You knew it would happen some day — the wages for workers in China are on the rise.

For years now, U.S. companies have been running to China to take advantage of the low wages, but now the poor and taken-advantage of over there are asking for more.

Check out a front page story in the New York Times today on the topic.

While workers are still making a substandard wage there, less than $300 a month for some jobs, it’s more than it was just a few years ago.

“For decades, many labor economists said that China’s vast population would supply a nearly bottomless pool of workers.” the article states. “So many people would be seeking jobs at any given time, this reasoning went, that wages in this country would be stuck just above subsistene levels. As recently as four years ago, some experts estimated that most of the perhaps 150 million underemployed workers in the countryside would be heading to cities.

“Instead, sporadic labor shortages started to appear in 2003 at factories in the Pearl River delta of southeastern China. Now those shortages have speard to factories up and down the Chinese coast.”

While wages in China have a long way up to go before U.S. companies start running back to their homeland, it’s a sign that you can’t take advantage of workers forever.

Rarely does a fired employee, or employees, get such public satisfaction.

Attorney General Gonzales finally got pushed out of his position, many months after the firing of 9 U.S. attorneys. Over and over again, news reports found that many of the attorneys had stellar records, but despite this they were canned. And Gonzales oversaw their terminations. Critics have argued the firings were politically motivated.

Whatever the motive, it appears now Gonzales is getting a bit of his own medicine. Something that’s rare when it comes to unjust firings of employees.

Gonzales’ role in the firings and his overall tenure at the Department of Justice have been raked over the coals by Democrats and Republicans. It’s not pretty to have the whole nation judge your job, but that’s what happens when you’re a big dog in politics, and in the business world.

Have you ever been fired? What happened to the manager that gave you the boot?

I remember a good friend of mine being fired by an inept manager who should never have been a boss in the first place. She went on to do a crummy job in her position, and years later the big bosses figured out she was a zero and quietly encouraged her to find another job. It was satisfaction for my friend even though it took a long time for the bozos that ran the place to wake up and smell the coffee.

And, by the way, getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to my friend. He is now a top notch journalist for a major news organization, at the pinnacle of his career.

Almost every one I knew who got canned ended up the better for it.

There’s sexual harassment and then there’s sexual harassment.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced yesterday that it settled a sexual harassment case with Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and the circumstances of the case are among the worst I have ever heard.

The suit brought by the EEOC charged that supervisors at the hotel demanded and or forced female Latina kitchen workers “to perform sex with them under threat of being fired.” These women, who mainly spoke only Spanish, “were forced to have sex in makeshift sex rooms” and that supervisors “performed other lewd acts on or in front of women, including unwanted sexual touching.”

Management was missing in action, according to the EEOC, because it failed to deal with the problem, even though the women involved brought it to the attention of upper management. Instead, these women were retaliated against by being demoted, having their wages cut, or having to deal with even more harassment.

The district director for the EEOC said: “Nevada employers need to be vigilant in protecting workers who have the courage to speak out against egregious discriminatory acts … The EEOC is determined to protect the civil rights of all workers and that includes protecting their right to protest illegal treatment.”

The settlement amount: $850,000. That is not a typo. A drop in the bucket for a major company such as Caesars. I’m sure they learned their lesson. NOT! It’s was a gamble and it looks like the house won.

(I’m waiting to hear if any criminal charges were brought against these managers.)

Update: On my question about criminal charges, here’s the regional attorney’s response:

“Managers were not arrested. The company did not report the allegations to the police and the women did not got to the police at the time it happened.”

I also asked if these women were working legally in this country. To that the attorney said: “The legal status is something we don’t ask because it is irrelevant to our ability to bring cases on their behalf.”

I recently addressed the issue of how older workers are being perceived in the workplace and I got a flood of letters from older employees thinking I was mocking them. Basically, I said mature workers have to stop feeling sorry for themselves and start caring less about what their younger colleagues think.

One woman didn’t like my tone in the column but she did like my sentiments on gray hair. I’m a big advocate of gray hair and am trying to make it the new brown, or blonde. I want to be proud of who I am, even as I get older; and frankly I don’t want anymore grooming tasks added to my daily routine. Dying hair, who needs it.

There was one comment she made about one of her coworkers. I thought it was appalling. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Here’s what Kath wrote:

I do appreciate your advice not to focus on my gray hair! A 40-ish woman in my office told me that gray hair is unprofessional! Yikes!

I’m not big on contests, but the AFL-CIO has been doing this great “Bad Boss” contest you all should check out.

Here’s one story from a bad boss semifinalist:

My story starts with me being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. I am in my early thirites and have not worked since March of this year. I also have three young children under the age of 8, and a wife who cannot work due to my condition. I think you get the idea.

In the industry I work in, disability benefits are available but only equal about one-half of what I normally would be making. These benefits are formulated from a day to day basis for days you have received no other compensation for. Needless to say, every day claimed is extremely important in the basic task of feeding my family and keeping the lights on.

