Company Finds Out The Hard Way It's Illegal To Pay $1.21 An Hour In America

This takes egregiously low wages to a whole new level.

A Silicon Valley company that digitizes images said Thursday that an "administrative error" led to it paying eight workers flown in from Bangalore, India just $1.21 an hour to work 120-hour weeks installing computers in the company's headquarters.

Electronics For Imaging paid the workers $40,000 in back wages and overtime and a $3,500 fine after the U.S. Department of Labor investigated the payroll violation based on an anonymous tip, a department official told The Huffington Post.

"These folks were not only not getting time-and-a-half when working extremely long hours, they weren't making the basic minimum wage," Michael Eastwood, assistant district director for the Labor Department's San Francisco division said.

In a statement, the company said it didn't realize it was illegal to pay workers temporarily in the United States the same wages they earn in their home countries. The $1.21 was equivalent to what the employees made in Indian rupees.

“We unintentionally overlooked laws that require even foreign employees to be paid based on local U.S. standards,” the company said in a statement.

Eastwood said the company also failed to keep documentation of the hours worked by the Indian employees. Though the workers were only owed $20,000 in back pay and overtime, regulators doubled that amount to $40,000 in the settlement to compensate for damages.

The company blamed an “administrative error” and said it took steps to ensure it would not occur again.

David Lindsay, a spokesman for the company, told HuffPost the labor violation occurred last year, and that the back wages, overtime and fine had already been paid. Eastwood confirmed that all dues were paid in August.

Electronics For Imaging earned a total net income of $109.11 million last year, up from $83.27 million in 2012. The stock price has climbed steadily over the last five years:

Wage theft is nothing new in the Silicon Valley region. Last year, Bloom Energy Corporation was forced to pay out nearly $64,000 in back pay and damages to 14 workers from Mexico who were paid just $2.66 an hour.

"Unfortunately, we do see a high level of wage theft violations," Eastwood said. "But we want to send a clear message that the Department of Labor is here and we are vigorously enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act."

This story has been updated with a quotes from the U.S. Department of Labor

Sears Reportedly Closing More Than 100 Stores, Laying Off 5,457 Workers

Sears Holdings Corp is shuttering more than 100 stores and laying off at least 5,457 employees, investor website Seeking Alpha reported on Thursday, indicating the struggling retailer may be stepping up store closures.

Sears said in August it had closed 96 stores in the six months since February and planned to close a total of 130 underperforming stores during the full fiscal year. It added at the time that it may shutter additional stores beyond the 130 target.

Sears spokesman Chris Brathwaite declined to comment on the number of planned closures, saying the company would provide an update when it reports quarterly earnings next month. Reducing operations to the best performing stores is key to Sears' revival strategy, he said.

"While this has resulted in store closures where appropriate - decisions that we do not take lightly - we continue to have a substantial nationwide footprint with a presence in many of the top malls in the country," Brathwaite said.

Sears shares rose 5.9 percent to $36.46 on Nasdaq at mid-afternoon.

Since August the company has moved to close at least 46 Kmart stores, 30 Sears department stores and 31 Sears Auto Centers, Seeking Alpha said, citing local media reports and liquidation notices. (http://bit.ly/1z0RVyd)

Sears is closing stores to cut costs as it shifts to an "asset-light" business model. The company lost nearly $1 billion during the first half of the fiscal year in a downturn that has worried some vendors and prompted a series of moves by the company to generate cash.

On Monday Sears said it would raise as much as $625 million through an unsecured loan and equity warrants, about half of which will be purchased by Chief Executive Eddie Lampert and his hedge fund. It was the company's third fundraising in a little over month.

It also said on Monday that it would lease seven stores to discount fashion chain Primark for an undisclosed amount, reflecting its effort to use generate rental income from better performing retailers.

Sears had 1,077 Kmart stores and 793 Sears stores in the United States as of Aug. 2. The company had 226,000 U.S. employees as of Feb. 1. (Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bangalore and Nathan Layne in Chicago; Editing by Kirti Pandey and Richard Chang)

Europe's Austerity-Fueled Depression Keeps Getting Worse

Europe's central bank just slashed interest rates and launched emergency stimulus measures -- but six years too late, and not enough to counter the austerity that has Europe in a worse mess than the Great Depression.

