Voters in Nebraska and Washington, D.C. on
Tuesday approved higher minimum wages,
according to a CNBC report.
Nebraska voters supported Initiative 433, which increases the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour, up from $9 per hour, by 2026. The minimum wage will adjust annually based on inflation after 2026.
In
D.C., voters approved Initiative 82, a ballot measure to increase the minimum
wage for tipped workers to $16.10 per hour from the current $5.35 per hour by
2027, matching the floor for non-tipped employees.
A similar Nevada ballot measure is
still pending. If it is approved, the minimum wage would rise
to $12 per hour by 2024, up from $9.50 or $10.50 per hour, depending on health
insurance benefits.
Currently, 30 states and the District of
Columbia have minimum wages above the $7.25 federal hourly rate, according to
the Economic Policy Institute. The
organization estimates that roughly 40% of U.S. workers are living in states
that already have a $15 minimum wage or will increase to $15 in the near future.
Twitter Asking Some Fired Workers to Return
After
completing his takeover, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk laid off 3,700 people last week
— almost half of its staff — but now the
company is reaching out to some
employees to come back, according to
multiple reports.
A
Bloomberg report cited sources saying that the company asked some folks to
return as they were laid off “by mistake.” It also noted it was calling some
other employees back as they were critical for building features for the platform Musk
envisions.
The
company had dismissed people across multiple departments, including human
rights, accessibility, machine learning ethics, transparency and
accountability, advertising, marketing, communications, engineering
and curation.
In
addition, some Twitter employees
who had been laid off last week have filed
a class-action lawsuit against the company for not
giving them adequate notice before dismissing them from their jobs. The case claims
Twitter violated
worker protection laws like the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining
Notification Act as well as the California WARN Act — both require 60 days of
advance notice before a mass layoff.
Facebook Parent Meta Announces Layoffs of 11,000 Staff
The Wall
Street Journal has reported that Meta Platforms Inc. plans to
cut more than 11,000 workers, or 13% of staff, embarking on the company’s first
broad restructuring to cope with a slumping digital-ad market and falling stock
price.
In
a message to staff on Wednesday, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company, the
parent of Facebook META and Instagram, would cut staff across all
its businesses, with its recruiting and business teams disproportionately
affected. The company is also tightening its belt by reducing its office space,
moving to desk-sharing for some workers and extending a hiring freeze through
the first quarter of 2023.
“This
is a sad moment, and there’s no way around that,”
Zuckerberg wrote, adding that he
had been wrong in assuming that an increase in online activity during the
pandemic would continue. “I got this wrong and I take responsibility for that.”
U.S.
staffers who are losing their jobs will receive 16 weeks of severance, plus an
additional two weeks for each year of employment at the company, and their
stock options set to vest in mid-November will still vest. Meta will cover
healthcare costs for those affected and their families for six months, Zuckerberg
said. Employees outside the U.S. who are affected will receive similar support,
with separate processes related to local employment laws.
Meta
reported more than 87,000 employees at the end of September, according to WSJ.
Survey: One in Five Britons Have Felt Office Discrimination
A recent survey by the Resolution Foundation,
an independent British think-tank, discovered one in five working-age Britons (18-65-year-olds) reported
experiencing some form of discrimination either at work or when applying for a
job over the last year, with those from ethnic minority backgrounds and those
with disabilities most affected.
The survey included
3,000-plus working-age adults fielded in September 2022.
The survey also found discrimination
on the grounds of age (3.7 million people) and sex (2.7 million) were most
commonly reported in absolute terms. But over one-fifth (21%) of people from
ethnic minority backgrounds say they have faced workplace discrimination
because of their ethnicity alone in the last year, for example, and 15% of
disabled people report encountering discrimination in the labor market based on
disability.
In
addition, the survey found low-paid workers are more likely to be anxious
about discrimination at work than their higher-paid peers (20%
of those in the lowest quartile of hourly pay, compared to 11%
of the highest-paid quartile).
Hannah
Slaughter, senior economist at the think-tank, said the analysis confirmed discrimination remains
“all too common in workplaces today,”
and pointed to the necessity for
the federal government to bolster enforcement of employees’ rights and assist
low-paid employees who are less
likely to take a case to
court.
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