"Hundreds of Mass. workers say companies failed to protect them from COVID-19; Experts worry federal government isn’t holding employers accountable" by Matt Rocheleau Globe Staff, May 17, 2020
As they risk their own well-being to care for infected patients or rush to keep store shelves stocked, workers across Massachusetts have filed hundreds of complaints with the federal government in recent weeks, alleging their employers failed to keep them protected from the coronavirus.
Yet worker advocates, as well as former leaders of the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, say the federal agency is falling short of its duty to hold employers accountable.
Most of the OSHA complaints have come from those considered essential workers, such as medical staff, delivery personnel, and supermarket employees, records show.
“This pandemic has created an unprecedented worker health and safety disaster,” said Jodi Sugerman-Brozan, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health. "People are literally dying from work.”
Massachusetts logged among the most complaints in the country, trailing only Oregon and California, records show. The files provide an intimate look into the extraordinary circumstances that workers say they were forced to work through during the early weeks of the pandemic.
As of Wednesday, more than 13,600 OSHA complaints and referrals related to COVID-19 had been filed nationwide. About half of those cases had been closed and none had resulted in citations or penalties, OSHA officials said.
Worker safety advocates said OSHA’s hands-off approach has put workers at grave risk. David Michaels, who served as the head of OSHA under Barack Obama, said the agency has largely “abdicated” its role to protect workers amid the pandemic.
"As we reopen the economy, unless we have strong OSHA rules, we will not be able to stop this epidemic and more workers will be sickened and killed,” said Michaels, now a professor at George Washington University’s public health school.
The agency, which is charged with enforcing workplace safety laws, said that it investigates every complaint and that employers have a duty to protect employees. "OSHA is diligently working every day to help employers understand and meet those obligations,” the agency said in a released statement.
The Globe examined about 3,500 COVID-19 complaint cases the agency had closed nationwide as of late April. Complaints are closed once OSHA informs an employer of the alleged complaint and receives a satisfactory response about steps the employer has taken to address the issue, and once closed, details of the allegations are made public.
Within those records is a portrait of a stressed Massachusetts labor force that is working through difficult and sometimes dangerous situations.
One complaint about Brigham and Women’s Hospital alleged that containers filled with COVID-related waste were stored inappropriately in hallways. The complaint said the containers were leaking and liquid from them was being tracked through the hospital by people and forklifts.
In a released statement, Brigham spokesman Mark Murphy said the hospital responded to the complaint and that “OSHA has not indicated that further actions are necessary.” The hospital has implemented “robust protocols” to protect patients and staff, he added.
Of Massachusetts’ closed cases, the Postal Service received the most frequent complaints — 10 overall. It was followed by Amazon and UPS, each with four complaints.
Several of the USPS complaints said Centers for Disease Control guidelines were not being followed to protect workers, including claims that broken sinks left workers with no way to wash their hands. One complaint said a supervisor was disciplining employees for taking leave during the pandemic.
USPS spokesman Stephen Doherty said the complaints have been resolved and did not lead to citations from OSHA. He noted the tally was small considering the agency employs 15,000-plus workers statewide.
Ten other companies received two complaints, including Walmart, which has come under fire amid deadly outbreaks at stores across the country. Under pressure from the city’s Health Department, the company temporarily closed its Quincy store after a 69-year-old worker died from COVID-19 on May 3.
Related:
"Two more Walmart stores in Massachusetts have closed as the company deals with deadly outbreaks here and around the country, including one in Quincy, where a 69-year-old woman who worked at a now-shut store died this week. Stores in Avon and Abington have been temporarily closed. A Walmart in Worcester reopened this week after being shut down by local officials amid an outbreak that infected 81 employees. Despite being one of the first major companies in the country to implement a safety plan, Walmart has struggled to prevent outbreaks at its stores....."
Also see: How a Walmart in Worcester became a coronavirus hot spot
Stay away from your local Walmart!
Local health officials have taken action in other cases. In New Bedford, officials recently shut down a seafood processing plant when workers tested positive for the virus. In Worcester, they shut down a Walmart when dozens of workers became sick.
OSHA’s Walmart complaints cite stores that were not shuttered by the company. One complaint claimed that Fall River pharmacy employees were working in close proximity to sick customers. Another complaint alleged that three employees had tested positive at a Tewksbury store but the location had not been disinfected. At both locations, the complaints said employees had not been given personal protective equipment.
