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(c) 2010-2024 Jon L Gelman, All Rights Reserved.

Friday, May 30, 2014

Equal Work, Less-Equal Perks; Microsoft Leads the Way in Filling Jobs With 'Permatemps'

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: March 30, 1998
They hold high-prestige, high-technology jobs at Microsoft's plush campus. They often do the same work as the Microsoft Corporation's permanent employees, developing CD-ROM's, designing World Wide Web sites and writing software manuals. Yet they do not qualify for Microsoft's coveted stock options, and their health and vacation benefits are pale imitations of those enjoyed by regular Microsoft workers.
They are long-term temps -- a seeming oxymoron, but in fact a new and growing phenomenon in the American work force, embraced by many corporations, especially high-tech ones, including Microsoft, AT&T, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft's Seattle neighbor, Boeing.
Microsoft is perhaps the leading practitioner of the trend, employing about 5,000 temps, including 1,500 long-term ones, meaning they have worked for the software colossus for at least one year. These temps work next to Microsoft's 17,000 domestic employees.
Some prefer the flexibility and the higher take-home pay that temp status affords, but many assail temping as a backdoor way to create a two-tier work force. The benefits that the lower tier loses out on, many temps say, far outweigh whatever extra pay they take home.
''It's a system of having two classes of people and instilling fear and inferiority and loathing,'' said Rebecca Hughes, who worked for three years as a temp at Microsoft, helping edit its CD-ROM on health care.
With work lives strung together by...
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California Senate votes to raise minimum wage to $13 an hour in 2017

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.latimes.com



The state Senate on Thursday approved a measure that would gradually raise the minimum wage in California from the current $8 an hour to $13 in 2017, despite warnings from the California Chamber of Commerce that the bill is a “job killer.”
Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) said his bill is necessary to help lift many of the 7.9 million Californians being paid minimum wage out of poverty. “Income inequality has been spoken of by our president as the defining challenge of our time,” Leno told his colleagues.


He said the current minimum wage is so low it allows many who receive it to get public assistance. “It is our tax dollars that are subsidizing the largest corporations paying these poverty wages.” Leno said. No other state has a minimum wage of $13 an hour.
Republican lawmakers said the increase will result in businesses raising prices or cutting their workforce. They noted that the Legislature last year approved a bill that would raise the minimum wage from $8 an hour to $9 on July 1 and to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016.
Leno’s bill would raise the minimum wage to $11 an hour on Jan. 1, 2015, to $12 a year later, and to $13 per hour on Jan. 1, 2017. After that, the minimum wage would increase automatically with the consumer price index.
The bill was approved by a bare-majority 21-12 vote and sent to the Assembly for consideration.
“The minimum wage is meant to be for entry-level jobs,” said Sen. Tom Berryhill (R-Modesto), who opposed...
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Intentional Fraud

All fraud is not actionable in workers' compensation. It is similar to discrimination action actions under the workers' compensation act. There is much talk, but few claims succeed, since they are based upon the element of intent.

This case caught my eye because of David DePaolo's recent blog post highlighting the recent, as David calls it, "Truly Imaginative" behavior of an individual playing two sides of the plot line.

The fraud issue struck a note for me as I have been reviewing cases for an upcoming seminar on workers' compensation issues. The decision of Bellino v Verizon, 2014 WL 10301786 (NJ App Div 2014) is a factual situation that seem to draw the ire of many insurance companies and employers. The injured worker failed to disclose some past medical information during a proceeding. The Court held that the element of intent was not proven.

Cases involving fraud are especially fact sensitive. Rarely does someone play both sides of the story line in perpetrating an intentional workers' compensation fraud scheme. Carlos Perry in West Virginia did so as the US Justice Department reports:

Knoxville Man Sentenced To Twelve Years Imprisonment For Workers' Compensation Fraud

Carlos Perry Found to Have Defrauded Six Insurance Companies Out of $401,649 in Benefits

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 20, 2014
ABINGDON, VIRGINIA – United States Attorney Timothy J. Heaphy announced today that Carlos Perry, 58, Knoxville, Tenn. was sentenced last week in the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia in Abingdon to twelve years in federal prison.

Perry was also ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $324,914.70. Perry had previously pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud.

According to evidence presented at the sentencing and guilty plea hearings by Assistant United States Attorney Zachary T. Lee, between January 2011 and February 2014, Perry developed a scheme in which he defrauded six different insurance companies of workers’ compensation benefits using false business and fictitious employees.  An investigation by the United States Secret Service determined that Perry’s scheme entailed Perry impersonating an owner of six fictitious businesses located in Wise, Va., Johnson City, Tenn., Bristol, Va., and Abingdon, Va., in order to obtain workers’ compensation insurance.  Perry then filed false injury claims on behalf of the fictitious employees. 

