HR News: 17 Feb, 2023

1.

TikTok, Yahoo, GitHub, and Baxter lay off employees

Bytedance owned TikTok, Yahoo, Microsoft-owned GitHub, and medical device manufacturer Baxter lay off employees. On Monday, Bytedance-owned social media app TikTok terminated its entire workforce in India, which consisted of around 40 employees. The India office staff was primarily responsible for the Brazil and Dubai markets.  According to a report by Economic Times, the affected employees will receive up to nine months of severance pay. The move has not been an unexpected one as the platform was banned in India approximately three years ago. Additionally, the employees were informed that February 28 would be their last day and were encouraged to search for other job opportunities. They were also given the reason that restarting operations in India was not going to be feasible due to the government’s stance on Chinese apps A TikTok spokesperson stated, “We have decided to shut down our India remote sales support centre, which was established in late 2020 to assist our global and regional sales teams We greatly value these employees and the impact they have had on our company, and we will provide them with support during this challenging time.” Yahoo; Joining the layoff spree, Yahoo is cutting 20 per cent of its workforce, amounting to 1,600 employees. The decisions is reportedly going to affect half of the company’s advertising technology business. Baxter; Baxter, a medical device manufacturer, has forecast a 2023 profit that is below the expectations of Wall Street and announced that it may cut up to 5 per cent of its worldwide workforce. This has caused the company’s shares to drop to $38.58, the lowest it has been in nearly seven years. GitHub; Microsoft-owned GitHub has revealed that it will be cutting 10 per cent of its workforce by the end of the company’s fiscal year. According to Fortune, the company had approximately 3,000 employees before this announcement. In addition, all of GitHub’s offices will be closed as their leases expire, partly due to low usage, and the company will transition to a primarily remote work model.

 

2.

Canada’s unemployment rate is 5%; 1.5 lakh jobs created in Jan.

Labour force participation has risen to 65.7%. While experts had predicted that Canada unemployment rate will go up to 5.1 per cent, the country’s economy has done better than expected. It create 1,50,000 jobs in January, with the majority being full-time work. This is way more than was expected. In comparison, December 2022 saw 70,000 jobs being added. The open immigration policy has resulted in growth in population. Students, temporary employees as well as other residents who are not permanent, are getting more jobs. The labour force participation rate has gone up to 65.7 per cent, that is, 0.3 percentage points. This is because, the labour force expanded by 1,53,000, or 0.7 per cent.

 

3.

Laid-off Googlers get more disappointing news

Apparently, Google has told the laid off employees that there was some error in calculating the number of stocks they would get. As if mass layoffs weren’t bad enough, Google managed to disappoint its laid-off employees yet again. The Company sent them an e-mail that indicated they would probably not get as many stocks as was stated. The tech giant has admitted that there was a calculation error and that the employees will get lesser stocks than were earlier promised.