The Massachusetts congressional delegation wrote a letter earlier this month to Walmart’s chief executive Doug McMillon, demanding more information about efforts the company is taking to protect workers.
The letter said that the Walmart workers’ advocacy group, United for Respect, recently filed an OSHA complaint on behalf of employees, including in Massachusetts. The complaint alleged that the company is failing on several fronts, including informing employees when a co-worker is infected, closing stores for cleaning and disinfecting, and more.
In a statement, Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove said: “While we are not going to comment on the specifics of a complaint, the controls and practices we have in place are consistent with CDC and OSHA COVID-19 preparedness guidance.” The company has rolled out several safety measures at its stores, including limiting the number of customers, performing temperature checks, installing sneeze guards, and making masks and gloves available.
Some worker safety advocates and experts have criticized OSHA for taking what they considered a hands-off approach.
The agency last month announced it wouldn’t conduct on-site inspections unless there is a report of coronavirus-related fatalities or “imminent danger” exposures, particularly at health care and first responder organizations. For other COVID-related complaints, the agency said it will ask employers to investigate such claims themselves.
As normal.
As of Wednesday, OSHA had launched more than 500 COVID-related inspections nationwide, most triggered by reported coronavirus deaths and hospitalizations, complaints, or referrals. Many of the cases remain open.
The agency had opened 13 COVID-related inspections in Massachusetts, records show. Eight of the inspections were opened as a result of either one or more virus-related deaths or by three or more hospitalizations.
John L. Henshaw, who served as the head of OSHA under George W. Bush, said OSHA has limited resources and needs to make smart decisions based on its capacity.
“OSHA does not have enough inspectors to be going to all of these places,” said Henshaw, who now runs a consulting firm focused on occupational safety and health issues, including the coronavirus.
Still, he said, OSHA should be providing more industry-specific guidance, consultation, and resources to detail best practices employers and employees can follow.
“Most employers are trying to figure out what they need to do because they don’t want their work force sick,” said Henshaw. “They just need a little bit of help, or in some cases maybe a lot, and the agency could be out there telling people ‘do that.’ ”
OSHA has issued guidelines for employers to follow, but critics said those guidelines are weak and not enforceable and many employers aren’t following them. Critics also lamented that the agency has stopped enforcing a requirement that most employers track coronavirus cases among their workers.
“Workers are really fending for themselves right now,” said Sugerman-Brozan, of the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health. “The agency that’s supposed to be defending them is missing in action."
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Want to take a walk around the warehouse now?
"Amazon facing scrutiny in Mass. after employees file complaints about working conditions" by Matt Rocheleau Globe Staff, May 17, 2020
Employee protests and sick-outs. A top executive’s resignation in solidarity. Demands for details on coronavirus infections among workers.
The retail giant Amazon has come under fire in recent weeks like few other businesses, and as the pandemic stretches on — and housebound consumers wait anxiously for their packages — the company finds itself facing intensifying scrutiny of workplace conditions at its busy warehouses.
Despite calls for more transparency, the company has declined to release details on the breadth of disease in its ranks. Several deaths have been reported at its facilities across the country.
While there haven’t been any publicly reported coronavirus fatalities among Amazon workers in Massachusetts, recently released records from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration show that workers have levied several complaints about conditions at Amazon facilities in the state.
These complaints were among 3,500 COVID-19 complaints filed nationwide with OSHA, closed by the agency, and made available for review. Complaints are closed after OSHA informs an employer of the alleged complaint and receives a satisfactory response in writing about steps taken to address the issue.
Last week, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey led attorneys general from 11 other states and the District of Columbia in calling on the company to provide details about its health and safety measures, data about infections and deaths among workers, and evidence of compliance with the state’s paid sick leave law. The letter also called for the same from Whole Foods Market, the grocery chain Amazon owns.
“Amazon and Whole Foods are occupying a unique space during this crisis, providing millions of Americans with groceries and necessary supplies,” said the letter, addressed to Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest person in the world, and the head of Whole Foods, John Mackey. “We understand that both companies are seeing a significant increase in sales as well, as consumers rely even more on online shopping and buy more groceries as they stay at home.”
