- The NLRB and You - Unfair Labor Practices
- The NLRB and You - Representation Cases
- A Guide to Basic Law and Procedure
- NLRB Forms and Technical information - Download complaint or petition forms (need Adobe Acrobat)
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Average annual pay by state and industry
- Collective Bargaining Agreements File - An online list of private and public sector agreements. Alphabetical listings by employer name. Also includes location, union, union local, number of workers and expiration date.
- Consumer Price Index (CPI)
- Mass Layoffs
- Occupational Outlook Handbook 2004-05
- Union membership
- Occupational Safety and Health Administration
Newspaper Indexes
- Newslink to newspapers
- Newspaper Association of America - Hot list of links to U.S. dailies, Canadian newspapers, international papers, weeklies, business papers and alternative press. Search by state or type of paper.
- Web Wombat - Newspapers from around the world. Use the quick jump on the left for U.S. papers
Newswires
- George Washington University, Gelman Library - has links to major wire services available on the Internet
Magazines
- Newslink to magazines on the web
Radio and TV
Finding Information About Companies
- Find Name, Address, Phone Numbers
- Public or Private?
- Company Overview
- Company Homepages
- Publicly Traded Companies
- Private Company Information
- Executive Compensation
- Non-Profits
- NLRB Election History
- The Unicore Database
Find Name, Address, Phone
If you need very basic information (company name, location, address) try the links below or any of the links used in the Finding People section:
- Anywho.com - business and residential phone and e-mail directory
- Switchboard - residential and business phone directory
- INFOSPACE - yellow and white page directories, reverse directory, maps and directions.
- Big Yellow - Extensive database of U.S. business listings
Return to the Top of the Page
Public
or Private? Company Search
Determine whether your company is publicly owned (traded on a stock exchange) or privately owned. There is much more information on publicly held companies. Public companies must report certain information to the Security and Exchange Commission and their shareholders.
- Yahoo! Finance - Enter any part of the company name in the box
- Quote.Com - To find the ticker symbol for a publicly held company
Company
Overview
If you successfully identified the ticker symbol, you can collect some quick, useful summary information at any of the following sites.
- Hoover's Online - Provides information on over 13,000 public and private companies. Use the tool box on the left side of the screen. You can search by company name, ticker symbol or keyword.
- Companies Online - Free information from Dun & Bradstreet and Lycos. Search by company name or ticker symbol. Also contains a Featured Company of the Week and Browse by Industry section
- MarketGuide - Search by ticker symbol or company name. Information includes company snapshot, stock charts, number of employees, officers.
- CorpTech Database of 50,000 High-Tech Companies - Provides profiles, competitor information, industry rankings, and other data on public and private high-tech organizations.
Company
Homepages
Company web sites are mostly a marketing tool but may offer annual reports, information on company executives, news articles and, information about products and services.
If you haven't yet located the home page for your company, try guessing the address. Many businesses have a website address that looks like this:
Type in the name of the company you are interested in.
- www.thenameofthecompany.com
If that doesn't work try:
- Companies Online - Free information from Dun & Bradstreet and Lycos. Search by company name or ticker symbol. Also contains a Featured Company of the Week and Browse by Industry section
- Dow Jones Business Directory - contains links and reviews of the best business web sites
Publicly Traded Companies
If the stock is publicly traded you can identify the stock symbol and get information at:
Public companies must report certain financial
information to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and their
shareholders. You can find annual reports (10K), quarterly reports (10Q), or
other reports such as 13Q ownership filings at any of the following:
- The SEC Edgar Database
- Use the handy and fast Quick Forms Lookup if you know the type of filing (10-K, proxy) you want for a particular company.
- If you want to search for a company and browse all their filings in the EDGAR database go to http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/srch-edgar
- FreeEdgar - This free service offers free, unlimited access to indexed SEC EDGAR filings; free email alerts of targeted company filings by creating a watchlist; free, unlimited access to Today's Filings and, instant download of financial data directly into Excel spreadsheets. Very user friendly.
- Watchlist - To use the Watchlist function, you must first register and create a password. Note at the bottom of the page you can choose if you want to receive other promotional material from FreeEdgar. When you have finished the registration form, you will be prompted to create your Watchlistlist.
