Fortune

Emails to the movie studio’s employees threatening them and their families is the latest bad news for Sony Pictures since a cyber attack last week exposed sensitive documents

Last week’s cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment turned scarier on Friday when the hackers responsible reportedly threatened company employees and their families.

Someone claiming to represent the hacker group Guardians of Peace sent emails to Sony Pictures employees in which they promised to bring about the “collapse” of the company. The message, sent by the self-described “head of GOP,” asked that employees join the hackers in denouncing Sony Pictures or suffer severe consequences.

“If you don’t,” the message said, “not only you but your family will be in danger.”

Variety, which obtained the email, also reported that Sony Pictures, after becoming aware of the message, told employees to turn off their mobile devices. There is no word on the number of employees who received the message.

“We understand that some of our employees have received an email claiming to be from GOP,” a Sony spokesman told Fortune in a statement. “We are aware of the situation and are working with law enforcement,”

In total, the e-mail is four paragraphs long, contains bad grammar, and goes on to attack Sony Pictures while promising further unspecified action. It’s unclear how many Sony employees received the message.

“[W]hat we have done so far is only a small part of our further plan,” the email said. “It’s your false [sic] if you if you think this crisis will be over after some time. All hope will leave you and Sony Pictures will collapse,” the e-mail reads.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is also investigating the matter. In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, the FBI said it was aware of the threatening e-mails and that it will continue to investigate the cyber attack.

Little is known about Guardians of Peace, which the email’s author described as “a worldwide organization.” The group took responsibility for last week’s cyber attack, involved leaking numerous sensitive company documents and causing Sony Pictures to shut down its computer system. Among the documents released was salary information for thousands of Sony Pictures employees as well as documents containing thousands of passwords to company computers, social media accounts and even financial accounts.

Reports surfaced earlier this week that Sony Pictures was set to blame the government of North Korea for backing the cyber attack, but the country has denied any involvement. Kim Jong Un previously called Sony Pictures’ upcoming release of the film The Interview — a comedy that depicts an assassination attempt on the North Korean leader — “an act of war.”

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

A year after gun-owners were stocking up for fear of heightened government restrictions

People just aren’t stocking up on firearms the way they used to.

Gun maker Smith & Wesson said on Thursday that rifle sales dropped by more than half in the Springfield, Mass. company’s latest quarter. The steep decline is part of a 22% dip in overall sales for Smith & Wesson, according to the company’s second-quarter earnings report.

Smith & Wesson blamed the sales misfire on a drop-off in consumer demand from last year, when the fear of potential government restrictions on gun ownership led gun-owners to stockpile firearms. Earlier this year, the company warned of lower gun sales in the U.S. going forward as part of a lowered sales forecast for the rest of the year.

Smith & Wesson shares dipped as much as 4% in after-hours trading as investors reacted to the latest disappointing sales numbers from the company, which has seen its stock drop 30% since the start of the year and reported overall sales that were off by 24% in the first quarter.

Also on Thursday, Smith & Wesson reported second-quarter profits of $5.1 million, or 9 cents per share, which is down from nearly $17 million in the same quarter last year. The company’s $108.4 million in second-quarter revenue actually beat Wall Street estimates (of around $105 million), but Smith & Wesson also delivered a lower than expected third-quarter outlook. The company expects earnings in the current quarter to fall between 9 cents and 11 cents per share, while analysts were expecting 21 cents per share.

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Artificial intelligence will rock the job market, your company will need a Chief of Work, and cubicle farms will disappear

If you happen to work at Microsoft, Google, Credit Suisse, or Unilever, you may be slightly ahead of your time — but only slightly. Those four companies have been featured in a new research report on the future of work.

“Most of the changes we’ll see in the next few years have already started to happen, but they will accelerate,” says Peter Martin, workplace strategy director for Asia at real estate company CBRE. “The future is already here.”

Why real estate? Simple: Many big commercial clients sign leases for a quarter century or more into the future, so the industry keeps an eye on how work, and the places where we do it, are most likely to evolve. CBRE teamed up with Genesis, a giant real estate developer in China, to conduct in-depth interviews and other research with about 220 expert observers, executives, and office workers around the world, many of them Millennials.

The study turned up some intriguing signs of things to come, like these three:

Artificial intelligence will transform the workplace

The era of automation, which has seen robots replace workers in routine jobs in warehouses and on manufacturing assembly lines, is shifting to “knowledge work.” Among the advantages of teaching computers to gather information, and base decisions on it, is that “humans have biases. For example, people tend to be overly optimistic about a risky course of action if they’ve already invested a lot in it,” Martin says. “AI eliminates those biases.”

It could also eliminate a lot of jobs — up to 50% of what knowledge workers do now, according to some estimates. Economies worldwide “won’t create new jobs at the same rate as we lose old ones,” says Martin. “So there will be a difficult period of adjustment.”

Martin likens this to what’s already happened within the legal profession, where computerization of routine research has slashed the number of new associates law firms need to hire. The upside: AI will free up human talent for more interesting, creative work. Eventually, we’ll all get used to it, Martin says — especially since many of the tasks AI will take over are the business equivalent of household drudgery: “You never hear anyone complain about the invention of the dishwasher.”

Companies will need a Chief of Work

Most C-suites haven’t added new roles since the Chief Information Officer title took hold about 20 years ago, but CBRE’s research suggests that’s about to change. For one thing, companies today have “human resources, we have IT, and we have a real estate division — all acting separately and, often, unwittingly working against each other,” Martin says.

