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Jobless engineers, MBAs: The hidden army of Indian election ‘consultants’ | India Election 2024

“How many tennis balls can fit in a passenger plane?”

Neeraj, a young economics graduate from the premier Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), was given 15 minutes to solve this question during his interview rounds at Nation With Namo (NwN), one of the in-house political consultancies of India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

He got the calculation right and joined a small team of graduates from India’s top universities who were dispatched to the eastern state of Tripura to conduct surveys, collect and analyse voter data for elections that were due in February last year.

Their job was to identify who was not voting for the BJP, separate them into demographic cohorts – age, gender, caste, tribe, religion – find a common concern, issue or fear and strategise how to exploit that in the BJP’s favour. And they were to do all this while staying under the radar.

“All of us who go through the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) are good at solving problems,” said Neeraj, who asked for his name to be changed as he is not authorised to speak to the media.

Admission to most of India’s top government-funded engineering, law and management colleges is through all-India exams. Millions of students take these exams, including the JEE for admission to 23 IITs, but only 2-3 percent make it to the premier institutes.

Neeraj is one of few who made it, and is now in the league of hundreds of graduates from India’s top engineering and business schools who have in recent years joined political campaigns, usually for short stints while they wait for lucrative corporate job offers.

An engineering degree from an IIT, whose alumni include Google CEO Sundar Pichai and former Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal, or an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, the alma mater of PepsiCo’s ex-CEO Indra Nooyi, are markers of excellence and used to be a guarantee of a good job. But that promise has been rescinded with campus recruitment drying up over the past few years and layoffs, especially at tech firms, surging.

The ability of these graduates – readily available – to manage and analyse enormous amounts of voter data makes them a valuable resource for political consultancies. The latter’s market size, estimated to be about $300m, is set to grow with individual candidates and national and regional parties looking for their expertise.

To attract graduates from these premier institutes, most political consultancies offer fellowships, and though the jobs are contractual and short-term, usually from three months to three years, they pay well, come with perks and the promise that their work will “shape the future”.

“There’s also the attraction of being close to power centres in some way,” said Ankit Lal, a computer engineer who runs a political consultancy firm, Politique Advisors, in Delhi.

In the small state of Tripura, where the BJP was seeking re-election, voter data culled and analysed by Neeraj and others in the NwN team showed that the party was in a comfortable position in the north. But in Amarpur constituency, home to a few tribal areas including Chabimura, voters were leaning towards other parties.

From Tripura’s capital Agartala, the long, winding route to Chabimura – first by road and then by motor boat on the Gomati River — passes through moss-covered hills with 16th-century sculptures, legends about pythons guarding treasures in caves, and years of poverty and neglect.

For centuries, members of the Jamatia tribe, who speak Kokborok, a Tibetian-Burmese language, have lived in this remote, rain-fed area known as the “Amazon of Tripura”.

In Chabimura, Neeraj’s field survey found a cohort and a solution. There were a few dominant Jamatia families, and impressing them, he figured, would have a trickle-down effect on tribal voters in the area.

“They are quite poor and all they wanted were boundary walls around their houses,” Neeraj said.

Two to three days after he made a recommendation to the BJP’s state leadership, four-foot high mud boundary walls were constructed with great urgency about 80 houses belonging to members of the Jamatia tribe. For added incentive, pairs of male-female goats were herded inside these boundary walls, which also became a canvas for party propaganda. Portraits of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the state’s chief minister and the local candidate were painted on them.

BJP’s Tripura spokesperson did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

The BJP, which had been in power in the state for five years, could have had these walls constructed at any time. But in a country where 800 million people survive on free or subsidised food grains, a pair of goats and a boundary wall are life-changing favours that earn gratitude and votes.

“In politics, vote is the only currency. Everyone has just one vote across the country. How each person spends that vote, all our effort goes into that,” another IITan, who has also worked for NwN, told Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity.

Bribing voters is a crime and a poll violation that can lead to a prison sentence and the election being nullified. But with the party hiring a vendor for the construction and not being directly involved, there’s deniability and proving the charge remains a matter of investigation.

The BJP candidate won the Amarpur seat, beating his nearest rival from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) by a narrow margin.

In India, polling officials carry electronic voting machines escorted by security personnel on a tractor [File: Anupam Nath/AP]

Months before India began the gargantuan, 44-day exercise of conducting national general elections from April 19, armies of tech-savvy IITians, MBAs, lawyers and researchers have been busy collating, studying and analysing voter data to decide on campaign strategy, issues to highlight, where to deliver gifts and polarising speeches while pushing a glut of fake news on social media and WhatsApp aiming to convince voters for their clients.

These backroom boys of Indian democracy, who have no skin in the game apart from the pay package and the thrill of a win, call themselves “politically neutral problem solvers”.

In conversations with Al Jazeera, they acknowledged that some of their, and their parties’, solutions to rake in votes may not be the best thing for a democracy, but they said they had no biases and were simply focused on cracking the problem.

‘Extremely opaque influence operations’

In the southern Indian state of Telangana, Rajesh, an engineer from IIT who asked for his name to be changed so he could speak freely, is in charge of a 12-member data team at Inclusive Minds, a leading political consultancy that works exclusively with the Indian National Congress Party, India’s main opposition party.

His life these days is governed by data – it’s flooding his head and the computers in his office and those of the many political consultancies that have mushroomed across India.

Hundreds of field associates spread across the country send Rajesh and his team reams of voters’ demographic details along with the names of their favourite candidates and the main issues that resonate with them. This is topped up with data from ongoing telephone surveys and ads.

Inclusive Minds, like many other political consultancies, has been placing advertisements on Facebook and Instagram through surrogate, party-loyal pages to gauge voters’ mood, favourite party, ideology, interests and concerns. Meta provides them data in silos of age groups, gender and, when possible, constituency.

Someone in Rajesh’s team also scans news and social media to figure out the impact of every political statement, rally, road show, speech, and party manifesto.

About 20-30 percent of the staff at Inclusive Minds, said Rajesh, is from IITs, and 5 percent from IIM. All of them are bound by their abiding faith in data and often repeat the same mantra: “Data is king.”

That data is sorted and broken down into cohorts. It’s on display on about 50 “dashboards” that are large, interactive screens, showing how all the polling booths in a particular constituency are going to vote, with bar charts, line graphs, drop-down menus and maps.

Some booths are “safe”, some are firmly with other parties, but it’s the swing seats, categorised as “favourable” and “battleground”, where all the attention is.

The ongoing voting will determine if opposition leaders including Rahul Gandhi make a dent in the governing Bharatiya Janata Party’s hold on the country [File: CK Thanseer/Reuters]

Rahul Gandhi campaigning — The ongoing voting will determine if opposition leaders including Rahul Gandhi make a dent in the governing Bharatiya Janata Party’s hold on the country [File: CK Thanseer/Reuters]

“In elections that were close, we would often talk about the need to polarise to get an edge — because if we don’t polarise, we’ll be stuck,” said Abhimanyu Bharti, a sharp, straight-shooting former political strategist who worked on Narendra Modi’s last two prime ministerial campaigns.

“The party would then tell RSS people to amp up the chatter [on the ground], to say, ‘Again these people [Muslims] will dominate us, crime will increase if they are not kept in check.’”

The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) is the BJP’s ideological parent body with close to 600,000 members.

Pratik Sinha, co-founder of AltNews, a fact-checking website, refers to political consultancies as “extremely opaque influence operations” with “zero ethical underpinnings” and says that political parties have outsourced their false propaganda, misinformation and online hate campaigns to them.

“Fake news, hate posts are increasing as we approach elections. Millions of rupees are being spent by surrogate, proxy pages on Facebook ads, on posting false information, hate speech, and all this is being done by political consultancies,” he added.

According to Boom LIVE, another fact-checking website, Muslims remain the primary target of fake news in India.

Data, said Mohammad Irfan Basha, who runs a small political consultancy, F-Jac, in Hyderabad, show that the larger the number of young voters in a constituency, the easier it is to create religious divisions.

“Most young voters are not dedicated to any political ideology. They are open to new thoughts, ideas, and that’s why they can be swayed easily and are used to polarise [situations],” Basha said.

In last year’s elections in the southern state of Telangana, Basha was handling the campaign and strategy of a former Congress leader who was now contesting the election on a BJP ticket.

“Data showed that more youth were joining us,” he said, and so he added a religious touch to his candidate’s speeches.

“In the Congress, the candidate was secular, now he says, ‘Jai Shri Ram,’” Basha said, referring to a Hindu religious chant that has been weaponised by the BJP to unite right-wing Hindus against Muslims.

Basha’s candidate won.

“Everything is fair in love and war, and this [elections] is war,” said former political strategist Bharti who now runs the online School of Politics that offers courses for aspiring politicians and consultants. Many of his students are graduates of IIT.

Young, cheap talent

Set up in the 1950s and 1960s in a newly independent India, IITs and IIMs were meant to power the building of a modern, self-sufficient, industrialised nation. As India’s economy changed, so did these institutions. They grew in numbers, courses were added, innovation was encouraged and start-up incubation centres were set up.

