFIX)     founder and former CEO Katrina Lake wrote in a blog post.

    As the new year began, Amazon

    (AMZN)     said it plans to lay off more than 18,000 employees. Departments from human resources to the company’s Amazon

    (AMZN)     Stores will be affected.

    “Companies that last a long time go through different phases. They’re not in heavy people expansion mode every year,” CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to employees.

    Amazon boomed during the pandemic, and hired rapidly over the last few years. But demand has cooled as consumers return to their offline lives and battle high prices. Amazon says it has more than 800,000 employees.

    At The New York Times DealBook summit In November, Jassy said he believes Amazon “made the right decision” regarding its rapid infrastructure build out but said its hiring spree is a “lesson for everyone.”

    Even as he spoke, Amazon warehouse workers who helped organize the company’s first-ever US labor union at a Staten Island facility last year were picketing Jassy’s appearance outside the conference venue.

    “We definitely want to take this opportunity to let him know that the workers are waiting and we are ready to negotiate our first contract,” Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls said, calling the protest a “welcoming party” for Jassy.

    Salesforce

    (CRM)     will cut about 10% of its workforce from its more than 70,000 employess and reduce its real estate footprint. In a letter to employees, Salesforce

    (CRM)    ’s chair and co-CEO Marc Benioff admitted to adding too much to the company’s headcount early in the pandemic.

    – CNN’s Clare Duffy, Matt Egan, Oliver Darcy, Julia Horowitz, Catherine Thorbecke, Paul R. La Monica, Nathaniel Meyersohn, Parija Kavilanz, Danielle Wiener-Bronner and Hanna Ziady contributed to this report.

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  • 5 Colorado first responders charged in 2019 death of Elijah McClain plead not guilty to all charges | CNN

    5 Colorado first responders charged in 2019 death of Elijah McClain plead not guilty to all charges | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The five Aurora, Colorado first responders indicted by a state grand jury for the 2019 death of Elijah McClain pleaded not guilty to all charges Friday afternoon in an Adams County courthouse.

    Aurora Police officers Randy Roedema and Nathan Woodyard, former officer Jason Rosenblatt and Aurora Fire Rescue paramedics Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec in September 2021 were each indicted on charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide as part of a 32-count indictment.

    McClain, a 23-year-old Black man, was walking home from a convenience store on August 24 when he was apprehended by Aurora police officers responding to a “suspicious person” call, according to the indictment.

    Officers pinned McClain to the ground after a brief physical struggle. Woodyard then applied a carotid hold, which caused McClain to lose consciousness, the indictment said.

    In testimony to the grand jury, Roedema also put McClain in a bar hammer lock. Roedema stated he “cranked pretty hard” on McClain’s shoulder and heard it pop three times.

    Eventually paramedics arrived to the scene. Cooper made the decision to administer a 500 mg dose of Ketamine, according to the indictment.

    “A correct dosage of Ketamine is calculated according to a patient’s weight, with 5 mg of Ketamine per kilogram of patient weight,” stated the grand jury indictment.

    “Cooper said he estimated Mr. McClain’s weight to be approximately 200 pounds (90.7 kg). At that weight, in accordance with the standing order from their medical director, Mr. McClain should have been administered 453 mg of Ketamine,” the indictment read.

    “Cooper administered 500 mg of Ketamine. Mr. McClain actually weighed 143 pounds (65 kg) and as such his weight-based Ketamine dose should have been closer to 325 mg of Ketamine.”

    After giving him the dose, McClain was put on a gurney by the officers and paramedics.

    “By the time he was placed on the gurney, Mr. McClain appeared unconscious, had no muscle tone, was limp, and had visible vomit coming from his nose and mouth,” the indictment says. “(Officer) Roedema said he heard Mr. McClain snoring, which can be a sign of a ketamine overdose.”

    The paramedics found he had no pulse and was not breathing and performed CPR. He never regained consciousness and was declared brain-dead on August 27, the indictment states.

    The original autopsy report listed the cause of McClain’s death as “undetermined.” An amended autopsy report, completed in 2021 and made public last September, said McClain’s death was caused by complications from ketamine injection following restraint. The manner of death was left “undetermined.”

    Aurora police confirmed to CNN Woodyard and Roedema remain suspended indefinitely without pay. Rosenblatt was fired by the department in 2020.

    Ahead of their arraignment in Adams County, Colorado court on Friday, a district court judge ruled the trials of five defendants in McClain’s death will be split.

    Paramedics Peter Cichuniec and Jeremy Cooper will be tried together, but separate from the other three defendants in the case, Judge Mark Warner announced in an order issued on Wednesday.

    Aurora police officer Woodyard will be tried separately from officers Roedema and former officer Rosenblatt, Warner said.

    The trial date for Roedema and Rosenblatt is scheduled to begin July 11. Cooper and Cichuniec’s trial is scheduled to begin on August 7 and Woodyard’s trial on September 18.

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  • What we learned at Davos: The economy is a mess, but there’s still hope | CNN Business

    What we learned at Davos: The economy is a mess, but there’s still hope | CNN Business

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    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Friday marks the end of the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, an elite gathering of some of the wealthiest people and world leaders.

    The glitzy retreat into the Swiss Alps looks increasingly out of date as the biggest war in Europe since 1945 deepens splits in the world economy. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

    The meetings between CEOs, politicians, and global figures at Davos can help set the tone for the year ahead. Here are some of the key talking points from this week.

    It’s a mess: The big stories coming out of Davos this year are full of phrases like “fragmenting global economy,” “economic uncertainty” and “the year of inflation.”

    While many executives and economists are now striking a more optimistic tone, global leaders are still fretting about the economic outlook. That’s not surprising since they’re contending with worrisome uncertainties — Russia’s war in Ukraine is still raging, inflation and interest rates remain elevated, there are looming energy and food crises, supply chain kinks and the debt limit standoff in the United States, not to mention the threat of global recession.

    The meeting began with a new report by the WEF that dubbed this decade the “turbulent 20s” and the “age of the polycrisis.” Business executives, politicians and academics, the report said, are bracing for a gloomy world battered by intersecting crises, as rising volatility and depleted resilience boost the odds of painful simultaneous shocks.

    Gita Gopinath, the number two official at the International Monetary Fund, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that the IMF is worried globalization is in retreat. “We’re very concerned about geoeconomic fragmentation,” she said. The issue had come up a lot in meetings with member countries at the conference, she added.

    CEOs and political officials are also worried about the United States hitting its borrowing cap on Thursday, forcing the Treasury Department to start taking “extraordinary measures” to keep the government open.

    If an agreement isn’t reached, markets could plunge (like they did the last time this happened in 2011) and the United States risks having its credit rating downgraded again. The situation is a “mess,” said Peter Orszag, CEO of financial advisory at Lazard.

    JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon told CNBC from Davos on Thursday that the reputation of the United States as creditworthy is “sacrosanct.” To even question it, he said, is the wrong thing to do. “That is just a part of the financial structure of the world. This is not something you should be playing games with at all.”

    But it may not be that bad: Many leaders’ economic forecasts actually struck a semi-positive tone, even as they factored in strong headwinds.

    So far, energy supplies have held up in Europe, and the US and China are engaging in diplomatic relations — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He met in Zurich on Wednesday.

    China’s removal of strict coronavirus restrictions late last year is also expected to unleash a wave of spending that may offset economic weakness in the United States and Europe.

    Climate change was a hot topic: The rich and powerful do love to flock to Davos in their carbon-emitting private jets to discuss climate change. But this year, severe warnings were issued to global leaders.

    The UN Secretary General accused fossil fuel producers and their financial backers of “racing to expand production, knowing full well that their business model is inconsistent with human survival.”

    Speaking at Davos on Wednesday, António Guterres said the commitment to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels is “going up in smoke.”

    “We are flirting with climate disaster. Every week brings a new climate horror story,” he said.

    Swedish activist Greta Thunberg also made her way to Switzerland and delivered a “cease and desist letter” to fossil fuel CEOs — signed by more than 800,000 people.

    The AI revolution is here: Some CEOs at Davos admitted that they’re using the revolutionary new AI bot, ChatGPT, to do their work for them, reports my colleague Julia Horowitz.

    Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of online learning provider Coursera, said that he uses the tool to bang out emails.

    “I use it as a writing assistant and as a thought partner,” Maggioncalda told CNN from Davos.

    Christian Lanng, CEO of digital supply chain platform Tradeshift, said he uses the ChatGPT to write emails and claims no one has noticed the difference. He even had it perform some accounting work, a service for which Tradeshift currently employs an expensive professional services firm.

    “I see these technologies acting as a copilot, helping people do more with less,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told an audience in Davos this week.

    There’s a saying on Wall Street that bad news for the economy is actually good news for the stock market and vice versa, reports my colleague Paul R. La Monica.

    That’s because investors often bet that dismal headlines will eventually prompt the Federal Reserve and other central banks to cut interest rates and provide more stimulus that can help boost corporate profits…and stock prices.

    But the debt ceiling debate in Washington is changing all of that.

    Wednesday’s big market sell-off and the continued slide Thursday might represent a turning point for market sentiment. Still, after a promising start to the year, stocks have seemingly taken a turn for the worse. Bad news actually might be bad news.

    “We’ve been snuggled up in expectations of a soft landing for the US economy,” said Kit Juckes, chief global foreign exchange strategist at Societe Generale, in a report Thursday. “Take away the blanket and it feels chilly.”

    Netflix announced Thursday that its founder Reed Hastings is stepping down as co-CEO at the company and will serve as executive chairman. Hastings will be replaced by co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, reports my colleague Clare Duffy.

    Under Hastings’ leadership, Netflix disrupted legacy movie rental companies like Blockbuster and helped shake up Hollywood by kicking off an arms race investing in original content.

    Last year, however, Netflix saw its stock and reputation take a hit after losing subscribers amid heightened competition from rival streaming services. In response, Netflix introduced a lower-priced, ad-supported tier for the first time in its history.

    Those changes may be paying off. In its earnings report on Thursday, the streamer said it added more than 7.6 million subscribers during the final three months of last year, well above the 4.5 million additions it had projected, for a total of more than 230 million paying subscribers worldwide.

    “Reed Hastings stepping down from his current role raises a lot of questions about Netflix’s future strategy,” Jamie Lumbley, analyst at investment firm Third Bridge, said in a statement. “While the subscriber growth numbers are encouraging, revenue growth is sluggish with the backdrop of a potential recession looming on everyone’s mind.”

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  • CEOs at Davos are using ChatGPT to write work emails | CNN Business

    CEOs at Davos are using ChatGPT to write work emails | CNN Business

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    Davos, Switzerland
    CNN
     — 

    Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of online learning provider Coursera, said that when he first tried ChatGPT, he was “dumbstruck.” Now, it’s part of his daily routine.

    He uses the powerful new AI chatbot tool to bang out emails. He uses it to craft speeches “in a friendly, upbeat, authoritative tone with mixed cadence.” He even uses it to help break down big strategic questions — such as how Coursera should approach incorporating artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT into its platform.

    “I use it as a writing assistant and as a thought partner,” Maggioncalda told CNN.

    Maggioncalda is one of thousands of business leaders, politicians and academics gathered in Davos, Switzerland this week for the World Economic Forum. On the agenda is an array of pressing issues weighing on the global economy, from the energy crisis to the war in Ukraine and the transformation of trade. But what many can’t stop talking about is ChatGPT.

    The tool, which artificial intelligence research company OpenAI made available to the general public late last year, has sparked conversations about how “generative AI” services — which can turn prompts into original essays, stories, songs and images after training on massive online datasets — could radically transform how we live and work.

    Some claim it will put artists, tutors, coders, and writers (yes, even journalists) out of a job. Others are more optimistic, postulating that it will allow employees to tackle to-do lists with greater efficiency or focus on higher-level tasks.

    It’s a debate that’s captivated many C-suite leaders, often after they tested the tool themselves.

    Christian Lanng, CEO of digital supply chain platform Tradeshift, said he was blown away by the capabilities displayed by ChatGPT, even after years of exposure to Silicon Valley hype.

    He’s also used the platform to write emails and claims no one has noticed the difference. He even had it perform some accounting work, a service for which Tradeshift currently employs an expensive professional services firm.

    To date, ChatGPT has mostly been treated as a curiosity and a harbinger of what’s to come. It relies on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 language model, which is already out of date; the more advanced GPT-4 version is in the works and could be released this year.

    Critics — of which there are many — are quick to point out that it makes mistakes, is painfully neutral and displays a clear lack of human empathy. One tech news publication, for example, was forced to issue several significant corrections for an article written by ChatGPT. And New York City public schools have banned students and teachers from using it.

    Yet the software, or similar programs from competitors, could soon take the business world by storm.

    Microsoft

    (MSFT)    , an investor in OpenAI, announced this week that the company’s tools — including GPT-3.5, programming assistant Codex and image generator DALL-E 2 — are now generally available to business clients in a package called Azure OpenAI Service. ChatGPT is being added soon.

    “I see these technologies acting as a copilot, helping people do more with less,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told an audience in Davos this week.

    Maggioncalda has a similar perspective. He wants to integrate generative AI into Coursera’s offering this year, seeing an opportunity to make learning more interactive for students who don’t have access to in-person classroom instruction or one-on-one time with subject matter experts.

    He acknowledges challenges such as preventing cheating and ensuring accuracy need to be addressed. And he’s worried that increasing use of generative AI may not be wholly good for society — people may become less agile thinkers, for example, since the act of writing can be helpful to process complex ideas and hone takeaways.

