Archive for December, 2008

One of the Google Alerts to which I subscribe is “health care reform,” which seems to offer the liveliest discussion of late of any topic I subscribe to. For obvious reasons, of course, what with our incoming president putting health care on the top burner (right below economic stimulus, I would imagine). Everyone in what [...]

You might think it was the early phase of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain if you visited South China these days. Guangdong Province is the manufacturing heartland of China, and its factories supply a lot of what we Americans find at Wal-Mart and many other retail stores, especially toys. But things are getting tough [...]

I call it “The Immaculate Recession” because our current turmoil seems to be solidifying what should’ve been obvious a long ago:  We are no longer an Industrial Revolution economy; we’re the Information Age economy, and in that area, we still lead the world. That’s why, when one surveys the pain going around in 2008, it’s [...]

Mostly right, I guess, given the composition of the current administration. Much indeed has been made of Bush’s so-called “midnight regulations,” which no doubt face reversal under Obama and the Democratic Congress, but one set of regulations looks to be ensconced for a while. That would be the Final Rule issued Nov. 17, and taking [...]

I won’t even begin to get into the changes to the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) coming into force on Jan. 16, 2009, but as many have mentioned, the FMLA Final Rule (registered on Nov. 17) is a boon to families of service members and to employers, the latter of whom now get a better [...]

I’ve been following the News Alerts and other features at Personnel Concepts and note that big changes are coming labor’s way next year even before the new president is sworn in on Jan. 20. First, there are a lot of clarifications and updates to the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). For one, it now covers [...]

Regardless of what you think of minimum wage laws (business owners generally hate them while workers and advocates generally favor them), it’s pretty hard to survive on a minimum-wage existence. Consider this:  San Francisco and Santa Fe, two cities that maintain their own minimum wage laws (which are higher than both the federal and state [...]