Diarmuid Gavin: Giving ex-battery rescue hens a new lease of life can also benefit your garden

I'm excited to give some ex-battery rescue hens a new lease of life - and add a new dimension to my garden

A rooster and a hen in the garden.

Diarmuid Gavin
July 25 2020

I've always wanted to keep chickens but this interest was not shared by other members of the family and as I spent most of my time abroad, I'd have had to rely on an unenthusiastic home farmer to look after them.

Lockdown changed all that and focused the mind - it's now or never for many things. I've a pretty garden, and some space and the ability to give ex-battery chickens a new lease of life. I'm also making a television series called Gardening Together which needs content so despite family opposition, I've got my way.

Paul Smyth, who I work with, is from a farming background - hens were second nature to him and because gardens and plants were first nature to him, he convinced me that they were the perfect partners.

So a couple of weeks ago I took delivery of three hens who were rescued from a battery farm and installed them in the new coop. In advance I'd fenced off an area of the garden. This was to protect them from predators and to protect the rest of my garden from being hen pecked. Hens can cause damage to plants so I've been learning from experts what plants to grow and what to avoid. It's also going to be a matter of trial and error and already some plants have been trampled. However, in terms of cost-benefit analysis, I'm happy to trade some herbaceous plants for those delicious daily fresh eggs.

Rhododendron



There are other benefits to the garden. Hens are fantastic at hoovering up slugs and other pests so I'll probably let them go free range around the whole plot occasionally to do a bit of pest control. Their manure will also be a valuable fertiliser. Like other animal manure, such as horse manure, it shouldn't be used fresh as this can burn plants. It's best mixed in with other garden compost where it accelerates the composting process. Even then it tends to be quite alkaline so it's best not used around your ericaceous plants such as rhododendrons (pictured above), azaleas, camellias and any heathers.

Hens will eat almost any plant if hungry but they're not overly fond of pungent tastes, so anything herby may survive. I sited the chicken run where my herb garden is and so far they aren't tucking into any of the rosemary, sage, chives, lemon balm, mint, thyme, or bay. They have, however, quickly decimated the hostas, sweet peas and echinaceas and there's no point growing any leafy veg here as that would be simply irresistible to them.

I've been told daffodils and other spring bulbs such as crocus, snowdrops, hyacinths, blue bells and tulips should be fine so I'll be planting bulbs here in the autumn. Prickly evergreen shrubs such as holly will probably be last on their menu so could form a useful barrier in areas you don't want them to roam. There are many ornamental salvias which should be fine as well as lavender and achillea, both of which are fragrant when crushed.

I've had my three hens living here for a few weeks now and so far it's a joy. I open their coop in the morning, scatter their feed and give them fresh water. And they cluck away happily. They each produce an egg a day... which up to this point is still thrilling for me. I clean out their mess every few days and close their door at night to keep safe from the nocturnal fox.

And I find myself sticking around their enclosure for 20 minutes here and there, enjoying the sound and movement they've brought to our suburban space.
Top Tip

Littlehill Animal Rescue and Sanctuary is active on Facebook and regularly announces rehoming dates. It has a sanctuary in Co Kildare where it can arrange a hen adoption for which it charges a small fee.

Two days after I delivered my last draft, the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic' - Emma Donoghue's timely new novel is set in Ireland during Spanish Flu outbreak

Emma Donoghue's new novel The Pull of the Stars is set in Ireland during the devastating Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918. The Room author explains how she came to write such a timely book

Author Emma Donoghue

July 19 2020 02:30 AM

The Great Flu of 1918-19 - misnamed the Spanish Flu by the governments of nations involved in the First World War, so as not to depress morale by admitting that this new strain of influenza was cutting a swathe through their populations too - hit the whole world hard, at the end of more than four years of devastating conflict.

Best estimates say 3pc of the global population died of it - far more than in the war's battles and bombings.

In Ireland, the mortality rate was by no means that high - perhaps 0.7pc, which still meant more than 20,000 people were lost. (The typical winter flu carried off old people, but the Great Flu was known for targeting young adults instead, so a whole generation of children were orphaned by it.)

So why would I choose Dublin as my setting for a novel about that pandemic, when I began to write The Pull of the Stars on the centenary of the outbreak, back in October 2018?

One reason was authenticity: I anted to create an absolutely credible drama set in one small maternity ward where women with bad cases of the new flu would be sent if they were also heavily pregnant, because before and after labour women and their babies were particularly vulnerable to this virus's effects.

I thought I could get the voices of my protagonist Nurse Julia Power, Doctor Kathleen Lynn (the one real historical figure in the novel), and their mostly working-class patients more right, and more flavourful, if I drew on the Hiberno-English I grew up with, and its flair for loquaciousness and dark humour.

My title echoes Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, because his plays (performed at the Abbey) were my first glimpse into the lives of the Dublin poor and those ground-down, heroic mammies.

