Thursday, January 23, 2014
Monday, August 26, 2013
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Are unpaid interns exploited?
Welcome to the Unpaid Interns Lawsuits Website
"Unpaid interns are becoming the modern-day equivalent of entry-level employees, except that employers are not paying them for the many hours they work. The practice of classifying employees as “interns” to avoid paying wages runs afoul of federal and state wage and hour laws, which require employers to pay all workers whom they “suffer or permit” the minimum wage and overtime. Employers’ failure to compensate interns for their work, and the prevalence of the practice nationwide, curtails opportunities for employment, fosters class divisions between those who can afford to work for no wage and those who cannot, and indirectly contributes to rising unemployment.
"According to the U.S. Department of Labor, an unpaid internship is only lawful in the context of an educational training program, when the interns do not perform productive work and the employer derives no benefit. “If the employer would have hired additional employees or required existing staff to work additional hours had the interns not performed the work, then the interns will be viewed as employees and entitled to compensation under the FLSA.”
"The U.S. Department of Labor’s test is not new. It is based on the United States Supreme Court’s 1947 opinion in Walling v. Portland Terminal Co., 330 U.S. 148, 152-53 (1947), which held that the FLSA’s definition of “to employ” as “to suffer or permit to work” does not include student participation in an educational or vocational training program, so long as the employer derives no benefit from the trainees’ work. The Court cautioned against arrangements “in which an employer has evasively accepted the services of beginners at pay less than the legal minimum without having obtained permits from the [Secretary of Labor].”
"Outten & Golden LLP is committed to ensuring that interns are fairly compensated for their work. To learn more about our class action litigation on behalf of unpaid interns, please peruse the information in the case-specific tabs above, or contact us directly.
QUESTIONS:
1. Do you believe that businesses should be allowed to have unpaid interns?
2. If the government requires businesses to pay interns a wage equal to at least the minimum wage, do you think this will help, or hurt, young people?
"Unpaid interns are becoming the modern-day equivalent of entry-level employees, except that employers are not paying them for the many hours they work. The practice of classifying employees as “interns” to avoid paying wages runs afoul of federal and state wage and hour laws, which require employers to pay all workers whom they “suffer or permit” the minimum wage and overtime. Employers’ failure to compensate interns for their work, and the prevalence of the practice nationwide, curtails opportunities for employment, fosters class divisions between those who can afford to work for no wage and those who cannot, and indirectly contributes to rising unemployment.
"According to the U.S. Department of Labor, an unpaid internship is only lawful in the context of an educational training program, when the interns do not perform productive work and the employer derives no benefit. “If the employer would have hired additional employees or required existing staff to work additional hours had the interns not performed the work, then the interns will be viewed as employees and entitled to compensation under the FLSA.”
"The U.S. Department of Labor’s test is not new. It is based on the United States Supreme Court’s 1947 opinion in Walling v. Portland Terminal Co., 330 U.S. 148, 152-53 (1947), which held that the FLSA’s definition of “to employ” as “to suffer or permit to work” does not include student participation in an educational or vocational training program, so long as the employer derives no benefit from the trainees’ work. The Court cautioned against arrangements “in which an employer has evasively accepted the services of beginners at pay less than the legal minimum without having obtained permits from the [Secretary of Labor].”
"Outten & Golden LLP is committed to ensuring that interns are fairly compensated for their work. To learn more about our class action litigation on behalf of unpaid interns, please peruse the information in the case-specific tabs above, or contact us directly.
QUESTIONS:
1. Do you believe that businesses should be allowed to have unpaid interns?
2. If the government requires businesses to pay interns a wage equal to at least the minimum wage, do you think this will help, or hurt, young people?
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
King of My Castle? Yeah, Right - NYTimes.com
King of My Castle? Yeah, Right - NYTimes.com
"The City by the Bay is going through one of its worst housing shortages in memory. With typical high demand intensified by a regional boom in tech jobs, apartment open houses are mob scenes of desperate applicants clutching their credit reports. The citywide median rental price for a one-bedroom is $2,764 a month, but jumps to $3,500 in trendy areas."
"One reason for the shortage? Me.I’ve recently joined the ranks of San Francisco landlords who have decided that it’s better to keep an apartment empty than to lease it to tenants. Together, we have left vacant about 10,600 rental units. That’s about five percent of the city’s total — or enough space to house up to 30,000 people in a city that barely tops 800,000...
"To stabilize rents and prevent eviction abuses that are typical when housing is scarce, the city developed some of the nation’s toughest housing policies. Rent-control ordinances, for example, sharply limit rent increases after the initial lease for most housing constructed before 1979. As a result, many leases morph into lower-rent tenancies for life, subsidized by landlords, even when the tenants are wealthy.
