Google Antitrust Ruling: Reshaping Workers' Comp Tech Landscape

On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Google had acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search. This landmark decision strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and may fundamentally alter how they do business.

NJ & NY Launch Apps to Help Prevent the Spread of Covid-19

Governor Phil Murphy and New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced the launch of COVID-19 exposure notification mobile apps in their respective states that will serve as crucial tools to supplement the effort to trace and contact individuals subject to a COVID exposure. 

Google Workers Complain of Retaliation #NotOKGoogle

The following post is shared from bloomberg.com

"Hundreds of Google staffers met on Friday and discussed what activists allege is a frequent consequence of criticizing the company: Retaliation. Two leaders of recent company protests said they’ve been mistreated by managers and collected similar stories from other workers at the world’s largest internet company.

Will Workers' Compensation Adapt to "On Demand" Employment

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google Inc. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The changing nature of employment status may have a profound effect on how workers' compensation exists, if at all, in the coming years. Today's post is shared from recode.net What happens as machines and artificial intelligence push humans out of the workforce? It’s one of the more important problems of our time — theoretical as it may seem in some sectors today — as technology makes industry after industry more efficient. One of the most important tech overlords, Google CEO Larry Page, thinks most people want to work, but they’d be happy working less. Page’s take: We have enough resources to provide for humanity. “The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people’s needs is just not true,” Page said, in an interview at a private event put on by the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures that was just released online. In fact, today humanity does dumb things like destroy the environment, in part because people work when they don’t have to, Page contended. The answer isn’t to just cut jobs en masse, Page said. People want to feel “needed, wanted and have something productive to do.” But most everyone would like a little more time off. So perhaps one solution would be to split up part-time work between people, as Page said Richard Branson is experimenting with in the UK. Page’s co-founder Sergey Brin had a slightly different take. “I do think that a lot of the things that people do have been, over the past century, replaced by machines and will continue to be,” Brin said. But after Page opined about his idea of “slightly less...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Related articles

• On-Demand Labor - Is Workers' Compensation Ready for Flex-Time Employment? (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
• Why older workers are still wanted in the office (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
• The Robotic Workforce (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
• The Vanishing Concept of a Job (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
• Worker Fatality in Moorestown NJ Leads to OSHA Citation (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)

FDA Issues Guidances for Industry on Social Media

Today's article shared from Thomas Abrams

Ongoing changes in technology transform medical products – and the ways that both patients and health care providers learn about those products. In today’s world, in addition to traditional sources of medical product information, patients and health care providers regularly get information about FDA-regulated medical products through social media and other Internet sources, and those technologies continue to evolve. But regardless of the Internet source used to communicate about medical products, the public health is best served by clear, accurate, truthful and non-misleading information about them.

That’s why the agency has proposed two draft guidances for industry with recommendations to help manufacturers and their representatives accurately communicate online about prescription drugs and medical devices.

These documents strive to ensure that the information provided by drug and device companies is accurate and will help patients to make well-informed decisions in consultation with their health care providers.

Our first guidance provides recommendations for the presentation of risk and benefit information for prescription drugs or medical devices using Internet/social media sources with character space limitations, such as Twitter and the paid search results links on Google and Yahoo. These recommendations address the presentation of both benefit information and risk information in this setting. We understand that...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Related articles

F.D.A. Shift on Painkillers Was Years in the Making (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
FDA Proposes Changes in Pain Medication Prescriptions (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
Johnson & Johnson to Pay More Than $2.2 Billion to Resolve Criminal and Civil Investigatio (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
As Robot-Assisted Surgery Expands, Are Patients And Providers Getting Enough Information? (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
FDA Warns Zithromax / Zmax Antibiotics Potential Risk of Fatal Heart Rhythms (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)

Wage Theft -- Another Assault on Workers' Compensation

As corporate American devises new methods to reduce wages it also assaults the injured workers' benefit safety net including workers' compensation insurance. It results in rate benefits to go down and premium bases to become inadequate to pay on gong claims. Today's post is shared from nytimes.com and is authored by it's Editorial Board. When labor advocates and law enforcement officials talk about wage theft, they are usually referring to situations in which low-wage service-sector employees are forced to work off the clock, paid sub minimum wages, cheated out of overtime pay or denied their tips. It is a huge and under policed problem. It is also, it turns out, not confined to low-wage workers. In the days ahead, a settlement is expected in the antitrust lawsuit pitting 64,613 software engineers against Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe. The engineers say they lost up to $3 billion in wages from 2005-9, when the companies colluded in a scheme not to solicit one another’s employees. The collusion, according to the engineers, kept their pay lower than it would have been had the companies actually competed for talent. The suit, brought after the Justice Department investigated the anti-recruiting scheme in 2010, has many riveting aspects, including emails and other documents that tarnish the reputation of Silicon Valley as competitive and of technology executives as a new breed of “don’t-be-evil” bosses, to cite Google’s informal motto. The case... [Click here to see the rest of this post] Workers' Compensation: Would Higher Minimum Wage for ... Apr 17, 2014 Wages determine rates of workers' compensation. The lowest wage earners go unnoticed in the struggle to increase benefits. Today's post is shared from njspotlight.com . Advocates decry current $2.13 per hour as unfair, ... http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/ Payroll Data Shows a Lag in Wages, Not Just Hiring Feb 11, 2014 But the report also made plain what many Americans feel in their bones: Wages are stuck, and barely rose at all in 2013. They were up 1.9 percent last year, or a mere 0.4 percent after accounting for inflation. Not only was that ... http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/ McDonald's Accused of Stealing Wages From Already ... Mar 16, 2014 McDonald's Accused of Stealing Wages From Already Underpaid Workers. Wage are the basic factor upon which to calculate rates for workers' compensation purposes. Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes ... http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Tech Giants Issue Call for Limits on Government Surveillance of Users

