--:-- Georgia Howe: Mass layoffs at tech giants Meta, Amazon, and Lyft spread to Disney, Walmart, and beyond. What's forcing the firings and what industries are on high alert?
--:-- John Bickley: I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's April 29th, and this is your Saturday edition of Morning Wire.
--:-- Georgia Howe: California, once the fastest-growing state in the nation, is now seeing its population decline. Are heavy-handed regulations part of the problem?
--:-- John Bickley: Businesses are leaving. They're seeking areas where taxes are lower, housing prices are lower, and business regulation is less prohibitive.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And pressure grows in Texas for the government to take more aggressive action on the crisis at the southern border.
--:-- John Bickley: The goal is to put pressure on the politicians so that you move the Overton window of what's possible.
--:-- Georgia Howe: We discuss a rally taking place in the state's capital today.
--:-- John Bickley: Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Disney is laying off thousands of employees this week. A move that comes as Bed Bath & Beyond announced it's filing for bankruptcy and ride-sharing giant Lyft is cutting 25% of its workforce.
--:-- John Bickley: Here with more on what's driving the trend and what it means for the nation's labor market is Daily Wire's senior editor, Cabot Phillips.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, it seems that way because that is what's happening. After taking over last week, new Lyft CEO David Risher announced the company would be laying off 1,200 of its roughly 4,000 employees.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: The move is reportedly part of an effort to cut costs so they can lower fare prices and better compete with their main rival, Uber.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: As Risher put it in an email to staff, "We need to bring our costs down to deliver affordable rides, compelling earnings for drivers, and profitable growth."
--:-- Cabot Phillips: That move comes a year after the company fired 700 more employees in a similar attempt to cut costs after their ridership numbers failed to hit pre-pandemic levels and their stock price was cut in half earlier last year.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: But like you said, this is hardly the first batch of mass layoffs that we've seen.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Yeah, tell us more about that growing trend.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So last month, Facebook parent company Meta made waves after announcing they'd soon lay off 10,000 jobs in a second round of mass layoffs.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the move was part of an effort to usher in a quote, "year of efficiency."
--:-- Cabot Phillips: He cited higher interest rates and higher costs brought on by new government regulations as a reason for the decision.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And then on Monday, Disney began massive layoffs of their own, cutting thousands of jobs from their parks and entertainment division, as well as ESPN.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: That move comes after thousands more employees were fired last month.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Perhaps most drastically, last week, the media company BuzzFeed announced they'd be laying off 15% of their staff and shutting down BuzzFeed news entirely.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And then Walmart, the nation's largest employer, laid off 2,000 employees earlier this month.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: But while we've started to see mass layoffs in a number of industries, it's been the tech industry that's been hit hardest.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: According to layoffs.fyi, which tracks hiring and firing trends, 597 corporations have implemented some form of mass layoff in 2023 alone.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: That's a big number.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Why have tech companies borne the brunt of these mass layoffs?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Well, for over a decade, tech companies appeared almost impervious to outside economic factors.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: They grew at astonishing rates, and really their biggest concerns were often finding enough new workers to help keep pace with their growth.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: But over the last two years the tech sector has been leading the way not in growth but in layoffs.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: A big factor on that front was COVID.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: During the pandemic demand for tech products went through the roof as everything from work to shopping to entertainment went online.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And to meet that demand tech companies rushed to hire at a frenetic pace.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: But as lockdowns came to a close, demand for tech products began to dip, and those same companies were stuck with bloated payrolls and diminished profits.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Beyond tech, the financial industry has also been hit hard by mass layoffs.
--:-- Georgia Howe: What's happening there?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: So as markets have struggled over the last few years, a number of mainstay financial firms have followed suit.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Accenture recently cut 19,000 jobs. Goldman Sachs announced plans to cut 3,200 workers. McKinsey is cutting 2,000 more.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Again, the list goes on.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: But it's worth noting, while a number of large corporations have implemented mass layoffs throughout the last year, the broader labor market has actually shown signs of resiliency, remaining surprisingly strong.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Overall unemployment still sits at 3.5%, which is near 50-year lows.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: And there are just under 10 million job openings across the U.S.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: But now the question becomes if these mass layoffs will soon spread to every industry, or if they're an anomaly reserved for companies that saw rapid growth when the economy was in a stronger spot.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Let's hope for the latter.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Cabot, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Anytime.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That's Daily Wire's senior editor, Cabot Phillips.
--:-- Georgia Howe: California was once the fastest growing state in the nation. Now, for the first time in its history, it's losing population.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Since 2020, about a million more people have moved out of the state than have moved into it.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Here to discuss the reason for the exodus is Judge Glock, the director of research at the Manhattan Institute.
--:-- Judge Glock: Thanks so much for having me back.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, you recently wrote an article about California's regulations in City Journal titled The Regulatory Labyrinth.
--:-- Judge Glock: And in that article, you argued that regulations were a major contributor to California's population decline.
--:-- Judge Glock: How much more regulated is California than other states?