A Chief of Work would coordinate all that, with an eye toward building a culture that attracts top talent, or what Martin calls “the complete experience of working for the company, and how that affects performance.” Finding the most efficient balance between full-time employees and growing armies of independent contractors will be in the Chief of Work’s wheelhouse, too.

Office cubicles will be a relic of the past

For huge swaths of the knowledge-working, laptop- or tablet-toting world, technology has already made a desk in an office obsolete, or at least optional. So, partly in the interest of face-to-face collaboration, companies in CBRE’s study are thinking up ways to make workspaces healthier, more comfortable, and more fun.

One example: Old-school fluorescent lighting could be replaced by LED lights that can easily change color throughout the day to reflect subtle changes in the sky outside, like those lights on many airliners now that simulate dawn, midday, and dusk for long-distance travelers.

Companies will also move toward creating campus-like office buildings, like Chiswick Park in England, with amenities and events that draw people in. Martin says more big companies around the world are starting to hand empty space, including erstwhile cube farms, over to local artists and musicians for use as studios.

“HR people tell us they see a tremendous increase in employee engagement from art, in particular,” says Martin. “Making a more interesting environment, where you bring more of the broader culture into the space, creates a buzz and an energy that you really can’t replicate in any other way.”

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

The court will hear a discrimination case that seeks to make clear what accommodations employers must make to expecting mothers

Should a pregnant worker have the right to workplace accommodations, such as a chair to sit on as she works a cash register or more frequent bathroom breaks during her job as a call center operator?

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 was supposed to make the answers to those questions—in both instances—crystal clear. Congress passed it to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision that pregnancy discrimination is not sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But over the years, employers have reached differing conclusions about how the Act’s language should be interpreted—specifically the line that says employers must treat pregnant women the same as “other persons not so affected [by pregnancy] but similar in their ability or inability to work.” Some companies have read that phrase to mean that they must meet the needs of pregnant women the same as they would meet the needs of any other worker who’s similarly physically restricted. But other employers believe that so long as their policies are pregnancy-neutral—which often means considering pregnancy the same way they would an off-the-job injury that garners no special treatment—they’re in the clear.

United Parcel Service abided by the latter interpretation in 2006, when it denied former truck driver Peggy Young’s request for light duty during her pregnancy, which forced her into unpaid leave. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear Young’s case and ultimately rule on what accommodations employers must make under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, a decision that could touchthe lives of the 68 million working women in the U.S. and the 62% of new moms in the last year who were part of the workforce.

“This case is of particular importance because so many working women are now working well into their pregnancy,” says Katherine Kimpel, a lawyer at Sanford Heisler who specializes in gender and race discrimination and who filed an amicus brief in the case supporting Young. In the U.S., 65% of working, first-time mothers stayed on the job into their last month of their pregnancy, Kimpel says. Among full-time workers, that figure surges to 87%.

All the while, pregnancy discrimination cases are on the rise. In fiscal year 2013, 5,342 pregnancy discrimination charges were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions and state and local Fair Employment Practices agencies, up from 3,900 in 1997. “For those reasons, how employers think about accommodating pregnancy really matters,” Kimpel says.

Peggy Young started working for UPS in 1999; in 2002, she took on a part-time role as a truck driver, picking up air shipments. Four years later, she took a leave of absence to receive in vitro fertilization. When she became pregnant and a midwife instructed her not to lift packages over 20 pounds, Young asked to return to UPS to do either light duty or her regular job as a truck driver, which seldom required her to lift heavy boxes. According to Young’s Supreme Court petition, her manager told her that UPS offered light duty to workers who sustained on-the-job injuries, employees with ailments covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act, and those who had lost Department of Transportation certification because of physical aliments like sleep apnea; not—the manager said—to pregnant workers. UPS wouldn’t allow Young to return to her former role either since her lifting restriction made her a liability. As a result, Young was required to go on extended, unpaid leave, during which she lost her medical coverage.

Young sued UPS in October 2008 for allegedly violating the Pregnancy Discrimination Act since the company failed to provide Young with the same accommodations it gave to employees who were not pregnant but equally unable to work. Young has lost the two previous rulings in the case. A district court decided in February 2011 that UPS’s decision not to accommodate Young was “gender-neutral” and ruled in the company’s favor. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals later affirmed that decision, ruling UPS had established a “pregnancy-blind policy.”

Since the Supreme Court decided to hear the case in July, UPS has announced changes to its policy for pregnant workers. Next year, it will offer temporary light duty to pregnant workers who need it. Despite that reversal, UPS maintains that its denial of Young’s light duty request was lawful at the time and that its policy change is voluntary and not required by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. The Chamber of Commerce filed an amicus brief supporting UPS, calling attention to companies that offer pregnant employees “more than what federal law compels them to provide.”

Young, meanwhile, has received support from across the political spectrum. Pro-life organizations as well as groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have filed briefs backing Young and calling on the high court to rule in favor of workplace accommodations for expecting mothers.

The justices will hear Young’s case nearly six months after the EEOC issued new guidelines to employers on how to treat pregnant workers amid the increase in bias complaints.

“There are lots of women like Peggy Young who need temporary changes at work during pregnancy and too often, even if employers are routinely accommodating disabled workers, pregnant workers are pushed out to unpaid leave or fired,” says Emily Martin, vice president and general counsel of National Women’s Law Center. “This case is really about whether pregnant women will continue to be asked to make the impossible choice between their jobs and their health.”

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com