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Posts Tagged ‘Web Economy’

This week, the House Subcommittee on Immigration and practices within the law to arrange a hearing called “Legal Employment Act” (HR 2164). Bill sponsored by Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas), would be authorized to use the E-verify system for all employers.

Although hailed as a success by Rep. Smith, E-Check program is actually a deeply flawed. If made mandatory, it would cripple the U.S. economy, destroy its social environment and lead to discriminatory results for workers, especially those in the Asia-American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) community.

E-Verify is a federal program on the web program that provides employers a way to check work permits an employee and supplements I-9 form for new employees. In theory, employers can electronically verify the employment eligibility of their employees by the two federal agencies: 1) Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and 2) the Social Security Administration (SSA).

Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. The drawbacks to the program far exceed its benefit.

Requiring use of E-Verify will prevent millions of American workers from getting jobs and cause many more workers to lose their jobs. Every day, employers already wrongfully receive red flags on workers, known as “tentative non-confirmations” (TNCs), based on errors in the E-Verify databases. These errors arise, for example, if a person’s name is misspelled or if his or her records are outdated.

E-Verify is particularly harmful for foreign-born workers, as green card holders and naturalized citizens are 20 times more likely than native-born citizens to falsely receive TNCs. This is especially troubling for AAPIs because more than 8 million AAPIs are foreign-born.

Furthermore, workers have little or no protection when they are falsely suspended or terminated as a result of E-Verify. Fane, a Tongan woman who was naturalized in 1993, was a victim of an improper E-Verify TNC. Although a U.S. citizen, E-Verify flagged her as unauthorized to work. She was not allowed to return to work until the issue was cleared up, losing out on two weeks’ worth of pay. Only after multiple trips to SSA did she discover that why she received a TNC: when she became a U.S. citizen, her records at SSA were not updated. Under E-Verify, Fane was never able to receive her two weeks’ worth of back pay – a heavy burden for a single mother of four children.

E-Verify promotes discrimination against AAPIs, as under-trained employers may assume a worker is undocumented if they receive a TNC in error and unduly fire the worker or simply not hire them at all. A government-funded study found that employer noncompliance with the E-Verify pilot program’s rules was “substantial,” finding that employers 1) engaged in prohibited practices such as pre-employment screening, 2) took adverse employment actions based on tentative non-confirmation notices, and 3) failed to inform employees of their rights. The proposed law would also allow employers to use E-Verify to prescreen job applicants. AAPI workers and other foreign-born or foreign-looking employees will have a harder time getting a job because employers may want to avoid the risk of E-Verify mismatches or errors. This opens to door to discrimination based on national origin and race.

In an ailing economy, we cannot afford to divert the time and resources of workers like Fane. The American Council on International Personnel reports that corrections at SSA usually take in excess of 90 days, and that employees must wait four or more hours per trip, with repeated trips to SSA frequently required to get their records corrected. E-Verify will jeopardize the productivity of its AAPI workers by creating hardship for employees.

Do not think the fans when they say that E-Verify will help our economy. E-Verify, with their high error rates and potentially discriminatory results will affect all workers, including U.S. citizens and green card holders. As the error rate is reduced and better implementation and accountability procedures are in place, we’ll let you hit the gas in this car broken. E-Verify is not ready for prime time and should not be mandatory.

European share fell for the sixth day Wednesday, with sentiment hit by a bearish assessment of the U.S. economy by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke.

The last strip was defeated by nearly 4.4% dropped out of the pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index as a string of disappointing data of the largest economy in the world, including the weak labor market and production has raised fears that the pace of recovery may be slowing.

At 04:51, the index fell 1.1% to 1092.25 points, after falling as low as 1,089.78 – its lowest intraday level since March 21.

Investor sentiment was rattled after Bernanke acknowledged a slowdown in the economy but made no suggestion of a further stimulus to boost the economy.

“The question marks regarding the growth dynamics for the global economy are becoming bigger and this is weighing on the markets,” said Tammo Greetfeld, equity strategist at UniCredit.

“If we put this in perspective, the Euro STOXX could move towards the region of 2,650 or 2,700 points, which is the lower end of the valuation that we have seen over the last two years,” he said, adding that whether these levels could attract buyers depended on the extend of economic slowdown and deterioration of the euro zone debt crisis.

The Euro STOXX 50, the euro zone’s blue chip index, was down 1% at 2,746.68 points.

