More than a friend of Facebook:
"Several workplace bills failed to gain legislative support this session, including measures to ban bullying at work, mandate paid sick leave, and forbid employers to ask workers for their social media passwords to check their activity on websites such as Facebook. Business groups said companies sometimes need these passwords if they are conducting workplace investigations, or in the financial world to ensure that workers aren’t violating disclosure rules."
So employers can check out your Facebook and EVEN SIGN IN TO IT, 'eh?
TALK ABOUT TRUE FA$CI$M and CORPORATE TYRANNY! It's right here in the liberal(?) laboratory of Massachusetts! No wonder I can't find work!
Related: Sweeping Clean the State House
I had to do it at cost to my$elf!
"A few wins for both workers, employers on Beacon Hill" by Deirdre Fernandes | Globe Staff August 03, 2014
“A lot of good things happened this session,” said Jim Klocke, the executive vice president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce....
If the BCC is happy, hell, $o am I.
Business groups got what they wanted: lower unemployment insurance taxes. Lawmakers froze rates for the insurance at last year’s levels, and lowered them in 2015, 2016, and 2017. The changes could save most Massachusetts companies 25 percent or more on unemployment insurance, the Chamber of Commerce estimates.
Businesses have lobbied to overhaul the state’s unemployment insurance system for years. Massachusetts has the fourth-highest unemployment insurance costs in the country, with companies spending $714 per employee, on average.
“That’s real cost relief,” Klocke said. “We hadn’t seen that in a long time.”
Believe it or not, it came out of the minimum wage hike the state and mouthpiece are crowing about. Sorry, readers, but I did the best I could. Guess it just wasn't good enough.
Nice to know you are a "cost," faithful worker.
Businesses also won with the expansion of tax breaks for research and development, which passed as part of a broader economic development bill, said Chris Geehern, executive vice president at Associated Industries of Massachusetts, the state’s largest employers group. The legislation should help Massachusetts keep its edge in life sciences, by giving companies more incentive to spend on the research and development that leads to new products, Geehern said.
Related: Patrick Pre$cribes a Pill
A recent study by the Pioneer Institute, a nonpartisan but conservative research group, found that between 2007 and 2011, research and development spending among Massachusetts businesses declined by 19.3 percent. If companies don’t invest in finding new projects and improving old ones, they can lose out to competitors, which can hurt job growth and the state economy.
The incentives can also attract and retain more high tech companies to the state, supporters say.
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In the final hours of the session, the Legislature also passed a controversial bill that would help homeowners who purchased foreclosed properties. The legislation reduces the amount of time foreclosed homeowners can challenge the legitimacy of a bank seizure and sue for their title from 20 years to about three.
In other words, the legi$lature gave a huge help to fraudulently-foreclosing banks and developers that bought the properties -- fuck you, citizen -- and then sneaking it through at the end of days before going on vacation.
In the wake of the financial crisis, lenders rapidly foreclosed on homeowners and resold their properties. The courts later found problems with the procedures that banks and mortgage companies followed to seize homes, clouding the titles of these properties when they were resold to new owners. As a result, some of these homeowners have struggled to resell their homes and refinance them in recent years.
Activists who work with foreclosed homeowners opposed the bill and said they plan to ask Patrick to veto it.
I'm with them. They smell like Occupy to me, even if the Globe won't say it.
Several workplace bills failed to gain legislative support this session, including measures to ban bullying at work, mandate paid sick leave, and forbid employers to ask workers for their social media passwords to check their activity on websites such as Facebook.
So employers can check out your Facebook and SIGN IN TO IT, 'eh?
Business groups said companies sometimes need these passwords if they are conducting workplace investigations, or in the financial world to ensure that workers aren’t violating disclosure rules.
All an oh, by the way afterthought to the Globe, huh?
--more--"
Also see: Cloud Over State House
It's now over the whole state.
