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posted by janrinok on Friday July 24 2015, @02:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the new-laws-coming-soon dept.

In the second quarter of 2015, Google spent a whopping $4.62 million on lobbying efforts. That's just slightly less than the $5.47 million they spent in the first quarter, but it still makes the search giant the third largest corporate lobbyist. Facebook increased its spend from $2.44 million to $2.69 million in the second quarter, while Amazon's budget grew from $1.91 million to $2.15 million. Meanwhile, Apple spent just $1.23 million of its huge mountain of cash.
...
Immigration issues also topped the list as the companies lobbied the government to create more pathways for high-skilled foreign workers. It's a topic about which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been particularly outspoken, going so far as to launch an advocacy group called Fwd.us back in 2013 with the explicit mission of fixing the immigration system.
...
The companies also prioritized taxation and trade policies. Facebook lobbied for the extension of the R&D tax credit. Amazon lobbyists, meanwhile, pursued the issue of the Remote Transactions Parity Act of 2015, an internet sales tax Amazon has endorsed that would require online stores to pay taxes in each state in which they sell goods.

Sigh. None of them lobbied for Robanukah.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @09:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2015, @09:39PM (#213348)

    Google Employees Have Been Sharing A Doc With Their Salary Info [refinery29.com]
    N.B. Many sites split their tiny articles on this across multiple pages.
    A pox on the lot of them.

    former Google employee Erica Baker began tweeting about an internal spreadsheet she created where employees could share their compensation packages
    [...]
    all salaries are not created equal at Google, even between two employees who do the same job
    [...]
    while Baker wasn't fired and the doc wasn't taken down, she was punished.

    Google has a peer bonus program, where one employee can recommend that another receive a $150 bonus. According to Baker's account, at least seven employees sent peer bonuses to her, and her manager denied all seven. She didn't even realize it was something a manager could deny until a coworker mentioned that he had sent one, but Baker never received it.

    Baker also noted that she wasn't the only Google employee complicit in the launch of this doc. A white male colleague was also involved. He was never reprimanded and received all of his peer bonuses.

    Management may not have loved the salary document, but employees did. Nearly 5% of the company shared their salaries, and the spreadsheet included details like gender, job title, years of experience, and bonuses. Baker claimed that the doc helped several employees to negotiate for bigger salaries--which is the whole argument for salary transparency in the first place.

    -- gewg_

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