- Tracking A Company
- Company Sleuth - Scours the Internet for free, legal, inside information. Create a list of the companies and information is delivered free via email, once a day. You must register. Currently, Company Sleuth only tracks US-based, publicly traded companies.
Sources include:
- New Patents
- SEC Filings
- Earnings Estimates
- Discussion Group Postings
- Stock Quotes
- Analyst Ratings
- New Trademarks
- Insider Trades
- Job Postings
- Press Releases
- Business News
Private
Company Information
- Corporate Information - Excellent site for finding both public and private company information. Organized by country, it contains a list of other sites that offer information about companies. Most of the links are free but there are some fee-based sites.
- CEO Express - Another meta site for the business researcher. Contains links to stock quotes, company research, government agencies, statistics, legislation, business news and magazines
- Price's List of Lists - A comprehensive list of links to articles listing the top ranked industries, organizations, schools, products, and people.
Executive Compensation
- Proxy Statements - Compensation of executives of publicly traded companies must be reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission. This information is in the SEC form DEF otherwise known as the proxy statement. These are available from the SEC EDGAR database.
- Executive Pay Watch - From the AFL-CIO, this site offers the salary and compensation figures for the chief executive officers of the Standard & Poor's 500 corporations.
- Wall St. Journal - Interactive Edition 4/18/98 - Stories and charts on executive pay
- Forbes Magazine - has an online database of executive pay. Search by company or CEO name. When you get your results, click on the CEO's name for details of what's in the compensation package. Also compares current year to previous years.
Non-Profits
- GuideStar - is a free service with information on the programs nonprofit organizations, up-to-date news stories on philanthropy, and a forum for donors and volunteers.
- Meta Index of Non-profit Internet sites - brought to you by Philanthropy Journal Online
NLRB
Election History
Local 2 OPEIU maintains a database of NLRB election history results between 1960-1997. The report contains employer name, location, date filed, date closed, election date, SIC Code, number of eligible voters, number of no votes, type of unit, petitioning union and employer address (if available). The database is updated as new information becomes available.
Request election history by sending an email to the Organizing Department of Local 2 OPEIU Results can be delivered by mail or fax.
The
Unicore Database
The UNICORE database tracks the union status of companies and can answer the following:
- What other facilities does the company own and are they organized?
- What other companies produce similar products and are they organized?
- What companies in this city/state/county are unorganized?
Information comes from a variety of sources including Dun & Bradstreet, the Federal Mediation and Concilitation Service (FMCS) and union data received directly from AFL-CIO affiliates.
A basic report on a company would include ultimate parent company and subsidiaries, location, number of employees, union status and whether there have been any ULPs or OSHA citations filed against the company.
This database is not housed at Local 2. Turnaround time is 2- 4 business days. Send requests to the Organizing Department Local 2 OPEIU. The document will be mailed or faxed to you.
SEARCH TOOLS & DIRECTORIES
- Top Four Search Tools - Powerful and easy to use search engines and directories.
- Introduction to Search Engines - If you're not sure exactly what a search engine is, start here.
TOP FOUR SEARCH
TOOLS FOR THE
WEB
- Google - Voted three times Most Outstanding Search Engine by Search Engine Watch readers, Google has a well-deserved reputation as the top choice for those searching the web. The crawler-based service provides both comprehensive coverage of the web along with great relevancy.
- AllTheWeb.com - An excellent crawler-based search engine, All The Web provides both comprehensive coverage of the web and outstanding relevancy. If you tried Google and didn't find it, All The Web should probably be next on your list.
- Yahoo - Launched in 1994, Yahoo is the web's oldest "directory," a place where human editors organize web sites into categories.
- MSN Search - Microsoft has its own team of editors that monitors the most popular searches being performed and then hand-picks sites that are believed to be the most relevant.
- Additional Search Tools - This is a more comprehensive list of search engines, directories, newsgroups, information libraries, and web developer resource listings.
- Introduction to Search Engines, or How to Search the Web Without Really Trying - If you're not sure exactly what a search engine is, start here.
