All posts tagged: employees

New York City Utterly Screwed Up Insurance for Employees Taking GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs

New York City Utterly Screwed Up Insurance for Employees Taking GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs

Image by Jaap Arriens / NurPhoto via Getty / Futurism After insurance for New York City employees began covering GLP-1 weight-loss injectables at the beginning of the year, nearly 1,000 city workers and their dependents began using the drugs. And now they’re being told that coverage was accidental and they need to stop. In a statement to Gothamist, a city spokesperson admitted that municipal employee insurance coverage for these fullness-mimicking medicines was made “in error.” “The city never planned to cover these drugs,” spokesperson Liz Garcia told the website, “due to the steep costs that would fall on city employees.” While those who take GLP-1s for diabetes will continue to have their medication covered by municipal insurer EmblemHealth, those who use them strictly for weight loss will be left out in the cold. For longtime NYC Department of Education employee Sarah Kalemkerian, that means her Zepbound prescription will go from costing $25 every three months to $550 per month — a price increase she can’t afford on her own. Kalemkerian told Gothamist that she’d tried every fad diet before …

‘A lot of uncertainty’: Former, current employees on Citi layoffs in Singapore

‘A lot of uncertainty’: Former, current employees on Citi layoffs in Singapore

CNA spoke to one ex-employee, Sarah, who has already found a job with a local bank. She recently resigned from her role in Citi’s wealth management division. Before the reorganisation, she was already concerned about career progression. The job cuts made her even less hopeful about finding other opportunities within the bank, and she was also disappointed by how the layoffs were handled. “Seeing some talented staff being laid off surely makes one feel sad,” said Sarah, who is in her 30s. It also seemed unfair that regional teams seemed less affected than country teams when some of them were merged. After March, she started actively looking for a new job. Other colleagues told her they were also open to leaving the bank, but she said many were taking a wait-and-see approach.  EMPLOYERS’ MARKET Hunting for a new job has been difficult for Mark, who said it’s an employer’s market in the banking industry now.  Most of the people he knows who got laid off in March have not found another job, while a few …

Humble Games lays off all employees

Humble Games lays off all employees

GamesBeat is excited to partner with Lil Snack to have customized games just for our audience! We know as gamers ourselves, this is an exciting way to engage through play with the GamesBeat content you have already come to love. Start playing games here.  According to recent reports, indie publisher Humble Games has laid off its entire team of 36 staffers. While unconfirmed, employees claim that these layoffs will lead to the publisher closing its doors. Humble Games is a subsidiary of media giant Ziff Davis. Alongside Humble Games, Ziff Davis’ gaming brands include IGN, VG24, Eurogamer, Games Industry Biz and more. While related, the charity-focused storefront Humble Bundle is a separate team and not affected by these cuts. At the time of publishing, Humble Games has not yet commented on these reports. Humble Games has published nearly 50 indie games and has another seven titles in development. It is unclear how these cuts will impact these upcoming games or their development teams. Lil Snack & GamesBeat GamesBeat is excited to partner with Lil Snack …

Bethesda Game Studios employees form a ‘wall-to-wall’ union

Bethesda Game Studios employees form a ‘wall-to-wall’ union

Employees at Bethesda Game Studios — the Microsoft-owned game developer that produces the Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises — are joining the Communication Workers of America. Quality assurance testers at Bethesda’s parent organization ZeniMax unionized last year, becoming Microsoft’s first official union in the United States. In its announcement, the CWA calls Bethesda’s new union “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft game studio,” because it stretches across development teams and job titles, including artists, engineers, programmers, and designers.  The CWA says the union will represent a total of 241 workers who have either signed a union card or indicated that they want to join via an online portal. It also says Microsoft has recognized the union (a voluntary step that avoids an election and precedes the actual contract negotiation). A Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat the company supports “employees’ right to choose how they are represented in the workplace” and that it “will engage in good faith negotiations with the CWA.” (TechCrunch has also reached out to Microsoft for comment.) “We are so excited to …

Data breach exposes details of 25,000 current and former BBC employees | BBC

Data breach exposes details of 25,000 current and former BBC employees | BBC

The BBC has launched an investigation after the details of more than 25,000 current and former employees were exposed in a data breach. The corporation’s pension scheme wrote to members on Wednesday to say their details had been stolen in a data security incident that it was taking “extremely seriously”. A spokesperson for the pension scheme said the details of about 25,290 people had been affected. The BBC said it had seen no evidence that the incident was a ransomware attack – a type of hack commonly used by organised cybercrime groups to steal large amounts of personal data. The BBC has one of the biggest occupational pension schemes in the UK, with more than 50,000 members. In its email to those affected, the pension scheme did not explain how the breach had happened, beyond saying that private records had been “copied from an online data storage service”. The data leaked includes the name, date of birth and sex of members, their home address, national insurance number and an indication that they are a member …

