Archive for September, 2009

Switzerland has jumped ahead of the United States in terms of global business competitiveness, according to the annual survey of the World Economic Forum. The People’s Republic of China has also moved into the top 30 for the first time. Though Switzerland and the U.S. both rank high on innovation and business climate, the U.S. [...]

They couldn’t muster the 60th vote, says Senator Tom Harkin, D.-Iowa, one of the sponsors of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which detractors have dubbed the Employee Forced Choice Act. The 60th vote needed to choke off a filibuster over the measure belonged to Ted Kennedy, but when Harkin phoned Kennedy’s doctor to get [...]

The City of Vallejo, Calif., has been in bankruptcy court for quite some time now, running up a legal tab of about $5 million, but it’s made some progress in getting most of its labor contracts voluntarily renegotiated to lower its obligations. Not so the electrical workers’ union, however. The group never agreed to a [...]

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has codified the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into its Compliance Manual, incorporating the law’s standard that the statute of limitation on discriminatory pay practices resets each time a paycheck is issued, regardless of when the initial discriminatory pay decision was made. The 2009 Fair Pay Act, to recount, [...]

Though the Obama administration has dropped the “no match” rule that created a safe harbor for employers who lay off workers whose Social Security numbers don’t match their names, the layoff route is still the route of choice for employers who get caught with illegals on their workforce. Such is the case with American Apparel [...]

A study done by the Center for Urban Economic Development, the National Employment Law Project, and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment has turned up some startling statistics revealing persistent wage abuse. Surveying 4,300 low-wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, the consortium found that: 26 percent reported being paid [...]

You can say you saw it here first (all except for the red border, which is a result of using Vista’s snipping tool). It’s the revised United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) home page, redesigned to make it more user friendly for finding forms and checking on one’s immigration processing status. If you want [...]

Pharma-giant Pfizer has agreed to pay the largest criminal fine in U.S. history–$1.195 billion–for marketing its drug Bextra for unapproved “off-label” uses. The company ran afoul of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act when it chose to market Bextra for purposes other than the anti-inflammatory treatment for which it was approved by the Food and [...]

The decision may not even resonate outside the court’s jurisdiction, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has found that individual managers can be held liable for former employees’ back wages even after a company has gone bankrupt. In a Nevada case, Boucher v. Shaw, former employees sued the CEO and CFO of the bankrupt [...]

Despite the united efforts of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and politicians trolling for the future votes of (suddenly amnestied) illegal immigrants, the Department of Labor is implementing the Bush-era mandate for contractors to use E-Verify. Everything E-Verify (unless delayed again or even canceled) thus takes hold a week from today, on Sept. 8, 2009. [...]