workforce

Paramount on Wednesday was expected to cut 1,000 employees, the first wave of a deep staff reduction planned since David Ellison took the helm of the entertainment company in August.

People familiar with the matter but not authorized to comment said the layoffs will be felt throughout the company, including at CBS, CBS News, Comedy Central and other cable channels as well as the historic Melrose Avenue film studio.

Another 1,000 jobs are expected to be cut at a later date, bringing the total reduction to about 10% of Paramount’s workforce, sources said.

The move was expected. Paramount’s new owners — Ellison’s Skydance Media and RedBird Capital Partners — had told investors they planned to eliminate more than $2 billion in expenses, and Wednesday’s workforce reduction was a preliminary step toward that goal.

Paramount has been shedding staff for years.

More than 800 people — or about 3.5% of the company’s workforce — were laid off in June, prior to the Ellison family takeover. At the time, Paramount’s management attributed the cuts to the decline of cable television subscriptions and an increased emphasis on bulking up its streaming TV business. In 2024, the company eliminated 2,000 positions, or 15% of its staff.

Longtime CBS News journalist John Dickerson announced earlier this week that he would exit in December. The co-anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” Dickerson has been a familiar network face for more than 15 years, completing tours at “CBS This Morning” and the Sunday public affairs show “Face the Nation.” He was named the network’s evening news co-anchor in January alongside Maurice DuBois to succeed Norah O’Donnell. The revamp, designed in part to save money, led to a ratings decline.

The Paramount layoffs are the latest sign of contraction across the entertainment and tech sectors.

Amazon said this week it was eliminating roughly 14,000 corporate jobs amid its embrace of artificial intelligence to perform more functions. Last week, Facebook parent company Meta disclosed that it was cutting 600 jobs in its AI division.

Last week, cable and broadband provider Charter Corp., which operates the Spectrum service, eliminated 1,200 management jobs around the country.

Los Angeles’ production economy in particular has been roiled by a falloff in local filming and cost-cutting at major media companies.

As of August, about 112,000 people were employed in the Los Angeles region’s motion picture and sound recording industries — the main category for film and television production. The data does not include everyone who works in the entertainment industry, such as those who work as independent contractors.

That was roughly flat compared with the previous year, and down 27% compared with 2022 levels, when about 154,000 people were employed locally in the industry, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The industry has struggled to rebound since the 2023 strikes by writers and actors, which led to a sharp pullback in studio spending following the era of so-called “peak TV,” when
studios dramatically increased the pipeline of shows to build streaming platforms.

“You saw a considerable drop-off from the strikes and the aftermath,” said Kevin Klowden, an executive director at Milken Institute Finance. “The question is, at what point do these workers exit the industry entirely?”

Local film industry officials are expecting a production boost and an increase in work after California bolstered its film and television tax credits.

But Southern California’s bedrock industry is confronting other challenges, including shifting consumer habits and competition from social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

“There is a larger concern in terms of the financial health of all the major operations in Hollywood,” Klowden said. “There’s a real concern about that level of competition, and what it means.”

Oct. 23 (UPI) — All-electric vehicle maker Rivian Automotive has announced it is laying off 4.5% of its workforce amid mounting market pressures, the company said Thursday.

In a memo sent to employees, company founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said the cuts involve restructuring of its marketing, vehicle operations, sales and delivery and mobile teams, according to CNBC.

“These were not changes that were made lightly,” Scaringe said in the memo. “With the changing operating backdrop, we had to rethink how we are scaling out go-to-market- functions. The news is challenging to hear, and the hard work and contributions of the team members who are leaving are greatly appreciated.”

Rivian ended 2024 with just under 15,000 employees.

Scarigne’s memo did not say exactly how many employees would be let go, but according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the plan, the layoffs would affect more than 600 employees.

Rivian and other elective vehicle makers are facing difficult sales and marketing conditions following the end of a $7,500 dollar tax credit for EV purchases in the new federal budget.

Demand has also been lower than expected for Rivian amid regulatory issues. The automaker also lacks new products until next year and faces a cash shortage. It lost $1.1 billion during the second quarter.

This is the latest in a series of layoffs. Rivian furloughed between 100 and 150 workers in its commercial and manufacturing teams between September 2024 and June.

Rivian is scheduled to release at least 150,000 R2 SUVs in 2026, which will be more widely available to consumers than previous models.

The company also recently started construction on its third manufacturing facility outside of Atlanta, where it plans to build the R2 and other models.

The company has struggled to maintain a sales pace with its current lineup of vehicles. Its sales are projected to drop by 16% in 2025 compared to last year.

Oct. 9 (UPI) — The offshore wind farm company Orsted announced Thursday it plans to cut its workforce by roughly one-quarter by the end of 2027 as it redirects its business toward Europe and Asia.

Orsted said Thursday that as a number of offshore wind farms are finalized and come online in the next few years it needs to right size its workforce to match a decline in construction activities it expects to see.

