The UAW's strike against General Motors enters day 10 and while there are various issues being discussed, there is one point the two sides argue about the most.
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Temporary workers has been the top request among union members, according to the Detroit Free Press.
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Temp workers are union members doing the same work as permanent employees, but get half the pay and far fewer benefits.
The union wants a those workers to get a path to being permanent and as temps, get pay and benefits that more closely match their permanent counterparts.
Temps make up 7 percent-to-10 percent of GM's workforce over the course of a year and GM is holding firm to the status quo, according to the free Press.
Temps account for about 4,100 workers at the end of 2018. Ford had about 3,400 temps and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles had 4,800, according to the UAW.
GM has reportedly backed off on proposing that workers pay for more of their health care — initially proposing a 15 percent share rather than the autoworkers' current 3 percent — but wanted the UAW to bend on temporary workers.
It marks a startling fall from grace for the ambitious 40-year-old billionaire.
So what's his story?
From kibbutz to co-working
Born in Israel, Mr Neumann served in the Israeli Navy before moving to New York to "get a great job, have tons of fun and make a lot of money", as he put it in a 2017 TechCrunch interview.
He enrolled at Baruch College at the City University of New York in 2002, but dropped out just shy of graduation to go into business.
One of his early ventures was a baby clothing company that evolved into the luxury Egg Baby brand.
Later, he and business partner Miguel McKelvey, an architect, renovated an office space and sublet the property. They sold the business but the idea grew into WeWork.
In interviews, Mr Neumann - who finally got his degree in 2017 - has tied WeWork's origin story to his own, linking his itinerant childhood and time spent living on a kibbutz to WeWork's emphasis on communal working.
He told Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2017 he sometimes even refers to WeWork as "Kibbutz 2.0".
Easy money
Mr Neumann's colourful personality once charmed investors, including Japanese investment giant Softbank, a major backer of WeWork.
Softbank's investments helped the company reach a peak valuation of about $47bn (£37.7bn) despite steep, ongoing losses - a mismatch that has drawn repeated questions.
Mr Neumann attempted to address that puzzle, telling Forbes in 2017: "Our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue."
WeWork's growth made Mr Neumann a billionaire, with an estimated net worth of $2.2bn, according to Forbes.
His glamorous personal life - his wife Rebekah is the cousin of actress Gwyneth Paltrow, while his sister Adi is a former model who was once a Miss Teen Israel - contributed to the buzz around the company.
But the mixing of work and pleasure - which had been a key element of WeWork's culture - became a problem as the firm set out plans to go public.
Potential investors questioned the links between Mr Neumann's personal finances and WeWork, as well as his decision to expand WeWork into areas of personal interest, such as surfing and a school.
They also raised questions about his judgment amid complaints about his hard-partying ways.
Magic fades
WeWork tried to respond to those concerns. Among other steps Mr Neumann returned $5.9m in stock he received for selling WeWork the trademark "We".
But even the announcement on Tuesday that Mr Neumann would step aside and reduce his voting power failed to quell questions about WeWork's long-term prospects.
Critics have long said WeWork was little more than a typical real estate company, and its shaky finances had been obscured by Mr Neumann's personal style.
Three current and former Volkswagen executives have been criminally charged with market manipulation in connection with a diesel emissions scandal.
CEO Herbert Diess, chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch and ex-CEO Martin Winterkorn did not inform investors early enough about the financial fallout, German prosecutors said.
The firm admitted in 2015 using illegal software to cheat on emissions tests.
VW said it was confident the allegations would prove groundless.
LONDON — One day after the British tour operator and airline Thomas Cook abruptly collapsed, leaving hundreds of thousands of travelers scrambling to make arrangements, the head of Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority promised that “nobody” from her country would be stranded and subsidiaries in several countries were working to bring people home.
Thomas Cook said on Friday that about 600,000 people were traveling abroad on its services, raising the prospect of hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded overseas after the company collapsed in spectacular fashion, but initial reports suggested that governments and private companies were moving to bring people home were underway.
In addition to the vast repatriation effort in Britain, several companies that are either subsidiaries of Thomas Cook or use the name while running independently of it were still operating and in a position to help passengers home from China, France, Germany, India and the Netherlands.
The repatriation of British travelers was being described as the largest such peacetime effort in the country’s history, and Deidre Hutton, the chairwoman of the Civil Aviation Authority, speaking to the BBC on Tuesday morning, said that around 15,000 people had already been flown back to Britain.
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Thomas Cook passengers being assisted at the airport in Palma, Spain.CreditCati Cladera/EPA, via Shutterstock
“Nobody is stranded, everybody will get their holiday and they will be brought back at the time they would have come back anyway,” she said. “I’m conscious that we’ve got a huge job to do still, because that’s about 8 percent of the total, but a reasonable start.”
An additional 74 flights were scheduled to bring back another 16,500 people back to Britain on Tuesday, and over the next two weeks, an additional 135,000 passengers will be repatriated, with the effort continuing until Oct. 6. Passengers who are traveling after that date will have to make their own arrangements.
