I know, some of us need college. But the fact is less than 30 percent of us get a four-year college degree. I know, it sounds scary. NOT! Many people survive and thrive without a college degree and we have to start accepting that. You hear the elite among us out there? (I wrote a story about this a while back for MSNBC.com and got a great deal of mail telling me I was nuts.)
There’s a great story in my local paper that talks about all the opportunities available to people who get job training or an associate degree. Some jobs the article suggests: computer support specialists, radiology technicians, aircraft mechanics. All these jobs pay well and all these jobs are in high demand.

I know, we all want our kids to go to college. I do too. But we just don’t know what the future holds, and we can’t limit their horizons. A few years back when my daughter was born, I suggested to a friend that maybe she wouldn’t go to college…maybe she would become an artist or musician and decide to go it alone..without a four-year degree. My friend freaked out. She thought I had lost my mind. While I want my kids to get as much education as they can cram into their heads, was my suggestion so wacky?

Talking about following your bliss. Check out the story in the New York Times today about rotund dancer in Havana, part of a troupe called, and I love this, “Danza Voluminosa”. It proves you can really do whatever you want if you focus on your dreams.

Lately, I’ve been coming across quite a few recent college grads who’ve decided to bypass the typical corporate career track and open up their own businesses. Well, it’s not quite fully their own businesses. These men and women have opted to buy franchise operations. I write about this franchising phenomenon in the New York Times today.

I hope you guys with newly minted diplomas don’t run out right a way and invest in your own franchise before doing some homework. Franchise operations aren’t cheap, they can range from high five to six figures. And they’re anything but easy to operate. While you do get lots of help from the franchisor (the company that owns the franchise operation) you still have to put in lots of blood, sweat and tears to make it work.

But, if you’re not sure of your career direction, and you think you have the heart of an entrepreneur but aren’t ready to launch your own business, franchising might offer an interesting opportunity.

Just watch out mom and dad. Don’t just clean out your savings to give junior a store to run. They have to feel they have something vested in it. It’s not just like paying for piano lessons they never use.

Having been a journalist for basically my whole adult life I never saw anything wrong with discussing the political landscape at work. It was just a matter of life in a newsroom. The news was happening and we talked about it. Whether it be presidential candidates or political scandals.

It seems such talk does happen in other industries. About one fourth of workers say their top managers openly talk about their political preferences at work, according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive for The Marlin Company, a workplace consulting firm. And apparently many of you don’t like what you hear.

“Over a quarter (26%) of those polled said they do not fit in with their company’s culture in terms of politics. However, men were more likely to say they fit in the company culture, with 75% indicating so, compared to 64% of women,” according to the study.

It looks like the older you are the more such talk gets under your skin. “Younger employees (age 18 to 34) were more likely to be comfortable sharing their political views (76%), compared to 64% of those age 50 or older. Younger employees were also more likely (84%) than older workers (68%) to say they were comfortable telling their boss which candidates they support.”

I think we all have to stop getting uptight about political speech in the office. If managers aren’t threatening you with termination if you dare to vote for someone other than their favorite candidate then what’s the big deal?

We need serious discourse in this country about the issues and candidates if we are ever going to make a difference.

It’s odd to promote a blog on a blog. But that’s just what I’m going to do. I started a new blog for MSNBC.com called YourBiz and it deals with small business and entrepreneurial issues. It’s for people who have their own small business and for those of us that are truly entrepreneurs at heart but have yet to make the break from working for the man.

I’ll be looking at all the issues that concern the world of small business and trying to get at the heart of what makes a successful entrepreneur.

Check it out and give me your feedback.

Tomorrow, the minimum wage will increase for the first time in ten years. It will go from $5.15 an hour to $5.85 an hour.

Did you guys even know what the minimum wage rate was? Did you realize it was so low, or high?

Employees who are at the bottom rung of the economic strata make minimum wage. Now that doesn’t mean most of those people who make minimum wage are poor. Many young kids who are from middle class, or upper middle class families take in that much for part-time jobs but many of them do not support their families. The majority of individuals living on the wage are poor, or damn close to it.

It’s a difficult situation. Raising wages can end up hurting some employers. But how do you raise the living standard of so many people if the wage stagnates for a decade. Home prices and oil prices have exploded. Is there just a segment of our society that alas will forever be locked into a poverty vortex never able to emerge?

Adam Smith, considered by many to be the father of capitalism, was a big supporter of free trade and allowing businesses to do as they please when it came to running their firms and paying their workers. But even he had his soft spot for the less fortunate among us.

One passage from Smith’s writings that is often quoted on the matter finds him open to government regulation when it came to reducing poverty. “When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.” He didn’t take kindly to the notion that an employer would do everything he or she could to keep wages down.

The trick for businesses is to find the right balance. Easier said than done I know!

There’s a photo of a 84 year old Chrysler retiree on the front page of the New York Times today. I’m looking at it right now. Every time I look at it it makes me so sad. I swear, I want to cry. It’s Nollie Dixon who spent 31 years as an autoworker…one of the toughest jobs around I might add.

The story addresses the growing number of retirees among the United Auto Workers and how that fact will impact the auto makers abilities to continue paying the benefits they promised these men and women when they were slaving away in the hot auto plants of our nation. (I’m serious, many of these plants were never air conditioned.)