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Related:
"Apple Inc. plans to soon start returning more employees to its major global offices while other tech companies are continuing work-from-home policies through at least the end of 2020 due to COVID-19. The first phase, which includes staff members who can’t work remotely or are facing challenges working from home, has already begun in some regions globally. It will expand to major offices across late May and early June, Apple has told staff. Facebook and Google have said that most employees can work from home through 2020. Amazon.com Inc. said that office workers will be able to work from home until early October and Twitter Inc. said staff can work from home “forever” if they choose....."
How will packages then be delivered?
"Amazon.com Inc. says the one- and two-day delivery times that shoppers have come to expect should gradually return in coming weeks as the online retailer catches up from a demand surge tied to the coronavirus outbreak. Once Amazon fell behind, it took several weeks and hiring 175,000 people to get back on track. Meanwhile, Amazon will end warehouse worker pay raises in June, after spending almost $800 million in extra incentives to keep employees picking, packing, and shipping through the Covid-19 pandemic. A group representing workers said it’s too soon given the risks to employees....."
They were fired because they were worried about reopening.
"Workers, advocates express safety concerns about reopening plan" by Katie Johnston Globe Staff, May 18, 2020
Employees gearing up to go back to work — and those who have been working all along — still face significant safety hazards as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, and the reopening plan unveiled by the Baker administration Monday morning doesn’t go far enough to protect them, advocates and workers said.
It's a mixed bag for $ure.
“It’s clear that workers’ voices and labor were not part of the plan,” said Jodi Sugerman-Brozan, executive director of the worker advocacy group Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health, noting that there were no worker advocates on the 17-member reopening advisory group.
“First OSHA was missing in action,” she said — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been widely criticized for failing to hold employers accountable during the coronavirus outbreak — “and now Governor Baker has passed the buck.”
Much of the responsibility falls on workers to report dangerous conditions, Sugerman-Brozan noted, and it’s not clear who workers should call to report them, and how they will be protected from retaliation for speaking up.
No resources were devoted to inspecting or addressing dangerous work conditions, she added, and it’s up to local boards of health or the state Department of Labor Standards to enforce safety rules, and neither has the staff to do so on the scale that’s necessary, she said.
The reopening plan focuses on preventing the spread of the virus through hand-washing, face masks, social distancing, and disinfecting, but penalties for employers who don’t comply will only be issued after they fail multiple times to address them, she noted.
Tom Kochan, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said Baker's plan is missing an appeals process for people who don’t think their employer is following the state's safety guidelines. “Companies are saying they are doing the right things, but their employees are still protesting,” he said. “Employees don’t feel they have a voice.”
People going back to work also need to be given extra paid sick leave so they don’t feel pressure to work if they’re ill, which could spread the virus to coworkers and customers, noted Raise Up Massachusetts, a workers’ advocacy coalition pushing the state Legislature to grant workers emergency paid sick time.
Unite Here Local 26 has issued a six-page plan detailing safety guidelines for the hotel, gaming, and food service workers in its union, who aren’t going back to work in the first phase. A number of its members are people of color who live in multigenerational households and have health issues that put them at higher risks.
The union’s guidelines include COVID-19 tests for every employee before they return to work; temperature checks for every guest and worker; touch-free time clocks; plumbing and heating system inspections; and plexiglass shields at front desks, but even the strictest rules have limitations because of workers’ daily interactions with guests and people on public transportation.
That's slowing down the recovery, and it's getting to the point where you are better off unemployed.
"Without significant testing and tracing capacity, it's hard for us to imagine how you open any of our industries in a safe way," said union president Carlos Aramayo. For essential workers who remained on the job over the past two months, including at many manufacturing plants, staying safe has often required banding together.....
That means scabs because “this thing isn’t going away.”
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"Office work gets green light, but many white-collar employers will still stay home; Some companies are reluctant to force their workers to return to the workplace" by Jon Chesto Globe Staff, May 18, 2020
The Baker administration on Monday said businesses should initially limit their offices to less than 25 percent of total capacity. They also need to develop COVID-19 “control plans” to demonstrate how they are preventing the spread of the coronavirus. Boston might have an even lower capacity limit to start; Mayor Martin J. Walsh is slated to discuss the city’s plans on Tuesday.
