Labor unrest in China’s grown recently in the wake of a string of suicides at the plant of electronics manufacturer Foxconn Technology. Worker deaths there forced management to give raises to workers and take a close look at how the folks who assemble much of our gadgetry are living.

The picture isn’t pretty — for anyone. Workers at the Foxconn plant are reported to have been working round-the-clock, often without a break and for minimal wages. They also lived, ate, slept and married at the plant, where they made an average of $300 a month.

The high number of suicides at company facilities caught international attention, and customers of the products made by Foxconn for companies like Apple and Dell began to agitate for the workers at stockholder meetings. Foxconn started getting pressure from its customers and made some substantial changes.

Now that Foxconn’s announced plans to double workers salaries by this fall, workers in other Chinese industries are taking a page from the tech employees book and raising a stink about their working conditions. Honda’s recently been hit by worker strikes for better pay and conditions that have been met with raises and plant closures.

All this worker unrest will ultimately be paid for by the consumer, who’ll get the bill for these improvements added to the cost of every desktop, tablet and smartphone (or automobile) made by Chinese workers.

Question is: What countries workers will be willing to undercut the Chinese labor force and create the next great outsourcing locale?

A massive Nielsen survey has asked consumers the burning question many Web site content providers are dying to hear the answer to: Will you pay for the news and entertainment you now get online for free?

The answer probably isn’t going to help anyone. The overwhelming response: Maybe.

Nielsen asked this question of more than 27,000 consumers across 52 countries.

As expected, the vast majority (85%) prefer that free content remain free. But there are some opportunities to be culled from the results.

Asked to focus on specific types of content, survey participants were more willing to at least consider paying for particular categories, especially if they have done so before: for example, games, music, movies and video.

Consumers are least likely to pay for content that is essentially homegrown online, often by other consumers at fairly low cost. These include social communities, podcasts, consumer-generated videos and blogs.

In between are an array of news formats — newspapers, magazines, Internet-only news sources and radio news and talk shows. This content is generally created by professionals, relatively expensive to produce and, in the case of newspapers and magazines, sold in paper form.

Yet much of their content has become a commodity that’s readily available elsewhere for free.

What’s got to happen to content before consumers will pay for it:

• More than three out of every four survey participants (78%) believe if they already subscribe to a newspaper, magazine, radio or television service they should be able to use its online content for free.
• At the same time, 71% of global consumers say online content of any kind will have to be considerably better than what is currently free before they will pay for it.
• Nearly eight out of every ten (79%) would no longer use a Web site that charges them, presuming they can find the same information at no cost.
• As a group, consumers are ambivalent about whether the quality of online content would suffer if companies could not charge for it –- 34% think so while 30% do not. The remaining 36% have no firm opinion.
• But they are far more united (62%) in their conviction that once they purchase content, it should be theirs to copy or share with whomever they want (a lesson the music industry learned the hard way).

Despite growing consensus that the media may only be able to generate appreciable online revenues by charging consumers for content, there’s not much agreement on how to do that.

Companies are experimenting with a range of payment models, from full service subscriptions to individual transactions, or micropayments. Among those surveyed by Nielsen, about half (52%) favor micropayments, although they have proved cumbersome to implement.

But a more manageable system may be no more enticing. Only 43% say an easy payment method would make them more likely to buy content online.

Regardless of what systems they choose, media companies will almost certainly not abandon advertising, and consumers will doubtless still see ads along with paid content.

For the 47% of respondents willing to accept more advertising to subsidize free content, that may be tolerable. But it will probably not sit well with the 64% who believe that if they must pay for content online, there should be no ads.

The Nielsen study is by no means the last word on the subject. And it remains to be seen if consumers are saying one thing but will wind up doing another.

The survey likely serves as confirmation of what most of us already knew. That’s because we’re all consumers as well, and most of us have an aversion to paying for stuff that we’ve usually gotten for free.

Non-exempt employees who respond to work-related e-mails and text messages after-hours must be paid for their time, says a recent federal court decision.

A group of retail sales associates and supervisors filed a lawsuit against their employer, T-Mobile USA, for back wages and unpaid OT.

They claimed they were required to use company-provided mobile devices to log into computer systems and respond to e-mail and text messages at “all hours of the day.”

The employees also alleged they were required to answer and make work-related phone calls, participate in conference calls and work off the clock during lunch breaks.

To protect your firm, make sure you have an “off-the-clock” policy that requires non-exempt employees to report all work time — no matter when it’s done.

Don’t be surprised if your organization gets hit with a new kind of lawsuit sometime soon. The latest legal challenge:

Some employees think they should be paid for the time they spend booting up their computer and shutting it down.