As campus recruitment peters off, graduates of premier technology institutes join election campaigns while they wait for corporate job offers [Courtesy: Creative Commons]

In the IIT pecking order, computer engineers from IIT Bombay sit on top. Tech companies and consultancies snap them up in campus placements. But there are few takers for chemical, mechanical, aeronautical, mining and metallurgical engineers.

In India’s depressed job market, where the unemployment rate for graduates is nine times higher than the unemployment rate of uneducated youth, professional, corporate-style political consultancies began recruiting directly from IITs and other campuses about five or six years ago and now, it’s an annual affair.

“It’s young, cheap talent. They are excited, very eager to work [and we get] fresh legs, fresh minds,” said a member of the Congress’ campaign team on condition of anonymity on the party’s recruitment drive in colleges in the eastern state of Odisha where state elections are being held simultaneously with national elections.

Political consultancies don’t look for any particular degrees, just tech-savvy, smart people with mathematical skills who know or can learn coding, are good at solving problems and can hit the ground running.

Most MBAs are hired to analyse data and take on managerial roles — setting up systems and processes, managing teams, allocating resources, and giving presentations to politicians. While IIT engineers handle the tech, collate and segregate the data.

“These are transitional roles. IIT and IIM fellows will give one or two years. Those who stay, for them it is a matter of survival,” said Lal of Politique Advisors.

Mohan, an engineer and an MBA who worked with the Association of a Billion Minds (ABM), the BJP’s in-house election strategy and campaign unit, said that while these stints can colour the view of future employers, the thrill of being in the thick of political action is unmatched. He can’t stop reminiscing about the time he worked for AMB on several state elections in 2022 and 2023 and felt like he was the “CEO with a bunch of people from IITs” carrying out his orders.

“The kick here is the control, working with people at the top and the kind of budgets you command. For projects worth $10-20m in state elections, we could take decisions directly. For projects worth $100m and more, proposals would be escalated to party leaders,” he said, and requested that neither his name nor the state he worked in be mentioned as he had signed a non-disclosure agreement. “Our phones get tapped to this day,” he said.

With an estimated price tag of $16bn, India’s general election is going to be the most expensive in the world. This includes what political parties will spend on political consultancies and on hundreds of surveyors and data specialists whose job is to find the lowest common denominator to swing the outcome. Sometimes, it’ll be a boundary wall, sometimes religion.

Secretive

Measure and track are the two mantras to win elections, said former political strategist Bharti.

“Tracking enables you to get real-time feedback and fix loopholes. In elections, the leader or a party that makes the least mistakes wins. That’s why plugging loopholes is important,” he said.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking reelection for the third time [File: India’s Press Information Bureau/Handout via Reuters]

Everything from candidate selection and campaign strategy, from slogans to the achievements to focus on, from issues to attack opponents on and which influencer to give an interview to, the temple to visit, even when and where to have a meal in the house of a Dalit family are data-backed decisions taken to swing votes.

Closer to voting days, most political consultancies switch gears and focus on the ground.

“Operatives” are deployed in large numbers not just to keep their ears to the ground, but to also report all activities of their own and Opposition party leaders, to figure out who is unhappy and can be brought or bought over.

“It’s so secretive that you start losing your identity,” said Neeraj, who sometimes posed as a tourist, a journalist or a researcher to gather political intelligence.

Most political consultancies work in secret. Employees have to sign NDAs and the salaries of staff in the same team often come from different sources. Phones of field operatives and cars of leaders are tracked through GPS and monitored by tech teams at political consultancies. Everyone Al Jazeera spoke with, spoke of 14-16 hour work days, disrupted family life, stress, exhaustion, immense pressure to deliver wins and a high attrition rate.

“It’s a very charged-up situation,” said Mohan, “and that’s why there are hardly any females in the core space. We have hired people from other colleges, but they crack very quickly. It’s only these young people from IITs and IIMs who have the calibre to operate in that environment and deliver.”

Neeraj recalls a meeting with the state party president of the BJP in Tripura where, on the basis of data and ground reports, the Nation With Namo team recommended that the party create some “hulchal” (stir things up) to create noise and get media traction.

“They love votes more than they care about lives,” Neeraj said, recalling that the party leader immediately offered to send some BJP workers to put up posters in areas dominated by a rival party. “They will beat our workers and we can then give a statement [to the media],” the BJP leader said.

“Suddenly, he got a call that a party worker had been murdered. He looked at us, smiled and said, ‘Bhai, mil gaya mudda (Brother, We’ve got our issue).’”

BJP’s Tripura spokesperson did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Neeraj no longer works for a political consultancy. But Mohan bubbles with excitement when he talks about the money that flows in elections that can be used to buy votes and opponents or hand contracts to cronies for all things election-related, including organising events and printing posters.

For now, he is waiting for a shift – when the power to run election campaigns moves from politicians to political consultancies.

“Right now, they [consultants] are struggling in terms of the power they need … in decision-making. It’s uncertain territory right now. Once that is sorted, I would certainly like to go back,” he told Al Jazeera.

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Will the US unemployment rate continue at historic lows? | Business and Economy News

All eyes will be on Friday’s US unemployment numbers to see how many jobs were added in March and whether the unemployment rate continues to stay in its historically low range or if it is time for the alarm bells to start ringing.

Job growth in the United States has continued at a steady clip in the months since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when businesses came to a sudden stop.

“In the aftermath of the pandemic as things started to pick back up, there was a real struggle to find people to work and companies had to raise how much you paid to get people,” said Matt Colyar, an economist at Moody’s Analytics.

There are a number of factors behind that, including restrictions on the number of foreigners entering the country during the COVID-19 pandemic and baby boomers dropping out of the workforce for fear of the pandemic, creating nearly a shortage of some two million workers aged 55 and older.

As business ground to a halt as a result of the pandemic, nearly 22 million jobs were lost. A lot of the hiring since then has been about refilling those roles, said Dan North, senior economist at Allianz Trade, adding: “It’s not like those jobs went away.”

Since the start of the pandemic, the US economy has lost 21,888,000 jobs and has added 27,387,000, according to Allianz Trade data. “You could argue that the economy has created only 5,499,000 new jobs,” said North.

But jobs are being created, nonetheless. While employment fell by 243,000 jobs in December 2020, following seven consecutive months of increases, the labour market has consistently added jobs each month since then, taking the US economy on a 38-month streak of monthly job gains.

If payroll employment is shown to have risen in March in Friday’s monthly jobs report, which is released at 8:30am local (12:30 GMT), then it will be a 39-month streak.

Healthcare and state sector driving jobs

While jobs in the leisure and hospitality sectors are still catching up to pre-pandemic levels, two sectors that are driving job growth are healthcare and state and local government, experts said.

“Healthcare in the US has always been under-supplied in terms of labour so a strong growth in that sector is a good thing,” said Bernard Yaros, lead US economist at Oxford Economics. “Our hospitals and health clinics should be fully staffed, especially given an ageing population.”

Hiring for government jobs is still focused on filling jobs that were lost during the pandemic, said Yaros. That sector was a late starter because of the government’s inability to match private sector salaries in order to attract talent, he said. But now that hiring is slowing down in the private sector, jobs in the state sector have seen solid growth, he added.

A lot of the hiring is also being driven by a rebound in immigration since 2023 – both legal and undocumented – that has allowed the economy to continue adding more than 200,000 jobs a month, said Yaros.

“When there’s an increase in labour supply through immigration, it allows for strong growth. But that doesn’t lead to inflation because you have more people looking for work so employers don’t have to raise wages [as much] to attract workers”, Yaros said.

However, hiring in most other sectors remains volatile and mixed, he added.

‘Starting to see some disruption’

“Underneath the shiny headlines, we are starting to see some disruption,” said North.

On Tuesday, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS report, from the US Department of Labor showed there were 1.36 vacancies for every unemployed person in February, down from 1.43 in January. The decline indicates a rise in unemployment.

According to the data, layoffs reached 1.7 million in February, up from 1.6 million in January. Job openings are down 11 percent year-on-year and job quits – the number of workers resigning from their jobs, likely for better opportunities, said North – have returned to pre-COVID levels, indicating that wage increases will not be as fast-paced or high as they have been.

Unemployment numbers, while still at historic lows, are slowly starting to creep up, hitting 3.9 percent last month, up from 3.7 percent for each of the three months prior.

While the unemployment rate has been below 4 percent for just over two years in a row – the longest such stretch since the late 1960s – the mood is starting to change. In a March consumer confidence survey by The Conference Board, consumers said that jobs are harder to get and that they expect their incomes to decrease over the next six months.

The question now is if, or when, unemployment numbers will break through 4 percent.

“If it goes up to 4.1 percent next month, everyone will start talking about the Sahm rule,” said North, referring to former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm, who invented a measure that examines how fast the unemployment rate is rising to determine if it is an indication of a recession.

While most economists agree that the chances of the US economy slipping into a recession have receded, a rise in the unemployment rate will slow down economic growth.

