This Labor Day, we take a moment to celebrate the contributions of workers worldwide and reflect on the critical labor issues and milestones that have shaped the past year. From corporate controversies to strides in workplace wellbeing, 2024–2025 underscored the ongoing importance of protecting fair, dignified work across industries.

Key Trends Shaping Labor Risks

Data from the past year shows that labor-related risks remain a significant and rising concern within the broader landscape of social risks affecting businesses and the global workforce.

• Working conditions overwhelmingly dominate the labor risk landscape, reflecting widespread worker actions, negotiations, and demands for higher standards.
• Workplace diversity and inclusion continues to be a significant area of focus, as organizations navigate evolving expectations around equity, representation, and belonging.
• Although smaller in proportion, forced labor and child labor risks remain critical concerns, attracting heightened regulatory scrutiny and public attention.

Real-world examples from the past year illustrate how companies have confronted—and, in some cases, exacerbated—these challenges.

Labor Controversies: A Year of Struggle and Advocacy

Several major companies faced notable labor controversies over the past year, revealing systemic issues and prompting calls for change:

• Starbucks Corp weathered a turbulent year, battling union disputes and a lawsuit alleging the company sourced coffee from a Brazilian supplier linked to slave-like working conditions. Domestically, tensions escalated with Starbucks Workers United amid widespread strikes across nine states, unlawful store closures, and stalled contract negotiations. Meanwhile, the company announced over 1,000 corporate layoffs as part of broader restructuring efforts.
• Volkswagen AG grappled with deep unrest, both at home and abroad. Mass strikes erupted over layoffs and wage cuts in Germany following the company’s decision to scrap its historic no-layoffs policy. Internationally, Volkswagen’s sale of its Xinjiang plant, under scrutiny for alleged human rights violations, highlighted the persistent pressure to address ethical concerns in global supply chains.
  
• Glovo faced intensifying scrutiny in Europe. Labor inspections and court rulings in Spain and Italy found the company had misclassified thousands of workers, evaded Social Security contributions, and skirted labor laws through subcontracting. Substantial fines, criminal complaints, and penalties for illegal worker surveillance have kept Glovo in the labor rights spotlight.
  

Other companies also faced investigations over child and forced labor violations. To mention a few, HelloFresh faced an investigation in the U.S. regarding allegations of migrant child labor at its Illinois facility, which has led to lawsuits from shareholders. Similarly, JBS USA reached a $4 million settlement related to child labor violations identified in its meatpacking plants. Additionally, Temu, managed by PDD Holdings, is being investigated in both the U.S. and Europe for purported connections to forced labor in China, highlighting ethical issues in global e-commerce supply chains.

Positive Highlights: Advancing Workplace Excellence

Despite these challenges, 2024–2025 also featured companies making meaningful strides in promoting employee well-being and ethical labor practices.

The steady engagement around Sustainable Development Goal 8—promoting decent work and sustained economic growth—remains a bright spot. While progress is ongoing, consistent attention to this goal underscores its critical role in shaping future business and social outcomes.
Several companies stood out for their positive contributions:

• Alight Solutions was recognized by Newsweek as one of America’s Greatest Workplaces for Mental Wellbeing 2025. Initiatives like Mindful Mondays, peer mentoring, and partnerships with organizations such as NAMI-NYC demonstrate Alight’s commitment to fostering a thriving, mentally healthy workforce.
  
• KnowBe4, a cybersecurity training leader, was named one of the Best Workplaces in Technology for the GCC region. Its culture of transparency, ownership, and continuous professional growth has positioned it as an exemplary employer.
  Cushman & Wakefield earned dual accolades: inclusion in the 2025 Global Outsourcing 100 by IAOP and a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index. These honors reflect the firm’s dedication to operational excellence and workplace inclusivity.
  

Looking Ahead: Progress and Persistence

As we mark Labor Day 2025, one truth stands out: while important progress has been made, much work remains. Workers continue to push for safer conditions, fair treatment, and respect across industries, prompting organizations to adapt and evolve.

Happy Labor Day!

On April 24, 2022, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Space X, The Boring Company, and Neuralink—and one of the most popular people on Twitter with one of the largest followings—reached an agreement to buy Twitter for roughly 44 billion dollars. On July 8, 2022, the deal failed to materialize after Musk withdrew from the negotiations due to his concerns about the company's alleged overabundance of fake Twitter user accounts, aka bots. As a result, the Twitter stock price plummeted by 15% after the announcement.

Now that his deal to buy Twitter has failed and culminated in a legal battle, Musk's public sentiment has reached all-time lows. The public sentiment for Twitter has also taken a hit. In general, public sentiment surrounding this deal was largely negative from both sides:

1. Musk's fans were disappointed because they thought it would allow him to spread his message about sustainable energy sources further.
2. Twitter's users were happy because they believed his involvement would have led to changes that would have made the platform less accessible than ever before.

But how exactly was public sentiment affected by the fallout of Elon Musk's failed Twitter acquisition? Let's find out. Here are five effects of the failed Musk-Twitter deal.

