Human Resource Community

Disney, a major player in the entertainment industry, is firing 7,000 employees as part of a cost-cutting strategy to tackle the challenges the company is facing. During the company’s earnings call for the December quarter, CEO Bob Iger made the announcement. Despite having to make a difficult choice, Iger praised the talent and commitment of Disney employees all across the world. Through a strategic reorganisation of its operations, Disney hopes to save about $3 billion in the next years on the content side, excluding sports. The three major business segments created by the restructuring are Disney Entertainment, ESPN, and Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products. The company aims to save $5.5 billion in costs across the entire organisation, resulting in a more efficient, integrated, and simplified approach to operations. Disney+, the company’s streaming service, reported a loss of about $1.5 billion during the most recent quarter. Disney anticipates that the streaming service will make a profit by the end of the current fiscal year (2024). Disney+ and other streaming services are part of the direct-to-consumer sector, which witnessed a 13% growth in revenue to $5.3 billion with an operating loss of about $1.1 billion. For Disney to address its challenges and run its companies more successfully in a difficult economic environment, layoffs and reorganisation are a necessary step. Despite the difficult decision, the company is still dedicated to providing its customers with top-notch entertainment and experiences.

According to an official blog, Zoom, a communications technology company, would be asking about 15% of its employees to leave. Particularly during the pandemic when the majority of businesses required their employees to work from home, the video communications company had gained widespread popularity as a conference tool. In order to meet the growing demand for the video-conferencing tool at the time, Zoom had also hired a large number of personnel. Zoom had a slowdown in growth as a result of the post-pandemic decline in demand for video services. The Company was forced to take what Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, refers to as a “difficult measure” as a result. The affected employees will receive 16 weeks of pay as severance, a year of healthcare coverage, and a bonus when they are let go. Zoom is currently working to reduce expenses and get ready for the impending recession. In addition to giving up his corporate bonus for 2023, Yuan is taking a 98% pay cut for this year. In the post, Yuan states that other executive leaders will also be forgoing their corporate bonus for 2023 and taking a 20% pay cut to their basic salaries.

The tech giant Google recently let go 12,000 workers, prompting protests from employees on both US coasts. The employees organised the protests to make people aware of the working conditions for subcontracted workers and to show support for their sacked co-workers. There were two protests: one outside Google’s corporate headquarters in New York City and one at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. The New York protest, which was conducted outside a Google store on Ninth Avenue shortly after parent company Alphabet Inc. released its fourth-quarter results and revealed a profit of $13.6 billion, drew around 50 employees. The Alphabet Workers Union, a labour group that includes both Google employees and subcontractors, organised the protests. Although the AWU lacks the ability to engage in collective bargaining, software engineer Alberta Devor, an AWU member who has worked at Google for more than three years, claimed that the protests demonstrated how some issues affect all workers, regardless of their position or status. Subcontractors protested what they saw as unfair working conditions at the California rally, including poverty wages and a lack of benefits. These workers, who carry out duties including evaluating content to train the company’s AI algorithms and screening YouTube clips and advertisements for offensive material, claim that their pay and benefits are significantly below Google’s own minimal standards and benefits for direct contract workers.

At a time when other edtech firms are significantly cutting back on staff, Physics Wallah, the unicorn edtech company, is hiring. Over the following two months, the company plans to add around 2,500 more employees to its workforce. It seeks faculty members, teachers, consultants, business analysts, data analysts, operations managers, and batch managers. In accordance with its growth plans and objectives, the company is apparently hiring for a variety of roles and responsibilities. The company is looking for individuals who share PW’s vision of offering “affordable and quality education for all” and who can be a student’s lifelong learning partner. In an effort to broaden its upskilling offerings, the Company recently acquired iNeuron, an edtech company with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and data science, in a deal worth Rs 250 crore. With a workforce of 6,500 employees, including more than 2000 teachers and subject experts, PW dodged downsizing like many other edtech companies. To strengthen its supply chain operations, the edtech platform has partnered with Unicommerce to deliver study materials. PW, which caters students of class 6 to 12, also provides materials for students hoping to take competitive exams like the NEET and JEE. Thousands of students throughout India rely on its content and study materials.

Employees in Vasant Vihar in Delhi and the Air India Colony in Mumbai who haven’t moved out of the home provided by the company have started having pay deducted from their salaries. The employees said that their December salaries had been significantly reduced, anywhere from 15,000 to 90,000 rupees. Last Friday marked the airline’s one-year of being privatised, but many of its employees who live in the airline’s staff quarters in Mumbai and Delhi had to accept severe pay cuts and hefty rising rents. Due to this, deductions have been made from the salaries of the employees who haven’t left their flats as of August 2022 and will keep happening until they do. They will also be required to pay a 10 lakh rupee additional penalty on top of the standard deductions. A letter informing Air India personnel living in the Air India Colonies in Kalina in Mumbai and Vasant Vihar in Delhi that a fine of 15 lakh and 10 lakh rupees, respectively, will be withdrawn from their pay and other benefits was sent, according to ANI. The employees of Air India claim that although the government gave the Tatas control of Air India, the colony was left out of the agreement. Due to higher establishment and living costs in Mumbai, which is regarded as the nation’s financial capital, employees there will see larger pay reductions than those in Delhi. In a letter written to Air India last year, the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) stated that individuals who don’t leave their accommodations will have to pay double the market rate for rent each month in addition to the fine. In a letter dated September 29, 2021, it was stated that anyone found residing in company accommodation without permission from August 1, 2022 until the date of vacating the housing would be subject to a penalty fee equal to the sum of normal occupancy charges and double the market rent. The penal rent will be deducted from the employee’s income and other due payments.