    Still, he sees the need to move quickly.

    “Anybody who doesn’t use this will shortly be at a severe disadvantage. Like, shortly. Like, very soon,” Maggioncalda said. “I’m just thinking about my cognitive ability with this tool. Versus before, it’s a lot higher, and my efficiency and productivity is way higher.”

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  • Ousted Disney CEO Bob Chapek will get $20 million exit pay | CNN Business

    Ousted Disney CEO Bob Chapek will get $20 million exit pay | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Ousted Disney chief executive Bob Chapek is set to receive a hefty paycheck following his exit.

    The Walt Disney Company said the former CEO, who took over in February 2020 after longtime CEO Bob Iger retired, is eligible to take home a severance pay package worth roughly $20 million, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday. That’s in addition to the $24 million he made last year — his $2.5 million base salary plus millions in stock options and awards. That’s down from the $32.5 million he made in 2021.

    Chapek abruptly exited the company in November after a hectic two-year stint marked by Covid-19 shutdowns, a PR debacle related to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and a significant slowdown in demand for streaming services. He was replaced by his predecessor, Iger.

    The proxy filing said that the board determined that Chapek “was no longer the right person to serve in the CEO role,” even though it had voted to extend Chapek’s tenure for three years in June 2022.

    “The significant developments and change in the broader macroeconomic environment over this period informed how the board viewed the appropriate leader in light of the rapidly evolving industry and market dynamics,” the filing said.

    Disney shares, which were trading at about $170 in January 2022, have fallen to about $100 a share.

    Iger has returned to Disney at a tumultuous time. Its streaming business lost $1.5 billion in the fourth quarter, and Disney’s media networks are struggling as cord-cutting accelerates and once-lucrative outlets like ESPN lose household reach.

    Dan Loeb, the activist investor and Third Point CEO, made headlines in August when he suggested “a strong case can be made that the ESPN business should be spun off to shareholders with an appropriate debt load.”

    A Wells Fargo analyst also called on Disney to ditch ESPN in December.

    Disney

    (DIS)     previously revealed that Iger earned a $1 million base salary. However, that compensation comes with an annual bonus of up to $1 million, as well as an annual incentive-based award with a target value of $25 million. That means that Iger has the potential of pulling in around $27 million.

    Last week, Disney named Nike executive chairman Mark Parker as its new board chair, replacing longtime director Susan Arnold, whose term limit is expiring.

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  • A lot of people hide their cancer diagnosis from their bosses. These companies aim to change that | CNN Business

    A lot of people hide their cancer diagnosis from their bosses. These companies aim to change that | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    After having surgery to remove a small cancerous tumor from his neck last year, Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun decided to tell his employees, clients and shareholders of his condition. He still needed to undergo radiation and chemotherapy, and explained to them what that would mean for his work schedule.

    While deciding to go public was difficult for Sadoun because it meant showing vulnerability both as a person and as a leader of one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, he said he received thousands of compassionate responses from both inside and outside Publicis after doing so.

    What shocked him most, he said, was how many people told him they hid their own cancer diagnosis from their employers for fear of losing their job or being perceived as weak. Instead, they took vacation days for treatments or scheduled very early morning procedures so they could work the same day, Sadoun told CNN. Some even hid their children’s cancer treatments from their boss, he added.

    “That is crazy,” Sadoun said. “I started 2022 with cancer and left it with a mission.”

    That mission is to create a worldwide campaign to encourage employers to eradicate the stigma and anxiety of having cancer at work.

    The initiative — called the #WorkingWithCancer Pledge — launched Tuesday at the 2023 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

    Many of the world’s best-known companies have agreed to the pledge already. They include Bank of America, Citi, Disney, Google, L’Oréal, Marriott, McDonald’s, Meta, Microsoft, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Toyota, Unilever and Walmart.

    Employers who take the pledge promise “to abolish job fear and insecurity that exist for cancer sufferers in the workplace.”

    Signatories also pledge to do a better job publicizing to their workforces the benefits they already have in place for employees with cancer and for employees taking care of a family member with cancer. They will also consider ways to do more.

    Walmart, for instance, notes on the #WorkingWithCancer Pledge site that it currently offers access to high-quality care in the United States through its Centers for Excellence Program, and that the care is often free for employees, including travel and lodging if necessary for both the employee and their caregiver. The company also said it provides free counseling with a licensed therapist, educational resources and experts on cancer, as well as leave-of-absence programs.

    In terms of forward-looking pledges, Publicis is committing to its employees worldwide that it will:

    • Secure the job and salary of any employee suffering from cancer for at least 1 year so they can focus on their health treatment
    • Offer career support to any affected employee after they return to work to help them assess whether they wish to do the same job or try something different, depending on their capacities after treatment
    • Provide affected employees with an internal community of trained volunteers who can offer support “so that our employees don’t feel alone at a challenging time”
    • Offer custom support to employees serving as caregivers to a family member with cancer so they can get what they need in terms of flexibility and time to both “maintain their energy at work and as a caregiver.”

    Leading cancer institutions, including Memorial Sloan Kettering, are backing Sadoun’s initiative.

    His hope is that if the world’s biggest companies go public with what they are doing both to help employees with cancer and to make it easier to talk about it at work, smaller companies may follow their lead.

    Given how prevalent cancer diagnoses are — and how, thanks to improved treatments and early detection, it can be more of a chronic disease than a death sentence in many instances — “Not only will we have to live with [cancer],” Sadoun said, “we will have to work with it.”

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  • India is set to become the world’s most populous country. Can it create enough jobs? | CNN Business

    India is set to become the world’s most populous country. Can it create enough jobs? | CNN Business

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    New Delhi
    CNN
     — 

    India will overtake China this year to become the world’s most populous country.

    The likelihood of India passing that major milestone within a few months shot up Tuesday, when China reported that its population shrank in 2022 for the first time in more than 60 years.

    This shift will have significant economic implications for both Asian giants, which have more than 1.4 billion residents each.

    Along with the population data, China also reported one of its worst economic growth numbers in nearly half a century, underscoring the steep challenges the country faces as its labor force shrinks and the ranks of the retired swell.

    For India, what economists and analysts call the “demographic dividend” could continue to support rapid growth as the number of healthy workers increases.

    There are fears the country might miss out, however. That’s because India is simply not creating employment opportunities for the millions of young job seekers already entering the workforce every year.

    The South Asian nation’s working-age population stands at over 900 million, according to 2021 data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This number is expected to hit more than 1 billion over the next decade, according to the Indian government.

    But these numbers could become a liability if policymakers do not create enough jobs, experts warned. Already, data show a growing number of Indians are not even looking for work, given the lack of opportunities and low wages.

    India’s labor force participation rate, an estimation of the active workforce and people looking for work, stood at 46%, which is among the lowest in Asia, according to 2021 data from the World Bank. By comparison, the rates for China and the United States stood at 68% and 61% respectively in the same year.

