January
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News / labor
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1 min read
Ubisoft Kept The Jewels And The Family Name
Read more . . . →Ubisoft just cut another 380 people. The Winnipeg studio is dead after eight years, Belgrade is gone, and the Rainbow Six team in Montreal lost 120 heads in one swing. That’s the sixth round of layoffs in a single calendar year — sixth — and the official reason is a €1.5 billion loss and a cost-cutting plan that runs all the way to 2028. They say it like there’s no money anywhere in the building, like the doors are about to close, like everybody’s just got to understand. Except there was money. Last fall Tencent wired €1.16 billion in cash...
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1 min read
They Bought The Stock, Not The Workers
Read more . . . →Meta cut roughly 8,000 jobs this year — about ten percent of a division — and dressed it up the way they always do: getting disciplined, freeing up resources for the AI bet, tough choices nobody wanted to make. Except in the same stretch of months the company authorized another forty billion dollars to buy back its own stock, and burned through more than seventeen billion of it in a single quarter. So the money was there. It was sitting right there the whole time. It just wasn’t earmarked for the people who got walked out by security. Here’s what...
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1 min read
The Layoffs Didn't Even Work
Read more . . . →They told you the robot was coming for your job. Eighty percent of companies deploying AI cut workers this year, and a Gartner study of 350 firms just confirmed what anyone with a calculator already suspected: the cuts didn’t boost returns at all. The companies that fired the most people got nothing for it. No productivity miracle, no margin bump, just a smaller payroll and the same balance sheet. They torched 184,000 jobs this year chasing a number that never showed up. And here’s the part that should make you throw something. Sam Altman — the guy selling the robot...
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1 min read
Whirlpool Got Its Tariffs. It's Building in Mexico Anyway.
Read more . . . →If you want to know what tariffs actually protect, look at Whirlpool. This is the company that spent years lobbying for them — it got Trump to slap a 20% levy on imported washing machines back in 2018 because LG and Samsung were eating its lunch. Whirlpool wrote the playbook everyone’s running now: tax the foreign stuff, save the American factory, bring the jobs home. And in 2026, with that exact policy back in full force, Whirlpool is laying off 341 people at its plant in Amana, Iowa and moving the work to Mexico. A second round of cuts is...
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1 min read
Ten Days On The Line
Read more . . . →In 2008 the workers at American Axle in Three Rivers, Michigan did the responsible thing. The company said the plant would die unless they gave back wages, so they gave back wages — a lot of them watched their pay get cut nearly in half, from $29 an hour to $14.50. They ate the concession to save their jobs. That’s the deal capital always offers in a downturn: bleed now or we close the doors. And for almost two decades they lived with it. Then this month nearly a thousand of them walked off the job at midnight, held the...
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1 min read
They Fired You to Pay for the Data Center
Read more . . . →Oracle made $3.7 billion last quarter. Profit up 27 percent. Then it emailed 30,000 people at six in the morning to tell them they were done — no manager, no warning, just a note from “Oracle Leadership” while the coffee was still brewing. The company isn’t broke. It’s the opposite of broke. It cut all those people to free up eight to ten billion a year, and that money isn’t going to you or to anyone who survived the round. It’s going into concrete and graphics cards. You got laid off so a data center could get built. That’s the...
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1 min read
They Made 200 Years of Your Salary, Then Called You the Cost Problem
Read more . . . →The number that should be on every front page: at half the companies in the S&P 500, the median worker would have to clock in for 200 years to make what their CEO made last year. Two hundred. Last year that figure was 192, so the math is getting worse on schedule. Median CEO pay climbed almost 6% to $17.7 million in 2025, rewarded for “bigger profits and higher stock prices,” which is corporate for “we found new ways to pay you less.” At Coca-Cola the boss pulled roughly 1,739 times the median worker’s $17,947. Read that wage again. That’s...
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1 min read
SoFi's Workers Had to Threaten the World Cup to Get Paid
Read more . . . →The people who run concessions at SoFi Stadium — the cooks, the dishwashers, the bartenders, the cashiers — voted 96 percent to strike a week before the World Cup rolled into town. Days later they had a tentative deal with Legends Hospitality. Quick, clean, almost civilized. Until you stop and ask why it took the single biggest event that building will ever host to get a few thousand people a contract they should have had already. They didn’t get heard because someone in management woke up fair. They got heard because they happened to be standing on the one patch...
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1 min read
The Richest School on Earth Just Waited Out Its Own Workers
Read more . . . →Harvard’s grad student union just ended the longest strike in its history — forty days on the line — and walked away with nothing. No contract. The raises they asked for, a real process for reporting harassment, protections for the non-citizen workers Harvard can punish just by doing nothing: all still “on the table,” which is the polite version of saying the table won. Eighty-one percent of members voted to go back, and not because anybody got what they came for. You can’t pay rent with principle, and a lot of these workers are on visas where one missed paycheck...
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1 min read
They Named It a 'Jobless Boom' Out Loud
Read more . . . →Economists came up with a name for 2026 and said the quiet part straight into a microphone: the “jobless boom.” Corporate profits are sitting at the highest share of the economy since 1950. Workers’ share of what they actually produce just hit the lowest point since the government started counting in 1947. The 500 biggest companies grew earnings 28% last quarter. The seven tech giants grew theirs 63%. And they’re spending that money to fire you. Meta’s own internal memos described its May layoffs as a way to “offset the cost of AI investments” — corporate for: we swapped your...
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