The year 2020 was good to Apple. In the last three months alone, covering Apple’s fiscal first quarter ended Dec. 26, the company recorded more than $100 billion in sales, with iPhone sales up 17% year over year. CNBC declared it ”the best quarter in the history of the smartphone.”
Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, the news has been filled with stories of US companies that have failed to keep employees safe, whether by not providing PPE or by making it impossible for workers to spread out and maintain a safe distance.
The roughly six minutes that belonged to Amanda Gorman, a 22-year-old Black poet from Los Angeles, may become what many Americans remember most vividly about Joe Biden’s inauguration as US president on Jan. 20.
At Quartz at Work, we often think about the workplace as just another arena in which life happens. It’s a setting for relationship building, creative quests, minding mental health, finding purpose—but also the constant, often unconscious reinforcement of life’s inequalities, including those built into the world’s racial and socioeconomic power structures.
Netflix has produced diversity reports every quarter since 2013, but this week it released its first inclusion report, meant to be a holistic look at rates of recruitment, retention, and promotion of underrepresented groups at the streaming company.
In the hours following the deadly Jan. 6 ambush of the US Capitol building, Twitter and Facebook both temporarily blocked US president Donald Trump from their sites, out of concerns that the “inciter-in-chief” would spark more violence with his continued questioning of Joe Biden’s election victory
It’s official: There will never be another Facebook post from US president Donald Trump.
American business leaders aren’t famous for issuing immediate and emotional statements about tumultuous political events, but the storming of the US Capitol on Jan. 6 by violent pro-Trump supporters inspired some CEOs to speak up swiftly.
Capitol Hill became a scene of chaos and terror on Jan. 6 as supporters of US president Donald Trump stormed Congress in an attempt to stop the certification of president-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
Every year, nearly 4 million women give birth in the US. Of those, only about 17% can take paid time away from work to recover and care for their newborn.
On the first work day of 2021, the New York Times broke the startling news that more than 200 Google engineers had unionized with the Communications Workers of America to form the Alphabet Workers Union. More than 260,000 people work for Google, so this minority union, which spent a year organizing in secrecy, will be limited in its power as it launches. But it might be seen as the thin edge of the wedge that’s busting open the door to more widespread collective action inside Google.
Global leaders took to social media and the airwaves on New Year’s Eve to wish their citizens a brighter future. Many acknowledged the sacrifices people made in 2020, and thanked the public for pulling together through an historically difficult year. To date, more than 1.8 million people have died in the Covid-19 pandemic.
A story playing out in Canada this week would make the writers behind HBO’s Veep envious.
The Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts are squaring off once again in their ongoing recruitment war. Last week, lawyers for the Girl Scouts filed papers in a Manhattan federal court to stop the Boy Scouts from nixing a trademark infringement lawsuit filed in 2018, one year after the scandalized Boys Scouts went co-ed and changed its name to Scouts BSA.
Hit “play” on UNESCO’s interactive world map tracing coronavirus-related school closures since February, and you can watch how quickly Covid-19 invaded countries and wreaked havoc on school systems around the world.
It has been an annus horribilis, but not for bitcoin.
As Americans dig into the details of the government’s new stimulus bill and debate the impact it will have on the average household, one provision has sparked utter disgust: the so-called “three-martini lunch” tax break.
Vaccinations have begun at last. Now come the questions, with one big issue hanging over companies: Should they make Covid-19 vaccines mandatory? And, if they choose not to, how can they ensure employees will roll up their sleeves and voluntarily take the jab?
Over the last decade, American workers have been dramatically changing their relationship with their employers. When large firms across industries have underpaid or mistreated workers, paid out bad actors, or failed to take a stand for what’s right, employee activists have increasingly pushed back, pressuring companies to do the right thing.
Recent waves of employee activism have sparked a national conversation in the US about how CEOs and companies can, or should, answer the calls for change coming from inside the house. But the stories of how these activists got started, or launched unionizing efforts, have often not been a part of that conversation. We at Quartz wondered: What advice would these activists have for people who are considering becoming organizers themselves? Some of their suggestions are straightforward enough, while others are riskier, and could result in losing your job.
Claire Stapleton remembers the evening that she was putting her toddler to bed, in early 2019, when a devastating email arrived from a manager at Google, her employer of 12 years. It was a memo sent to Google’s entire marketing department addressing rumors that she was being pushed out of the company, which she read on her phone.
Like a lot of left-leaning voters, Jon Stewart, the US comedian and political satirist, was not overjoyed that Joe Biden won the Democratic primaries this year. In an interview with Stephen Colbert this summer, he said he was rooting for Biden in the general election over US president Donald Trump, but the moderate politician, he said, “wasn’t my guy.”
Working from home in your Zoom tops and pajama bottoms may be safe and cozy, but it’s also a privilege that’s not available to everyone and has economic implications beyond one’s personal pocketbook.
