After those national headlines, Capitol Hill is finally listening. Representatives Eliot Engel (D., N.Y.) and Jan Schakowsky (D., Ill.) introduced “The Social Networking Online Protection Act” to the House on Friday, a bill that would prohibit employers from asking candidates for their social networking passwords.

“No one would feel comfortable going to a public place and giving out their username and passwords to total strangers,” Rep. Engel said in a statement provided to The Hill. “They should not be required to do so at work, at school, or while trying to obtain work or an education.”

If the bill were to pass, employers or school and university admittance boards could be fined up to $10,000 for a violation.

The issue first exploded after the AP pointed to statistician Justin Bassett’s account of the questionable practice last month, spurring lawmakers such as Senators Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) to call on the Justice Department for an investigation.

But public concern waned after AP reporter Manuel Valdes admitted his evidence was mostly anecdotal and the practice “doesn’t seem to be widespread.”

Even if the hubbub was a bunch of sound and fury, the bill still has a long road to go before hitting President Barack Obama’s desk. There are still rounds of committee hearings, getting it through the floor of the House and the Senate and getting the two sides of the legislature to agree on a final version before sending it to the White House.

And none of those are easy feats.

Facebook isn’t commenting on this bill in particular, but it’s safe to assume the company will support its passage.

Soon after the AP published its initial story, Facebook made it a Terms of Service violation for anyone to share or solicit Facebook passwords. And when Maryland became the first state to pass a similar bill earlier this month, Facebook commended the legislature on the move, although Governor Martin O’Malley hasn’t signed it quite yet.

There’s no telling the exact timeline — so to speak — on moving the bill through Congress, but my guess is it won’t be speedy.

But in the process, companies are making a lot of the same mistakes — from not researching ahead of time how workers can best use the devices, to underestimating the costs and the additional challenges tablets present for IT networks.

Here’s a rundown of five of the biggest mistakes, and what companies have learned from them.

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Since the rise of Facebook and Twitter, companies believed they had the right to fire employees who posted complaints or hostile or rude comments online about their employers.

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Next week, for example, a National Labor Relations Board judge will consider whether a medical-transportation company illegally fired a worker after she criticizing her boss on Facebook, in the federal agency’s first complaint linked to social media.
In another case, workers sued a restaurant company when they were dismissed after managers accessed a private Myspace page the employees set up to chat about work.

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The NLRB, an independent federal agency that settles disputes between private-sector employers and employees, said the supervisor questioned the employee about a customer complaint on her work but that the employer illegally denied her representation from her union during the probe. The employee later posted the negative remark about the supervisor on her personal Facebook page from her home computer.

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The deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter, involves a three-year traffic agreement under which Monster will become the provider of career and job content on the Yahoo (YHOO) homepage in the U.S. and Canada.

Obviously a smart move for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, who has been trying to narrow the company’s focus to its core portal business–most recently by selling email technology provider Zimbra to VMware (VMW).

Now, if only Bartz can unload Yahoo Games and Yahoo Shopping.

The release, below.

Monster to Acquire HotJobs Business and Enter into Multi-year Traffic Agreement with Yahoo!
NEW YORK & MAYNARD, Mass., Feb 03, 2010 —— Monster Worldwide, Inc. (MWW 16.42, +0.38, +2.37%) announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the assets of Yahoo! HotJobs, a leading online recruitment website, from Yahoo! (YHOO 15.46, +0.29, +1.91%) for $225 million in cash. Monster and Yahoo! have also entered into a three year commercial traffic agreement, to take effect upon the closing of the acquisition, in which Monster will become Yahoo!‘s provider of career and job content on the Yahoo! homepage in the United States and Canada. The traffic agreement calls for performance based annual payments calculated by clicks and expressions of interest, subject to annual floors and ceilings. In addition, the traffic agreement provides Monster with an exclusive right for a period of time following the closing of the acquisition to negotiate similar traffic agreements with Yahoo! properties on a global basis, including countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America, subject to certain limitations.

“HotJobs with its significant customer base plus the traffic agreement are an ideal complement to Monster’s innovative recruitment solutions and global reach,” said Sal Iannuzzi, chairman, chief executive officer and president of Monster Worldwide. “These agreements, combined with Monster’s career Communities and our recently introduced 6Sense(TM) semantic search technology, will bring substantial new benefits for employers seeking more qualified candidates and job seekers searching for more relevant opportunities across a wider range of industries—globally.”

“Bringing together Monster and HotJobs creates even greater access and opportunities for both recruiters and job seekers,” said Hilary Schneider, EVP, Yahoo! (NSDQ: YHOO). “The transaction with Monster enables us to continue to provide an important service to our users through the traffic agreement. Yahoo! remains focused on its core businesses and delivering exceptional experiences to users, partners and advertisers.”