But I also liked the idea of an Irish setting because that meant taking an already complicated situation - a pandemic, hard on the heels of a world war - and throwing in the extra complication of our lurch towards independence.


I drew a lot on two excellent histories of the crisis, Caitriona Foley's The Last Great Plague: The Great Flu Epidemic in Ireland 1918-19 and Ida Milne's Stacking the Coffins: Influenza, War and Revolution in Ireland 1918-19 (as someone who has published academic studies as well as fiction, I know how much the latter often draws on the tireless and pretty much unpaid research and analysis that goes into the former).

If (allow me to generalise wildly) my grandparents' generation was mostly shocked and unimpressed by the Easter Rising in 1916, but mostly voted for Sinn Féin in 1919, then the pace of changing opinion in those years must have been startlingly rapid, I thought. What if I took a nurse who feels she has "no time for politics" and put her through the extraordinary peak of the epidemic, working past the point of exhaustion in an understaffed, understocked hospital?

Might she begin to question both the British Government's and the Catholic Church's roles in shaping the lives of her slum-dwelling, malnourished, ever-pregnant patients?

How might she be changed, as the country around her changed?

Read More
Emma Donoghue fills her pandemic period piece with death and historical detail

Two days after I delivered my last draft of The Pull of the Stars, the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic. The novel wasn't due to come out till 2021, but my publishers decided it was so timely they should move it up to summer.

I didn't add a single echo of today to the novel, in the copy-editing process; it felt all too weirdly similar already. Maybe that's because the fear of invisible germs, weighed against the need to carry on with life anyway, is the same in any time and place.

The Pull of the Stars is called that because influenza comes from influence - Renaissance Italians thought the illness was caused by the influence of the stars.

But in researching and writing this novel, and even more as I've watched how Covid-19 has played out under different political regimes across the world, I've become more and more aware that health is political: a human right snatched away from so many, whether at the point when they're born (the most dangerous single day in a life) or later, but still too early.

Boris Johnson's notoriously vague 'Stay Alert' reminds me of the 1918 public information posters headed 'Save Yourself From Influenza': victim-blaming, across the centuries. And when I hear blustering leaders blaming the poor - especially Black communities - for what they imply are self-inflicted pre-existing conditions that leave them vulnerable to coronavirus, I think of those who died in 1918 partly because they were too tired, ill-fed or weakened by previous sickness to ward this one off. Because (like migrant farm workers today, say) they were in no position to follow useless government advice along the lines of, 'On feeling the first symptom of influenza, take to your bed and rest for a fortnight'.

This may all sound grim, but as usual I found it cathartic and even cheering to set a story in dark times, and even find some light at the end of it.

I'm glad to be publishing a novel that shines a spotlight on the astonishing courage and stamina of frontline healthcare workers (so many of them women).

I'm deeply grateful that our state of scientific knowledge is so much better than in 1918, when all doctors could offer bad flu cases was aspirin or whiskey.

This too shall pass, says the medieval Persian proverb. Or as Kathleen Lynn in my novel puts it, "the human race settles on terms with every plague in the end".

Emma Donoghue is the author of novels including Room, The Wonder and Akin. The Pull of the Stars is published on July 21 by Picador Book

A Writer's llfe: Packed with generous sympathy

Emma Donoghue was born in Dublin in 1969, the youngest of eight children. Her father was the literary critic, Denis Donoghue. She went to UCD and studied English and French, then moved to England and did a PhD at Cambridge. She has written screenplays, short stories, children's books and non-fiction as well as novels, and counts herself lucky enough to never have had an "honest job" since being sacked after a single summer month as a chambermaid.

In 2004, Publishers Weekly described her as "distinguished by her generous sympathy for her characters, sinuous prose and an imaginative range that may soon rival that of AS Byatt or Margaret Atwood".

In 2010 she published Room, an international bestseller that was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prize, and won the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, along with many other awards.

Room was very soon made into a film directed by Lenny Abrahamson, for which Emma wrote the screenplay. It won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Film, the Irish Film and Television Academy Award for Best Film, among many other awards. Emma now lives in London, Ontario, with Chris Roulston and their children, Finn and Una.

In 2011, she wrote a wise and funny piece on parenting: "If you're out in public with your kids, it can feel as though the CCTV cameras are always trained your way. Every parent I know jokes about the nightmarish possibility of being reported to Child Protection Services. You can bring down the wrath of a stranger simply by failing to keep a broad-brimmed sunhat on your child or letting her race around with a lollipop in her mouth.

"You might think that, having defied convention when it came to conception (anonymous donor, two mothers, as I tell anyone at the playground rash enough to ask 'is their dad tall?'), I'd be relaxed about what people thought of my parenting at the micro level. But no, I still get that Bad Mum Blush when our daughter bloodies her knee and I - not having a plaster - have to improvise with an old tissue."

