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General Electric Co. announced Thursday that it will cut 12,000 jobs from power division amid a global softening of electricity demand and the switch from coal and other fossil fuels. "The plans announced today are driven by challenges in the power market worldwide," the manufacturing giant said. "Traditional power markets including gas and coal have softened. Volumes are down significantly in products and services driven by overcapacity, lower utilization, fewer outages, an increase in steam plant retirements, and overall growth in renewables." The company said Thursday that the cuts will "right-size" GE Power amid the transition taking place in the...

Initial jobless claims drop 2,000 to 238,000; Puerto Rico plunge The numbers: Initial U.S. jobless claims, a tool to measure layoffs, fell by 2,000 to 238,000 in the seven days ended Nov. 25, a week that included the Thanksgiving holiday. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch had forecast claims to total 240,000. The more stable monthly average of claims rose 2,250 to 242,250, the government said Thursday. The number of people already collecting unemployment benefits, known as continuing claims, increased by 42,000 to 1.96 million. What happened: New applications for unemployment benefits have subsided to a nearly 45-year low after a mini-surge...

PARIS -- Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been working the plunger on the overseas branch of the Washington swamp's public relations department, also known as the U.S. State Department. Some of the swamp critters are now to the point of flushing themselves down the drain, either out of honor or frustration or both. Tillerson has shaken up his department this year, according to the New York Times, dismissing numerous staffers and forcing many others into early retirement. Meanwhile, diplomats are "sounding the alarm," the Times reports, evoking the specter of Benghazi and framing their own plank-walking as a potential...

ESPN says it is eliminating 150 studio and production employees as the sports broadcasting giant continues to shift its focus to a more digital future. [Snip] ESPN has lost about 10 million subscribers during the past six years, based on estimates by Nielsen Media Research.

November 27, the Denver Post set into motion its latest round of layoffs just over a year after shrinking the newsroom staff by 26 employees through the combination of a buyout offer and supplementary dismissals. Seven positions included in the Post's contract with the Denver Newspaper Guild are affected, and another four employees working non-union gigs also appear to have been discharged. "The Post gave the required two-week notice of layoff in seven union covered positions," notes the DNG's Tony Mulligan, corresponding via email. "Four are in the newsroom and three are in advertising support." ... As for why the...

Remington Outdoor, the second-largest U.S. gunmaker has suffered a “rapid” and “sharp” deterioration in sales and a similar drop in profits since January, and faces “continued softness in consumer demand for firearms,” credit analysts at Standard & Poor’s Global Ratings said in a report Friday. S&P as a result has cut the company’s corporate credit rating — already at a junk-bond-level CCC+ — two full notches, to CCC-, a move likely to make the company’s high-yield debt less attractive to investors and lenders, and force Remington to pay more in interest. The company could face a change in control, bankruptcy,...

A tale of sadness and woe from the liberal democrat professionals in the State Department: Mr. Miller got just five minutes with the secretary of state, the former officials said. Afterward, Mr. Miller, a career Foreign Service officer, was pushed out, joining a parade of dismissals and early retirements that has decimated the State Department’s senior ranks. Mr. Miller declined to comment. The departures mark a new stage in the broken and increasingly contentious relationship between Mr. Tillerson and much of his department’s work force. By last spring, interviews at the time suggested, the guarded optimism that greeted his arrival...

Cook County board meetings are usually dry and filled with policy and procedure details. On Tuesday, that was not the case. There were tears and real emotion. CBS 2’s Roseanne Tellez introduces us to some of the people who got the most unwelcome news, days before Thanksgiving. Some county employees begged for their jobs. Cook County commissioners who supported a penny-an-ounce sweetened beverage tax say they warned of the cost of repealing it: a budget amendment filled with pain. “It has actual layoffs of human beings who have jobs and who have families,” Commissioner Larry Suffredin (13th District) said. Officials...

The ranks of top US diplomats are being depleted at a “dizzying” speed, the head of America’s diplomatic trade union has warned. Since January, the number of “two-star” minister counselors has dropped by 42% and “three-star” career ministers by 14%, according to Barbara Stephenson, president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) and former ambassador to Panama. At the highest ranks of the State Department, the number of career ambassadors has dropped from five to two, after the retirement of three top diplomats. “These numbers are hard to square with the stated agenda of making State and the Foreign Service...

Disney/ABC TV has begun making long-feared layoffs as part of a broader restructuring of its broadcast business, with rumors swirling that bigger moves—including a possible sale of ABC—are coming. Deadline first reported the staff reductions on Thursday, saying they could impact up to 200 employees across Disney and ABC properties. An ABC source with knowledge of the situation said that the cuts will hit upward of 40 of its employees on the East Coast and still more out west. Multiple people at ABC told Splinter that there is a widespread belief at the network that the belt-tightening could be tied...

