If ever you’ve been swept up in a mass layoff, among the many unwelcome tasks on your new to-do list is how and when to tell people you lost your job.
Often, the go-to place to alert your professional network has been social media like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and others.
But the way you deliver the message matters if your goal is to set yourself up well for new opportunities.
Take a little time before posting: You don’t need to go public right away.
“Take time to digest the fact that you no longer have a job,” said career coach Aneri Desai, who works primarily with immigrants. “Take your time to understand your situation.”
If you’re upset, tell your partner, your friend or your pillow. Just don’t post your fury or bitterness online.
Consider a “soft” announcement first: If you’re not sure yet what you’re going to do — or even whether you want to stay in the same career — you can put up an initial “soft” post just to let people know your job was eliminated, Desai noted. It’s okay to say “Not sure yet what my next move will be, but stay tuned. I will reach out when I’m clearer on next steps.”
This can be an especially useful move if your company’s layoffs are making headlines and you’re being bombarded with messages from friends and colleagues asking if you were affected.
Keep it short: Whether you’ve worked at a place for five years or 25 years, you could probably write a book about your experiences.
But please don’t. Shorter is best — a few paragraphs at most. “Don’t use all the characters you can. You want people to read it,” said career coach Marlo Lyons, author of “Wanted: A New Career.”
Gratitude is good, but also focus on your accomplishments: If genuine, express appreciation for your mentors and colleagues, and the opportunities you had at your job. But don’t spend most of your post thanking people, Desai said.
“So many people put the spotlight on ‘how lucky I was to work with this team’ but they miss out on giving credit to themselves,” Desai said. “Toot your horn.”
By that, she means it’s important to note some of the big ways you added value to your company: for example, howyou automated and expedited the claims process at your employer, making the experience easier and faster for the 50,000 clients the company served last year.
Be specific about what you want and your skills: When you are ready to look for a new job and receive help from your network or hear from recruiters, your post should be “very explicit,” Lyons said.
Detail the hard and soft skills you will bring to a new employer. Specify which field or set of related fields you want to be in ( like sales, account management, business development); what role titles you’re interested in (e.g., vice president-level positions, senior manager); whether you’d prefer to work remotely or hybrid;and any other details that will help people help you.
Extend the reach of your post: You want as many people to see your post as possible.
You also might tag people whom you are thanking in your post. But this may not be the right move for everyone. If there’s a risk you’ll leave out someone who has been especially helpful to you — or conversely, if you’re intentionally not tagging your current boss — “that may leave a negative impression,” Lyons said. In that case, better to reach out privately to the individuals you want to thank and instead invite anyone reading your post to “please comment for reach,” she suggested.
Keep it upbeat: If you’re financially freaked out, don’t say so, Lyons said.
You don’t want to give the impression that you’ll take the first job that comes alone.
“Companies want you to want them — not just for you to take the job because you have to,” Lyons said. “It’s okay to say you’d like a job sooner rather than later. But be careful not to appear desperate.”
Be consistent across platforms: Chances are you may announce your layoff on more than one social platform. So be consistent in your message. You don’t want to put out a very professional post on, say, LinkedIn but then launch an angry tweetstorm on Twitter.
“[Before] someone goes to hire you,” Lyons said, “they will read your posts.”
President Joe Biden has gone on the attack over Social Security and Medicare.
In speeches and tweets this week, Biden and his White House have singled out particular Republican senators – notably including Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin – over proposals from those senators that could affect the retirement and health care programs.
The Republican senators have responded forcefully, accusing Biden of deceiving the public about where they stand. Here is a fact-check of the exchanges.
Biden and his White House targeted Lee on Wednesday over a video clip of Lee saying, “I’m here right now to tell you one thing that you probably have never heard from a politician. It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.” The clip has gone viral on Twitter this week; a second viral clip features Lee saying moments later, “Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort and need to be pulled up.”
The videos are authentic, though Biden didn’t tell his Wednesday speech audience in Wisconsin they are from more than 12 years ago – an event in 2010, when Lee was running for the Senate but before he was first elected. And as Lee noted in Wednesday tweets responding to Biden, Biden didn’t mention that Lee added at the same 2010 event that current Medicare beneficiaries should have their benefits “left untouched” and that “the next layer beneath them, those who will retire in the next few years, also probably have to be held harmless.”
Still, while Biden could have included more context, he was accurate in saying Lee had called for Social Security to be phased out.
And while Lee said in a tweeted statement on Wednesday that, during his 12 years as a senator, he has not called for “abolishing” Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits, only for “solutions to improve those programs and move them toward solvency,” he has supported benefit cuts. For example, he has endorsed various proposals over the years to raise the Social Security retirement age.
Since last year, Biden has criticized Scott over particular components of what Scott calls his “12 Point Plan to Rescue America.”
In the State of the Union address on Tuesday and in speeches on Wednesday and Thursday, the president referred to a part of Scott’s plan that says, “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” Biden correctly asserted that “all federal legislation” would include Social Security and Medicare, which do not currently require congressional re-approval.
Scott responded by accusing Biden of being dishonest and confused. Scott argued on Twitter on Wednesday that while his plan does say that “all” federal legislation should sunset in five years and become subject to a new vote by Congress, “This is clearly & obviously an idea aimed at dealing with ALL the crazy new laws our Congress has been passing of late.”
But the plan itself doesn’t say that.
The plan’s official text, which remains online on a dedicated website, says “all federal legislation,” period, should be sunset in five years – not all recent legislation, all crazy legislation or all legislation except for the laws that created Social Security and Medicare. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected Scott’s plan last year, McConnell too said that the plan “sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.”
Last year, Biden sometimes overstated the support for Scott’s sunset proposal among congressional Republicans, which appears very limited. Biden has been more precise in his speeches this week, attributing the proposal to Scott himself or accurately saying in the State of the Union that “some” Republicans – “I’m not saying it’s a majority” – support it.
Biden may have created an inaccurate impression, however, by mentioning the sunset proposal during the section of the State of the Union in which he discussed the battle over the debt ceiling. There is no indication that House Republicans are pushing this proposal as part of the current debt ceiling negotiations with the Biden administration, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has, more generally, said cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table” in these negotiations.
Scott, in turn, has tossed a false claim into the debate with Biden this week by repeatedly accusing the president of having cut billions from Medicare in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. The Inflation Reduction Act did not cut Medicare benefits; rather, it allowed the government and seniors to spend less money to buy prescription drugs – and, in fact, simultaneously made Medicare benefits more generous to seniors. The claim of a Medicare cut was repeatedly debunked last year, when Scott and a Republican campaign organization he chaired used it during the midterm elections.
