BUSINESS
By Gregory Karp | August 19, 2007
How would you like to get a huge discount on all your out-of-pocket health-related spending, including doctor co-payments, eyeglasses, aspirin, hearing aids, birth control, braces and smoking-cessation products? You can get the discount - in the form of tax-free spending - if you have a flexible spending account through your employer. If you don't use one, you could be wasting hundreds of dollars a year. Though FSAs have formally been around since the 1970s, they are a seldom-used employee benefit.
BUSINESS
By Eileen Ambrose | July 15, 2007
Retirement savings plans at schools, hospitals and other nonprofits are about to undergo their biggest overhaul since Lyndon Johnson was president. It's about time. For far too long, many 403(b)s have operated with little or no employer oversight. Workers can be confronted with hundreds of investment options, a daunting prospect for even sophisticated investors. And it isn't unusual for many of their choices to be high-fee mutual funds and annuities. The overhaul is coming from the Internal Revenue Service, which first proposed changes more than two years ago. The IRS says it will soon release final regulations, which could take effect as early as January.
BUSINESS
By Hanah Cho | March 28, 2007
Just days before starting a new job as a receptionist, Kimberly Sudhoff took a telephone call from a hiring manager who asked for her uniform size. Because she was four months' pregnant, Sudhoff said she wasn't sure about her size. A few days later, she said, the manager rescinded the employment offer and questioned Sudhoff's commitment to the job. Sudhoff said she was encouraged to reapply after having the baby. "It's really terrible to say, but you can't help to think if I wasn't pregnant, I would have gotten the job," recalled Sudhoff, 27, who lived in Hagerstown at the time and has since moved to Mississippi.
NEWS
By Robert Manor | May 30, 2007
A deeply divided Supreme Court ruling sharply limits the ability of workers to sue employers for gender pay discrimination linked to actions taken years earlier. Employer groups praised yesterday's 5-4 decision, saying it protects employers from unfair liability and requires workers to act promptly to protect their rights. Civil rights advocates criticized the ruling, saying it will prevent workers who are discriminated against from recovering all the money they are due from employers.
NEWS
By Liz Atwood | October 27, 1999
Every weekday morning, Fran McDonough gets up and commutes to her job at Bell Atlantic -- walking through the kitchen, down the stairs and into the basement where she turns on her computer."
NEWS
By NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE | March 15, 1999
WASHINGTON -- After finding that workers who complain of health and safety hazards are often dismissed from their jobs, the Clinton administration will soon propose sweeping new protections for such whistle-blowers, federal officials say.The law that created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration prohibits employers from retaliating against people who report unsafe or unhealtful working conditions.But the inspector general of the Labor Department, Charles Masten, said such reprisals often occur, and Charles Jeffress, the assistant secretary of labor in charge of OSHA, said the Clinton administration would soon recommend changes in the law to increase the protection of workers who expose health and safety hazards.
NEWS
By LOS ANGELES TIMES NEWS SERVICE | October 11, 1999
LOS ANGELES -- About 1,200 union activists will converge in Los Angeles today for a national AFL-CIO convention that highlights the movement's reborn zeal to organize workers. Despite all the hoopla, participants don't need to look far beyond downtown's Convention Center for sobering reminders of what they're up against.There is, for example, Pedro Ramirez, a machine operator in nearby La Puente who said he was harassed, punished with dangerous assignments and forced out of his $6.75-an-hour job after signing a union authorization card.
NEWS
By Larry Carson | April 1, 1999
The idea of helping someone get to work sounds simple, but it's not.Not when the jobs are in labor-starved Howard County and the workers are in job-starved West Baltimore's empowerment zone. That's why a coalition of leaders from county, city, state and regional government agencies met with several dozen Howard employers at a Dorsey hotel yesterday.They're expecting to get $650,000 in federal and local grant money to begin by July to bring workers from older city neighborhoods to fill evening- and night-shift jobs in booming Howard County, where hourly wages of up to $11 are going begging.
NEWS
By Marcia Myers | December 16, 1999
Richard McGee finds work for people, and for most of his company's 55 years, that work was in Baltimore.The '90s could have meant a reversal of fortune for him as better jobs took firm root in the suburbs, far away from bus or train stops. Unemployed city residents without cars had no way to get to them.But McGee made a radical and costly decision: He would provide the rides. Today his South Baltimore employment agency spends $14,000 a week shuttling about 350 workers to and from jobs in buses and vans every day. In cities across the country, it is an idea that is bridging serious transit gaps.
NEWS
By Larry Carson | April 1, 1999
The idea of helping someone get to work sounds simple, but it's not.Not when the jobs are in labor-starved Howard County and the workers are in job-starved West Baltimore's empowerment zone.That's why a coalition of leaders from county, city, state and regional government agencies met with several dozen Howard employers at a Dorsey hotel yesterday.They're expecting to get $650,000 in federal and local grant money to begin by July to bring workers from older city neighborhoods to fill evening- and night-shift jobs in booming Howard County, where hourly wages of up to $11 are going begging.