The age of the electronic pink slip may have reached an all-time low when employees were told they had been laid off via a text message from their employer. 900 truck drivers were stranded last Tuesday when Tulsa-based Arrow Trucking closed their doors, canceled the drivers' fuel cards and left them to fend for themselves just three days before Christmas.

The drivers were told to return their rigs to the nearest dealer and call a special hotline to get a bus ticket home. Some drivers allege that they have not been paid for the last three or four weeks work and most were left trying to get their belongings out of the rig and back to their homes. Help for the truckers has been provided by users of Facebook who set up a site called "Support For Stranded Arrow Trucking Drivers".

This week the CEO of Arrow Trucking was served with a notice that he and his company are being sued in federal court. Three former employees have filed the lawsuit claiming the company violated the WARN act, which requires companies to give a 60-day notice before any large layoffs.

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34 trade groups, including the Business Software Alliance (BSA), are protesting a new Chinese policy that gives local IT products preference for government contracts. The Chinese government's Indigenous Innovation Product Accreditation Program will create a national catalog of products that would get preference in government contracts. Six product categories would initially be covered including software, computers and telecommunication products.

The new Accreditation Program will block foreign products with American companies unable to qualify based on the given criteria. The Chinese government is the largest legal market for U.S. software in the country and the Accreditation Program could mean that all US and foreign suppliers could be denied access to this market.

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In Kansas officials at the state universities are lobbying to free the institutions from restrictive state government purchasing requirements. A pilot project that allowed Kansas University and Fort Hays State University to bypass state purchasing guidelines suggests that Kansas taxpayers save money and institutions speed up their purchases. Fort Hays State University has been able to save an average time of 11 days on purchases.

Kansas University says that the pilot program saved the state nearly $1 million in the last fiscal year and gave it more flexibility to implement changes, such as new procurement software suited to the university's needs. All competitive bids conducted by the university's purchasing department are sent to vendors electronically and bids are received in the same fashion.

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The depressed economy continues in one of Asia's high flying nations. Manufacturing totals in Singapore fell in November at a level that was the highest for eight months. Industrial production dropped 8.2 percent from a year earlier following a 3.2 percent increase in October.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing, which account for about a fifth of Singapore's industrial output, fell 53 percent in November. The Singapore government expects to fall 2.5 percent overall in 2009, but reverse the trend in 2010.

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