“This is a necessary consequence of our decision to focus our business and the fact that we’ll be finalizing our large construction portfolio in the coming years — which is why we’ll need fewer employees,” Rasmus Errboe, CEO of Orsted, said in a press release.

“At the same time, we want to create a more efficient and flexible organization and a more competitive Orsted, ready to bid on new value-accretive offshore wind projects,” Errboe said.

Right now, the company employs roughly 8,000 people globally but as it wraps up current construction work and some employees become redundant, on top of natural attrition and other moves, Orsted plans to reduce its head count to roughly 6,000.

The company has spent the year updating its portfolio, it said, as its roughly 8.1 gigawatt construction portfolio starts to come online, with most of its geographic and technical focus to be aimed at Europe, as well as some markets in the Asia-Pacific region.

In the United States, Orsted was ordered by the Trump administration in August to stop construction its nearly completed Revolution Wind project off the coast of New England.

The stop work order was part of a Trump move to cut nearly $700 million in funding from 12 wind farms because it considered the projects to be “wasteful.”

Revolution Wind, at the time, was roughly 80 percent complete and expected to provide enough power for more than 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut.

“We’re building a more financially robust and competitive company with solid earnings, which will increase as we complete our projects,” Errboe said in the release. “Once we’ve achieved this, Orsted will be a significantly stronger, more focused and competitive company.”

On the news, shares for the company were trading 0.7 percent higher on Thursday, according to CNBC.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 (UPI) — Federal employee union leaders and members say being furloughed or still working, but without pay, has created personal hardships as the government sits largely idle during the second week of a shutdown.

And for many, the shutdown over funding has deepened concerns about the long-term erosion of the federal workforce. Agencies already operating with limited staffing could face additional strain as employees decide public service is not worth the stress and leave.

“It’s my opinion that we have functionally been in a shutdown, or at least a partial shutdown, for eight months now,” said James Kirwan, legislative affairs director of the National Labor Relations Board Union.

“Since January, one-eighth of the federal workforce is gone. That’s over 300,000 federal workers who were either fired or pressured to take the deferred resignation program. As a result, a lot of programs are dealing with much smaller capacities.”

Kirwan, who is furloughed, spends his days meeting with congressional representatives to advocate for federal worker protections in future budgets. The National Labor Relations Board, where he works overseeing private-sector union disputes, is almost entirely shuttered.

“I think 99.8% of the National Labor Relations Board is furloughed,” he said. “If you are an employee claiming you’ve been fired because of anti-union discrimination, there’s nothing you can do right now. There’s no legal mechanism at your disposal to get your job back.”

Kirwan said he remains committed to his role at the NLRB, but fears for the future of federal service, noting that while government jobs have never been the highest paying, they historically offered stability, union protections and flexibility. But now these benefits are eroding as collective bargaining agreements lapse and layoffs continue.

“Twenty percent of the federal workforce is GS-7 or below, which basically means that they make less than $30,000 or $35,000 a year. We’re talking upward of 200,000 federal employees,” he said.

“For them, not receiving a paycheck is potentially devastating because it means that they have to take out more credit card debt, loans — things that can put them in financial jeopardy.”

While Kirwan is grounded in Washington, others feel the effects of the shutdown across the country.

James Jones, based in Boone, N.C., a representative of Local 446 with the American Federation of Government Employees, works for the National Park Service. He said the shutdown hit at one of the worst possible times — the fall season in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“It’s the fall color season. Our park gets very busy during this time of year, probably the busiest time of the year for us. We don’t have enough maintenance folks to really keep up with the amount of traffic that is coming into the park each day,” he said.

Jones told UPI that one or two Park Service workers visit the parks each day to clean the bathrooms and take out trash, but it’s not enough. With parks remaining open without proper staffing, he said a bigger mess will await them when they eventually return — if they do.

“We work for Americans, we serve the American public, and the longer we’re out of work, the larger the toll it’s going to take on these public services,” Jones said.

An Army veteran, Jones has been through several shutdowns and shared frustrations regarding the constant political gridlock and its wear on morale.

“It kind of makes me angry because I’d rather be at work. Not just collecting a paycheck, but I’m pretty committed to the National Park Service and its ideas and mission, and I’d like to be there doing my job,” he said.

He added that the frustrations lie deeper than just financial uncertainty, but it affects other means of living, as well.

“It’s not just the back pay, it’s all your benefits. It’s the longer the shutdown lasts, we’re losing annual leave, we’re losing sick leave, we’re losing retirement benefits, our health care premiums aren’t being paid,” Jones said.

While in Chicago at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Colin Smalley, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 777, described a similar sense of exhaustion. Even before the shutdown, he said, agencies were grappling with what he called a “brain drain.”

“We have people who are in their field, people in the design of a project from 20 to 25 years ago, and they still are around to inspect these federal projects. We do levees, flood control, reservoirs and other things that protect our communities,” he said.

Smalley added: “We have people who have that long-reaching expertise and institutional knowledge who are walking out the door, and that really puts a stress on our ability to deliver the project.”