Wipro notified 452 freshers that they had to leave the company since they performed poorly on the internal evaluation. Despite the training they had received, it appeared that these freshers did poorly on the organization’s internal test. According to Business Today, the impacted employees received a termination letter informing them that the company had decided to waive off the cost of their training even though they actually owed them Rs. 75,000. For some new hires who were finally onboarded after months of waiting after getting the offer letter, the termination came as a huge shock. Wipro, however, says that these fired freshers were let go because they failed the test, which consists of evaluations that determine whether the person will be able to match with the goals of the company. The Company apparently makes an effort to mentor and train them, but if they don’t still improve, they are terminated. In the last several weeks, layoffs in the tech sector have been making headlines. Most organisations throughout the world are turning to team downsizing as a result of firms realising they have excess staff on hand and an anticipated recession.

According to reports cited by the UK broadcaster Sky News, Microsoft Corp. is considering eliminating 11,000 jobs, or around 5% of its total workforce. According to a report by Bloomberg, the company intends to reduce the number of engineering divisions through new rounds of layoffs. Microsoft now joins other tech giant in announcing layoffs in response to a weakening market and a failing economy. Microsoft reportedly let go of less than 1,000 workers across many divisions earlier in October. Less than 1% of the more than 200,000 employees of the software company were affected by these cuts. The company had said in July that a modest number of positions had been cut and that it would eventually hire more people. As of June 30, the company employed 221,000 full-time employees, including 122,000 in the US and 99,000 abroad, according to filings. After several quarters of a slowdown in the personal computer market impacted Windows and device sales, the company, according to Reuters, is under pressure to sustain growth rates at its cloud unit Azure. On January 24, Microsoft is expected to announce its quarterly results. For thousands of tech workers, the start of the new year has a dismal tone due to worldwide layoffs. More than 30,000 individuals had lost their employment globally in less than a week in 2023. By the way, this is almost twice as many workers as were fired throughout the entire month of December 2022. According to data from Layoffs Tracker, 30 organisations have fired 30,611 individuals in total over the first six days of January. In addition to Amazon, the list also includes many other companies, such as cryptocurrency exchange Huobi, tech giant Salesforce, and video hosting platform Vimeo. This statistic includes a sizable fraction of the over 18,000 positions that Amazon.com Inc. decided to eliminate as part of a workforce reduction. The 11,000 layoffs announced by Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., last year have now been surpassed by the Jeff Bezos-owned company.

According to reports, Elon Musk owned, Twitter is looking to close its coworking spaces in Delhi and Mumbai after doing so in Bengaluru. Reports citing sources state that the office closing procedure began in December of last year. There are about 80 workers in The Executive Centre in Delhi’s Qutub district and about 150 at the WeWork facility in Mumbai’s BKC. The sources claim that the company has left coworking facilities in Bengaluru as well, indicating that this was the result of company-wide reforms. The remaining employees of Twitter in Singapore were advised to stop coming to work and work remotely earlier this week after Musk, who failed to pay the rent for the San Francisco headquarters, reportedly failed to pay the rent. The decision to let Twitter staff leave the CapitaGreen building and work from home was reportedly communicated to them via email. “Twitter employees were just walked out of its Singapore office – its Asia-Pacific headquarters – over nonpayment of rent”. “Landlords walked employees out of the building,” Casey Newton of Platformer wrote in a tweet on Thursday. Due to its failure to pay the $136,250 rent for its San Francisco office premises, Twitter has been sued in the US.

The ex-employees who left Twitter in November 2022 received severance agreements on January 8, 2023. Twitter cut over half of its 7,500 employees in the beginning of November 2022. Elon Musk, the new CEO, said that all departing employees received three months of severance pay, which is 50% more than what is needed by law. However, the ex-employees claim that they were only given their final two months’ pay through January 4th (the formal date of their termination), and that they were forced to wait to get a post-termination severance payout. Despite Musk’s assurance that they would receive an extra month of pay as severance, the employees contend that given what Twitter had already agreed to pay prior to Musk’s takeover, they are actually owed more. Bonuses, stock vesting, and other benefits that might reach tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for each employee were also meant to be included in the severance package. The severance agreements that Twitter is offering are actually “settlement agreements,” according to Lisa Bloom, a principal attorney at The Bloom Firm in Los Angeles who is currently representing former Twitter employees. These agreements “SILENCE WORKERS FOR LIFE” and require them to give up significant legal rights.

Allegations have been made against Air India for allegedly not responding to a situation when a man on one of their planes allegedly urinated on a woman. According to a report in the Economic Times, as a result, the company would have to delay the implementation of their new human resources policy. According to reports, the airline’s acquisition deal with the government, signed in January 2022, prohibits it for a year from changing its “terms of employment.” The new human resources policy’s implementation has been delayed as a result, and it can now only go into effect after March 2023. According to the report, union resistance prevented the agreement from going into effect on January 1 as originally anticipated. Since the Tata group does not have a hiring-firing culture, a senior official from the company told the Economic Times, Air India has implemented indirect recognition programmes to reward customer-focused behaviour and accountability. The CEO added that the company is committed to putting the Tata Code of Conduct into practise by doing away with biases and prejudices within the workplace and encouraging staff to base decisions on facts and statistics rather than rumours and conjecture. According to reports, the airline’s management has finished drafting a new service agreement with major performance metrics and objectives. It was mentioned that increased accountability would make the move more efficient. In response to the recent drunk man incident, aviation regulatory body, the DGCA, has given the airline instructions to keep track of any passengers who have displayed disruptive behaviour and to add them to a “No-Fly-List.” The regulator further demanded that the airline notify their internal committee about the incident, which will have 30 days to decide how long the unruly passenger will be prohibited from flying, with options ranging from no days to a permanent ban.