Perry received the checks sent by the insurance companies and impersonated the fictitious employees at doctor’s visits and in communications with the insurance companies.  The United States Secret Service discovered that Perry utilized nineteen fictitious identities in the course of his scheme and used the social security numbers of numerous real persons to execute his fraud.  On January 29, 2014, Perry was arrested by the United States Secret Service and the United States Marshals Service at a doctor’s office in Kingsport, Tenn., where he was impersonating one of the fictitious employees.  As a result of Perry’s scheme, six separate insurance companies sustained a combined loss of $401,649.66. 

The investigation of this case was conducted by United States Secret Service, United States Marshals Service, and the Virginia State Police.  Assistant United States Attorney Zachary T. Lee is prosecuting the case for the United States.
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Thursday, May 29, 2014

Reports of Worker Fatalities during Flowback Operations

John Snawder, Ph.D, DABT; Eric Esswein, MSPH, CIH; Bradley King, MPH, CIH; Michael Breitenstein, BS; Marissa Alexander-Scott, DVM, MS, MPH; Kyla Retzer, MPH; Max Kiefer, MS,CIH and Ryan Hill, MPH.



Although worker safety hazards in the oil and gas extraction industry are well known, there is very little published data regarding occupational health hazards (e.g., types and magnitude of risks for chemical exposures) during oil and gas extraction operations. To address the lack of information, NIOSH requests assistance from oil and gas stakeholders in further characterizing risks for chemical exposures during flowback operations and, as needed, develop and implement exposure controls. This blog briefly describes flowback operations and addresses reports made known to NIOSH of recent worker fatalities related to or located at flowback operations.

Worker Fatalities



NIOSH learned about several worker fatalities associated with flowback operations through media reports, officials with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and members of the academic community. According to our information, at least four workers have died since 2010 from what appears to be acute chemical exposures during flowback operations at well sites in the Williston Basin (North Dakota and Montana). While not all of these investigations are complete, available information suggests that these cases involved workers who were gauging flowback or...
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Median CEO Pay Tops $10 Million For The First Time

Wage inequality impacts workers' compensation. Benefits are calculated upon wages earned at the time of the accident. Many workers hold two jobs and rates are calculated only upon one job. Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.npr.org


Leslie Moonves of CBS received $65.6 million in total compensation in 2013, an increase of 9 percent. CBS stock rose nearly 70 percent last year.

Are you getting rich off the rising stock market? America's CEOs are.
Median compensation for the chief executive of a Standard & Poor's 500 company was $10.8 million last year, according to a study by The Associated Press.
That represents an 8.8 percent increase over 2012 and marks the first time that median compensation crossed the eight-figure mark.
Much of the increase was due to performance cash bonuses, stock awards and options. The S&P 500 index rose 30 percent last year, while earnings per share increased by more than 5 percent, lifting CEO compensation, which is generally tied to such indicators.
Bankers got the biggest raises, with total compensation on Wall Street rising 22 percent — matching the 22 percent they'd received a year earlier. Media industry CEOs also did nicely, with the top officials of CBS, Viacom, Walt Disney and Time Warner each pulling in more than $30 million
All told, more than two-thirds of CEOs got a raise, according to the study, which AP and the executive pay research firm Equilar conducted using federal filing statements.
Women CEOs made more than men — $11.7 million, compared to $10.5 million. But that applied only to the dozen women who were included in the sample, compared to 325 male CEOs.
Last year was the fourth in a row in which CEO compensation increased, following a dip with the Great Recession. "The median CEO pay package climbed more than 50 percent over that stretch," according to the AP. "A chief...
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How Tech Companies Tricked A Generation Into Working For Free

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.forbes.com

Last month Apple announced it would open beta testing access for its soon-to-be-revealed version of OS X to anyone with a compatible computer. Once a process reserved for a limited number of developers operating under non-disclosure agreements, the ability to have early access to new software from one of the most desirable companies in the world feels like an unexpected gift. The labor necessary to test software as complicated and widely distributed as an operating system is hard to calculate, but, like all forms of software testing, there is a point where the expense of paying workers is no longer economically feasible. But because Apple has cultivated an image of unattainable desirability for its products, this structure of uncompensated labor becomes a happy privilege, an opportunity to contribute to the ongoing evolution of a brand they love as an echo of themselves.
These voluntary forms of unwaged labor have become endemic as work has increasingly shifted toward the production of digital metaphors like apps, operating systems, and analysis. As the economy has continued to create its divine mirage of growth, workers have come to seem like profit deterrents whose need for sleep, food, play, and security drag down the system. Central to this shift has been the mass distribution of computers, the uses of which have become so frictionless and pleasing they encourage the subconscious guilt of the average worker, who begins to suspect that spending her day telecommuting in...
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