This might not seem like much to a salaried worker, but to an hourly employee who watches the clock carefully, it could be a big deal.

In the past year, several companies, including AT&T Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Cigna Corp., got socked with lawsuits from employees who say they weren’t paid for the 15- to 30-minute task of booting their computers at the beginning of the day and logging out before they leave

Add those minutes up over a week, and hourly employees can lose some serious coin, argues plaintiffs’ lawyer Mark Thierman, a Las Vegas solo practitioner who’s filed a handful of computer-booting lawsuits in recent years.

“These are hourly employees who are not making much more than minimum wage,” Thierman told the National Law Journal. “There’s a good half-hour a day that they’re not being paid for. It adds up.”

For example, let’s figure a call center worker spends a half hour a day on booting a PC up and shutting it down. The worker’s time is clocked automatically based on when they log into the company’s network and when they log out. The worker puts in five days a week and makes $15 a hour. Over the course of a week, that’s 2.5 hours of time in the office call center that the worker’s not getting paid for.

That’s $37.50 a week of being at work that’s unpaid and $150 a month the worker misses out on.

It’s also $150 the company saves by not paying the worker for that time. Spread that out over a call center with 50 employees, and the company stands to save — or lose — $7500 a month. Chicken feed? Maybe, maybe not.

But the attorneys’ fees to hang onto that amount will need to be factored into the equation if you get hit with a suit.

The big question in these suits depends on which perspective you believe. The attorneys who are bringing suit argue that workers generally spend the time waiting for their computer to boot or shut down engaged in work activities — organizing materials, doing paperwork, consulting their calendar.

Company lawyers say most employees use the time for nonwork activities, like getting a cup of coffee or going for a cigarette break.

Regardless, the suits keep on coming. You may want to check out these cases:

• In California, hundreds of customer service representatives at call centers are suing Cigna Corp., claiming they were denied pay for the time spent booting up computers before and logging out after their shifts at the call centers. Hazel v. Connecticut General Life Insurance Co., No. C08-03552 (N.D. Calif.).
• In Georgia, AT&T and BellSouth Corp. have also been hit with computer-booting claims, filed by sales consultants and associates who claim, among other things, that they were denied pay for time spent booting up and shutting down computers before and after their shifts. Brooks v. AT&T, No. 1:07-cv-3054 (N.D. Ga.).
• In Missouri, UnitedHealth Group also is battling a proposed collective action that claims it failed to pay employees who work from home for time spent booting up their computers. Wolfert v. UnitedHealth Group Inc., No. 4:08-cv-01643 (D. Mo.).

What’s your take on whether this time should or shouldn’t be paid for by the employer?

In a perfect world, you might have more choices like this one: We’ll give you a decent raise, or you can pass up the money and work from home some of the time.

A recent poll by the National Association of Wholesale-Distributors found that more than half of workers would pass on the raise for the opportunity to telecommute — at least occasionally:

That can be good news in these tight economic times, when companies are struggling to keep afloat and hang on to their valuable employees

One way more and more employers are trying to lower workers’ costs and increase flexibility is to let some employees telecommute at least one day a week.

That can be a big boost to recruitment, retention and employee satisfaction, but it also comes with several challenges.

IT is usually charged with making telecommuting work and finance is dedicated to controlling costs, so you might keep want to keep in mind:

1. Security — In some cases, employers can be held liable when personal information about employees or customers is stolen. Managers need to work closely with IT to make sure employees have a secure set-up before they do any work from home.

2. Ground rules — Establish some firm guidelines from the outset, such as:

• no working on public wireless networks
• family members or others don’t use company equipment, and
• any data in physical form (CDs, paper documents, etc.) must be kept in a secure place.

3. Safety – The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) won’t inspect home offices – or require employers to inspect them. Still, employers should be ready to handle claims of injuries from people working at home.

4. Discrimination –- As with any benefit, there’s always a chance someone might claim discrimination when some employees get the offer and some don’t. A clear policy on telecommuting based on objective criteria can avoid this problem. IT can help establish which tasks can be performed remotely and which can’t.

5. Technology choices — Picking the right tools for telecommuters will require an understanding of roles and responsibilities. Working closely with managers to pick the right tools will be IT’s job.

1. Plain old HTML. Demand for HTML programming skills is declining as companies start to embrace Web 2.0 technologies.
2. Legacy programming languages. Cobol, Fortran, PowerBuilder, and more, don’t rate as highly as they once did.
3. NetWare. Windows Server and Linux skills have either replaced, or are replacing, NetWare skills in terms of demand.
4. Non-IP network. IP/Web skills have usurped non-IP network expertise.
5. PC tech support. This includes not just knowledge of hardware issues, but printers and other peripherals as well.