Weekly round-up: Olympic medals, Nike CEO’s blame game, and influencers

In this week’s round-up of HR news, the French are striking again, this time about gold medals. There’s a new addition to the “CEO hates on remote work” group, and people are bouncing back from redundancy by becoming influencers.

Fools’ gold

As the countdown for the Paris Olympics continues, a new controversy arises. According to NBC News, fantastically on brand, dozens of workers at the French national mint, who are making the medals for the games, are going on strike, demanding the same “Olympics bonus” being paid to police officers and other government officials also goes to them.

On 8 April, around 50 workers demonstrated outside their workplace and claimed that they had been able to disrupt the production of the Olympic medals ahead of the games, which start on 26 July.

The mint, however, claimed that production was not affected by the strike: “Production of the medals is not blocked, all of the medals have been minted, and we are at the finishing stage. We will deliver on schedule and on time.”

The mint further explained that only 2 per cent of their 430 workers were a part of the strike, falling to 0.5 per cent the following day (two workers) who mainly did so during their break time.

“Stop the contempt!” the General Confederation of Labour union, or GCT, posted on X. “In this context of inflation, there is an urgent need to increase wages!”

The medals themselves have been a talking point, each one forged with a piece from the Eiffel Tower to represent the host nation. The French striking is infused in their DNA and has been a regular occurrence during this pre-Olympics campaign.

To stave off this distraction from the games, the government has offered state workers bonuses of €500 to €1,500 for their efforts. But that has not eliminated the possibility of industrial action altogether.

Nike CEO scapegoats remote work for its failures

According to Yahoo Finance, Nike’s chief executive, John Donahoe, blamed the company’s lagging innovation pipeline – which has been scorched by analysts and consumers – on employees doing remote work. Nike, like many companies across the globe, shut down its footwear factories in Vietnam for a number of months during COVID-19. This, of course, resulted in employees working from home for a number of months.

“In hindsight, it turns out it’s really hard to do bold, disruptive innovation, to develop a boldly disruptive shoe, on Zoom. Our teams came back together 18 months ago in person, and we recognise this. So, we realigned our company, and over the last year, we have been ruthlessly focused on rebuilding our disruptive innovation pipeline along with our iterative innovation pipeline,” said Donahoe.

This blanket statement, which puts the blame back on employees, has been called out by analysts, stating that Nike’s innovation failures are deeper than employees not featuring in the office.

Notably, Nike’s remote set-up during and following the pandemic was not unique, explained Matt Powell, adviser at Spurwink River and senior advisor at BCE Consulting.

“There were a whole bunch of brands who really thrived during and post-pandemic even though they were working remotely. So, I’m not sure that we that we can blame remote work here on Nike’s issues,” Powell said.

Instead, the problems are believed to have arisen from a series of bad decisions throughout the past few years, including a broad loss of talent at the company, a decision to lean too heavily on direct-to-consumer and a mindset shift towards decisions based on financial goals.

Redundancy is a pathway to full-time content creation

Dialogue around the redundancies in the media and tech spaces has been all over social forums, with a number of big-time media corporations cleaning house, leaving a number of talented media-trained individuals without an income.

According to US News, content creation has held strong appeal for recently redundant workers as they search for flexibility in the job market.

Rather than trying to return to traditional employment, many people are turning towards creating their own path on social media. Through online content creation, individuals can make money from brand deals and advertising by producing social media videos ranging from educational to entertaining.

“I think most employees look at employers now and no longer think that they are going to find security – permanent security – in a job. I think it makes it less risky to do something like go and be a content creator because employment with a traditional employer is so much riskier,” said Sarah Damaske, professor of labour and employment relations, and sociology at Penn State.

In an estimated $250 billion industry, 4 per cent of global content creators pull in more than $100,000 annually. YouTube, which is one of the best money-making platforms for creators, has more than 3 million channels in its YouTube Partner Program, which is how the creators earn money. A spokesperson said the platform paid out more than $70 billion in the last three years. So, there is definitely money to be made in the space, along with the flexibility of the role.