450
YouTube Music staff laid off in middle of meeting about employment rights with Austin City Council
(completemusicupdate.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
450 points (98.5% liked)
Not The Onion
11559 readers
1583 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I feel like Google just needs to give their employees the list of employees they're keeping at this point just rip the Bandaid right off and be done. It feels like every other week there's enormous layoffs from these big tech companies....
It's probably too complicated to do it all at once. By the time they finally figure it out, they already want to do more and the cycle repeats and never ends... although maybe thats the solution. They want to do so many layoffs that they can't do them all at once (but have to) and end up in a perpetual never ready to do layoffs situation, so no one gets laid off!
Magic!
There’s a percentage (of their workforce) that if companies cross it while doing layoffs, they are required to give a pretty big notice to the employees before laying them off. I think maybe 60 or 90 days?
There’s several other criteria as well, such as the company being a certain size, and it has to be a high enough percentage of employees at that specific location. But this is part of why you’ll hear about several layoff cycles within a year at one company instead of all at once.
Most companies that do meet the criteria just pay out the employees in lieu of the notice, which is allowed, but avoiding paying at all is definitely a motivator to avoid doing bigger rounds of layoffs.
They just see it as the cost of doing layoffs.
This notice is called the WARN Act.
The pay out isn't in lieu of the notice. What they do is lay off employees on the same day they publish the notice, and just keep the laid off employees on the payroll for 60 or 90 days, depending on jurisdiction (New York requires 90 days whereas most other states only require 60 days). This complies legally, but it's questionable ethically given the whole point of the act is to give employees advance notice of layoffs.
What's funny is watching tech companies try to apply this US-centric approach in other countries. Some European countries have a layoff process that takes multiple months to complete, and requires the employer to have just cause. They can't lay off people just because they want to. Some big tech companies that wanted to lay off employees in European offices failed to do so because of the strong protection of workers.