Despite assurances that workers wouldn’t be expected to handle more work to compensate for staffing losses, Smalley said they are still under pressure to meet the same deadlines with fewer people.

Although he expressed frustration with political leadership, he said this crisis has only deepened his commitment to the work.

“This whole episode is reinforcing my commitment to public service,” he said. “It reinforces the way I feel about serving my own communities. … My biggest fear is a slow descent into loss — of expertise, resources and the sense of common good that holds us together.”

THE three jobs most at risk of being taken over by AI have been revealed.

British workers will be forced to compete with a surge of 100,000 virtual AI employees by the end of 2026, research by Agentic AI firm Gravitee has suggested.

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Software engineers, HR managers and customer service managers appear to be most at risk.

Almost half of company executives surveyed by Gravitee said more than half the work of these roles could be done by an AI agent.

It means companies could cut these jobs to slash business costs.

The other jobs at risk include salesperson, marketing manager and communications manager.

The AI firm surveyed 250 executives at large UK companies and all said they were planning to use AI agents in some way.

Most of the companies said they would ’employ’ between 16 to 20 AI agents to carry out tasks previously carried out by human employees.

Meanwhile 65% of the firms said they would be making job cuts over the same period, suggesting much of the work done by their current employees could be performed more cheaply by AI bots.

Still, nearly a quarter of companies said they plan to increase their headcounts to support the AI expansion.

Rory Blundell, chief executive at Gravitee, said: “Agentic AI will offer a huge productivity boom to firms of all sizes, with AI agents completing rote, repetitive tasks while workers are freed up to focus on more interesting challenges.

“However it’s clear that, at least in the short term, there’s a risk of widespread job cuts until companies know how to balance the investment with the return, which may be shortsighted. Not least because AI Agents, without proper governance, can cause widespread chaos and disruption.”

A report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that AI could hit three in five workers and even replace their jobs.

Companies and even the government have already begun to slash their workforce to make way for the technology.

The UK’s biggest accountancy firms – PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and EY – have reportedly slashed the number of junior roles available by up to 29 per cent, while the government is axing at least 10,000 roles in the civil service.

Amazon, Telstra, Salesforce and Fiverr have all announced plans for lay-offs in the last 12 months, with jobs going instead to AI agents. 

There were 315,550 available entry-level roles in November 2022 (when the popular AI tool ChatGPT was launched) across the UK, which dropped to 214,934 last month, according to the jobs site Adzuna.

The 40 roles most at risk

Similar research has previously been carried out by Microsoft, which revealed the 40 jobs most likely to be taken over by AI.

Researchers looked at 200,000 conversations between people in the US and Microsoft’s AI chatbot, called Copilot, as part of the study.

They found that the jobs most likely to be affected by AI are those in the communications industry.

Interpreters and translators are the jobs most at risk, followed by historians, and passenger attendants such as air hosts and hostesses or train ticket inspectors.

Sales representatives came fourth on the list, then writers and authors, and customer service representatives.

Other jobs on the list included radio DJs, concierge workers, teachers, public relations specialists and telephone operators.

Jobs that involve physically working with people, operating or monitoring machinery, or doing manual labour tend to be the least-impacted by AI.

This includes nursing assistants, sewage workers, painters and plasterers, roofers, cleaners, and massage therapists.

One of California’s largest agricultural employers plans to close a Central Valley grape nursery by the end of the year after laying off hundreds of employees, including many supportive of a United Farm Workers effort to unionize the workforce.

Wonderful Co., owned by billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, plans to shut down the majority of the nursery in Wasco, northwest of Bakersfield, and donate the farm to UC Davis, representatives for the company and the university confirmed this week.

The move comes as Wonderful Nurseries remains locked in a battle with the UFW after the union last year petitioned to represent workers growing grapevines, using a new state “card check” law that made it easier for organizers to sign up workers. Company officials said their decision was unrelated to that.

“The decision to wind down Wonderful Nurseries was purely a business decision and in no way, shape or form related to our ongoing litigation with the UFW or the fraud so many farm workers reported by the union,” Wonderful Co. spokesman Seth Oster said.

In February, Wonderful Nurseries President Rob C. Yraceburu said in an email to employees that the state’s agricultural industry has seen tens of thousands of orchard and vineyard acres abandoned or removed. The table and wine grape industry is in a major downturn, meaning nurseries such as theirs have seen “significantly decreased sales and record losses, with no expectation of a turnaround anytime soon.”

Yet some labor experts and Wonderful employees are questioning the timing of the layoffs, which started just five months after the UFW won a key legal victory in its effort to organize the workforce.

Victor Narro, a labor studies professor at UCLA, said the closure and donation to UC Davis should be scrutinized.

“The question is, what’s the reason they’re doing it?” he said. “Is it really, in the end, to avoid unionization of the workforce? Or is it really that they’re making a sound financial decision?”