Anyway, the way it was supposed to work was that active workers would be able to subsidize the retirees when it came to health coverage because they were paying into a pot a portion of their pay. Now that the retirees outnumber the workers the system is in big trouble, especially with U.S. automakers scrambling to hold onto their dwindling market share. (A problem they brought about themselves by not adapting to the times.)

Nollie thinks he’s getting the shaft. “I just feel like now that I’m old, they don’t care, I ain’t nothing to them.”

Seems to be the disgrace of our time.

Update:

The biggest disgrace: Not all automaker employees are worried about the future.

Chrysler CEO Tom LaSorda took home more than $3 million in compensation last year.

Lately I’ve been getting lots of emails from women who gave up their careers and spent many years at home to raise their children. Unfortunately, many of these women regret their choice.

My column on MSNBC today addresses the issue.

Many of these women found their path back to the world of work was difficult, to say the least. And quite a few found themselves divorced, wondering why they made the choices they had.

It’s a sad state of affairs and something few women ponder when they make the decision to give up work and rely mainly on their husbands for their economic well being.

I quote Leslie Bennetts, author of The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?, mainly because I liked the book very much and I give her kudos for even broaching the sticky topic. Her main message to me was women need to think about what the future holds, for their sakes and the sake of their children; not just cross their fingers and hope for the financial best.

While I know the big issue for many women is how they can balance it all given that the business world is still not embracing flexibility for family-work balance, we need to take charge and not just give in to the pressure. If a woman, or man, for that matter, is thinking about quitting altogether because they can’t see how taking care of kids and working will work out, what better time to demand stuff from your employer. What do you have to lose?

UPDATE: I will be discussing this topic on the BE HAPPY DAMMIT on Lime radio, on SIRIUS Channel 114, tomorrow morning, July 17 at 8:45. Karen Salmansohn, the host of the show and a best-selling author, is the type of person I call a “reality-checkophile”, and she’s funny to boot. Listen in tomorrow morning!

OK, so working moms typically work like dogs at home, making meals, doing laundry, etc. And they typically work like dogs at work. If you’re up late one night, until 2:30 a.m. to be exact, because your son took a spill off his bicycle and you end up in the ER, and you have big work meetings in New York the next day you have to attend you become a walking zombie.
Balancing work and family is tough.

What woman wouldn’t dream about getting a part time gig so she has more time to sleep?

We needed a national study to tell us this?

This from Pew Research:

Among working mothers with minor children (ages 17 and under), just one-in-five (21%) say full-time work is the ideal situation for them, down from the 32% who said this back in 1997, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Fully six-in-ten (up from 48% in 1997) of today’s working mothers say part-time work would be their ideal, and another one-in-five (19%) say she would prefer not working at all outside the home.

People, it’s hard out there. Life isn’t easy. What do you think overworked women would say when asked such a question? Everyone is coming out of the woodwork, pointing to this study as more proof that women really all want to stay home and have their kids suckling off their teat 24 hours a day.

On the contrary, these studies point to frustrated moms who are sick of banging their heads against the wall of Corporate America. They want the work-life understanding so many HR managers tout but rarely seem to deliver on.

Come on everyone. This should be our battle cry to ask for more from our employers. And I’m talking moms and dads. We won’t get it if we don’t demand it. And we definitely won’t get it, and our daughters and sons won’t get it, if we banish ourselves from the workplace.

Consumer confidence took a nose dive last month.

Do you guys follow the consumer confidence index? I’m sure you hear radio and TV commentators talk about it each month. But what the heck is it?

The Consumer Confidence Survey is based on a representative sample of 5,000 U.S. households. The monthly survey is conducted for The Conference Board.

The survey gauges the mood among consumers…basically their attitude toward their own economic conditions and their plans to spend money. The spending of our money on things like Iphones and fancy vacations, not to mention the basics like clothing and food, is the engine that drives the economy. So, if we know what consumers intend to do going forward we can figure out how confident they are in the economy, thus allowing us to surmise whether the economy will expand or falter.

A bunch of different factors dictate how we feel about spending money. But I think the biggest thing is our job outlook. Are we going to get raises? Will we land that great job? Will I keep my present job or be replaced by a lower wage earner in India or within my own town?

All these contribute to whether we’re going to buy a new car or keep our fingers crossed that the old clunker keeps going another 25,000 miles.

Yes, escalating gas prices don’t help our confidence, but job security is at the top of the list. Right? What’s your take on this?

Lately I’ve been writing about how workers wages have stagnated, and some companies have actually fired high-priced workers to replace them with lower wage employees; and still others are asking workers to take as much as a 50 percent cut in pay.
Talk about doing a number on your confidence.

This is the typical male reaction to sexual harassment:

I worked at a job with 33 women and I was the only man. You
think sexual harassment bothered me. No way! I don’t think men
care. Of course, it would bother a woman but not us guys.

What man doesn’t want a young beautiful woman paying him
compliments or saying how nice his shoulders, back, etc. look.

That’s what Robert told me recently. He didn’t want his full name used but he wanted to offer his two cents about what sexual harassment means to men and women.

His feelings are not necessarily the feelings of most men. In my column today I explore the growing problem of sexual harassment against men and how many are sick and tired of it.

Personally, I never let vulgar behavior on the part of men I worked with bring me down. I tended to just ignore it, or joke around with the guy as well if I thought the sexual overtones weren’t extreme. I never minded photos of voluptuous women hanging on walls or on computer screens. But I know lots of people out there can be sensitive to such things. Part of me wants to say just get over it. But hey, if you tell a guy or gal to stop, and say it with force then they should.