All of this feeds into decisions that the Fed will have to take on whether to cut interest rates, and how quickly. The benchmark overnight interest rate is in the 5.25 percent to 5.5 percent range, where it has been since July to curb a 40-year high inflation spike. While inflation has come down since then and is hovering around 3.2 percent as of the end of February, the latest data available, that’s still higher than the Fed target of 2 percent.

In such a scenario, a robust job market – and a healthy spending ability alongside – will have the Fed looking for signs of a rise in inflation, delaying interest cuts.

But a slowdown in hiring – and a rise in unemployment, ultimately – could bring the prospect of interest rate cuts. The data on Friday will offer some clues.

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Is the US media layoffs phenomenon the next housing crisis? | Media

In the past few months, the media sector in the United States has gone through one of its worst rounds of layoffs in decades, with some voices within the sector even asking if journalism is a viable career path despite surging subscriptions at publications like The New York Times.

Most recently, outlets like Vice and the sports blog Deadspin were decimated in a massive round of job cuts. Vice ended its online publication, and Deadspin laid off its entire editorial team.

These are the latest in a slew of headcount reductions at countless newsrooms around the US over the past decade at the hands of wealthy owners. The latter overwhelming have the backing of some of the biggest private equity and wealth management firms in the US like Apollo Global Management, Fortress Investment Group and Alden Capital, to name a few. These institutions are also called shadow banks.

A surge in private equity investments in media, experts said, has led to decisions that benefit investors but not always the companies and their employees, similar to the 2008 housing crisis and private equity’s ability to flourish during that time.

While the media business is in the spotlight now, it is a microcosm of a bigger challenge across the US economy. What makes it stand out is that it’s been a long and high-profile battle.

One such moment came with tech’s control (overwhelmingly led by Meta, then Facebook) in 2018 over audience traffic, which made newspapers, magazines and news portals beholden to the algorithmic choices of social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, which ultimately hurt the sector.

That was an optimal entry point for private equity to get a stronger foothold in the media business.

“Media companies were struggling at the time but not nearly enough as the journalism community was led to believe,” explained Margot Susca, the author of How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy.

“Funds use these market conditions to justify the gutting of these American institutions,” said Susca, who is also a professor of journalism at American University in Washington, DC.

‘Liquidating the entire industry for profit’

Like in the housing market, financial institutions capitalised on someone else’s misfortune to make money from it. In the 2008 recession, it was lenders and big investment banks ranging from Lehman Brothers to Washington Mutual, a move that ultimately led to their collapse.

The key is real estate. In the housing crisis, banks seized foreclosed homes for pennies on the dollar after homeowners defaulted on subprime mortgages.

In the case of the media sector, shadow banks are going after physical newsrooms and selling them. For instance, in 2018, Gannett sold the headquarters of the Asheville Citizen Times to Twenty Lakes Holdings, a real-estate affiliate of Alden Capital. Gannett sold the building for $3.2m. Alden then sold it to developers for $5.3m.

A comparable move happened at Vice last year. Only months after Fortress Investment Group acquired the publication, it left its office in Brooklyn, New York.

There’s a lot of real estate at shadow banks’ disposal. Private equity, hedge funds and other comparable firms control roughly half of all daily newspapers in the US.

“The problem with the news media sector is not its viability. The problem with the news media sector are these locust funds that are liquidating the entire industry for profit,” Susca said.

But where do shadow banks go once physical assets like real estate have been liquidated?

They squeeze out revenue where they can for as long as they can. That often means cutting staff.

G/O Media, formerly known as Gizmodo Media Group, sold off Deadspin, its sports blog. The new owner, Lineup Publishing, said it would not bring over any existing editorial staffers even though it aimed to “be reverential to Deadspin’s unique voice”, G/O CEO Jim Spanfeller said in an email to employees.

Great Hill Partners acquired the media brand in 2019 and drastically shifted Deadspin’s editorial vision. The publication was a sports-centric one that also housed vibrant cultural commentary on a variety of topics. At the direction of the new owner, the publication was directed to “stick to sports”. The announcement led to mass resignations.

This week, G/O Media sold two more publications from its portfolio — The AV Club and The Takeout.

G/O is not in a financially dire position, according to Spanfeller, who told Axios this year, “We’re not strapped for cash.”

Unionised staff at US publishing company Conde Nast walk the picket line during a 24-hour walkout amid layoff announcements in New York City in January [File: Angela Weiss/AFP]

According to the Writers Guild of America East, which includes various unions representing editorial staff from multiple media firms, Great Hill Partners made an estimated $44m in revenue in 2023. The guild suggests that Great Hill Partners has enough money to make decisions that do not undermine the financial security of its staffers.

When Spanfeller was appointed in 2019, the private equity firm said he was a significant investor in the company but did not disclose the specifics of the financial agreement. Spanfeller’s appointment came directly from the firm suggesting that it intended to oversee day-to-day editorial operations across G/O’s portfolio.

Great Hill Partners did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

G/O is the latest in a string of companies laying off workers in the last few months alone.

Last month, Engadget, a brand owned by Yahoo, had a series of layoffs including of high-profile editors. It came amid a reported refocus on traffic growth. But how can you drive more traffic with high-quality reporting with fewer people to make the product?

Meanwhile, Apollo Global Management, which now owns Yahoo, is doing very well. The asset management firm’s stock is up nearly 250 percent over a roughly five-year period – 80 percent this past year alone. The firm acquired Yahoo in 2021 and also has a significant stake in several other large media companies, including Gannett, which owns hundreds of newspapers around the US, including USA Today, the fifth largest. In 2019, Apollo provided $1.8bn to finance the acquisition of the newspaper giant and merge it with GateHouse Media.

‘Layoffs were the core strategy’

Once Gannett’s acquisition of GateHouse was complete, it scrapped hundreds of jobs immediately. In 2022, the newspaper group slashed roughly 600 more jobs in two rounds of cuts in August and November.

Apollo also acquired both Northwest Broadcasting and Cox Media Group, which included 54 radio stations, and 33 TV stations.

“After funds became owners, layoffs were the core strategy to try to maximise revenue. [These are] firms that just had profit as the sole motivation,” Susca said. “Layoffs are the stark reality of hedge fund ownership and private equity investment.”

Historically, private equity firm involvement has led to layoffs – an average of 4.4 percent of job losses in two years as well as a 1.7 percent decrease in pay, according to a study from the University of Chicago.

That is what happened at Cox Media Group. Almost immediately after its acquisition, talent from local TV and radio stations across the country was laid off.

Apollo Management did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

New York-based Alden Capital operates a similar job-cutting strategy and is one of the most infamous hedge funds in the sector for decimating a number of newspapers around the country.

In 2020, Vanity Fair referred to the firm as the “grim reaper of American newspapers”.

Vanity Fair’s stern critique is because of the massive slate of layoffs at the papers Alden Capital owns, including the Denver Post, even as one of the company’s executives said “advertising revenue has been significantly better”, according to reporting from Bloomberg in 2018.

Alden bought Tribune Publishing and gutted many of its newsrooms. At the time, Tribune was profitable, but Alden still moved forward to strip down its papers to make more profits.

Alden often pushed to beef up subscriptions even after shedding physical assets like office space and social assets like its people, which, Tim Franklin, senior associate dean at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, suggests is a losing strategy.

“It’s like charging for 16 ounces of Coca-Cola and putting it in a 12-ounce bottle. You’re giving people less and then expecting people to pay. The problem is that you end up in this doom loop. You’re getting less digital subscription revenue because you are providing less content, so then you make cuts and then you see even less revenue and you make more cuts. It’s this never-ending cycle of rinse and repeat,” Franklin said.

Alden Capital did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Doomed to failure

Shadow banks and big banks have made risky investments and hoped they would work out financially.

They sold the idea that someone could very well make payments on a subprime mortgage. Now, the idea is that a media company can create quality reporting on a shoestring budget and a fraction of its headcount. But those are unrealistic expectations and doomed for failure.

During the 2008 housing crisis, big banks essentially created an insurance plan for themselves: sell the debt and make money off the interest. Now private equity is employing a comparable strategy for media.

In the housing crisis, the banks bundled the mortgage loans in a package and sold them to the bond market to random investors. The banks had protections. If a lender defaults, they sell the debt on the secondary market for a profit. The strategy was to bet on the homeowners who were most likely not going to be able to afford the mortgage payments. But ultimately, that backfired, and the resultant housing crisis has been well documented.

“The only people there [who] were able to buy homes at the point could do so with cash or with Wall Street financing because that cash was still flowing,” said Aaron Glantz, author of Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream.

“Private equity is not depending on that credit system,” Glatz added.

NBC and MSNBC laid off employees [File: Justin Lane/EPA]

In either situation, the protections afforded investors were not passed down to homeowners in 2008 or writers, editors, on-air talent and others in the media industry now.

While some savings and lending banks failed and were the recipients of massive bailouts, shadow banks flourished. Generally speaking, these companies make money during times of economic vulnerability, leading to an even more challenging situation for average people.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, funds were largely criticised for buying up distressed housing across New York City and forcing out longtime residents – a move that brought rent-stabilised properties to market rate, which ultimately allowed them to drive up prices on their buildings and raise the value of the buildings around them.

