The Great Wall of Shame

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Good Afternoon Party People! 🎉

The Great Wall of Shame. Fired for missing quota by 5 mins?! And the latest in layoffs. We have a party for you all today!

PARTY PLAN đźŽ‰

🧱 The Great Wall of Shame

🤨 Fired for missing quota?!

✖️ The latest in layoffs

And, of course, MEMES!

MEME OF THE DAY

WORKPLACE

The Great Wall of Shame

New York City’s comptroller just released an interactive dashboard that compiles a list of some of the city’s worst labor law offenders.

And Chipotle, Amazon, and Uber all landed on the list…

(Without even seeing the list, everyone already agrees Chipotle deserves to be on there for when their employees skimp you on the steak).

The list covers everything from harassment and wage theft to union busting efforts and offering unsafe working conditions. The list is interactive, allowing users to punch in a given company's name and see its violations.

The list is interactive, allowing users to punch in a given company's name and see its violations. Users can also search the list by violations.

For example, there are designated sections for "discrimination and harassment" and "wage theft," which can be toggled. When clicked on, those sections then display employers guilty of violating the said provision.

The employer violation dashboard spans 234 pages and covers companies of all sizes. There have already been reports of business owners leveraging the list to poach talent as well as customers from competitors that appear on the wall of shame.

Every city needs this!

CULTURE

Fired for Missing Quota (By 5 Mins?!)

According to interviews with current and former employees, a group of workers on Tesla’s data annotation team was fired for missing a quota by five minutes.

Talk about high expectations… And that’s maybe not even the craziest part of this story!

“For about $20 per hour, an army of Tesla annotators review troves of video taken by test drivers and owners — and are forced to deal with absolutely bizarre workplace rules while doing so.”

According to the group of employees that were interviewed by Business Insider, employees have to sift through intimate and “often disturbing” moments captured by the vehicle’s cameras.

All while being closely tracked and monitored by their employer.

At one of its data annotation locations in Buffalo, New York, employees are subjected to two separate monitoring software systems: HuMans, which measures how long they spend on each clip and gives them performance reviews for it, and Flide Time, which tracks keystrokes and how long workers spend with their data labeling software open.

And even their bathroom breaks are also monitored! (Not by video, hopefully…)

Spending too much time on clips can result in the HuMans program marking workers as having poor performance and ultimately ending up on a performance improvement plan (PIP). Flide Time, which monitors keystrokes, requires workers to log anywhere from 5-7.5 hours minimum for their shift to be “complete.”

If workers come up even five minutes short of their required time, they could face disciplinary action, including termination.

Hopefully, they at least get pizza parties on Fridays every once in a while!

LAYOFFS

The Latest in Layoffs

Overall, September job cuts have been relatively mild up to this point. Good news!

Below is the latest list of job cuts (via MacroEdge):

  • Boeing is enacting a company wide hiring freeze to preserve cash. Looks like their planes aren’t the only thing crashing.

  • Boar's Head will close a manufacturing facility in Virginia, resulting in ~500 job cuts.

  • Verizon Communications Inc. will take a pre-tax charge of as much as $1.9 billion in the third quarter tied to 4,800 job cuts.

  • Seattle Public Schools unveils plans to close up to 21 schools, reduce staffing levels.

  • Microsoft will cut another 650 jobs, mostly at Activision Blizzard.

  • PricewaterhouseCoopers’s (PwC) U.S. unit is laying off about 1,800 workers, its first formal layoff since the GFC, to address declining demand.

  • Samsung Electronics, the world’s top producer of smartphones, TVs, and memory chips, is reportedly planning to reduce its global workforce in some divisions by up to 30%.

  • Amazon to eliminate hundreds of positions in California - primarily at distribution centers.

  • Volkswagen told union leaders on Tuesday that it is ending a labor agreement that protected workers from mass layoffs.

  • UPS is laying off more employees amid effort to boost profitability and shore up costs. The company has already laid off 12,000 workers this year.

  • The City of Chicago has enacted a citywide hiring freeze, effective immediately.

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