The Boston Globe lost $50 million last year. It's projected to lose $85 million this year. So the New York Times Co. asked the newsroom to accept a package of cutbacks. Yesterday, they voted "no." Now they're really getting screwed.

Silicon Valley businessmen fancy themselves unflinching hard-core capitalists. Yet they hate to compete for workers — and the New York Times found an email to prove it.

Tech giants have long sought more work visas, saying they enrich immigrants. But a reported Justice Department investigation raises the possibility Google, Apple and Yahoo, among others, colluded to hold down wages.

[Submit your own Gawker Stalker sightings to stalker@gawker.com] May 12 @ 11am There's a work stoppage at the essex hotel. mr. penn happened to be there filming a movie, saw his brothers and sisters protesting.

In a 427-to-36 vote yesterday afternoon, the union that covers the New York Times newsroom ratified the 5% pay cut that management asked for in March to mirror the pay cut they put in place for all non-union employees.

While the New York Times Co. is threatening to shut down the Boston Globe if its unions don't agree to steep cuts in its labor contracts, employees covered by the Newspaper Guild at the NYT are voting today on whether to accept a 5% pay cut for the remainder of the year in exchange for 10 days of paid vacation (which together adds up to a 10-day furlough).

Our first black president might appoint our first openly gay cabinet member! Or, you know, maybe not. And the job is really one of the most toothless and sadly irrelevant in the cabinet. That's right: Secretary of Labor! As if there was even any of that "labor" stuff left, in this country. Anyways, please say hello to Mary Beth Maxwell.

Writer/actor/director/producer Tyler Perry knows what's best for his writers. And what's best for them, apparently, is to churn out sitcom scripts without union protection or representation. The Writers' Guild of America West has filed a complaint against Perry's production company for unfair labor practices, claiming four writers on his TBS sitcom, Tyler Perry's House of Payne, were shitcanned for trying to join the union.

It turns out that the ad industry has managed to find some minority people to hire after all! The NYC Human Rights Commission has been formally on the industry's ass to hire more non-white people and stop being such insular crackers. But everybody watching assumed they would fail, because ad reporters are extremely cynical and also because the industry really didn't seem to give a fuck itself. But hey, looks like they have snagged some of those elusive employees "of color!":

This year, healthcare costs are set to rise nearly six percent, again, and guess who will pay the expense? Employees, not employers. You will be allowed to choose between paying more to insurance companies for the same deductible or the same amount but with a higher potential emergency outlay. [AP] (Photo by Vick the Viking)

Operating-system monopolist Microsoft maintains a campus and a number of satellite offices here in the Valley, and competes voraciously with other local companies for talent from around the world. So what, exactly, do they pay foreign workers? One of the ways the company makes good on regulatory promises is by posting job listings internally. It's part of the government's PERM process to certify immigrants for H-1B and permanent-residency eligibility; companies must first show that they tried and failed to find local workers for the job. The listings provide a peek into the current going rate for different positions, from technical writer to program manager.

The Nvision conference put on by chipmaker Nvidia is turning out to be unintentionally interesting. The stock price is down and Intel is looking to join AMD as a competitor in the high-end graphics processing market. Attendees are being greeted by union activists from Unite Here pointing out how the company has shipped thousands of faulty chips inside machines from Dell and HP.It's part of the union's strategy to convince the company to pressure subcontractor Aramark into negotiating a better deal with striking service workers. And after today's festivities, a group of Diggnation groupies will be delivered by CalTrain after a boozy ride from San Francisco for a live taping of the show at 6:30 p.m. after the day-long conference. Both the activists and the fanboys will surely add color to the official company line CEO Jen-Hsun Huang pitched at the keynote. (Photo by AP/Mark Lennihan)

The Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers have reached a tentative agreement with Denver-based telco Qwest, pending approval by the 20,000 employees under contract. The agreement was reached in the eleventh hour after the CWA and IBEW had voted to authorize a strike when their contracts expired at midnight on Saturday. The contract calls for 9 percent raises over its three year term, and brought employees of Qwest's directory-assistance operations under contract. Based on the language of the CWA's press release, critics might complain about the agreements reached on healthcare, with the union citing the healthcare cost epidemic and Qwest's financial performance as mitigating factors in their concessions to the bosses during negotiations.The Qwest deal follows on a larger contract signed on behalf of Verizon employees by the CWA, also under threat of strike. "That day, with the strike deadline looming, the company started bargaining a lot more seriously," CWA spokesman Jeff Miller said of the earlier negotiations in a phone call last week. But even by adding call-center employees, the CWA has their work cut out for them expanding its rolls. "The new technologies are not as labor-intensive as past years. An awful lot of jobs have disappeared in the traditional copper wireline business," Miller added. What about fiber-optic linemen, like those working on Verizon's Fios efforts? Those employees were largely under contract already, according to Miller. And once the fiber's in the ground, those jobs will get buried, too. (Photo by AP/David Zalubowski)

You'll be seeing a lot of articles this week claiming the U.S. is 101 years behind Japan in broadband, or some similar number-fumbling. The source is a report sponsored by the Communications Workers of America, a union which represents more than 700,000 workers in telecom and other jobs (for comparison, AFL-CIO membership is just over 12 million.) Let's skip the bogus arithmetic and get to what they want: "With the government’s help, we can make the most of our network capacity." Knock it off with the network stats and give us your pork price tag, willya?

The U.S. Department of Labor and law firm Fragomen Del Rey Bernsen & Loewy, which represents clients such as IBM on immigration issues, are in a legal tussle. The department is conducting an audit of Fragomen's practices in helping clients disqualify American applicants — a necessary step before employers can obtain H-1B visas for foreign workers. Now Fragomen has fired back with a lawsuit that calls the Labor Department's rules restricting lawyers' activities unconstitutional. How do lawyers work to make sure no citizen applicant could possibly qualify?In the video above from last year, attorneys from law firm Cohen & Grigsby detailed how the firm suggests a minimum of job opening ads are placed in markets where it's unlikely a qualified applicant will apply, so few are received. The firm also provides the company with a checklist which the employer can use to quickly process — and reject — any applications it may receive so that the company can permanently certify the foreign national. If a citizen passes that test, there are further tricks to making sure something arises from the interview process that disqualifies them. Disqualifying Americans also works in the favor of companies overall, since it allows them numbers to cite when complaining about the need to raise immigration quotas and expedite the process. Fragomen is citing the First Amendment and due process in arguing that it should be allowed to offer counsel to employers. Meanwhile, up to 3,000 applications are on hold pending the investigation.

At the Start conference yesterday, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg, creator of the popular WordPress blog software, startled the audience by claiming his company didn't have any employees. Instead, he said, they're all independent contractors. "Is that legal?" some audience members whispered. We're not employment lawyers here, so we can't say. But we note that the IRS says independent contractors are "generally free to seek out business opportunities" and "are available to work in the relevant market." Translation: Mullenweg has just announced that his programmers are available for the poaching! If, that is, you don't mind the occasional security hole. Update: Audience members missed Mullenweg saying this was true of Automattic's foreign workers only. U.S. employees have full benefits, he tells us. Only the offshore workers are eligible for poaching! (Photo via Ma.tt)

Engineer David Walsh has brought suit against his employer, Apple, alleging that the company misclassified him and others as exempt from overtime pay. The practice is endemic across California, especially at startups. Local labor laws set a high bar for exempting employees from overtime pay, and non-exempt employees can become very expensive for companies which demand workaholic schedules. I was misclassified years ago when working as a Web producer for Williams-Sonoma and got a nice settlement check after a visit from the National Labor Relations Board. The notorious "EA Spouse" blogger helped shake up labor practices across the entire videogame industry. While stuck at your desk missing your legally required meal break, read below to see if you're exempt or non-exempt:

65,000 employees of Verizon represented by the Communication Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers agreed to postpone any strike after their contracts expired over the weekend. The unions agreed to indefinitely hold off on any work stoppage because progress was being made on the health benefits and job security fronts. Verizon has been aggressively replacing unionized employees with non-union technicians by outsourcing work to subcontractors. [WSJ] (Photo by AP/Mike Groll)

Columnist Michael Musto: "We're hoping to settle it, but if it happens, I would turn it out... I'll get out my entire summer wardrobe and put on quite a show." [Daily News]

An interesting philosophical question: Should employees get paid overtime for checking their BlackBerries outside work hours? Money-grubbing writers at ABC News say "Yes." Money-grubbing executives at ABC say "No." We say: throw away your BlackBerry and it becomes a moot point.