Oracle is Friday expected to start laying off at least 500 staff, eliminating duplication across product engineering and management, following its $8.5bn acquisition of BEA Systems.

A Pittsburgh computer consultancy is paying $45,000 in civil penalties over claims it discriminated against legal US residents by advertising only for developers on H-1B visas.

Jeff Raikes, head of Microsoft's Office software business is stepping down after 26 years with the company.

Mind the gap Saturday Mind the Gap Saturday is a feature every Saturday where Blognation China tells its readership the differences - the gap - in the tech, mobile and enterprise worlds between China and the Western world.

So you know what kind of a feared corporate animal the "fried squid" is, heard that your friend has fallen victim to yet another jiaban, laughed along to the rare Taiwanese laughathon between nine and five (you should have been crackin'!), and "sharpened your knives before a fight".

Alcoholic workers could receive protection from the Disability Discrimination Act despite the fact that alcoholism is specifically barred from protection, employment experts have said. They say workers could claim protection for the disease's symptoms.

Open source and scripting technologies may be capturing the headlines lately, but Java and Microsoft language skills still put developers top in salary talks with bosses.

A company's claim for ownership of the copyright in a piece of software has failed because it was not explicitly stated in a contract. Meridian International Services had said that its ownership was an implied term of an agreement.

CSC is shifting more UK jobs offshore in an effort to control costs.

The latest round of redundancies will hit the Global Infrastructure Services (GIS) department. Initially, voluntary redundancies will be offered but compulsory job losses are likely if not enough volunteers are found.

Monster Worldwide, the owner of employment search site Monster.com, last week began notifying the estimated 1.3 million users affected by a breach that leaked résumé information and pledged to beef up network monitoring and defenses to prevent such a leak from happening again.

Two-thirds of UK managers believe that lack of management skills is the major factor contributing to bullying at work, according to new research. Misuse of power was listed as the most prolific type of bullying used within the workplace.

A survey by the Ban Bullying at Work campaign questioned 512 senior managers across the UK in conjunction with the Chartered Management Institute ahead of the fifth national Ban Bullying at Work day which takes place on 7th November.

Trying to contain damage amid reports that con artists are targeting online job sites, Monster Worldwide has shut down a rogue server that was siphoning personal information from the resumes of job seekers. The disclosure came amid new details of a Trojan that's amassed personal information on hundreds of thousands of people.

Top business leaders have called for science and engineering undergrads to be given an extra £1,000 per year to help reverse the decline in Britain's pool of technical talent.

According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the golden carrot would tempt the youth away from claptrap like David Beckham studies and French.

Employers could have grounds to demand ownership of employees' social networking profiles, such as those generated on Facebook, MySpace or Bebo, according to a leading intellectual property lawyer.

The news comes in the wake of a court ruling which forced a journalist to hand over the contents of his contacts list to his former employer after he left that company.

Mental ill health is the second largest cause of time lost due to sickness absence in UK organisations with stress, depression, and anxiety accounting for over 50 per cent of these mental health problems, according to a report published this month.

The findings from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and Active Health Partners were based on the absence records of 30,000 employees working across 40 different organisations.

The number one cause of time lost due to sickness absence is musculoskeletal conditions. But CIPD found that employees take on average 21 days for each mental health-related sickness absence spell. The average length of time off for an employee suffering depression is 30 days.

CIPD employee relations adviser Ben Willmott said: "This research shows how important it is for managers and HR practitioners to be aware of the signs of mental ill health so that they can take action early and provide support before the individual's condition deteriorates to the point they go off on long-term sick leave."

The organisation is also calling for the government to help and encourage more employers to provide their staff with access to cost-effective occupational health services.

"We would like to see tax incentives introduced to encourage more employers to offer occupational health services to employees, as well as further Government investment in the development and extension of services such as NHS Plus and Workplace Health Connect," said Willmott.

"Just as crucially GPs need to work more closely with employers to identify opportunities for phased return-to-work for individuals with mental health problems in less demanding or reduced hours' roles as part of their rehabilitation. Otherwise more employees with mental health problems will fall out of employment altogether and add to the incapacity benefit claimants," he said.

The report, New directions in managing employee absence, is available to buy from CIPD's bookstore.

Copyright © 2007, OUT-LAW.com

OUT-LAW.COM is part of international law firm Pinsent Masons.

More than one in four employees in the UK works longer than 48 hours each week.

According to a study published today by the International Labour Organisation, more of the UK's workforce put in "excessive hours" than in any other developed country.

The ILO estimates that 22 per cent of workers around the world – or over 600 million people – are working excessively long hours, i.e. more than 48 hours a week.

Among those countries with the highest incidence of long working hours for 2004-5 (defined as more than 48 hours per week), Peru topped the list at 50.9 per cent of workers, followed by the Republic of Korea (49.5 per cent), Thailand (46.7 per cent) and Pakistan (44.4 per cent).

In developed countries, where working hours are typically shorter, the UK stood at 25.7 per cent, Israel at 25.5 per cent, Australia at 20.4 per cent, Switzerland at 19.2 per cent, and the US at 18.1 per cent.