On Friday afternoon, the day after McConnell told a Kentucky radio station that Scott’s proposal will be a “challenge” for Scott’s own 2024 re-election campaign in a state with a large population of seniors, Scott announced he is introducing a new bill that would make it more difficult for Congress to make any cuts to Social Security and Medicare and that would send the Inflation Reduction Act’s $80 billion in Internal Revenue Service funding to Social Security and Medicare instead.
This week and in numerous previous speeches, Biden has castigated Johnson for saying last year that Medicare and Social Security should be treated as discretionary spending, which Congress has to approve every year, rather than as permanent entitlements.
Biden has accurately cited Johnson’s remarks this week. Here’s what Johnson told a Green Bay radio show in August: “We’ve got to turn everything into discretionary spending, so it’s all evaluated, so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be going bankrupt. Because, again, as long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt.” When Johnson faced criticism for those remarks at the time, he stood by them and said that was his consistent longtime position.
Johnson, however, claimed Wednesday that Biden was “lying” when the president discussed Johnson’s comments shortly after saying that some Republicans want to “cut” Social Security. Johnson has repeatedly said that his proposal to require annual approval for Social Security spending, and to “fix” and “save” Social Security in light of its poor fiscal shape at present, does not mean that he wants to put the programs on the “chopping block” or even to “cut” it.
“The Democrats have been accusing me, since the first time I ran for office, of wanting to end Social Security, wanting to cut it, wanting to gut it, wanting to – I’ve never said that. I’ve always been consistent: I want to save it,” he said in a radio interview this week.
It’s impossible to definitively fact-check this particular dispute without Johnson specifying how he wants to “fix” and “save” the program. His office did not respond to a CNN request for comment.
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates noted in an email to reporters on Thursday that, though Johnson accused Biden this week of lying about his stance on Social Security, Johnson also said in interviews this week that Social Security is a “legal Ponzi scheme” and that “Social Security might be in a more stable position for younger workers” if the government had proceeded with Republican President George W. Bush’s controversial and eventually abandoned proposal in the mid-2000s to allow workers born after 1949 to divert a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts in which they could buy into the stock market and make other investments.
Russia will cut crude oil production by half a million barrels per day starting in March, a little over two months after the world’s major economies imposed a price cap on the country’s seaborne exports.
“We will not sell oil to those who directly or indirectly adhere to the principles of the price ceiling,” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said in a statement. “In relation to this, Russia will voluntarily reduce production by 500,000 barrels per day in March. This will contribute to the restoration of market relations.”
The cut is equivalent to about 5% of Russian oil output.
Futures prices for Brent crude, the global benchmark, jumped 2.7% Friday to $86 a barrel as traders anticipated a tightening in global supply. US oil gained 1% to trade at $79 a barrel.
In June last year, the European Union agreed to phase out all seaborne imports of Russian crude oil within the following six months as part of unprecedented Western sanctions aimed at reducing Moscow’s ability to fund its war in Ukraine.
In a move aimed at further tightening the screws, G7 countries and the European Union agreed in December to cap the price at which Western brokers, insurers and shippers can trade Russia’s seaborne oilfor markets elsewhere at $60 a barrel. Earlier this month, EU countries also banned imports of Russia’s diesel and refined oil imports.
Novak warned that the crude oil price cap could lead to “a decrease in investment in the oil sector and, accordingly, an oil shortage.”
Neil Crosby, a senior analyst at oil data firm OilX, told CNN that a 500,000 barrel-a-day cut is not the “worst-case scenario” and is still a smaller hit to Russian production than most analysts were expecting last year.
“But it sets a precedent for further cuts ahead if necessary or desired by Russian authorities,” Crosby said, adding that Moscow could be anticipating difficulty in finding enough demand for its crude.
Russian Urals crude traded at a discount to Brent crude of $28 a barrel on Friday. Over the past few months, India and China have snapped up cheap oil from Moscow, just as the EU — once Russia’s biggest customer for crude — has ended all imports.
“Russia currently has a limited pool of buyers for its crudes and has likely found a ceiling to its export sales in the near term, primarily to China and India,” said Alan Gelder, vice president of refining, chemicals and oil markets at Wood Mackenzie.
According to Reuters, Russia took the decision to reduce its output without consulting the OPEC+ group of producers, which includes Saudi Arabia. OPEC+ decided in October to cut output by 2 million barrels per day and has not adjusted that stance since.
A potential drop in global oilsupply could come at a tricky time. China’s swift reopening of its economy in December after almost three years of strict coronavirus restrictions has pushed up estimates for global oil demand.
Last month, the International Energy Agency said it expected global demand to surge by 1.9 million barrels per day to reach an all-time high of 101.7 million barrels per day, with China accounting for nearly half of the increase.
Western sanctions — added to the grinding cost of war — areweighing on Russia’s economy. The country’s budget deficit ballooned to $45 billion last year, or 2.3% of its gross domestic product.
But Russia’s central bank held its main interest rate at 7.5% Friday, saying that economic activity was better than expected and that inflation was likely to come down this year.
Rivian Automotive is laying off 6% of its workforce in an effort to cut costs as the EV maker, already grappling with falling cash reserves and a weak economy, braces for an industry-wide price war.
The company is focusing resources on ramping up vehicle production and reaching profitability, Chief Executive R.J. Scaringe said in an email to employees on Wednesday announcing the job cuts. Reuters obtained a copy of the email.
Layoffs at Rivian come amid falling EV prices kicked off by cuts made recently by Elon Musk-led Tesla
(TSLA) and Ford Motor Co.
The price cuts by Tesla and Ford are expected to hurt EV upstarts such as Rivian, Lucid Group and British startup Arrival, which Monday said it would lay off half its staff.
Despite a blockbuster initial public offering in November 2021, Rivian’s shares have fallen nearly 90% from their peak that month to Tuesday’s close. Rivian’s stock was trading down 4% on Nasdaq on Wednesday, paring some losses after news of the job cuts.
“We must focus our resources on ramp and our path to profitability,” Scaringe said in the email, in which he apologized to employees for the necessity of the cuts.
A Rivian spokesman confirmed the email was sent, but declined further comment.
“They’re bleeding cash and would like to grow at a much faster rate, but they continue to struggle with their EV production ramp and have been unable to meaningfully drive down unit costs,” CFRA Research analyst Garrett Nelson said. “We think that is what’s behind this decision.”
Rivian is focusing on ramping up production of its R1 trucks and EDV delivery vans for top shareholder Amazon.com and launching its R2 platform, he said. “The changes we are announcing today reflect this focused roadmap.”
Irvine, California-based Rivian, which has about 14,000 employees, will let go of about 840 staff in a move that will not affect manufacturing operations at its plant in Normal, Illinois.
Rivian, which has been losing money on every vehicle it builds, narrowly missed its full-year production target of 25,000 vehicles last year as it dealt with supply-chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It had previously halved that target.
