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Among the many changes brought on by the Health Care Act of 2010, Code Sec. 45R, the Small Employer Health Care Credit (the Credit), was designed to encourage small business employers to provide coverage to their employees. However, businesses have been left with several questions as to the specific requirements for eligibility and filing to claim the Credit.

Eligible Businesses An eligible business is defined as a business that has fewer than 25 “full-time equivalent” (FTE) employees and pays average wages of $50,000 per year or less. An FTE calculation will take into account aggregate hours worked by part-time employees in determining eligibility. Seasonal workers, defined as an employee that works fewer than 120 days out of the year for an employer, are not included in calculating FTEs.

To determine average wages, employers must include all wages, compensation and commissions including overtime, bonuses, vacation and sick leave. Emp

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Pringles chips are displayed in a posed photo at a West Bath grocery store on Tuesday.

AP Photos Pringles chips are seen in a posed photo at a West Bath grocery store on Tuesday. Diamond Foods Inc. is buying Procter & Gamble Co.’s Pringles chips business in a $1.5 billion deal, the biggest in a string that have given the maker of Pop Secret popcorn and Kettle chips a steadily growing share of the snack aisle.

AP Retail Writer

NEW YORK — Diamond Foods Inc. took its biggest bite yet of the snack business with a $1.5 billion deal to buy the Pringles brand from Procter & Gamble Co.

The deal is the biggest in a stack of acquisitions for Diamond and will more than triple the size of the maker of Emerald nuts and Pop Secret popcorn.

Adding Pringles will make it a distant second in the snack business to PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay, which controls nearly half of the market.

The move also lets P&G complete its exit from all its major food businesses. T

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In a rerun of a failed 2010 measure, HB 3349 – Buy America got a hearing in the House Business and Labor Committee, but lack of support precluded a vote on the bill.

The summary for HB 3349 reads Prohibits contracting agency (e.g., government) from awarding contract for public improvement or public works unless iron, steel, wood products and manufactured goods, including equipment, used in public improvement or public works are produced within the United States. Specifies exceptions. The term public improvement or public works is interpreted to mean any construction. The term iron, steel, wood products and manufactured goods, including equipment seems to include, other than minerals (e.g. stone) anything non-supernatural.

Both private (including AOI) and public sector representatives have discussed the difficulties presented by this and related bills. The requirements imposed by these measures will impose further burdens on all contractors and especially smaller contracting agencies that have few, if any, fulltime public contracting professionals, and create confusion among bidders and manufacturers. I

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LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP) — The number of Indiana teens and college students with jobs fell sharply during the recession, and their employment prospects might not improve this year as they battle low turnover and increased competition from older workers.

A 2010 study by the Washington, D.C.-based Employment Policies Institute shows Indiana had the 14th highest teen jobless rate in the nation, at 27.7 percent.

The rate reflects a national trend for younger workers. In 2007, 62 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds were employed nationwide in July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number dropped to 48.9 percent in July 2010, making it the lowest percentage since the government began crunching data on the topic in 1948.

Business owners and education leaders say high unemployment rates are increasing competition for jobs. Many adults are seeking positions that are traditionally geared toward teen workers, and now that the federal minimum wage has risen to $7.25 an hour, some employers prefer older workers.

“A lot of people will want adults for the same wages,” Dan Washington, co-owner of two Dog-n-Suds drive-in restaurants in Lafayette and West Lafayette, told the Journal & Courier. ” Read more…

What is Walmart — in a strictly taxonomic sense, that is? Based on size alone, it would be easy to confuse it with a nation: in 2002, its annual revenue was equal to or exceeded that of all but 22 nation-states. Or, if all its employees — 1,4-million in the US alone — were to gather in one place, you might think you were looking at a major city. But there is also the possibility that Walmart and other planet-spanning enterprises are not mere aggregations of people at all. They may be independent life forms — a species of super-organisms. This seems to be the conclusion of the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the US supreme court, in a frenzy of anthropomorphism, ruled that corporations are actually persons and therefore entitled to freedom of speech and the right to make unlimited campaign contributions. You may object that the notion of personhood had already been degraded beyond recognition by its extension, in the minds of pro-life thinkers, to individual cells such as zygotes. Read more…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court hears arguments today in a major class action suit against Wal-Mart.

At issue in the largest job discrimination lawsuit ever against the nation’s largest retailer is not the outcome, but whether the suit can move forward.

More than two dozen briefs have been filed by business interests on Wal-Mart’s side, and civil rights, consumer and union groups on the other.

The question is crucial to the viability of discrimination claims, which become powerful vehicles to force change when they are presented together, instead of individually.

Lower courts have said the suit could go forward.

But Wal-Mart wants the high court to stop the suit. The company argues it includes too many women with too many different positions in its 3,400 stores. Wal-Mart says there is no evidence that women are poorly treated at Wal-Mart.