Month: March 2022

After the vote count was announced Thursday, the outcome of the election to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse still hung in the balance. The tally stands at 993 votes against unionizing and 875 in favor; however 416 ballots remain challenged, mostly on the grounds of voter eligibility. The National Labor Relations Board will hold a

Alex Collinson, an analysis and research officer at the UK’s Trades Union Congress (TUC), points out that the reintroduction of the three-day waiting period means that if someone isolates for five days of a week, they only get paid for two days. “It brings SSP down from £96 a week to £39, which is not

“There’s a real belief that we can move at a pace that’s more similar to a software company,” says Brown, who worked at a data startup before starting Alga Biosciences. (His cofounders are both chemists.) Researchers have only just started studying the effect of algae in cattle feed, but Brown’s startup plans to move much

But the war in Ukraine has also reignited a debate within the VPN industry about whether these companies offer a safe way to dodge Russian internet censorship. “The most popular VPNs in Russia are free services,” says Simon Migliano, head of research at Top10VPN.com. “These VPN services are operated by highly opaque entities. It’s very

Uber has been especially squeezed in New York, because the city has since 2018 capped the number of ride-hail vehicles allowed to operate on its roads. As of January, there were just over 96,000 vehicle licenses granted in the city, according to the Taxi and Limousine Commission, though 30,000 of them weren’t used that month.

Ten days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, TikTok announced it had suspended new posts from Russian accounts due to the country’s new “fake news” law. But the company was quieter about a second policy shift—one that blocked TikTok users in Russia from seeing any content posted by accounts located outside the country. Findings by social

The supply chain is in chaos—and it’s getting worse. Air freight warehouses at Shanghai Pudong Airport are log-jammed as a result of strict Covid testing protocols imposed on China’s biggest city following a local outbreak. At the city’s port, Shanghai-Ningbo, more than 120 container vessels are stuck on hold. In Shenzhen, a major manufacturing hub

Retail associates at a pair of Google Fiber stores in Kansas City, Missouri, have voted to unionize, becoming the first group represented by the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) to gain collective bargaining rights and win National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recognition. After a campaign that subjected workers to anti-union meetings and messages, despite a request

Everyone thinks it’s normal to make a call without knowing which provider the other person is using, says MEP Paul Tang. “This should be a common exchange. It’s not just because Threema or Signal do not want it, it’s also the convenience of the user.” Some MEPS, including Tang, expressed disappointment at a compromise that

Hey, everyone. Among the first signs of spring: a climate-change-induced increase in pollen and a rising new Covid variant. Can we have six more weeks of winter? The Plain View Sergey Vasylchuk knew trouble was afoot when Russian troops began gathering at the border. People assured him the massed armies were only a feint, but

Bradley Moss is having a busy year. A consultant with union-avoidance firm The Burke Group, Moss has been paid by Amazon to traverse the US from Bessemer, Alabama, to Staten Island, New York, holding meetings and canvassing the warehouse floors to try to convince 12,000 workers at two warehouses to vote against unionizing. Friday marks

Argyle CEO Shmulik Fishman says the company can coach lenders on factors like consistency of work and upward trajectory. “Is your job title changing in an upward direction every six months? These are signs of a good worker and one where you might want to take another look,” he says. Reputation markers, however, can reflect

Aleks bought a one-way ticket out of Russia on February 21, right after Vladimir Putin recognized the breakaway Ukrainian territories of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states. A software developer working remotely for a European tech firm, Aleks—who asked that his full name be withheld—says that was a sign that worse things were coming. “I

A year ago, Anna (not her real name) would spend eight hours a day driving for food delivery platforms Just Eat and Deliveroo to earn £150 ($200 USD) a day in her home city of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Now to get close to that figure, Anna says she has to work 12-hour days. That’s before

California regulators, who are still hammering out the details of the Clean Miles Standard, have sensed the tension between drivers and the companies. “Employment status is the elephant in the room,” Shrayas Jatkar, a policy specialist at the state Workforce Development Board, said at a recent meeting hosted by state agencies involved in writing the

