Labor

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.

Employees at the trading card marketplace, which eBay acquired in November, are working with the Communications Workers of America on the union. Nicole Carpenter of our sister site Polygon spoke with some of the employees involved.

The company is in the process of laying off 18,000 people, and carried out a round of cuts today. Washington’s publicly-accessible WARN system lets us know how many people in Amazon’s home state were affected: 1,852 in Seattle, and 448 across the lake in Bellevue, for a total of 2,300.

Apple has struck a deal with a group of investors to carry out a “Workers’ Rights Assessment,” according to The New York Times. A third party will be looking into how its actions around worker organization (which have garnered several complaints to and from the National Labor Relations Board) square with its stated human rights policies.

“Most” of the people affected will be managers, according to Deadline, though apparently the company classifies around half of its employees with that title. In a statement to Deadline, DirecTV said it was “adjusting [its] operations costs” because less people are paying for TV and shows are getting more expensive to secure and distribute.

A little less than a year after workers voted to organize Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse under the Amazon Labor Union, it’s now officially official. The National Labor Relations Board has certified the vote, despite Amazon’s objections.