To further conserve its cash, Rivian late last year shelved plans to build delivery vans in Europe with Mercedes. Rivian had earlier pushed back by a year to 2026 the planned launch of a smaller R2 vehicle family at the $5 billion plant it is building in Georgia.
Last July, Rivian, which is scheduled to report fourth-quarter results on Feb. 28, laid off staff and suspended some programs as part of a broader restructuring.
The company has a market valuation of $17.8 billion. Its cash and cash equivalents stood at $13.27 billion as of Sept. 30, 2022, down from over $18 billion a year earlier.
The US economy added an astonishing 517,000 jobs in January, showing that the labor market isn’t ready to cool down just yet.
The unemployment rate fellto 3.4% from 3.5%, hitting a level not seen since May 1969 — two months before Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon — according to new data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Economists were expecting 185,000 jobs would be added last month, based on consensus estimates on Refinitiv.
“With 517,000 new jobs added in January 2023 and the unemployment rate at 3.4%, this is a blockbuster report demonstrating that the labor market is more like a bullet train,” Becky Frankiewicz, president and chief commercial officer of ManpowerGroup, said Friday.
The shockingly strong monthly jobs gain — a number that several economists cautioned was influenced by seasonal factors and is subject to future revisions — bucks a trend of five consecutive months of moderating job growth during the latter half of 2022.
“The blowout 517,000 increase in total employment was almost certainly a function of seasonal noise and traditional churn in early-year job and wage environment and exaggerates what is already a robust trend in hiring,” Joe Brusuelas, principal and chief economist with RSM US, said in a statement.
Nonetheless the juggernaut of a report may cause complications for the Federal Reserve, which has been trying to tame high inflation with higher interest rates, said Seema Shah, chief global strategist of Principal Asset Management.
“Is [Fed Chair Jerome] Powell now wondering why he didn’t push back on the loosening in financial conditions?” Shah said in a statement. “It’s difficult to see how wage pressures can possibly soften sufficiently when jobs growth is as strong as this, and it’s even more difficult to see the Fed stop raising rates and entertain ideas of rate cuts when there is such explosive economic news coming in.”
“The market is going to go through a roller coaster ride as it tries to decide if this is good or bad news. For now, though, looks like the US economy is doing absolutely fine,” she said.
Still, the report also showed that wage growth moderated on an annual basis: Average hourly earnings fell 0.4 percentage points to 4.4% year over year. Monthly wage gains held steady at 0.3%.
“It’s quite remarkable to see such a realignment of the employment picture coinciding with an easing of wage pressure,” Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst for Bankrate, said in an interview. “I think that might be part of this report that could help keep blood pressures down among Federal Reserve officials in the near term.”
Additionally, average weekly hours jumped to 34.7 hours from 34.3, and employment in temporary help services rebounded after two months of declines, indicating further demand for labor, noted Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.
The report also showed an increase in the closely watched labor force participation rate to 62.4% from 62.3%. However, the increase in the share of people working or looking to work was a function of the BLS’ annual benchmark revisions to its household survey, one of two surveys that factor in to the monthly jobs report, noted PNC chief economist Gus Faucher.
Had it not been for the revisions, that number would have been unchanged at 62.3%, he added.
“The labor market is structurally tighter post-pandemic,” he said.
Every January, the BLS makes revisions on its employment data to reflect updated population estimates and other factors.
“On net, you saw stronger hiring in 2022 than what was initially reported,” said Sarah House, chief economist with Wells Fargo, told CNN.
Average monthly job growth in 2022 was revised up from an average of 375,000 per month to 401,000, she said.
Seasonality questions aside, other trends do align to support a strong January 2023 jobs report, Bankrate’s Hamrick said.
“When you have a number of things lining up, almost like a crime scene investigation, it tends to lend some credibility to that question of believability,” he said of the surprising half-a-million-plus job gains. “What are the things that are lining up? The continued remarkably low level of jobless claims, the rise in job openings, the increase in labor force participation.”
The gains were also widespread across industries, with job growth led by leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, and health care, according to the BLS report.
Industries that shed jobs last month included motor vehicles and parts (down 6,500 jobs), utilities (down 700 jobs) and information (down 5,000 jobs).
In recent months, mass layoff announcements — especially from Big Tech — had spurred concern that the cutbacks were a harbinger of broader cutbacks to come.
That doesn’t appear to be the case, considering jobless claims have remained historically low, job openings haven’t slipped and job gains remain strong, said Giacomo Santangelo, economist at Monster.
“The news is talking about big names laying off, but we don’t really hear what happens at small firms with less than 200 employees,” he said. “What we’re seeing at Monster is a lot of firms, a majority of firms, are looking to hire.”
The glut of available jobs — there are 1.9 open positions for every one job seeker — coupled with skills that are in high demand mean that workers are likely finding jobs quickly, he said. Additionally, those laid off by large technology firms likely received generous severance packages, so not all are filing for unemployment benefits.
Friday’s report showed that the median duration of unemployment was 9.1 weeks, just a smidge above the pre-pandemic level of 8.9 weeks in February 2020.
A week that has been chock-full of economic data will be capped off Friday with the first US jobs report of 2023.
Economists estimate that 185,000 positions were likely added in January, according to Refinitiv.
That would be a considerable drop from the 504,000 jobs added in January 2022 and the 520,000 added in January 2021. It also would nearly match the 183,000 monthly average between 2010 and 2019, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.
And yet, while the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate hikes have helped make a dent in inflation and resulted in slower economic activity without stark rises in unemployment, the full effects have yet to come, Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned Wednesday.
“I would say it is a good thing the disinflation we have seen so far has not come at the expense of a weaker labor market,” Powell said in a news conference following the Fed’s first monetary policymaking meeting of the year. “But I would also say the inflationary process you see under way is really at an early stage.”
America’s unemployment rate dipped back down in December to 3.5%, once again matching a 50-year low. It’s expected to tick up to 3.6% come Friday.
Layoff announcements — led by large tech firms — are picking up steam: The 43,651 job cuts announced in December jumped to 102,943 in January, according to a new data released Thursday morning by Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Still, those spikes in cutbacks haven’t become widespread. New data released Thursday by the Labor Department showed weekly initial jobless claims fell for the fourth time in five weeks, landing at 183,000, which is the lowest weekly total since April.
“It’s a very interesting time where it’s really not clear whether what we’re seeing is a welcome, healthy rebalancing of the labor market — or a more worrying stall,” said Julia Pollak, senior economist with ZipRecruiter.
Beyond the key headline indicators of payroll gains, unemployment and average hourly earnings, here are some other areas of the jobs report that Pollak and other economists will scrutinize when the January jobs report is released Friday morning.
In December, the average working week for employees — including part-time workers — was 34.3 hours, according to BLS data.