The European Central Bank surprised markets on Thursday by cutting its target short-term interest rate to basically zero. ECB also plans to buy a bunch of bonds to push longer-term rates lower, too -- an echo of the U.S. Federal Reserve's many rounds of "quantitative easing," used in recent years to goose the economy (or at least the stock market).

Good job, good effort, ECB, except this comes nearly six years after the Fed cut its own rates to zero and launched QE. In other words, the ECB is way behind the game. That's one reason the U.S. recovery, unsatisfying as it has been, looks like the 1990s economic boom compared to the crap hoagie that is Europe's economy.

Europe's current slump is worse than the Great Depression, as Paul Krugman and many others have pointed out. Here's a chart for evidence, via Professor Nicholas Crafts at the University of Warwick:

The red line represents Europe's current GDP growth and the forecast for the next year or so. As you can see, it's flatlined. The black line shows the growth of European countries that wisely dumped the gold standard during the Great Depression of the 1920s and '30s. The yellow line shows the countries that stuck with gold for too long. Europe is currently doing just about as well as those miserable countries.

In fact, this chart is about eight months old, and the red line's end should probably be lower than it is. Europe's GDP has relapsed lately, raising fears of a triple-dip recession, as this graph from Trading Economics shows:

U.S. GDP hasn't exactly been gangbusters, but it's at least managed to stay positive (mostly):

Europe's unemployment rate, meanwhile, is 11.5 percent, compared with 6.2 percent for the United States. European inflation is also dangerously low, near zero percent, while U.S. inflation isn't far from the Fed's target of 2 percent.

Low inflation sounds great, unless you consider the case of Japan, or the U.S. in the Great Depression. In those cases, prices kept falling, so people stopped buying stuff because they expected prices to fall -- which they did, which made people continue to not buy stuff. All the while, the economy got worse.

That's the path Europe is on. It's largely the fault of Europe's fiscal policy makers, who have stubbornly refused to spend money to stimulate the economy, aside from a paltry stimulus package that amounted to just 1.5 percent of GDP in 2008. By comparison, the U.S. stimulus plan in 2009, though probably not nearly big enough, was worth more than 5 percent of GDP. Europe has also imposed strict austerity measures on Greece and other countries struggling with high debt loads.

The ECB hasn't helped by waiting too long to act aggressively. And now it's playing catch-up in the middle of a depression.

In America, Only The Poor's Eating Habits Aren't Improving

CHICAGO (AP) — Americans' eating habits have improved — except among the poor, evidence of a widening wealth gap when it comes to diet. Yet even among wealthier adults, food choices remain far from ideal, a 12-year study found.

On an index of healthy eating where a perfect score is 110, U.S. adults averaged just 40 points in 1999-2000, climbing steadily to 47 points in 2009-10, the study found.

Scores for low-income adults were lower than the average and barely budged during the years studied. They averaged almost four points lower than those for high-income adults at the beginning; the difference increased to more than six points in 2009-10.

Higher scores mean greater intake of heart-healthy foods including vegetables, fruits, whole grains and healthy fats, and a high score means a low risk of obesity and chronic illnesses including heart disease, strokes and diabetes. Low scores mean people face greater chances for developing those ailments.

The widening rich-poor diet gap is disconcerting and "will have important public health implications," said study co-author Dr. Frank Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health. Diet-linked chronic diseases such as diabetes have become more common in Americans in general, and especially in the poor, he noted.

"Declining diet quality over time may actually widen the gap between the poor and the rich," Hu said.

Harvard School of Public Health researchers developed the healthy diet index used for the study. It is similar to federal dietary guidelines but features additional categories including red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages and alcohol.

The study authors used that index along with government estimates on trans fat intake to evaluate information in 1999-2010 national health surveys that included interviews with people about their eating habits. The results are published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Hu said the widening diet gap reflects an income gap that deepened during the recent financial crisis, which likely made healthy food less affordable for many people. Hu also noted that inexpensive highly processed foods are often widely available in low-income neighborhoods.

