Travails of French employers under the Code du Travail — though it’s not as if America doesn’t have plenty of firms that follow the same strategy of keeping head counts below a certain regulatory-trigger threshold. [Business Week]
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Posts tagged as:
small business
I’ve got some comments on an interesting new survey from the Kauffman Foundation/Thumbtack.com. [Cato at Liberty; & welcome Neal Boortz readers]
Related: “When Julia tried to start a small business” [Coyote]
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The Lookout News of Santa Monica, Calif. reports on obstacles to the revitalization of the Pico Boulevard commercial district:
“Businesses on Pico have been very frustrated by code compliance regulations for years,” [Pico Improvement Organization chairman Robert] Kronovet said. “You have a business that might have a sign in the wrong place or a door that isn’t right and the city fines them to the point that they don’t want to stay.
“These are small businesses. They don’t have the money to fight it.”…
Proprietor Elvira Garcia [of Caribbean restaurant Cha Cha Chicken] says business has been terrific, but that the success has been hard-won.
“We wanted to renovate our bathroom areas to make it more handicap-accessible and it took us almost three years to get all the permits,” Garcia said.
“We kept giving all the paperwork they need, but it took forever. We needed the Pico Improvement Organization to plead our case.”
California has the nation’s most active entrepreneurial corps of ADA enforcers, roaming business districts to file mass complaints against small businesses over handicap accessibility which they then settle for cash.
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New York’s notoriously stringent Department of Labor has fined a pizza shop owner $5,535 for not giving his employees enough polo shirts to wear — at least five for those who work five days a week, even if they work only a few hours a day. Owner Christian King
was told that an appeal would take years due to the backlog and the fine would accrue with interest….
“What happened to him is not unusual,” agreed Richard De Groot, a Syracuse consultant who advises businesses — including King’s — on human resource issues. He represents employers across much of the Eastern Seaboard and says New York is unusually demanding.
“There is so much in the way of state rules and laws,” he said, adding that he would advise some businesses, such as manufacturers, to simply look to elsewhere.
[Albany TImes-Union via Stoll]
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- “Brazil Sues Twitter in Bid to Ban Speed Trap and Roadblock Warnings” [ABA Journal]
- Obama nominates Michigan trial lawyer Marietta Robinson to vacancy on Consumer Product Safety Commission, ensuring aggressively pro-regulatory majority [Bluey, Heritage]
- “AMA reports show high cost of malpractice suits” [HCFN] “Average expense to defend against a medical liability claim in 2010 was $47,158″ [American Medical News, more] Survey of 1,200 orthopedic surgeons finds defensive medicine rife, at cost of billions, accounting for 7 percent of all hospital admissions [MedPageToday]
- “Sue us only in Delaware” bylaws would kill off forum-shopping and what fun is that? [Bainbridge, Reuters]
- Trial by media: Lefty “SourceWatch” posts, then deletes, docs from Madison County pesticide suit [Madison County Record]
- Think you’ve beaten FCPA rap? Meet the obscure “Travel Act” [Mike Emmick, Reuters] Federal court expands “honest services fraud” in lobbying case [Paul Enzinna, Point of Law]
- “On the horrors of getting approval for an ice-cream parlour in San Francisco” [NYT via Doctorow/BoingBoing]
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- Big business vs. free markets again: light bulb makers “fuming” over GOP effort to restore consumer choice [Sullum] Large grocery chains like DC’s bag tax [Tim Carney]
- Eeeuw! Bystander can sue train fatality victim whose body part flew through air and hit her [Chicago Tribune]
- “Recommended Cell-Phone Ban Comes as ‘Shocking,’ ‘Heavy-Handed’ To Some” [Josh Long, V2M]
- “Exploding churros are newspaper’s fault, Chilean court rules” [AP]
- In New Jersey and North Carolina, GOP friends of trial bar block legal reform bills [Armstrong Williams, Washington Times]
- Kozinski vs. ill-prepared lawyer in case of Sheriff Arpaio vs. newspaper that covered him [The Recorder; Phoenix New Times case]
- Federal judges block cuts to in-home personal care services in California, Washington [Disability Law, San Francisco Chronicle, KQED]
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- Steve Chapman on FDA salt reduction initiative [Tribune/syndicated] Canada: “Health minister takes sodium-reduction plan off the table” [Calgary Herald] Flashback: FDA holds first hearing on regulating salt content in food [2007, Medical News Today] Discussion of my piece last week [Adler/Volokh, Instapundit]
- More on McDonald’s sidestepping of San Francisco would-be Happy Meal ban [Fair Warning, earlier; background here, here, here, here, etc.]