The administration has been encouraging workers to stay at home, post-reopening. Toward that end, it released a list of employers on Friday that had committed to continuing work-from-home policies “for the foreseeable future,” to offer flexibility and to ease the demand on public transportation. More than 50 companies, representing at least 150,000 workers, said they would extend work-from-home policies at least through the end of the spring. Many will extend them into the summer, and some for the rest of 2020.
Nearly all of the 10,000 local employees at State Street, one of the largest employers on Governor Charlie Baker’s list, are working from home. (State Street is deemed by the state to be an essential business, so some workers, such as traders, go in now.) Temperature checks and masks will be part of the protocol; workers will be assigned specific zones to limit their movements.
Here is a look at the 21st-Century office.
At Dell Technologies, another big employer on Baker’s list, the return-to-office dates remain open-ended. About 90 percent of the Texas company’s 160,000 employees worldwide, including most of its 9,000-plus in Massachusetts, are working remotely right now. Dell has been working toward this moment for a while: Seven years ago, it set a goal of ensuring at least half of its workforce could participate in arrangements that include some remote work by 2020.
“Within two weeks, we enabled more than 90 percent,” said Howard Elias, Dell’s president of services and digital. “We’ll go back at a pace that makes sense in each local market . . . We’re very supportive of the governor’s plan to not rush back.”
The concern about returning too quickly is particularly acute for companies in the central business districts of Boston and Cambridge, whose employees rely heavily on the MBTA.
“We might have been one of the first to go out,” said Andrew Glincher, chief executive of the law firm Nixon Peabody, in the Financial District. “I can assure you we will not be one of the first to go back.”
I don't even want to reopen anymore. They have ruined it.
On Friday, Brightcove chief executive Jeff Ray told his nearly 650 employees, including 230-plus in Boston, that the video tech firm’s offices would be closed until Sept. 13. He approved stipends for workers to help them pay for home-office supplies.
Art Papas, chief executive of the staffing software firm Bullhorn, in Downtown Crossing, hasn’t set a return date yet. He said it’s probably not likely that his 250 employees in Boston will come back until the fall, or maybe 2021. He is taking it month by month.
“Even if we could go back into the office,” Papas said, “until there’s better control of the spread of the virus, why would we load the transportation system and, God forbid, load the hospital system?”
(Blog editor shakes his head at the cancellations far into the future, and it really makes one wonder what something wicked this way comes)
Many suburban employers are reluctant, too. At the Waltham cloud-computing company Dynatrace, Denise Mitchell, vice president of global human resources, said the 200 headquarters employees can start to return on June 8, but it will be voluntary. She doesn’t expect to hit 25 percent until late summer, at the earliest, and at InkHouse, a Waltham public relations firm, chief executive Beth Monaghan has told all employees they will work from home through August, with the option to continue doing that through the end of the year.
The 'burbs are supposed to be the place to be, too.
Dan Fishbein, president of Sun Life US in Wellesley, said the insurer is weighing whether to include virus tests in its screenings. Workers would probably sit at every other desk, take the stairs instead of the elevators, and stay out of conference rooms while COVID-19 remains a threat. More permanent modifications could be necessary. He said it will be “more likely months than weeks” before the 1,200 workers at the office start to return.
Yogesh Gupta, chief executive of Progress Software in Bedford, said his employees won’t start coming back until June 15, at the earliest, and even then, Gupta plans to allow people to work from home for a still-to-be-determined time.
“I don’t want to put a stake in the ground and make them panic for no reason,” Gupta said.
Plus, some typical aspects of office life won’t necessarily be there when they return.....
Then it is time to leave.
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"Tech giants in no rush to reopen their offices" by Rachel Lerman and Jay Greene Washington Post, May 18, 2020
Tech’s titans set the agenda for US employers in early March, sending staff to work from home as the coronavirus started to spread near their West Coast headquarters, and despite pressure from the president and other politicians to begin to reopen society to resuscitate a moribund economy, those same giants — Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Twitter — will likely be among the last large employers to reopen their office doors and welcome staff back.
Google and Facebook told employees that many workers who can do their jobs remotely should plan to do so until 2021. Amazon said its headquarters employees will stay home at least until October. Microsoft told staff Monday that working from home remains optional through October for most employees, though the company will allow some workers to voluntarily return to their offices in stages, and Twitter decided to give up on timelines altogether - telling most employees they can just work from home forever.
Stay home until the va¢¢ine is ready, that's the me$$age!
