WSJ What’s News - The New Corporate Playbook for How to Do a Layoff

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

P.M. Edition for Nov. 17. As companies are laying off thousands of workers, they’re using new tactics like texting and emails and listen-only video calls to communicate to workers that they’ve lost their jobs. Chip Cutter, who covers workplace issues for the Journal, discusses what’s driving these new strategies and how workers are responding. Plus, the head of FEMA has resigned after about seven months on the job. And “Baby Shark Dance”—every toddler’s favorite jam—is YouTube’s most watched video ever. But that mind-blowing popularity hasn’t translated to major sales for the South Korean company behind it. Alex Ossola hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The acting head of FEMA has resigned in the latest high-level departure at the federal agency. Plus, why prop bets are so popular and why sports leagues are starting to crack down on them. If people start doubting that what they're watching is genuine competition, you essentially don't have a business anymore. And does Amazon laying people off via text and email signal a new approach to job cuts? It's Monday, November 17th. Alex O'Sullough for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News,

the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. Sinclair, one of the country's largest owners of local TV stations, says it has built a roughly 8% stake in local TV broadcaster EW scripts to help it buy the company. Sinclair says it's discussed a deal with scripts, but there's no agreement yet. We're in a moment when employers are laying off thousands of workers, and how they're doing it keeps evolving. During the pandemic, it was Zoom calls, then it was surprise calendar invites to HR meetings. Now, many companies are

trying to make layoffs more efficient, and they tend to involve a lot less FaceTime. When Amazon started laying off some 14,000 employees last month, they received a text to check their emails, which then informed them they'd lost their job. Some Southwest Airlines employees learned they lost their jobs while at home via a scripted video call that was in listen-only mode, not letting them respond. For more on how layoffs keep changing and why, I'm joined now by Chip Cutter, who covers workplace issues for the journal. Chip, why are companies shifting to doing layoffs this way? Well, HR people keep trying to make this more efficient. When you're trying to let go, in some cases, thousands of workers, how do you do this all in a really short period of time?

And so that's why you've seen many go to this approach where you are told via text, you're told via email, everybody learns their fate at once. And in many cases, companies want to minimize some of the in-office emotions. They don't want people to be coming from conference rooms crying and having their colleagues embracing them. And it's easier to do that when you're at home and when everybody has told it once. But then a lot of people would argue, this feels a little heartless. This feels tough on workers where you learn just in the middle of the night in some cases when you look at your phone that you no longer have a job. Let's talk about one recent example from Condi Nast. The company said it would move its Teen Vogue publication under Vogue.com and let some employees go.

After that, a group of workers confronted an HR executive, Stan Duncan, outside his office to ask for an explanation. Video of the encounter from media publication The Rapp was pretty quickly all over the internet. We appreciate you, you would go back to the workplace where you're... Is there a place that you'd be able to speak to us? Not today. We have other things going on. Do you think we're not worth speaking to, Sam? Does your words not fine. Condi Nast later fired four participants involved in the in-office protest and suspended others.

And this example just shows us layoffs can be unpredictable. There can be real pushback. The firings of these workers after the in-office protest then led to their own protest in a rally outside of Condoness headquarters in Lower Manhattan last week. That brought the New York Attorney General, Atisa James, to the rally. She said that she was going to take Condoness to court. Now, Condoness has said that the terminations were lawful. based on clear violations of company policy. They'll say that they'll respond to the attorney general if she has concerns.

But I think a lot of HR people who are doing these layoffs have watched what has happened at Kondaynast and said, ooh, we do not want that to happen to us. Yeah, layoffs in general can be really messy. But does this new approach companies are taking that tries to make these job reductions as efficient as possible come with any downsides for its business? Does it affect how others perceive the company? It does. It gives people a sense for how this organization.

organization operates. After Amazon's layoffs, you saw people on the internet just criticizing how they did this. I mean, one person on LinkedIn wrote, who thought that was okay? And so you see people really scrutinizing the approach that companies take here. It reflects on their brands. It reflects on their values. It shows you how they operate. That was Wall Street Journal reporter, Chip Cutter. Thanks, Chip. Thank you. Major U.S. stock indexes all fell about 1% to start the week. As a several off in tech stocks intensified. Trading lower were shares of meta-platforms and Nvidia. The chipmaker reports earnings later this week.

Into updates from Washington, David Richardson, the acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has resigned after about seven months in the role. The Department of Homeland Security says that FEMA's chief of staff will take over for him starting in December. There is no reason provided for Richardson's resignation. Richardson was a DHS official and didn't have a background in emergency management. Career officials at FEMA have criticized his ability to run the agency. President Trump has also called for getting rid of FEMA as his administration tries to overhaul how the government handles emergency management and disaster relief funding. And Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook's lawyer has provided the first detailed defense of her mortgage applications.

