Expert Compliance Insights & Tips for Businesses

January 30, 2009

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Car Washes Targeted by ICE for Immigration Raids

News item from the blogosphere: Earlier this year, Car Care Inc., a subsidiary of Mace Securities Inc., was ordered to pay a fine of $100,000 and to forfeit $500,000 to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) following a 2006 investigation. (At one time, Mace, a manufacturer of security and personal defense products, was one of the largest carwash chains in the nation.) Car Care Inc...

January 30, 2009

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Unemployment Benefits for Strikers? Court Says Yes

New Jersey nurses strike unemployment benefits

The New Jersey State Supreme Court, in a 6-1 ruling, has authorized striking nurses to receive unemployment benefits, overturning just about every precedent concerning unemployment insurance. The lone dissenting justice, Roberto Rivera-Soto, called the decision "perverse," noting that it "upends the common-sense notion that striking employees have left their employment voluntarily and, hence, ...

January 29, 2009

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Vicky Crawford: Six Years to Get Her Day in Court

discrimination sexual harassment Vicky Crawford

This week the U.S. Supreme Court reversed lower-court rulings in the case of Vicky* Crawford, allowing her suit against Metro Nashville Public Schools in Tennessee to go to trial. (*I've also seen her first name spelled Vicki, don't know which is correct.) The way I read things, Ms. Crawford got royally screwed both by her employers and by the courts. In 2001, Gene Hughes was hired as the emp...

January 29, 2009

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President to Sign Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act Today

Barack Obama Lilly Ledbetter Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act Supreme Court

No doubt emblematic of his entire time in office, President Barack Obama will sign his first piece of legislation today--a labor law that overturns a Bush-era Supreme Court decision. Lilly Ledbetter, who was the subject of that Supreme Court ruling, will be there when Obama inks the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law. The legislation reverses the court's decision in the Ledbetter case that...

January 28, 2009

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Unemployment Nearing 20 Percent If You Count Everyone

unemployed unemployment unemployment rate

Okay, forget the official figure of 7.2 percent that the media quote for U.S. unemployment. As the accompanying graphic from Shadow Stats shows, what the media report is called the U3 unemployment rate--the officially unemployed shown on the bottom red line. When you add in "discouraged" and "marginally attached" workers, you get the middle line on the graph, which is trending toward 14 percen...

January 27, 2009

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Can the NLRB Force a Company to Reopen?

National Labor Relations Board NLRB Republic Windows and Doors

According to employer attorney George Lenard on his blawg, the answer is yes, no, and "it depends," though he does say it's not a very realistic outcome. The company in question is the now-infamous Republic Windows and Doors, late of Chicago but now reincarnated in a place called Red Oak, Iowa, and renamed Echo Windows. The difference? No United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers union in ...

January 27, 2009

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Good to Great, Then Gone or Gobbled Up

Circuit City Fannie Mae Good to Great Jim Collins

An associate introduced me to a book entitled Good to Great by Jim Collins, who is widely regarded as a management guru. His book examines the traits and disciplines that separate the great enterprises from the merely good ones. (If you want a good explanation of what propels the great companies, Jim provides a downloadable good-to-great diagnostic tool, which pretty much summarizes his book i...

January 26, 2009

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Some New Year's for the People's Republic of China

People's Republic of China

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 (some would say 10 million) workers laid off. Economic growth has slowed to about 7 percent...

January 24, 2009

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Stop Making Sense; No One Is Going to Listen Anyway

Health Care Reform Medicaid Medicare

If you're been following the ongoing cyber-debates about how to reform health care, you've no doubt run into a lot of wishful thinking, as in, "If the government pays for health care, then it's free." Wrong for all kinds of obvious reasons, most notable of which is that either you or your employer is going to have to pay for your coverage--unless you qualify under a government program because ...

January 23, 2009

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Will Health IT Solve This Regulatory Mess?

HIPAA JCOAH medical regulations

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. This was a real eye-opener. The author, Deane Waldman, i...

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