Monster believes that the acquisition of HotJobs and the traffic agreement with Yahoo! will provide a number of benefits to jobseekers and employers, who today have more diverse competitive choices than ever before, and a value to all of its stakeholders, including its shareholders. These include:

Anticipated increase in job matches and search efficiencies–By bringing more diverse job and career opportunities, tools and resources together in one place, employers and job seekers will enjoy greater convenience and more precise search results and better matches with Monster’s patented 6Sense(TM) search technology and other innovative products.

Expected expansion of job seeker pool for employers–Monster will be able to offer its employers a significantly larger pool of candidates across diverse geographies and industries. Based on Media Metrix comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) reporting, last year HotJobs averaged 12.6 million unique visitors per month.

Expected expansion of the number of job postings across industries for job seekers–Through the combination of Monster and HotJobs job postings, job seekers will have access to more job opportunities in one place in those industries currently leading job creation, including healthcare, finance and insurance, retail, manufacturing, information and wholesale trade.

Broader reach anticipated for recruitment advertising through additional media alliances and reseller agreement–With the addition of HotJobs’s network of more than 600 daily and weekly newspapers, Monster’s alliances with local papers will grow to a total of approximately 1,000, giving Monster reach in all 50 states. The additional newspaper alliances, through their online and print classified ads, will further Monster’s current strategy of connecting job seekers with smaller, local businesses, particularly in healthcare, education, and skilled and hourly job categories.

Yahoo! will continue to manage its broader Newspaper Consortium (NPC) partnership, including providing both search and display advertising, content distribution, and its ad-serving platform, to newspapers in its NPC.

The transaction is subject to clearance under Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act and other customary closing conditions. The transaction is currently expected to close sometime during the third quarter of 2010, subject to regulatory review. Monster expects to realize operating synergies from the acquisition and currently anticipates the transaction will be breakeven on a pro forma full year earnings in 2010 and accretive thereafter, inclusive of the costs incurred under the traffic agreement.

Stone Key Partners LLC and Bank of America Merrill Lynch acted as financial advisors to Monster in connection with this transaction. Allen & Company LLC provided a fairness opinion to Monster’s Board.

Great news, right? Until you realize that the “planned reductions” to which the company refers were up 47 percent from a year earlier and are still at recession levels. So while this is the third consecutive month in which layoffs declined, the job market is still in lousy shape.

Employers have sacked 711,100 employees so far this year. That’s 145 percent percent more than the 290,671 they cut in the first quarter of 2008. Keep in mind, this is “planned layoffs” we’re talking about. Presumably there were some unplanned ones as well.

“Job cuts are still at recession levels, but the fact that they are falling is certainly promising and may suggest that employers are starting to feel a little more confident about future business conditions,” said Challenger CEO John Challenger. “Hopefully, the next few months will bring further relief, as we tend to see downsizing activity slow during the summer months.”

Yeah, “hopefully.” But don’t count on it. Because Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says the economy hasn’t quite bottomed out yet. Which means things may get a bit worse before they get better.

“The most recent information on the labor market–the number of new and continuing claims for unemployment insurance through late April–suggests that we are likely to see further sizable job losses and increased unemployment in coming months,” Bernanke recently told the congressional Joint Economic Committee.

Sacked.

A quick scan of the carnage.

• 8,000 whacked at Sprint (S)
• 6,000 let go at Royal Philips (PHG)
• 1,100 sacked at AMD (AMD)
• 4,000 adjusting to new economic realities at Motorola (MOT)
• 3,000 laid off at Seagate (STX)
• And a few hundred at Oracle (ORCL), as well
• 1,900 declared redundant at Dell (DELL)
• 5,000 losing their jobs at Microsoft (MSFT)
• 1,000 managers and 5,000 contractors pink-slipped at Alcatel-Lucent (ALU)
• 1,500 gone at Yahoo (YHOO)
• 12,000 released into the wild at AT&T (T)
• 600 cut loose at Adobe (ADBE)
• 6,000 aligned with the global economic climate at Sun (JAVA)
• And at Nortel (NT) 1,300 positions cut on top of the 1,200 previously announced

Grim isn’t it? Sad thing is, this is just a simple snapshot of what’s been happening in tech. According to the Department of Labor, employers in the states shed 524,000 workers in December, 2.6 million in all of 2008. That makes the last year the worst for layoffs since 1945, when 2.75 million jobs were lost. And that’s frightening, because according to some experts, we’ll get no respite in 2009. “We are very early in the cycle,” Peter Morici, a professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland told BusinessWeek, adding that we’ve so far only seen a sliver of the job losses to come. “We are going to see the fury of the Old Testament for what we have done to the economy.”