Disney/ABC Television Group has begun laying off employees, part of a long-anticipated restructuring and reallocation of resources at the Walt Disney Company’s non-sports broadcast and cable television arm. A source tells Variety that the company began notifying affected employees Thursday morning. The volume of employees impacted is said to be significantly lower than the 10% workforce cut that had been speculated when news broke of the layoff plan six weeks ago. Cuts are impacting all the group’s entertainment units, including ABC Entertainment ABC Studios, Disney Channel, DisneyXD, Disney Junior, and Freeform — but impact is expected to be minimal on...

The retail landscape looks like it's about to get rougher for everyone — especially those on the lowest rung of the ladder. Retail is the largest employer in the US, employing an estimated 4.6 million people in full- or part-time jobs. But estimates also say that the sector has shed more than 89,000 jobs in general merchandise stores alone between last October and May of this year. At last count, over 6,375 stores have been announced for across the country this year. It's this shedding of jobs that's about to create what retail-industry consultant Doug Stephens is calling a "retail...

The employees of Glenn Beck’s Mercury Radio Arts and The Blaze, the privately-held companies that comprise his once thriving but now crumbling conservative media empire, suspected something bad was going to happen Thursday morning when they arrived for work at the suburban Dallas, Texas, production complex and noticed the extra compliment of security guards. By the time Beck himself spoke to his dwindling army of underlings as one of his personal bodyguards from Gavin de Becker’s celebrity protection service stood watch, nearly 60 of their coworkers had been abruptly fired—a body count that amounted to almost 30 percent of the...

Glenn Beck’s struggling media project the Blaze will be conducting mass layoffs in a bid to “keep pace with the massive changes” in the media industry. “Today, we said goodbye to just over 20 percent of the combined workforce of Mercury Radio Arts and the Blaze,” Beck said in a statement Thursday regarding his television and internet operation. “We are losing a lot of talented and committed colleagues, who are some of the best human beings I know  —  some have been friends of mine for 30 years.”

Glenn Beck‘s TheBlaze is saying farewell to 20 percent of its employees. And Beck may cry. “What happened?” he asked in a highly emotional piece that he posted to his website and to Medium that makes it sound like someone is literally ripping out his spleen. “My heart is heavy today.” “Today, we said goodbye to just over 20 percent of the combined workforce of Mercury Radio Arts and TheBlaze (with most of the changes happening at TheBlaze),” he wrote. “We are losing a lot of talented and committed colleagues, who are some of the best human beings I know — some...

They’re going to have to start laying some people off, and for much of Washington, DC, that’s a completely foreign concept. Agencies are “pretty certain” they will need to institute reductions in force as they aim to satisfy an executive order from President Trump and ensuing guidance from the Office of Management and Budget, said Leslie Pollack, deputy associate director of OPM’s HR Strategy and Evaluation Solutions, on WJLA’s “Government Matters” program. Those documents required executive branch agencies to reorganize themselves and, in the process, cut the size of their workforces. Pollack’s office, which provides human resources consulting to federal...

Economics: Last year, the "Fight for $15" movement was said to have unstoppable momentum, driven by labor unions, left-wing politicians and a sympathetic press. Then reality struck. Too bad it didn't strike sooner. "This is a trend that cannot be stopped." "The political earth has shifted." "This movement continues to build." "Even economic experts who oppose the increased rate see it gaining momentum." That's what all the "experts" were saying last year. It was easy to make such assumptions. Protests and strikes were on the rise, hitting 340 last year. In 2015 alone, 14 cities and states approved $15 minimum...

Boeing Co. is offering voluntary buyouts to some workers on the flight line at its 787 Dreamliner campus in North Charleston, but the aerospace giant says it's too early to say whether more layoffs are in the offing. Those affected by this latest round of cost-cutting include flight readiness technicians and flight readiness inspectors. The buyout offers represent the first time workers who were eligible to vote for union representation have been asked if they'd like to voluntarily leave the company. Those workers have until Aug. 4 to decide whether to take the buyout offers. "There is still time remaining...

Shares of Harley-Davidson (HOG) dropped 10% in the morning after the company reported second-quarter earnings and were down nearly 6% at the end of the day. Almost everything was bad. Retail sales by its dealers in the US fell 9.3% in Q2, compared to a year ago, to 49,668 motorcycles. They were “down more than we anticipated,” the company said. And with “soft sales across most markets,” sales by its dealers globally fell 6.7%. “Industry new motorcycle sales deterioration continued,” the company said in its presentation, lamenting “weak industry sales on soft used bike prices.” In addition to the industry...

The CEO of Apple-Metro Inc., a company that operates about 40 Applebee’s restaurants in the New York metropolitan area, said he’s been forced to cut at at least 1,000 servers in the past year as a result of New York’s recent minimum wage hike. “We have 1,000 less servers this time this year than we did this time last year,” Zane Tankel told Fox Business’ Stuart Varney on Monday. That amounts a two-thirds reduction of his total workforce, Tankel said. Tankel said the minimum wage increase has forced him to adopt a “concierge” type model of having servers help customers operate self-serve...