Emily Hourican

Protests against governor’s arrest continue in challenge to Kremlin

Sergei Furgal has been in a Moscow jail since he was detained on July 9 on murder charges.

Thousands protested in support of Sergei Furgal (Igor Volkov/AP)

By Associated Press Reporter

July 25 2020

Tens of thousands of people have marched across the Russian city of Khabarovsk to protest against the arrest of the regional governor on murder charges, continuing a wave of demonstrations that has lasted two weeks in a challenge to the Kremlin.

Sergei Furgal has been in a Moscow jail since his arrest on July 9, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has named an acting successor.

Protesters in Khabarovsk, near the border with China, see the charges against Furgal as unsubstantiated and demand he goes on trial at home.

The continuing large-scale protests are seen as a challenge to the Kremlin (Igor Volkov/AP)

Unlike in Moscow where police usually move quickly to disperse unsanctioned opposition protests, authorities have not interfered with the demonstrations in Khabarovsk, apparently expecting them to fizzle out over time.

But daily protests, peaking at weekends, have now gone on for two weeks, reflecting anger at what local residents see as Moscow’s disrespect of their choice of governor and simmering discontent with Mr Putin’s rule.

Authorities suspect Furgal of involvement in several murders of businessmen in 2004 and 2005. He has denied the charges, which date back to his time as a businessman with interests focusing on timber and metals.

A politician on the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party ticket, Furgal won the 2018 election even though he had refrained from campaigning and even publicly supported his Kremlin-backed rival.


 

The region’s governor Sergei Furgal was arrested on July 9 and is being held in Moscow (Igor Volkov/PA)

His victory was a humiliating setback to the main Kremlin party, United Russia, which also lost its control over the regional legislature.

During his time in office, Furgal earned a reputation as a “people’s governor”, cutting his own salary, ordering the sale of an expensive yacht that the previous administration had bought and offering new subsidies to the population.

Mikhail Degtyaryov, appointed by Mr Putin on Monday as Furgal’s successor, is also a member of the Liberal Democratic Party – a choice that was apparently intended to calm the local anger.

Mr Degtyaryov has refrained from facing the protesters and left the city on Saturday for an inspection trip across the region.


PA Media

Protesters clash with federal agents outside Portland courthouse

Demonstrators were heard chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Feds go home’.

Tear gas fills the air outside the federal courthouse in Portland (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)


By Gillian Flaccus and Sara Cline, Associated Press

July 25 2020 12:11 PM

Thousands of protesters gathered outside the federal courthouse in Portland into the early hours of Saturday, directing fireworks at the building as plumes of tear gas dispensed by US agents lingered above.

The demonstration went on for hours until federal agents entered the crowd at around 2.30am and marched in a line down the street, clearing remaining protesters with tear gas at close range. They also extinguished a large fire in the street outside the courthouse.

The Federal Protective Service had declared the gathering as “an unlawful assembly” and cited that officers had been injured.

As the crowd dispersed, someone was found stabbed nearby, Portland police said. The person was taken to a hospital and a suspect was detained.

Demonstrators gathered outside the federal courthouse in Portland (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)

By 3am, most demonstrators had left with only some small groups roaming the streets.

Earlier, the protest had drawn various organised groups, including Healthcare Workers Protest, Teachers against Tyrants, Lawyers for Black Lives and the “Wall of Moms”.

As the crowd grew – authorities estimate there were 3,000 present at the peak of the protest – people were heard chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “Feds go home” to the sound of drums.

Later, protesters vigorously shook the fence surrounding the courthouse, shot fireworks towards the building and threw glass bottles. On many occasions, such actions were met by federal agents using tear gas and flash bangs.

The flow of tear gas caused protesters to disperse at times, but some came armed with leaf blowers and directed the gas back to the courthouse.

Officials in Oregon claim the presence of federal officers has inflamed the situation (Noah Berger/AP)

It was unclear whether anyone was arrested during the latest protest. The federal agents, deployed by President Donald Trump to tamp down the unrest, have arrested dozens during nightly demonstrations against racial injustice that often turn violent.

Friday’s protest came hours after a US judge denied the state of Oregon’s request to restrict federal agents’ actions in the city.

Democratic leaders in Oregon say federal intervention has worsened the two-month crisis, and the state attorney general sued to allege some people had been whisked off the streets in unmarked vehicles.

US District Judge Michael Mosman said the state lacked standing to sue on behalf of protesters because the legal action was a “highly unusual one with a particular set of rules”.

A medic treats Black Lives Matter protester Lacey Wambalaba after exposure to chemical irritants deployed by federal officers (Noah Berger/AP)


Oregon was seeking a restraining order on behalf of its residents not for injuries that had already happened but to prevent injuries by federal officers in the future. That combination makes the standard for granting such a motion very narrow, and the state did not prove it had standing in the case, Mr Mosman wrote.

The clashes in Portland have further inflamed the nation’s political tensions and triggered a crisis over the limits of federal power as Mr Trump moves to send US officers to other Democratic-led cities to combat crime.