The UFW has not directly accused the Resnicks of retaliating against workers supportive of the union by closing the farm. But it has raised questions about the timing of both the layoffs and this week’s confirmation the nursery would be closed.

The entrance to Wonderful Nurseries on March 25, 2024, in Wasco, Calif.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

At its seasonal peak, the 1,400-acre nursery employs about 600 workers who would have been part of the bargaining unit, but now only 20 still work at the facility, said Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns for the union. Overall, about 100 employees now work there, according to the company.

Yraceburu told employees there will be a phasedown in shutting the grape nursery. Workers, including those employed by farm labor contractors, will have an opportunity to apply for other Wonderful worksites, he said. A company spokesman said no other Wonderful farm is facing a similar reduction in workforce.

The nursery has been operating at a significant loss for several years, Oster said, but he did not say for how long or just how much it has lost.

It was not immediately clear whether UC Davis will recognize the farmworkers union once the university takes control of the nursery.

In a statement, UC Davis spokesperson Bill Kisliuk said the university is grateful for the gift, which includes the Wasco facility combined with a $5-million startup donation. The university will form an implementation committee to plan the use of the facility, Kisliuk said.

Although the university has a long history of respecting labor agreements, he said, the academic use of the site will be significantly different from the current commercial operation.

“This gift expands and builds upon one of the world’s leading agricultural research programs and will catalyze discovery and innovation,” he said. “We look forward to working with the Wonderful Company to successfully transfer the Wasco facilities and property to the University later this year.”

The Resnicks are big donors to state politicians and charities, but their philanthropy has been the target of recent union organizing efforts. In late July, UFW and other labor organizers gathered outside the Hammer Museum, the recipient of more than $30 million in donations from the Resnicks, who have a building named after them. The gathering came after the union released a video that appeared to show a Wonderful employee paying other workers to participate in an anti-union protest.

In the video, the worker, who has been a forefront anti-union advocate and has organized protests, is seen handing out $100 bills from the trunk of a car and encouraging workers to sign a sheet. In a separate video, she can be heard saying that she was directed to first feed everyone, hand out $100 and then they would receive an additional $50.

The unedited versions of the videos were shown during a hearing before an administrative law judge for the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board, where Wonderful Co. has challenged the UFW’s petition to represent the nursery employees. The board oversees collective bargaining for farmworkers in the state and also investigates charges of unfair labor practices.

Wonderful Nurseries in Wasco.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Now that Wonderful is closing its Wasco grape nursery, it is unclear what will happen in the proceedings, because there will soon be no workers to unionize. But the board could issue a ruling that would affect future disputes.

The UFW and Wonderful Co. have traded accusations over the last year: The company accused the union of using $600 in COVID-19 federal relief funds to trick farmworkers into signing the authorization cards. The company submitted nearly 150 signed declarations from nursery workers saying they had not understood that by signing the cards they were voting to unionize.

The UFW has rejected those accusations and, with the video, is suggesting that workers were paid to protest against the unionization effort at the height of the back-and-forth a year ago.

Rosa M. Silva, a Wonderful Nurseries worker for the last six years, said tensions have long been running high at the nursery, with some co-workers saying they don’t have a right to ask for raises or benefits. She said she believes that the company would rather shut down the nursery to avoid negotiating with them, a claim that Wonderful has forcefully rejected.

In July, Silva took a day off work and rallied outside the Hammer Museum. Protesters handed out fliers that read: “Tell Wonderful Company’s billionaire owners: Respect the farm workers. Stop spending money fighting the United Farm Workers.”

“This is my message to the Resnicks: if you can give millions to this art museum, which a majority of your workers will never visit, why can’t you also pay your workers something fair?” she said at the protest. “If you care so much about being respected by artists and lovers of art, why can’t you respect the people who plant, grow and harvest the products you sell?”

The UFW filed its petition with the labor board in February last year, asserting that a majority of the 600-plus farmworkers at Wonderful Nurseries in Wasco had signed the authorization cards and asking that the UFW be certified as their union representative.

At the time, it appeared to be the UFW’s third victorious unionization drive in a matter of months — following diminishing membership rates over the last several years.

Under the law, a union can organize farmworkers by inviting them to sign authorization cards at off-site meetings without notifying their employer. Under the old rules, farmworkers voted on union representation by secret ballot at a polling site designated by the state labor board, typically on employer property. The state law has since revitalized the union’s organizing efforts, and it has gone on to organize other farms.

Wonderful has sued the state to stop the card-check law. A ruling by a Kern County Superior Court judge that found the certification process under the card-check law as “likely unconstitutional” was superseded in October by an appellate court, which is still reviewing the case.

Ana Padilla, executive director of the UC Merced Community and Labor Center, said the Central Valley has been blanketed with anti-union messaging ever since the passage of the card-check law.

She also questioned the timing of shutting down the Wasco nursery. “Layoffs, store closures and offloading organized worksites are all part of the anti-unionism playbook,” she said.

This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.

