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This is an excerpt from the Huffington Post. Click on link to read entire article.

Still waiting for a response to the 300 resumés you sent out last month? Bad news: Some companies are ignoring all unemployed applicants.

In a current job posting on The People Place, a job recruiting website for the telecommunications, aerospace/defense and engineering industries, an anonymous electronics company in Angleton, Texas, advertises for a “Quality Engineer.” Qualifications for the job are the usual: computer skills, oral and written communication skills, light to moderate lifting. But red print at the bottom of the ad says, “Client will not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.”

In a nearly identical job posting for the same position on the Benchmark Electronics website, the red print is missing. But a human resources representative for the company confirmed to HuffPost that the The People Place ad accurately reflects the company’s recruitment policies.

“It’s our preference that they currently be employed,” he said. “We typically go after people that are happy where they are and then tell them about the opportunities here. We do get a lot of applications blindly from people who are currently unemployed — with the economy being what it is, we’ve had a lot of people contact us that don’t have the skill sets we want, so we try to minimize the amount of time we spent on that and try to rifle-shoot the folks we’re interested in.”

From the home page at http://www.graymatterscoalition.com/:

Gray Matters Coalition (GMC) is a grass roots special interest group focused on employment reform to help protect the rights of workers who are over 50 years of age.

78 million people were born between 1946 and 1964 and make up the baby boomers, the largest group of mature adults in American history. This group accounts for 28% of the American population. With this perplexing statistic in mind, we feel that now is the time to bring important workplace issues to the forefront for national awareness and strive to have a voice in shaping the laws and policies that affect job security and the financial future of mature Americans.

Our Mission

Our mission is to bring age discrimination issues to the forefront of national awareness and to become a powerful political voice in shaping the laws and policies that affect job security and the financial future of mature Americans.  In so doing, we endeavor to help build a workplace where experience, knowledge, and wisdom will become the foundation of a strong, multigenerational work force.

Small Window of Opportunity

We boomers vowed never to become our parents, marched for our causes in the 60’s and 70’s, and fought discrimination on all levels. We made advances in civil rights, equal rights, and equal pay for equal work. We changed the music, built a thriving middle class, and lived the American dream. Unfortunately, the tables are turning, and we are quickly losing ground. Time is of the essence, and we must take action now! If we wait five, ten, or fifteen years, it will be too late. With the passage of time, congress will get younger, and we will loose the advantage of an experienced, caring, mature congress that understands the downward mobility cycle that faces aging Americans.

The Bottom Line

The Gray Matters Coalition is inspired and driven to restore dignity in maturity and strives to re-establish the teamwork mentality, return a conscience to capitalism, revitalize our can-do attitude, and rekindle the American spirit that made this country great.

This is an excerpt from msnbc.com. Click on link to read entire article.

As recession fades, experts see dearth of full-time positions with benefits

Stephen Luebkert was laid off in March 2009 from a Boston-based semiconductor company. He lived for four months on his severance while he looked for another full-time job and eventually ended up working again for the same firm.

The difference is that now he is a contract employee. He no longer gets any of the perks of being a permanent worker, including paid vacations or sick days, health insurance or tuition assistance. And he estimates that he makes about 20 percent less — for the same job he was doing before.

The thing he misses most? “A feeling of security.”

As employers begin to cautiously hire again after the deepest economic downturn in a generation, Luebkert is in the vanguard of an emerging new contingent work force. For some businesses, these contingent workers could become a permanent solution, eliminating a huge swath of full-time jobs with benefits, say labor and business experts.

“It’s cheaper to hire contingent workers, but also more flexible for employers,” said Bill Kahnweiler, associate professor and human resource expert at Georgia State University’s Department of Public Management and Policy. Contingent workers allow companies to stay lean and avoid hiring more permanent workers. “If someone decides, ‘We need to be this size,’ it’s far easier to do that with contract workers and temps,” Kahnweiler said.