--:-- Judge Glock: By almost any measure, California has many more regulations than any other state in the union.
--:-- Judge Glock: Different groups that evaluate state regulations from the Mercatus Center, the Cato Institute, the Pacific Research Institute, they all rank California as the state with the most in the most damaging regulations.
--:-- Judge Glock: These cover everything from mandating how much water your bathroom sink is allowed every minute. It's 1.2 gallons, in case you're curious, to requiring toy stores to have what they call gender-neutral toy aisles.
--:-- Judge Glock: Now, I've heard about regulations requiring restaurant kitchens in California to have some very particular doors and layouts, that kind of thing.
--:-- Judge Glock: Are regulations primarily a concern for businesses?
--:-- Judge Glock: It's definitely a problem for everybody in the state.
--:-- Judge Glock: And one of the biggest ways that regulations are hurting average citizens is by increasing the cost of housing.
--:-- Judge Glock: So let's say you want to build a house in California. Besides the usual electrical and building codes, you also need to meet precise state requirements for your mandated electrical car charging spot and the mandated solar panels of your roof.
--:-- Judge Glock: If you're landscaping your new yard, you will need to submit what's called a landscape documentation package.
--:-- Judge Glock: And then you're only allowed to use some types of plants on parts of your property.
--:-- Judge Glock: In some places, you'll need to submit special reports by archaeologists, paleontologists, and even biologists to show that you're not disturbing anything old.
--:-- Judge Glock: All this could add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of a home and mountains of paperwork.
--:-- Judge Glock: And a lot of residents simply realize they can buy a nicer home for half the price without all these regulations in neighboring states.
--:-- Judge Glock: Now, what about the business environment? What are some of the regulations that California might consider amending if they like to retain citizens?
--:-- Judge Glock: One of the ways that California makes its kind of mountain of regulation so much more burdensome is that they allow basically anybody to sue if a local business doesn't abide by them.
--:-- Judge Glock: For instance, the state provides special awards for people who sue a business for not complying with disability regulations, say not having a ramp for your restaurant or a special device for your motel pool.
--:-- Judge Glock: One serial plaintiff filed over 100 lawsuits in a year, mainly against small restaurants in Chinatown.
--:-- Judge Glock: A local restaurant owner called it a shakedown for small mom and pop businesses.
--:-- Judge Glock: But one of my favorite or maybe least favorite regulations in California is what's called Prop 65.
--:-- Judge Glock: This required businesses to post warnings about having certain chemicals in their products or on their property.
--:-- Judge Glock: If you've been to the state, you might've noticed these everywhere.
--:-- Judge Glock: But if a business forgets to put the label up, lawyers can sue and collect big rewards.
--:-- Judge Glock: According to one estimate, there have been over $300 million in Prop 65 settlements over the past two decades.
--:-- Judge Glock: And businesses are so scared of these lawsuits that they found one example of business attaching Prop 65 warnings to the trees it had for sale.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Where do these regulations come from? What's the incentive to impose so many?
--:-- Judge Glock: Yeah, one reason is that regulations allow politicians to extract more funds from businesses.
--:-- Judge Glock: Basically, the more regulations politicians impose, the more businesses need politicians' help to get around them.
--:-- Judge Glock: And the more they donate to those politicians.
--:-- Judge Glock: Now, California is very proud of all its supposedly strict campaign finance rules.
--:-- Judge Glock: There's an interesting exception to those. It's called bequests, where politicians can ask businesses to donate to, quote-unquote, charities.
--:-- Judge Glock: So Governor Gavin Newsom has made bequests to businesses to donate to his wife's charities, which have then paid her more than $2.3 million in salary over the past decade.
--:-- Judge Glock: Those businesses donated include many regulated by the state like Comcast, AT&T, and even the now defunct Silicon Valley Bank.
--:-- Judge Glock: Former Mayor Eric Garcetti created a charity called the Mayor's Fund for Los Angeles, which raised six-figure donations from government-regulated companies like Snap and a local utility company.
--:-- Georgia Howe: How do all these costs and regulations affect the business environment of the state in general?
--:-- Judge Glock: Well, they definitely make it a lot harder to operate.
--:-- Judge Glock: According to one estimate from 2018 to 2021, 352 different company headquarters moved out of the state, including some massive ones like Oracle and Tesla.
--:-- Judge Glock: Yet the state continues passing more and more rules, and so more and more people and jobs and businesses keep leaving.
--:-- Georgia Howe: All right. Well, Judge, thank you so much for coming on today.
--:-- Judge Glock: Thanks again for having me.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That was Judge Glock, Director of Research at the Manhattan Institute.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The ongoing humanitarian crisis at the southern border is prompting demands for more aggressive government action from a growing number of Americans, including a group gathering today in Austin, Texas.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Joining us to discuss the rally is one of its organizers, Mark Meckler, president of Citizens for Self-Governance and Convention of States Action.
--:-- Mark Meckler: Hi, Mark.