Google Execs Say Employees Will Be Rewarded for Huge Profits With Fewer Layoffs

Google Execs Say Employees Will Be Rewarded for Huge Profits With Fewer Layoffs

Lots of techspeak with very few answers here. Questioning Power Google employees have been pretty down as of late amid massive layoffs — but according to the company’s C-suite, the beatings won’t continue. As CNBC reports, an all-hands meeting at Google’s parent company Alphabet got contentious last week when staffers began asking executives why morale was so low despite record earnings that pushed the company’s market cap past $2 trillion. “We’ve noticed a significant decline in morale, increased distrust, and a disconnect between leadership and the workforce,” read one employee comment from an employee on the all-hands forum. “How does leadership plan to address these concerns and regain the trust, morale, and cohesion that have been foundational to our company’s success?” In another question, an employee asked why, “despite the company’s stellar performance and record earnings, many Googlers have not received meaningful compensation increases.” “When will employee compensation fairly reflect the company’s success,” the employee asked, “and is there a conscious decision to keep wages lower due to a cooling employment market?” With her feet to …

Samsung Is Mandating 6-Day Work Week For All Executives

Samsung Is Mandating 6-Day Work Week For All Executives

Working the standard five days a week and 40 hours has become quite the struggle for many working-class Americans. Still, a large and well-known company has seemingly ignored the burnout crisis and decided their employees need to work longer.  Popular tech company Samsung recently announced that all of its executives will have to follow a new mandate requiring them to be in the office most of the week. Samsung is forcing executives to work a 6-day week to ‘inject a sense of crisis’ in their employees. According to The Korea Economic Daily, Samsung, a Korean company, has introduced a companywide six-day workweek policy for executives as the company attempts to address and devise emergency measures to tackle ongoing business uncertainty. This comes after a disappointing financial year in 2023, which included revenue of around $51 billion in last year’s final quarter, down 3.8% year-on-year and down 2.2% compared with initial analyst predictions. “Considering that performance of our major units, including Samsung Electronics Co., fell short of expectations in 2023, we are introducing the six-day work week for …

HR Rep Shares 7 Things Employees Should Never Do In The Workplace

HR Rep Shares 7 Things Employees Should Never Do In The Workplace

There are a lot of unspoken rules one should follow in the workplace, but not many employees may be aware of them. In fact, they may sometimes break these “rules,” costing them their position in the process. In this way, there are many actions that workers can take in order to be successful in the workplace. However, there are other actions that you should avoid completely. An HR worker shared 7 rules for what employees should avoid doing in the workplace Valerie Rodriguez, who calls herself a “multifaceted corporate girl” on her TikTok bio, offered advice to employees with key takeaways based on her experience working in HR for nearly 10 years. 1. Don’t get too personal with other employees Rodriguez claims that oversharing details about your personal life with your coworkers may pose a problem.  “Sharing too much does not do you any good at any point in your career,” she said. “Especially when you know that you’re trying to move up [and] you’re trying to establish yourself as a reputable person within the …

Tesla just laid off more employees after gutting the entire charging team

Tesla just laid off more employees after gutting the entire charging team

Tesla isn’t done with laying off workers. According to reports from Business Insider and Electrek, Elon Musk’s EV car company laid off more employees over the weekend. With these latest cuts, Tesla has now entered its fourth week of layoffs. It’s unclear just how many workers lost their jobs at Tesla in this latest round of layoffs. At least seven employees have confirmed being laid off from their jobs in Tesla’s software, services, and engineering departments.  “After watching my team gradually slimmed down week after week since mid-April, I received the dreaded ‘Hello Employee’ email this Sunday afternoon,” according to a LinkedIn post from a now-former Tesla employee (via Business Insider). Tesla’s bad year Tesla’s first quarterly report of the year saw the company’s earnings tumble by nine percent, falling well short of what experts and analysts predicted. Tesla sales and profits have dropped by around 50 percent year-over-year. Mashable Light Speed Then, just last month, Tesla issued a recall for its new Cybertruck after consumers reported a very serious issue where the acceleration pedal …

How one company’s employees use Microsoft Copilot to avoid the worst part of meetings

How one company’s employees use Microsoft Copilot to avoid the worst part of meetings

Microsoft Amid the fears that AI will take over, well, everything, perhaps it’s worth considering where the supposed takeover may start. And where, indeed, it might even be useful. Also: AI taking on more work doesn’t mean it replaces you. Here are 12 reasons to worry less Ever since Microsoft Copilot emerged with a rush of promises, I’ve wondered where it might be most easily embraced.  One of Microsoft’s first suggestions was that you treat it as a friend, while you wander through life entirely alone. It was, in its way, persuasive. Yet what role is Copilot already playing in everyday business functions? Currently, some selected companies are testing Copilot to see if it brings them, well, benefits. It’s easy to be enchanted by AI, but sometimes harder to see whether it can make an active, accurate contribution to company efficiency and — who knows? — perhaps even profits. I was moved, then, to learn of the early reactions of one organization: Amadeus. The renowned travel software company seems to have found a vast benefit …