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Former Canada Goose employees allege layoffs via email ‘inhumane’ – Global News

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When Canada Goose employees received an email on Monday, March 25, telling them not to come into the office the following day, they feared the worst.

The last time they received a directive like that was in August and it preceded a round of layoffs.

This time around there were terminations too, but with one key difference: people were informed of their layoff from the luxury parka maker via email.

The decision to approach terminations this way was described as “inhumane,” and “disheartening” by three former employees who spoke with Global News and shared some of the email communications they received on condition of anonymity.

Global is protecting their identities as they fear repercussions for speaking with the media and worry it may harm their future employment prospects.

“Being terminated after years of being successful at your job is traumatic,” one laid off worker tells Global News. “It’s being done through emails and you really feel like you’re just a number and you didn’t matter.”

In a statement to Global News on Thursday, Canada Goose’s chief human resources officer Jess Johannson said: “decisions like this are heartbreaking — we understand the human impact they have, and we know there’s no perfect way to share this kind of news.”

She went on to say, “our focus was to ensure that our team members were treated with respect and dignity and given the grace to process the news on their own time.”

‘Completely shocked’

On March 26, Canada Goose CEO Dani Reiss announced “sad news” in a LinkedIn post: the company was laying off 17 per cent of its global corporate workforce. He said the job cuts put the company in a better position for scaling and will help the Toronto-based business focus on efficiency and brand, design and operational initiatives.

Shortly after 9 a.m. that day, employees received two emails: one from Reiss laying out the restructuring plans; another from Canada Goose Human Resources contained notices of termination for those who were being laid off.

“I was completely shocked and I was truly blindsided,” one former employee said.

Johannson points out that every employee affected was invited to schedule a virtual meeting with “a Human Resources Business Partner.” She says that while some employees chose to schedule those immediately, others opted to speak at a later time.

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Canada Goose said the meeting could happen “as soon as they [the former employee] want to.”

Two of the former workers say that putting the onus on people who had just received termination notices to schedule a follow-up with HR was “traumatic.”


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One of them claimed they didn’t “get human contact for hours after notice” and human resources was “not proactively reaching out.”

When asked about these specific claims, Canada Goose referred to its earlier statement from Johannson that said the focus was “to ensure that our team members were treated with respect and dignity and given the time to process the news on their own time” and that affected employees were able to schedule a meeting “at a time that worked best for the employee.”

The company reiterated: “We know there’s no perfect way to share this kind of news” and “some employees chose to schedule those [meetings] immediately, while others appreciated the opportunity to speak at a later time.”


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The former employee called it “disheartening because I think they deserved a little bit more sympathy, empathy and a human conversation rather than an electronic communication.”

All three expressed disappointment at Canada Goose’s email strategy. One said they were “extremely disappointed that a Canadian icon would go down this route.”

One of the restructuring casualties is a longtime employee who says they have dedicated themselves to building up the storied brand. They say the email-first layoff approach “wasn’t aligned” with the company’s wholesome image.

“The Canada Goose culture has always prided itself on treating people fairly, with as much respect as possible.”

Global News asked Canada Goose about these claims, but the company did not directly address them in its response.


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Email notices are legal, but ‘a bad idea’: lawyer

With the rise of remote work, email pink slips are becoming increasingly common, according to labour and employment lawyer Lior Samfiru, national co-managing partner of Toronto-based Samfiru Tumarkin LLP. Before the pandemic he says instances of it were rare; he had dealt with two such cases in two decades.

Samfiru says layoff notifications via email aren’t illegal, but he advises against them because they leave too much to chance.

He says they’re “a bad idea” because employers have a duty to inform employees of their termination in a timely fashion but a digital-first email process means some communication can slip through the cracks, going unopened because it was missed, undelivered or ended up in a spam folder.

“The timing of when someone received that notice of termination may be very important,” Samfiru told Global News on Thursday.

Best layoff practices allow laid-off employees to ask questions, without putting the burden on them to take the next steps while they’re in shock over losing their job. When that doesn’t happen, frustrated employees often seek legal counsel.

In fact, he tells Global News that about a dozen former Canada Goose employees have reached out to his law firm with questions.

“When an employee terminates by email, it potentially exposes them to legal action because they’re essentially driving their employees to a lawyer,” Samfiru says.

Email layoffs ‘distressing’: HR expert

Andrew Monkhouse, adjunct professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, has expertise in both the legalities of being let go as well as HR practices. He tells Global News that traditionally, people were told in person that they were being let go but the pandemic has upended both the way that we work and the way that terminations are conducted, ushering in trends such as email layoffs.

“It’s becoming more common because more people are working from home, including HR staff,” he said Thursday. Cost-cutting and the need to let many people know about terminations, while using the smallest number of resources possible, are factors too.

Monkhouse says the best practice remains letting an employee know they’re laid off through one-on-one direct communication, whether that’s in person or remotely and following up with written correspondence. Like Samfiru, he also advises against using email as a first method of contact.

“People expect that there’s a certain level of dignity in being let go,” he says. “Receiving an email letting you know that you’ve been terminated can be quite distressing.”

From an etiquette perspective, Samfiru warns that an email approach may further exacerbate an already stressful situation.

“That employee may leave employment with a bad taste in their mouth and bad feelings towards that employer,” he says.

Samfiru says the remote work trend is not an excuse to bypass workplace courtesy.

“We still have the ability, technology, means and resources to arrange for the employee to meet with the person letting them go, have their questions answered, to be treated respectfully.”

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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