Microsoft expects to bring back employees ‘‘more slowly rather than more quickly because, economically, we can serve the economy with more remote work than people in many industries can,’’ president Brad Smith said in an interview. It’s a matter of social responsibility, Smith said.
‘‘What we recognize is that economies are going to need to be opened gradually by turning a dial rather than flipping a switch,’’ Smith said, ‘‘and as economies do that, I think we have a responsibility not only to adhere to the public health guidelines, but to be slower than others in bringing people back simply because we can.’’
Related: A Bill Gates ‘cure’ for schools post-coronavirus is already causing a bad reaction
And not just in the fever dreams of right-wing conspiracy theorists!
Also see: Cuomo questions why school buildings still exist — and says New York will work with Bill Gates to ‘reimagine education’
Is there anything this guy doesn't have his hands in?
The declarations are a big shift for an industry that has for decades prided itself on work environments with communal cafeterias, volleyball courts and open office plans - all design features meant to foster collaboration and make long hours more bearable.
Those perks have also served as popular recruiting tools for the tech giants, helping them hire hundreds of thousands of employees across the West Coast, and benefits like free food, virtual golf and napping pods help the firms retain valued engineers, project managers, and more, providing campuses designed to discourage workers from joining rivals.
That has helped propel Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google owner Alphabet and Facebook to become the five most valuable companies in the world, collectively employing nearly 1.3 million workers. As their strong quarterly results showed last month, the tech giants have the financial wherewithal to ride out the pandemic, even as some of them lose sales and advertising dollars in the economic downturn.
Related: As the Quarantine Guts the Economy, America’s Five Wealthiest People Have Gotten 75 Billion Dollars Richer
Four of the five are familiar names that are in tech!
Their financial might also lays bare the fissure in corporate America between the haves and have nots. Companies such as airlines, hotel chains and oil firms are struggling to remain afloat as the global economy sputters. Even in tech, some companies such as ride-share services Uber and Lyft, travel sites Expedia and TripAdvisor, and homestay provider Airbnb face massive challenges in the coronavirus era.
They didn't even get a bailout.
Even the big five tech firms haven’t been able to keep all their workers at home. Amazon has continued to require warehouse staff during the pandemic, and faced backlash over accusations of dangerous working conditions. Facebook is offering financial incentives to lure content moderators back to the office, because many of the jobs can’t be done remotely.
One big exception to the extended work-from-home timeline among tech giants appears to be Apple, a company that has already been hard hit by the pandemic and was forced to temporarily slow manufacturing in China and shutter its retail stores in the US - though both are reopening now. Apple declined to comment on its plans to bring workers back to the office. Bloomberg News reported that the company plans to start bringing workers back in phases starting this month, but the pandemic has also forced much of Big Tech to face what many individual teams within the companies have known for years: Much of their work can be done remotely and remote workers often are just as productive, at least in the short term.
With that reality and safety issues top of mind, many experts expect the companies’ extended work-from-home timelines to set a similar agenda for smaller tech firms and outside industries. Other businesses have long followed in tech’s trendsetting footsteps.
‘‘They’ve had a ripple effect on how other industries and sectors understand what a white collar workplace should look like if you want to attract the best talent,’’ said Margaret O’Mara, a professor of history at University of Washington and the author of ‘‘The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,’’ a chronicle of the tech industry.
Tech companies are particularly well-suited to allow remote work, since many tasks require computers and little else.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent an e-mail to employees last week, telling them that the ‘‘ramp back to the office will be slow, deliberate and incremental.’’ With a few exceptions, most Google employees will work from home full time for the foreseeable future, ‘‘potentially’’ until next year, he said.
Facebook spokeswoman Pamela Austin said the company told employees its offices wouldn’t open until July 6 at the earliest, and even then employees who could work from home can choose to do so until the end of the year.
‘‘We found that we can sustain productivity to a very high degree with people working from home,’’ Microsoft’s Smith said.
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Time for a nap:
An employee slept in the nap room at Thrive Global, Arianna Huffington’s wellness website, in New York. Commodities like nap pods, games, and free food attracted many to jobs at large tech companies like Apple or Google are missing now that employees have moved to working remotely (Vincent Tullo/The New York Times).