I have been an employee for about 10 years and as such, I have built up some paid time off. I sent paperwork in to take some of my time off, to help pay the bills, but when the paycheck came, I was short on several days. This was compounded when I did not claim disability benefits on the days I thought I was being paid for. As an end result, I lost out on my vacation days AND DISABILITY BENEFITS. Talk about getting hit where it hurts.

My boss threw away the paperwork I sent in and then lied about ever receiving it knowing that filing a grievance for the time I should have received would take months if not years to resolve. Its hard enough just trying to stay alive, let alone trying to pull knifes out of not only my back, but the backs of my wife and children too.

Check out the bad boss website.

And while you’re at it, share your bad boss story with me.

Here’s an excerpt about bad bosses of my book, “From the Sandbox to the Corner Office“:

Richard D. Parsons, CEO of Time Warner
Early in his career, Richard D. Parsons worked with a boss who was competent and smart, but had one major character flaw—an explosive temper, “which he made little effort to keep in check,” according to Parsons.
It was Parsons’ job to be the buffer between other employees and this manager. “I was put in a situation where people would report to me and then I would in essence beard the lion and take issues to his office,” he explains. But his boss created an atmosphere of fear, and when someone creates a fear dynamic, the people around him or her never know when the boss is going to explode “and splatter all over everybody,” Parsons says.
On one occasion, this boss caused a grown man in the group to cry, recalls Parsons. Even though the distraught individual did not work directly for Parsons’ boss, he found himself on the other end of the boss’ wrath getting yelled at and having things thrown at him. “Everyone was under a lot of stress, and this guy started to cry,” Parsons says.
Parsons learned from this episode in his career that leading out of fear undermines the whole organization. “It tended to stifle, muffle, and impede effective communications, particularly bad news, which is what you need to know first. No one wanted to set off this manager, so they didn’t tell him things they thought he wouldn’t be happy hearing.”
What was lacking on the part of the short-fused boss, who Parsons otherwise thought was a savvy executive from an operations standpoint, was a basic thoughtfulness about the work at hand and the staff. “If you’re deeply thoughtful about what you’re doing it helps no matter what you’re doing. I realized you need to develop a habit of thinking something through before you say it and commit to it and do it.”
A big stick or bellowing is not a sign of a good leader. “Excessive volatility or behavior that’s intimidating derails people coming to you to share their views candidly and in a timely way. If they are afraid of you it won’t work. I would rather have people come to me candidly than be revered. Being a tough leader is about making tough decisions, unpopular decisions, decisions that may cause pain or disappoint. They don’t have to be tough themselves,” he adds.
The experience with the angry boss reinforced things he learned early on when he attended college at the University of Hawaii at age 16, and read articles about the Polynesian leaders and how they were basically type B personalities. That resonated with him, and he’s always, surprisingly, described himself as a type B leader. “Leadership and aggressiveness have, in the modern world, achieved a synonymous state that isn’t real. It doesn’t have to be aggressive. It can be quiet.”

Parsons’ Bad Boss Lessons
1. A great leader doesn’t need people revering him or her. A leader needs to develop a trust with subordinates so they can readily disclose bad news.
2. Think about what you’re going to do before you do it. Spewing your anger on employees and colleagues only poisons the work environment and the organization at large.
3. Leaders do not have to carry a big stick. Toughness is all about the difficult decisions you make for the business day to day.

I don’t know about you guys, but if I were trapped underground in a mining shaft I wouldn’t want the CEO of the company that put me there to oversee the rescue effort.

“We are back to square one underground,” says Robert E. Murray, chairman of Murray Energy Corp., owner of the Crandall Canyon mine where the miners have been stuck for almost two days.

Who knows how the mine collapsed. It might be due to negligence or a natural disaster. But either way I’d want the people digging for me to have as few allegiances to Murray as possible. It’s not because I think he’s a bad man. It’s just because his interests lie in protecting his company’s reputation, not me. That’s just how it is.

I think it’s been highly inappropriate that he’s been yelling into cameras for hours now about what he thinks caused the tragedy. He should step aside.

On another note, here’s yet another example of a difficult job that fewer and fewer Americans want to do — mining. It turns out three of the trapped miners are actually Mexican nationals. Maybe this will shine some more light on how much our economy relies on non Americans desperate to make money.

There are tough jobs and then there are tough jobs.

From the Associated Press today:
HUNTINGTON, Utah - Six miners were trapped in a cave-in Monday at a coal mine less than 20 miles from the epicenter of a minor earthquake, authorities said.

Miners probably have one of the worst jobs on earth. I feel like a jerk that I ever complained about my lot in work life.

During bad times managers often ask employees to make sacrifices. Take cuts in pay, work extra hours, and in the end we will all prosper.

Well, that’s not the way it works in the airline industry it appears. Now that so many U.S. carriers are back from the brink, and actually bringing in some solid profits, you’d expect executives to want to spread the money around. Alas, that’s not happening. Even though top dogs at the big carriers got hefty bonuses recently, the workers who made concessions when these companies were in bankruptcy court, or nearing bankruptcy, are out of luck. No plans to give them some money back, and few signs that work conditions will improve.

Check out my analysis on Northwest and the airline industry on MSNBC.com today.

Should we be expecting companies to share?