NVIDIA PAYS THE CEO'S KIDS $1,000,000 EACH That is a lot of money for non-technical roles. The filings speak for themselves. Nvidia's H-1B filings carry a median wage of $169,191. That covers 10,111 filings since FY2015, mostly software developers and electronics engineers. One CEO child's salary equals almost six of those engineers. No American's were qualified for these jobs.

NEARLY ONE IN THREE GERMAN COMPANIES PLANS TO CUT STAFF IN 2027 This is a big one. The German Economic Institute (IW) surveyed 1,017 private companies in October. 32% expect a smaller workforce next year, up from 29% in the spring. Only 17% plan to hire. That means almost two companies are planning cuts for every one planning to grow. Investment points the same way. 39% plan to invest less in 2027, while 25% plan to invest more.

IBM IS ENDING VISA SPONSORSHIP FOR MOST CONSULTING ROLES. BUT LOOK AT ITS INDIA FOOTPRINT. As work visas in America get harder to get and stricter, more companies just offshore the jobs. IBM is the poster child for this. IBM confirmed the change to Bloomberg. Affected employees can move to IBM jobs outside the US or leave at the end of the year. THEY HAVE 15 LARGE OFFICES IN INDIA On February 9, ICRA rated IBM India and said the subsidiary accounts for nearly one-third of IBM's global workforce. It also said IBM India brings in around 6 percent of IBM's revenue, and that more than 70 percent of IBM India's own revenue comes from work for IBM and its other subsidiaries. NEARLY ONE-THIRD OF THE HEADCOUNT. AROUND 6 PERCENT OF THE REVENUE. THINK ABOUT THAT. IBM's leased operating assets in India were $428 million at the end of 2025, up from $218 million at the end of 2023. India is one of only three countries IBM breaks out on that line, because each is at least 10 percent of the total. Consulting is IBM's largest division, with more than 150,000 workers. The open question is still who fills these seats, and where.

COMCAST'S STATE LAYOFF NOTICES ADD UP TO 994 JOBS. COMCAST SAYS MORE TO COME. Goodall flagged this weeks ago. The filings are now public. The notices list 634 jobs in Pennsylvania, 159 in Washington, 119 in New Jersey and 82 in California. A WARN notice is only required when a layoff at one site crosses a size threshold. Comcast told Bloomberg some cuts fell below that line, so they never appear in a filing, and it has not given a total. For scale, Comcast had about 179,000 employees at the end of 2025. The cable side is shrinking: in the third quarter it lost 144,000 domestic residential broadband customers and 274,000 video customers, and Connectivity and Platforms revenue fell 2.7% to $19.7 billion. The CFO said the overhaul brings a fourth quarter charge of more than $1 billion. Comcast says it will also post more than 1,100 new roles, over 500 of them in Philadelphia, while executives plan to use AI agents to handle customer contacts.

BLACKROCK FOOTPRINT 69 OF 74 U.S.-HEADQUARTERED COMPANIES WITH >5,000 EMPLOYEES IN INDIA… BlackRock owns more than 5% of each of them. Some trends are just too large to ignore.

THE LAW SAYS H-1B WORKERS MUST GET THE EQUITY TOO If a company offers stock options to similarly employed U.S. workers, it has to offer the same package to its H-1B workers. That is 20 CFR 655.731. Employers cannot deny those benefits just because the visa is temporary. Anthropic is about to mint 4,250 employee millionaires. In FY2026 it had 189 H-1B approvals, including 66 first-time. That is up from 35 total approvals in FY2024.

LAYOFFS ARE MUTED. GETTING BACK IN IS THE HARD PART. Richmond Fed President Barkin says layoffs remain muted. We agree, and that is only half the picture. In October, 1.96 million Americans had been out of work for 27 weeks or longer. That is 27.6% of all unemployed people, the highest share since December 2021. The average time spent unemployed reached 27.1 weeks. That is also the highest since December 2021. Two years ago, in October 2024, the long-term count was 1.60 million. Fewer people are getting fired. The ones who do lose a job are staying out far longer.

FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY POSTED AN H-1B NOTICE FOR A JOB THAT STARTS AFTER THE STATE PAUSE ENDS FAU posted the notice on October 14 for a Coordinator, Systems Technician in Boca Raton, paying $67,001 a year. The notice lists a prevailing wage of $59,155 at Level I. That is the lowest of the four wage levels the Labor Department uses, the one meant for entry-level work. Florida's Board of Governors paused new H-1B hiring at all 12 state universities on March 2, through January 5, 2027. Renewals for current H-1B workers are still allowed. This position starts January 27, 2027. That is three weeks after the pause ends. The board can extend the pause before then.

PEPSICO IS CUTTING ABOUT 1,000 JOBS ACROSS NORTH AMERICA The WSJ reports the cuts hit its food and beverage business as part of a turnaround. PepsiCo North America CEO Krishnan said the changes roll out over the next week. Activist investor Elliott built a $4 billion stake last year and pushed for cost cuts. Last month PepsiCo also closed its Knoxville bottling plant and laid off 112 workers. Its Hyderabad business services center opened in 2019 with 250 people. By January 2023 it had 2,800, with a stated plan to reach 4,000.

20-SOMETHINGS ARE SKIPPING THE FIRST JOB? I think the better headline would be they are forced to try to make ends meet themselves, but we will summarize their report anyway. The Wall Street Journal reports that young Americans are turning down entry-level offers and starting companies instead. The paper says AI is shaking up those starter jobs, and that younger founders are using it to get businesses off the ground. Babson College's Global Entrepreneurship Monitor puts early-stage entrepreneurship among ages 18 to 24 at 23.6% in 2025. The rate among ages 25 to 34 is 23.0%. Both sit above every older age group in the survey. A decade earlier, in 2015, the 18-to-24 rate was about 10%. Gusto surveyed more than 1,000 people who started businesses in 2025. About 71% of Gen Z founders in that survey used AI to help launch. The entry path into wage work is also thinner. The New York Fed puts underemployment among recent college graduates at 42.5% in the third quarter of 2026. That means they hold jobs that typically do not require a bachelor's degree. Their unemployment rate was 5.2%.

BOEING IS CUTTING 5% OF ITS COMMERCIAL AIRPLANE WORKFORCE The division had nearly 50,500 employees at the end of 2025. Notices start going out in December, through a mix of layoffs and attrition. The reason given is production. Boeing Commercial Airplanes head Pope told staff that slower output "puts us in an overstaffed position." Boeing's own India site says it has about 7,000 employees in the country. Its Bengaluru campus is the largest Boeing facility of its kind outside the US. Its approved H-1B petitions rose from 26 in FY2025 to 72 in FY2026.

THE H-1B WAGE RULE IS NOW ONE STEP FROM PUBLICATION The current floor is what creates the labor arbitrage of "Cheap Foreign Labor." This rule is not a solution, but it does help. The Labor Department sent its final prevailing wage rule to the White House for review on November 6. The White House lists it as economically significant. The rule sets the minimum pay an employer must offer on H-1B, H-1B1, E-3 and PERM green card filings. The proposal raised the Level I floor from the 17th percentile of local pay to the 34th. Level I is the entry-level wage. At the 17th percentile, about 83% of local workers in the same job earn more. Until published, the old wage floors still apply. New filings can still use them.

WE ASK: IS IT SAFE TO HIRE EMPLOYEES ON FOREIGN VISAS IF YOUR OWN CEO IS BEING TARGETED? Nvidia fell 8% at the open today. $NVDA The board is probing whether Jensen Huang was targeted by Chinese intelligence. Meanwhile NVIDIA's H-1B approvals rose 38% in FY2026, to 2,436...

SMALL TRUCKING COMPANIES ARE FOLDING AND NO LAYOFF COUNT WILL CATCH IT This deserves far more attention. Bloomberg counts 221 trucking bankruptcies so far in 2026. That extends a three-year spike at levels not seen in decades. Most of the pain is at small carriers running 20 trucks or fewer. Often just one. The federal WARN Act only applies to employers with 100 or more workers. A five-truck outfit can shut down and never file a notice. A survey of hundreds of small carriers by Truckstop and Bloomberg Intelligence found about two-thirds have flat or falling revenue. Almost 40% expect to be out of trucking in six months or don't know where they will be. Every one of those is a paycheck that never shows up in a layoff headline.