That’s downfrom the January 2021 high of 35 hours when the average workweek balloonedas workers were scarce and other employees were forced to pick up the slack and the extra shifts, Pollak said.
“Typically, in good times, the workweek tends to be somewhere between 34.3 and 34.6 hours on average, and somehow it’s slowed all the way down to the bottom end of that range,” she said. “If it continues to deteriorate, that would suggest weakening demand for labor.”
And usually, when demand gets weak, hiring stalls and layoffs and job losses follow, she said.
As businesses recovered from the pandemic, they’ve increasingly relied on staffing agencies and contract employees. That sector started the pandemic with 2.9 million employees, plummeted to 1.9 million during the April 2020 trough, hit a record high of 3.56 million in July 2022 and has declined in each month since.
“The recent decline in temp staffing is mostly the result of a healthy recovery in full-time, in-house hiring,” Pollak said. “But if it falls much below 3 million, I think that would be a warning sign as well.”
Temporary and contract hiring can show where businesses expand and reducetheir workforce at the margins, said Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo.
“The fact that we see that paring down suggests that the demand backdrop is starting to soften, and maybe they just don’t see the reason to hire and expand as much as they had previously,” House said.
The imbalance of labor demand and worker supply has been consistently highlighted by the Fed as a potential sticking point in its efforts to lower inflation. While Fed officials have noted that wages don’t appear to be driving inflation, they have expressed concern that a a low participation rate and the imbalance of worker supply and demand could cause pay to rise and, in turn, cause higher prices.
The labor force participation rate inched up two-tenths of a percentage point in December to 62.3%. Although that came following three consecutive months of declines, the percentage of people working or actively looking for work hovered between 62.1% and 62.4% throughout 2022.
Based on Wednesday’s labor turnover data, that gap grew wider in December: There were 11.01 million job openings, or 1.9 available jobs for every unemployed person that month.
“Long Covid is pretty real, and there’s a sizable share of the population who continue to suffer health effects related to Covid that are preventing them from being able to work,” said John Leer, chief economist with Morning Consult. “Then there’s ongoing child care challenges; we’ve got a lot of folks who retired early; we’ve got limited immigration not where it was pre-pandemic.”
Beyond that and the ongoing demographic shifts of Baby Boomers aging out of the workforce, there’s also possibly some “information asymmetry” that’s occurring, he said.
“There are people outside of the labor market who aren’t working, and they just simply don’t know how needed they are right now,” he said. “And I think that’s a function of being a little removed. The world has changed pretty dramatically over the last two to three years, and it’s going to be difficult to show people that the skills they possess are needed right now.”
The government’s monthly jobs report is scheduled to be released at 8:30 a.m. ET on Friday.
Every year, Americans in snowy states wait with bated breath to see whether Punxsutawney Phil will spot his shadow. And every year, we take Phil’s weather forecast – six more weeks of winter, or an early spring? – as gospel, meteorology be damned.
It’s about as strange (and cute) as holidays get. So how did Groundhog Day go from a kooky local tradition to an annual celebration even those of us who don’t worry about winter can find the fun in?
We explore Groundhog Day’s origins from a tiny event to an American holiday we can all be proud of. Spoiler: there are badgers, immortality and at least one groundhog on the menu.
Every February 2, the members of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club trek to Gobbler’s Knob, Punxsutawney Phil’s official home just outside of town. Donning top hats and tuxedos, the group waits for Phil to leave his burrow, and if he sees his shadow, the town gets six more weeks of winter. If he doesn’t see his shadow, Punxsutawney gets an early spring.
But the early seeds of the Groundhog Day we know today were planted thousands of years ago, according to Dan Yoder, a folklorist “born and raised in the Groundhog Country of Central Pennsylvania” who penned the definitive history of the folk holiday turned national tradition.
The holiday evolved over centuries as it was observed by different groups, from the Celts to Germans to the Pennsylvania Dutch and eventually, by those in other parts of the US. Its evolution began in the pre-Christian era of Western Europe, when the Celtic world was the predominant cultural force in the region. In the Celtic year, instead of solstices, there were four dates – similar to the dates we use today to demarcate the seasons – that were the “turning points” of the year. One of them, per Yoder, was February 1.
These turning point dates were so essential to Europeans at the time that they Christianized them when Western Europe widely adopted Christianity. While May 1 became May Day, and November 1 became All Saints’ Day, the February 1 holiday was pushed to the following day – and would eventually become Groundhog Day.
First, though, the February holiday was known as “Candlemas,” a day on which Christians brought candles to church to be blessed – a sign of a source of light and warmth for winter. But like the other three “turning points,” it was still a “weather-important” date that signified a change in the seasons, Yoder wrote.
And when agriculture was the biggest, if not only, industry of the region, predicting the weather became something of a ritual viewed as essential to the health of crops and townsfolk. There was some mysticism attached to the holiday, too, as seen in a poem from 1678 penned by the naturalist John Ray:
“If Candlemas day be fair and bright
Winter will have another flight
If on Candlemas day it be showre and rain
Winter is gone and will not come again.”
The animal meteorology element wasn’t folded in until German speakers came to parts of Europe formerly populated by the Celtic people and brought their own beliefs to the holiday – except, instead of a groundhog, they hedged their bets on a badger. An old European encyclopedia Yoder cited points to the German badger as the “Candlemas weather prophet,” though it’s not clear why. (Sources including the state of Pennsylvania and the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club say the Germans also considered hedgehogs as harbingers of the new season.) When the holiday came overseas with the Pennsylvania Dutch, they traded the badger for an American groundhog, equally shy and subterranean and likely more prevalent in the area in which they settled.
Many sources claim that the original Groundhog Day took place in 1887, when residents of Punxsutawney set out to Gobbler’s Knob, known as Phil’s “official” home, but the first piece of evidence Yoder found of townspeople trusting a groundhog for the weather, a diary entry, was dated 1840. And since Pennsylvania Dutch immigrants mostly arrived in the mid-to-late 18th century, it’s likely that the holiday existed for decades earlier than we have recorded, per the Library of Congress.
Part of the reason so many of us know about Groundhog Day is due to the 1993 film of the same name. The phrase “groundhog day” even became shorthand for that déjà vu feeling of reliving the same day over and over. But Punxsutawney Phil became something of a cult celebrity even before the film debuted – he appeared on the “Today” show in 1960, according to the York Daily Record, and visited the White House in 1986. He even charmed Oprah Winfrey, appearing on her show in 1995.
Before he was a celebrity, though, he was lunch. In a terrible twist, the earliest Groundhog Days of the 19th century involved devouring poor Phil after he made his prediction. The year 1887 was the year of the “Groundhog Picnic,” Yoder said. Pennsylvania historian Christopher Davis wrote that locals cooked up groundhog as a “special local dish,” served at the Punxsutawney Elk Lodge, whose members would go on to create the town’s Groundhog Club. Diners were “pleased at how tender” the poor groundhog’s meat was, Davis said.