"In addition, a complex legal structure has been created to make evictions for just cause extraordinarily difficult.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Monday, April 29, 2013
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Shakespeare: poet, playwright, hoarder
Shakespeare: all about the pounds and pence, not the poetry? - latimes.com
EXCERPTS:
"Shakespeare, Mr. “I can raise no money by vile means” [“Julius Caesar”], was in fact a tax dodger, a grain hoarder and a determined debt collector [“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” -- “Hamlet”].
"Nowadays, we’d call him a profiteer and a scofflaw. In Tudor England, where he was investigated for his laconic tax observances and once prosecuted for his hoarding practices, it’s a surprise that he didn’t end up swinging from a gibbet “for daws to peck at” [“Othello”]. No wonder he vigorously wrote, in “Henry VI part 2,” “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
"Researchers turned up archival evidence that for a decade and a half – including some very hungry years for England -- Shakespeare “purchased and stored grain, malt and barley for resale at inflated prices to his neighbors and local tradesmen.” When they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, Shakespeare went after them full-throatedly, and the profits he did make he used “to further his own money-lending activities.”
"Not all of this is new, but Jayne Archer, one of the researchers, suspects that the fact that so little of this information has made its way into Shakespeare’s public profile may be laid to “willful ignorance on behalf of critics and scholars who … cannot countenance the idea of a creative genius also being motivated by self-interest.”
"There’s evidence that the memorial raised up to him in his hometown not long after his death originally showed him with an image with which his neighbors associated him: a bag of grain, not the writerly accouterments of quill and parchment added later. Four hundred years later, the tourists still make pilgrimages to Stratford because, face it, who’s going to go home with souvenir paperweights and china thimbles commemorating the Tudor equivalent of a commodities trader?
EXCERPTS:
"Shakespeare, Mr. “I can raise no money by vile means” [“Julius Caesar”], was in fact a tax dodger, a grain hoarder and a determined debt collector [“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” -- “Hamlet”].
"Nowadays, we’d call him a profiteer and a scofflaw. In Tudor England, where he was investigated for his laconic tax observances and once prosecuted for his hoarding practices, it’s a surprise that he didn’t end up swinging from a gibbet “for daws to peck at” [“Othello”]. No wonder he vigorously wrote, in “Henry VI part 2,” “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
"Researchers turned up archival evidence that for a decade and a half – including some very hungry years for England -- Shakespeare “purchased and stored grain, malt and barley for resale at inflated prices to his neighbors and local tradesmen.” When they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, Shakespeare went after them full-throatedly, and the profits he did make he used “to further his own money-lending activities.”
"Not all of this is new, but Jayne Archer, one of the researchers, suspects that the fact that so little of this information has made its way into Shakespeare’s public profile may be laid to “willful ignorance on behalf of critics and scholars who … cannot countenance the idea of a creative genius also being motivated by self-interest.”
"There’s evidence that the memorial raised up to him in his hometown not long after his death originally showed him with an image with which his neighbors associated him: a bag of grain, not the writerly accouterments of quill and parchment added later. Four hundred years later, the tourists still make pilgrimages to Stratford because, face it, who’s going to go home with souvenir paperweights and china thimbles commemorating the Tudor equivalent of a commodities trader?
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Florida County Spends Tens Of Thousands On Ambulance For Obese Patients « CBS Tampa
Florida County Spends Tens Of Thousands On Ambulance For Obese Patients « CBS Tampa
EXCERPTS:
ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. (CBS Tampa) —
"Central Florida News 13 reports that the ambulance was purchased after emergency responders had to transport at least two dozen patients who weighed more than 500 pounds last year.
“With some of these morbidly obese patients, we have to send more firefighters just to lift and to move the patient. So once they’re in and we get them to the hospital, someone has to be at the hospital to unload them,” one Orange County fire official told News 13. “That’s pulling a lot of resources from emergency calls just to do that.”
"Orange County paid $23,000 alone for the lift gate and stretcher and the stretcher is 10 inches wider than the average one.
“In the past you’d have to get five, six, seven firefighters to physically lift the patient in. It increases the chance that something could happen to the patient,” a fire official told News 13. “It also greatly increases the chance that something could happen with back injuries within fire services.”
EXCERPTS:
ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. (CBS Tampa) —
"Central Florida News 13 reports that the ambulance was purchased after emergency responders had to transport at least two dozen patients who weighed more than 500 pounds last year.
