Eduardo Escobar
Dr. Scott J. Behson
MGMT4243
02/04/2013
Employment Law, Aliens, and Property Rights Employment law is designed to equilibrate the power balance between employers and employees. Employment law deals with what the relation between responsibilities and freedoms and employers and employee. This law also sets and defines the limits and restrictions to both parties. The law is meant to be fair and protect both employer and employees' rights. The first of the following articles talks about protecting the employer's rights over the work and development of new products based on advances made while working at the employer' facilities. The second and third articles both deal with overseas workers, how hard it has become to hire and provide visas for these aliens to work legally in the US. In the Article S.C. Supreme Court Upholds Confidentiality and "Holdover" Inventions Assignment Clauses in Employment Agreement the South Carolina Supreme Court takes a deep look into the employers' agreement an employment contract designed to protect the employer's intellectual property from unfair competition by its own workers in the case Milliken & Co. v. Morin. The issue here is that the research scientists for the Advanced Yarns Team resigned to start a new company to launch a new fiber for which they had the idea while working for Milliken. The employment contract prohibited them from using, modifying or adapting information of importance for three years after leaving the corporation. The contract also stipulated that inventions patentable or not related to Milliken's business, research, or resulting from work performed in the company are the property of Milliken. The agreement had a holdover provision stating that inventions developed one year after termination of employment also belonged to Milliken. The court had to stipulate if the clauses of the employment contract were reasonable, and ruled that under the standard of reasonableness the clauses were valid because they did not restrict the employee from using general skills and knowledge in the future. The court ruled in favor of Milliken's allegation of ownership of the rights to the new fiber developed six months later after termination of the employment contract. Both the article Overseas Workers for State Contracts and the article Why It's Getting Harder to Hire foreign Workers deal with hiring foreign workers, the needs of businesses, and limitations imposed by the governmental agencies aimed to restrict the hiring of aliens in a weak economy. The first of the two articles mentioned states that companies developing software like IBM hire aliens because they cannot find Americans to fill in the positions available since they would rather work at more exciting jobs as Girish Bhatia, CEO of Gcom Software affirms. The second article shows how tougher it has become to hire aliens to fill in