Thank you for smoking … since it became legal and only through state-sanctioned dealers. The taxes from pot sales are making their way into communities in the form of $31 million in grants. What a benefit that will be when every person ever incarcerated for marijuana is home with a cleared record!
A few companies were tardy on their layoffs, holding out until January to make the cuts instead of the classic right-before-Christmas timing. Ulta laid off some number of its corporate staff, which is no surprise when we think about our own beauty standards this year. Visiting a salon? We don’t even know where the hairbrush is.
Northern Trust Bank is laying off 500 employees and cutting pay for many others as low interest rates tug its earnings down. Don’t fret too much though: The bank still made $1.23 billion last year.
Even the people who are back at their jobs aren’t necessarily there for long. United Airlines brought back its furloughed employees only to remind them that they may get chopped again at any time.
British trading firm IG Group is buying Chicago-based online brokerage Tastytrade for $1 billion, a pretty neat illustration of the gap between markets and lived reality. IG Group is hoping to coast on the Robinhood phenomenon, wherein regular people take to stocks like they’re scratch-off lottery tickets, hoping to tap into the same insane wealth that professional investors appear to enjoy. It rarely works.
Finally, a bit of news that’s close to our hearts. Government contracts often come with a clause that some percentage of the work go to minority-owned firms, whether those contracts are for construction or advertising or anything else. This makes people in charge feel quite chuffed with themselves! Look at them, giving back!
What these contracts don’t specify, however, is that minority-owned firms receive any value from the contracts, or have any power in the situation. So the same thing happens pretty much every time: A white-owned and well-established company wins the contract, with a promise to subcontract out just enough of the work to meet the requirements. Minority-owned firms may get a little work out of it, but entirely at the pleasure of the companies that already have plenty of power.
This is a long preamble to a little bit of news that might start chipping away at it. New York-based ad agency Hero Collective is suing Chicago-based DDB for stringing it along in an effort to win an ad contract with the U.S. Army, then cutting the smaller agency out of the profits. The goal, other than to get paid for the work they’ve already done, is to force a conversation on this absolutely bullshit, pseudo-sharecropping system. If the government’s going to spend money on advertising the Army (no please), at least let it benefit a small business in full.
Jobs, Glorious Jobs
Director of Innovation for Kraft Heinz
Learn how people want to eat today, and guess how they’ll want to eat five years from now, so you can help Kraft Heinz develop new products and update old ones. If you’re really, really dedicated to snacking, this is a job to put all your research to good use.
Production Editor for The University of Chicago Press
If your favorite part of college papers was the formatting, well, here’s an opportunity to be the final boss of the Chicago Manual of Style. You’ll spend all day reading academic texts, but if you’re still reading after that first sentence, that’s likely fine by you.
Inspiration of the week
Sitting with genuine human emotions is not something we’re great at — that’s what the jokes are for. But after more than four years in a perpetual flinch, we’re ready to try not greeting every day with dread.
Yes there’s still so much work to do and no these aren’t the people we wanted in the White House. But if we can’t learn to take the wins how they come, we’ll never have the energy to keep fighting. So practice putting your shoulders down and simply enjoying this moment for what it is: The first but not the last time a Black, South Asian woman was sworn in as the Vice President of the United States.
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