“They’re reliant on cash that is just sitting around ready to be spent or credit lines that they can get from banks like JPMorgan Chase or they can leverage other assets. They own so many other assets,” Glatz said.

One of those assets over the past decade is a growing number of media companies.

But even then, it poses the question: If all these media companies are struggling, why are their executives so wealthy?

Behind a number of these mass layoffs are uber-wealthy executives. That’s the case for Business Insider, The Washington Post and Vice, just to name a few.

In January, Business Insider, owned by the German media giant Axel Springer, laid off 8 percent of its workforce. Axel Springer, however, is doing well financially. Its CEO, Mathias Doepfner, has a net worth of $1.2bn.

Executives on both the editorial and business side at the short-lived outlet The Messenger raked in close to million-dollar salaries. Meanwhile, editorial staffers launched a crowdfunding campaign to make ends meet because the outlet did not give them any severance packages.

NBC and MSNBC laid off 75 people this year. Brian Roberts, the CEO of NBC’s parent company, Comcast, raked in more than $32m in 2022.

Despite the recent layoffs, the network hired former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel as a contributor. Hiring McDaniel was met with swift backlash from high-profile talent across the news organisation and the NBC News Guild, the union representing journalists across the network.

The union in particular pointed out that McDaniel – who was known for helping to enable former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged – was hired after the company laid off more than a dozen unionised journalists. Amid the backlash, NBC cut its ties with McDaniel.

NBC is just the latest major network to make job cuts. At CBS, despite its high viewership during American football’s Super Bowl, parent company Paramount laid off staffers the following day at CBS News. Meanwhile, CEO Bob Bakish made $32m in 2022.

In November, Conde Nast laid off 5 percent of its workforce. The Newhouse family, which leads Advance Publications, the parent company of the magazine giant, has a net worth of $24.1bn, according to Forbes.

Vice Media, which was once valued at close to $6bn, has since filed for bankruptcy and ended publishing on its website [File: Eric Thayer/Getty Images/AFP]

In recent weeks, Vice laid off hundreds of employees and ended publishing on its website. It has been plagued with a nearly endless series of layoffs in the past few years. Prior to filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year, the media company paid its executives roughly $11m – even though its executives were notoriously known for mismanagement.

Yet they were bailed out. Amid the Chapter 11 filing, Fortress Investment Group acquired Vice – a company that was once valued at $5.7bn – for $225m. Executives left with hefty paycheques while staffers were left jobless with little notice.

Fortress did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

The Washington Post eliminated 240 jobs, yet it is owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who is worth more than $200bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him the second-richest person in the world.

In 2019, Senator Sherrod Brown sent a stern letter to Alden Capital, pressing the fund not to buy Gannett. Brown was unsuccessful.

In 2021, Brown, alongside Senators Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren, introduced the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, which would have reformed the private equity industry.

The bill never made it past committee, so it never had a vote in the full Senate.

Experts believe that Washington has not done nearly enough to curb the power of private equity.

“You have a government system, a regulatory, legislative system that has basically failed at every turn to stop the growth of these hedge funds,” Susca said. “And private equity firms in the journalism market, to me, is an institutional failure.”

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India’s Urban Company revolutionised gig work for women. Then it bled them | Business and Economy

Bengaluru, India — After years of working at a salon in Bengaluru, Shakeela Banu made a major life change in 2018 and joined Urban Company (UC), an app-based home services platform that has more than 52,000 workers across Indian cities, one-third of whom are women.

At first, Banu was happy with the working conditions. Her manager treated her well, she said, and she got plenty of work as a beautician on call. She estimates that she’s worked with 3,000 customers since she joined the company and has turned down many requests from those who would ask for her services privately. It was her way of staying loyal to her employers.

However, things have soured since then.

Last year, the platform rolled out new rules including that workers maintain ratings of 4.7 or higher out of 5 and accept 70 percent of the job leads, with only four cancellations allowed in a month to avoid getting blocked.

Banu was one of many UC workers whose profile was blocked due to “low” ratings.

On its blog, the company said that these measures are meant to raise the operating standards for workers and improve customer experience. (There are also plans afoot for stricter rules under which workers will need to accept at least 80 percent of the jobs and only three cancellations will be allowed.)

If workers miss these criteria, they receive a warning and need to attend either online or offline sessions to retrain in services where they have received poor ratings. If their metrics don’t improve after that, their profiles are blocked. Retraining online is free, but the workers have to pay a fee, ranging between 6,000 rupees and 15,000 rupees (between about $72 and $180), if they have to train at the UC office.

Urban Company relies on a pay-to-work model which asserts that workers are “independent partners” who are being provided with a customer base and professional training they would not otherwise have.

The workers incur multiple costs before they qualify for jobs with UC, including training fees, onboarding fees, product fees, and a monthly subscription fee to get a guaranteed quota of jobs, averaging about 50,000 rupees (about $600). Additionally, for every job, UC also takes a commission fee of up to 25 percent in service charges and taxes. Workers are not compensated for travel costs or vehicle rents.

Urban Company did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comments.

Bad reviews, blockings

When UC launched in 2014, workers were attracted to the flexible schedule it offered. In Ghaziabad, Maya Pal, who used to run her own salon, joined UC to get some extra work in 2018.

An Urban Company protest in Gurugram, India in July 2023 [Courtesy of AIGWU]

“Before, we used to get 60 to 70 jobs every month. Now we get job leads once every two days if we are lucky,” said Pal, who has been working with UC for four years. “Then they ask us to maintain our acceptance rates. If you don’t give us jobs, how do we maintain the rate?”

Even after being available on the app for 12 hours, the leads aren’t enough, workers say.

“On the app, we have to keep our location turned on. If we move away from our marked location, they stop sending job leads,” said Pal, adding the system requires her to be housebound all day.

During the lockdown, Pal had to close her salon. Then she met with a couple of accidents and had to cancel UC jobs. Her ID was blocked for four months. With no other income to support her family, Pal, a single mother of two, pulled her kids out of school.

She says that only when UC workers consistently receive five-star reviews on 10 jobs do their ratings improve. It takes one bad review to make it fall again.

UC partnered with the Ministry of Finance’s National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) to provide training and digital certification to skilled professionals to help them become micro-entrepreneurs. At the same time, workers have been warned against sharing their phone numbers with their clients and all orders have to be via the UC app. Violations can lead to termination or blocking.

“There are seasonal blockings, too,” said Spandan Pratyush, secretary for the All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU)-NCR, a trade union of all app-based workers in India. “You wouldn’t have seen a lot of blocking … when there was a huge demand around the period of [the Hindu festival] Diwali.” But since then, the blockings increased, workers said.

The workers think that the ongoing mass blockings since May 2023 are a step to extract money from new inductees while pruning older workers.

“The new workers won’t question the new policies, new rates and whatever conditions have been applied. But older workers who have been working for years under certain conditions, they would obviously object to changes way more,” Pratyush said.

All is not going well for the new trainees, either. In Gurugram on the outskirts of capital New Delhi, Deepali Khare interviewed with UC and joined as a trainee beautician in late August.

The beautician training at UC costs around 45,000 rupees (about $540), which includes the training fee and money to buy products used during training sessions. Khare agreed to pay this amount in instalments.

The training sessions, which started about 9:30am, were supposed to end by 6pm but would go till 9pm. Trainees also had to bring models to practise salon services on and pay for their food and transport.

The company did not mention “that we need to get 45 models for 45 days of training”, Khare told Al Jazeera.

Then, abruptly, in September, Khare received a message from her trainer that she need not attend more sessions. She was baffled. She had been dropped from training midway without any sort of performance review. Upon repeatedly asking why she’d been dropped, the company said that there were quality issues.

“If there are quality issues, why couldn’t they give us more training? During the interview, they had said that they would increase the training days if you are new to the job. There was no mention of failing us,” she says. “If they had, I would not have spent so much money on this. Isn’t this a type of fraud?”

Five others from her group of 10 had been removed, too.

“I still have the [product] kit I purchased from them. I must have paid about 14,000 rupees [$168] for it,” she said.

Former UC trainee Deepali Khare’s unused piles of beauty products [Courtesy of Deepali Khare]

The trainees and workers are required to buy the products – a combination of known and in-house brands, used for services in the beauty, repairs and home-cleaning segment – directly from UC. Workers need to scan the barcodes of the products before every job and maintain a usage rate above 70 percent. These products, the workers say, are sold to them at inflated prices.

UC has also increased product prices. For instance, the price of the disposable kits used for the massage services, containing 25 packets of single-use items like bedsheets, pillow covers, towels, candles and napkins, was hiked from 1,440 rupees (about $17) in October to 1,800 rupees (about $22) in November. Massage oils that used to cost roughly 54 rupees now cost 66 rupees.

“It’s fine that they increase the price of the products. But then, shouldn’t they increase the price of the services, too? Only then will we be able to cover the costs,” said one worker who didn’t want to be named.