HOMEWARE giant Wayfair has slashed its UK workforce by more than half in just two years, as it grapples with tumbling sales and a sharp drop in profit.

The US-based furniture retailer, which operates across Britain, cut staff numbers from 847 in 2022 to just 405 by the end of 2024, according to fresh filings with Companies House.

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The dramatic reduction follows a tough period for the business, with UK turnover plunging from £83.4million in 2022 to just £59.4million last year.

Profits also took a hit, with pre-tax earnings slipping from £2.6million to £2.2million over the same period.

Wayfair said it had made a 17 per cent cut to administrative expenses and was now focused on “driving cost efficiency” and “nailing the basics” as it tried to steady the ship.

Despite the ongoing slowdown, bosses remain upbeat about the retailer’s long-term prospects and said the group is working towards maintaining profitability and generating positive free cash flow.

The wider company reported a net revenue of $11.9billion (£8.8billion) globally last year – down $152million (£112million) on the year before.

International sales fell to $1.5billion (£1.1billion), while revenue in its core US market dropped to $10.4billion (£7.7billion).

Wayfair recorded a net loss of $492million (£363million) despite raking in $3.6billion (£2.7billion) in gross profits.

There was some relief in early 2025, as first-quarter results showed a $1billion (£740million) rise in total revenue, thanks to a modest recovery in US sales.

However, international takings continued to fall, dipping by $37million (£27million) to $301million (£223million).

Wayfair isn’t the only retailer feeling the pinch on the high street. Furniture favourite MADE.com collapsed into administration in 2022 after failing to find a buyer, leading to hundreds of job losses.

Habitat also shut down all standalone stores in 2021, moving exclusively online after years of underperformance.

Even major players have been forced to adapt.

Wilko closed its doors for good in 2023 after nearly a century in business, with more than 400 stores shutting and 12,000 staff affected.

Argos has continued to reduce its physical footprint, shutting dozens of standalone shops and moving into parent company Sainsbury’s stores to save costs.

Retail experts say changing consumer habits, rising costs and weaker demand are continuing to batter the home and furniture sector.

Many shoppers have tightened their belts amid soaring bills and higher interest rates, with big-ticket items like sofas and beds often the first to be cut from household budgets.

Wayfair bosses said the company remains “resilient” in the face of economic uncertainty and is pressing ahead with its long-term strategy to streamline operations and stay competitive.

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June 25 (UPI) — Bumble, the company that produces the online dating app designed to empower women, on Wednesday announced it is laying off 30% of its staff in a bid to reverse financial problems.

The company, which is based in Austin, Texas, announced the reduction of 240 positions at a saving of $40 million, with reinvestment of most of that money into product and technology development as it “realigns its operating structure to optimize execution on its strategic priorities,” according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Bumble said it will incur $13 million to $18 million of nonrecurring charges, mainly related to severance, benefits and associated costs for affected employees in the third and fourth quarters of 2025.

Bumble, which also runs Official, Badoo, Fruitz and other dating apps, announced it is increasing its second-quarter revenue forecast to $244 million to $249 million, up from the previously forecast $235 million to $243 million.

In 2024, Bumble had revenue of $1.07 billion with a $557 million net loss.

Bumb’s stock price closed up 25.14% to $1.31 on NASDAQ. The stock had a high this year of $8.64 on Feb. 4. Its public offering was $76 per share in 2021.

In February 2024, the company also cut 30% of its workforce.

At the start of the year, Bumble announced that founder Whitney Wolfe Herd was returning as CEO in March after stepping down from the role in 2023 though she remained on the board of directors. She co-founded Bumble in 2014 and helped create another app, Tinder, in 2012 and left two years later.

She filed sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits against Tinder, which later were settled.

Match, which owns Tinder and Hinge, also has been struggling. In May, Match said it was laying off 13% of its staff to reduce costs and streamline its organizational structure in a struggle to attract and retain users, including young ones.

Wolfe Herd said online dating is at an “inflection point.”

“The reality is, we need to take decisive action to restructure to build a company that’s resilient, intentional and ready for the next decade,” she wrote in an email to Bumble employees.

It was a much different situation one year ago. Bumble was the most downloaded dating application in the United States with 735,000 downloads.

“Bumble is designed to help you feel empowered while you make those connections, whether you’re dating, looking for, according to Bumble’s website. “On Bumble, women set the tone by making the first move or by setting an Opening Move for matches to reply to. Shifting old-fashioned power dynamics and encouraging equality from the start.”

Like with other dating apps, potential matches are displayed to users, who can “swipe left” to reject a candidate or “swipe right” to indicate interest.

In February 2022, Bumble announced it had acquired Fruitz, a French-owned freemium dating app popular with Gen Z and used across Europe.

OXNARD, Calif. — At 6 a.m. Wednesday, Juvenal Solano drove slowly along the cracked roads that border the fields of strawberry and celery that cloak this fertile expanse of Ventura County, his eyes peeled for signs of trouble.