The ILO report noted that laws and policies on working time have a limited influence on actual working hours in developing economies. But the same appears to be true in the UK.

The Working Time Regulations implement the EU's Working Time Directive in the UK. The directive provides that workers in all sectors, public or private, must not work longer than 48 hours a week, including overtime. The directive also specifies requirements for rest periods, breaks and no less than four weeks' paid holiday per year. Its aim is to protect workers from the health and safety consequences of overworking.

However, in 1993, the UK negotiated an opt-out which allows member states not to apply the limit to working hours under certain conditions: prior agreement of the individual; no negative fall-out from refusing to opt-out; and records kept of working hours of those that have opted out.

Robyn McIlroy, an employment law specialist at Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, said: "There is no doubt that the right to ask employees to opt-out of the 48-hour limit on average weekly working time affords employers more flexibility, particularly during periods of heavy demand.

"Despite that there is increasingly a recognition that perpetuation of a long-hours culture will ultimately be counter-productive, particularly with an ageing working population, and compared to even five years ago more firms than ever before genuinely would prefer that their employees enjoy work-life balance," she said.

In February 2006, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) responded to reports at the time which said that more people work over 48 hours in the UK than in other EU countries. The CIPD said a far greater proportion of the UK workforce works less than 30 hours a week than on the continent. It also said that the average working hours for full-time workers in the UK are falling. Its survey, Working Time Regulations: Calling Time on Working Time, claimed that three-quarters of long-hours workers do so out of choice.

According to the CIPD, removing the opt-out clause from the UK Regulations would increase moonlighting, as employees may be forced to take up a second job if overtime is curtailed.

In June 2006, at a meeting of the EU Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council, the UK and other members states defended their right to retain the opt-out.

Copyright © 2007, OUT-LAW.com

OUT-LAW.COM is part of international law firm Pinsent Masons.

The majority of European IT professionals say that a failure to finish projects on time would not pose a risk to their job. Under a quarter of IT workers in the US felt safe enough to say the same.

Comment Those of you afraid of Robert Cringely's claim that IBM will layoff 150,000 workers might want to read his latest column. The PBS scribe has blown it again.

At the bottom of a piece on Google, Cringely returns to the IBM layoff topic and makes the following statement: "Last week IBM also posted more than 15,000 new positions on Yahoo HotJobs. If these jobs are real and IBM foresees stable employment numbers, won't 15,000 existing IBM employees have to leave?"

Here’s a question, what do they put in the water in Hull that makes the students there keep winning the UK heat of Microsoft’s annual Imagine Cup?

OK students, off you go again. It's that time of the year when the wind-up starts to Microsoft's Imagine Cup – the annual worldwide competition to encourage comp-sci students.

EMC is cosying up to Microsoft - or is it the other way around? The pair have ensured that as yet unlaunched Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 can natively access EMC's Documentum ECM software.

Imagine Cup We've been in India for the past week taking part in the Imagine Cup 2006 finals. Unfortunately we were knocked out and didn’t make it through to the top three.

Well, the judges have spoken and the results are in, and the winners of this year’s Imagine Cup are….Italy.

Imagine Cup We're down in Reading at the moment, flying out to India tomorrow morning for the Imagine Cup World Finals.

We've been working hard and finally went as code complete as we are going to get before we head out. All the features we want to show off are fully functional and we've just this minute finished presenting a 20 minute pitch to the guys from Microsoft.

Imagine Cup Time is ticking, and we're flat out working on getting the digital recovery environment finished. It seems that despite some pretty damn good project planning, for students anyway, we're only a week or so away from deadline and we're still doing some of the development.

Imagine Cup We recently spent a week at the Microsoft Technology Centre in Reading. We had a great time, including an all-night code/debug-athon and copious amounts of Coca Cola.

There were experts on hand and we had the opportunity to seek advice and some invaluable guidance from them. Martin Grayson one of the user interface/user experience guys spent the first few days showing us various WinFX/.Net 3.0 features.

Imagine Cup While we were in the sunny US we headed over to see those fine chaps at Channel9, for an interview about the Imagine Cup.

Imagine Cup blog We've been quiet recently... Perhaps a-little too quiet... Not without good reason though, for this week we jetted off to Sunny Seattle. And yes it really is sunny! Why? To give a presentation to Bill Gates, someone important enough to convince us to make sure our demo worked without a flaw. As fun as playing demo roulette is, we thought there would be enough tension in the air without us shooting ourselves in the head.

Imagine Cup blog The majority of the work we've done in the past revolves purely around the back end of a system. Lately however there's been a shift from Back to Front-end design. Using Expressions and Windows Presentation Foundation we've been trying, "trying" being the operative word, to get the Digital Recovery Environment to look "Nice." It's certainly been an interesting experience...

Imagine Cup We've gone and done it.

We're on Flickr: there's not many pictures there at the moment but we'll be uploading some more. So if you want to see us working away and doing other random stuff then check us out here. ®

Imagine Cup One of the things we've been playing around with lately is the animations used in Windows Presentation Foundation.