Groundhog meat eventually left the menu of Punxsutawney establishments as the townsfolk realized his worth. In the 1960s, Phil got his name, a nod to “King Phillip,” per the Groundhog Club. (The specific King Phillip he was named for is unclear; Mental Floss pointed out that there has not been a King Phillip of Germany, where many Pennsylvania settlers came from, in centuries). Before that, he was simply “Br’er Groundhog.”
Punxsutawney Phil’s popularity has inspired several imitators: There’s Staten Island Chuck in New York, Pierre C. Shadeaux of Louisiana and Thistle the Whistle-pig of Ohio, to name a few fellow groundhog weather prognosticators. But there’s only one Phil, and he’s the original.
Despite their early practice of noshing on Phil’s family, the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club avers that there has only been one Phil since 1886. He’s given an “elixir of life” every year at the summertime Groundhog Picnic, which “magically gives him seven more years of life,” the club said. (Groundhogs can live up to six years in the wild and up to 14 in captivity, per PBS’ Nature, so do with that what you will.)
Phil also doesn’t have to spend the offseason alone. He’s married to Phyliss, per the Groundhog Club, who does not receive the same elixir of life and so will not live forever like her groundhog husband. There is no official word on how many wives Phil has outlived through over the years.
As for his accuracy in weather-predicting – Phil’s hit or miss. He often sees his shadow – 107 times, in fact, per the York Daily Record, which has analyzed every single one of Phil’s official weather predictions since the 19th century. Last year, Phil saw his shadow, which coincided with a huge winter storm. Fingers crossed for better luck for us all this year.
As many as half a million workers are striking across Britain on Wednesday, closing schools, canceling university lectures and bringing most of the rail network to a standstill in what unions say is the biggest single day of walkouts in more than a decade.
Teachers, university staff, train drivers and civil servants — including staff checking passports at airports — are striking in large numbers over pay and working conditions as living standards continue to plunge after years of below-inflation raises.
At the same time, the Trades Union Congress, which represents 48 unions, is holding over 75 rallies across the United Kingdom to protest a government bill that it argues is an “attack” on the right to strike. The bill would require basic service levels to be maintained in the fire, ambulance and rail sectors in the event of walkouts.
Escalating strike action comes just weeks after the government tried to resolve pay disputes to bring an end to the worst wave of industrial unrest the country has seen in decades. Many public sector workers have been offered raises of 4% or 5% for the current financial year, with the annual rate of inflation running at 10.5%
Up to 300,000teachers are expected to strike on Wednesday, marking the first of seven days of strike action through February and March by the National Education Union, the largest union in the sector. Strikes will affect around 23,400 schools, about 85%, in England and Wales, with many closed fully or partially.
Wednesday also marks the beginning of strikes by 70,000 members of the University and College Union (UCU), which will hit 150 UK universities on 18 days in February and March, affecting 2.5 million students.
Meanwhile, more than 100,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents civil servants, will strike over pay, pensions and job security at 123 government departments and agencies.
And only around 30% of train services are expected to run on Wednesday, according to Britain’s railway company Rail Delivery Group, which warned in a statement on its website that the disruption could drag on into the rest of the week because many trains won’t be in the right depots.
The strikes will take a toll on already slowing economic growth. The United Kingdom is likely to be the only major economy to fall into recession this year, after recording one of the strongest growth rates among advanced economies last year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The IMF has marginally upgraded its forecast for global growth, on the back of China’s reopening and an improvement in financial conditions as inflation starts to ease.
On Britain, however, the fund has turned gloomier.
Research director Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas said this was because of higher energy prices, lower productivity as a result of employment not recovering to its pre-pandemic level and elevated inflation leading to higher interest rates and mortgage costs.
The IMF expects inflation to remain above 8% in the United Kingdom this year, compared to a rate of 4.6% across advanced economies and 6.6% globally. It sees the UK economy contracting by 0.6% in 2023, a 0.9 percentage point downgrade from its forecast in October.
An economic slowdown and persistent inflation will worsen a cost-of-living crisis that is afflicting thousands of workers, as wages fail to keep pace with rising prices.
The average 5% pay increase for teachers this year is inadequate, particularly as it follows a decade of “wage erosion” that is leading to a “recruitment and retention crisis,” NEU deputy general secretary Niamh Sweeny told CNN.
According to the union, pay for experienced teachers has declined by 23% since 2010 once inflation is taken into account. Support staff such as teaching assistants have seen salaries fall by 27% in real terms over that period, and some can earn more working in their local supermarket than in education, according to Sweeny.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education responded: “Strike action is highly damaging to children’s education, particularly following the disruption that children have experienced over the past two years.”
Sian Elliott, a senior policy officer at the Trades Union Congress told CNN that the solution to the wave of strikes was simple: “All that is needed in order to resolve the current disputes is just to offer an improved pay deal.”
Yet rather than resolve pay disputes, the government has “rushed” an anti-strike bill through parliament without adequate scrutiny or an impact assessment, she added.
In a sign that industrial unrest could escalate further, UK firefighters have voted to strike for the first time since 2003. The Fire Brigades Union has given the government until February 9 to make an improved pay offer.
Nurses and ambulance drivers will begin a new wave of walkouts next week.
Editor’s Note: Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank and advocacy group based in Washington, DC. He is also a former senior policy adviser to Congress’ Joint Economic Committee. Follow him on Twitter. The views expressed in this piece are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
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With only a thin and fractious majority in the House, the GOP is facing two years of struggling to set any kind of positive agenda. But one thing every elected Republican would agree on is the need to scrutinize the Biden administration.
This is, of course, business as usual. The party that doesn’t control the White House will always seek to scorepolitical points on possible bureaucratic scandals. In return, Democrats’ instinctive reaction might be to circle up the wagons and seek to stonewall or downplay as many of these efforts as possible.
But one area of focus for the Oversight Committee deserves to be taken seriously, not just as a political point-scoring operation, but as an earnest attempt to improve how government works. A genuine bipartisan commitment can and should be made to evaluate the extent of fraud in the pandemic-era safety net measures. A better understanding of where the system failed would not only shine a light on how some funds were misspent but also lay the groundwork for better administration of safety-net benefits, in ways applicable and valuable even outside of the unique circumstances of a global pandemic.
Recall that as the initial wave of coronavirus cases hit US shores, economists feared we could be headed for an economic meltdown. People stopped going about their daily lives, stay-at-home orders went into effect and businesses responded by laying off workers left and right. The unemployment rate spiked to 14.7% in April 2020, the highest level in the post-World War II era.
