The 2024 US election may be over, but it may not feel that way in the workplace.

“I wonder how many people are going to be fired today for a fist fight during lunch over the election. I would be willing to bet that number will not be zero,” David Barron, an employment attorney at law firm Cozen O’Connor, said during a virtual webinar on Nov. 6.

Even before many had cast their ballots, the election had made its mark: 27% of managers said the election caused conflict between employees, while 38% said it decreased morale and productivity, according to an October Resume Builder report. And 75% of workers surveyed by career platform Zety in October said political conversations had them thinking about quitting.

People leaders who are continuing to manage political disagreements among employees might consider bringing in outside experts to help, said Ellen Waldman, VP of advocacy and educational outreach at International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution (CPR).

Keep reading here.—MC

Salary transparency in job postings is becoming more common, but at a slower rate, potentially affected by economic factors, according to new data from Indeed.

Zoom in. Salary transparency has been on the rise since 2019 when fewer than 25% of job postings on Indeed included any compensation information. In September, 57.8% of US job postings on the site “contained some salary information,” a 5.6% increase from 2023, but a slowdown from 2022, when there was a 15.7% rise. The slower growth could be a result of the sluggish labor market.

Employers in states with transparency laws—like New York, Hawaii, and Maryland—were more likely to include salary information in job postings. States with wage transparency laws also saw the greatest YoY growth. One-quarter of US workers now live in an area with pay transparency rules.

Big picture. Despite pay transparency legislation, the gender pay gap widened in 2023, for the first time in two decades. Women earned 83% of what men made, down from 84% in 2022. The gap is even wider for women of color.

Keep reading here.—KP

KPMG is laying off 330 employees in its US audit business because too few people were leaving on their own, the Wall Street Journal reported.

KPMG has been shedding jobs over the last couple of years after bulking up staff during the pandemic. Audit layoffs in March were preceded by layoffs of around 5% and 2% of US staff in 2023. The new layoffs will affect about 4% of the firm’s roughly 9,000 auditing staff in weeks to come.

Big Four, big cuts. KPMG’s layoffs are the most recent in a string of layoffs by large accounting firms in the past two years. PwC cut about 1,800 employees, or 2.5% of its workforce, including some auditing staff, from its US business in September. It was the firm’s first round of formal layoffs since 2009. Deloitte laid off 1,200 workers, according to CPA Practice Advisor, and EY 3,000 in April 2023. However, most of these layoffs have involved advisory rather than auditing personnel, according to the WSJ, because clients forgo those services before auditing.

Don’t blame the robots? Big Four firms have been using artificial intelligence in their auditing work, although KPMG said AI wasn’t related to the layoffs, the WSJ reported. But a recent survey by Source Global Research found that nearly six US and British companies expect that AI will lead their auditors to employ fewer college-educated workers, the WSJ reported.

Keep reading on CFO Brew.—GD