Around 60 percent of the cost for the flights was funded by a government insurance program called the Air Travel Organizer’s License, which means that Thomas Cook customers who booked package travel — generally, some combination of flights, hotels and car rental — are assured of refunds for future canceled trips and for repatriation free of charge.
Customers who bought only flights from Thomas Cook do not have the same protections and may need to rely more on personal travel insurance, if they have it.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said the government should look into how such situations could be avoided in the future, and seemed to back rules that would turn over responsibility for repatriation to travel companies rather than the government.
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Passengers boarding an Airbus A380 airliner being used for transporting Thomas Cook customers at Dalaman Airport in Turkey.CreditUmit Bektas/Reuters
“How can we make sure that tour operators take proper precautions with their business models where you don’t end up with a situation where the taxpayer, the state, is having to step in and bring people home?” Mr. Johnson said, according to Reuters.
He voiced his criticism of the company from New York, where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly this week. Speaking at a climate summit on Monday, he asked how business leaders managed to pay themselves large sums as the company went “down the tubes.”
“I think it is a bit bewildering that you can have 160,000 people stranded,” Mr. Johnson said, according to Reuters. “It’s not possible for me to know exactly what happened with the directors of the board of Thomas Cook and how it came about when they paid themselves x, y or z.”
He later tweeted on Monday night that he had met with British Consulate employees in New York who were working to repatriate travelers and thanked the consular workers for their efforts. “It’s a tough time for those who have had holidays disrupted but team hard at work to support them,” he wrote.
The travel company had struggled financially for some time and announced its closing after negotiations to obtain at least 200 million pounds, or $250 million, in additional emergency financing failed over the weekend.
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A Thomas Cook banner at Dalaman Airport in Turkey on Monday.CreditUmit Bektas/Reuters
Thomas Cook India posted a statement on its website on Tuesday reassuring customers that it was not part of the British company after being acquired in 2012. The Dutch Thomas Cook subsidiary said it had not yet declared bankruptcy and so was open for business as usual.
A Chinese subsidiary of Thomas Cook, which caters largely to Chinese tourists traveling abroad, said on Monday that its operations would not be affected by the bankruptcy of the parent company.
The subsidiary, Thomas Cook China, said online that it “regretted” the bankruptcy of the British company, and added that Thomas Cook China “has healthy finances, has not been affected by this matter, and all its operations continue as normal.”
The Chinese unit is a Shanghai-based joint venture between the Thomas Cook parent company and a Chinese majority shareholder, Fosun, a corporation that has invested heavily in tourism. Earlier reports said Fosun owned 51 percent of the joint venture, with the other 49 percent in the hands of the Thomas Cook parent company.
As well as operating the joint venture with Thomas Cook, the Fosun Group has been a major shareholder in the now bankrupt British company. In previous months Fosun had proposed a rescue deal that would have given it a 75 percent stake in the tour division of Thomas Cook, but the plan failed to gain enough support from other stakeholders in the company.
Fosun said in a statement to Agence France-Presse that it was “disappointed.” Shares of units of Fosun listed in Hong Kong, Fosun Tourism and Fosun International, have fallen this week, reflecting investor disquiet about damage to the Chinese group’s international ambitions and financial health.
Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.
David Paul Morris | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Google does not have to apply the right to be forgotten globally, the European Court of Justice ruled Tuesday.
Europe's top court had been looking at two separate cases involving the search engine: whether it must remove sensitive personal data worldwide or just in Europe; as well as whether it must automatically delete search results with sensitive information.
The ECJ's ruling states that Google's delisting of search results that concerned EU citizens only applies in the bloc's 28 member states.
"The Court concludes that, currently, there is no obligation under EU law, for a search engine operator who grants a request for de-referencing made by a data subject, as the case may be,... to carry out such a de-referencing on all the versions of its search engine," the ECJ said in a statement Tuesday.
This follows on an earlier decision on the so-called "right to be forgotten" — a ruling made five years ago that grants European citizens the right to ask search engines, such as Google, to remove sensitive information about them, such as past crimes.
"Since 2014, we've worked hard to implement the right to be forgotten in Europe, and to strike a sensible balance between people's rights of access to information and privacy," Peter Fleischer, senior privacy counsel at Google, told CNBC in an emailed statement.
"It's good to see that the Court agreed with our arguments, and we're grateful to the independent human rights organisations, media associations and many others around the world who also presented their views to the Court," he added.
In 2016, France's privacy watchdog CNIL fined Google 100,000 euros (109,889) for refusing to remove sensitive information from search results on the internet upon request under "right to be forgotten."
During a hearing at the Luxembourg-based institution last year, lawyers defending Google argued that applying the right to be forgotten worldwide could restrict people's access to information in certain countries, Politico reported.
At the same time, Tuesday's decision delivers a setback to the European Union and its prospects of extending its own privacy standards globally.
Tension between global tech and national rules
"Google will be happy with the decision, and I think the broader question is who has jurisdiction when it comes to tech, which is global in its nature," Dexter Thillien, senior industry analyst at Fitch Solutions, told CNBC via email.