He argues that apparent discrepancies in loan documents were either accurate at the time or, quote, inadvertent notation that couldn't constitute fraud given other disclosures to her lenders. The Supreme Court has, for now, blocked President Trump's attempt to remove her from the Fed, and we'll hear arguments in January. Coming up, are the creators of your toddler's favorite song, Swimming in it? That's after the break. scandals have become a familiar part of pro sports these days. And they're increasingly driven by prop betting. That's a bet placed not on the outcome of a game, but on a specific statistic

within it. The wave of players and coaches who have been accused of manipulating play has forced leagues to work with sports books to try to reduce their risk. WSJ sports reporter Jared Diamond joins me now to discuss what's driving the trend and what's being done about it. Jared, why has prop betting gotten so much more popular lately? So for most of the history of gambling in this country, prop bets in really exists. People would bet on the outcome of games, maybe you'd bet against the spread. So these gambling companies started realizing, hey, if we only have people betting on the outcome of games, they bet, and then they don't bet again. But now because of online betting, we could keep people betting throughout the game again and again every 30 seconds, every minute.

So suddenly markets started sprouting up saying, oh, how many points will this person score? How many rebounds of this person grab? Hey, let's keep it going. What's going to happen on this drive, on this play, on this pitch? They could take bets on all of those things to where some people are literally betting every couple of minutes or more. That's just more money for the sports books. More prop bet markets popped up. And they became extremely popular with consumers who increasingly want to bet on sports.

So MLB, along with the NBA and the NFL, have been working with betting companies to reduce the number of prop bets. How effective has that been? And what else could the leagues be doing? So we're just at the beginning of all of this. We're leagues finally going, hey, maybe we need to kind of do something about this. You know, sports gambling has only been legal in this country now for seven years, which sounds like a long time, but really isn't. So we've started seeing the NBA working with sports books to have them stop offering property. bet market on certain kinds of players.

Baseball now has worked with sports books to stop offering individual pitch markets entirely, how fast a pitch will go, the location of a pitch. It's obviously a start, but whether it's enough remains to be seen. The reality is pro sports leagues like gambling. There's plenty of studies that show that people who gamble are more likely to be engaged in their sport. It drives interest. So on the one hand, they kind of want fans to be gambling.

because it brings people to their sports. But on the other hand, the people start doubting that what they're watching is genuine competition, you essentially don't have a business anymore. And this is that line that I think sports leagues

are struggling to kind of walk. That was WSJ Sports Reporter, Jared Diamond. Thank you, Jared. Thank you. In international news, Hamas has grown more popular in Gaza since the ceasefire. A major reason, security.

As the ceasefire, fire took hold last month and Israeli forces pulled back, Hamas fighters re-emerged on the streets as police and internal security forces. That has reduced crime and looting and has allowed Hamas to rebuild its image. Posters and analysts say Palestinians now see the militant group as more pragmatic, which could pose a challenge to President Trump's plan to bring peace to the enclave by disarming the group. Speaking of President Trump's peace plan, the U.S. expects the UN Security Council to back Trump's plan after a flurry of behind-the-scenes diplomacy by top Trump officials and U.S. allies. The plan would create

a legal mandate for an international stabilization force and lay the groundwork for a new transitional government in Gaza. The vote is planned for this evening. If it passes, it would be a diplomatic victory for Trump, but still leaves many questions about the future of Gaza unanswered. And the UK government is overhauling its immigration policy to crack down on people seeking asylum. It's changing laws to make it easier to expel migrants, quadrupling, the weight to become permanent residents to 20 years, and could even confiscate assets like jewelry and cars of asylum seekers to offset the cost of processing their claims. The UK is the latest European nation to respond to voter on happiness with illegal immigration.

And finally, if you've been around a young child in the past decade, chances are you're all too familiar with this little tune. Sorry that's stuck in your head now. Anyway, it's such an addictive song that kids, including, unfortunately for me, my toddler, can't stop listening to it. Baby Shark Dance is YouTube's most watched video ever. Since it was uploaded to the site in 2016, it's been played more than 4.7 million times a day on average. But for Pinkfong, the South Korean company behind the earworm, that mega virality hasn't made the company mega-rich. Last year, it had $67 million in revenue. YouTube has strict rules around its

made-for-kids videos, which make that content less profitable for creators than stuff that's not for kids. Tomorrow, Pinkfong will go public in South Korea, and its IPO is expected to generate nearly $50 million. The company plans to use those funds to create new content, hopefully some that my daughter and I can both enjoy. And that's what's news for this Monday afternoon. Also, heads up, we've got a special episode in your feed. On the third episode of our Economic Indicators series, we took a look at heavy truck sales and what they can tell us about how the U.S. economy is doing. That's in your feed now.

Today's show is produced by Pierre Biennameh and Zoe Colkin, with supervising producer Tali Arbell. I'm Alex O'Sulloch for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening. Thank you.