The overall diet improvement was largely due to decreased intake of foods containing trans fats but the disappointing results point to a need for policy changes including better nutrition education, Hu said.

In recent years the government and manufacturers have moved to phase out use of artificial trans fats in foods including processed cookies, cakes, frozen pizza and margarines. Trans fats contribute to unhealthy cholesterol levels and can increase heart disease risks. These fats are made by adding hydrogen to vegetable oil to improve texture and shelf life.

The study authors say their results are consistent with an earlier report showing that "nearly the entire U.S. population fell short of meeting federal dietary recommendations."

The federal guidelines are updated every five years and new ones will be issued next year. The current recommendations emphasize limiting intake of trans fats, sodium, processed foods and added sugars. They don't specify amounts but encourage diets high in whole grains, vegetables and fruits.

The Harvard index has a similar emphasis with some specifics; to get a top score would include eating daily more than two cups of vegetables, at least four servings of fruit and at least one ounce of nuts.

A JAMA Internal Medicine editorial says the Harvard diet index isn't perfect because it puts equal emphasis on various foods that may not contribute equally to health. Still, the study highlights a "growing chasm" that is a public health concern, the editorial says. It suggests that government efforts to close the gap with programs including food stamps may be insufficient and that limiting government benefits to cover only healthful foods might be a better strategy.

___

Online:

JAMA Internal Medicine: http://jamainternalmedicine.com

Federal dietary guidelines: http://tinyurl.com/9yjgeoz

___

AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner

Illinois Issues Long-Awaited Fracking Rules For Oil And Gas Companies

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — The Illinois Department of Natural Resources released a long-awaited plan Friday to regulate high-volume oil and gas drilling that supporters hope could bring an economic boost to southern Illinois but environmentalists fear may be too lenient.

The lengthy report follows months of delays and complaints over the process to draft rules governing hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in Illinois. Industry officials say southern Illinois has rich deposits of natural gas, but a final draft of the rules — initially touted as a national model of both sides working together — has taken months for the agency to produce as industry groups warned the state was losing business.

A 150-page report was given to the 12-member Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, which has 45 days to act, or the rules can take effect. Environmental groups, industry experts and lawmakers also got their first look at the report Friday, and some said they expect to spend hours, possibly days, combing through the details.

"These are highly technical rules that will require a really close look at the details," Josh Mogerman, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said earlier Friday. "Our experts are going to be spending their holiday weekend going through these rules with a fine tooth comb."

The new rules would require companies awarded drilling permits to submit lists, some of them redacted, of the chemicals used in fracking. The redacted list would be made available to the public by department and be submitted to the public health department. The industry says releasing the full list would expose trade secrets.

In issuing drilling permits, the department would be required to determine within one day whether an applicant had fully completed the necessary forms. The department would then have 60 days to approve or reject an application.

Hydraulic fracturing uses a mixture of water, chemicals and sand to crack open rock formations thousands of feet underground to release trapped oil and gas. Opponents fear it will pollute and deplete groundwater or cause health problems, while the industry insists the method is safe and will cause the same economic surge that oil booms have created in other states.

Illinois was praised last year for passing legislation seen as a compromise between industry and environmentalists on how to regulate the practice, while other states have declared moratoriums or adopted less comprehensive regulations. But the implementing rules proposed by the DNR were criticized by environmentalists as weakening the agreed-on provisions. Industry officials, in turn, said they would stall permits.

"Our hope is that the rules implement the law that was negotiated in all sides in good faith," Mark Denzler, chief operating officer of the Illinois Manufacturer's Association, said ahead of the report's release Friday.

Agency officials spent months pouring over the more than 30,000 comments in response to the first draft, at the same time coming under increasing criticism by fracking supporters who had hoped that drilling would begin this summer. Backers say allowing more drilling could bring thousands of jobs to the rural area.

The panel reviewing the rules is made up of a bipartisan group of lawmakers from the Chicago area and central Illinois tasked with evaluating state agencies' rules. It has 45 days to sign off on the suggested rules, change them or prohibit their filing. It is also allowed to ask for a 45-day extension in making its recommendations.

