Following a vote by Brooklyn Cablevision workers voting to form a union, about 120 workers at a Cablevision contractor in the Bronx walked off the job in a wildcat strike last Thursday. The vote by 282 technicians and dispatchers working for Cablevision in Brooklyn is the first time workers at the cable company have successfully [...]
Intellectual property is a broad term, covering everything from formal patents and copyrights registered with the government to the informal know-how protected by trade secret law. Companies protect some trade secrets through non-compete clauses and other trade secret lawsuits when employees leave for another company. But some states — and California is one of them [...]
Google dominates Internet advertising, with 44.1% of the $113 billion per year global online advertising market, but it’s quietly gunning for control of the even larger television advertising sector. As Robert Kyncl, a senior manager at Google’s YouTube operation said in a recent New Yorker interview that “this industry [i.e. TV] is worth three hundred [...]
There are hesitant signs of economic recovery but high unemployment is still chronic and black and latino communities face a full-fledged jobs depression. As calculated by the Department of Labor in December, latino unemployment was at 11.6 percent and black unemployment at 15.5 percent – fully twice the rate of whites. The cause of high [...]
A new bill introduced in Congress would expand the categories of IT workers denied overtime protection under the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act. Not only would this deny the additional pay — time-and-a-half — for those tech workers forced to work over 40 hours a week, but it would eliminate the incentives companies have not [...]
The Communications Workers of America is in a drawn out contract fight with Verizon and is highlighting the fact that not only is the company trying to ripoff its employees, it’s also ripping off the taxpayers. A report by Citizens for Tax Justice early this month had highlighted top corporate tax avoiders and Verizon was [...]
Friday night saw workers at Verizon — still in union negotiations for a new contract — join with anti-Wall St. protesters to march against what they labelled the VeriGreedy policies of a telecom company reporting record profits- in fact doubling its profit margins in its most recent quarterly report. At the same time, Verizon is [...]
Unions have joined with anti-corporate activists at groups like MoveOn.org to ask consumers not to buy the new iphone 4S with Verizon until the company comes to the bargaining table with its workers and gives them a fair contract. Verizon workers conducted a short strike a month ago but returned to the bargaining table, but [...]
Reuters have an article about employers wanting to fire employees over Facebook postings that criticize the employer– and the surprise those employers have that they can’t because of federal labor law. That law protects not just workers seeking to form a union but any “concerted activity” by employees, which includes complaining to another employee about [...]
The New York Times had a story yesterdayentitled Closed in Error on Google Places, Merchants Seek Fixes, which details how easy it is for rival companies or others to claim a company is closed and have Google Places list the company as out of business — potentially devastating commerce for a restaurant, hotel or store. [...]