The following is a transcript of Bill Moyers’ interview with Jim Hightower from the final broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal. It has been edited for length.

BILL MOYERS: Once upon a time, a whole lot of just plain Americans woke up to realize the economic system was working against them. They had believed in it; they worked hard to make it work for them. They knew its shortcomings but saw in it the way to a decent return for their labor and a better future for their families.

Then, one day, calamity struck: The system turned on them. And they discovered that they had been betrayed, bamboozled, by the people at the top.

But they didn’t hang their heads and turn tail, like a dog whipped by its master. They organized and fought back — millions of them in a grass roots movement for democracy. What they did became known as the Populist Moment, an extraordinary time in our country’s history.

But, the flimflam gang returned with a vengeance in our time — the monied interests and political mercenaries who connived to bring on a calamity that lost eleven million Americans their jobs, robbed people of their homes and pensions, and brought the world’s economy crashing down.

But once again, people are organizing and fighting back; as they did in that early Populist Moment that took on the monopolies and financial trusts. The stirrings of a popular insurgency could be seen late this week as thousands marched on Wall Street. These people are angry at the banks that have cost them so dearly and they want reforms to prevent similar disasters in the future. They want to break up the Wall Street oligarchy and require the banks to use their capital to build and revitalize and innovate, to create jobs and security.

This is an excerpt from The Guardian. Click on link to read entire article.

So Goldman Sachs, the world’s greatest and smuggest investment bank, has been sued for fraud by the American Securities and Exchange Commission. Legally, the case hangs on a technicality.

Morally, however, the Goldman Sachs case may turn into a final referendum on the greed-is-good ethos that conquered America sometime in the 80s – and in the years since has aped other horrifying American trends such as boybands and reality shows in spreading across the western world like a venereal disease.

When Britain and other countries were engulfed in the flood of defaults and derivative losses that emerged from the collapse of the American housing bubble two years ago, few people understood that the crash had its roots in the lunatic greed-centered objectivist religion, fostered back in the 50s and 60s by ponderous emigre novelist Ayn Rand.

While, outside of America, Russian-born Rand is probably best known for being the unfunniest person western civilisation has seen since maybe Goebbels or Jack the Ripper (63 out of 100 colobus monkeys recently forced to read Atlas Shrugged in a laboratory setting died of boredom-induced aneurysms), in America Rand is upheld as an intellectual giant of limitless wisdom. Here in the States, her ideas are roundly worshipped even by people who’ve never read her books or even heard of her. The rightwing “Tea Party” movement is just one example of an entire demographic that has been inspired to mass protest by Rand without even knowing it.

As a member of the enigmatic class, “long-term unemployed,” I find rather scant comfort we’re so numerous now. And with the U.S. Senate’s recent inability to extend Federal benefits, at least for now,  and an almost ironclad media blackout on the subject, sometimes it seems we’re personally and collectively invisible. And I don’t do invisible well, you?

This is an excerpt from Alternet.org. Click on link to read entire article.

Attacks on black and gay members of Congress over healthcare have prompted comparisons to the civil rights movement. In fact, we need to move the historical lens further back.

Photo Credit: By NICHOLAS KAMM, AFP/Getty Images

In response to the imminent passage of health care reform protesters spat on Representative Emmanuel Cleaver. They hurled homophobic obscenities at Representative Barney Frank. They shouted racial slurs at Representative John Lewis.

Democratic leadership responded by marching to the Capitol in a scene that looked more like a 1960s demonstration than a morning commute for the majority party.

The attacks on black and gay members of Congress immediately mobilized lefty mainstream media. On Monday night both Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow drew parallels between the health care battle and the civil rights movement. I like, respect, and appear frequently on both programs, but I think both have missed the mark in their racial analysis.