- “Caveat Venditor: Cottage Food Laws Great in Theory, Often Less So in Practice” [Baylen Linnekin of pro-freedom Keep Food Legal, who guestblogged at Reason last week]
- Rather than get government out of way, left’s farm bill (“Local Farms, Food and Jobs Act”) would cut small/local/organic growers in on more USDA programs [Obama Foodorama, Linnekin]
- Good riddance to monopoly powers of the Canadian Wheat Board [CBC]
- Texas now allows home bakers to sell their wares [Austin Chronicle via @pointoflaw]
- Widespread opposition to new Department of Labor proposal to ban kids from much work on farms [Nebraska Outback]
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- A request for anti-SLAPP lawyers in Maine and Maryland [Popehat]
- “Gallup: Government Regulation the Top Concern Among Small Business Owners” [NRO Corner] Almost as if in rebuttal to claims from Treasury economist [Business Roundtable]
- Foreclosure law firm in upstate NY under fire after pics posted of its Halloween party [Nocera, Mystal]
- “GAO Report Details Secrecy Of Asbestos Trusts” [Dan Fisher, Forbes] Crown Cork & Seal seeks successor-liability bill in Massachusetts [Eagle-Tribune]
- Case against FMCSA’s rule change on truckers’ hours-of-service [Marc Scribner, CEI]
- Richard Epstein on John Paul Stevens as justice and, now, author [Hoover]
- Feds say lawyer who advised giant theft ring was partly paid in chic shoes and other designer gear [ABA Journal]
- “Table Saw without ‘saw stop’ technology defective: First Circuit” [George Conk, Ted Frank, earlier here, here]
- Court OKs burned patron’s flaming-rum suit against Bacardi [Reuters]
- Feds won’t pursue Title IX complaint against 60 Oregon school districts [Oregonian]
- IRS putting the squeeze on small tax preparers [WaPo]
- How the incinerator (and decades of bad decisions) bankrupted Harrisburg [Bond Girl]
- “The most thoughtful, reasonable guy in the whole symposium” — aw [Greenfield on law licensing, earlier] P.S. And similarly from David Lat;
- Adam Freedman and readers on Florida “wrongful birth” case [Ricochet, earlier]
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- Dodd-Frank, arms-trade laws serve to entrench bigger business against smaller [Tim Carney, Rand Simberg] Similarly with automakers and coal producers [David Henderson]
- One guess as to why: “Many Physicians Feel They’re Delivering Too Much Care” [WSJ health blog, CJAC] Insurers report incidence of med-mal claims has dropped, severity has increased [National Underwriter] Roundtable on defensive medicine [Orthopedics Today]
- Pinball Hall of Fame adversary doesn’t like being called a vexatious litigant [Las Vegas Weekly via @loweringthebar]
- U.K. “Solicitors from Hell” gripe site has so far defied multiple efforts to shut it down [Independent]
- WTC dust inhalation suits grind on on despite doubts on scientific effect [PoL, more] “Improbable Chain of Events Dooms Con Ed’s 9/11 Lawsuit” [Mark Hamblett, NYLJ]
- Nathan Glazer’s work in perspective, and an interview [City Journal];
- In the mail: Curtis Wilkie’s Dickie Scruggs book, “The Fall of the House of Zeus.”
Please do regulate babysitting much harder, urges Coyote [earlier; see also]
A victory for California consumers and producers in search of artisanal tippling. [San Francisco Chronicle, last year]
At least so long as it’s produced in an industrial manner. [Chicago Tribune]
In my new post at Cato at Liberty, I quote a few highlights from Philip Greenspun’s account of his encounter with Federal Aviation Administration regulators intent on applying to the smallest aviation businesses the same rules that govern the largest. Per George Wallace, “All regulation aspires to the condition of a Monty Python sketch.”
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Around the country today, CPSC regulations are forcing retailers to throw out new, unused baby cribs — estimates of the number range higher than 100,000 — that the federal government itself considers safe enough to be used in day cares. I explain the latest Nanny State snafu in a new post at Cato at Liberty.
More: Quin Hillyer, CFIF; Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason. And CPSC commissioner Anne Northup corrects a misimpression in some parts of the press:
The new standards ban drop-side cribs. But the standards also prohibit the sale, new or used, of all cribs – both drop-side and fixed-side – that are not tested to the new standards by a private laboratory. Because very few cribs that were not originally manufactured to the new standards will ever be tested, the new standards essentially ban all such cribs – drop-side and fixed side. As reported in today’s press, millions of drop-side cribs have been recalled. On the other hand, tens of millions of fixed side cribs manufactured to previous standards have never been recalled, never been found to be unsafe, and now also cannot be sold new or resold used.
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Patrick at Popehat has compiled “A Small Businessman’s Guide To Dealing With Obnoxious Letters From Lawyers.”
After taking heat in the press, Montgomery County, Md. has waived a $500 fine levied against a kids’ lemonade stand [WUSA, Daily Caller]
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