Two weeks after the sale talks collapsed between Paramount Global and Skydance Media, the company’s co-chief executives tried to rally employees for the future in a packed town hall meeting Tuesday morning.

The company’s so-called “Office of the CEO,” comprising division heads George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins, addressed 500 employees on the Paramount Pictures studio lot in Los Angeles while thousands more tuned in remotely.

“We know what a difficult and disruptive period it has been,” Robbins said during the meeting, which was held at the famed movie and TV studio’s Paramount Theatre. “And while we cannot say that the noise will disappear, we are here today to lay out a go-forward plan that can set us up for success no matter what path the company chooses to go down.”

That plan is a multipronged approach intended to increase profits for Paramount’s streaming service while cutting costs and putting some of the company’s assets up for sale. The company has struggled to compete in streaming, while its once-robust cable channels continue to decline.

“Let me be clear … a 61% decline in profits is simply unacceptable,” McCarthy said during the meeting, referring to recent dismal financial results. “We need to act now to reverse this trend.”

Paramount is advancing talks with potential partners to expand the international reach of Paramount+, which could help make up for the declines in linear TV.

The company is also looking at selling certain assets and has already hired bankers to help with the process, Cheeks said. Those assets could include BET and non-CBS-affiliated TV stations. Proceeds from any potential sales could help Paramount pay down its mountain of debt.

It’s all part of a $500-million cost-cutting plan the company previously telegraphed earlier this month, which would include an unspecified number of layoffs. The belt tightening comes after several waves of cost-cutting and previous asset sales, such as the jettisoning of book publishing giant Simon & Schuster and CBS real estate, including its Manhattan skyscraper and the movie and television lot in Studio City.

The Office of the CEO structure was established after the firing of Chief Executive Bob Bakish, who opposed controlling shareholder Shari Redstone’s plan for Skydance Media and its leader David Ellison to take over Paramount.

Skydance, Paramount and Redstone’s holding company National Amusements Inc. has until recently engaged in months of closely watched deal talks. Under the proposal, Skydance would have acquired National Amusements, including Redstone’s voting shares in Paramount. Then Paramount would have acquired Skydance, putting Ellison in charge of the combined company.

Paramount’s special committee was set to vote on the complicated transaction, but Redstone pulled her support at the last minute, killing the deal.

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.

The Supreme Court on Thursday made it harder for the Securities and Exchange Commission to penalize fund managers accused of defrauding investors.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices said those accused of stock frauds are entitled to a jury trial in a federal court, not an administrative hearing before a judge appointed by the SEC.

The court said the 7th Amendment and its right to a jury trial is not limited to private lawsuits, but extends to suits brought by the government seeking fines or penalties for violating the law.

“A defendant facing a fraud suit has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers before a neutral adjudicator,” said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the court. “Rather than recognize that right, the dissent would permit Congress to concentrate the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury in the hands of the executive branch. That is the very opposite of the separation of powers that the Constitution demands.”

Dissenting, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling will make it much harder to enforce regulatory laws.

Congress has “enacted more than 200 statutes authorizing dozens of agencies to impose civil penalties for violations of statutory obligations. Congress had no reason to anticipate the chaos today’s majority would unleash after all these years,” she said. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed.

The decision is consistent with the conservative court’s determination to rein in the so-called “administrative state.”

Congress created the SEC in 1934 in response to the stock market crash with a mission to root out schemes and frauds that cheated investors.

In recent years, conservatives have criticized the SEC as an agency with unchecked power. They say it can enact rules as a legislature does, investigate potential violations as a prosecutor, and at times serve as judge and jury to impose large fines on those who violate its rules.

The case of SEC vs. Jarkesy focused on the agency’s unusual power to seek large fines and penalties through in-house administrative hearings.

In 2007, George Jarkesy launched a hedge fund in Houston that managed about $24 million for 120 investors. It lost money after the Wall Street sell-off in 2008.

The SEC later said he had misled investors by telling them a prominent accounting firm was serving as an auditor and an investment bank was serving as a broker. The agency also said he inflated the value of shares to inflate his management fees.

The SEC brought an administrative claim against Jarkesy and his Patriot28 fund, and after more than six years of review, he was ordered to pay a civil penalty of $300,000 and to “disgorge” $685,000 in illicit gains.

On appeal, his attorney said Jarkesy was “put to trial before a captive agency judge sitting unconstitutionally with no right to a jury.” The SEC “almost always wins in its own courts,” he said.