Congress wanted to provide aid as quickly as possible; there simply wasn’t time to sit around and construct the ideal policies. As part of the frenetic response, the federal government used the often-clunky unemployment insurance systems run by states to try to backstop households’ finances.
Fraud became an issue due to a number of factors, according to a June 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office, including unclear federal guidance, ill-equipped state offices and a relaxation of normal eligibility rules. It didn’t help that 32 states run their unemployment insurance systems on outdated infrastructure, often developed in the 1970s and 1980s, according to that same report. These systems make it difficult for states to have the flexibility and responsiveness necessary to run benefit programs efficiently – even when there isn’t a global pandemic.
The underlying structure of unemployment insurance may have been an issue as well – the federal government provides support and technical assistance, while states determine eligibility and ensure accurate payments. The jerry-rigged systems in many states couldn’t handle the surge of applicants and a newly created unemployment insurance program relied on self-certification. Without any requirements to prove lost income, the program opened the door to bad actors.
But some of the headlines about the amount of fraud in pandemic assistance are likely overblown. One widely-repeated claim about the ubiquity of fraud was advanced not by a disinterested party but by a company that sells ID verification systems. The GAO report estimates the amount of unemployment insurance fraud is likely over $60 billion (or about 7% of total $878 billion spent), although the true amount may not be knowable.
$60 billion sounds like a lot of money, but some could argue the result justified the leaky process. Research by the Brookings Institution found that the expanded unemployment benefits delivered the most aid to lower-income workers, stabilizing the broader economy by keeping consumption stable. At the peak of Covid’s impact, millions of workers every week were applying for unemployment insurance; if excessive concern about fraud had prevented rolling out the federal expansion of benefits, it could have taken a lot longer for the economy to recover.
But with the worst of the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, cracking down on people who abused the system and making it harder for future scammers to do the same is an appropriate area for the Oversight Committee to focus on. A full, bipartisan Congressional inquiry could spotlight the weaknesses of the current system and where it was taken advantage of in order to lay the groundwork for future efforts to improve the way benefits are disbursed.
Not doing so would allow distrust around government programs to fester. Some voters who hear stories about fraudsters taking advantage of pandemic-era assistance – especially blatant examples of people who listed their name as “N/A” or claimed that they owned nonexistent farms – may lose faith in government’s ability to function properly. Knowing that the expanded assistance helped the economy does nothing to change or address the fact that some people took advantage of loopholes in the system.
Some initial steps have been taken to address this lingering concern. The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which was created as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act in 2020, has provided publicly available data on how emergency pandemic funds were spent. Last summer, Congress passed bipartisan bills extending the statute of limitations to prosecute individuals who committed fraud through the Paycheck Protection Program or the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program. And Democrats, such as Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who previously served as the chair of a subcommittee on the coronavirus response, have rightly pointed out that small business aid during the pandemic was also plagued by fraud and improper payments.
Yet more could be done. A GAO report in October 2021 made six recommendations about how the Department of Labor could stem fraud in unemployment insurance programs, but a recent follow-up found the department had not implemented any of them. The deluge of cases has left investigators overwhelmed, and Congress could beef up funding for the agents that investigate pandemic fraud.
Last year, the Biden administration announced initial steps to combat fraud and identity theft in pandemic relief, but it hasn’t made a priority of supporting bills like the one introduced in 2021 by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, which would have modernized the unemployment insurance program. Helping states develop better systems of determining eligibility and automating basic safeguards could make it easier to keep scammers out and make sure the truly deserving get the benefits they need.
Republicans are right to put the spotlight on those who took advantage of pandemic-era programs. Democrats should join them. Getting benefits into the hands of people who merit them and keeping them out of the hands of people who don’t should be something both parties agree on. Amid all the other controversies that take up political oxygen, a concerted effort to crack down on wrongdoing and improve how our social safety net functions could be a welcome breath of bipartisan air.
The Republican-controlled House has made the Internal Revenue Service a political target after Democrats bolstered the agency with new funding last year.
Within the first week of the new Congress, a dozen GOP lawmakers introduced a bill that would abolish the IRS altogether and replace the entire federal tax code with a national sales tax.
Separately, the House voted to rescind nearly $80 billion in funding for the agency that Democrats approved last year – with many top Republicans repeating the misleading claim that the money will be used to hire 87,000 auditors.
“Instead of adding 87,000 new agents to weaponize the IRS against small business owners and middle America, this bill will eliminate the need for the department entirely by simplifying the tax code with provisions that work for the American people and encourage growth and innovation,” said Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter, a Republican from Georgia who introduced the Fair Tax Act earlier this month.
It’s highly unlikely that either bill will become law, given that Democrats still control the Senate. But the measures highlight how America’s two major political parties have very different strategies when it comes to addressing the embattled tax collection agency – which has seen its budget shrink by more than 15% over the past decade and has struggled to not only process returns on time but also answer taxpayers’ questions. Just 13% of phone calls were answered last year.
Democrats have taken a different approach, making funding the IRS a priority. The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed along party lines last year, approved $80 billion for the IRS over 10 years. By using the money to crack down on tax cheats, it’s estimated that the agency could boost federal revenue by more than $124 billion over that time period.
The Republicans’ Fair Tax Act is not a new idea. A version was first introduced in Congress in 1999. It’s never had enough support to become law, but it puts forth an appealing message to those Americans who love to hate the federal tax agency.
It would get rid of the complicated federal tax system, doing away with the annual task of filing tax returns. Instead, the bill would replace federal taxes on individual and corporate income with a national 23% sales tax in 2025, allowing for adjustments to the rate in later years. Americans would pay Uncle Sam whenever they bought a new good or service for personal consumption.
The bill calls for abolishing the IRS and directing states to collect the new federal tax.
While every consumer would pay the same tax at the cash register, the bill provides for a monthly tax rebate payment, based on the poverty rate and family size. It’s meant to help offset the tax levy on low-income Americans who tend to spend a higher share of their paycheck on goods and services.
A national sales tax appears very simple: one rate all Americans pay on new goods and services they buy.
But some policy experts say the Fair Tax Act is more complicated than it looks.
“Moving away from taxing income and toward taxing consumption is a step in the right direction for a pro-growth and simpler tax code,” said Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, an independent tax policy nonprofit.
But there could still be complications. First, the tax rate would likely have to be higher than 23% in order for the federal government to pull in the same amount of tax revenue that it does now. One estimate found that a tax rate of about 30% would more likely be able to generate the same amount of revenue– or 44%, if measured the way state sales taxes are typically presented.
Second, a nationwide sales tax could leave low- and middle-income people worse off. The current tax system is progressive, meaning it takes a larger percentage of income from high-earners than low-income groups. Even with the monthly tax rebate, a national sales tax would still be less progressive.
