News / corporate-greed
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1 min read
Your Face Is a Performance Review
Read more . . . →There is a nine-billion-dollar industry being built around technology that reads your face at work and decides whether you’re happy enough to keep your job. Emotion AI (cameras and software that analyze your expressions and tone of voice, and in some cases the electrical activity of your actual nervous system) is already deployed in hiring, training, and performance reviews across the country. Your employer can run a sentiment check on your face during a meeting the way they run a spell check on an email. Independent research found the tech is about 50 percent accurate. A coin flip. They built...
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Fifty-Three Cents
Read more . . . →The government started tracking how much of the economy goes to workers in 1947. In seventy-nine years of data, it has never been lower than right now. Labor’s share of GDP just hit 52.8 percent. Corporate profits, in the same quarter, hit $4.8 trillion. Both are records. One of them gets celebrated on earnings calls. The other one is you. Twenty years ago, workers took home almost 65 cents of every dollar the economy generated. Now it’s 53 and dropping. Wages since 2019 are up 3 percent adjusted for inflation. Profits are up 50. That’s not a rounding error. That’s...
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$133 Billion and a Three-Minute Call
Read more . . . →Microsoft posted $133.7 billion in net profit this year. Up thirty-one percent. Then they fired 3,200 Xbox workers, some of them in three-minute phone calls from Montreal. Fifth round of layoffs in three years. The gaming division pulled in $21.8 billion and added two hundred million players. The people who built the games those players showed up for got a call shorter than a cigarette break telling them September is their last month. Hundreds of those workers are CWA union members who just organized and are fighting for first contracts. Microsoft started cutting while negotiations were still open. The union...
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1 min read
He Bought the Picket Line
Read more . . . →Tesla just ended the longest strike in modern Swedish history. One thousand and twenty-one days of industrial action, and the company’s resolution strategy was to write severance checks to every remaining striker until IF Metall had nobody left to represent. The walkout started in October 2023 over something basic: Tesla refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement. In Sweden, where those agreements cover 90% of the workforce, that refusal was never a negotiation tactic. It was a declaration. Three years later, the agreement is still unsigned, and Tesla operates in Sweden with zero union representation. At the strike’s peak, 500...
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312 to 1 and Nobody Blinked
Read more . . . →The AFL-CIO dropped its annual number this week: 312. That’s how many times the average S&P 500 CEO out-earned the median American worker last year. It was 285 the year before. Average package: $22.8 million. Average worker: $73,000. One of these people sat in meetings. The other one did the work those meetings were about. CEO pay went up 21% in a single year while the people who generate the revenue got whatever their annual review felt like giving them. Then there’s Musk, who broke the spreadsheet entirely. His Tesla comp package was $158 billion — fourteen times the total...
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Your Groceries Have Surge Pricing Now
Read more . . . →Walmart is putting digital price tags on every shelf in every store by the end of this year. They say it’s about efficiency — updating a price used to take two days with paper tags, now it takes minutes. What they’re not telling you is that the same technology lets them change the price of milk at 5pm when every tired parent in the zip code walks through the door. The grocery workers’ union has a name for it: surveillance pricing. Uber for your cereal aisle. The tags can respond to foot traffic, time of day, weather, local demand. The...
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Walmart Gets $2.4 Billion Back. You Get the Receipt.
Read more . . . →Walmart just got a $2.4 billion refund check from the federal government. Apple got $2.19 billion. Amazon, $600 million. Ford, $1.3 billion. Your refund: zero. Trump spent two years collecting $166 billion in tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled were illegal, and now the money is flowing back — to the corporations that filed the customs paperwork. You paid the markup at the register for two straight years. You ate the price hikes on everything from groceries to sneakers. The refund process is designed so that only the “importer of record” can claim a cent. You were never the importer...
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You're Paying to Power the Machine That Replaced You
Read more . . . →Oracle fired 30,000 people in March to free up cash for AI data centers. No warning. Employees got termination emails at 6am from “Oracle Leadership” — not from their manager, not from HR — a mass email from the void telling them their role had been eliminated and today was their last day. The company needed $50 billion for server farms, and the fastest way to find it was to stop paying humans. Call it what it is: a cash grab with a body count. Here’s where it gets good. Those data centers need electricity — obscene amounts of it...
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Record Buybacks, Record Insider Selling. Do the Math.
Read more . . . →In July, S&P 500 companies announced $166 billion in stock buybacks — the biggest July on record. That’s the corporate treasury spending shareholder money to hoover up its own shares and tell everyone the stock is a bargain too good to pass up. So here’s the number they’d rather not put in the same sentence: the executives signing off on those buybacks sold $77.6 billion of their own stock in the first half of the year, the second-fastest insider selling pace in more than two decades. With their own cash, those same insiders bought back $6.9 billion. They sold roughly...
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BILL Had a Good Quarter, So It Fired a Third of You
Read more . . . →BILL Holdings had a good quarter. Revenue up 13 percent, earnings beat, the kind of numbers a company puts in a press release with an exclamation point. So on May 7 the board did the obvious thing with all that success: it moved to fire up to a third of the company — roughly 700 people out of about 2,333 — and on the exact same day authorized a billion dollars to buy back its own stock. Not a slow quarter. Not a demand cliff. A beat. The money was never missing. There was a billion dollars sitting right there,...
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