The legal action from Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum accused federal agents of arresting protesters without probable cause and using excessive force. She sought a temporary restraining order to “immediately stop federal authorities from unlawfully detaining Oregonians”.


  

Federal officers were deployed by Donald Trump in a bid to calm the city (Noah Berger/AP)

David Morrell, a lawyer for the US government, called the motion “extraordinary” and told the judge in a hearing this week that it was based solely on “a few threadbare declarations” from witnesses and a Twitter video.

Ms Rosenblum said the ramifications of the ruling were “extremely troubling”.

She added: “While I respect Judge Mosman, I would ask this question: If the state of Oregon does not have standing to prevent this unconstitutional conduct by unidentified federal agents running roughshod over her citizens, who does?”


PA Media

'Trump will try to steal this election by attacking postal votes'

:: Joe Biden warns of dity tricks

Warning: Joe Biden fears Trump won’t leave White House
Annie Linskey


July 25 2020 02:30 AM

Joe Biden has warned donors that Donald Trump will try to "indirectly steal" the 2020 election by making a case against mail-in ballots, a voting method that many are expected to use to avoid exposure to the coronavirus during November's US vote.


The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee asked donors attending a virtual event to spread the word that "this president is going to try to indirectly steal the election by arguing that mail-in ballots don't work".


Mr Trump will present mail-in ballots as fraud by making the argument that "they're not real, they're not fair", said Mr Biden.


On 'The Daily Show With Trevor Noah' in June, Mr Biden had warned that Mr Trump might "try to steal" the election. He has said Mr Trump might try to delay the election and might not leave the White House voluntarily if he loses.


Mr Biden's remarks offered the most detail about how he believes Mr Trump might unfairly influence the contest's outcome. Mr Biden's campaign has mounted an aggressive voter-access effort, including hiring a team of lawyers to challenge any irregularities.


They come as Mr Trump in recent weeks has stepped up his rhetoric about the veracity of mail-in voting. At an event last month in Arizona, the US president suggested without evidence that the method presents an opportunity for fraud.


"Where are they going? Where are these ballots going? Who's getting them? Who is not getting them? A little section that's Republican," Mr Trump said, speaking specifically about California's vote-by-mail system.


"Will they be stolen from mailboxes as they get put in by the mailman? Will they be taken from the mailmen and the mailwomen? Will they be forged? Who is signing them? Who's signing them? What, are they signed on the kitchen table and sent in? Will they be counterfeited by groups inside our nation?"

Mr Trump added: "Will they be counterfeited, maybe by the millions, by foreign powers who don't want to see Trump win?"


Matthew Morgan, the general counsel to the Trump campaign, accused Mr Biden of sowing fear.


"Joe Biden is fearmongering and purposely misleading American voters," said Mr Morgan said. "The only people trying to fundamentally change the way we vote and make our election system less secure are Democrats."



Meanwhile Mr Trump has attempted to make dementia an issue in the campaign during a TV interview.


His phrase "Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV." got an unlikely moment in the spotlight. The president (74) was attempting to demonstrate his mental fitness by reciting five words, in order over and over in a television interview.


He said the collection of nouns was part of a cognitive test he had aced while declaring that his likely Democratic opponent, Joe Biden (77), could not do the same.


The Trump campaign has long tried to paint Mr Biden as having lost some of his mental sharpness.


But the gambit has yet to prove successful in denting the former vice president's standing in the race.


That leaves Mr Trump trying to escalate the attacks while defending his own ability to handle the mental rigours of the job.


On Fox News Mr Trump boasted of having "a good memory, because I'm cognitively there". But he said: "Now Joe should take that test because something's going on." (© The Washington Post)

Pronouns Suck? Tesla Founder Elon Musk Tweets Ugly Comment Mocking Transgender Inclusion
Seth CohenContributor
Leadership Strategy
I write about leadership, politics, inclusion and social change.

Over the past twenty-four hours, Elon Musk has stirred up controversy on Twitter, sharing a series of social media posts that once again has put the outspoken founder of Tesla and SpaceX in the spotlight. However, it’s his apparently transphobic two-word Tweet from Friday evening that has prompted outrage.

Musk, who added a red rose to his Twitter name in an apparently mocking reference to the symbol used by members of the Democratic Socialists of America, first posted, and then pinned, a Tweet suggesting that there isn’t a need for the additional federal stimulus package currently being debated in Congress. That Tweet was followed by a reference to universal basic income, a concept that Musk has tweeted favorably about in the past.

Then, eleven hours after posting that “Twitter sucks,” Musk shared what many found to be an offensive and transphobic Tweet commenting that “pronouns suck.” Musk’s Tweet appears to be a mocking criticism of gender-neutral personal pronouns, used by many in an effort to be more inclusive of transgender and non-conforming individuals.