Notes: Dates on the charts follow the day/month/year format. Additional timeline source: “A timeline of Elon Musk's tumultuous Twitter acquisition attempt,” ABCnews.com, July 13, 2022.

1. Merger and acquisition sentiment dropped from the beginning

Musk had been exploring the possibility of purchasing Twitter as early as January 2022 when he began increasing his positions in Twitter stock. By March 14, Musk became the largest shareholder in the company, according to a securities filing. And that's when the sentiment toward the acquisition began to drop.

M&A sentiment experienced a further drop when Musk officially announced his offer to purchase the Twitter company on April 14, 2022. On Reddit, for example, members of the r/Economics community posted and engaged with the following: Elon Musk Launches $43 Billion Hostile Takeover of Twitter, a post that since has been removed but represents one of many sources feeding sentiment toward the topic.

In May 2022, Musk announced a hold on the deal, pushing M&A sentiment even farther down. And more recently, in late June and early July when Twitter sued Musk for breaching the M&A agreement, M&A sentiment fell deeper into the negative space.

2. Sentiment for Elon Musk and Twitter declined likewise

But how do Elon Musk's and Twitter's sentiments evolve with M&A mentions?

In measuring and analyzing M&A mentions in web data, we found that Twitter's brand suffered but not nearly as much as Musk's. Both of their sentiments dropped in April when Musk announced his offer. However, Musk's sentiment suffered more when he put the deal on hold in May and again in June when Twitter filed a lawsuit against him.

Figure 2 shows two additional drops in Musk's sentiment for July. These correspond to news events regarding the trial, including news about the trial's start date in October.

3. Musk's brands, Tesla and SpaceX, suffered, too

Unfortunately for Musk, his other brands also experienced a drop in sentiment. For example, Tesla's sentiment experienced corresponding declines compared to Musk's, but not nearly as much as SpaceX's (Figure 3). One reason for this disparity could be the open letter SpaceX's workers wrote. The workers voiced their concern about Musk's behavior in this letter, stating, "Elon's behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us."

Further, in Figure 3, we track Tesla's stock performance. Initial data shows a possible correlation between Tesla's stock price and sentiment. However, further analysis and backtesting are needed to confirm this correlation.

4. Musk's sentiment suffered more than Twitter's

Twitter's sentiment remained relatively stable, seeing only a minor drop when Musk became the largest shareholder. Even Twitter's stock price remained stable, experiencing a temporary increase when Musk purchased Twitter stock but settling after. It's worth noting that Twitter's stock price was declining before January 2022, which might have influenced Musk's decision to buy.

In contrast, Musk's sentiment took a huge hit when he became the largest shareholder.

5. It’s not only about Musk and Twitter

In late 2021 and early 2022, open-source sentiment polarity was dipping. It experienced its biggest dip after February 2022 when Twitter admitted it had mistakenly removed Ukraine open-source intelligence accounts.

However, in April 2022, Musk said that one of the ways he wanted to improve Twitter was to make its algorithms open source to increase trust. How did the open-source community take the news? According to the chart (Figure 5), well. Open-source sentiment polarity jumped back up.

Analyzing the M&A sentiments

Overall, Elon Musk’s sentiment polarity reached lower levels than those of Twitter and his other brands—although SpaceX took a significant hit, too. Whether because of his brash public statements or his employees criticizing his focus and intentions, data shows that netizens were not supportive of his attempted acquisition. And with the Twitter v. Musk court battle scheduled and looming, his sentiment doesn’t seem like it will be improving anytime soon.

Reach out to SESAMm

To learn more about how we analyze web data or to request a demo, reach out to one of our representatives.

All our best wishes for this new year 2019!

2018 proved to be an eventful year for SESAMm with multiple renowned customers acquired, our A series fundraising campaign, numerous prizes won and milestones reached. Here is a look back at our rewarding year 2018 followed by our next steps for 2019.

Successful market entry in the US and around the world

The rapid growth of the alternative data industry and of SESAMm

As a Fintech company specialized in alternative data for Asset Management, 2018 represented a thrilling year in our industry and 2019 already promises to be even more exciting.

During 2018, after our very first business trip in the United States, our international sales development beyond Europe began accelerating. In just one year, we already signed contracts with multiple clients. These include major hedge funds in the US and a major global trading company managing $100 billion in financial assets and part of the Top 10 in its market. The US market represents a powerful strategic growth driver and we are already preparing to open an office there soon!

SESAMm signed its first contract with a client in Africa: Ipro Investment, renown asset manager established for 25 years specialized in emerging markets. Finally, we also signed a contract with our first Japanese client, Nikko Global Wrap, one of the subsidiaries of Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management which is a major asset manager in Japan managing JPY 1.7 trillion.