An eerie silence hung over the morning. The workers who would typically be shuffling up and down the strawberry rows were largely absent. The entry gates to many area farms were shut and locked.

Still, Solano, a director with the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project, felt relieved. Silence was better than the chaos that had broken out Tuesday when immigration agents raided fields in Oxnard and fanned out across communities in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties that grow a considerable portion of the state’s strawberries, avocados and celery.

The organization, part of a broader rapid-response network that offers support and counsel for workers targeted by immigration raids, was caught off guard when calls started pouring in from residents reporting federal agents gathering near fields. Group leaders say they have confirmed at least 35 people were detained in the raids, and are still trying to pin down exact numbers.

In the past week, Solano said, the organization had gotten scattered reports of immigration authorities arresting undocumented residents. But Tuesday, he said, marked a new level in approach and scope as federal agents tried to access fields and packinghouses. Solano, like other organizers, are wondering what their next move will be.

“If they didn’t show up in the morning, it’s possible they’ll show up in the afternoon,” Solano said. “We’re going to stay alert to everything that’s happening.”

While agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol showed up at food production sites from the Central Coast to the San Joaquin Valley, much of the activity centered on the Oxnard Plain. Maureen McGuire, chief executive of the Ventura County Farm Bureau, said federal agents visited five packing facilities and at least five farms in the region. Agents also stopped people on their way to work, she said.

In many cases, according to McGuire and community leaders, farm owners refused to grant access to the agents, who had no judicial warrants.

California, which grows more than one-third of the nation’s vegetables and more than three-quarters of its fruits and nuts, has long been dependent on undocumented labor to tend its crops. Though a growing number of farm laborers are migrants imported on a seasonal basis through the controversial H-2A visa program, at least half the state’s 255,700 farmworkers are undocumented immigrants, according to UC Merced research. Many have lived in California for years, and have put down roots and started families.

Juvenal Solano, with Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project, said Tuesday’s raids in Ventura County farm fields marked a dramatic escalation in tactics.

(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)

Until this week, California’s agricultural sector had largely escaped the large-scale raids that the Department of Homeland Security has deployed in urban areas, most recently in Los Angeles and Orange counties. California farmers — many of them ardent supporters of Donald Trump — have seemed remarkably calm as the president vowed mass deportations of undocumented workers.

Many expected that Trump would find ways to protect their workforce, noting that without sufficient workers, food would rot in the fields, sending grocery prices skyrocketing.

But this week brought a different message. Asked about enforcement actions in food production regions, Tom Homan, Trump’s chief adviser on border policy, said growers should hire a legal workforce.

“There are programs — you can get people to come in and do that job,” he said. “So work with ICE, work with [U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services], and hire a legal workforce. It’s illegal to knowingly hire an illegal alien.”

Ventura County strawberry fields had far fewer workers Wednesday, a day after federal agents targeted the region for immigration raids.

(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)

California’s two U.S. senators, both Democrats, issued a joint statement Wednesday decrying the farm raids, saying that targeting farmworkers for deportation would undermine businesses and families.

“Targeting hardworking farmworkers and their families who have been doing the backbreaking work in the fields for decades is unjustified and unconscionable,” Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff said in their statement.

The California Farm Bureau also issued a statement, warning that continued enforcement would disrupt production.

“We want to be very clear: California agriculture depends on and values its workforce,” said Bryan Little, senior director of policy advocacy at the California Farm Bureau. “We’re still early in the season, with limited harvest activity, but that will soon ramp up. If federal immigration enforcement activities continue in this direction, it will become increasingly difficult to produce food, process it and get it onto grocery store shelves.”

Arcenio Lopez, executive director of MICOP, said he is especially concerned about the prospect of Indigenous workers being detained, because many cannot read or write in English or Spanish, and speak only their Indigenous languages. The organization’s leaders suspect that many of those detained Tuesday are Indigenous, and are rushing to find them before they sign documents for voluntary deportation that they don’t understand. They’re urging that anyone who gets arrested call their hotline, where they offer legal assistance.

Rob Roy, president of the Ventura County Agricultural Association, said he has been warning growers since November that this time would come and providing training on their legal rights. Many know to ask for search warrants, he said. But that still leaves undocumented workers vulnerable on their way to and from work.

“I think overall here, they’re fairly safe on the farms or the building,” Roy said. “But when they leave work, they’re very concerned.”

Elaine Yompian, an organizer with VC Defensa, said she is urging families to stay home, if possible, to avoid exposure.

“We actually told a lot of the families who contacted us, if you can potentially not work today, don’t go,” Yompian said, adding that they are able to provide limited support to families through donations they receive.

Families whose loved ones have been detained are struggling to understand what comes next, she said.

“People are terrified; they don’t know at what point they’re going to be targeted,” Yompian said. “The narrative that they’re taking criminals or taking bad people off the streets is completely false. They’re taking the working-class people that are just trying to get by.”

This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.

