“Today I am signing Assembly Bill 1844 and Senate Bill 1349, which prohibit universities and employers from demanding your email and social media passwords,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “California pioneered the social media revolution. These laws protect Californians from unwarranted invasions of their social media accounts.”
I didn’t know this was a problem, companies demanding passwords from employees for their email, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. I can’t imagine how this would come up and how I would react. Though, I have heard stories and there are, from c|net, “more than 100 cases currently before the National Labor Relations Board that involve employer workplace policies around social media.”
Good to see this practice banned before it becomes more widespread.
The Economist published a barometer of world business according to 1,500 senior executives. It’s a complicated graph but very interesting because it shows North America will once again lead the world out of trouble.
Read it as follows, “Balance of respondents expecting:”
global business conditions to improve (let side)
their companies to have more employees in a year’s time (right)
On both sides North America leads the way with improving business conditions and new hirings.
“In North America more executives are bullish than bearish for the first time in a year. On jobs, the balance of firms expecting to hire over the next year has increased in all regions.”
Hiring continued its slow pace in April as employers added a modest 115,000 jobs to their payrolls.
The jobless rate inched down to 8.1% last month, the Labor Department said Friday, but that wasn’t because more people were employed. Rather, the rate fell as more workers dropped out of the labor force (about 342,000 workers).
The April jobs report was highly anticipated because job growth slowed sharply in March after three strong winter months of payroll gains averaging 252,000.
Job growth last month was bolstered by continued strength in manufacturing, which added 16,000 jobs to payrolls, and professional services such as architecture, engineering and computer systems design also increased staffing.
Wages overall were subdued; average earnings for all private-sector employees went up by a mere penny from March, to $23.38 an hour.
The consumer electronics giant will increase the headcount at its European headquarters in the southern city of Cork over the next 18 months from 2,800 at present, a spokesman for the company said.
He said the jobs would “support our growing business across Europe.” The Cork operation provides distribution, supply chain management and back office functions.
While workers are still being laid off as consumer spending continues to shrink, Dublin has succeeded in attracting Google and Facebook thanks to its low corporate tax rates and educated, English-speaking workforce within the eurozone.
The “major hiring campaign” by Apple will kick off in the next few weeks, according to Israel’s Ynetnews. The new positions will work at Apple’s R&D center in Haifa.
The company is expected to rely on the assistance of a “headhunter” who will handle the hiring of “dozens of candidates simultaneously.”
The new employees will join the roughly 200 personnel at Anobit, a flash memory company that Apple purchased in late 2011 for a rumored $490 million price. That strategic acquisition is expected to help Apple secure capacity of flash memory for devices like the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook lineup.
Apple’s new hires will be located in Haifa’s Scientific Industries Center, an international technology center known as Matam. Other companies with operations there include Google, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
Amazon.com added 9,400 employees to its payroll in the quarter ended March 31. That’s the biggest single quarter of headcount growth in Amazon’s history.
The company now employs 65,600 full- and part-time workers worldwide.
With its current trajectory, Amazon is rapidly approaching Microsoft in size. Microsoft employs more than 93,000 but hasn’t been growing as quickly as in the past. More than 40,000 of Microsoft’s employees are in the Seattle region; Amazon doesn’t break down its employment by region.
In February, 2012, Amazon purchased 3 million square feet of office space in Seattle, that would more than double their existing office space of 2 million square feet:
In one of Seattle’s biggest real-estate deals in years, fast-growing Amazon.com has agreed to buy three blocks in Seattle’s Denny Triangle — and preliminary paperwork has been filed with the city to build a 1 million-square-foot office tower on each of them.
The deal includes options for Amazon to buy even more of Denny Triangle holdings.
“In terms of economic development and new jobs for Seattle, this is off the charts,” Al Clise said.
Though, it’s possible that Amazon is ramping up in another area, secretly, as they have been known to do.
* * *
On another note, I tried to find perspective on the size of these companies. I found that, according to reports (pdf), the total size of the tech industry in United States is 4.15 million. Which is an all-time high for the industry bouncing back from 2008, the last time numbers were this good.
I also found that Foxconn and it’s parent company employ 836,000 workers, third largest in the world, and IBM employs 427,000, tenth largest in the world.