The online criticism of Musk was immediate, apparently even drawing the ire of his girlfriend, musical artist Grimes. In a since deleted Tweet, the musician, whose real name is Claire Boucher and who is a co-parent of Musk’s child, tweeted a reply saying “I love you but please turn off ur phone or give me a dall [sic]. I cannot support this hate. Please stop this. I know this is not your heart.”

Musk’s tweet on Friday isn’t the first time his use of the popular social media medium has sparked outrage — Musk has a long history of taking to Twitter to express his amusement, irritation, and exploration of whatever topic crosses his mind. But his use of Twitter has also landed him in legal trouble. In 2018, Musk was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission related to a Tweet by Musk that claimed he had secured funding to take his publicly-traded company Tesla private at $420 a share. The lawsuit, which asserted that Musk had misled investors, was settled by Musk later that year, with the entrepreneur paying a $20 million fine and relinquishing his role as Chairman of the Board of Tesla.


WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 09: Elon Musk, founder and chief engineer of SpaceX speaks at the 2020 ... [+] GETTY IMAGES

Musk also got into hot water in 2018 for a subsequently deleted Tweet in which Musk used the term “pedo guy” to describe Vernon Unsworth, a British caver and one of the rescuers of the 12 boys and their soccer coach that were famously trapped in a cave in Thailand in July, 2018. Unsworth sued Musk for defamation in California, but a jury found that Musk was not liable to Unsworth. For his part, Musk answered that his Twitter comment, which seemingly was a reference to pedophilia, was “heated rhetoric” and not meant to state that Unsworth was, in fact, a pedophile.

Musk’s newest Tweet comes at a time when America is already mired in a national debate about issues of identity and inclusion, and in particular, inclusion of transgender individuals. In addition to ongoing discrimination of transgender individuals in all aspects of American society, there is also a troubling trend of violence against trans individuals in the United States. According to Human Rights Campaign (HRC), in 2019 at least 27 transgender or gender non-conforming people were fatally shot or killed by violence. 91% of the victims were Black women and 81% were under the age of 30. HRC has also counted 22 murders of transgender and non-conforming individuals in 2020, including at least 4 deaths since the start of July.

By seemingly mocking the issue of personal pronoun usage, the widely-followed entrepreneur isn’t just sharing the musings of an eccentric businessman, he is also stoking a cultural conflict and diminishing an issue that is an important aspect of the recognition and inclusion of transgender and non-conforming individuals. While likely not intended to be hateful, Musk’s comment nonetheless shows an incredible amount of ignorance by a man seen by many as one of the boldest and most insightful entrepreneurs of our lifetime. Musk’s Tweet, whatever it’s motivation, should not only be followed by clarification, but it demands an apology as well.

Of course pronouns matter – so does human dignity. If Elon Musk wants to send people to space, perhaps he should spend a bit more time respecting them here on earth first.

Using whatever personal pronoun they prefer.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Seth Cohen

Leaked documents reveal Exxon changed its employee-ranking system amid the coronavirus pandemic, putting more workers at risk of getting cut

Benji Jones

Carlos Jasso/Reuters

Leaked documents revealed Exxon Mobil made changes to its internal employee-ranking system in April, exposing a much larger portion of its staff to performance-based cuts.
In May, Exxon's CEO said the company did not have layoff plans. Four former employees and one current employee said the company was obscuring layoffs in performance-based cuts.
"We do not have a target to reduce headcount through our talent management process," an Exxon representative said. "Employees who need significant improvement (NSI) are given a plan and opportunities to improve their performance."
Almost all major oil companies have taken aggressive action to weather the downturn brought by the coronavirus pandemic, which sent the price of oil tumbling.
Are you a current or former Exxon employee? Reach out to this reporter at bjones@businessinsider.com or through the secure messaging app Signal at 646-768-1657.
For more stories like this, sign up here for our weekly energy newsletter, Power Line.

The oil giant Exxon Mobil, challenged by a collapse in oil prices, made changes to the way it assesses employee performance to cut more workers without using traditional layoffs, according to current and former employees and documents seen by Business Insider.

Exxon ranks its salaried employees based on their performance, according to the documents, five former workers, and one current employee. Employees at the lowest rank, called "Needs Significant Improvement" (NSI), are at risk of being cut.

In April, Exxon expanded the number of employees required to be placed in that lowest category, the documents show, putting 8% or more of salaried US workers at risk of losing their job.

Click here to subscribe to Power Line, Business Insider's weekly energy newsletter.

"We have a rigorous talent-management process which routinely assesses employee performance," Ashley Alemayehu, an Exxon representative, said in a statement to Business Insider. "We do not have a target to reduce headcount through our talent management process. Employees who need significant improvement (NSI) are given a plan and opportunities to improve their performance."

Oil companies have been hammered this year by the coronavirus pandemic, which sapped demand for fuel and sent the price of oil into a tailspin. Today a barrel of Brent crude, the international benchmark, is down about 34% since the start of the year.

