Labor

The new deal adds protections around using digital voice replicas, reports Reuters.

Last Week Tonight’s segment about food delivery pulls heavily from Josh Dzieza’s terrific, award-winning feature, with a strong reminder to always tip.

The layoff comes after reports that the company is doing away with its Just Walk Out cashierless retail tech at its large format stores. GeekWire reports AWS VP Dilip Kumar cited the change in emails about the cuts internally.

The city’s chatbot for business owners is telling people to break the law, including telling bosses they can take employees’ tips (they can’t), and that stores can go cashless (also wrong, as of 2020). The chatbot is powered by Microsoft Azure AI.

In spite of unfair labor practice complaints and a round of layoffs, the 150 members of the AEGIS (CWA) union at Sega of America have a new contract. It guarantees members annual wage increases, warnings before layoffs, hybrid work schedule commitments, and severance packages.

The Information reports Meta has had issues keeping AI talent and has resorted to hiring researchers without an interview. Meta has been losing researchers to Google’s DeepMind, OpenAI, and Mistral, which was founded by former Meta engineers.

The union’s animation voice actors voted 95.52 percent to 4.48 percent on Friday to ratify contracts that were similar to the deal that ended the actors’ strike last year but didn’t include the same definition, as Variety notes.

SpaceX already filed one lawsuit claiming the agency’s actions o (on a complaint about workers who say they were fired illegally for criticizing Elon Musk) are unconstitutional and now there’s this complaint issued Wednesday night.

The Alphabet Workers Union alleges Google and subcontractor Cognizant “unlawfully terminated” a group of YouTube Music contractors in February, who had been working for months for Google to recognize them as employees. The union claims Google fired the contractors “in retaliation” for organizing.

Bloomberg prompted GPT-3.5 to sort equally-qualified resumes for jobs like software engineer and financial analyst. Over the course of thousands of tests, Bloomberg found resumes with names distinct to Black Americans were least likely to be ranked as top candidates.

Deadline reports that film and TV labor unions are ready to strike if talks break down with Hollywood studios tomorrow. Studios previously narrowly averted a strike with one of the unions, the Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), in 2021.

According to Bloomberg, Rockstar will ask employees to return to the office five days a week beginning in April. In an email sent to employees, Jenn Kolbe, head of publishing, wrote security and productivity were the main reasons for implementing RTO as well as the “tangible benefits” of in-office work.

Just one day after PlayStation laid off 900 employees (which followed layoffs from Activision Blizzard, Riot Games, Discord, Unity, and others), EA announced on Wednesday that it’s cutting 5 percent of workers, which amounts to around 670 roles.

Fourteen Amazon employees can no longer access the European Parliament building without an invitation, WIRED reported Wednesday. And it’s all because they skipped a hearing about working conditions in its fulfillment centers and declined to let policymakers tour them (Amazon blamed the busy holiday period, WIRED said).

Wired writes about how tech job interviews have gotten even more demanding after the series of layoffs that rocked the industry these past few years:

Nearly 700 workers across multiple Ubisoft offices in France have gone on strike. The strike originally began on February 14th after negotiations between Ubisoft and the STJV (Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo) union fell through, citing a failure to agree on wage increases.

In a memo obtained by TechCrunch, Mozilla said the company is making a “strategic correction” that will involve “working through a much smaller team to participate in the Mastodon ecosystem.” The company launched its mozilla.social instance last year.

From his full interview today with Andrew Ross Sorkin:

WMG CEO Robert Kyncl -- who thinks you could pay more for Spotify-- revealed the record label will lay off 10 percent of its workforce, or 600 employees. It’s winding down the podcast division behind Rap Radar and Drink Champs, and IMGN Media. It’s also in an “exclusive process” to sell Uproxx and HipHopDX.

Here are just a couple of employee-submitted questions that CEO Sundar Pichai answered during the company’s all hands last week: