How much labor overhead would you estimate for a product that you retail for around £35? Maybe 5%? How about 0.02%? Sounds unbelievable? Not if you’re the Disney Corporation, whose blatant exploitation of Chinese workers was brought to the fore recently with an undercover investigation carried out by Solidar Suisse and China Labor Watch in conjunction with The Guardian. Staff at the Wah Tung factory in Heyuan, who reported that they often had to work overtime and were penalized or dismissed if they took more than three days of sick leave, also stated that per their production volumes the labor costs came up to a meager 1p per completed doll.
Artificial Intelligence is driven talent search is getting smarter and is delivering better prospective employee profiling than ever before. Using the power of machine learning and massive scale online scanning of social media profiles, software vendors are being able to provide solutions that accurately and efficiently harvest prospective employees from massive talent pools. This is the advent of deep learning technology and it goes way beyond just recruitment analytics. Companies like eightfold.ai, who tout themselves as a Talent Intelligence platform that ensures laser-sharp accuracy in search and selection of talent, are being used by industries as diverse as sports, pharmaceuticals, and technology.
There seems to be no end in sight for the miseries of Amazon workers in the US. In what appears to be the latest incidence of non-compliance of workplace safety, twenty-four workers had to be hospitalized after a robot at a New Jersey warehouse perforated a chemical repellant can be meant to repel bears, by accident at its New Jersey warehouse. However, no casualties were reported, and an Amazon spokesperson has said that all the workers injured in the accident are expected to be released from the hospital in the next 24 hours. This is one of several workplace conditions related complaints against the e-commerce giant in the US and UK over the past years.
The newly elected Mexican President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador proposed an increase in work visas for Central Americans and suggested that the US should go for a similar stance. This comes as part of negotiations with the US to curb the northward flow of immigrants. Lopez Obrador came up with a proposal for increasing investment in productive projects that will boost job creation. The number of illegal immigrants is the lowest in the past 20 years, but there is a spike in family and asylum seekers. The projects and investments target to bring down poverty and crime rate in the region. The plans set for the project include a refinery and two railway projects to generate jobs in Mexico and Central America.
Croatia is staring at a grave labor shortage and its booming seaside resort sector is the one to take the maximum fall. National Employers’ Association HUP says that Croatian firms are failing to fill at least 30,000 jobs in a state-run economy. The bulk of it is in tourism that is 20% of their GDP. A gap between the education and economic requirement, skill mismatch and a brain drain towards countries in the Western EU are the key reasons, Croatia is falling behind in the race of becoming a prominent EU name. ABS, Sisak hired 71 employees in the last financial year, 40% of the interviewed candidates did not meet the basic skills and 43% of hires needed internal training to start the work.
Prominent name in French Pharmacy is looking to trim down the current 25,000 workforces in France by shedding 670 positions by 2020. Thierry Bodin, CGT union says that the intended job cuts will affect IT, HR and Finance among other departments. The company plans to outsource 80 IT positions. The decision is in the wake of overreaching the targeted $ 1.70 billion in savings by a year. The company intends to give cost-reduction a hearty push in a coming couple of years.
One of corporate America’s most admired leaders, Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney is set to face a performance test even 13 years after he stepped into the CEO’s role at the media giant. While the stock hasn’t exactly been soaring lately, Iger’s proposed pay package, described as “exorbitant” by some media houses, was opposed by shareholders. Consequently, Disney moved to stipulate his compensation being tied to several performance metrics. Iger will now be eligible for upto 1.17 million Disney shares, currently valued at $135 million, if Disney beats 75% of the S&P 500 index from the present through 2021. He currently earns $3.5 million salary, bonus and other equity awards.
Raising the curtains on what seems set to be a round of tough negotiations with business and industry owners across Deutschland, IG Metall, Germany’s largest trade union, demanded a 6% wage hike for it’s 72,000 strong workforce in the country’s steel industry. This is besides the 1,800 euros for each worker that its NRW branch is demanding. Bitter negotiations that also included strikes across the country had led to a 4.3% hike in last year’s negotiations, and IG Metall seems all set to repeat it’s opening stance in the coming year, too. With 2017 having been it’s 9th year of strong and consistent growth, the export segment is also facing headwinds, largely due to an expected overall slowdown in the EU markets.
Wall Street is notorious for its chauvinism. No more. In the #MeToo world, the natural disposition of the banking and finance industry has largely been to shun interactions with women as much as possible. Interviews conducted by Bloomberg with more than 30 senior executives in the industry revealed that the paranoia in the industry is reaching stratospheric proportions, with most men being cautious to avoid even being in a meeting room alone with a female colleague without the door open. This is causing complications for aspiring women too, with hiring being severely skewed in favor of men. Wall Street is yet to throw up any high profile case of sexual harassment or abuse in the #MeToo movement, which has even struck religion and education.
In spite of some headwinds in the consumer and housing sectors, Australian employers stepped up their hiring game as of last year, with record salaries being reported from other sectors. The third quarter reports on the growth of the economy recorded an all-time peak of gross profits of 90 bn AUD. The job vacancies index, however, showed a slowdown, in spite of the record growth in wages. The index slowed to an annual growth rate of 2.3% for the entire year. According to economists, this may be worrying given that this was the lowest that the indicator has fallen to, since March 2015.