Surveillance of workers is a two-way sword. As companies complain about it, they employ surveillance against their own workers to deny work related compensation claims. Today's post was shared by The New York Times and comes from www.nytimes.com

Eight prominent technology companies, bruised by revelations of government spying on their customers’ data and scrambling to repair the damage to their reputations, are mounting a public campaign to urge President Obama and Congress to set new limits on government surveillance. On Monday the companies, led by Google and Microsoft, presented a plan to regulate online spying and urged the United States to lead a worldwide effort to restrict it. They accompanied it with an open letter, in the form of full-page ads in national newspapers, including The New York Times, and a website detailing their concerns. It is the broadest and strongest effort by the companies, often archrivals, to speak with one voice to pressure the government. The tech industry, whose billionaire founders and executives are highly sought as political donors, forms a powerful interest group that is increasingly flexing its muscle in Washington. “It’s now in their business and economic interest to protect their users’ privacy and to aggressively push for changes,” said Trevor Timm, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The N.S.A. mass-surveillance programs exist for a simple reason: cooperation with the tech and telecom companies. If the tech companies no longer want to cooperate, they have a lot of leverage to force significant reform.” The political push by the technology companies opens a third front in their battle against government surveillance,...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Related articles

• Rare Cancer Treatments, Cleared by F.D.A. but Not Subject to Scrutiny (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
• Genetic Tester to Stop Providing Data on Health Risks (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
• Addiction Specialists Wary of New Painkiller (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
• CDC releases new findings and prevention tools to improve food safety in restaurants (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
• Trickle Down Stagnation (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
• Johnson & Johnson to Pay More Than $2.2 Billion to Resolve Criminal and Civil Investigatio (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)

Subscribe to Workers Compensation on Google Currents

Stay up to date with Workers Compensation on Google Currents an application for your table or smartphone. It is FREE.

Click here: Workers Compensation

Source: http://goo.gl/mag/vLHRn

or

1. Click here to download.
2. Sign in.
3. Click ADD.
4. Search for "Gelman workers compensation"
5. Click on our RRS feed: "http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
6. Click "Done."

Facebook Makes an Appearance in Workers' Compensation Court

Social networking sites, such as Facebook, have now become informational sources that workers' compensation lawyers are now utilizing for evidentiary purposes. The question that remains unanswered is how information obtained through social networking sites can be admitted and utilized as evidence.

In a recently published article, Law School Professor Gregory M. Duhl and attorney Jaclyn S. Millner, focus on the issues of professional responsibility, discovery, privacy and evidence when social networking factors integrate with a workers's compensation proceeding. Since the compensation system is theoretically no-fault and the evidentiary system is informal, the authors theorize that the workers' compensation arena will act as a fertile ground for experimentation in the legal application of this new technology. 

Social networking site have experienced a surge in use. Web users spend more time on Facebook now than on Google.  Workers' Compensation judges are  also increasing their use of social networking sites.

Text, photos and commentary, shared among the social network, will provide a new avenue of factual discovery that may assist the decision maker in reaching an evaluation of the claim. The authors review the professional responsibilities of attorneys to their clients in advising them of the potential benefits and hazards of social networking, as well as  their  strategy for preparing text and photographic material into evidence. They conclude that lawyers handling workers' compensation matters need to be educated on how to properly utilize facts and opinions gathered from the social networking system.

Duhl, Gregory M. and Millner, Jaclyn S., Social Networking and Workers’ Compensation Law at the Crossroads (September 2010). Pace Law Review, Vol. 31; William Mitchell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2010-16. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1675026

...

For over 3 decades the Law Offices of Jon L. Gelman 1.973.696.7900
 jon@gelmans.com have been representing injured workers and their families who have suffered occupational illnesses. Author NJ Workers Compensation Law (West).

Related Articles:

Compensation Judges Are Becoming Linkedin
Facebook Job Boast Leads to Work Comp Fraud Charges
The Social Network - In Theaters October 1 (Columbia Pictures)