Latest news with #jobcuts
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Federal health agency finalizes mass layoffs after Supreme Court lifts pause
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is moving forward with mass layoffs after the Supreme Court lifted a pause on the Trump administration's sweeping efforts to cut the workforce at federal agencies. The administration began a wave of terminations at HHS on April 1, part of a plan to cut 10,000 jobs at the department and many more across the federal government. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco halted the layoffs, ruling on May 22 that approximately 20 affected agencies, including HHS, wouldn't be able to function as Congress intended. The Supreme Court, in a July 8 ruling, allowed the job cuts to proceed. An HHS spokesperson said July 15 that employees originally targeted for layoffs have now been terminated, with some exceptions. Combined with earlier job cuts and people who accepted early retirement offers, the total Health and Human Services workforce is expected to drop from 82,000 to 62,000 people. President Donald Trump has been pushing big cuts at federal agencies through the Department of Government Efficiency. The HHS cuts affect a vast array of programs, including the HIV prevention division in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and tobacco prevention efforts at the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration. Word of the cuts prompted concern from leading health experts when they were announced in April. 'The randomness of today's actions is reckless and will harm Americans rather than make them healthy,' Dr. Colleen Kelley, chair of the HIV Medicine Association, said at the time. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in March when the department announced plans for big cuts that the move would reduce "bureaucratic sprawl" and realign his agency "with its core mission and our new priorities." Contributing: Maureen Groppe, Sarah D. Wire, Josh Meyer, Bart Jansen, Ken Alltucker, Cybele Mayes-Osterman, Eduardo Cuevas, Sudiksha Kochi, Adrianna Rodriguez, Terry Collins This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump's administration finalizes mass layoff of health workers
Tahawul Tech
a day ago
- Business
- Tahawul Tech
Amazon announces job cuts across its AWS Unit
Amazon is said to have cut hundreds of jobs in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit, as the company continues to invest billions in its data centre infrastructure as part of an AI push. Reuters reported Amazon confirmed the job cuts, but it did not provide an exact number. The news agency reported in June Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warned the use of generative AI would lead to a reduction in its workforce. 'We've made the difficult business decision to eliminate some roles across particular teams in AWS', a representative for Amazon told Reuters. 'These decisions are necessary as we continue to invest, hire, and optimise resources to deliver innovation for our customers'. Several impacted employees told Reuters yesterday (17 July) they had lost their jobs and their computers were deactivated. Amazon spent $24.3 billion on capex in Q1, down from $26.3 billion a year ago. For the full year of fiscal 2025, Amazon expects to outlay $105 billion in capex which will primarily go towards AI capabilities and AWS expansion. Source: Mobile World Live Image Credit: Amazon
Bloomberg
a day ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Colombia Firms Warn of Layoffs and Rising Costs From Petro's Labor Overhaul
Colombia's security firms and hospitals are warning of job cuts and surging costs as a knock-on effect of President Gustavo Petro's push to boost worker benefits. The overhaul, signed into law at the end of last month, provides earlier overtime pay, doubles their wages on Sundays and holidays and limits fixed-term contracts, among other changes. Doing all that increases the cost of formal employment and risks driving some cash-strapped companies to hire off the books.
