It’s been a challenging couple of weeks for Uber. First the ruling in NYC that the rideshare giant must pay its drivers almost $30 an hour minimum (hey, good-paying work if you can get it) and now 12,000 Uber drivers have filed a class action saying Uber is purposefully delaying their requests for arbitration on issues like minimum wage, overtime pay, sick days, and more. The rate at which Uber is processing the complaints, it would take a decade for them all to be heard, the suit says. Uber requires most drivers to sign an arbitration agreement, but there’s an option to opt out of it … buried in the 21 pages of terms and conditions that few people ever read. Business Insider
When Verizon announced it had offered its employees voluntary buyouts, which included some 60 weeks of severance pay, along with bonuses and benefits, and more than 10,000 took them up on it, the reasoning was the company was getting lean and mean for the future, with the advent of its next-generation 5G technology. Apparently, there was a little more to it than that. Tuesday, Verizon announced it will take a $4.6 billion charge related to its Oath media assets, which include Yahoo and AOL. Oath has struggled to compete with Facebook and Alphabet for ad dollars, and this is the result. Reuters
Ghosting isn’t just for dating anymore. The Fed’s Beige Book, aka the Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions, which was released this week, defines ghosting in the workplace as a situation in which a worker just stops coming to work without notice and then is impossible to contact. Since the Beige Book is a collection of the buzz the Feds are hearing from banking, business, and economic leaders, it means ghosting in the workplace is now officially a thing, most likely because it’s a job seeker’s market. It can happen at any time — before or after a job interview, after hiring, or after onboarding. Counter it with thoughtful hiring practices and robust onboarding. Quartz at Work
Steve Glaveski, CEO and co-founder of Collective Campus, is telling us (via HBR) it’s time we do away with the eight-hour workday. Four hours of focused, uninterrupted time in “the zone” without any distractions and a couple of hours to handle things like meetings and email, and we should be good to go. Glaveski tested this principle at his office in Melbourne, directing people to limit distractions and focus, focus, focus. The result? The company maintained and in some cases increased its quality and quantity of work. More benefits include extreme employee elation at working fewer hours each day, hiring and employee retention are a snap, and employees are highly motivated to get the job done. Sounds like a win to us. Harvard Business Review
This should come as no surprise, given the fact that the top boss has been criticizing federal agencies from the FBI to the CIA, but the number of federal employees who would recommend their agency as a good place to work dropped at the majority of federal offices, according to the annual Best Places to Work in the Federal Government report. At issue, the White House is taking steps to make it easier to fire federal workers and restrict the workplace role of their unions, capping more than a year of growing acrimony between Trump officials and the federal bureaucracy. The head of the American Federation of Government Employees calls it a war on rights in the workplace, and says it has taken its toll on morale. The Washington Post