In its annual business summary for the financial year 2023 (FY23), UC reported that its losses before taxation fell from 5.14 billion rupees (about $62m) in FY22 to 3.08 billion rupees (about $37m) in FY23. Product sales contributed 22.13 percent of the FY23 revenue, where the collection increased from 910 million rupees (about $11m), or 20.77 percent, in FY22 to 1.41 billion rupees (about $17m) in FY23.

The rest of the revenue comes from service sales including the commission UC charges its workers, which, along with product sales and fees, can total up to nearly 40 percent.

Protests

After a spate of ID blockings last year, UC workers protested in Bengaluru, New Delhi and its suburbs, Kolkata and other cities.

In August, when their demands were not met even after the protests, AIGWU filed a complaint with the state labour department against unfair labour practices including the permanent and arbitrary ID blocking of workers.

AIGWU also asked the department to pass a bill to define and identify the employee-employer relationship between them, which would ensure that the workers are entitled to rights, including of collective bargaining, under Indian labour law. The amount of control the company exercises on its workers contradicts its claim that they are independent workers, AIGWU said.

“It’s important to ask what nature of work is considered a ‘gig’. A transparent contract will reflect the degree of reliance these companies have on a worker,” Rajesh Joseph, a labour expert at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, said. “When you are asking a worker that they should be working a certain way, then the relationship changes beyond gig work.”

After a spate of ID blockings last year, UC workers protested in several cities [Courtesy of AIGWU]

In September, UC replied to AIGWU’s August complaint and said that UC workers are independent contractors and since there is no employer-employee relationship between the workers and UC, Indian labour laws do not apply to them.

India’s new Code on Social Security, 2020, extends social security schemes for gig workers and platform workers, but it has not come into effect yet. So far, there are only some piecemeal local efforts.

In 2021, the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court ruled that Uber drivers must be treated as workers – not independent contractors – who are entitled to benefits like minimum wage and paid leave. Experts believe that this ruling set an important precedent for gig workers globally.

According to government think-tank NITI Aayog, an estimated 7.7 million workers were part of the gig economy in 2020-21, and that number is expected to more than triple to 23.5 million by 2029-30.

It is not clear where platform work falls under Indian labour laws. In most states, according to the Shops and Establishments Act, an “employee” can mean a person paid on a contract, piece rate or commission basis – and the employer has to provide either one month’s previous notice or pay to remove or dismiss an employee.

In Gurugram, the labour department has been conducting since August a conciliation process between UC and the workers with AIGWU.

“At least verbally it has been observed by the labour commissioners in Gurugram and Noida that they are full-time workers,” said Pratyush, who was present at the meetings.

During one such meeting in mid-October, the company representatives had agreed to open the blocked workers’ IDs and return the money to the trainees, such as Khare, who were dropped. But she was never reimbursed, she told Al Jazeera.

“The company representatives didn’t turn up for the next few meetings,” Pratyush told Al Jazeera. In a meeting on November 21 in Gurugram, the company said that they have looked at it on “a case-by-case basis, and they cannot open the IDs or return the money. They did not give a reason,” Pratyush said.

In its annual report (PDF), Fairwork India rated digital labour platforms in India on five principles: fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts, fair management and fair representation. Urban Company, which had topped the 2022 ratings by scoring seven out of 10, dropped to a score of five out of 10.

In January, the Gurugram labour department moved the case to the industrial tribunal and labour court since no compromise was reached during the conciliation process. While the labour department can determine who is an employee and employer, only courts have the power to enforce this during the claims process.

“But the recommendations made by the conciliation officer under unfair labour practices, such as constantly changing the terms of employment, forcing them to log in for 12 hours or more, no leave policy, and no maternity benefits, will be helpful,” Pratyush said.

Banu did not retrain with Urban Company. But Pal did, and is working with the platform again. Her recent gross monthly earnings have fallen from 50,000 rupees to 15,000 rupees (from $603 to $181) in the initial months of 2018. After deducting product costs and commissions, she barely makes 6,000 ($72) rupees a month.

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America’s underemployment problem | Business and Economy

New York City, USA – Makalah Monroe works at an Outback Steakhouse in Laurel, Maryland. She is a student and the only one in her household with a car. By any account, Monroe has a full plate of responsibilities that she is working hard to keep up with. She works full-time and yet struggles to get by.

“I often leave an eight-hour shift with only about $60 in hand,” Monroe told Al Jazeera.

With credit card, phone and insurance bills piling up, her current pay is just not cutting it for her. Often, she has to decide which gets paid and what has to wait.

“I usually have to call the car and insurance companies and tell them I either need to pay late or pause payments entirely,” she added.

Monroe is like the millions of Americans whose financial situation hinges on the outcome of the US presidential election. President Joe Biden is set to focus on a number of economic wins during his first term, including record job growth, low unemployment and tumbling gas prices, among other key economic indicators that have made it evident that the US economy is on the upswing.

But the incumbent president, his Republican opponents, third-party candidates and Biden’s longshot Democratic challengers face the harsh realities of underemployment in the United States.

However, with significant economic growth, the question is: Do Americans like Monroe have a better chance for social mobility under the eventual Democratic nominee – most likely Biden – or the most likely Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump?

According to data compiled by the Economic Policy Institute, underemployment sits slightly below 7 percent – the lowest since the agency began tracking the data in 1990. When Trump left office, underemployment was at more than 14 percent. After a peak in March 2021, there has been a steady decline since.

“Since the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment has declined pretty steeply and quickly,” said Lonnie Golden, professor of economics and labour-human resources at the Pennsylvania State University.

Cost-of-living surge

While the Biden administration saw record job growth, it is not clear that the new jobs in question are well-paying sustainable jobs that meet the cost of living across the US.

“In the last year, we’ve seen an uptick in the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures the number of people working part-time but would prefer to be working full-time hours,” said Golden.

“These figures kind of mask the extent of underemployment for people because they’re seeking a second job for more income,” she added.

Despite the economic gains, child poverty is up 137 percent, and average rent prices have surged nationally.

According to a new report out from Zillow, the percentage of income needed to rent a median-price apartment in the US jumped by 40 percent since before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In some cities, it is even higher.

In Miami, Florida, renters need to spend 43 percent of the average income to afford a median-price rental apartment. The minimum wage in Miami is $12 an hour.

Nationally, the minimum wage’s buying power peaked in 1968 and has not kept up with the cost of living since.

According to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the number of those underemployed is much higher – 33 percent among college graduates. That is because its metric considers graduates working jobs that do not require a college degree.

Amid the recovery, much of the consistent job gains were in the leisure and hospitality sector – an industry that is notorious for low wages.

“The low wage pool is what’s growing the American workforce,” Saru Jayaraman, founder of One Fair Wage, told Al Jazeera.

Jayaraman asserts that Biden, who historically is more pro-worker than his Republican challengers, could do much better strategically if he fully embraces issues about payment.

“It’s getting harder and harder to tell workers to vote for a Democrat who will raise wages when that doesn’t happen,” Jayaraman said.

However, during the last election cycle, Biden did follow through on many of his promises.

One of Biden’s first actions as president was to raise wages across the board via the Raise the Wage Act. But that did not pass as the bill was blocked by Republicans. Biden, however, was able to raise the minimum wage for all federal contractors. The US government is the nation’s biggest employer.

Biden has not acted on abolishing the subminimum wage that allows tipped workers to make a wage of only $2.13 an hour – although many states require higher direct wage amounts for tipped employees. The rest is supposed to be made up in tips – a move that is widely accepted in the food service industry and other domestic industries.

The Trump administration, however, actively tried to limit tipped wages for these same restaurant workers. The former president pushed for business owners to take control of tips and pass them along to workers as they see fit.

Proposed solutions to underemployment include a number of compounding proposals, one of which is the nonprofit One Fair Wage’s push to abolish the subminimum wage nationally.

One Fair Wages efforts have helped get wage measures on the ballot all over the country, garnering more votes than either presidential candidate.

“In 2020, more people voted for a $15 minimum wage in Florida than [the number of votes for] either Trump or Biden,” Jayaraman said.

Faults in proposed fixes

One proposed fix has been a Universal Basic Income. Americans got a taste of that in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when the government released one-time payments. That stimulated the economy. Consumer spending surged.

In May 2020, personal spending rose 8.2 percent from the month prior. That had the same effect during the second round of government payouts. Consumer spending ticked up by more than 4 percent in the months following the second release, which was in early 2021.

However, that was one of the many reasons why inflation soared in the years following.

Printing more money means that the individual dollar is less valuable than it once was, driving up prices. Yet wages did not grow nearly fast enough.

“Only a few years ago, it used to be that one in three Americans working full time lived in poverty. We are inching closer to one in two,” Jayaraman said.

The Department of Labor for its part is taking steps to address massive shifts in the economic makeup of the US. In September, the department announced a $57m grant to expand job training programmes, including in large population centres like New York, California, Illinois and Ohio.

The move is aimed at helping those who are underemployed pivot into high-demand and expanding industries related to addressing climate change and staffing up the US’s infrastructure projects.

