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Human Times helps you stay ahead of the latest news and trends that impact the HR industry. Every weekday, our unique blend of AI and team of expert HR and employment editors and researchers monitor 100,000s of articles, and social posts to create summaries of the most relevant and useful content to help you lead, innovate and grow. The award winning Human Times newsletter has four geographical editions with news tailored to your region.
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Recent Editions
Human Times
North America
The IRS has temporarily reassigned employees from IT and human capital offices to taxpayer services roles during the current filing season, as the agency grapples with staffing cuts. Affected staff have been placed on 120-day involuntary details as customer service representatives or tax examiners, with training beginning in late February. The move follows warnings from the Treasury Inspector General that the IRS has lost about 19% of its workforce since October 2025, including significant reductions in IT and filing-related staff, potentially jeopardizing system upgrades and modernization efforts. While the agency says the reassignments are intended to support taxpayers during its busiest period, some employees have raised concerns that diverting IT personnel could further delay technology projects and increase processing backlogs.
Full Issue
Human Times
UK
UK unemployment has reached 5.2%, the highest level since early 2021, according to the latest labour market data. The jobless rate increased from 5.1% in the previous quarter, with 130,000 fewer workers on payrolls over the year. Young people, disabled people and men are bearing the brunt of the rise. Earnings growth also slowed, with basic pay rising by 4.2%, down from 4.4%. In London, the unemployment rate surged to 7.6%, nearly double the 4% rate in the south east. Youth unemployment has reached 18.8% in the capital, compared with 14% country-wide, with the number of 18-24 year olds out of work up by 80,000 on the quarter to 575,000. Liz McKeown at the Office for National Statistics also notes that private sector wage growth continues to slow and is at its lowest rate in five years, while public sector pay growth also slowed but remains elevated. Commenting on the figures, Suren Thiru, economics director at the Institute of Chartered Accountants, said: "The UK's jobs market is continuing to come apart at the seams as the stifling squeeze from spiralling labour costs pushes more businesses to pivot from simply freezing recruitment to actively cutting jobs."
Full Issue
Human Times
Europe
UK unemployment has reached 5.2%, the highest level since early 2021, according to the latest labour market data. The jobless rate increased from 5.1% in the previous quarter, with 130,000 fewer workers on payrolls over the year. Young people, disabled people and men are bearing the brunt of the rise. Earnings growth also slowed, with basic pay rising by 4.2%, down from 4.4%. In London, the unemployment rate surged to 7.6%, nearly double the 4% rate in the south east. Youth unemployment has reached 18.8% in the capital, compared with 14% country-wide, with the number of 18-24 year olds out of work up by 80,000 on the quarter to 575,000. Commenting on the figures, Suren Thiru, economics director at the Institute of Chartered Accountants, said: "The UK's jobs market is continuing to come apart at the seams as the stifling squeeze from spiralling labour costs pushes more businesses to pivot from simply freezing recruitment to actively cutting jobs."
Full Issue
Human Times
Middle East
Passports and other identity documents belonging to hundreds of attendees of Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW), Abu Dhabi’s flagship investment conference, have been exposed online. Scans of more than 700 such items, some belonging to prominent politicians and business leaders, were discovered on an unprotected cloud storage server associated with the state-sponsored event, which hosted more than 35,000 people in December. ADFW, in a statement to Reuters, said: "a vulnerability in a third-party vendor-managed storage environment relating to a limited subset of ADFW 2025 attendees . . . The environment was secured immediately upon identification, and our initial review indicates that access activity was limited to the researcher who identified the issue."
Full Issue
Read the latest HR highlights
How HR is Tackling Long Covid?
Fingers remain tightly crossed around the world that the rampant hospitalization and fatality stage of the Covid-19 pandemic has generally peaked. Vaccination programmes are accelerating, and restrictions are gradually being lifted...
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ESG Is Not Just Another Name For CSR
Back in the distant 1980s if you wanted to demonstrate your environmental and ethical credentials it was sufficient to shop at or purchase shares in retailer The Body Shop. The charismatic Anita Roddick, founder of the “hippy” tinged retail chain, heralded a new age of environmental concern, caring capitalism and corporate awareness that evolved into what became known as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR was much talked about and lauded, but in reality often ended up being a lot of a hot air (excuse the pun) and often never progressed much beyond a footnote in the annual report.
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Have Older Workers Paid The Highest COVID-19 Price?
Across the world the pandemic is slowly but surely moving into its next phase. Recovery beckons. As furlough schemes across the U.S. and U.K. are being wound down, restrictions eased or lifted, and workforces moving back up the gears, early signs indicate that older employees are more likely to be casualties of the pandemic aftermath than their younger colleagues. Here at the we have witnessed an increasing number of stories supporting the growing belief that older workers are disproportionately paying the highest Covid-19 price.
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Bosses. What's not to like? Plenty, say employees
“You’ll never have another boss like me, someone who’s basically a chilled-out entertainer”
So said, David Brent, the fictional manager of Slough-based paper merchant Wernham Hogg in the seminal TV comedy The Office. Ricky Gervais’s portrayal of Brent as a flawed, narcissistic, incompetent, and deluded manager was so well observed that many (including me) believed it was a genuine fly-on-the-wall documentary when they alighted accidentally on the first ever episode.
Rolling with the Payroll
To mark National Payroll Week the team at the Human Times has provided some insight into the industry that we hope you’ll find useful.
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