You can go there to cry:
"Over its six years, Thrive has become a quiet force in venture capital. At its helm is Joshua Kushner, the younger son of a New York-area real estate family — his brother is Jared Kushner, who leads the family business and is the son-in-law of Donald Trump — who has carved his own path. Kushner, who began investing while at Harvard Business School, left Goldman Sachs soon after arriving to focus on his venture endeavor, which became Thrive....."
Also see: Be very wary of Trump’s health surveillance plans
Why would that be, WaCompo?
Looks like the KUSHNERS will be THRIVING like COVID-19 while we are all exterminated.
Time to start tweeting:
"Twitter employees don’t ever have to go back to the office (unless they want to)" by Heather Kelly Washington Post, May 12, 2020
SAN FRANCISCO — It was one of the first companies to send its workforce home when the novel coronavirus started spreading. Now Twitter is going to be the first to make working remotely a permanent option.
Twitter said Tuesday that employees who were able could continue working from home, or possibly anywhere else that makes them happy and productive, forever. The policy will not apply to employees who have to do things in person, like maintain the offices or technology like servers.
‘‘Opening offices will be our decision, when and if our employees come back, will be theirs,’’ said Jennifer Christie, Twitter’s head of human resources, in a blog post.
Its main offices including its San Francisco headquarters won’t begin to open until September, and the company said there will be additional precautions in place when workers do return. All in-person events are canceled for the rest of the year, and it will revisit whether to have any 2021 events later this year. Business travel will also be on hold through September.
The company had 5,100 employees in more than 35 offices around the world, according to its most recent earnings report. Chief executive Jack Dorsey announced the plans to employees in an e-mail Tuesday, according to BuzzFeed.
Later in the morning, Dorsey accidentally started a live stream on Twitter’s periscope tool, giving updates about the company, before saying, ‘‘Whoops, I just realized this is live.’’
The company said in its blog post it was already set up to have a decentralized workforce before the pandemic, and that made the sudden transition easier.
The last few months have been an unexpected test of that system, and Twitter said it has shown that it works.
When the coronavirus first started spreading widely in the United States, companies were hesitant to be the first to switch to a work-from-home model. After Twitter made the decision to send office workers home on March 11, other companies quickly followed suit.
Now, as states and counties look toward loosening stay-at-home restrictions and allowing more businesses to open up, many are watching Silicon Valley’s plans to go back to their open offices.
Facebook and Google recently said most employees could continue working remotely through the end of the year but did not share any longer-term changes.
If and when tech workers do go back, their corporate campus — once known for free food, communal activities, shared bikes, and other perks — could look vastly different and make staying home more appealing.....
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Related:
"Twitter Inc. will ask users to watch their language as part of a new test to clean up parts of its service. When someone replies to another user’s post, Twitter may prompt them to reconsider their response if it includes slurs, epithets, or swear words, a company spokesperson said. Twitter has tried for years to clean up its site, which can be full of hate speech and slurs."
"Twitter Inc. will now label some misinformation related to COVID-19 that it deems confusing or misleading, increasing the likelihood that more tweets will be marked or taken down. Twitter previously announced that it would remove coronavirus information posing a direct threat to user safety. The new label will apply to tweets that are “less severe,” but “where people may still be confused or misled,” the company said Monday in a blog post. The tweets may be given a label that says, “some or all of the content shared in this tweet conflicts with guidance from public health experts regarding COVID-19.” Users will have an option to click for more information."
They are acting like Turkey.
"Twitter’s stock tumbled Thursday after the company failed to show that it’s weathering the pandemic-borne digital advertising slump the same way its bigger rivals Facebook and Google are. The San Francisco-based social company’s higher expenses outweighed its revenue growth in the first three months of the year, leading to a loss of $8.4 million. And when asked during a conference call how April looked in terms of revenue, executives pointed back to the second half of March — when advertising declined. Facebook, in contrast, said on Wednesday that after a March decline, it saw “signs of stability” in the first three weeks of April. And it said ad revenue during that period has been flat compared with the year-ago period. Google parent company Alphabet also posted results this week that didn’t look “quite as bad as some people had feared,” said Edward Jones analyst David Heger. All three companies are seeing an increase in usage, since the virus outbreak has forced people to stay at home. Twitter reported that average daily users grew 24 percent year over year, the highest growth rate in the company’s history. Twitter has added 14 million daily users since the previous quarter."