Every major oil company has taken aggressive action to weather the downturn, including Exxon. In early June, BP said it would lay off 10,000 workers, citing the coronavirus pandemic, while Chevron announced job cuts of a similar size.

Read more: Layoffs, furloughs, and budget cuts: We're tracking how 20 energy giants from Shell to Chevron have responded to the historic oil market meltdown
'Today we have no layoff plans'

Exxon CEO Darren Woods told investors on May 27 that the company didn't plan to cut jobs.

"Today we have no layoff plans," he said.

In the statement Friday, Alemayehu said Exxon had no plans for layoffs.

Four former employees and one current employee said the change in the review process amounts to layoffs by another name because they would lead to more performance-based cuts. The people spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Business Insider has verified their identities.

Exxon had 75,000 employees at the end of last year, including nonsalaried workers, Alemayehu said.

Before the pandemic, if a company fired a large number of workers, it would have to pay a higher tax for unemployment. That usually creates an incentive to characterize layoffs as performance-related cuts, said Michele Evermore, a senior researcher and policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project.

But because of the pandemic's influence on the economy, every state has waived the requirement that companies pay a premium for laying off staff, she said. So that's likely not what the change to Exxon's performance assessment is about, she said.

The people who spoke with Business Insider said it was about optics — Exxon doesn't want to announce layoffs.
FILE PHOTO: View of the Exxon Mobil refinery in Baytown, Texas Reuters
How Exxon ranks its employees

Exxon sorts its salaried workers into five categories within groups of peers, based on performance, from "outstanding performance" to "performance needs improvement," according to two of the documents reviewed by Business Insider.

"The reason we chose 5 primary categories is that this is the best way of achieving the level of differentiation we need to support a meritocracy and meet our objectives," one of them said.

Within the bottom category, "performance needs improvement," a subset of employees must be assigned to "needs significant improvement," according to the documents and two former employees.

Before the pandemic, Exxon required that a minimum of 3% of employees in certain groups be placed in the NSI category. In April, Exxon bumped up the minimum to 8% and expanded it to include new employees, they said.

"Establishing minimum levels in our lower performance category ensures we maintain a healthy talent pool that is motivated to continuously improve and is replenished on an on-going basis through hiring," an internal document said.

Employees in the NSI category are given a few options, depending on whether they're new hires, according to the former employees and additional documents Business Insider reviewed.

People who have been at Exxon for less than two years have to leave the company. Other employees ranked NSI are given the option to enroll in a performance-improvement plan.

Read more: Layoffs, furloughs, and budget cuts: We're tracking how 20 energy giants from Shell to Chevron have responded to the historic oil market meltdown

Darren Woods, CEO of Exxon REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
'Don't let the performance metrics fool you'

Three of the former employees, all of whom were new hires, said they were caught by surprise when they learned that they were in the bottom rank.

"Up until yesterday, I was not provided any constructive feedback or reason to believe my work would put me in the bottom bracket," said one of the former employees, who was recently told he was in the bottom 8% and would be forced to resign. "Don't let the performance metrics fool you. It was definitely a layoff."

Another former employee said that during her review, she was told that her performance was not in line with her peers, but there "was nothing measurable," she said.

Read more: Big Oil survived the market crisis, but its largest players are still losing billions. 7 top energy analysts laid out what to expect next, from dividend payments to clean-energy investments.

Three former employees also said that when they joined Exxon, they were told they would not initially be ranked.

"As new hires, we were told that we'd just get thrown in the middle, and we didn't have to worry about rankings for the first two years," one of them said. "Then the guidance changed."

This story has been updated to include additional information from current and former Exxon workers.


Get the latest Oil WTI price here.

Get the latest ExxonMobil stock price here.

NEWSLETTER

US coronavirus cases are probably 10 times higher than the official numbers, more and more research suggests
Aria Bendix

Charles Davis, 49, self-administers a coronavirus test in LA County on July 8, 2020. Al Seib/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

The true number of coronavirus cases may be more than 10 times higher than official tallies in many parts of the US, a new CDC study found.
MIT researchers estimated last month that US cases were eight times higher than the official tally.
The bulk of underreporting likely happened in March, but testing shortages and delays are still causing some cases to be missed.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.


The US has by far the largest coronavirus outbreak in the world, but its 4 million reported infections are a small fraction of the true case total.

A new model from the COVID-19 response team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that coronavirus cases are probably more than 10 times higher than the total tally in many parts of the country.

The researchers performed antibody tests in 10 sites across the US, including early hotspots like New York City, western Washington, and the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as places with more recent outbreaks, like South Florida and Louisiana. Antibody tests can tell whether someone was previously infected with COVID-19 even if they didn't get diagnosed initially.

The researchers compared the results of those tests, collected from late March through mid-May, to the number of cases reported during that time. They estimated that there were around 1.8 million coronavirus cases across the 10 sites, but only 165,000 infections had been reported. That meant cases were almost 11 times higher than the official number.


