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Category Archives: Employment

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time


My guess is the planning committee consisted of three  guys in their early 20s who subscribe to Maxim; how else to explain Yahoo’s  hiring lap dancers to entertain at a corporate event in Taiwan? Sphere: Related Content Related posts No related posts.

Recover the Bonuses


New York’s financial firms paid about $18.4 billion in bonuses for 2008, an amount the New York Times reports as the “sixth-largest haul on record.”  These are the same financial firms that lost billions of dollars, the same firms whose disastrous investment and risk management practices propelled the world economy into the worst downturn since [...]

Social Network Cooties


Another report about employers, employees, and network usage, of 200 corporate IT folks in the U.S. and Canada.  The good news:  Employees under 30 “tend to be computer savvy and are brimming with new ideas.”  The bad news:  50% of those surveyed said that Gen Y employees were either “a major security concern” or “somewhat [...]

Monitoring Employees


This report from The Guardian presents the results of a survey of British employment managers concerning Internet usage: The survey found 65% of organisations monitored usage, rising to 86% in local government and 88% in the police. This led 65% of employers to block access to “inappropriate” sites, rising to 89% in local government and [...]

Smoking and employment


Sometimes students think we make it up. Tuesday we talked about employers monitoring off-duty conduct such as smoking. After many students expressed disbelief that an employer could discharge an at-will employee for smoking–”But smoking is legal!”–I related how The Scotts Company did that very thing a few years ago. Welcome to at-will employment. The next [...]

In retirement, the grass in greener


Back in those days when one frequently encountered the distinctive odor of marijuana cigarettes in movie theaters, on city sidewalks, and while strolling along the Esplanade, unscrupulous dealers would leaven their product with oregano, an herb of similar green hue that delivers great results when sprinkled on pizza but fails to enhance the marijuana experience. [...]

Just Asking For It


Emmalee Bauer worked as a sales coordinator for Sheraton Hotels in Des Moines. During work hours she kept a journal. Her supervisor told her not to write on company time. Bauer responded by entering all 300 pages of her handwritten journal onto her work computer’s hard drive. Her journal described how she avoided work by [...]