As reported by CNBC, Disney began its second round of layoffs on Monday, bringing total job cuts in recent weeks to 4,000 when the latest round is completed.
Earlier this year, Disney said it would slash 7,000 jobs from its workforce as part of a larger reorganization of the company that will see it cut costs by $5.5 billion. The announcement was made during Bob Iger’s first earnings call since returning as CEO.
Eliminating 7,000 jobs from its workforce equates to about 3% of the roughly 220,000 people Disney employed as of Oct. 1, according to a securities filing, roughly 166,000 in the U.S. and about 54,000 internationally.
Disney notified employees of a first wave of layoffs on March 27, which saw cuts in its metaverse strategies unit and part of its Beijing office.
“The senior leadership teams have been working diligently to define our future organization, and our biggest priority has been getting this right, rather than getting it done fast,” according to a note to employees Monday from co-chairmen of Disney Entertainment, Alan Bergman and Dana Walden.
The second round of cuts, which were completed Thursday, will affect various divisions across the company, including Disney Entertainment and ESPN, as well as Disney Parks, Experiences and Products. The jobs affected will span across the country from Burbank, California, to New York and Connecticut. Disney said it expects to start its third wave of layoffs before the beginning of the summer in order to reach the 7,000 target. Disney has previously said it doesn’t expect layoffs to affect its hourly workers at its parks and resorts.
Labor Board Rules Tesla Broke the Law
As reported by Reuters, Tesla Inc. supervisors at a Florida service center violated U.S. labor law by telling employees not to discuss pay and other working conditions or bring complaints to higher level managers.
Managers at the Orlando repair shop illegally silenced workers in 2021 after some of them complained that new hires were being paid more, according to the decision issued Tuesday by National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Administrative Law Judge Michael Rosas.
The judge ordered Tesla to cease and desist from violating workers' rights and to post notice of the violations in the service center and email it to employees. The ruling is the latest loss for Tesla before the labor board as it also faces lawsuits alleging widespread race and sex discrimination at its assembly plants.
According to the decision, in late 2021, employees became aware that new hires at the collision center were being paid a higher hourly rate than existing workers.
Several workers complained, including a technician who contacted a Tesla vice president and had his complaint forwarded to the company's head of human resources, according to the ruling.
Supervisors at the service center held a meeting where they instructed the facility's 25 employees not to discuss their pay and other working conditions and not to file complaints with higher level managers, Rosas said. Weeks later, the technician who had complained was fired, according to the decision.
The technician filed a complaint against Tesla with the NLRB last year, and Tuesday's ruling came after Rosas held a hearing in February.
Tesla had argued that it had quickly repudiated the managers' comments by posting a notice in the service center that Tesla policy allowed workers to discuss their pay.
The judge said that attempting to silence employees violated their fundamental right under U.S. labor law to band together to advocate for better working conditions.
The decision came about a month after a U.S. appeals court upheld an NLRB ruling that Tesla CEO Elon Musk broke the law by tweeting that employees would lose stock options if they joined a union. The company is also appealing an NLRB decision that said it unlawfully barred factory workers from wearing union t-shirts.
Gap Plans to Cut Hundreds of Corporate Jobs
Gap Inc. is eliminating hundreds of corporate jobs from its global workforce as part of a broad restructuring aimed at making the company more nimble and less bureaucratic, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The current round of cuts is slated to be larger than in September, when Gap eliminated roughly 500 corporate positions, the Journal reports. Those job cuts were mostly at its main offices in San Francisco and New York, and were part of efforts to save about $250 million annually.
More recently, the leaders of each of the company’s brands — Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic and Athleta — have been conducting a wide-ranging review with the goal of stripping out layers of management to speed decision making.
“Our goal is to flatten the organization, increase spans of control to create more robust roles and individual empowerment, and decrease layers to remove bottlenecks and make better, faster decisions,” according to a memo from Gap chairman and interim CEO Bob Martin to employees last week.
In March, Gap said it identified an additional $300 million in cost cuts, including by stripping out layers of management. At the time, company leaders didn’t say how many jobs would be lost. But it announced the elimination of one high-profile position, that of chief growth officer.
The company began notifying employees it planned to lay off in its international sourcing division on April 18. The finance team will be apprised in late May, according to the memo.
The moves come as Gap continues to operate without a permanent leader after its previous CEO stepped down in July. Martin said in March that the board was close to picking a new CEO, adding that the person would come from outside the company.
Gap employed about 95,000 people worldwide as of late January, most of whom work in retail locations. Roughly 9% of its staffers work in headquarters locations, the company said.
Report: A Dubious Milestone for Women CEOs
Female CEOs now outnumber the male CEOs named John or a common alternative like Jon or Jonathan, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News.
Bloomberg’s research, inspired by Lauren Harris, Stanford University economics doctoral student, was in reaction to a New York Times story from 2015 that had found fewer women ran big companies than men named John.
Bloomberg found that the record 41 women now running S&P 500 companies, “no longer need to measure themselves against John, or, for that matter, any Tom, Dick or Harry.” No single male name matches their number, according to its analysis of CEO first names in the benchmark index from 2015 to 2023. (Harris, who used a larger sample going back to 1994, reached a similar conclusion.)
Female CEOs first outnumbered any single male name among S&P 500 CEOs in 2018. But they tied with James the following year and didn’t really break free from the men until this past year, when 10 new women joined their ranks, including Jennifer Rumsey, CEO of truck-engine maker Cummins.
Bloomberg’s analysis found another data point that illustrates another trend diminishing the preponderance of Johns: There are now 186 unique first names that appear among S&P 500 CEOs, up from 133 in 2015. That's, in part, due to the rise of non-Western or otherwise non-Biblical first names among the group, like Reshma Kewalramani, CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, who came to the U.S. from India when she was 11.
“We still have a long way to go,” Rumsey, who last year became the first female CEO in the company’s 104-year history, told Bloomberg. “This question, how does it feel to be a woman in this role, can cause you to question sometime: Do people think I got this role because I’m a woman? Am I confident in myself? What are other people thinking of me?”
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