The department faces a Nov. 15 deadline for the rules to be established.

Whole Foods Is Taking This Kale Thing Way Too Far

We've officially reached an unhealthy level of kale obsession. Here's proof:

Visiting #wfmfamily @WholeFoodsCRP - they have a great event coming up 9/6 #backtoschool! Funding #wholekids pic.twitter.com/kjpE3VvXaC

— WFM_Newtonville (@WFMNewtonville) August 21, 2014

Perplexed? We were too.

It turns out Whole Foods' "Kalegating" event, taking place at one of the chain's locations in Boston, is the high-end grocery store's spin on good old American football tailgating. Of course, "tailgating" usually involves eating chips, hot dogs and other heavy meats out of the back of a car or truck while chugging copious quantities of beer. There's also usually a football game at some point.

Whole Foods' party will serve...“a lot of kale,” a company marketing rep told Boston Magazine, which first wrote about the event. The rep said they'd also serve some “normal” football foods like wings and dip too.

As for the kale pong? Apparently that's sort of like beer pong, but with kale smoothies instead of beer, according to Boston Magazine. In other words, it's nothing like beer bong.

Apparently the winner of the tournament will win a $100 Tailgating Essentials Gift Basket, which we can assume probably will include include everything but what most people would consider tailgating essentials. It probably involves lots and lots of kale.

To play in the kale pong tournament, you'll have to pay $10. The money will be donated to the Whole Kid's Foundation, which aims to end childhood obesity by improving kids' nutrition and wellness. Whole Foods did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Are Corn Flakes Republican? This App Will Tell You

The cereal aisle could be the new ballot box.

A new app called BuyPartisan scans barcodes on thousands of supermarket items and displays color-coded charts that break down the manufacturers’ political donations by Democratic, Republican or other.

“We’re billing this as the nutrition label for your conscience,” Matthew Colbert, a former political operative and founder of app developer SpendConsciously, told The Huffington Post on Thursday.

The app uses data from the Center for Responsive Politics, the Institute for State Money in Politics and the Sunlight Foundation tracking donations by corporate boards, employees and political action committees.

It has bugs. Scan the sticker on a Chiquita banana, for instance, and the PAC segment lists donations by a realtor, a restaurant and a supermercado all bearing the name “Chiquita.”

Colbert said the app only has complete data for about 100 different companies. When it can't find specific information on a company, it searches all its databases to fill in any information with numbers that could possibly be related.

“We apologize for that,” he said. “We’re fixing that now -- it should be fixed in the next couple of weeks.”

But Colbert guarantees the accuracy of the app’s “compare” section, an encyclopedia of more than 100 major companies. It lets you select up to five companies from the list and see their political contributions side by side. Say you were torn between a box of Kellogg’s Mini Wheats or General Mills’ Wheaties. For both companies, donations lean Republican -- but Kellogg’s CEO John A. Bryant gave more to Democrats than General Mills CEO Ken Powell.

“This is just one small snapshot of who that company is,” said Colbert, a native New Yorker in his 30s, “and if you make a decision based on that, that’s cool. If you don’t, you don’t.”

For users worried about exposing their political preferences to the world, the app doesn’t collect any data about individual users and won’t without first asking for consent with a privacy policy, Colbert said. There is no mobile payment component to the app, so it cannot track purchases.

Eventually, he hopes SpendConsciously will develop a product that lets users scan their bank statement, determine what causes or parties their money inadvertently supported, and donate to organizations that reflect their values.

“You know how you have a carbon offset? What if you could have a guilt offset?" he said.

Colbert, who worked as a campaigner and Capitol Hill staffer, declined to name the politicians he worked for or give his party affiliation, saying the app’s reputation as a nonpartisan tool was crucial to growing an audience. His app is one of the latest in a string of new issue-based shopping apps, such as 2nd Vote -- which guides shoppers to companies with conservative values -- and 2AO, which lists businesses that welcome firearms.

Though The Washington Post hinted that Colbert could be related to a comedian who shares both his last name and his interest in money's role in politics, the politico-turned-entrepreneur laughed off the question to HuffPost.

"Not to my knowledge," he said.