Mining shares, which are the worst performing sectors in Europe so far this year, fell 2.1% as copper prices shed 1.5%, reflecting a rise in the dollar as risk aversion intensified.

LOOKING UNLIKELY

Some investors were likely to have been disappointed by a lack of indications from Bernanke of further quantitative easing measures to support the economy in the wake of the Fed’s current $600 billion government bond buying, known as QE2, which is set to end in June.

“Other Fed members were also speaking yesterday with much the same message coming through: monetary policy is likely to remain accommodative for some time yet, but further QE looking unlikely at this stage,” Evolution Securities analysts wrote in a note.

Among individual fallers, Kabel Deutschland fell 6.2%, as traders pointed to unsurprising earnings and a proposed dividend that was not as high as some had hoped.

The euro, which has been used by a number of investors as a barometer for “risk-on/risk off” trends over the past year, has been sending a contrary signal over the past two weeks, rising about 5% while the Euro STOXX 50 has dropped 5% over the same period.

The 30-day rolling correlation between the euro and the Euro STOXX 50 has fallen to 0.2 from 0.6 back in early May, highlighting the fact that correlation strategies may be becoming less effective in the short-term.

Technical indicators also painted a bearish picture for equities, with the 14-day relative strength index on the FTSEurofirst 300 at 31.9 — inching towards “oversold” territory of 30 and below.

With the addition of a downbeat mood, German exports in April fell more than in January 2009, the Federal Statistical Office reported.

With the QE2, set at five weeks and Greece down the hill towards the global standard is not best suited to withstand an economic slowdown.

This is precisely what seems to happen when Asian demand is affected by a cooling of China and Japan struggling.

Let’s take a look at the evidence:

Japan’s economy shrank by 0.9 percent in the three months to March, battered by the earthquake, tsunami and ongoing nuclear fiasco.

The preliminary HSBC/Markit purchasing managers’ index for China fell to 51.1 in May from a final reading of 51.8 in April, holding in expansionary territory above 50 but amidst growing evidence that China is coming off the boil. Chinese demand for raw materials and semi-finished products has been one of the global economy’s principal supports, but now a monetary policy tightening campaign may be gaining traction.

The Chicago Fed national index, derived itself from 85 economic indicators, came in at negative 0.45 in April compared to 0.32 in March. There are numerous signals of an industrial slowdown in the U.S., while the housing market continues to weaken, threatening financial stability and consumer spending.

Finally, in Europe the euro zone composite flash PMI, an indicator combining service sector and manufacturing purchasing, fell to 55.4 from 57.8. More worryingly, the headline manufacturing index had its biggest fall since Lehman Brothers failed, falling by 3.1 points to 54.8.

“All in all it seems to us that the odds are high that a domestic and global economic slowdown is already in place.  In the U.S. the slowdown is happening with only weeks to go before the end of QE2, a program that has been a major prop for even the tepid recovery we’ve undergone so far,” said Charlie Minter of fund managers Comstock Partners in a note to clients.

“For the stock market nothing seems to matter until, suddenly, it does.”

It has begun to matter recently to the stock market, which has fallen in recent sessions after a sustained rally. The bond market has already figured this out; since mid-April U.S. 10-year yields are down more than 12 percent to 3.12 percent. Given that the U.S. debt market faces a debt showdown and the end of QE2, both factors which should theoretically send yields higher, this slide in yields shows real doubts about future growth.

CRUEL SUMMER

It is worth noting that the euro zone’s woes were not this time concentrated in the weak peripheral states; this time Germany got whacked too. That may well reflect the wrench thrown into production from Japanese plant closings, which in itself will self-correct. It is also likely reflecting a slowdown in demand for German products from China. If you believe that Chinese demand was artificially boosted by very easy credit, and that Chinese demand in turn was driving global growth, then this is an indicator of a very busy and volatile summer in financial markets.

Global markets have ignored, more or less, the euro zone’s issues for more than a year, but did so in a very supportive atmosphere. The Federal Reserve was buying up Treasuries, sending cash into risk markets in waves, while China continued to grow at a blistering pace. It may be that China is important not just because its slowdown affects demand, but because it lets investors focus on the actual prospects in the euro zone.

Will Germany and France be as willing to foot the bill for Greece if their own manufacturing bases begin to shrink? It is possible but a lot less likely.

Meanwhile the crisis both builds and spreads, with a dispute over debt reprofiling (a sort of doe-eyed default) between the European Central Bank and European officials and a fantasy plan by Greece to raise 15 billion euros through asset sales.