"Orange County paid $23,000 alone for the lift gate and stretcher and the stretcher is 10 inches wider than the average one.
“In the past you’d have to get five, six, seven firefighters to physically lift the patient in. It increases the chance that something could happen to the patient,” a fire official told News 13. “It also greatly increases the chance that something could happen with back injuries within fire services.”
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
On failing to see the obvious
10 Things Minimum Wage Haters Don't Want To Admit
It is amazing the extent to which people can fail to see the obvious when it conflicts with what they want to believe. In this list of arguments for raising the minimum wage, compiled by a proponent and published at a well-known media site,
1. Compare point 3 with point 4.
2. Compare point 5 and point 10.
See any problems here?
It is amazing the extent to which people can fail to see the obvious when it conflicts with what they want to believe. In this list of arguments for raising the minimum wage, compiled by a proponent and published at a well-known media site,
1. Compare point 3 with point 4.
2. Compare point 5 and point 10.
See any problems here?
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
$175,000 Mattress Sold as 'Investment' in Good Sleep
$175,000 Mattress Sold as 'Investment' in Good Sleep
EXCERPTS:
URL: http://www.cnbc.com/100563624
EXCERPTS:
"British mattress manufacturer Savoir Beds this week is launching a limited edition "Royal Bed" with a $175,000 price tag at Kensington Palace in London. Savoir describes its mattress as "an investment" in your well being – presumably since "buying" a $175,000 mattress would just seem ridiculous.
"Ultimately, a "great night's sleep" is what it's all about, said Savoir Beds' managing director Alistair Hughes. "It's an investment that pays off every morning of your life."
"Each mattress will require more than 700 hours of labor. It will contain "masses and masses" of curled Latin American horse tail, "mountains" of pure Mongolian cashmere, and enough specially woven silk to be strung from New York to Miami and almost halfway back again (more than 1,600 miles worth).
"Only 60 of the beds will be made."
"The mattress is fully customizable in size and support – each side of the bed can be made with a different firmness to make both you and your significant other as comfortable as possible.
"Of course it's a massive amount of money and it will only appeal to the very lucky and very wealthy," Hughes acknowledged. But "if you're buying Gucci handbags, a suit from Saville Row or a Rolls Royce, you're looking for the best. And you spend a third of your life in bed."
"And consider this: the bed, mattress and box spring are guaranteed to last at least 25 years (although you'll have to replace the topper every 5-7 years for $5,000-$10,000).
If you divide $175,000 by 365 nights for 25 years, it comes out to less than $20 per night.
Sounds completely reasonable.
"Ultimately, a "great night's sleep" is what it's all about, said Savoir Beds' managing director Alistair Hughes. "It's an investment that pays off every morning of your life."
"Each mattress will require more than 700 hours of labor. It will contain "masses and masses" of curled Latin American horse tail, "mountains" of pure Mongolian cashmere, and enough specially woven silk to be strung from New York to Miami and almost halfway back again (more than 1,600 miles worth).
"Only 60 of the beds will be made."
"The mattress is fully customizable in size and support – each side of the bed can be made with a different firmness to make both you and your significant other as comfortable as possible.
"Of course it's a massive amount of money and it will only appeal to the very lucky and very wealthy," Hughes acknowledged. But "if you're buying Gucci handbags, a suit from Saville Row or a Rolls Royce, you're looking for the best. And you spend a third of your life in bed."
"And consider this: the bed, mattress and box spring are guaranteed to last at least 25 years (although you'll have to replace the topper every 5-7 years for $5,000-$10,000).
If you divide $175,000 by 365 nights for 25 years, it comes out to less than $20 per night.
Sounds completely reasonable.
© 2013 CNBC.com
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Greek unemployment reaches record 26 percent
News from The Associated Press
ATHENS, Greece (AP) -- "Unemployment in debt-crippled Greece rose to a record of 26 percent in the last quarter of 2012, as austerity measures combined with a deep recession took a harsh toll on the workforce.
"The figures were worse than the previous quarter's 24.8 percent, and 20.7 percent a year earlier.
The national statistical authority said Thursday that 1.29 million people were out of a job in October-December 2012. In the under 25 age group, unemployment was 57.8 percent.
"The rate for women was 29.7 percent, compared with 23.3 percent for men.
"Greece's economy has been falling apart over the past three years, savaged by its financial crisis. The country is surviving on international rescue loans, released on condition it keeps up a tough program of spending cuts and tax hikes.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Macroeconomics in two pictures (from Greg Mankiw)
This is really good. Macro policy summarized in two pictures:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)