Labor

The e-commerce giant is downsizing again, cutting around 20 percent of its 11,600-strong workforce after Flexport takes over its logistics business.

YouTube Music contractors voted 41-0 in favor of becoming a union on Wednesday. The workers first filed for a union election in October.

Around 100 employees in Amazon’s gaming divisions are being laid off as part of the company’s broader cuts, according to a report from Bloomberg. While some of the affected employees work at the company’s game studio in San Diego, work will apparently still continue on an unannounced game.

Grubhub has been ordered to pay $65.11 in minimum wage violations to a former driver after a federal court ruling in Los Angeles recognized him as an employee, and not an independent contractor.

Alphabet has appealed the National Labor Relations Board’s decision that it counts as a joint employer for the workers, but the election is still happening. It’s set to start on the 22nd, according to the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA.

It’s another addition to the growing list of tech workers trying to organize. According to Rolling Stone, employees cited wage disparity and a lack of transparency around Epic Games’ purchase of the music website as reasons they want to unionize.

The autonomous car unit shares its parent company, Alphabet, with Google, which in January cut over 12,000 jobs or about six percent of its workforce. The Information reports that after a new round of layoffs affecting primarily engineers, Waymo has let go of about 8 percent of the people working there.

AI is based on low-paid labor. This interview with one of the people who help decide what Google will show you is worth a read — for starters, he says he makes $3 less per hour than his daughter, who works in fast food.

According to a report from The Financial Times, Meta employees say things are “still a mess” and that “zero work” is getting done because the company hasn’t provided clear guidance surrounding budgets for various projects.

Yahoo is reportedly laying off around 20 percent of its workforce, including 1,600 people in its ad tech department, according to Axios.

The Communications Workers of America has filed complaints alleging the tech giant, among other things, forced employees to go to anti-union meetings at a store in Iowa and at its flagship Fifth Avenue store in New York. It’s a charge the company has faced before, and one that the National Labor Relations Board could issue a complaint over.

The company reportedly told employees that it’d be cutting 500 positions, according to Reuters. It’s another entry for the sad yet informative big tech layoff tracker.

After alleging safety violations at three warehouses last month (which came with $60,269 in proposed penalties), the regulator says it found ergonomic hazards at three more Amazon warehouses. The inspections that lead to the citations are part of a larger investigation that OSHA says is still ongoing.

The latest mass layoff event in tech is happening at PayPal, where CEO Dan Schulman announced:

Viola Zhou writing for Rest of World on the events leading up to riot police beating up protesters at Foxconn’s iPhone megafactory:

According to Platformer’s Zoe Schiffer, the company’s employees won’t have to test before coming into the office starting in February, and will be getting less sick leave for covid. Apple implemented its office hybrid schedule last September.