Tag Archives: Work

You can be legally fired in most states for refusing to work Thanksgiving Day

Customers navigate through the aisles during the Black Friday sales event on Thanksgiving Day at Target in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. November 23, 2017. REUTERS/Kamil Krzaczynski Big-box retailers like Target, Best Buy, and Walmart closed their doors for Thanksgiving Day, giving their employees a day off before the Black Friday rush. However, in most parts of the U.S. it would be legal for these retailers to mandate employees clock in during this holiday, experts say. Thanksgiving, along with 11… Source link

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Alphabet is putting its prototype robots to work cleaning up around Google’s offices

What does Google’s parent company Alphabet want with robots? Well, it would like them to clean up around the office, for a start. The company announced today that its Everyday Robots Project — a team within its experimental X labs dedicated to creating “a general-purpose learning robot” — has moved some of its prototype machines out of the lab and into Google’s Bay Area campuses to carry out some light custodial tasks. “We are now operating a fleet of more than 100 robot… Source link

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Vaccine requirement will help people feel safe at work, boost labor force participation

Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh says the Biden administration’s new vaccine requirements will help boost the labor force participation rate. On Friday, the Labor Department said the labor force participation rate was unchanged in October, at 61.6%. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the participation rate has stayed between 61.4% and 61.7% since June 2020.  “We really have to focus on how do we bring confidence back to those folks that are just afraid of coming back,” said Walsh in… Source link

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Sonos’ voice assistant might work alongside Alexa but not the Google Assistant

When Sonos purchased a privacy-focused voice assistant Snips in 2019, it strongly implied that it planned to build an assistant that would “add to our customers’ ease of use and control” instead of going head-to-head with bigger assistants from other big tech companies. Nearly two years later, we might be close to being using the company’s homegrown assistant, as a Reddit user found code in the Sonos app that appears to show voice commands for Sonos Voice Control (via Protocol).

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Google Wants to Work With the Pentagon Again, Despite Employee Concerns

Three years after an employee revolt forced Google to abandon work on a Pentagon program that used artificial intelligence, the company is aggressively pursuing a major contract to provide its technology to the military. The company’s plan to land the potentially lucrative contract, known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, could raise a furor among its outspoken work force and test the resolve of management to resist employee demands. In 2018, thousands of Google employees signed a… Source link

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‘A lot of us are willing to work’

The great — which has , holiday — has bottlenecked West Coast ports, and drawn the involvement of the White House to address it. As the disruption reaches a boiling point and adds to rising price pressures, longshoremen, union representatives and truck drivers have pointed fingers over which party is best positioned to alleviate some of the strains. Cargo ships afloat in the Pacific Ocean demonstrate the convergence of strong consumer demand, and a widespread shortage of bodies to meet… Source link

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Google will make it easier to separate your work and personal life on Android

Google’s Work Profile tool for Android, which lets you hide your work apps and data with the flip of a switch and keeps your personal phone use safe from your company, will be coming to more users next year. According to a blog post from the company, currently, the feature is limited to phones that your organization manages, but Google says it’ll start to become available to people using Google Workspace in 2022. After that, it’ll branch out with the ultimate goal of letting anyone… Source link

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How gaming studios are fighting back against a toxic work culture

Video game developer Eidos-Montreal announced its shift to a four-day workweek last Thursday, marking it as the most high-profile studio in the gaming world to do so. Eidos’ announcement is a tectonic shift in an industry that’s been notorious for the poor treatment of its developers for decades. Crunch culture — the video game industry practice of working longer hours for big studios (known industry-wide as AAAs), and pushing employees to exhaustion when a project’s deadline draws… Source link

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‘We need to force people in many respects’ back to work

Gary Cohn, a key architect of former President Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, has a new mission.  “We now need to get people back into the workforce and we need to force people in many respects to re-enter the workforce,” Cohn told Yahoo Finance Live. Cohn said he is worried the current shortage of labor threatens to undermine the ability of American businesses to compete at home and globally. The U.S. Department of Labor’s latest JOLTS report showed there are almost 11 million job… Source link

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