Am I Owed California IT Overtime?

June 5th, 2009. By admin

For those of you in California who work in IT or computer industry, it might be a bit confusing to figure out if you qualify for overtime pay. After all, just being labelled “Exempt” doesn’t necessarily mean much–you could be labelled such and yet still qualify for overtime pay based on a number of “tests”.

LawyersandSettlements.com outlines some of these tests for you, but here’s something you may not be aware of: you may be entitled to back overtime pay–going up to FOUR YEARS back. So even if you’re legitimately Exempt now, you may not have been a couple of years ago.

One of the requirements in determining Exempt status is your level of pay. The chart below shows the minimum pay requirements (2005-2009) that you needed to be at in order to be considered Exempt. While there are other factors that must be looked at to determine if a job is indeed Exempt, your rate of pay is a good place to start. 

Year	Hourly Rate	Annual Rate (40 hour week)
2009	$37.94	$79,050
2008 as of Sept.	$36.00	$75,000
2008 prior to Sept.	$36.00	$74,880
2007	$49.77	$103,522
2006	$47.81	$99,445
2005	$45.84	$95,348

Source: Division of Labor Standards Enforcement; History of Rate of Pay for Exemption for Computer Software Employee (California Labor Code Section 515.5(a)(3))

Pharma Pill Pushers Use Suicide Ruse – Again

June 4th, 2009. By Evelyn Pringle

Nearly every year, researchers on drug company payrolls publish some ridiculous study with claims that more people may be dying from suicide due to a black box warning about an increased risk of suicide in young people on the labels of SSRI and SNRI antidepressants as a ruse to increase sales of drugs.

Judging from a new study out this month, with a June 2, 2009 headline on WebMD stating: “Are Antidepressant Warnings Causing Harm?”, apparently this year is no exception even though in the US there were 164.2 million prescriptions dispensed for antidepressants in 2008, compared to 143 million in 2004, according to IMS Health, a healthcare information company.

The study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, claims there has been a drastic drop in the diagnosis of depression in adults and kids.

Air France Flight Mystery Deepens

June 4th, 2009. By janem

On May 27, five days before Air France Flight 447 crashed into the ocean, Momento24 reported that an Air France flight from Argentina to Paris was delayed before departing after the airline received a bomb threat over the phone at the airport offices. Police and firemen inspected the plane but found nothing. Coincidence?

According to the Washington Post (June 3), Aviation safety analysts are continuing to play down lightning as the force that tragically caused the plane crash, explaining that aircraft routinely encounter such strikes. Still, a struggle with a “complex of thunderstorms” is the probable theory.

  

But why did the pilot fly through the thunderstorms? “It’s not like we didn’t know that flying through a thunderstorm was a bad thing,” said William R. Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation. “We’ve known this for decades — that thunderstorms need to be avoided at all costs…The question is why did the pilot have to fly though this thunderstorm and is there anything we could have done that would have made the aircraft more survivable?”

 

The cause of the plane crash is still unknown…

Sex and Psych Drugs – Young Couples Beware

June 2nd, 2009. By Evelyn Pringle

Although the adverse effects of women taking psychiatric drugs while pregnant related to birth defects and infant withdrawal syndrome are often discussed or reported, the serious adverse effects on the sex lives and reproductive systems of millions of young couples are rarely mentioned.

Whatever the reason, due to the ever widening marketing campaigns by the psycho-pharmaceutical industry, young people need to be warned before they get conned into taking psychiatric drugs. Read the rest of this entry »

Reglan and Pregnancy…worth the risk?

June 2nd, 2009. By admin

So you’re pregnant, you’re heavy, you’re tired, and you’re suffering from indigestion and nausea quite badly. This is typically a situation beyond the ability of Alka-Seltzer to remedy. One of the medicines currently available to treat acid reflux (GERD) and nausea is Reglan, and it may be recommended to pregnant women in some instances, in the tablet formulation. The only problem is there’s a chance, slim perhaps, but still a chance your indigestion might be replaced by tardive dyskinesia—a movement disorder syndrome. And there’s also the question of what it could do to the fetus. So what should you do?