Not even the Twitter war with Trump can rai$e their $ong, and what was a dead woman's body doing in Joe Scarborough's office?
Also see:
"Google wants people using its video chat software so badly, the company is now giving it away. Starting Wednesday, Google Meet, the Alphabet Inc. company’s teleconferencing app, will be available at no cost. Currently Meet is part of Google’s paid workplace software suite. People can use the service for calls with as many as 100 participants. Google said it will cap free calls at 60 minutes, but won’t begin enforcing that time limit until the end of September. The company said Tuesday that more than 100 million people a day use Meet now but it has ceded ground to rivals like Zoom, which reported 300 million daily participants last week."
I hope they were not watching as about 20 people were tuned in to a Zoom conference call just after noon on Thursday when 72-year-old Dwight Powers unexpectedly slumped from his chair and disappeared off-screen. Near where Powers had been sitting in his Amityville, N.Y., home, his 32-year-old son, Thomas Scully-Powers, suddenly appeared, standing naked, witnesses told police. Several people on the video chat dialed 911.
"Spotify’s results might be a case study in how humans react to periods of great stress. In Wednesday’s earnings release, the streaming company detailed how people are using its service, saying that “every day now looks like the weekend” as usage in car, wearable, and Web platforms drops while TV and game-console use increases more than 50 percent. “Two in five consumers we surveyed in the United States said they were listening to music to manage stress more than they typically do, which explains the recent rise we’ve seen in searches for ‘chill’ and ‘instrumental,’ ” Spotify said in its release. “We’ve also seen an uptick in consumption of podcasts related to wellness and meditation over the last few weeks.” The world’s largest streaming audio service added 15 million monthly active users in the first three months of the year, bringing the total to 286 million, compared with previous guidance of 279 million to 289 million."
"Comcast’s net income slid in the first three months of the year as the coronavirus pandemic forced it to shut down its theme parks and its movies were kept out of shuttered theaters. Comcast also reported Thursday that it lost 409,000 cable TV customers, the biggest source of the company’s profits, as cord-cutting accelerated. That’s already more than half the 671,000 customers it lost in all of 2019. But it added 477,000 internet customers, which it said was its best quarterly number in more than a decade. It came as US workplace shutdowns began in March and a mass work-from-home migration underscored the role home internet plays in Americans’ lives. Americans are increasingly opting for cheaper streaming video providers that are delivered over the internet, like Netflix, which both benefits and harms Comcast’s business as an internet and traditional TV provider. Competition in online video is also increasing with new entrants like Disney and Apple. Comcast’s own streaming service, Peacock, will launch nationwide in July, with free and paid versions."
You can put it on your charge card.
"Whistleblowers say Facebook has not warned investors about illegal activity, in new SEC complaint" by Nitasha Tiku Washington Post, May 27, 2020
SAN FRANCISCO — A consortium of Facebook insiders and critics filed a confidential whistle-blower’s complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission late Tuesday, claiming the social media giant is aware of illegal activity on its platform, such as the sale of opioids, and has failed to properly police it.
The complaint, which was obtained by The Washington Post, includes dozens of pages of screenshots of opioids and other drugs for sale on Facebook and its photo-sharing site Instagram, with some having seemingly obvious tags such as ‘‘#buydrugsonline.’’ It also notes that Facebook has a pattern of taking down content when it is pointed out by media or activists, only to have it reappear later.
The filing is part of a campaign by the National Whistleblowers Center to hold Facebook accountable for unchecked criminal activity on its properties. The complaint focuses on federal securities law.
The consortium is led by Gretchen Peters, an Emmy Award-winning journalist formerly with ABC News and author of the 2010 book ‘‘Seeds of Terror,’’ which documented the Taliban’s role in the Afghan heroin trade. She is now executive director of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online (ACCO), a Washington, D.C.-based group of investigators and academics taking on Big Tech.
Then she is a piece of $hit because the Taliban nearly eradicated the crop. That's why Afghanistan needed invading.
Tuesday’s filing is the first time the group includes someone who previously worked at the company. In a sworn statement attached to the complaint, a former Facebook content moderator said the social network’s moderation policies were ad hoc and often changed in response to media events.
