Archive for the ‘Random Musings’ Category

China ushered in the Year of the Ox yesterday (today in the U.S.) amid deepening economic and social woes. It’s hard to get the truth out of the People’s Republic, which is anything but a republic, but the year just closed saw some 18,000 businesses close, mostly in the southeast, and at least 2 million [...]

I’m usually not a fan of the stuff in the Huffington Post since it’s–let’s just say–a bit past center politically, but in my ongoing research on HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), I came across a first-person account of how HIPAA and other medical regulations affect the delivery of health care in America. [...]

The latest version of the economic stimulus legislation includes 187 pages called the Health IT for Economic and Clinical Health Act, or HITECH, with $20 billion in funding to implement a nationwide system of electronic health records (EHRs). This is something that President Obama spoke of frequently during his campaign, and now it appears to [...]

The Associated Press recently reported that 600 executives at the banks just bailed out by the U.S. government took in $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses and perks last year. That comes to about $2.6 million per exec, but we all know that not all execs are created equal. Then came this news from the Government [...]

I ran across a blog posting today by someone named Chef Sheila, but it appears as if the article itself was done by someone else judging by the first paragraph that praises “this journalist’s informative piece” (unless she’s vainly referring to and complimenting herself). Be that as it may, the piece is called “Meltdown 101: [...]

This morning I was poring over a press release from a law firm advising employers to use caution and follow labor law mandates in laying people off in hard times. The release began by lamenting a 40-percent rise in business bankruptcies in the 12-month period ending in June 2008, which saw a total of 33,822 [...]

Turns out that a survey of severance pay around the world reveals that the U.S. pays the least of all monitored countries. READ THE SURVEY RESULTS

With tens of thousands of us Americans losing our jobs every week, I found it interesting to discover that China just in the past year implemented what’s called the Labor Contract Law, which basically gives every employee a nearly unbreakable contract with their employer. Plus, many of these contracts are open-ended, meaning they go on [...]

Here’s something I just learned. I generally don’t pay much attention to unemployment insurance law since I don’t qualify for it, but some people have been pretty smart at gaming the system. To wit: Under federal unemployment rules that are being changed Jan. 6, 2009, a worker who drew wages from jobs in two or [...]

Over at the Ohio Employer’s Law Blog, Jon Hyman has an interesting discussion on the proposal to add ugly to the protected classes under labor law and employment laws. To wit, Hyman writes: “Under the current state of the law, it is illegal to discharge, to refuse to hire, or otherwise to discriminate with respect [...]