--:-- Georgia Howe: First, tell us about this rally, the How Many More rally, and what's it seeking to accomplish?
--:-- Mark Meckler: Well, the rally is intended to draw attention to what's actually going on at our southern border.
--:-- Mark Meckler: People always talk about an immigration crisis or illegal immigration.
--:-- Mark Meckler: That's not really correct. What we have is the largest humanitarian crisis, frankly, that we've seen in the modern history of the United States.
--:-- Mark Meckler: We have sexual slavery at a scale unimaginable in the United States.
--:-- Mark Meckler: We have carnage on the ranches.
--:-- Mark Meckler: The photos I've seen, the documentary evidence I've seen is incredible.
--:-- Mark Meckler: We have one person dying of fentanyl poisoning in the United States of America every seven minutes.
--:-- Mark Meckler: Over 70 in the last year, that more Americans than died in the entire Vietnam War.
--:-- Mark Meckler: And it goes on and on.
--:-- Mark Meckler: Our hospitals are overrun, our schools are overrun, our law enforcement overrun.
--:-- Mark Meckler: This is just a humanitarian crisis.
--:-- Mark Meckler: So the goal of the How Many More rally is to draw attention to the crisis and put pressure on the Texas legislature and the Texas governor to actually do something about it.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So you think this movement can begin with Texas.
--:-- Mark Meckler: Yeah, you know, it's important that we talk about it in the right legal context.
--:-- Mark Meckler: Often people talk about immigration. It's not really an immigration issue.
--:-- Mark Meckler: In the United States versus Arizona, the Supreme Court decided that the states can't enforce immigration law.
--:-- Mark Meckler: This is about Article 1, Section 10 of the United States Constitution, which gives the states the power to repel invasion.
--:-- Mark Meckler: Texas has a concurrent clause in their constitution.
--:-- Mark Meckler: There's definitely an invasion taking place on our southern border.
--:-- Mark Meckler: So there's multiple things the state can do.
--:-- Mark Meckler: They can build physical barriers.
--:-- Mark Meckler: They can build their own wall.
--:-- Mark Meckler: The state can and is working now on a bill called HB 20, House Bill 20.
--:-- Mark Meckler: That provides for a Texas Border Protection Unit.
--:-- Mark Meckler: That's a specific law enforcement unit with the function of repelling the invasion.
--:-- Mark Meckler: They can make stiffer penalties for things like criminal trespass.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And what action has Governor Greg Abbott and Texas lawmakers already taken so far?
--:-- Mark Meckler: Well, the governor at least verbally declared an invasion, and I thought that was a good first step.
--:-- Mark Meckler: He has Operation Lone Star going on, which has put more resources on the border.
--:-- Mark Meckler: But if you go down there, if you talk to the people who are down there every day, what you see is Operation Lone Star is like a Band-Aid on a hemorrhaging wound.
--:-- Mark Meckler: It's really not enough to make a difference on the border.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So the goal is give them the room, give them the political cover, the backing of the people to actually get in there and do the serious heavy lifting that's required.
--:-- Mark Meckler: We have major public figures coming.
--:-- Mark Meckler: Ted Nugent is opening the rally.
--:-- Mark Meckler: Laura Logan is one of the best reporters down on the border.
--:-- Mark Meckler: Jason Jones, Mark Morgan, former Border Patrol commissioner.
--:-- Mark Meckler: So a lot of folks, serious folks, so we're bringing serious heft to this to give us the best chance of having the legislature and the governor take appropriate action.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Final question. Title 42 is expected to end on May 11th.
--:-- Mark Meckler: What will take place, do you think, when that occurs?
--:-- Mark Meckler: I think what we're going to see is a surge of illegal immigrants to and across the border.
--:-- Mark Meckler: Title 42 gave the government a reason to repel a whole bunch of people.
--:-- Mark Meckler: 2.5 million people denied entry because of Title 42 being in place.
--:-- Mark Meckler: So what you can just imagine is a surge of 2.5 million people who couldn't otherwise get in are now going to make return trips to the border and try and get into the country.
--:-- Mark Meckler: So that makes this issue more pressing than ever.
--:-- Mark Meckler: And I think it's really important that we look at this in real human terms and ask ourselves this question, how many more young girls are we going to allow to be sold into sexual slavery?
--:-- Mark Meckler: How many more families have to lose brothers and daughters and fathers and sisters to the scourge of fentanyl?
--:-- Mark Meckler: How many people have to die along the border on the ranchers' properties?
--:-- Mark Meckler: We've got to ask ourselves that question as individuals.
--:-- Mark Meckler: If people are interested in participating, they can go to howmanymore.com to get information about how to join us at the rally.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well, Mark, thanks so much for joining us.
--:-- Mark Meckler: That was Mark Meckler, president of Convention of States and organizer of the How Many More Rally.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That's all the time we've got this morning.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with us.
--:-- Georgia Howe: We'll be back later this afternoon with an extra edition of Morning Wire.