Greece may turn out to be a minor worry; Belgium and Italy have been threatened with credit downgrades by Fitch.

So what happens from here? A palatable outcome would be a gentle decline in economic momentum followed by a strong second half. This makes absorbing the impact from Europe easier, and makes it easier for Europe to come to terms with itself.

A less likely, perhaps, but still possible scenario is that the manufacturing slowdown gains speeds just as Europe faces a contagion from the periphery, either to parts of the core, to the banking system of the core, or both.

At this stage, the Federal Reserve is a horrible choice, we extend the quantitative easing supported by the recent economic slowdown, or peace of mind, the rhythm is a recession, and I hope to get something else?

What’s the Latest Development?

Another attempt to make a go of using the power of the web to create an economy of “micro-payments” whereby individuals and corporations could charge tiny sums for their content. Flattr, a micropayment startup founded by Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, is preparing to launch a new feature that will combine its payment system with Twitter, and allow any Flattr user to send money to someone via their Twitter name.

What’s the Big Idea?

Could this help launch a “tip jar” system that actually works on a large scale and transforms the online content industry in much the same way The Pirate Bay disrupted it, but for the better? Or will it just be the latest failed micropayment startup? Since there aren’t any of the physical restrictions on money and transactions that occur in the real world this kind of micro-economy should work quite well. The only problem is that it never has.

It is not unusual for the American Heritage Credit Union in Philadelphia to get 500 resumes for a job advertisement, reports CBS News senior business correspondent Anthony Mason.
But business is growing, the company is taking: tellers, managers and assistant vice-president.

“We potentially could bring in 38 new positions by the end of the year,” said Flora Caranac with American Heritage.

Economist Ellen Zentner said when you base it off the last three months of data; it looks like the economy is getting some momentum on job growth.

“We’ve had the unemployment rate drop a full percentage point very quickly over just four months and that’s nearly unprecedented,” Zentner said.

In February, employment increased in 35 states. The biggest overall growth coming in California, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas and Illinois.

But more than 6 million Americans have been unemployed now for six months or more, like Marianne Gannon, a former sales manager with Mastercard. She’s joined a job search group in Westchester County, New York.

Gannon, who has been out of work for 15 months, thinks there’s a bias against people who have been out of work for a long time.

“I applied one night to a particular company on their website,” Gannon said. “And two and a half minutes later I got an email saying ‘Thank you very much. We’ve reviewed your application and resume and we do not feel it is a fit.’”

On job web sites we found repeated postings for sales and management positions that required applicants to be “currently employed.” CBS contacted four firms for an explanation but none replied.

“Even friends or neighbors or whatever around here – they’re like, ‘you’re still out of work?’ It’s like what don’t you understand? The job market stinks,” Gannon said.

The new study, UCLA and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the researchers found evidence of a trend towards the unemployed, according to a report that is often marked, even if they are voluntarily leaving a position.

Craig Alexander, senior vice president and chief economist at TD Bank Financial Group, recently spoke with members of the business community and local politicians in the framework of the 6th edition of the Economic breakfast.

By Lindsey Cole/The Oshawa Express

Flooding. Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Political instability. A recession.

Put all of these ingredients together and you have a recipe for a global economy that is facing some significant challenges.

But, believe it or not, the world is beginning to rally, with Canada fairing incredibly well in the mix, says Craig Alexander, senior vice president and chief economist for the TD Bank Financial Group.

He spoke to a group of local members of the business community as well as City staff and councilors at the 6^th Annual Economic Outlook Breakfast, put on by the City of Oshawa.

During his speech he highlighted several areas of improvement and the challenges that are facing the world, North America and the local economy.

He says it’s a tangled web and Canada’s success depends largely on the rest of the world.

“It was a severe recession,” he says of the 2009 economic downturn. “People didn’t know how bad the recession was going to be. People didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel and if they did they thought it was a train.”

But, he says, overall countries are rebounding well and though a natural disaster can be seen as a setback, the tsunami in Japan will not completely decimate the country.

In North America imports will be affected for a short time when it comes to automobiles and technology but overall, things will rebound.

“The rebuilding will actually stimulate economic growth,” Alexander says of Japan. “The economic conditions are improving (on the whole). It’s a very positive outlook. Having said that, it’s a very risk filled environment. There are some very big challenges out there.”