INTRODUCTION TO SEARCH
ENGINES,
(OR HOW TO SEARCH THE
WEB
WITHOUT REALLY TRYING)
The World Wide Web gives you access to millions of documents and information sites, but sifting through all of that to find just what you're looking for may seem a rather daunting task. Fortunately, there are a host of different search tools--known as search engines and directories--to help you and Local 2's Web site contains links to several of the most useful ones. If your Web browser has pre-set bookmarks, you'll probably also find some search tools listed there.
Directories
Directories are
simply indexes which list Web sites by subject matter. Like any index, the
categories are somewhat subjective, so you might find unions listed under
the economy, labor, political organizations, interest groups, or some other
category. Keep in mind that no Web directory is comprehensive; new Web sites
are simply being created too quickly for anyone to keep up. (One estimate is
that the number of Web pages doubles every 55 days!) However, each of the
directories listed in Local 2's Web site indexes hundreds of thousands of pages
and will help you get started.
Here's an example of how you might use a directory to find information on school-to-work programs:
Step 1:
Point your Web browser to http://www.opeiu-local2.org (Of course, if you're
reading this online, you're already there.)
Step 2: Choose
Search Tools & Directories from
the main menu.
Step 3: Choose Search Tools for the Web from the table of
contents.
Step 4: Follow the link to the Yahoo directory.
Step 5: From the table of contents, choose Education.
Step 6: Next, choose Sub Category Listing.
Step 7: Scroll through the list of sub categories and find
Career and Vocational and, under that, School-to-Work; follow the link and
you'll see a list of sites related to education and workplace issues,
including the Central Illinois Education to Careers Partnership.
Step 8: Follow that link to learn about the organization and
its programs.
You may have to try a few different categories to find exactly what you want. For instance, instead of starting from the Education category, you might have followed Business and Economy to Companies to Education and found a link to a company called Academic Innovations that is also involved in school-to-work.
Instead of clicking your way through all those categories, you could also try Yahoo's internal search function. Type "school-to-work" in the box at the top of the page and hit the "Search" button. Yahoo will give you a list of sites that match your search. You can also narrow your search by first clicking on a category such as Education and then doing a search; be sure to choose the "Search only in Education" option.
Search Engines
Search engines
are just what they sound like: programs that go out and search the Web for
pages that match specific search criteria you've entered. Search engines are
easy to use; just type a word or phrase into the blank box provided and
click the "Search" button. (Note that search engines won't work with some
Web software. Refer to your software's documentation to learn about other
search tools such as gopher and WAIS.)
If you were to run the school-to-work search you did on Yahoo using a search engine that goes out to search the Web, such as Alta Vista or Open Text, you might get dozens or hundreds of hits. These search engines will generally give you a list of hits similar in structure to Yahoo's, along with additional options to see your search terms on the page or to find similar pages. If your search doesn't turn up what you'd hoped, you have two options: modify your search or try another search engine. To broaden or narrow your search, click on Options or Help for information about additional search criteria you can enter. To run your search on a different search engine, look for pointers to other search engines (at the bottom of the page that displays your search results) or return to Local 2's site.
Choosing the Right Search Tool
Although you
might expect that one search engine would find exactly the same set of Web
pages as another, that's not the case. Some engines search just titles and
headers of pages, some search the entire text of documents, and some search
in other directories; most engines use some combination of search
strategies. In the school-to-work search above we found 49 hits on Yahoo;
running the same search on a search engine that searches the full text of
Web pages yielded more than 10,000 hits, but many of them turned out not to
be relevant to the search's purpose. Similarly, one directory might have
more documents indexed than another, but might be divided into categories
that make it harder to find items on your topic. Your best strategy is to
spend a little time browsing around different directories and running sample
searches to get a feel for the strengths of each tool.
A technical note: Search engines don't really go out and search the whole Web while you're waiting. Instead, the search engine has "robot" software that downloads Web pages to a database. Differences in how quickly robots update the database and which pages they gather also account for some of the differences in search engine results.
See, that wasn't hard. Now you're ready to return to the List of Search Engines and dive into the Web!
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