While the programme is expected to have widespread effects, the Labor Department says it will help about 10,000 workers.

It also comes alongside a wave of unionisation efforts across big businesses like Amazon to even small independent coffee shops. Several companies and trade have successfully lobbied for higher wages and fairer contracts.

That, however, came from empowered workers in individual sectors rather than overarching policies from Washington.

The Biden administration has been largely supportive of unions that have called for fairer contracts like the United Auto Workers, for instance.

Movement, however, is slow. Wage increases are often staggered marginally over several years. The required wage increases for federal contractors were unilaterally implemented by executive order in April 2021 – three months into Biden’s presidency. It took effect a few weeks ago.

But as Washington hypothesises over a myriad of potential solutions, people like Monroe still have rent and electricity bills piling up.

“I’m basically living paycheque to paycheque right now,” Monroe said.

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Undeterred by Gaza war, thousands of Indians turn up for jobs in Israel | Unemployment

Rohtak, India – It’s a frigid January morning and the sun has not risen yet.

A shivering Pramod Sharma queues up outside the main entrance of Maharshi Dayanand University (MDU) campus in Rohtak, a small town in the northern Indian state of Haryana, about 84km (52 miles) from New Delhi.

Sharma, 43, is joined by hundreds of other men appearing for a skill test for the role of a shuttering carpenter in Israel – the first time the Israeli construction sector has opened up to Indians, who had previously found work there primarily as caregivers.

Workers queue for construction jobs in Israel at a university in Rohtak [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]

After more than 100 days of Israel’s war on Gaza, a labour crisis has emerged in the country, rooted in its decision to block tens of thousands of Palestinians from working in Israel.

In October, Israeli construction companies reportedly requested their government in Tel Aviv to allow them to hire up to 100,000 Indian workers to replace Palestinians whose work licenses were suspended after the Gaza offensive began.

Over in India, Israel’s desperate search for labour has in turn exposed a gulf between claims of economic success by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which insists that a rising GDP is turning the nation into a global powerhouse, and the lived reality of millions of people. As India heads for national elections, the unemployment rate hovers around a high 8 percent.

The Haryana government in December advertised 10,000 positions for construction workers in Israel, including 3,000 posts for carpenters and ironworkers, 2,000 for floor tile fitters, and 2,000 for plasterers. Its advertisement said the salary for the jobs would be around 6,100 shekels, or approximately $1,625, a month – in a state where the per capita income is around $300 a month.

The same month, Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, also released a similar advertisement for another 10,000 workers. Reports said the recruitment drive began in state capital, Lucknow, on Tuesday, drawing hundreds of applicants.

This is the queue for recruitment drive to send labourers to work in Israel. The registration cum screening began at ITI Lucknow on January 23 is witnessing huge influx of job seekers from UP, Bihar and West Bengal. pic.twitter.com/jLsVogk7QC

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) January 24, 2024

Earlier this month, recruiters from Israel arrived in India to interview the workers.

An official from Haryana Kaushal Rozgar Nigam Limited, one of the state government agencies overseeing the recruitment drive, told Al Jazeera an average of 500-600 applicants were interviewed every day during the weeklong recruitment drive in Rohtak that ended on Sunday.

‘Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’

Sharma came to Rohtak with a group of about 40 other workers from Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, more than 1,000km (620 miles) east of Rohtak.

He told Al Jazeera he initially took a verbal test by a recruitment agency in Bihar, which interviewed him about construction-related topics.

“They told me I had cleared the first round, that an Israeli client will now come to Rohtak for a second round of interviews, and that I should come here,” he said.

“We have been sleeping inside the bus in this cold for the last three days and using the washroom at a roadside eatery, waiting for our interview.”

Workers from Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, wait to be interviewed [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]

Sharma, who lost his construction job in New Delhi during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, said working in Israel appears to be “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to climb out of poverty.

Since then, he has been working under a government employment scheme that pays him less than $3 a day for working for five hours in a field. But he still struggled to provide three square meals to his wife, two children and a dependent sister.

“If I am able to get this job in Israel, I will be able to provide for my children and save up enough to get my sister married,” he said.

Shiv Prakash, another construction worker from Bihar who returned from Saudi Arabia last year, said the salary offered by Israeli companies is three times what he previously made.

“Who would want to miss such an opportunity?” asked the 39-year-old.

A worker extends his hand with an orange band displaying his interview number [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]

Vikas Kumar, 32, from Haryana’s Panipat district also appeared for the skill test. He said Israeli officials set up multiple construction-related simulations, with applicants performing a live demo in the final round.

Kumar works 12 hours a day as a plasterer and earns $120 (10,000 rupees) a month. He hopes to secure a job in Israel to support his family of six.

Israeli citizens, foreign workers flee war

Israel’s economy took a major hit on October 7 when Hamas launched an unprecedented attack inside its territory, killing nearly 1,200 people. Since then, Israeli forces have killed at least 24,620 Palestinians, including 16,000 women and children, in Gaza.

The war also forced nearly 500,000 Israelis and more than 17,000 foreign workers to leave the country, according to data from the Israeli Population and Immigration Authority. Furthermore, around 764,000 Israelis, or nearly one-fifth of Israel’s workforce, are currently unemployed due to evacuations, school closures, or army reserve duty call-ups for the war.

The Israeli construction sector mainly relies on foreign labour, a majority of whom are Palestinian. However, after the Gaza assault began, work licenses of more than 100,000 Palestinian workers were suspended by the Israeli government.

While the ongoing war is being cited as the reason for Israel seeking workers from India, the Israeli government had been working on the plan for well over eight months. In May 2023, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen signed an agreement with his Indian counterpart, S Jaishankar, allowing 42,000 Indian construction workers to migrate for work.

A job advertisement calling ‘only Hindu’ workers to apply for jobs in Israel [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]

But it is not just the labour class that desires to travel to Israel for work. Young, educated Indians are also applying for these jobs in their search for a stable income.

Sachin, a 25-year-old final-year engineering student at a state-run university in Haryana, also appeared for the interview. “Nobody would want to go to a place where rockets fly overhead but there are little opportunities in India,” he told Al Jazeera.

According to a 2023 report by a leading private university, India’s unemployment rate among college graduates under 25 years of age reached a staggering 42 percent after the pandemic.

‘Oppose uprooting Palestinian workers’

But India’s plan to send workers to a country effectively involved in a genocide of Palestinians has been criticised by labour groups and the opposition.

In November, 10 of India’s biggest trade unions issued a strongly-worded statement, urging the government to not send Indian workers to Israel amid the ongoing war on Gaza.

“Nothing could be more immoral and disastrous for India than the said ‘export’ of workers to Israel. That India is even considering ‘exporting’ workers shows the manner in which it has dehumanised and commodified Indian workers,” said the statement.

The Construction Workers Federation of India, another major union, also opposed “any attempt to send the poor construction workers of our country to Israel to overcome its shortage of workers and in any way support its genocidal attacks on Palestine”.

Stills of skilled Indian workers who applied for construction jobs in Israel [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]

Tapan Kumar Sen, former Indian parliamentarian and general secretary of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, said his organisation was not opposed to cross-border labour mobility, but it should not come at the expense of Palestinian workers.

“We want all workers to find work. We don’t want someone fired and someone else given a job. Every Indian worker should oppose uprooting Palestinian workers and replacing them with Indian workers,” said Sen.

Clifton D’Rozario, national secretary of the All India Central Council of Trade Unions, told Al Jazeera the Indian government was acting like a “contractor” for Israel and that the idea of sending workers to Israel reminded him of indentured servitude during the British colonialism in the 19th century.

“The state negotiating for a section of workers to be sent to a particular state, one that has a history of oppressing another community, to come in as a replacement under any circumstances is unacceptable. Even if there is no conflict, I say that is not acceptable,” he said.

As criticism mounted, spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs Randhir Jaiswal last week told a news conference the government was conscious of its responsibility to provide safety and security to Indian nationals abroad. He said the labour laws in Israel were “robust and strict, and provide protection of labour rights and migrant rights”.

Al Jazeera reached out to the Israeli officials conducting the interviews, but they refused to speak or provide information about the recruitment drive.

Experts meanwhile say India should thoroughly assess the conditions in Israel they would be subjecting the workers to, even if it was financially beneficial.

In the past, Israel has been accused of violating the rights of workers. According to a 2015 Human Rights Watch report, Thailand workers in Israel’s agriculture sector were paid salaries below the minimum wage. They were also subjected to unsafe working conditions and forced to work long hours.

There have also been examples of Indian workers caught in the crosshairs of the conflicts in the Middle East.

In March 2018, the Indian government admitted that 39 Indian workers were killed after they were kidnapped by the ISIL (ISIS) armed group in Iraq. A group of 46 Indian nurses were freed in July 2014 by ISIL after more than a week in captivity.

India’s pro-Israel stance under Modi

India’s foreign policy has historically backed the Palestinian cause. But that policy has seen a shift in the past decade.

In 2017, Narendra Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel. He is also seen referring to his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu as a “close friend” on social media.