Congress has steadily expanded the types of cases eligible for administrative hearings. The SEC increased its use of the administrative process after losing a series of jury trials in insider-trading cases, including a 2013 verdict favoring Mark Cuban, then an owner of the Dallas Mavericks.

Unionized workers at the Sierra Club, a leading environmental organization, have voted overwhelmingly to authorize a potential strike amid layoffs and allegations of financial mismanagement.

The vote, in which 87% of about 180 staffers who cast ballots authorized union leaders to call a strike, raises the likelihood of a work stoppage at the historic institution, which has been roiled by downsizing efforts as fundraising has plummeted.

“What has intensified over the last year is a lack of reciprocity, respect and care for members of the union and a dismissal of their humanity,” said Cecilia Garcia-Linz, who has worked at the Sierra Club for 13 years and serves as president of the Progressive Workers Union, which represents Sierra Club employees. “Just because we love the planet and enjoy the work we do doesn’t mean we should forgo wages or other rights they are trying to take away.”

As contract talks have dragged on for the past several months, the union has filed claims of unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board alleging that Sierra Club leaders have deliberately delayed bargaining and retaliated against union leaders by targeting them for layoffs, as well as unlawfully limited employees’ ability to speak out about their workplace conditions, among other charges.

Garcia-Linz said the union plans to call a strike as soon as Tuesday if progress isn’t made on contract negotiations and union leaders who have been laid off aren’t reinstated. A strike would be undertaken by the roughly 200 unionized workers in the Sierra Club’s national organization, not staffers employed by its various local chapters.

Sierra Club spokesperson Jonathon Berman called the union’s allegations “baseless” and said the organization has offered robust pay raises and expanded benefits in negotiations.

“A common tactic from PWU National leadership has been to allege union busting and personally attack individuals within the organization whenever leadership cannot agree to one of their demands,” Berman said in an email.

The Sierra Club experienced a boost in fundraising and increased staffing significantly when former President Trump was in office as it and other groups positioned themselves as a line of defense against Trump administration policies widely viewed as being harmful to the environment. After Trump lost his reelection bid, fundraising fell and the organization has been forced to return to pre-2017 staffing levels, Berman said.

Berman said that after layoffs of about 70 employees — about 10% of the total workforce — and eliminating more than 80 vacant positions, the company is now on track to hit its revenue goals for the year. A strike, he added, would “undermine the Sierra Club’s operations and ability to fundraise.”

The total number of employees in the Sierra Club’s chapters and national staff are down from a high of 913 in 2022 to 718 this year, according to a May budget report compiled by the organization.

A bargaining session with an outside mediator is scheduled for Monday, Berman said.

Much of the union’s ire has been focused on Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous, who took over the organization last year after it went through a wrenching internal reckoning over racist views promoted by its founder, John Muir, more than a century ago and allegations of abuse by a former senior employee that arose out of the #MeToo movement.

Several workers said they were initially excited about the hiring of Jealous, who professed pro-labor sentiment on a listening tour at the beginning of his tenure, but the relationship began to sour when he announced deep cuts to staff and an organizational overhaul in April 2023 that he said would mitigate a budget deficit he had inherited.

In an interview this month, Jealous said the Sierra Club’s leadership was “being extremely transparent,” and that people may not have realized how precarious the group’s finances had been.

“These are the hard decisions that you have to make when you lead a more than century-old institution and you’re committed to it having a future as long as its past,” he said.

In early June, unionized workers sent a letter to the Sierra Club’s board of directors informing them they had issued a vote of no confidence in the organization’s leadership, with more than 90% of 330 union-represented workers approving the rebuke.

In response to union allegations that Jealous has not reigned in spending and has hired friends for management posts, Berman said that travel budgets have been reduced and that many vacant senior-level positions had needed to be filled.

“Given the looming budget crisis Ben Jealous inherited, we moved quickly to fill those key roles with seasoned leaders,” Berman said. “Having worked with Ben Jealous before should not be a disqualifier.”

Erica Dodt, an elected member of the union’s executive committee and a bargaining team member who is about eight months pregnant, was laid off last month. She said that, along with concerns over losing her healthcare benefits, she worries that the turmoil is coming during a year when Trump is seeking reelection.

And Jennifer Cardenas, who worked as a Sierra Club field organizer in the Inland Empire for about two years before being laid off, said her team was hit hard by layoffs last year. The cuts, she said, had unraveled the team’s work on environmental justice issues in communities of color.

“It’s really disheartening,” she said.

Staff writer Sammy Roth contributed to this report.