A man eats breakfast at a restaurant that is advertising that they are hiring in Annapolis, Maryland. American states are moving to cut pandemic unemployment benefits, a painful blow for millions of people who will soon be left without income. With punishing jobless levels during the Covid-19 pandemic, unemployment benefits had been extended — especially to the self-employed — and extended further until September 6,2021 even for those who had reached the maximum duration.—AFP
Secret to CEO success: pay higher wages
Masaru Tange says the strategy that turned his company into one of Japan’s best-performing stocks may be surprising: he buys smaller firms and boosts their workers’ pay. Mr Tange’s Shift, a software tester, acquires other businesses near the bottom of the industry supply chain and raises their engineers’ salaries. He says he’s able to do this and still charge competitive prices by cutting out layers of companies that serve as middlemen in the outsourcing process. And having more workers leads to higher sales. Shift’s shares have risen more than 5,300pc since it went public in 2014, the second-best performance on Tokyo’s benchmark stock index. The company’s market capitalisation has surged to about $2.3bn, pushing the value of Tange’s 33pc stake to about $745m. Tange, 46, says his business model is an attempt to remove inefficiencies in Japan’s software industry, where layers of subcontractors take cuts on orders before passing the work to another company below. It’s also, he says, a break from the merger & acquisition strategy of buying a business and looking to reduce costs.