“Firms are also wary of wages getting compressed and losing their best talent to competitors without transparency,” says Obloj. “But in the data, the opposite happens—there’s no exodus of superstars from organizations that become transparent, and amid the Great Resignation, we can’t apply the lens of the ’70s and ’80s, when it was enough to

Arkady Yurievich Volozh seemed to be in good spirits. It was February 11, his birthday, and the 58-year-old billionaire CEO and cofounder of Yandex, the Russian tech behemoth, was in the sort of open, engaging mood that could be called privetliviy, after the casual Russian word privet for hello. He was speaking from his car

It has become easier to be labeled an extremist in Russia. On Monday the label—once reserved for the likes of the Taliban and the Islamic State—was given to Facebook’s parent company, Meta. A Moscow court ruled that Meta was an extremist organization in a decision that effectively banned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram from

Two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, Gregory Offner was looking for ways to help from his home in Philadelphia. He scrolled through Twitter and saw people posting receipts of Airbnbs they had booked in Ukraine, to get money directly into Ukrainian bank accounts. Offner was inspired. He chose an apartment in Kharkiv, a city in

In the predawn hours of Wednesday morning, workers at three Amazon warehouses walked off the job. More than 60 employees at two delivery stations in Queens, New York, and one in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC coordinated the first multistate walkout at US Amazon warehouses and demanded a $3 hourly raise. As high-profile union

A Russian “suicide drone” that boasts the ability to identify targets using artificial intelligence has been spotted in images of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Photographs showing what appears to be the KUB-BLA, a type of lethal drone known as a “loitering munition” sold by ZALA Aero, a subsidiary of the Russian arms company Kalashnikov,

Other conflicts and political leaders may be less fortunate, and could be more vulnerable to disruption by deepfakes, says Sam Gregory, who works on deepfakes policy at the nonprofit Witness. Zelensky’s high profile helped Ukraine’s deepfake warning two weeks ago win international news coverage, and it also helped his quick response on Wednesday to spread

But experts believe the short term will be more complicated and could spark a resurgence of fossil fuels. In the first week of March, power plants in Europe burned 51 percent more coal than a year earlier, according to data from research institute Fraunhofer ISE. The world’s biggest private coal producer, Peabody Energy, posted record

Valeriya Ionan, a deputy minister at Ukraine’s Ministry for Digital Transformation, was breastfeeding her two-month-old son Mars when the first explosions boomed over Kyiv in the early hours of February 24. “I didn’t get at first what was happening,” she says. Cold truth soon dawned: Russia was invading Ukraine. Ionan, a 31-year-old MBA who previously

Five hundred miles above Earth, there’s a growing layer of trash. Space debris made up of used rocket bodies and dead satellites hurtles through space, moving at almost 18,000 miles per hour. And the US Space Surveillance Network says the layer is growing: The network is tracking around 40,000 objects larger than a few inches

Gas price graphs look like sheer cliffs. Employers are finally summoning white-collar workers back to their offices and their commutes. Nations all over the world have banned Russian gas and oil following the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Plus, the ever-worsening climate crisis demands that humanity keep every possible bit of carbon out of the atmosphere

Code pours from Feross Aboukhadijeh’s fingers. As a devotee of the open source software movement, he has written immensely popular web apps, peer-to-peer file exchanges, and more than 100 other pieces of code that he has given away, all in the 10 years since he graduated from college. Lately, though, Aboukhadijeh has entered a new

It’s still continuing. We have towers deployed all along the southern border and the northern border. It’s part of Congress’s annual budget. But the vast majority of our work has been on the military side. There’s no billion-dollar contracts coming down the line to massively expand the border work. When I visited the border with

“Even minor disruption in the form of these very small-scale collective actions can bring the station-level managers to the bargaining table,” says Eli Friedman, an assistant professor of international and comparative labor at Cornell University. Although China bans independent unions and labor strikes, that hasn’t stopped gig workers from organizing unofficially. Many food delivery riders

You saw the many cryptocurrency-related Super Bowl ads, and maybe you found them weird, or deeply dystopian, or just disturbingly familiar. Nevertheless, perhaps you believe the blockchain has financial rewards left to reap and want to jump in, or you’ve already got some of your money tied up in cryptocurrencies via companies like Coinbase and