    For women, the numbers are even more alarming. India’s female work participation rate was just 19% in 2021, down from about 26% in 2005, the World Bank data shows.

    “India is sitting on a time bomb,” Chandrasekhar Sripada, professor of organizational behavior at the Indian School of Business, told CNN. “There will be social unrest if it cannot create enough employment in a relatively short period of time.”

    India’s unemployment rate in December stood at 8.3%, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), an independent think tank headquartered in Mumbai, which publishes job data more regularly than the Indian government. In contrast, the US rate was about 3.5% at the end of last year.

    “India has the world’s largest youth population … There is no dearth of capital in the world today,” Mahesh Vyas, the CEO of CMIE, wrote in a blog post last year. “Ideally, India should be grabbing this rare opportunity of easy availability of labor and capital to fuel rapid growth. However, it seems to be missing this bus.”

    Lack of high quality education is one of the biggest reasons behind India’s unemployment crisis. There has been a “massive failure at the education level” by policymakers, said Sripada, adding that Indian institutions emphasize “rote-learning” over “creative thinking.”

    As a result of this toxic combination of poor education and lack of jobs, thousands of college graduates, including those with doctorates, end up applying for lowly government jobs, such as those of “peons” or office boys, which pay less than $300 a month.

    The good news is that policymakers have recognized this problem and started putting “reasonable emphasis on skill creation now,” Sripada said. But it will be years before the impact of new policies can be seen, he added.

    Asia’s third largest economy also needs to create more non-farm jobs to realize its full economic potential. According to recent government data, more than 45% of the Indian workforce is employed in the agriculture sector.

    The country needs to create at least 90 million new non-farm jobs by 2030 to absorb new workers, according to a 2020 report by McKinsey Global Institute. Many of these jobs can be created in the manufacturing and constructions sectors, experts said.

    As tensions between China and the West rise, India has made some progress in boosting manufacturing by attracting international giants such as Apple to produce more in the country. But, factories still constitute only 14% of India’s GDP, according to the World Bank.

    With a 6.8% expansion in GDP forecast for this fiscal year ending March, the South Asian nation is expected to be the world’s fastest growing major economy. But, according to a former central banker, even this growth is “insufficient.”

    “A lot of this growth is jobless growth. Jobs are essentially task one for the economy. We don’t need everybody to be a software programmer or consultant but we need decent jobs,” Raghuram Rajan, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, told media company NDTV, last year.

    According to the Mckinsey report, for “gainful and productive employment growth of this magnitude, India’s GDP will need to grow by 8.0% to 8.5% annually over the next decade.”

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  • The top 1% captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world over last two years | CNN Business

    The top 1% captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world over last two years | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The world’s wealthiest residents have been getting far richer, far faster than everyone else over the past two years.

    The top 1% have captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world during that period, according to Oxfam’s annual inequality report, released Sunday. Their fortune soared by $26 trillion, while the bottom 99% only saw their net worth rise by $16 trillion.

    And the wealth accumulation of the super-rich accelerated during the pandemic. Looking over the past decade, they netted just half of all the new wealth created, compared to two-thirds during the last few years.

    The report, which draws on data compiled by Forbes, is timed to coincide with the kickoff of the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, an elite gathering of some of the wealthiest people and world leaders.

    Meanwhile, many of the less fortunate are struggling. Some 1.7 billion workers live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages. And poverty reduction likely stalled last year after the number of global poor skyrocketed in 2020.

    “While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International. “Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires — a roaring ’20s boom for the world’s richest.”

    Though their riches have slipped somewhat over the past year, global billionaires are still far wealthier than they were at the start of the pandemic.

    Their net worth totals $11.9 trillion, according to Oxfam. While that’s down nearly $2 trillion from late 2021, it’s still well above the $8.6 trillion billionaires had in March 2020.

    The wealthy are benefiting from three trends, said Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America’s director of economic justice.

    At the start of the pandemic, global governments, particularly wealthier countries, poured trillions of dollars into their economies to prevent a collapse. That prompted stocks and other assets to soar in value.

    “So much of that fresh cash ended up with the ultra-wealthy, who were able to ride this stock market surge, this asset boom,” Ahmed said. “And the guardrails of fair taxation weren’t in place.”

    Also, many corporations have done well in recent years. Some 95 food and energy companies have more than doubled their profits in 2022, Oxfam said, as inflation sent prices soaring. Much of this money was paid out to shareholders.

    In addition, the longer term trends of the unwinding of workers’ rights and greater market concentration is heightening inequality.

    By contrast, global poverty increased greatly early in the pandemic. Though some progress in poverty reduction has been made since then, it is expected to have stalled in 2022, in part because of the war in Ukraine, which exacerbated high food and energy prices, according to World Bank data cited by Oxfam.

    It’s the first time that extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously in 25 years, said Oxfam.

    To counter this growing inequality, Oxfam is calling on governments to raise taxes on their wealthiest residents.

    It proposes introducing one-time wealth tax and windfall taxes to end profiteering off global crises, as well as permanently increasing taxes on the richest 1% of residents to at least 60% of their income from labor and capital.

    Oxfam believes the rates on the top 1% should be high enough to significantly reduce their numbers and wealth. The funds should then be redistributed.

    “We do face an extreme crisis of wealth concentration,” Ahmed said. “And it’s important before all, I think, to recognize that it’s not inevitable. A strategic precondition to reining in extreme inequality is taxing the ultra-wealthy.”

    The group, however, faces an uphill battle. Some 11 countries cut taxes on the rich during the pandemic. And efforts to hike levies on the wealthy fell apart in the US Congress in 2021, even though Democrats controlled both chambers and the White House.

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  • Elon Musk’s Twitter accused of unlawful staff firings in the UK | CNN Business

    Elon Musk’s Twitter accused of unlawful staff firings in the UK | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A law firm representing dozens of former UK Twitter employees is accusing the company of “unlawful, unfair and completely unacceptable treatment” of workers following recent mass layoffs, which the firm referred to as a “sham redundancy process.”

    In a letter sent to the company on Monday, law firm Winckworth Sherwood alleged that Twitter violated UK law by cutting off terminated employees’ access to internal systems without engaging in the required warning and consultation period. The letter also said Twitter has failed to provide information about the selection criteria used to determine the layoffs.

    The letter states that 43 affected UK employees are prepared to take the issue to an Employment Tribunal, a UK system for employees to bring legal disputes against their employers, if the company does not agree to cooperate with negotiations over the layoff process.

    The warning marks the latest challenge to Twitter from former employees affected by mass layoffs that took place after Elon Musk acquired the company in October. Twitter laid off half of its global staff in early November, and has continued to fire and push out additional employees in the months since, including through an ultimatum to work “hardcore.”