Crafting a metaphor that connects the civil rights movement and the bigoted language of this weekend’s protesters is seductive. It seems so obvious given that Representative John Lewis plays a critical role in both. A young Lewis was severely beaten 45 years ago when he tried to lead a group of brave citizens across the Edmund Pettus bridge in an effort to secure voting rights for black Americans.

This weekend he graciously rebuffed his detractors in a perfect example of nonviolent, direct resistance. Representative Lewis said he harbored no ill will against those who called him names and insisted that we are all citizens of this nation and that we must learn to live peacefully and respectfully together. It was the kind of response that makes Lewis a hero to many.

But there is a very important difference between Bloody Sunday of 1965 and Health Care Reform Sunday of 2010. In 1965 Lewis was a disenfranchised protester fighting to be recognized as a full citizen. When he was beaten by the police, he was being attacked by the state. In 2010 Lewis is a long time, elected representative. When he is attacked by protesters, he is himself an agent of the state. This difference is critically important; not because it changes the fact that racism is present in both moments, but because it radically alters the way we should understand the meaning of power, protest and race.

This is an excerpt from Alternet.org. Click on link to read entire article.

Workplace privacy is dead and buried. Employers can and do read e-mail, eavesdrop on telephone calls, monitor Internet access and watch workers with hidden cameras.

Privacy is dead. Get over it. So says Scott McNealy, former president of Sun Microsystems.

He’s right. Workplace privacy is dead and buried. Employers can and do read e-mail, eavesdrop on telephone calls, monitor Internet access and watch workers with hidden cameras (even in bathrooms and locker rooms). Virtually all of this is legal. Technically, employers aren’t supposed to listen to personal telephone calls, but it happens all the time and you have no way of knowing. Some judges have found bathroom cameras to be an invasion of privacy, but other judges allow it.

As bad as this is, it’s getting worse. Bosses are now spying on workers’ home lives. Millions of workers carry company-issued cell phones. Every one of these phones is equipped with GPS. The technology required to track cell phones is readily available and not very expensive. The cost of tracking an employee 24/7 is only $5 a month. Employers often keep GPS tracking a secret or tell the workers they can turn off the GPS when they go home and continue to track them. The National Workrights Institute (NWI) has already begun receiving complaints about GPS.

Even more serious are the problems created by company-issued laptops. Employers usually tell workers it’s OK to use them for personal purposes as well as business. It’s presented as a perk—now you don’t need to buy your own computer.

What employers don’t tell you is that the company’s computer technicians look at your private documents when the computer comes in for upgrading or repair. Not only are your personal e-mail, photographs and financial records revealed, but the techs tell your boss about anything they don’t like. If you say something negative about the company, tell risqué jokes or make controversial comments about politics or religion, it can cost you your job.

If you think your boss wouldn’t fire you for something like this, think again. Heidi Arace was fired by PNC Bank for telling an off-color joke by e-mail. Nate Fulmer lost his job because he criticized organized religion on his personal website.

The ultimate nightmare comes from webcams. If your company-issued laptop has a webcam, bosses can turn it on whenever they want. If they do it at night, they’ll probably see the inside of your house, maybe your bedroom. A suburban Philadelphia school district was recently caught turning on the webcams in laptops issued to students. Some were in the students’ bedrooms.

Unionized workers have some protection against these abuses. While the law on GPS is still emerging, many labor lawyers believe GPS tracking is a mandatory subject of bargaining. Union members also are protected against arbitrary termination. It would be highly unlikely an arbitrator would uphold the termination of a worker who turned off the GPS when they went off duty. Nor would an arbitrator allow an employer to fire a union worker because they said something on their personal blog the boss didn’t like.

But for the rest of us, these practices are legal. Congress has been asleep at the switch when it comes to protecting privacy for the past 20 years. The last federal privacy law was enacted in 1986 and doesn’t even mention electronic communications other than telephone calls. Since then, advancing technology and employer abuse have eliminated any semblance of privacy at work. It’s time for Congress to wake up and take action before our private lives become an open book to employers as well.