Attorney General John Ashcroft for attacking privacy & freedom of information

Runners Up:

California Governor Grey Davis

for vetoing 3 workplace privacy bills, sabotaging financial privacy & proposing a Cal-Patriot Act so bad that his own counsel said it was illegal.

HHS Secretary Thommy Thompson

for gutting the HIPAA Medical privacy regulations to allow drug companies to have everyone's medical records without permission.

Admiral John Poindexter

for NSDD-145, "Sensitive but Unclassified" & the new Office of Information Awareness to spy on everyone just in case you are a terrorist.

Runners Up:

Booze Allen & Hamilton

for providing the FBI with CALEA, Carnivore, Magic Lantern & lots more surveillance toys that we don't know about (yet).

Direct Marketing Association

for ensuring that your junk mail is correctly delivered to you.

2001-04-23
Ivan Gale and Jeff Palfini _The Industry Standard_
Putting Lay-offs in Perspective
"Internet Economy firms, from the tiniest start-ups to giants such as Yahoo! and Cisco, have announced lay-offs of almost 90K workers since 2000 January...   The University of Texas estimates that 3.1M people worked in the Internet Economy as of last June, which means that lay-offs to date account for only 2.5% of the Net work-force.   Meanwhile, the overall economy has seen 2.2M lay-offs since January, representing approximately 1.6% of a total work-force of 135.8M people.   During this year's first quarter - the toughest yet for dot-coms - Internet job cuts amounted to nearly 26K; that's about 7% of all lay-offs tracked by out-placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.   Automobile manufacturers eliminated almost 35K jobs, and retailers let go more than 15K people."

2001-04-24

2001-04-25

2001-04-25
_Berkeley Daily Planet_/_AP_
No surprise, consumer confidence drops
"But economists played down the timing, saying much of the April drop reflected a souring assessment of business conditions and job prospects.   The index has declined for most of the past year, but consumers' assessments of business conditions and job prospects had remained strong – until April.   'This plunge... is a significant turn for the worse, to my way of thinking, because what it's saying to me is that the cumulative affect of lay-offs and rising energy prices is now really reaching into people's pocket-books.', said David Orr, chief economist for First Union Corp. in Charlotte, NC...   'It's clear that consumers have begun to worry about employment trends and these concerns are gnawing away at consumer confidence.', Franco said...   On employment, 14.2% of those surveyed said jobs are 'hard to get', up from 12.6% last month.   Those saying jobs are plentiful fell from 43.8% to 40%."
more Conference Board info

2001-04-25 14:10PDT (17:10EDT) (21:10GMT)
Rachel Konrad _CNET_
Body shop must pay fees in H-1B law-suit
"According to the original ruling, which the judge upheld April 18, recruitment agency Compubahn must pay $215,050.61 in legal fees and other expenses to Dipen Joshi.   The 33-year-old from Gujarat, India, sued Compubahn in 2000 January for fraud, misrepresentation and violation of a California statute against unfair competition...   The programmer left Gujarat in March 1998 to work for Compubahn, which he thought was a computer programming company with clients such as Oracle and Sun Microsystems.   The company's Web site says it provides "end-to-end solutions for its clients from database design and development through Dynamic Web-based applications.'   Joshi said he soon realized that Compubahn was not a technology company, but instead a [body shop] that placed foreign programmers in U.S. companies [temporarily]."
 

2001-04-26

2003-04-26
Sharon Machlis _ComputerWorld_
Dot-com job cuts hit record in April (with table)
abc News
"Job cuts in the Internet arena have hit a record 17,554 so far this month, according to an out-placement company that tracks Net-related lay-offs.   That's up more than 80% from the 9,533 cuts announced last month."

2001-04-26
Sharon Machlis _ComputerWorld_
Dot-com job cuts hit record in April (with tables below)
"Job cuts in the Internet arena have hit a record 17,554 so far this month, according to an out-placement company that tracks Net-related lay-offs.   That's up more than 80% from the 9,533 cuts announced last month."
 