Waste has been a critical problem in Indonesia. Reportedly, 40.16% of the 33.7 million tons of waste generated in 2024 was unmanaged. This statistic has forced the country to renew its 100% waste management target from 2025 to 2029. Besides, 48% of Indonesian households burn their waste despite the legal prohibition of such activity, causing air pollution and respiratory diseases. Amidst the shortcomings in Indonesia’s waste management system, the contribution of its informal waste pickers is inevitable.

The informal sector collects around 1 million tons of plastic waste, which mostly ends up at recycling facilities. In Jakarta alone, informal waste pickers have estimatedly reduced the waste volume by 30%, not only reducing the recycling costs for municipalities but also helping to extend the lifespan of dumps and sanitary landfills. As waste accounts for roughly 10% of Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2021, the informal waste pickers’ work in diverting recyclables also contributes to combating climate change.

The Overlooked Workforce

Despite their central role in waste management, the well-being of informal waste pickers is far from ideal. Its precarious nature remains a major issue. Waste pickers in Bekasi and Depok earn only about one-third of the government’s minimum wage in both locations. In the Bantar Gebang landfill in Bekasi, the income per person not only fell below the legal minimum wage but was also lower than that of occupations in both the formal and informal sectors.

The informal waste pickers also work in horrible conditions. They often directly make contact with medical waste and other sharp waste. Leachate that contaminated the groundwater was also one of the most dangerous environmental problems at the site. Furthermore, many informal waste pickers do not have access to free health services, forcing them to rely on paid services or ignore their health problems.

To add insult to injury, the work of informal waste collection remains highly stigmatized due to its association with waste. Informal waste pickers in Surabaya cope with their low social status by changing clothes before they go home and emphasizing that waste-picking is at least a halal job, unlike stealing or other immoral occupations. Consequently, the combination of their precarious working conditions, low income, and social stigma often heightens their risk of psychological health issues, including depression.

Despite their roles in creating more livable cities, the regulation that includes informal waste pickers is nearly nonexistent. From the first law regulating waste management (Law No. 18/2008) to Presidential Regulation on National Waste Management Policy and Strategy (No. 83/2018) and Ministerial Regulation on Waste Reduction Roadmap by Producers (No. 75/2019), none of them explicitly recognize informal waste pickers. The regulations leave them outside of the system.

The poor condition of Indonesian informal waste pickers also stems from the intergenerational poverty cycle. These workers are trapped in debt and poverty due to the lack of access to employment, education, sanitation, water, healthcare, welfare schemes, and housing. Their low income as waste pickers and the lack of government protection prevent them from breaking the cycle.

The lack of institutional support, like cooperatives and unions, also hinders Indonesian informal waste pickers from leveraging their well-being. Albeit organizations like Pemulung Berdaya Cooperative and Indonesian Scavengers Association exist, they have not yet represented the majority of Indonesian informal waste pickers, especially in urban cities outside of Jakarta and its satellite areas.

Making the Invisible, Indispensable

Indonesia’s informal waste pickers might be invisible in policy, but they are surely indispensable in practice. Thus, the government needs to recognize these “invisible heroes” by acknowledging them as essential workers. Consider how Brazil’s national waste policy puts informal waste pickers as valuable actors in the waste management system. The law mandates the catadores (Brazilian informal waste pickers) to share responsibility in reducing the volume of solid waste.

Take the case of Belo Horizonte, a large city in Brazil, which developed an integrated system of solid waste management, including the catadores, into a formalized relationship with the wider recycling ecosystem. This might be one of the reasons why informal waste pickers in Belo Horizonte have a higher perceived social status compared to those in Surabaya, according to a study by Colombijn and Morbidini.

Integrating the informal waste pickers into the system may increase recycling rates while reducing child labor and providing benefits such as healthcare, education, and social recognition. The city of Accra, Ghana, formalized partnerships with informal waste pickers by providing them with access to finance, equipment, health insurance, and motorcycle licenses.

Just as crucial is creating and supporting cooperatives to give economic agency to informal waste pickers. Learning from the Solid Waste Collection and Handling (SWaCH) Cooperative in India, the presence of institutional support not only provides gloves, masks, footwear, jackets, carts, and implements for its members. Beyond this, cooperatives act as intermediaries and leverage the bargaining power of informal waste pickers. In Pune, every registered waste picker has the right to health insurance, thanks to the advocacy work of the cooperative.

The same inclusive principle must also extend to Indonesia’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) system. Despite the formal regulation through the Ministerial Regulation (No. 75/2019), informal waste pickers are once again overlooked. Excluding informal waste pickers from the EPR system is neither practical nor just, according to the Consumer Goods Forum’s Coalition of Action on Plastic Waste. Instead, EPR financing may target waste pickers’ cooperatives or other inclusive initiatives. The Producer Responsibility Organization can provide technical support to improve informal waste pickers’ rights and working conditions. Most importantly, the informal waste pickers themselves must be included in the discussion of EPR policy formulation.