Soon after the Gaza war began, India in late October abstained from voting on a United Nations General Assembly resolution calling for a ceasefire. Two months later, however, New Delhi backed another UN resolution demanding ceasefire.

Back home, authorities in several Indian states banned pro-Palestinian rallies and arrested people for protesting or even posting Palestine solidarity messages on social media.

Mani Shankar Aiyar, former federal minister and diplomat, said India’s policy for at least the last 50 years had been to encourage Indians to go as migrant workers in the Middle East and other parts of the world.

“Their remittances to India are a very important part of our economy. So, for economic reasons, I would certainly support the idea of Indian labourers going to Israel. However, given the context of Israel’s present genocide in the Gaza Strip, this is the worst way for Indians to make a little money out of Israel,” he told Al Jazeera.

According to a UN report on international migration, inward remittances from Middle Eastern countries to India were $38bn in 2017.

Many Indian aspirants for the jobs in Israel said they were unfettered by the war in Gaza, with some workers even supporting Israel in its operation against the Palestinians.

“Given a chance, I am even willing to work for the Israeli forces,” Yash Sharma, an aspirant from Haryana’s Jind region, told Al Jazeera.

Many others like Sharma had a far more compelling reason. “I will take my chance. It is better to die there than go hungry,” he said.

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2023, the year of layoffs | Business and Economy News

Carlin Putman of Houston, Texas worked at AIG for more than two decades. Earlier this year, she lost her job. She was devastated.

But the writing was on the wall for months as the company tried to cut costs.

“No matter how much work we had, it was working off of bare bones,” Putman told Al Jazeera English.

Late last year, the insurance giant announced it would lay off hundreds of employees, including Putman.

“When you are reporting to the board, the less headcount you can show that looks better for them,” Putman said.

In 2022, AIG’s Peter Zaffino was the highest-paid CEO in the entire property and casualty insurance sector. He made more than $75m last year — most of which came from stock grants.

According to data compiled by research firm Equilar, that makes Zaffino the third-highest-paid CEO by revenue in all of corporate America.

AIG has not made any public commitment to its top bosses taking any kind of pay cut amid the layoffs. AIG did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

AIG has yet to issue its proxy statement — the document a company releases as it solicits shareholder votes in advance of an annual shareholder meeting and which includes executive compensation for the year. AIG’s most recent was in March. Like most publicly traded companies, it will issue the next one in the first half of 2024.

Other companies did respond to Al Jazeera’s inquiries but said executive compensation has yet to be disclosed. T-Mobile for example said it will release the specifics of CEO Mike Sievert’s compensation package in April as did Pfizer, Morgan Stanley, Ford, GoDaddy and many others.

While corporate America was swift about layoffs, the consensus on executive compensation is to be determined, indicating they could rise. That sends a mixed message about the state of the economy heading into the 2024 presidential election.

High layoffs amid record job growth

Layoffs in tech and other sectors have come despite record job growth [File: Mark Lennihan/Reuters]

In January, Salesforce laid off approximately 10 percent of its workforce. CEO Marc Benioff blamed economic conditions.

The layoffs came despite record job growth in the United States. In 2022, the US economy added 4.5 million jobs — the second-highest in 40 years. Excluding this month, data for which is not yet available, the economy added more than 2.5 million jobs in 2023.

In October, The White House touted inflation slowed by 60 percent since its peak in June 2022.

Concurrently, Salesforce reported $8.2bn in revenue in the first quarter.

“CEOs often get rewarded for layoffs because Wall Street sees it as a sign that the chief executive is taking the tough action to ensure that the company is mean and lean so often they will see a bump in their share price after a layoff,” Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute For Policy Studies, told Al Jazeera.

“In that kind of context, there is no way that shareholders are going to be calling for the CEO’s head or even reducing their bonuses because shareholders are happy when the stock price goes up,” she added.

In a letter to staffers, Benioff said in part “we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”

Yet analysts like Wedbush’s Dan Ives called Salesforce first Q1 results a “masterpiece”. Marc Benioff made the rounds on business news TV to tout its earnings report and was rarely questioned about the massive job cuts even as Benioff’s pay increased 4 percent in 2022, according to Equilar data.

Salesforce has added more than 3,000 jobs since the recent cuts. Benioff did not commit to taking any pay cut. Salesforce did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Despite tailwinds in the US economy over the last two years, according to Layoffs.fyi — a platform that tracks tech industry layoffs — there were more than 260,000 layoffs in the sector.

According to a report from Challenger, Gray and Christmas, there were roughly 20,000 layoffs in the media industry in 2023. The same report found the retail sector cut 78,000 jobs and the healthcare industry cut roughly 57,000.

Salary cuts not always noble

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he would not take a bonus this year [File: Cathal McNaughton/Reuters]

Despite thousands out of a job this year, seldomly are c-suite executives taking any kind of a pay cut. Al Jazeera evaluated more than 90 companies across multiple industries to see who opted to take a pay cut publicly this past year.

Several companies announced that its CEOs would take pay cuts. In February, Twillio announced its CEO, Jeff Lawson would take an almost 50 percent pay cut. Micron Tech announced that its CEO would take a roughly 20 percent pay cut. Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon announced he would take a pay cut, as well. Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai said he would not take a bonus this year.

How meaningful those are, varies. For instance, Pichai’s announcement only comes after a huge compensation rise for 2022. According to Equilar data, that was a 3,474 percent increase over the year prior.

The most notable cut was at Zoom Communications. Its CEO, Eric Yuan made headlines earlier this year after he announced that he would take a 98 percent pay cut amid layoffs at the video conferencing giant which surged in popularity of the program in everyday life during the COVID-19 pandemic. He took responsibility for overhiring.

For executives taking pay cuts is not always that easy of a thing to do because it can make the company look weak, thus impacting its stock price. Generally publicly traded companies are beholden to their shareholders through a concept called shareholder supremacy and companies can get sued if executives make decisions that are not in the best interest of its shareholders.

But salary cuts are not always as black and white as public relations campaigns make them seem.

Intel for example said it would “temporarily reduce base salaries for our CEO and NEOs 25% and 15%, respectively, with 2023 target bonuses based on the new blended salaries (certain months at prior salary and certain months at reduced salary),” in its most recent proxy statement.

But experts have suggested that that is not always as noble as it seems.

“Where they [CEOs more broadly] are taking cuts is what we need to understand. If they are taking cuts in salary, that’s really the most significant, it’s just the most obvious that people see,” Harikumar Sankaran, professor of finance at New Mexico State University told Al Jazeera.

In the case of Intel, the tech giant cut out cash bonuses for its CEO, Pat Gelsinger. However, the Silicon Valley-based tech giant enhanced the role its stock plays in its executive compensation package.

“A lot of executives with great fanfare announced they were not taking a salary but then when we looked at total compensation, it was just as big as the year before,” Anderson said.

“It is only better than nothing if it’s a meaningful cut in their total compensation. If it is just window dressing in terms of a small cut in base pay, they are going to make out like bandits with their equity-based pay.”

According to the company’s most recent proxy, CEO compensation topped $11.6m, $8.8m of which was in stock awards.

Intel also refocused its compensation commitment to focus more on “at risk” pay. Its proxy statement argued that it will “strengthen our pay-for-performance linkage, provide further alignment with stockholders’ long-term interests, and meet the cost cutting needs of our company given the continued macroeconomic headwinds we face.”

“If companies were to say they would not accept stock grants for the next two years, that would be a significant statement,” Sankaran said.

That said, how CEOs opt to compensate themselves ultimately does not change the increasingly strained financial situation for the hundreds of thousands of American workers who lost their jobs this year.

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‘Where is our future’: Uganda declares war on used clothing | Business and Economy

For nearly three decades, the chaotic, overcrowded Owino secondhand market in Uganda’s capital has been the cornerstone of Hadija Nakimuli’s life, helping the widowed shopkeeper build a house and raise 12 children.

But a potential government ban on the sale of used clothing threatens to sever this crucial lifeline for Nakimuli and tens of thousands of vendors like her.

“Where is our future if they stop secondhand clothes?” the 62-year-old asked, rummaging through her stash of underwear, dresses, shoes and bags.

Established in 1971, the sprawling market employs some 80,000 people, 70 percent of them women, according to Kampala city authorities.

“Other than students, my clients include ministers [and] members of parliament who call me to deliver clothes to their air-conditioned offices,” said Joseph Barimugaya, whose stall stocks menswear.

“This trade should not be tampered with. Everyone benefits, including the government, which gets taxes,” the father of four said.

Every day, hundreds of customers squeeze through the narrow alleys separating the makeshift wooden stalls, eager to grab a bargain.

Here, a secondhand Pierre Cardin blazer goes for 40,000 Ugandan shillings ($11), a fraction of the price of a new one.

“As a teacher, I earn less than 500,000 shillings [$131]. If I am to buy a new garment, it means I would spend all my salary on clothing,” Robert Twimukye, 27, said while shopping at Owino on a Saturday afternoon.

He is not alone.