    More than 300 former US employees have filed demands for arbitration against the company, according to attorneys representing them. Twitter is also facing four proposed class action lawsuits in the United States related to the layoffs. Now, the backlash to the layoffs may be escalating in the UK.

    “Our clients have been aghast at the direction taken by their employer, whose mission they have genuinely believed in and, in a number of cases, whose growth and transformation they have supported for many years,” lawyers for Winckworth Sherwood wrote in the letter. “They remain resolved to protect their positions, professional reputations and legal claims against the Company should it now proceed to dismiss them unlawfully and unfairly.”

    Twitter, which cut much of its public relations team as part of the layoffs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.

    UK trade union Prospect, which represents more than 100 UK Twitter employees, also wrote to the company this week raising concerns about its layoff process, including claims that Twitter is “choosing not to honor” its promise that employees laid off following Musk’s acquisition would receive severance with terms no less favorable than prior to his takeover.

    Prospect also said the company has given workers “an arbitrary date to sign their rights away” in order to receive better separation terms, although negotiations over the layoffs are ongoing. (Typically, negotiations over mass layoffs by UK companies involve discussions of the reasons for terminations and how to minimize their size and impact.)

    “It is to be celebrated that in the UK it is not possible to simply fire employees en masse at will as Twitter has done in other countries,” Prospect, said in the letter. “Rest assured, Prospect will continue to lobby the Government and raise public awareness about employers who treat their workers like commodities to be discarded on a whim.”

    In the United States, there have also been concerns among Twitter employees after they began receiving their severance packages last weekend. The offers promise one month’s pay in exchange for agreeing to various terms, including a non-disparagement agreement and waiving the right to take any legal action against the company, according to Lisa Bloom, a lawyer representing dozens of former Twitter employees affected by the layoffs.

    Many were dissatisfied by the offer, according to public posts and attorneys representing ex-employees, raising concerns about the terms and saying it falls short of what the company has previously promised to provide to affected employees.

    The amount is also significantly less than provided at rivals like Facebook-parent Meta, which laid off thousands of workers around the same time and guaranteed them 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for each year they were employed at the company.

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  • Apple’s first US labor union reaches new milestone for tech industry | CNN Business

    Apple’s first US labor union reaches new milestone for tech industry | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Workers at Apple’s first unionized retail store began collectively bargaining with management on Wednesday, in a milestone moment not only for the iPhone company but for all of Big Tech.

    Apple store workers in Towson, Maryland, who made history in June by voting to form the first union at one of the tech giant’s US stores, started contract negotiations with Apple management on Wednesday morning. The worker group, based out of a mall near Baltimore, is organized with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) union.

    Risa Lieberwitz, a professor of labor and employment law at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said “there’s a lot at stake” for Apple employees at this and other stores as the negotiations commence. “Other Apple workers will be watching this,” she said. “Other workers in the tech industry will be watching this.”

    The success of the Towson Apple store workers’ unionization bid came amid a broader wave of workplace organizing. A tight labor market lent workers new leverage and the Covid-19 pandemic exposed some of the inequities faced by America’s frontline workers. New unionizing efforts emerged among workers in stores and warehouses from companies such as Amazon, Starbucks and Apple.

    The rise of worker organizing efforts has prompted a range of responses from top tech companies. Amazon has so far refused to recognize its first union and engage in negotiations after a landmark union win last spring and continues to fight its legitimacy.

    Microsoft, by contrast, has publicly embraced its first union and said this month it looks “forward to engaging in good faith negotiations as we work towards a collective bargaining agreement.”

    Apple appears to be the first of those three companies to join the negotiating table with its unionized workers, but it comes after some tensions. Apple was previously hit with a complaint from the National Labor Relations Board over allegations that it interrogated employees regarding their support for a union and selectively prohibited the placement of pro-union fliers in a break room at a New York City Apple store. (Apple pushed back at those claims in a filing with the NLRB.)

    An Apple spokesperson told CNN in a statement that the company “will engage with the union representing our team in Towson respectfully and in good faith.” The statement added that the company values the work of its retail team, and touted the company’s compensation and benefits for retail staffers.

    David DiMaria, the lead organizer of the Towson Apple store union campaign with the IAMAW, said excitement was high among the Apple store workers ahead of Wednesday’s first meeting. “First contracts are a lot of prep work, and they’ve been putting in a lot of time doing all that prep,” he told CNN. “And now it all pays off, and they actually get to go to the table and start to negotiate their contracts, so spirits are high. They’re really excited and they can’t wait to get there.”

    Issues that are top of mind for the bargaining unit include pay, working conditions, and, mostly, having a voice at work and “being a part of that decision-making process in the things that affect them on the day-to-day is really important,” according to DiMaria.

    Lieberwitz noted that negotiating a first contract for a union in the United States is “generally difficult” regardless of the industry, as many employers have historically resisted negotiating or have attempted to draw-out the process, as the longer a union goes without a contract, the longer a company will not have to agree to any of worker’s demands. An analysis of Bloomberg Law labor data found that it takes well over a year (465 days) on average for a union that won an election to ratify a first contract.

    For the workers, she said, “it will require patience, a recognition that this may take a long time, and sticking together in that sense of labor solidarity.”

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  • Greece drops some espionage charges against aid workers who rescued migrants from the sea | CNN

    Greece drops some espionage charges against aid workers who rescued migrants from the sea | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A Greek court dropped espionage charges against a group of aid workers who rescued migrants from the sea, in a move hailed by rights groups and lawmakers.

    Irish-German citizen Sean Binder and 23 other humanitarian workers had their misdemeanor charges set aside by a court on the island of Lesbos Friday, however felony charges against the group remain pending.

    The court in the island’s capital Mytilene called a halt to the prosecution of the some of the misdemeanor charges due to “procedural irregularities” in the investigation, Binder’s lawyer, Zacharias Kessas, said outside the court.

    “They recognized that there are certain procedural irregularities that made it impossible for the court to proceed on the core of the accusation, so concerning the misdemeanors, somebody can say that the accusations are dropped,” Kessas said.

    “But we cannot feel happy about this because really they just realized what we were shouting for the last four years, so there are still many things to be done in order to reach the final step which is the felonies that are still ongoing, and the investigation is still in process.”

    A statement from Amnesty International Friday said the Lesbos court “sent the indictment back to the prosecutor due to procedural shortcomings, including a failure to translate the indictment.”

    Binder and Syrian refugee Sarah Mardini were arrested in 2018 after participating in several search and rescue operations with non-profit organization Emergency Response Center International near Lesbos, an island in the Aegean Sea.

    The group had faced four charges classified by Greek judicial authorities as “misdemeanors”: espionage, disclosure of state secrets, unlawful use of radio frequencies and forgery, according to a UN Human Rights Office statement.

    The court’s move was welcome by rights group and politicians.

    Lawmakers from the European Union said it was “a step toward justice.”

