Category Archives: Uncategorized

If a woman could sue McDonald’s for spilling coffee on herself, was there any limit to what the courts might be forced to rule upon? But as [this documentary] shows, the punchlines and misinformation put forward by so-called tort “reformers” didn’t begin to tell the story of Stella Liebeck. The facts are that McDonald’s brewed its coffee at 180 degrees, a temperature hot enough to seriously burn anyone who might spill it on themselves. In fact, Liebeck’s injuries were so serious she required skin grafts. And she wasn’t the first person burned by McDonald’s hot coffee — at least 700 others had reported injuries after mishaps with the chain’s coffee.

This website shows how the Recovery Act helped Wisconsin and what we can do to create a more secure economic revival.

For the last 100 years, every productivity study in every industry has come to the same conclusion: After about 40 hours in a week, the quality of your work starts to degrade,” she writes. “You make mistakes. That’s why working 60 hours may not save you time or money: You’ll spend too much of that time fixing the mistakes you shouldn’t have made in the meantime. That’s why software companies that limit work to 35 hours a week need to employ fewer QA engineers: There isn’t as much mess to clean up.

9. The material world will not bring you true happiness. My generation was taught to think that happiness and success come from consumption. Materialism doesn’t bring you happiness. The media keeps feeding our need to buy more (appealing to our inner lizard of lack) and then we end up in our 50s or 60s with too much stuff and chained to The Man. We ask ourselves, “Is this all there is?” I am not saying that having abundance is a bad thing. What I am saying is that it is not the answer to happiness.

This article discusses how large factory farms’ routine use of antibiotics are the biggest cause of drug-resistant bacteria. The numbers and types of drug-resistant bacteria are increasing, and are causing more illnesses and deaths. The article discusses pending legislation, H.R. 1549, that would require factory farms to reduce their overuse of antibiotics, and find ways to produce food that are safer for public health.

Dr. Ali Khan, Deputy Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Congress this week that the evidence implicating the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture in the creation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is “unequivocal and compelling.”

…

The widespread use of antibiotics in animal agriculture does slightly increase the yield and profit margin obtained by factory farms. But do the American people really think that preserving the profitability of factory farming is more important than the future viability of what may be the most significant medical tool ever developed?

To participate in the campaign to pass H.R. 1549, click here.

Worker abuse is a widespread problem — in a 2007 Zogby poll, 37% of American adults said they had been bullied at work — and most of it is perfectly legal. Workers who are abused based on their membership in a protected class — race, nationality or religion, among others — can sue under civil rights laws. But the law generally does not protect against plain old viciousness.

That may be about to change. Workers’ rights advocates have been campaigning for years to get states to enact laws against workplace bullying, and in May they scored their biggest victory. The New York state senate passed a bill that would let workers sue for physical, psychological or economic harm due to abusive treatment on the job. If New York’s Healthy Workplace Bill becomes law, workers who can show that they were subjected to hostile conduct — including verbal abuse, threats or work sabotage — could be awarded lost wages, medical expenses, compensation for emotional distress and punitive damages.

This Wisconsin Court of Appeals case, The Selmer Company v. Rinn, found that Wisconsin’s non-compete statute (Wis. Stat. § 103.465, which protects workers’ mobility, and invalidates overly-restrictive non-compete agreements) did not apply to an employee’s stock option agreement with his employer. According to the Court:

[U]nlike typical restrictive covenants, upon which a prospective employee’s position may depend, there were no consequences attached to Rinn’s refusal to accept the agreement. The circuit court found Rinn was not pressured to sign the stock option agreement, nor was his employment conditioned upon his doing so. Indeed, the circuit court found Rinn’s refusal would not have affected his employment in any way.

Because the non-compete statute did not apply, the agreement’s non-solicitation and confidentiality provisions were scrutinized under law that was better for the employer. The agreement was found enforceable. The employee’s competitive actions were found in violation of the (enforced) agreement’s provisions. This case is also notable because the Courts involved found sanctions (penalties) should be made against the employee for continuing competitive activities that a court prohibited, and also for violating legal procedural rules (specifically, discovery rules). Bottom lines for WI workers: (1) do not assume that WI’s pro-worker non-compete statute will apply to and/or invalidate your non-compete agreement; (2) with non-competes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure– have an attorney review your situation BEFORE you take a new job and/or engage in activities the employer may allege are non-competitive; (3) there are additional risks to you if you violate a court order (or put yourself in a position where your opponent could argue that to be the case).

Judge Richard Posner of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals does a lot of reading—but he apparently hates boilerplate as much as the next person.

Appearing at a recent American Constitution Society conference, Posner recalled his encounter with hundreds of pages of documentation for his home equity loan, Above the Law reports. Posner got a laugh when he said he didn’t read it; he just signed it.

The most interesting issue in this article is not it’s focal one, i.e. that a judge ignored the fine print when getting a loan as a consumer.

Most interesting, to me, is that this is a striking example of REAL consumer behavior (e.g. people generally don’t read the fine print of important documents before signing them), as compared to legal fictions (e.g. people are presumed to have read, understood and willingly signed the contract at issue). To me, the scariest aspect of this scenario is not that a judge didn’t read the fine print. Far scarier is that our legal and political systems are based on the legal fictions, rather than the realities.

The first reality: most people don’t understand most of the complex documents they sign. Another reality: many companies take advantage of people who don’t read or understand their contracts. And more companies will do this, the way the trend is headed. That is, if existing economic and legal incentives remain intact, and continue to reward companies who lay traps via fine print.

Scariest of all, note the central element that allows all such contractual transactions to unfold: trust. When people sign contracts they don’t read and/or understand, they do so with the belief that the company that drafted the lengthy fine print can be trusted. That is, our internal monologue that says, “I don’t know what all that stuff in this contract means, but I assume the other party does not intend to take advantage of me.” Judge Posner’s scenario exemplifies the huge role that trust plays in the consumer’s mind– even a very sophisticated consumer who is exceptionally well-versed in law and economics. If all THAT consumer has to rely on is trust– given the lack of law and/or enforcement with teeth for most such scenarios nowadays– yikes.