Those challenges include inflation, the cost of food, oil prices and countries facing large deficits.

When it comes to food prices, nature is again to blame.

“Food prices have soared. There just isn’t that much food in the food we buy. An awful lot of it is the marketing, the packaging,” he says, adding prices soared six to eight per cent year over year. “The story is mother nature.”

But when it comes to oil prices, political unrest in the Middle East is the cause and it is cause for concern. Alexander says that is driving oil costs up and the worry is that the unrest will spread to large oil companies in large countries like Saudi Arabia.

“It’s a low probability that we’re going to have an oil shock,” he says, adding it’s something they are keeping an eye on. “If things cool down in the Middle East then you will see oil prices go down.”

Closer to home, the United States is beginning to rally, despite the housing crisis. This, in turn, is benefiting Canada.

“It (the Canada) just chugged along. It’s now recovered all the ground it lost. The U.S. is still in a hole, it’s still got a long way to go but there’s no question that it is improving,” he explains.

“Before Americans were spending like drunken sailors. Consumers have been going without for about two years.”
He says two million jobs were created in 2011 in the U.S., but the jobs lost during the recession amounted to 8.7 million. It shows a slow but steady growth rate, he adds.

When it comes to Canada and the local economy, Alexander says the nation is doing well.

“There was nothing fundamentally wrong with Canada. We were hit with a massive external shock,” he says. “Canada was chugging along nicely when it was sideswiped.”

He says locally Oshawa struggled on the manufacturing side of things, but as the country began to rebound so did Oshawa as car sales ramped up and jobs were created.

However, he adds that while Canada has managed to get most of the jobs back numerically, they went to different areas.

“The jobs haven’t been created in the places that lost them.”

It has moved to service jobs and for Durham that has meant huge improvements.

“The GTA is very competitive. The GTA is very robust. The region as a whole is very strong,” he says. “When you get in the Durham Region it gets a little more diversified.”

He says the GTA unemployment rate is 8.3 and Oshawa is 8.9, so Oshawa is still higher, but Oshawa’s plan is in the right direction, focusing on skilled labour, competitive taxes, retraining and building infrastructure.

“There are still a lot of people out there that need our support,” he says.

“The economy is fundamentally changing. It’s becoming a knowledge-based economy.”

A study by the World Bank published reports Thursday that the online gaming industry has become a company of 3 billion U.S. dollars offered wages to migrant workers in Asia to play all day, raise money virtual and sold to wealthy clients in the Western world for real money.

The report also highlights a new industry in which companies seeking to increase the popularity of its brands to pay low-skilled workers abroad to become his followers to Facebook or Twitter followers.

The study “Knowledge Map of the virtual economy,” World Bank is the first look in depth the impact of online gaming and social media in the developing world. The report was prepared by infoDev, an organization financed by donors to the bank. Lehdonvirta Vili, co-author, said that the bank should not pay the money in the industry because he said the dealmaking violates some of the terms of game publishers and service is cheating.

Known as “gold farming,” the game-playing profession took off in the early 2000s with games such as World of Warcraft and has become a complex industry.

Low-educated laborers in Asia spend hours each day advancing through levels of an online game, picking up gold, swords and gems that enhance a player’s status. Then gaming studios, which employ the players, sell those virtual goods to online retailers. Finally, the retailers sell those items to more than 120 million players worldwide, many of them in North America and Europe, who are unwilling to play the games all day to gather the items on their own.

The bank’s report indicates that online gaming has a positive impact in Asia because 70 percent of the industry’s revenue remains in the gaming countries, with most of that money going to the gaming studios. Compared with the $70 billion coffee market — in which only a small fraction of the revenue remains in the bean-growing countries — gaming has a “much better development impact,” the report concludes.

The report also includes a survey of 26 players and studio managers that offers a rough, yet rare demographic look at their lives: Most of the players work out of studios in China, in Beijing or Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. They earn an average wage of $2.70 an hour, one dollar more than Beijing’s minimum wage for part-time factory work.

“The larger point is that online gaming is often viewed as exploitation. Certainly it’s not a dream career, but the players’ earning is not at sweatshop levels,” Lehdonvirta said.

The gaming studios keep about two-thirds of the industry’s $3 billion in revenue. “Previous studies presumed that the players sold the goods, but that’s not true,” Lehdonvirta said. “If you’re a rural online game player in China, you have no way of setting up a Web site and developing a customer database, and maintaining customer relations.”