    The spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Liz Throssell, welcomed the court’s recommendation to drop some of the charges but reiterated the UN’s call “for all charges against all defendants to be dropped.”

    Binder’s elected representative, MEP Grace O’Sullivan, said the prosecution “essentially was full of holes” in a video posted to Twitter.

    “Good news from Greece. We’ve just heard that Sean Binder and the other search and rescue humanitarian workers have had their charges dropped,” she said.

    While the misdemeanor charges were dropped on Friday, an investigation into felony charges against the humanitarian workers remains pending, Amnesty International said in a statement.

    The aid workers stand accused of assisting smuggling networks, being members of a criminal organization, and money laundering – charges that could result in up to 25 years in prison if they are found guilty, according to a European Parliament report published in June 2021.

    Referring to the felony charges that remain pending, O’Sullivan said while they didn’t know how long that would take, “today is actually a step in the right direction. A step towards justice.”

    “All we want is justice. We want this to go to trial and it doesn’t seem like this will happen anytime soon given what happened today,” Binder said outside the courthouse.

    “At the same time, we have been so lucky to have so much support internationally, everywhere, and I think that has forced the prosecution of this court to at least recognize the mistakes made and at least to some extent there has been less injustice.”

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  • Tim Cook agrees to a massive pay cut | CNN Business

    Tim Cook agrees to a massive pay cut | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    Apple CEO Tim Cook has agreed to cut his pay this year after shareholders rebelled.

    The world’s largest tech company said it would reduce Cook’s target pay package to $49 million, 40% lower than his target pay for 2022 and about half Cook’s $99.4 million total compensation that he was granted last year.

    The vast majority of Cook’s 2022 compensation — about 75% — was tied up in company shares, with half of that dependent on share price performance.

    But shareholders voted against Cook’s pay package after Apple’s stock fell nearly 27% last year. The vote is nonbinding, but the board’s compensation committee said it took the vote into consideration.

    “The compensation committee balanced shareholder feedback, Apple’s exceptional performance, and a recommendation from Mr. Cook to adjust his compensation in light of the feedback received,” the company said in its annual proxy statement released Thursday.

    This year, the executive’s share award target has been cut to $40 million. About $30 million, or three-quarters, of that is linked to share price performance.

    Cook’s base salary of $3 million will stay the same, the company said, as well as a $6 million bonus.

    The board said it believes Cook’s new pay package is “responsive to shareholder feedback, while continuing both to align pay with performance and to recognize Mr. Cook’s outstanding leadership.”

    The tech boss, who has headed up Apple since 2011, is estimated to have a personal wealth of $1.7 billion, according to Forbes.

    Apple’s share price, like other tech companies, plunged last year as coronavirus lockdowns shuttered some of its factories in China. Supply chain bottlenecks and fears that a global economic slowdown would crimp demand also dragged down its stock.

    In January last year, the tech giant became the first publicly traded company to notch a $3 trillion market capitalization, yet has has shed nearly $1 billion of that value since.

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  • New York nurses strike ends after tentative deal reached with hospitals | CNN Business

    New York nurses strike ends after tentative deal reached with hospitals | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A nurses strike at two private New York City hospital systems has come to an end after 7,000 nurses spent three days on the picket line.

    The New York State Nurses Association union reached tentative deals with Mount Sinai Health System and Montefiore Health System, which operates three hospitals in the Bronx that had been struck. The nurses had been arguing that immense staffing shortages have caused widespread burnout, hindering their ability to properly care for their patients.

    The union said the deal will provide enforceable “safe staffing ratios” for all inpatient units at Mount Sinai and Montefiore, “so that there will always be enough nurses at the bedside to provide safe patient care, not just on paper.” At Montefiore, the hospital agreed to financial penalties for failing to comply with agreed-upon staffing levels in all units.

    Montefiore said the agreement also includes 170 new nursing positions, a 19% increase in pay over the three year life of the contract, lifetime health coverage for eligible retirees and adding “significantly more nurses” in the ER.

    The deals were announced in the early hours Thursday morning — at 3 a.m. ET for Montefiore and about 30 minutes later at Mount Sinai. The nurses returned to the job for the 7 a.m. ET shift Thursday, and Montefiore Medical Center said all surgeries and procedures and outpatient appointments for Thursday and after will proceed as scheduled.

    Nurses will need to vote to approve the deal before it is finalized. But the union said the tentative deal will help put more nurses to work and allow patients to receive better care.

    “Through our unity and by putting it all on the line, we won enforceable safe staffing ratios at both Montefiore and Mount Sinai where nurses went on strike for patient care,” the nurses union said in a statement. “Today, we can return to work with our heads held high, knowing that our victory means safer care for our patients and more sustainable jobs for our profession.”

    Mount Sinai called the agreement “fair and responsible.”

    “Our proposed agreement is similar to those between NYSNA and eight other New York City hospitals,” Mount Sinai said in a statement. “It is fair and responsible, and it puts patients first.”

    “From the outset, we came to the table committed to bargaining in good faith and addressing the issues that were priorities for our nursing staff,” Montefiore said in a statement. “We know this strike impacted everyone – not just our nurses – and we were committed to coming to a resolution as soon as possible to minimize disruption to patient care.”

    The hospitals had stayed open during the three-day strike, using higher-cost temporary nursing services to provide care, and transferring other employees to take care of non-medical nursing duties. They had also diverted and transferred some patients to other hospitals and postponed some elective procedures.

    The striking nurses have said they are working long hours in unsafe conditions without enough pay – a refrain echoed by several other nurses strikes across the country over the past year. They said the hours and the stress of having too many patients to care for is driving away nurses and creating a worsening crisis in staffing and patient care.

    The union representing the nurses had reached tentative agreements offering the same 19% pay hikes at other New York hospitals, avoiding strikes by about 9,000 other nurses spread across seven hospitals in the city. But the nurses at the hospitals that went on strike said the pay raises weren’t the main problem, that the more severe staffing shortages at Mount Sinai and Montefiore needed to be addressed before a deal could be reached.

    Both hospitals had criticized the union for going on strike rather than accepting offers they described as similar to those the union accepted at other hospitals in the city.

    – CNN’s Chris Isidore contributed to this report

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  • Silicon Valley layoffs go from bad to worse | CNN Business

    Silicon Valley layoffs go from bad to worse | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Shortly before Thanksgiving, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy confirmed rumors that layoffs had begun in multiple departments at the e-commerce giant and said it would review staffing needs into the new year.

    On Wednesday, Jassy provided a sobering update on that review: Amazon is cutting more than 18,000 jobs, nearly double the 10,000 that had previously been reported and marking the highest absolute number of layoffs of any tech company in the recent downturn.

    At Amazon and other tech companies, the second half of last year was marked by hiring freezes, layoffs and other cost-cutting measures at a number of household names in Silicon Valley. But if 2022 was the year the good times ended for these tech companies, 2023 is already shaping up to be a year when people at those companies brace for how much worse things can get.