Strengthening and developing our position in Europe

At the European level, SESAMm has also extended its customer portfolio:

• Groupama AM: new major clients and leading French Asset Management players managing €103 billion Asset under Management (AuM);
• Société Générale: leading French bank present all over the world;
• Raiffeisen Bank International: one of the leading banks in Europe with more than 50,000 employees servicing over 16.5 million customers and possessing around 2,400 business outlets;
• GT Patrimoine : the largest consulting and private management firm in the Lorraine area and based in France for 12 years.

In addition, after our 1st successful collaboration, a new contract was signed with Candriam, leading Asset Management firm and members of the New York Life Group, managing more than $112 billion AuM worldwide.

We are very proud to see how much traction we gained in just a year. The growing use and interest in alternative data for the Asset Management industry, both for quantitative and fundamental funds and asset managers, lead us to prepare for new opportunities of growth & business development.

Cutting edge solutions to respond to market needs

Big Data & AI for Cryptocurrencies

Our first cryptocurrency project began in early 2018. Initially, we started tracking the evolution of the most popular cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) and we analyzed their social data to produce social sentiment & emotions indicators. These indicators have since been integrated into our visualization platform of market sentiment, L’Humeur des Marchés.

This led us to establish a unique partnership based on L’Humeur des Marchés with NapoleonX, a major player as the leading French cryptocurrency manager: the first sentiment and emotion cryptocurrencies analysis destined for the general public. Since then, ETH and BTC sentiment, emotions & opinion value from SESAMm has been available to individual investors and the general public on NapoleonX platform.

The evolution of L’Humeur des Marchés

Our platform L’Humeur des Marchés is an essential tool to guide companies in their investments. During 2018, multiple improvements were added into L’Humeur des Marchés to further enhance its insights & analytics. For example, users have now the possibility to build automated strategies which can generate daily trading signals. Multiple new features were also added such as a strategic backtesting system, daily alerts with 3 years of history and day+1 signal to forecast market movements giving asset managers an edge over competitors.

"L'humeur des marchés" is SESAMm's data visualization platform to analyze market sentiment & emotion for asset management

L’Humeur des Marchés, our data visualization platform

Finally, additional filters have been added to better study & analyze market sentiment: there are now 6 different filters for data sources (sort by sources from web & press, news, blogs, discussions, social trading or all of them) and 9 languages covered (sort by English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, German or all of them). These new filters allow for a wider and more accurate coverage of assets, leading to improved tools & insights for investment decision.

Global recognition & awards for SESAMm

To accomplish our worldwide ambitions, we have started being more and more present abroad, especially at international events. They represent great occasions to promote SESAMm, demonstrate the unique benefits and advantages brought by our technologies & solutions and finally create business opportunities.

This year, we participated in many international events in the US and in Japan, including New York and Hong Kong for Eagle Alpha’s Alternative Data event, Canada, Africa and even London at the French Fintech Tour.

Having been selected for unique international awards reinforces our confidence in the benefits of our solutions for the Asset Management industry, for example with “Talk data to me” by Neudata, Elevator Lab Competition, and Groupama’s award “Créateur de confiance” (Trust Creator) among others.

SESAMm won the pitch "Talk data to Me" of Alternative Data Summit event by Neudata

SESAMm pitch “Talk Data to Me” winner during Alternative Data Summit by Neudata

Moreover, SESAMm has competed in several acceleration programs, in which we were selected in the following ones:

• Fintech Business Camp Tokyo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government accelerator program by Invest Tokyo and powered by Accenture;
• Elevator Lab, Acceleration program of Raiffeisen Bank International where SESAMm competed and was selected;
• French Tech Tour America, IMPACT USA’s program to prepare and discover North America’s markets & opportunities;  
• Pass French Tech, La French Tech’s highly selective program for hyper-growth startups & companies.

SESAMm’s plans for 2019: recruitment, development and growth

This year, we are very proud to see our team grow so much in so little time: we had 16 collaborators at the beginning of January 2018 and we are now a team of 28 members! Talented profiles have joined SESAMm team with NLP, AI & Quant engineers & experts from world-renowned schools. New collaborators will join SESAMm in the first quarter of 2019 and we are still recruiting in various fields such as Data Science, Quantitative Analysis, IT and Natural Language Processing among others. You can find all our offers on our dedicated page SESAMm Career!

Following our international success, especially in the US and in Japan, we are now preparing to open an office in the US in the following months and are already considering this option for Japan. Next month’s promise to be exciting and we will be participating in multiple events such as AI & Data Science for trading in New York in March, Machine Learning in Quant Finance by GFMI in April, and many events & conferences on alternative data, data science, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data for Asset Management around the world.

As you can see, 2018 represented SESAMm an exceptional year for its growth with new customers, including global companies, technological improvements for our solutions & services and a bigger and even more motivated team! Our major event in 2018 was the accomplishment of a €2.6 million Series A fundraising campaign, which enabled us to continue our international development, mainly in America and Asia, and the recruitment of many profiles. 2019 will represent another step for SESAMm to become a leading company in the alternative data solutions in the world. Stay tuned: SESAMm news will arrive soon!