Licensed marijuana producers in Canada are turning out to be the hottest employers, with demand for workers outstripping supply many times over. So much so that companies are importing workers from the Caribbean and Guatemala to work in production greenhouses. Licensed marijuana producers, who employed 2,400 workers at the end of 2017, are expected to create around 125, 000 jobs at the end of the first year of legalization, according to industry leaders. While companies are already recruiting by the thousands for direct production, the next wave of jobs are likely to be in derived roles like R&D, formulations and other sciences.
The Digital Transformation wave has been in the making for quite some time now, and companies across the board are increasingly looking at hiring tech talent for their internal initiatives. According to research released by the Drucker Institute, positions in cutting edge jobs, including blockchain, robotics, artificial intelligence and augmented reality aren’t being posted only by tech companies, but a broad spectrum of sectors including banking, insurance and even healthcare and education. In fact, there were more advertised jobs from other sectors for tech talent in the Management Top 250 listings by the Drucker Institute this year, than from core technology companies.
In the aftermath of the Monsanto acquisition and probably as a direct fallout, German chemical major Bayer announced that it would cut down around 12, 000 jobs and sell off some of its businesses, amid sliding stock prices. Bayer has also been reported to slash around 10.15% of its workforce worldwide in order to leverage the synergy that had been identified as a part of the Monsanto merger. This comes amidst growing pressure on Chief Executive Werner Baumann as the stock of the company has plummeted by just over a third so far this year over concerns of pending lawsuits Monsanto is facing.
 (1).jpg "TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TAKES A MAJOR STEP TOWARDS FUTURE JOB CREATION IN TECH")
In spite of the occasional strain in their relationship, the Trump administration announced discussions with the stewards of the American technology companies including luminaries like Satya Nadella from Microsoft, Sundar Pichai from Alphabet and Steven Mollenkopf and Safra Catz of Qualcomm and Oracle respectively. The roundtable discussion sessions, the first of their kind with the current president and technology heads, will focus on the future of jobs in the technology space. Larry Kudlow, the advisor at the White House, stated that several people who were dissatisfied with those companies would also be present at the discussions. Several other companies had been approached but had not confirmed their attendance as of publication.
After a decade at the helm, Unilever Chief Executive Paul Polman has announced that he will step down as in his role at the FMCG major. This move was a direct fallout of the intense pressure caused by investors in the UK, halting Polman’s efforts to move the company’s global headquarters to the Netherlands. Polman’s successor will be Alan Jope, who has spent more than 30 years at the company. Prior to his current role, he had been running Unilever’s beauty and personal care division since 2014. Jope has also been a distinguished member of Unilever’s Leadership Executive since 2011.
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According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research based out of Washington, women earned up to 51% less than men, when time with no income is factored into calculations. In the study that spanned overall women’s income between 2000 and 2015, the pay disparity was found to be significantly greater than had been previously assumed. Entitled “Still a Man’s Labor Market” the study also showed that workers wanting to return to employment after a year off, a common choice among women, were offered far less compensation than they had previously drawn. While men are also affected by the same, women face a greater degree of challenges and are often hurt far more on the compensation front.
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Property sharing behemoth Airbnb is facing the ire of Israeli Americans over it’s delisting of properties along the West Bank area, in a lawsuit filed at a Delaware Federal Court. The plaintiffs, in this case, have accused AirBnB of discriminating on religious grounds, in violation of the Fair Housing Act. The unicorn has also been asked to compensate the plaintiffs for lost revenue and legal fees. In its announcement, Airbnb stated that it is reviewing its policies on allowing “host” users to enlist properties in specific areas which, according to them, may contribute to “human suffering”. The lawsuit also calls for a stop on future discrimination against Jews and Israelis.
With a 1,400% increase in the number of startups developing AI and Machine Learning products according to a recent research by Stanford, the impact of Artificial Intelligence on business cannot be overstated. According to the Forbes Human Resources Council, the recruitment and hiring function is going to undergo one of the biggest transformations in this process. In a recent post, several developments were pointed out by industry experts that included greater accuracy in candidate matches, more inclusion, and diversity in workforces, proactive candidate selection and greater outreach to the passive talent pool, accelerated times-to-hire, easier forecasting, and easier candidate filtering and tracking.
A long speculated theme was addressed recently in a survey conducted on close to a thousand HR professionals across HR, Learning and Organizational Development professionals on their opinions on managerial ethics at the workplace in the UK. The survey, conducted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, revealed that 28% of respondents believed that they had come ethical conflicts between themselves and what was expected from them by the organization. HR personnel were largely considered the overseer of ethics in an organization and 44% had regularly challenged the tasks that were expected of them, while more than half (58%) saw the scope of improvement in the HR’s role as ethics drivers in the organization.
Mark Luckie, a former Strategic Partner for Global Influencers at Facebook, recently pointed out that the company is not doing enough on the racial diversity front, in spite of the world’s largest social network specifically denying the allegations. Luckie pointed out how Facebook was anything but inclusive as an organization with an example where coworkers clutched their wallets while walking by him, a behavior he said that was based on his skin color. He also alleged that the HR had often sided on the wrong side of discrimination earlier, gaslighting employees into believing such racial behavior was a figment of their imagination.
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