The report also focused on a trend in which companies pay low-skilled workers in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines to “like” their Facebook fan pages or become a follower of that company on Twitter. The practice inflates a brand’s popularity.

Twitter regularly suspends accounts created only to follow others. Sean Garrett, a company spokesman, wrote in an e-mail: “We’ve seen numerous instances wherein the accounts that are bought are later suspended. . . leaving the company with few followers and no recourse.”

Facebook spokesman declined to comment on. Site rules allow companies to offer coupons, for example, people, if “as” a page of ads across Facebook.

The British government should e-privacy at the international level, together with EU partners and the United States, the Communications Minister Ed Vaizey said.
In his speech, the CBI Forum on e-privacy and digital economy, Vaizey said the Internet must be potted “lightly regulated driven.

But he said similar privacy standards were emerging from current regulation and new legislation in Europe and the US.

Unlike traditional television and radio publishing, Vaizey said the internet did not respect national boundaries. And he said: “The rules governing on-line privacy need to reflect that.”

“For the sake of web users and businesses we need a unified and consistent approach to on-line privacy that crosses borders.”

US regulation under a forthcoming ‘consumer bill of rights’ was said to be “not that different” from European data protection and e-Privacy directives, and Vaizey said countries should work together.

Creating an international standard to ensure the privacy of online business to compete on an equal footing, in which Web users enjoy the same protection that is based on the site. “

A web design company that closed last week, more than 17 million federal tax liens, and a lawyer for the company, said Tuesday that contributed to his decision to “relax” its operations.

HIT Web Design, also known as Heritage Web Design, unexpectedly closed its doors on March 8, with little attention to employees or customers. Provo attorney Sonny Olsen said HIT was unable to meet existing obligations and outstanding “because of the economy and levy a tax dispute.

“HIT made the most reasonable and prudent decision that it could given what the recession has done to this company and the industry,” Olsen said.

The Internal Revenue Service filed four tax liens on HIT Web Design’s property in Provo from Oct. 25 to Nov. 8, according to Utah County Recorder’s Office records.

The company also is known as Heritage Internet Technologies and Heritage Web Solutions.

HIT was contesting the liens “well in advance of the company dissolving, and [the tax liens are] making it impossible to resolve the wage claims and liability claims while it is pending,” Olsen said. “So HIT Web Design is working with IRS to resolve these issues.”

The company also is “evaluating its position” to try to address other liabilities, he said.

“HIT is well aware of the wages owed to employees at the time of HIT, and management intends to pay for these requirements to the extent that it has power,” Olsen said in a statement.

Colorado web designers Madwire Media, the fastest growing web design company in Colorado, brought six million U.S. dollars in the northern Colorado economy in 2010 and forecasts in addition to fifteen million in 2011.

With unemployment still high and a fragile economy, companies left and right have had to close their doors or lay off employees to stay afloat. CNN Money Magazine reported that unemployment has remained above 9% for 21 consecutive months, and economists and politicians, including Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, have said repeatedly that is likely to remain high in coming years.

Even amid this broken economy, Colorado’s largest web design firm with local, national and global clients, Madwire Media, grew from five to over forty employees in 2010 and plans to add 35 more to the staff by the end of 2011. With this growth, Madwire Media impacted the Northern Colorado economy by six million dollars last year. The reason for such growth is because they put great focus on phenomenal customer service, modern design, efficient development, and marketing that drives results at incredibly low rates.

At this rate, it is forecasted that Colorado web design firm Madwire Media will add an additional fifteen million dollars to the local economy in 2011. This brings a positive light to a not-so-positive economy. Madwire Media is obviously doing it right, and their integrative and non-traditional approach to business probably has a lot to do with it.

Madwire Media is not your unfortunately typical poor service, email only, slow turnaround time, under-delivering web design and internet marketing company. In fact, they pride themselves in being the complete opposite of that. They eat, sleep and drink great service, design, marketing, and affordability. They never leave their clients hanging out to dry, under-serviced, and unsatisfied. Madwire Media is outperforming in the current market, helping to stimulate the economy by bringing in new money nationally and locally.

Madwire Media does everything in their power to help their clients reach their goals, within their budget, and build their business. When it comes to internet marketing and design, they do it all.

His business approach is refreshing and encouraging today’s economy and the media Madwire is sure to create plenty of buzz in the market this year. With its innovative web site design, SEO marketing to inbound, brand identity, and social media, which seem to do anything, and do well.