1.
Lufthansa
to let go 29,000 employees by end of 2020, 10,000 in 2021
In all, the German airline
will shed about 40,000 jobs. With no hope of returning to pre-COVID levels
of demand for at least another five years, German airline, Lufthansa, has
decided to let go about 29,000 employees by the end of this year. Next year, it
will cut about 10,000 jobs in Germany. Outside Germany, the airline will let go
about 20,000 employees, including 7,500 from its catering unit, which it is
selling off. The subsidiaries of the airline, Eurowings, Swiss, Austrian and
Brussels Airlines, have also been forced to reduce flights and lay off many of
their ground staff. The German government had provided financial assistance in
the form of €9 billion to the airline, of which €3 billion have already been
consumed. Therefore, there is no other alternative left except job cuts.
2.
Google in the dock for
forcing Black tech co-lead to resign
Google wanted Timnit Gebru to withdraw her
research paper on the ethical issues pertaining to use of AI-driven systems to
understand human language and writing. Over 1,400 members of Google’s workforce have
come together to protest the firing of Timnit Gebru, technical co-lead at the
technology company’s ethical artificial intelligence (AI) team. Gebru, who is
Black, was apparently eliminated because she tried to speak up about the
ethical problems that could emerge from AI-driven systems that are employed to
comprehend human language — the kind of systems employed by Google’s search
engine — in her research paper. Gebru was reportedly forced to tender her
resignation after she told her colleagues, via an e-mail, that the Company had
asked her to withdraw her research paper. Her research paper exposed the fact
that the AI used by many organisations, including Google, had the ability to
reproduce human writing, including hate speech and biased language. When Gebru
tweeted about this, she received a lot of support from netizens. Almost 1,400
employees have come forward to show solidarity and demand reasons for censoring
her research paper and forcing her to withdraw the same.
3.
Pilots’
unions discourage Air India staff from bidding for the airline
The
unions want the issue regarding pay cuts to be resolved and arrears to be cleared
first. The
Indian Commercial Pilots’ Association (IPCA) and the Indian Pilots’ Guild (IPG)
have discouraged employees of Air India from participating in a bid to buy the
airline. Last week, a group of about 209 employees had come forward to invest
in the airline with help from a private equity (PE) fund. Each employee was to
contribute Rs 1 lakh and get a 51 per cent stake in the Company. However, the
unions have asked its members not participate in the bid until all issues
pertaining to salary cuts and the pending arrears are cleared and resolved. The
unions have been objecting to the 70 per cent pay cuts of the pilots as
compared to the 10 per cent pay cut of the senior management for some time now.
Also, the union has been negotiating for the release of the 25 per cent arrears
that have been withheld. The unions maintain that while the deadline for the
bid is December 14, no move has been made to clarify the matter of the 25 per
cent arrears that have been illegally held back from the pilots. The union
members are more disappointed because most other airlines have restored the
salaries of their employees or revised the cuts for the pilots, whereas Air
India has made no attempt to do so. Therefore, the unions want all the pending
issues to be addressed first before the employees take part in the strategic
bid.
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