2001-04-26
Allan E. Wall _American Patrol_
anchor babies
 

2001-04-27

2001-04-27
Michael Mahoney _CNN_/_eCommerce Times_/_CIO Today_/_NewsFactor_
After Lull, Dot-Com Lay-Offs Set Record in April
Tech News World
"After 2 consecutive months of declining lay-offs, dot-com companies made a record 17,554 job cuts in April, marking an 84% increase over the 9,533 e-business jobs cut in March, according to a report released Thursday by job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas (CGC)...   April's job cuts beat the previous record of 12,828, set in January.   In 2000 April, only 327 dot-com job cuts were announced.   In the first 4 months of 2001, a staggering 51,564 dot-com cuts have been recorded -- more than any other 4-month period since CGC started tracking lay-offs in 1999 December."

2001-04-27
Darcy Evon
Life after lay-offs
"Chicago-based out-placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that over 51,500 people have lost their jobs since January with 17,554 of those reflecting dot-com lay-offs in April, a shocking increase of 84% in dot-com lay-offs over March."

2001-04-27
Amanda L. Milligan _Crain's Chicago Business_
Dot-com shake-out gains steam with 17,554 lay-offs announced in April
"There were a record-breaking 17,554 dot.com jobs eliminated in April—compared with 327 cuts made in the year-earlier period.   April's figure was 37% higher than in January, when the most severe cut-backs before this month had occurred.   And the April figure nearly doubled the 9,533 cuts announced in March...   The technology sector, with 6,059 cuts, far surpassed other product categories in April.   Rounding out the top three industries with the most cuts were consumer services and financial services, with 2,959 and 2,341 cuts, respectively...   In 2001, there have been 51,564 dot.com jobs cuts announced nationwide.   Challenger Gray & Christmas has tracked dot.com job cuts nationally since 1999 December."

2001-04-27
Norm Matloff _V Dare_
In Oakland Americans Need Not Apply
"On Tuesday, April 24, the Oakland City Council passed a law which will require the city to fill openings in certain designated job categories (e.g. librarians, building inspectors, etc.) with workers who are bilingual in either Chinese (specifically Cantonese) or Spanish...   the city already offers bilingual services.   The real reason for making a new law, not stated by de la Fuente and the others, is that they want much more than 'some' access for the non-Anglophones; they want equal access.   The term 'equal access' appears throughout the statute, including in its title...   Second, there are only a few jobs open per week in all the designated categories combined.   That means it will take many years to hire enough people to provide 'equal access'.   At the very least the vast majority of jobs in those categories will go to Latinos and Chinese for some years to come...   70% of Asian-Americans are indeed immigrants...   If Asian-American activists want their group to be treated as Americans, they should consider the effect of continuing high levels of Asian immigration on such attitudes -- and certainly should not support laws like the new one in Oakland...   Interestingly, Brown related the 'need' for 'equal access' bilingual service to the H-1B program! He spoke of the 'global economy', and how much we "need" the H-1Bs (this was right after he mentioned a big plan to make Oakland a high-tech center)...   He said that once the H-1Bs become immigrants, they bring their elderly parents to the U.S.   The latter don't know English, and according to Brown, can't learn English.   (My personal experience as an ESL teacher in San Francisco Chinatown says otherwise.)"

2001-04-28

2001-04-29

2001-04-30

2001 April
_Employment Policy Foundation_
Fact & Fallacy: Putting Lay-Offs in Context
"Median duration of unemployment has ranged between 9.4 weeks & 5.8 weeks over the past 10 years."

2001 April
Carl F. Horowitz _Center for Immigration Studies_
An Examination of US Immigration Policy and Serious Crime

2001 April
_American Journal of Roentgenology_/_NIH_
The radiology job market

2001 April
Mike Frost _HR News_
Despite Down-Sizing, Employment Levels Hold Steady (with table, below)
"According to a report issued by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an international outplacement firm in Chicago, employers trimmed nearly 378K positions from their payrolls in the three months between 2000 December and 2001 March.   That compares with just fewer than 131K positions during the same period a year earlier...   During February, reported Challenger Gray & Christmas, companies announced they would give pink slips to about 101,700 employees.   That's down 28% from January, when 142,200 lay-offs were announced.   However, it is up significantly from this time last year; in 2000 February, only 35,400 jobs were cut...   John Miller, senior vice president of U.S. sales and marketing at Drake Beam Morin, an out-placement firm based in Boston... has seen a rise in 'dwell time' -- the amount of time it takes a recently laid off worker to secure a new position."

_BigCharts.com_ S&P Retail Index
Note the signs of weakness shown in the dip from 1998 July through November, relatively flat 1999, and the drop all through 2000.

AAA southern California fuel prices
AAA national fuel prices
AAA state by state

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