Two former employees of Mario Batali are suing the celebrity chef for pay that they claim is rightly theirs. Stephanie Capsolas and Herman Ricardo Alvarado, a waitress and kitchen runner respectively, claim that Batali wrongly divvied up their tips with other employees.
Attorney Denise A. Schulman says that the restaurant Babbo, owned by Batali, was improperly taking 4.5 percent of its wine sales every night and subtracting it from the tip pool, which deprived employees of that income and decreased their base wage.
The employees’ class action lawsuit also claims that the workers are paid below minimum wage and work overtime, with shifts that exceed 10 hours.
Chef Mario Batali, who has not commented on the lawsuit, owns 15 eateries which are located in New York, Nevada and California.
Last week, on June 22, 2010, the country got its first ever comprehensive plan to end homelessness. It’s hard to believe that an estimated 1,000 mayors and county executives have presented ten-year plans to end homelessness in their areas, but the federal government has been treating homelessness on a piecemeal basis for nearly 234 years. I guess it’s better way way way late than never, right?
end homelessness among families, children and youth by 2020.
Will America’s new organized plan end homelessness once and for all?
The contributing agencies plan to do this by emphasizing “housing first,” keeping people on the verge of homelessness in their homes and ushering the homeless into permanent units as quickly as possible. We should all expect to see broad rental assistance like the celebrated stimulus effort the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program and the promotion of permanent supportive housing units for those with chemical dependency and/or mental health issues.
The federal strategic plan is the culmination of work from 9,000 individuals, according to Barbara Poppe, the executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness and the MC for this morning’s announcement ceremony, which also included speeches from Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki. For months, the USICH gathered public opinion. (Thankfully, anything along the lines of “They’re bums!” was disregarded.)
What do you think of the new plan? Is it too ambitious? Do you think our country have the ability to successfully carry out these actions?
California’s political race is heating up. The highly anticipated bashing television commercials are airing.
Republican candidate Meg Whitman’s campaign recently released a spot that calls Democratic nominee Jerry Brown’s political career a “FAILURE.” At one point, the spot features a photo of Jerry Brown on a variation of the popular online FAIL Blog (roughly 50 seconds into the clip embedded below). The clip features the popular blog design look-alike with the word “FAIL” stamped over the picture of his face. The spot has put the Cheezburger Network into a frenzy. The Cheezburger Network not only owns and operates the FAIL Blog, but also the popular blog called “I Can Has Cheezburger.”
On Friday, CEO Ben Huh took to the FAIL Blog to pen a post calling the ad campaign an “Honesty Fail.” Huh is so displeased with the spot that he told CNET, “We are talking to our attorneys on this.”
The issue is that the FAIL Blog image used in the ad is obviously manufactured, but the blog owners would rather not be affiliated with any political party in any campaign.
Huh has written, “The FAIL Blog community involves liberals, conservatives and everyone across the political spectrum. And we do not endorse the use of FAIL Blog’s image or any content on any of the Cheezburger sites for anyone’s political gain.”
We will have to see what happens next. Huh has asked for a written apology and the removal of the video, although the matter could escalate if the company has legal ground to take further action.
Last week, we launched a new opportunity on our site for third parties to exchange links with our website. All of the information on how to qualify to be a site partner can be found at the link listed below:
If you would like for whocanisue.com to link to your site (and vice versa), please don’t hesitate to fill out the consideration form at the link that I have provided below:
We are currently hiring customer service representatives for our beautiful offices in Boca Raton, Florida. We are looking for individuals with great communication skills, have adequate computer and analytic experience, and can speak both English and Spanish.
In case you forgot or never saw the piece in the first place, we figured we would remind you of our feature on the Today Show a while back. We had the pleasure of being reviewed on the show, and our CEO, Curtis Wolfe talks about how the website works and how it fills a much needed void in the legal process.
Attorney General Eric Holder says that Faisal Shahzad, the accused Times Square bomb plotter, has support from the Pakistani Taliban. And, in the wake of the latest close-call terrorist attack, Holder has suggested he would like to work with Congress on updating certain restrictions under the Miranda rights.
The public safety exemption gives law enforcement agencies permission to delay reading a suspect their rights, when it is believed that they may be a serious threat to the public. Attorney General Holder wants to clarify the exemption, while still ensuring that it stays within its constitutionality.
“We’re now dealing with international terrorism,” says Holder. “And if we are going to have a system that is capable of dealing in a public safety context with this new threat, I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public safety exception.”
On June 13, 1966, the outcome of Miranda v. Arizona provided that suspects must be informed of their legal rights when they are placed under arrest. The rights were created to protect citizens from intimidating police interrogation methods.
April saw good news in the U.S. job market. According to The Labor Department’s monthly report on the job market, employers added 290,000 jobs last month.
The report was characterized as “the strongest sign yet of healing in the labor market, as private nonfarm payrolls expanded substantially,” by Christina Romer, chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
But Romer cautioned that “the unemployment rate is painfully high, and payroll employment is still nearly 8 million below its level at the start of the recession.”
Despite that, the good news did not translate in the legal sector, which lost 1,100 jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is the second month in a row that legal jobs declined by four digits.
In fact, since April 2009, the legal sector has lost about 28,000 jobs.
We’re back with the third installment of the feedback we have received during our ongoing Twitter experiment that we have been conducting to get user feedback on our brand.
Once again, we haven’t been very successful collecting the feedback. Maybe Twitter users are afraid of us?
Either way, you can see the few comments we did get back below:
Steveology: @whocanisue Can I sue you for breach of unintended contract? Good luck with your website.
Good luck with your website.