Although there are no official figures available, the Uganda Dealers in Used Clothings and Shoes Association estimates that 16 million people – one in three Ugandans – wear used clothing.

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Panama celebrates court order to cancel mine even as business is hit | Mining

For more than a month, protests against Central America’s largest open-pit copper mine have held Panama in a state of siege. Roadblocks have caused gas and propane shortages. Many supermarket shelves have run bare. Restaurants and hotels have sat empty.

But on Tuesday, protesters in Panama got the news they were waiting for.

The country’s Supreme Court of Justice ruled that Panama’s new mining contract with the Canadian company First Quantum was unconstitutional.

Protesters danced in the streets in front of the Supreme Court. They waved the red, white and blue Panamanian flag and sang the national anthem.

The ruling, a big blow for investors and for the country’s long-term credit rating, is, for the moment, a source of relief for Panama, which has been shaken by the country’s largest protest movement to plague the country in decades.

The news of the Supreme Court ruling came early on Tuesday – the day of the anniversary of Panama’s Independence from Spain.

“Today, we are celebrating two independences,” 58-year-old restaurant worker Nestor Gonzalez told Al Jazeera. “Independence from Spain. And independence from the mine. And no one is going to forget it.”

People turned out to celebrate. The bistro where Gonzalez works, in the western province of Chiriqui, was packed with patrons by noon – something the restaurant had not seen since mid-October.

“We are so happy,” said Gonzalez. “Because, we had been locked up in the province of Chiriqui for 35 days, without gas, without propane, and with little food. I had to go look for firewood in the mountains because I had no propane to cook with. So thank God that the justices took a stand and issued this ruling.”

The mine, known as Cobre Panama, has been in production since 2019, and extracting 300,000 tonnes of copper a year. It represents roughly five percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and 75 percent of Panamanian exports. The mining sector contributes roughly seven percent of Panama’s GDP with Cobre Panama as the country’s most important mine.

But protesters said Cobre Panama was a disaster for the country’s environment and a handout to a foreign corporation.

“I’m protesting because they are stealing our country. They are just handing it over,” said Ramon Rodriguez, a protester in a yellow raincoat in a march in late October, after protests ignited against the mine. “The sovereignty of our country is in danger. That’s why I’m here.”

This question of sovereignty is particularly important for Panamanians, who fought throughout the 20th century to rid the country of the United States-controlled Panama Canal Zone. This was an area almost half the size of the US state of Rhode Island that sliced through the middle of Panama.

“This contract is bad. It never should have been made. Never. So you have to fight,” said Miriam Caballero, a middle-aged woman in a grey sweatshirt who watched the October protest pass.

Protesters said Cobre Panama was a disaster for the country’s environment and a handout to the Canadian firm that had the mining contract [Michael Fox/Al Jazeera]

Impact on foreign investment

This was not the first contract with the mine. In 2021, the Supreme Court declared the previous contract unconstitutional for not adequately benefitting the public good. The government of President Laurentino Cortizo renegotiated the contract with improved benefits for the state. This was fast-tracked through Congress on October 20. Cortizo signed it into law hours later.

The president and his cabinet had applauded the new contract, saying it would bring windfall profits for the state.

“The contract ensures a minimum payment to the state of $375m dollars a year, for the next 20 years,” said Commerce Minister Federico Alfaro told Panama news outlet Telemetro. “If you can compare this with what the state was receiving before, which was $35m a year, it’s a substantial improvement to the past.”

Cortizo promised to use the funds to shore up the country’s Social Security Fund and increase pensions for more than 120,000 retirees.

After the protests spiralled out of control, he announced a moratorium on all new mining projects and promised to hold a referendum over the fate of Cobre Panama. The idea didn’t gain traction. The protesters wouldn’t budge.

Members of Panama’s business sector have blamed Cortizo for mishandling the crisis and refusing to use a heavy hand to end the roadblocks and stop the protests. Last week, they said it had cost the country $1.7bn.

Cortizo, whose approval rating was already down to 24 percent in June, responded to this week’s court ruling stating, “All Panamanians need to respect and abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court.”

Analysts say the protests and the ruling will have an impact for foreign companies looking to do business in Panama.

“I believe this court ruling is sending a very clear message to foreign investors,” Jorge Cuéllar, Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at Dartmouth College, told Al Jazeera. “If this is the kind of foreign investment that politicians and capitalists are innovating in 2023, then Panamanians want no part of it.”

But this stance will likely come at a price.

In early November, after more than a week of protests, rating agency Moody’s downgraded Panama’s debt to the lowest investment-grade rating. It cited financial issues and noted the political turmoil. JP Morgan analysts said, at the time, that if the mining contract were revoked, it would substantially increase Panama’s risk of losing its investment-grade rating.

First Quantum also has much to lose. Its shares have lost 60 percent of their value over the last month and a half. More than 40 percent of the company’s production comes from the Panamanian mine.

Over the weekend, the company notified Panama that it planned to take the country to arbitration under the Free Trade Agreement between the two countries.

But in a statement released after the ruling, First Quantum said, “The Company wishes to express that it respects Panamanian laws and will review the content of the judgement to understand its foundations.”

Protesters said the country’s sovereignty was at stake [Michael Fox/Al Jazeera]

‘Jobs at risk’

The announcement is also a blow for the employees of the mine. The mine employs roughly 6,600 people – 86 percent of whom are Panamanian – and a total 40,000 direct and indirect jobs.

The Union of Panamanian Mine Workers, Utramipa, announced its members would march in several cities on Wednesday against the Supreme Court decision and in defence of their jobs.

“We are not going to allow them to put our jobs at risk, which are our means for supporting our families,” the union said in a statement.

Last week, Utramipa member Michael Camacho, denounced the protests on the news outlet Panamá En Directo. Operations at the mine were suspended last week due to protests at its port and the highway in and out of the facility.

“What about us, the workers? We are also Panamanians. We have the right to go to our homes and return to our place of work,” said Camacho. “But at this moment, we are being held hostage by the protesters, by the anti-social, the terrorists – which is what we should call them – and the people that stop us from passing.”

For the majority of Panamanians, the Supreme Court ruling is a welcomed sign that the country is on the road to normalcy.

Protesters in some provinces have promised to stay in the streets until the Supreme Court ruling is officially published – which usually takes a few days – or until the mine is closed for good. But many roadblocks have now been cleared, highways that stood empty for weeks are now open, and gas stations are rolling back in business.

“We are in a new phase,” Harry Brown Araúz, the director of Panama’s International Center of Social and Political Studies, told Al Jazeera. “The protests, as we have seen until now, should be lifted. And the government has said that it will begin the process of closing the mine in an orderly manner. This can generate confidence in the population, which had been lost.”

Araúz says the protest movement and the ruling are a powerful sign of the strength of Panama’s democracy, which the country regained just over 30 years ago.

“This is a really important moment,” he says. “It marks a before and after for Panamanian democracy.”

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US employers added 236,000 jobs in March, unemployment at 3.5%

US hiring slowed in March – but the jobs market remains historically tight in a trend that could put pressure on the embattled Federal Reserve to proceed with another interest rate hike.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 236,000 last month, according to the Labor Department’s closely-watched March jobs report released Friday.

The figure was roughly in line with expectations. Prior to the March jobs report’s release, economists polled by Dow Jones had forecast jobs growth of 238,000.

The US unemployment rate sank slightly to just 3.5%, down from 3.6% in February.

“Employment continued to trend up in leisure and hospitality, government, professional and business services, and health care,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a release.

Average hourly wages ticked 0.3% higher, slightly more than economists expected. Wages have increased by just 4.2% over the last 12 months – the slowest clip since mid-2021.

Elsewhere, hiring in February was revised upward to show the US economy added 326,000 jobs that much – 15,000 more than what was previously reported.

Investors anxiously awaited the latest hiring data given lingering uncertainty about the Fed’s policy path. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has often cited tightness in the jobs market as the central bank enacted a series of rate hikes over the last year.

Hiring in March matched expectations.

“The labor market is cooling down though not as quickly as the Fed would like it to,” Derek Tang, an economist at LH Meyer/Monetary Policy Analytics in Washington, told Bloomberg. “This keeps a May hike in play, though just barely.”

The market is pricing in a 69% probability that the Fed will implement another quarter percentage point interest rate hike at its next policy meeting on May 2-3, according to CME Group’s FedWatch tool. Investors see just a 31% chance that the Fed will pause its tightening campaign.

The Fed implemented a quarter-point hike last month, signaling its resolve to tame inflation despite weakness in the US banking sector. Inflation is still running abnormally high – with prices jumping 6% year-over-year in February, according to last month’s Consumer Price Index.

Powell and other experts have suggested that bank crisis could lead to tightened credit conditions that would further cool prices.

US stock futures were mixed as the market digested the March jobs report. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures fell about 55 points, while Nasdaq and S&P 500 futures were flat.

Hiring stayed resilient even as major US companies slashed jobs and enacted cost-cutting measures amid signs of a slowing economy.

Disney began its first of three planned rounds of layoffs in late March as part of plans to cut about 7,000 jobs and $5.5 billion in expenses.

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