Projecting that discrepancy nationwide suggests the US saw 14.4 million infections over the period studied. Just 1.3 million infections were recorded during that time, however, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The study joins a slew of similar research that illustrates the degree to which coronavirus cases have been vastly underreported in the US.
Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

"The debate is by how much are cases and deaths undercounted," Dr. Howard Koh, a professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, previously told Business Insider. "We probably won't know the real number of deaths and numbers infected until this is all over."

A few studies are coalescing around estimates similar to the CDC's. Research from MIT suggests that around 17.5 million people in the US had gotten COVID-19 by June 18 — around eight times the official number.


And a study published in the journal Science found that the US probably saw around 8.7 million coronavirus cases in the last three weeks of March alone, though only 100,000 were officially counted during that time. That analysis was based on reports of flu-like illnesses from the CDC's influenza surveillance system. The researchers found that many states reported a surge of illnesses in March — about 2.8 million — that weren't attributable to the flu or seasonal respiratory diseases. They think most were coronavirus cases.

That study also suggested that just one-third of coronavirus patients in the US sought medical care in the first place, which would mean the actual surge of coronavirus cases was likely three times larger than those extra documented flu-like cases. That's how they arrived at an estimate of 8.7 million cases in March.

Additionally, a CDC report published Tuesday found that Indiana's true case tally was 10 times higher than the one reported by the end of April.
Underreporting is still a problem
A Quest technician handles coronavirus samples. Quest Diagnostics

The primary reason US numbers are so low is that the country's testing capacity was severely hampered at the beginning of the pandemic. The CDC initially distributed faulty tests, then lingering shortages of accurate tests meant that only patients with severe symptoms were eligible.


This was compounded by the fact that some people may not have known their symptoms were coronavirus-related: In the early days of the pandemic, the CDC only listed three COVID-19 symptoms: a fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath. The agency now associates 11 symptoms with the disease. Plus, many people with mild or asymptomatic cases are unlikely to seek out a test at all.

The US has ramped up testing considerably over the last few months and is now testing 171 out of every 100,000 people each day — a higher per capita rate than in any other country.

But testing delays and shortages are still a problem.

Quest, one of the largest diagnostic testing companies, told Montana officials last week that it couldn't accept new tests for another two to three weeks, the Daily Beast reported. Its average turnaround time for results is now seven days or more, compared to just three or four days in June. A small number of patients may wait up to two weeks.


"Demand for COVID-19 molecular testing continues to outpace Quest's capacity and is highest in the South, Southwest, and West regions of the country," the company said in a press release.

More than 5% of coronavirus tests are coming back positive in 34 states, according to data from Johns Hopkins, and 27 states have seen their positivity rates rise over the last two weeks — a sign that cases are still being missed.

"There could be a lot more people infected than we thought," Elizabeth Halloran, a biostatistician at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and University of Washington, previously told Business Insider. "We'll have to piece it together with the serology afterwards."

Trump talks up his rule-cutting, but courts saying otherwise

By KEVIN FREKING and ELLEN KNICKMEYER

FILE- In this July 24, 2020, file photo President Donald Trump speaks during an event to sign executive orders on lowering drug prices, in the South Court Auditorium in the White House complex in Washington. Trump is working overtime to solidify his image as a champion regulation-cutter in the leadup to the November election. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)


WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is positioning himself as a champion regulation-cutter in the leadup to the Nov. 3 election, but in between his showy red-tape-cutting events, his deregulatory agenda is taking a beating in the courts.

One day, he’s hailing a massive rollback to one of the nation’s most important environmental laws, which he hopes will speed up gas pipelines and all kinds of other big projects. Another, he’s holding forth between two pickup trucks being used as props on the South Lawn of the White House — a blue one piled with weights identified as government regulations and a red one, of course, that has been unburdened.

“No other administration has done anywhere near,” Trump declared.

But there’s a sharp disconnect between the president’s muscular rhetoric and the many courtroom battles he’s lost.

Trump’s deregulatory victories have been shrinking in number as courts uphold many of the lawsuits filed by states, environmental groups and others in response to his administration’s sometimes hastily engineered rollbacks.

Just hours before Trump’s South Lawn event, for example, a federal judge reinstated an Obama-era rule that required oil and gas companies operating on public lands to take reasonable measures to stop climate-damaging methane emissions.

The judge described the Trump administration’s legal groundwork to justify the rollback as “wholly inadequate” and “backwards.” “An agency cannot flip-flop regulations on the whims of each new administration,″ she wrote.

The defeat was the administration’s third major loss in federal courts in just one week.

“Those were three really huge major decisions all across the span ... where the Trump administration was rebuked across the board,” said Vickie Patton, general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund, who had a role in all three cases.

Bethany Davis Noll, director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, estimates the administration has emerged victorious in 15 percent of the regulatory lawsuits. Previous administrations generally won about 70 percent, she said.