The stakes are clear: promoting a better waste management system is not merely about the technology and infrastructure, but also justice and inclusion. Considering the environmental and economic benefits they have contributed to society at large, informal waste pickers should not remain the “invisible heroes.” They have kept our cities clean; they too have the right to a better living standard and recognition.

Bob Worsley has solid conservative credentials. He’s anti abortion. A fiscal hawk and lifelong member of the Mormon Church. As an Arizona state senator, he won high marks from the National Rifle Assn.

These days, however, Worsley is an oddity, an exception, a Republican pushing back against the animating impulses of today’s MAGA-fied Republican Party.

Here’s how he speaks of immigrants — some of whom entered the United States illegally — and those who seek to demonize them.

“We have people that are aristocratically living in another world,” Worsley said. “Maybe they work for you, but you haven’t really lived with them and understand they’re not criminals. They are good people. They’re family people. They’re religious people. They are great Americans…. So I think that’s a problem if you don’t live with them and you’re making policy.”

If that line of reasoning is too mawkish and bleeding-heart for your taste, Worsley makes a more pragmatic argument for a generous, welcoming immigration policy, one unsentimentally rooted in cold dollars and cents.

“The Trump Organization needs workers, hospitality workers, construction workers,” Worsley said. “The horse-breeding industry, the horse-racing industry, they need these people. The pig farmers, the chicken farmers.”

Worsley owns a Phoenix-based modular housing firm and is chairman of the American Business Immigration Coalition, an organization representing more than 1,700 chief executives and business owners nationwide. Their exceedingly ambitious goal: to find compromise and a middle ground on one of the most contentious and insoluble issues of recent decades — and to bring some balance to a Trump policy that is almost wholly punitive in its nature and intent.

“We are employers … and we don’t have a workforce. We need this workforce,” Worsley said. “And building a wall and stopping all immigration is not going to work, because the water will rise until it comes over.”

A serial entrepreneur before he entered politics, Worsley doesn’t favor throwing the U.S.-Mexico border open to all comers. The “lines between countries” should mean something, he said. But now that America’s borders have been practically sealed shut, fulfilling one of President Trump’s major campaign promises, Worsley suggests it’s past time to address another part of the immigration equation.

“What we need is bigger portals, bigger legal openings to come through the border,” Worsley said, likening it to the way a spillway releases pressure behind a dam. “We need a secure workforce as much as we need a secure border.”

The immigration issue was Worsley’s impetus to enter politics. Or, more specifically, the scapegoating and vilification of immigrants that prefigured Trump and his “poisoning the blood of our country” Sturm und Drang.

Worsley, speaking at a 2017 legislative meeting in Phoenix, entered electoral politics to fight anti-immigrant policies

(Bob Christie / Associated Press)

Worsley, whose ventures included founding the SkyMall catalog — a pre-Amazon everything store — was coaxed into running to thwart the return of former Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, who was recalled by voters in part for his fiercely anti-immigrant lawmaking. (Worsley beat him in the 2012 GOP primary, then won the general election.)

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Worsley did his youth missionary work in Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. “I developed a certain level of comfort and love for the people down there,” Worsley said.

Moreover, the experience colored his perspective on those impoverished souls who traverse borders in search of a better life. A person can’t empathize “unless you’ve actually walked in their shoes, lived in their homes, eaten their food and socialized with them,” Worsley said via Zoom from his home office in Salt Lake City. “And I think that’s a problem.”

He left the Arizona Senate — and electoral politics — in 2019, vexed and frustrated by the rise of Trump and the anti-immigrant wave he rode to his first, improbable election to the White House.

“It was really irritating because I had fought this in Arizona a decade before,” Worsley said. “And so to have this kind of comeback on a national stage was incredibly frustrating.”

He moved part time to Utah, to be closer to his extended family. He wrote a book, “The Horseshoe Virus,” about the immigration issue; the title suggested the convergence of the far left and far right in the country’s long history of anti-immigrant movements.

He became involved with the American Business Immigration Coalition, recruited by Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee, whom Worsley knew through politics and a mutual friendship with Arizona’s late senator, John McCain. Worsley became the board’s chairman in January.

He’s still no fan of Trump, though Worsley emphasized, “I am still a Republican and would vote for a Mitt Romney or John McCain kind of Republican.”

That said, now that the border is under much tighter control, Worsley hopes Trump will not just seek to round up and punish those in the country illegally but also focus on a larger fix to the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system — something no president, Democrat or Republican, has accomplished in nearly 40 years.

It was 1986 when Ronald Reagan signed sweeping legislation that offered amnesty to millions of long-term residents, expanded certain visa programs, cracked down on employers who hired illegal workers and promised to harden the border once and for all through stiffer enforcement — a pledge that, obviously, came to naught.

“Once you’ve secured the border and you don’t have caravans of people coming toward us, then you can address [the question of] what’s the pragmatic solution so that this doesn’t happen again?” Worsley asked. “We’re hopeful that’s where we’re going next.”

It’s long overdue.