    On the same day Amazon announced layoffs, cloud-computing company Salesforce said it was axing about 10% of its staff – a figure that easily amounts to thousands of workers – and video-sharing outlet Vimeo said it was cutting 11% of its workforce. The following day, digital fashion platform Stitch Fix said it planned to cut 20% of its salaried staff, after having cut 15% of its salaried staff last year.

    The continued fallout in the industry comes as tech firms grapple with a seemingly perfect storm of factors. After initially seeing a boom in demand for digital services amid the onset of the pandemic, many companies aggressively hired. Then came a whiplash in demand as Covid-19 restrictions receded and people returned to their offline lives. Rising interest rates also dried up the easy money tech companies relied on to fuel big bets on future innovations, and cut into their sky-high valuations.

    Heading into 2023, recession fears and economic uncertainties are still weighing heavily on consumers and policymakers’ minds, and interest rate hikes are expected to continue. Beyond that, the growing number of layoffs may also give certain tech companies some cover to take more severe steps to trim costs now than they may have otherwise done.

    While there have been some layoffs recently in the consumer goods sector and hints of more to come elsewhere, the situation in Silicon Valley remains in stark contrast to the economy as a whole.

    The Labor Department’s latest employment report on Friday pointed to a year of extraordinary job growth in 2022, marking the second-best year for the labor market in records that go back to 1939. Meanwhile, a separate report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found tech layoffs were up 649% in 2022 compared to the previous year, versus just a 13% uptick in job cuts in the overall economy during the same period.

    In his note to employees this month, Jassy chalked up the need for significant cost cutting at Amazon to “the uncertain economy and that we’ve hired rapidly over the last several years.” Others across the industry have echoed those points, with varying degrees of atonement.

    In a series of apologies that are beginning to sound the same, Silicon Valley business leaders from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to Salesforce’ Marc Benioff have blamed the wave of job cuts on their own misreading of how pandemic-fueled demand for tech products would play out.

    Benioff began a memo to the employees of Salesforce last week by invoking, as he so often does, the Hawaiian word for family. “As one ‘Ohana,” he wrote, “we have never been more mission-critical to our customers.” But the economic environment was “challenging,” Benioff wrote. “With this in mind, we’ve made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 10 percent, mostly over the coming weeks.”

    “As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that,” Benioff went on to say. Like other tech leaders, however, it’s unclear if Benioff will face any repercussions to his title or compensation.

    Patricia Campos-Medina, the executive director of the Worker Institute at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, slammed this spate of mea culpas as “empty apologies” to the workers now paying for their miscalculations.

    While there will be a lot of near-term uncertainty for these tech workers, as well “a big economic hit on their lives,” Campos-Medina added, “I do think that this is a very skilled workforce that will find a way to engage back in the economy.” She predicts many of the laid-off tech workers will likely be able to find jobs and “we will see more stability in the mid-to-long term.”

    But the end may still not be in sight. Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities said last week that the Salesforce and Amazon layoffs “add to the trend we expect to continue in 2023 as the tech sector adjusts to a softer demand environment.” The industry is now being forced to cut costs after “spending money like 1980’s Rock Stars to keep up with demand,” he added.

    And despite the robust overall labor market, there are growing concerns that tech layoffs could spread elsewhere.

    “I think we’re seeing an inflection point; the rate of jobs growth is slowing and a lot of these tech layoffs that we’re hearing about, I think are going to start materializing across the broader economy by the end of the first quarter,” John Leer, chief economist at Morning Consult told CNN’s Chief Business Correspondent Christine Romans in an interview Friday.

    In that sense, at least, Silicon Valley may once again be ahead of the curve, but not in the way it wants.

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  • This company will make employees pay a hefty fine if they bother colleagues on vacation | CNN Business

    This company will make employees pay a hefty fine if they bother colleagues on vacation | CNN Business

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    New Delhi
    CNN
     — 

    Getting urgent work emails from colleagues even during vacation? This is a common occurrence for many white-collar workers, especially in India where employees feel overworked and underpaid compared to their global peers, according to several studies over the years.

    But one Mumbai-based firm has come up with a novel way to fix this problem.

    Dream11, a fantasy gaming platform, will fine its employees 100,000 rupees ($1,200) if they contact colleagues with “work-related calls or messages” during their time off.

    This is part of the company’s efforts to ensure that its employees get to “switch off and enjoy a healthy work-life balance,” according to a statement shared by Dream11 with CNN.

    Under the policy, called Unplug, employees log off from all office work for seven days in a year.

    “Individuals who have opted for an unplugged leave are logged out of … emails, Slack and WhatsApp groups,” the statement added.

    The spokesperson did not share when the policy was first introduced. According to a December interview with CNBC, the company’s co-founders said the policy has been effective so far.

    Founded in 2008, Dream11 has more than 1,000 employees, is valued at $8 billion and includes Tiger Global and Tencent among its investors, according to to data platform Tracxn.

    Not taking a break can be dangerous for health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), working long hours is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year through stroke and heart disease.

    In a global analysis of the link between loss of life, health and working long hours, WHO and the International Labour Organization estimated that in 2016, some 745,000 people died as a result of having worked at least 55 hours a week.

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  • What to expect at work this year | CNN Business

    What to expect at work this year | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The pandemic has transformed work over the past three years in ways few expected. It normalized remote work, created a shortage of critical workers and drove home to organizations that employees’ mental health and need for a sane work-life balance are critical to retention and engagement.

    So what does 2023 likely hold for you at your job, regardless of your industry?

    There are welcome and unwelcome developments on tap, along with some potentially confusing ones, too.

    Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

    Regardless of whether the United States slips into a recession, there will be more widespread job cuts than what we’ve seen happening so far in industries like tech, media and finance.

    “We’re starting to see more layoffs pick up in other industries. I do anticipate rising layoffs in most sectors,” said Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

    But that shouldn’t be surprising, given that layoffs in 2021 and 2022 were at their lowest levels since 1993.

    That said, the job market has cooled a bit — but it’s still running hot, with a high level of job openings per job seeker.

    The overall slowdown in hiring is likely to continue, with employers more likely to reinstate performance-improvement plans for underperforming employees and performance-related layoffs, Challenger predicts.

    And, of course, should there be a real recession, the layoffs would cut much deeper.

    While there is still tension between executives and employees about how many days people should be physically present at work, hybrid work and work flexibility isn’t going away.

    “Today, the majority of employers (66%) are permitting hybrid working and an additional 9% give employees the option to work from home every day,” according to benefits consulting firm Mercer.

    Nevertheless, this may be the year employers start to actually enforce their minimum-days-in-the-office mandates, Challenger said.

    Just this week, for example, Disney CEO Bob Iger ordered employees to return to corporate offices four days a week beginning March 1.