To be sure, the president has had a few wins, and many important cases are not yet resolved.

Among the administration’s victories: It scrapped an Obama-era regulation that imposed tougher restrictions on hydraulic “fracking” operations. Trump also signed 15 resolutions of disapproval that passed a Republican-led Congress, overturning an array of rules issued by federal agencies in the final months of Barack Obama’s presidency.

But where Trump has really made his mark is throttling back new regulations, said Cary Coglianese, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and director of the Penn Program on Regulation.

“There’s just been much less new regulation of great consequence during the last three and a half years,” Coglianese said.

With respect to peeling back existing regulations, Coglianese finds Trump efforts to be limited and mostly aimed at undoing the work of his predecessor. That includes throwing out Obama’s legacy efforts to moderate climate change by mandating far more fuel-efficient vehicles and setting the first limits on carbon pollution from U.S. power plants.

Other administration efforts would greatly weaken the scope of two laws that have served as the foundation for a half-century of public health and environmental regulation, removing federal protections for millions of miles of waterways and wetlands and reining in environmental reviews and public input for major projects.

Among modern-day presidents, Coglianese said, Democrat Jimmy Carter was probably the most impactful, deregulating the airline, trucking and railroad industries. Democrat Bill Clinton systematically got rid of outdated regulations through a reinventing government initiative.

With Trump, “there’s a lot more smoke-and-mirrors to the deregulatory picture than the administration paints,” Coglianese said. “It’s certainly not at all the driver of economic growth during the pre-COVID period of the administration and it’s certainly not enough to take us out of the economic troubles we find ourselves in.”

The president early in his administration directed agencies to scrap two regulations for every new one they create. The White House said last week that it has taken seven deregulatory actions for every significant new rule.

But even the White House’s own records reflect that many of those rule-cutting measures were minor. The ratio falls to 2 to 1 over the past two years when only significant rules are considered.

The president’s pose between the two pickups was designed as a reminder to supporters — not as an overture to win over new ones — that if you distrust regulations, Trump is still your guy, said Daniel Bosch, who tracks regulatory policy at the conservative American Action Forum.

“Those folks that are driven and motivated by deregulation know that the president is committed to that,” Bosch said.

Trump also sees the regulatory issue as a chance to tie Vice President Joe Biden to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. He argues that Biden’s support for the Paris climate accord and other policies would lead to higher energy bills and job cuts.

If he wins, Biden pledges to do to Trump’s regulatory record what Trump did to Obama’s: obliterate it.

“We’re not just going to tinker around the edges,” Biden said last week. He pledged to “reverse Trump’s rollbacks of ... public health and environmental rules and then forge a path to greater ambition.”

Trump’s regulatory legacy will be greatly shaped in coming months by court rulings in lawsuits challenging some of his most potentially consequential rollbacks.

“He needs to win reelection in order to defend those rules in court, and even then I think it’s going to be a longshot to win some of those,” Noll said.

Both sides know the end game for many of the rollbacks may be in the Supreme Court — and Trump may have a chance to name more justices to the court if he wins a second term.

If it comes to that, said Patton, the environmental group lawyer, then regulatory litigation could be “generation-defining.”

—-

Knickmeyer reported from Oklahoma City. Will Weissert contributed from Washington.

Hedge fund Bridgewater Associates sued by former co-CEO Murray

Bhargav Acharya, Kanishka Singh

FILE PHOTO: Eileen Murray Co-CEO, Bridgewater Associates, speaks during the Milken Institute's 22nd annual Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., April 29, 2019. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo

(Reuters) - Bridgewater Associates former co-Chief Executive Officer Eileen Murray filed a lawsuit against the hedge fund on Friday, saying it is withholding up to $100 million in deferred compensation because she publicly disclosed her gender discrimination dispute with the firm.

Murray, who stepped down as co-CEO earlier this year, said in the suit that the circumstances surrounding her departure had given rise to substantial claims by her against Bridgewater based on gender discrimination, unequal pay and breach of contract.

Murray had informed the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a self-regulatory agency that she now chairs, of the dispute with Bridgewater, which is the world’s largest hedge fund. In response, Bridgewater told Murray on July 14 in writing that her public disclosures of her dispute with the firm would result in a forfeiture of her deferred compensation, according to the complaint.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Connecticut, the withheld compensation is estimated to be in the range of $20 million to $100 million, due over the course of the next decade.


In the suit, Murray, who was one of the highest-ranking female executives in the industry as co-CEO of the hedge fund, called Bridgewater’s attempt to withhold the deferred pay an “improper gambit to silence her voice” and “part of a cynical plan to intimidate and silence her.”

The hedge fund said it had no immediate comment on the lawsuit.

Murray, 62, joined the hedge fund, founded by billionaire Ray Dalio, in 2009 and became co-CEO in 2011.


Reporting by Bhargav Acharya and Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Leslie Adl