"As we're unlikely to see global rules, that tension between global tech and national rules will continue, and this means that some jurisdictions will still try to implement rules which will have a global impact," he added.
Tuesday's ruling comes amid increasing scrutiny of the tech giant from European regulators, with the EU's antitrust authority cracking down on the company in recent years.
In March, the European Commission fined Google $1.7 billion for abusing its dominance over the digital advertising market, marking the third consecutive year of EU antitrust rulings on the U.S. firm. Among those rulings was a record $5.1 billion fine for anti-competitive practices on Google's Android devices.
But when it comes to privacy, Google is also facing intensifying pressure from authorities in the United States.
Earlier this month, it was announced that Google-owned YouTube would pay $170 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the New York attorney general that it earned millions by illegally collecting data from children without their parents' consent.
Representatives for the company were also questioned by lawmakers at a Senate hearing on data privacy last year.
Amid the rising scrutiny, the tech giant has been attempting to overhaul its reputation. Back in June, the company unveiled several measures aimed at safeguarding its users' privacy and data, such as new extensions to allow users better control over their privacy settings and restricting third-party data collection.
Earlier, the company announced it would set up a European hub to handle data privacy. CEO Sundar Pichai said Google planned to have more than 200 privacy engineers working in Munich, Germany, by the end of the year.
— CNBC's Elizabeth Schulze contributed to this article.
NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - After the collapse of Thomas Cook left hundreds of thousands of passengers reliant on the British state to repatriate them, Prime Minister Boris Johnson questioned whether bosses should have paid themselves so much ahead of its demise.
A passenger hauls his luggage past a sign of the collapsed travel firm Thomas Cook at Jerez de la Frontera Airport, Spain September 23, 2019. REUTERS/Jon Nazca
Running hotels, resorts and airlines for 19 million people a year, it currently has around 600,000 people abroad and will need the help of governments and insurance firms to bring them home from places as far afield as Cancun, Cuba and Cyprus.
Speaking in New York, Johnson questioned why the state should be left responsible for the actions of handsomely paid directors and said tour operators should have some sort of insurance against such debacles.
“I have questions for one about whether it’s right that the directors, or whoever, the board, should pay themselves large sums when businesses can go down the tubes like that,” Johnson said.
“You need to have some system by which tour operators properly insure themselves against this kind of eventuality,” he said.
Thomas Cook was brought down by a $2.1 billion debt pile, built up by a series of ill-fated deals, that hobbled its response to nimble online rivals. It had to sell three million holidays a year just to cover interest payments.
With the business draining cash, Chief Executive Peter Fankhauser found its lenders were no longer willing to step in. Fankhauser has earned 8.3 million pounds, including 4.3 million pounds in 2015.
The British government decided Thomas Cook was a bet it did not want to take.
Thomas Cook’s demise, announced in the early hours of Monday after failing to secure a deal with creditors or a government bailout, sparked alarm at hotels where some customers have been asked to pay their bills again by out-of-pocket resort owners.
“I think the questions we’ve got to ask ourselves now: how can this thing be stopped from happening in the future?” Johnson said.
“How can we make sure that tour operators take proper precautions with their business models where you don’t end up with a situation where the taxpayer, the state, is having to step in and bring people home?”
Emergency flights brought 14,700 people back to the United Kingdom on 64 flights on Monday, and around 135,300 more are expected to be returned over the next 13 days, Britain’s aviation regulator said.
Seventy-four flights were scheduled on Tuesday, to bring back 16,500 people. More than 1,000 flights are planned.
“A repatriation of this scale and nature is unprecedented and unfortunately there will be some inconvenience and disruption for customers. We will do everything we can to minimize this as the operation continues,” Richard Moriarty, Chief Executive at the Civil Aviation Authority, said.
“We want people to continue to enjoy their holiday, so we will bring them back to the UK on their original departure day, or very soon thereafter.”
Writing by Guy Faulconbridge, Editing by Paul Sandle
The strike by UAW workers against General Motors is now having an effect on workers at GM facilities that aren't involved in the walkout.
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As the strike heads into a ninth day, facilities in the U.S. and Canada have had to temporarily layoff thousands of workers according to The Wall Street Journal.
In Ohio and Canada, GM has furloughed more than 1,200 employees at engine plants.
Last week, 2,000 workers at GM’s assembly plant in Oshawa, Canada were also furloughed.
Nearly 50,000 full-time factory workers hit the picket lines more than a week ago, making this the longest nationwide walkout against GM since 1970.
The walkout is also affecting auto-parts suppliers in the U.S. that produce components for the company’s cars and trucks.
The issues that the UAW is fighting for include better new-hire pay, fewer temp workers and the preservation of existing health-care plans.
UAW members may reportedly remain on the picket line against General Motors until they OK a tentative agreement, which could add at least another week to the work stoppage.
When it called the strike, the UAW GM council voted that employees would not work until the group of local leaders voted to end the work stoppage, according to the Detroit Free Press, citing three people familiar with the union’s thinking. However, two UAW local leaders who are on the council told the Free Press that even after the vote, workers could stay on strike until membership ratification.