    Front-line employees like retail workers, health care aides and security guards, whose jobs require them always to be on site, may be offered other forms of flexibility, said Emily Rose McRae, senior director of research at Gartner, a workplace consulting firm.

    That could include being given a regular schedule, as opposed to working “on demand,” where they don’t know their schedule in advance, McRae said. It also could mean getting more paid leave, or that front-line workers could opt out of working certain shifts or certain days.

    McRae said she sees more employers offering what she calls “proactive rest” options this year.

    The idea is to actively help people recover before becoming fully depleted not only by work, but by the upending of their lives from the pandemic and the social and political upheaval of the past few years.

    “The big shift is in recognizing our work force is in trouble,” McRae said.

    Proactive rest can take many forms. Some employers may offer days off — whether it’s a whole week or just one day a week for a set period of time. Or it could simply mean branding a given workday as a no-meeting day.

    Information technology professionals will continue to win the day at work when it comes to who gets the biggest raises and bonuses.

    “Most organizations are anticipating the talent market to remain as competitive, or more competitive, at least in the first half of this year,” said Tony Guadagni, a senior principal in Gartner’s HR practice. “They will do what they have to to attract that critical talent.”

    Employers’ projected increases for this year in terms of merit increases (3.9%) and total pay (4.3%) are the highest they’ve been in 15 years, according to workplace consulting firm Mercer. But given that inflation is still pacing higher than those levels, you may not feel the raise you get is making a huge difference in what you can afford — unless your skills are in high demand.

    It used to be difficult to figure out whether you were being paid competitively for your talents, since companies weren’t open about what they paid others and colleagues wouldn’t discuss their pay.

    But now that New York City, the state of California, and a handful of other states and localities have implemented pay transparency rules for job postings, it will be easier in 2023 to confirm you’re being paid fairly relative to your teammates, and to determine the salary range on offer if you’re looking for a new job.

    Still, these laws are very new, and companies have not been uniform in how they’re handling the new rules. Some recent job postings, for instance, have advertised unhelpfully wide pay ranges — think $50,000 to $200,000.

    Beyond the big benefits employers typically offer full-time staffers (e.g., subsidized health insurance, a 401(k) match, etc.), they also offer a range of secondary benefits or perks, such as tuition reimbursement, supplemental life insurance, a stipend for home office supplies or financial coaching.

    Gartner and Mercer are seeing more companies let employees decide how best to spend these perk dollars by letting them direct a fixed amount of money across the secondary benefits that are most important to them.

    Your organization may engage in “quiet hiring” this year, if it hasn’t already.

    It’s a misleading term, in that it is neither quiet nor does it involve actual hiring.

    Rather, your company will want to repurpose existing employees — possibly you, if you have relevant skills — for the employer’s highest priority projects this year.

    That could be a great opportunity if you hate being limited to the same tasks of your official job, or if you want to develop new skills and work with new people in your company.

    It also could be highly frustrating, especially if a company is simply putting everyone on rotation to make sure understaffed, critical tasks get done by anyone with the adequate skills to do so.

    Either way, “quiet hiring” may offer an initial taste of a broader trend likely to unfold over the next several years that could spell the end of “jobs” — and specifically job descriptions as we know them, according to consulting firm Deloitte.

    That’s because many employers want to transition away from being a jobs-based organization to a skills-based one so they can quickly adapt to change, address talent shortages and provide their workforce with opportunities to develop professionally, said Arthur Mazor, a principal global leader at Deloitte’s Human Capital Practice.

    So instead of viewing you as a holder of Job X, your company is likely to view you as a person with an array of skills that can be deployed in many ways.

    Early adopters this year can be found across various industries, Mazor said — from software makers to auto manufacturers to financial services to health care.

    Even at companies that have not formalized a shift to being a skills-based organization, the change is happening anyway. Roughly 70% of workers say they’re already doing work outside of their job, according to Deloitte.

    One recent example, cited in Deloitte’s latest work report, comes from M&T Bank, a leading Small Business Administration lender. Its chief talent officer told the firm, “when the Paycheck Protection Program was rolled out during the pandemic, we had to stop thinking about jobs and start thinking about skills. … By focusing on skills versus jobs — and rapidly mobilizing talent in an agile way — we outperformed our peers.”

    It’s too early to determine exactly how this will play out for employees, in terms of incentives offered for switching to a new project or pinch-hitting for another department, how an employee’s work will be assessed and rewarded, and how much say they will get in the projects assigned.

    But done right, Mazor said, employees should have the opportunity to share on an internal database their skills and what areas they wish to develop before being matched with a new assignment.

    “This isn’t a clandestine effort. It involves worker input.”

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  • Disney names Nike executive Mark Parker as new chairman | CNN Business

    Disney names Nike executive Mark Parker as new chairman | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The Walt Disney Company has named Nike executive chairman Mark Parker as its new board chair, replacing longtime director Susan Arnold, whose term limit is expiring.

    Parker, a Disney board member since 2016, takes over Disney’s board at a time of transition for America’s largest media company. Bob Iger recently returned as CEO after a brief hiatus.

    “Mark Parker’s vision, incredible depth of experience and wise counsel have been invaluable to Disney, and I look forward to continuing working with him in his new role, along with our other directors, as we chart the future course for this amazing company,” said Iger in a statement. “On behalf of my fellow Board members and the entire Disney management team, I also want to thank Susan for her superb leadership as Chairman and for her tireless work over the past 15 years as an exemplary steward of the Disney brand.”

    In 2019, Parker stepped down as Nike’s CEO after 13 years at the helm. Disney said among Parker’s qualifications as board chair is that he navigated a successful CEO transition at Nike. Disney announced Wednesday the formation of a CEO succession committee to replace Iger, who said in November he would return as chief executive for only a two-year stint.

    “It is the top priority of mine and the Board’s to identify and prepare a successful CEO successor, and that process has already begun,” Parker said in a statement Wednesday.

    Iger’s return shocked the media industry. Disney ousted Bob Chapek, who replaced Iger in 2020 as CEO.

    Among the problems facing Disney: Its streaming business lost $1.5 billion in the fourth quarter. And Disney’s media networks are struggling as cord cutting accelerates and once lucrative outlets like ESPN lose viewership. Dan Loeb, the activist investor and Third Point CEO, made headlines in August when he suggested “a strong case can be made that the ESPN business should be spun off to shareholders with an appropriate debt load.”

    Another activist shareholder group, Trian Partners, nominated its leader Nelson Peltz as a director. Disney said Wednesday it will work with Peltz but opposed his appointment to the board.

    “Mr. Iger’s mandate is to use his two-year term and depth of experience in the industry to adapt the business model for the shifting media landscape, rebalancing investment with revenue opportunity while bringing a renewed focus on the creative talent that has made The Walt Disney Company the envy of the industry,” the company said in its opposition of Peltz.

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