The ex-moderator, whose job was to track graphic content in private Facebook groups, claims that if moderators saw discussions about illicit payments for illegal goods, such as child pornography or illegal narcotics, they had no way to warn executives running Facebook Pay, the system that lets users send and receive money across the main social network, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
‘‘There were groups where pornographic content related to children was auctioned, and they used [Facebook] systems [for] all of it, from what I could see,’’ the ex-moderator wrote in a sworn statement.
Another whistle-blower behind the complaint is an ex-employee at a cyber security firm hired by Purdue Pharma to police online counterfeiters of its drug OxyContin. This person said other Internet platforms such as eBay, Alibaba, Craigslist, and Google agreed to work with the cybersecurity firm to take down illegal offers to sell OxyContin around 2012 and 2013. Facebook, however, refused to take action on its main site as well as on Instagram, the person claims in a statement.
‘‘Facebook executives were made aware the scale of counterfeit OxyContin being sold across their platforms was enormous, but while other tech firms and the pharmaceutical industry invested heavily in resources to mitigate the damage of illegal narcotic sales online killing tens of thousands of Americans, Facebook executives aggressively lobbied other social media platforms including Twitter not to take action or to engage in the counterfeit OxyContin removal initiative,’’ the statement says.
After COVID-19, I am in absolute awe of the raw power of the pharmaceutical lobby.
They can command and economy to be destroyed, and it is.
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At least they help clean up the rubble from which they benefit:
"As small businesses falter, Big Tech lends a hand; Grants and donations could prove crucial for recipients, while burnishing the donors’ reputations" by Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff, May 11, 2020
For April Teixeira, founder of the Corny Bread Co., March was the cruelest month.
For the first couple of weeks, sales at her small startup were surging. “The beginning of March was my best month ever," said Teixeira, 55, whose company makes a gourmet corn bread sold at farmers markets and WeWork office centers. "This was going to be my year.”
:-(
Then came the COVID-19 shutdown, which pushed her business to the brink, but now Teixeira has been handed a lifeline: a $10,000 grant from a foundation set up by the telecom giant Verizon. The cash will let her catch up on bills while providing some capital to expand the business once the crisis has passed.
“There’s a relief now," Teixeira said, “because going forward . . . I now know that I have the resources.”
Verizon is one of several major US technology companies that are splashing out millions of dollars to prop up small businesses. The Verizon Foundation has donated $7.5 million, while social-networking company Facebook has pledged $100 million in cash and advertising services. The search-and-advertising titan Google is providing $340 million in advertising credits to customers of its Google Ads services.
None of that is coming my way!
The fund-raising service GoFundMe, in cooperation with Yelp, Intuit QuickBooks, GoDaddy, and Bill.com, is providing $500 matching grants to small businesses that raise $500 through GoFundMe, and the business management software company Salesforce spent $5 million to give $10,000 grants to 500 small businesses, while the online printing company Vistaprint joined with the US Chamber of Commerce to give out $5,000 grants.
Still a far cry from the endless trillions Wall Street and corporate AmeriKa received.
What gives?
Scott Stern, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, said it’s just good business.....
You might want to scan this first.
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You know, "there’s never a good time for a pandemic, but... but of all aspects of the business world that the coronavirus has upended, corporate relocations could be near the top of the list. The once booming office-leasing market around Greater Boston has ground to a near-standstill since Governor Charlie Baker ordered all nonessential workplaces closed in March to curb the virus. The future is hard to envision, but many employers expect big changes, including office layouts designed to be “COVID safe” and more people working from home....."
You can then work from your Comfort Zone, and here are eight podcasts that could help you get some sleep.
Good night, readers.
MORNING UPDATE:
"Dell Technologies Inc. has suspended some employee benefits, signaling that the computer hardware giant is cutting costs to contend with the weakening global economy. The company will discontinue contributions to employees’ 401(k) retirement plans under a matching program, beginning June 1 and continuing at least until the end of the fiscal year, Dell chief operating officer Jeff Clarke wrote to employees in a recent memo. Dell has also frozen external hiring, internal promotions and raises for the rest of the fiscal year, a person familiar with the matter said. Dell hasn’t yet conducted mass layoffs or cut the salaries of rank-and-file employees. Dell entered the COVID-19 pandemic with some challenges, including falling demand for data-center hardware, computer component shortages, and a massive pile of debt stemming from its acquisition of EMC Corp. Chief executive Michael Dell has agreed to take a pay cut during the coronavirus crisis."