A 2011 independent analysis of a similar national sales tax found that, on average, most income groups would pay more tax than they did under the federal tax system at the time – except the top 5% of earners who would see a tax cut.
Additionally, it’s hard to imagine that lawmakers would pass a bill that does not exclude some things from the sales tax, like health care costs, for example.
“The basic income tax is simple too,” said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
It’s the deductions, credits and exclusions – like for retirement savings and charitable giving – that make it complicated.
Plus, Americans would likely have to file some paperwork to some tax collection entity in order to receive the rebate, Gleckman said. The administration cost may be less than it is now, but it wouldn’t be zero.
Tax filing season opens Mondayand National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins expects IRS services for taxpayers to improve this year – in part due to the funding increase provided by Congress.
Since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in August, the IRS has hired 5,000 new customer service agents. The agency has also worked to improve its technology so that taxpayers can ask questions via an automated service online, said Treasury Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo on a call with reporters last week.
The IRS started the year with about 400,000 unprocessed paper individual returns and about 1 million unprocessed business returns. But it’s in much better shape than the prior year, when it had a backlog of 4.7 million unprocessed individual returns and 3.2 million unprocessed business returns, according to the taxpayer advocate’s annual report to Congress.
Taxpayer service, like answering the phones and processing returns in a timely manner, has suffered as the IRS’ budget has shrunk.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought even more challenges for the IRS. It was tasked with administering several rounds of stimulus payments to millions of Americans with a lot of its staff working from home. This caused long delays for many taxpayers who filed a paper return. The IRS is starting to implement a scanning system so that returns filed by paper can quickly be made digital. Previously, paper returns had to be entered manually into the agency’s computer system.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Just this week, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, Microsoft
(MSFT) and Vox Media announced layoffs that willaffect more than 22,000 workers.
Their moves follow on the heels of job cuts earlier this monthat 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’sAmazon
(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 earlyin 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.
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.”
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.
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 globalstaff in early November, and hascontinued 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.
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.”
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 foundtech 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.
After months of uncertainty and feeling left in the dark, many former Twitter employees impacted by a mass layoff in early November began receiving their severance offers over the weekend. But some are frustrated by the offer and the conditions attached to it.
The severance offer promisesone month’s pay in exchange for agreeing to various terms, including a non-disparagement agreement andwaiving 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, saying it falls short of the “3 months of severance” that new owner Elon Musk had previously promised would be provided. (That time period appeared to include pay for the 60-days advanced notice Twitter was obligated to provide under various state laws.) 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.
The former Twitter employees are now stuck deciding whether to accept the money or join the hundreds of others who have already filed arbitration demands or lawsuits against the company.
“We’ve been hearing from hundreds of Twitter employees who are considering their options and not happy about only being offered one month severance, after they were promised much more,” Shannon Liss-Riordan, another lawyer working on behalf of former Twitter employees, told CNN in a statement Monday. “We have filed hundreds of arbitration claims already and will continue to file them.”
The severance fight comes as Musk scrambles to cut costs at the company he bought in October for $44 billion, including a significant amount of debt. After laying off half the company in early November, Musk continued cutting and pushing out additional employees, including by requiring anyone who remained to sign a pledge committing to “hardcore” work.
Twitter’s trust and safety team experienced at least a dozen additional cuts on Friday, according to a report from Bloomberg over the weekend.
Bloom, who said she has also filed dozens of demands for arbitration on behalf of former Twitter employees, said the severance offer does not include pro-rated bonuses or accelerated stock vesting for eligible employees, which could amount to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost funds for some affected workers. The company typically provided such benefits to laid-off employees prior to Musk’s acquisition, she said.
The severance offer would also require that employees who sign agree not to cooperate as a witness in any legal actions brought by third parties against Twitter. But they would also have to agree to cooperate on behalf of Twitter in its defense to “provide truthful information” as a witness in any legal action against the company, according to the attorneys.
One Twitter employee laid off during the early November mass layoffs tweeted over the weekend urging fellow affected employees not to “click or accept ANYTHING in that package” without first speaking to an attorney. “For me personally, the money is one component,” they said. “It’s about principle. I strongly believe that we should be keeping people accountable for the promises that they make and failing to deliver on them.”
To add insult to injury, at least one former employee claimed on Twitter that the severance offer went to their email’s spam folder.
Two months after Elon Musk laid off half of Twitter’s workforce, some employees affected say they have yet to receive any formal severance offer or separation agreement.
One former Twitter employee told CNN that they had expected to receive some information from the company by Wednesday, the last official employment date for many workers affected by the first wave of layoffs under Musk based on state and federal notice period regulations.
As of early Thursday, however, the former employee said they had yet to receive any documents related to a severance agreement or offer. Other laid-off employees tweeted similar remarks this week, including one who said they had “never even seen a severance letter let alone been offered severance.”
A spokesperson for Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney representing hundreds of former Twitter employees, confirmed that her clients who were hit by the Twitter layoffs in early November also had yet to receive any severance information as of Thursday. “There was some anticipation that they would be sent yesterday, but we haven’t seen that,” Kevin Ready, the spokesperson, said of the severance agreements.
“Yesterday was the official separation date for thousands of Twitter employees, and after months of chaos and uncertainty created by Elon Musk, these workers remain in the lurch,” Liss-Riordan said in a Thursday statement.
The employee concerns come as Musk scrambles to cut costs at the company he bought in October for $44 billion, including a significant amount of debt. After laying off half the company in early November, Musk continued cutting and pushing out additional employees, including by requiring anyone who remained to sign a pledge committing to “hardcore” work.
The company was recently sued by a commercial landlord and a private flight company alleging Twitter has failed to pay bills. And The New York Times last month reported that Twitter was considering denying laid off employees their severance as a cost-cutting measure, citing people familiar with the talks among company leadership, adding to the sense of uncertainty for affected workers.
Twitter, which cut much of its public relations department as part of the layoffs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the claims it has not offered or paid any severance. At the time of the layoffs, Musk promised that “everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance,” a time period that appears to include the 60-days advanced notice Twitter was obligated to provide.
A report by Fortune on Thursday afternoon, citing an unnamed source familiar with the situation and screenshots viewed by the publication, said that Twitter planned to send severance agreements to affected employees on Thursday, although it was unclear exactly when they would go out. The severance agreements were set to provide laid off US employees with one month’s base pay and would include a provision requiring employees to waive participation in pending lawsuits against the company, according to the report.
Liss-Riordan has filed four proposed class action lawsuits against Twitter on behalf of employees affected by layoffs, with claims including that Twitter backtracked on promises to allow remote work and consistent severance benefits, as well as complaints related to alleged disability and gender-based discrimination. She has also filed three claims against Twitter with the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of former employees. Liss-Riordan said Thursday that she has also filed another 100 demands for arbitration against Twitter on behalf of former employees, after filing an initial 100 last month.
