In late September, we were stunned to read (and report) that in the first mega-layoff in recent Chinese history, the Harbin-based Heilongjiang Longmay Mining Holding Group, or Longmay Group for short, the biggest met coal miner in northeast China had taken a page straight out of Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg's playbook and fired 100,000 workers overnight, 40% of its entire 240,000 workforce.
Tunisia is under a curfew again just five years after the Jasmine Revolution which ousted the old corrupt regime of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2015 and started the so called Arab Spring. Unemployment protests have spread nationwide and become violent, resulting in a nationwide curfew being imposed by the authorities to curb growing social unrest. Al Jazeera English YouTube video: Protests over unemployment rates and the economy had intensified and spread to several cities including the capital.
When your organic growth is over, your revenue just missed consensus expectations once again ($7.74Bn vs $7.77BN expected), your stock is trading near 4 years lows and and you are stuck in the imploding energy sector, what do you do? Why you announce a $10 billion stock buyback, but since you will have to fund it with more debt (whose cost in recent weeks has soared) you have to get rid of "overhead." How do you do that? Simple: you announce you are firing 10,000 workers.
Senior Tories claim that British Chancellor, George Osborne, will face a fiery backbench revolt if he persists with plans to raid the pensions of high-income tax payers in his bid to slash the deficit. Under proposals being drawn up by senior civil servants in the Treasury, ahead of the Budget in March, all workers paying into a pension would receive a flat rate of tax relief of between 20 and 30 per cent. As higher-rate taxpayers tend to allocate more of their annual income into retirement pensions, the proposed changes would create a multibillion-pound tax windfall for the Treasury.
Apple, Sony and Samsung have been accused of employing child labor slaves as young a seven years old by human rights organisation Amnesty. Amnesty have accused the tech giants of failing to do basic checks to ensure minerals used in their products were not mined by children. A report into cobalt mining, a component of lithium-ion batteries, found young children being forced to mine for the mineral in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on behalf of these firms. BBC News reports: The firms said that they had a zero tolerance policy towards child labour.