Harvard Business Review
a day ago
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
New Research on How Layoffs Affect the Labor Market
For months, economists, journalists, and analysts have wondered whether a recession might hit the U.S. economy. When a recession strikes, many companies respond by immediately downsizing their workforce to preserve cash, streamline operations, and maintain flexibility in the face of macroeconomic uncertainty. Yet these employment cuts can have devastating consequences on workers and cause lingering damage to the labor market at large. In new research, we studied the spillover impacts that corporate job-cutting during a recession can have on employees' long-term economic well-being and the labor markets in which they reside—and what corporate leaders and policymakers can do to mitigate such effects. We found that concentrated bursts of employment cuts amplify the negative worker consequences of layoffs—and they can help explain why job loss during recessions is particularly devastating for labor markets. Our work suggests that it would be valuable for firms and policymakers to work together to retain workers in the midst of economic downturns. How Individual Job Cutting Impacts the Broader Economy Employment cuts can have devastating consequences on workers, especially when they are part of a broader economic downturn. Previous academic research has established two facts about firm layoffs. First, the start of a recession prompts many companies to sharply and suddenly destroy more jobs. Second, the average worker who is laid off during a recession experiences a staggering 19% decrease in their future lifetime earnings, compared to a less extreme 11% earnings loss associated with layoffs during normal times. Together, these two facts paint a troubling picture: companies ramp up job cuts exactly when they impose the most damage on affected employees. Nonetheless, many corporate leaders feel that they must make the difficult decision to proactively reduce their workforce at the start of a recession in order to safeguard their firms' financial well-being and long-term viability. But here's the rub: recessions induce many business leaders, across a broad array of geographies and industries, to simultaneously conclude that it is a prudent time to cut employment. With so many laid-off workers desperate to find a new job, even healthy firms may struggle to adjust their business plans to accommodate new employees. Unemployed workers, in turn, may be forced to endure a prolonged spell of joblessness that weakens their skills and attachment to the labor force. As a result, individually rational decision-making by companies can produce inefficient collective outcomes in the market. We examined the significance of these spillover effects to better understand what might be done to prevent such rapid deterioration of labor markets. To do this, we used comprehensive administrative data from the U.S. Census Bureau on workers' quarterly employment status and labor earnings between 1994 and 2020. We studied the variation in the employment cuts by large national firms that operate in many different geographic markets and which tend to make company-wide layoff decisions based on factors, like credit, that are unrelated to the conditions in any one local market. The large employment share of these firms means that their workforce decisions are key drivers of local labor market conditions. We find that job destruction has substantial negative spillover effects. When a worker is laid off in a local labor market with a one percentage point higher rate of job destruction, they earn an estimated $4,200 less over the following six years than laid-off employees where there was a lower rate of job destruction. Our findings suggest that each layoff that an individual business makes during an economic downturn leads to a per-year reduction of $17,000 in total earnings across workers outside of their own business. In other words, the pile-on of layoffs severely deteriorates local labor markets, which may take years to recover. What Policymakers and Corporate Leaders Can Do Our findings suggest that the aggregate effects of job destruction impose substantial costs on workers by damaging wider labor market conditions. This may be one reason why some regions have struggled to recover from the Great Recession. For policymakers, the large spillover effect from layoffs may motivate greater interventions to directly stabilize employment during downturns. While the expansion of job-saving employment subsidies (such as short-time work) has been a historical staple of European labor market policy, the United States has only recently experimented with expanding familiar types of firm support. Research on the most prominent of these policies—the Paycheck Protection Program during the COVID-19 pandemic—has found that these subsidies helped to prevent job loss for millions of workers. However, the lack of targeting and substantial cost leave scope for better policy design in preparing for the next recession. Though we only examine private U.S. employment, our results may also inform workforce decisions of public institutions that wish to avoid congesting the labor market. The negative consequences can be seen from the recent wave of layoffs from the federal workforce, which has led to an overwhelming number of new applications and has made finding jobs in state and local governments more difficult for displaced workers. Our research also has implications for the difficult decisions employers must make when restructuring their workforce. Advance notice of workforce cuts, as mandated for mass layoffs covered by the WARN Act or performed by federal agencies, helps maintain a vibrant labor market by giving workers time to find new opportunities that fit their skills and experience. Because workers would seek to avoid looking for jobs when labor market conditions are poor, companies experiencing financial strain may want to consider alternative work arrangements before resorting to layoffs. For example, recent research suggests that many workers would be willing to accept wage cuts to avoid being laid off by their employer. These kinds of interventions—which can prevent workers from facing total joblessness—may help maintain vibrant labor markets while offsetting some of the steep financial costs faced by workers. Some Caveats There are several important caveats with the interpretations and implications of our results. First, in additional analyses, we find that employers tend to have a higher revenue-per-worker following episodes of job destruction due to the reallocation of labor to growing firms. While our paper suggests these potential productivity gains do not fully offset the estimated costs faced by workers, more research could help provide a more complete understanding of the effects of job destruction on the labor market and how its deterioration might impact firms' revenues. . . . Many firms turn to layoffs to stabilize their businesses during an economic downturn. Yet the collective impacts of these decisions across businesses can cause lasting damage to workers and labor markets. Our research suggests firms and policymakers can help support healthy labor markets when they work together to stabilize and maintain jobs in times of crisis.
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
Children of ex-federal workers' rally against job cuts
Politics Children of ex-federal workers' rally against job cuts July 19, 2025 | 11:53 AM GMT Former federal workers gathered at the Hart Senate Office Building, some accompanied by their children, to speak with Senate staff about the work they once did.