Last month, the employees represented by Liss-Riordan scored an early win in court when a judge ordered Twitter to inform laid-off employees of the pending lawsuits before asking them to sign any separation agreements that include a release of legal claims.
A homeless shelter in El Paso, Texas, released a video showing what the group said was Customs and Border Protection officials apprehending a person outside of its welcome center.
The Opportunity Center for the Homeless posted the surveillance video, which shows someone who appears to be in law enforcement pushing the person up to the teal windows at the entrance of the building and then slamming the person to the ground and handcuffing them.
Another person who appears to be in law enforcement stands over them.
The group says the surveillance video was taken at 11:50 a.m. on January 6.
It is unclear what led up to the incident. CNN reached out to the Opportunity Center for the Homeless Sunday night to inquire about the person’s whereabouts or condition following the January 6 incident and whether there was any additional video taken before or after the footage that was shared on social media.
Opportunity Center for the Homeless founder Ray Tullius issued a statement saying, “Through the years, the Opportunity Center for the Homeless has had a respectful and long-standing working relationship with law enforcement officials in the community.
“[On Friday], an individual receiving services at the Welcome Center, located at 201 E. 9th Avenue, was apprehended in front of the facility by Customs and Border Protection officials with what seems to us to be excessive force.
“To our knowledge, this is an isolated incident. However, it raises our concerns for the well-being of the individual taken into custody and all the guests receiving services in our homeless programs. As we have done it for the last twenty-nine years, the Opportunity Center for the Homeless will continue to extend a helping hand to those in need of help,” the statement reads.
In a statement, US Customs and Border Protection said its Office of Professional Responsibility is reviewing the incident.
“Although, at the moment we do not have all the details of what occurred during this incident, CBP takes all allegations of misconduct seriously, investigates thoroughly, and holds employees accountable when policies are violated,” the agency said.
In a normal year at this time, a typical LinkedIn feed might be full of posts about year-end reflections on leadership and professional goals and suggested lifehacks for the year ahead — possibly with a few posts from CMOs offering tips on brand strategy, for good measure.
Those posts are still there. But mixed in are many others about job hunts, offers of support for laid off friends and colleagues, and advice for coping with career hurdles in an uncertain economic environment.
Some LinkedIn users affected by recent layoffs have formed groups on the site aimed at providing assistance, coordinating around signing exit paperwork and aiding with connections for new jobs. One LinkedIn group of employees affected by the November layoffs at Facebook-parent Meta, for example, now has more than 200 members. Even bosses who are doing the laying off have turned to LinkedIn to explain themselves and seek support or advice, as one marketing CEO did in a post alongside a tearful selfie last year (to mixed results).
If the first year of the pandemic was marked by widespread layoffs in lower paying retail and services jobs, the past few months have been defined by something different: the prospect of a white-collar recession. Even as the overall job market remains strong, there has been a wave of recent layoffs in the tech and media industries — which just so happen to make up a core part of LinkedIn’s user base. Suddenly, the normally staid professional network has become both a vital lifeline for recently laid off workers and a surprisingly lively social platform.
The LinkedIn mobile app was downloaded an estimated 58.4 million times worldwide in 2022 across the Google Play and Apple app stores, up 10% from the prior year, according to research firm Sensor Tower.
The number of posts on LinkedIn mentioning “open to work” were up 22% during November compared to the same period in the prior year, according to data provided by the company. LinkedIn says it also saw a steady increase in the rate of users adding connections last year compared to the year prior, a sign that users were more active on the platform.
The uptick in use appears to have been good for LinkedIn’s business. The platform posted 17% year-over-year revenue growth in the three months ended in September, according to parent company Microsoft’s most recent earnings report. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts in the October earnings call that LinkedIn was seeing “record engagement” among its 875 million members, with growth accelerating especially in international markets.
Some of LinkedIn’s momentum may predate the wave of layoffs. “There’s been an uptick in [LinkedIn use] since the pandemic,” said Jennifer Grygiel, an associate professor and social media expert at Syracuse University. “You had to do social distancing and we were quarantining and people were working remotely so there was a shift in real-life networking possibilities.”
LinkedIn rose to the occasion — and now it may be rising to another one.
Even apart from the layoffs, the social media landscape has been through a volatile year. Facebook and Instagram have been criticized by users for racing to turn their services into TikTok. TikTok has been criticized over concerns that user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government. And after Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter late last year, the platform has been criticized for morphing into a possible haven for its most incendiary users.
But LinkedIn remains, as ever, LinkedIn — and at this moment, with fears of a looming recession and career concerns top of mind, LinkedIn may be just what the digital world needs.
Grygiel said many people working in media or academia are likely now looking for somewhere to build and engage in professional communities other than Twitter. And while upstart Twitter alternatives like Mastodon have experienced a surge in growth, they still don’t have the same sort of network effect that comes with a legacy platform’s broad user base.
LinkedIn in recent years has leaned into courting influencers who regularly post content to the site, potentially giving users more reasons to visit. And the platform has been growing its “learning” section, which provides video courses taught by various industry experts and which the company says experienced a 17% increase in hours spent as of November compared to the year prior. But lately it appears users have more than enough reason to use LinkedIn amid a wave of thousands of layoffs.
Perhaps the clearest and most public examples of LinkedIn’s new centrality came from rival social networks like Twitter.
In the wake of Twitter’s November mass layoffs — in which half the company was terminated, followed by additional firings and exits — many former and remaining employees took to LinkedIn, rather than the platform they had built, to seek support, community and new opportunities.
One group of Twitter employees created a spreadsheet of laid-off workers from the company alongside recruiters hiring for other firms, and used LinkedIn to help facilitate sign-ups. Another pair of former Twitter employees set up a system to connect job hunters with recruitment professionals open to volunteering to provide free resume review and interview prep services, which they promoted through LinkedIn.
“We completely understand how the job-hunting process can be scary and overwhelming … While we can’t guarantee where your next opportunity will be or when it will come, we can offer guidance, so you will be ready for that opportunity when it arrives,” Darnell Gilet, a former Twitter senior technical recruiter who helped coordinate the effort, said in a LinkedIn post.
Gilet, who was affected by the mass layoffs at Twitter in November following Elon Musk’s takeover, told CNN last month that around 28 different recruiters and talent acquisition professionals had agreed to participate in the system, and that he himself had spoken to nearly two dozen job seekers since shortly after he was laid off to offer advice and support. He said LinkedIn seemed like the obvious place to promote the service.
“Chaos creates opportunity for somebody, right?” Gilet said. “People are getting laid off and you have this recession that’s looming, the ideal place … that would have the greatest growth opportunity from that would be a platform that’s focused on careers like LinkedIn. So it makes perfect sense.”
