Come on all you wonder women out there, admit you have worn a tight skirt to work and were unable to easily move around. How productive were you really? You looked good, but feeling uncomfortable and probably a bit self conscious, your productivity was surely diminished.

There’s a funny story in the Wall Street Journal’s Style section today that talks about how young attorneys are breaking all the rules when it comes to their attire, and the old legal guard is getting sick and tired of it.

A decade after the dot-come boom made casual Friday a week-long event, many people under 30 have never witnessed a suits-only office.

And when they wear suits, the article goes onto say, it’s the tiny, sexy kind:

Winston & Strawn brought in a personal shopper from a local department store last year to address associates on how to shop and dress for work. Mr. Mills says that when some associates do make an effort to dress up, they seem to base their look on Hollywood. “You get the TV-woman lawyer look with skirts 12 inches above the knee and very tight blouses,” he says. “They have trouble sitting and getting into taxis.”

I can cast stones because I am guilty of this type of attire. The sexy, butt gripping, uncomfortable kind. Looking back now, I realize how it may have derailed my work success on those particular days, when I poured myself into that chic, though impractical, suit.

Can it really impede your career?

This from Diversityjobs.com:

According to a recent sexism study conducted by Lawrence University professor Peter Glick, dressing sexy for work can have very negative effects for women as they climb up the corporate ladder.

Glick’s study found that while dressing provocatively on the job is viewed as inappropriate for women on all levels of responsibility, female managers who chose to dress sexy for work were perceived to be less competent and less intelligent. On the other hand, women in lower level positions who chose to wear racy attire were not perceived as less intelligent or less competent.

Also suggested by Glick’s study was that women who wear sexy outfits are perceived as using their sexuality to move up in the professional ranks.

The study actually contradicts the myriad of print, television, and Internet advertisements that encourage women to emphasize their sex appeal in all arenas and professional levels. In reality, the study suggests, women in higher level and high power jobs may need to dress more modestly and conservatively to win the respect of their colleagues and coworkers.

And unfortunately, dressing provocatively is not a protected category:

Dressing sexy at work can even result in being fired. But even if you are fired or denied promotion for dressing sexy at work, you might not even be able to legally seek any damages.

Hey, I’m all for freedom of expression of yourselves in the workplace. But why do we women sabotage ourselves? Why do we try so hard to fight sexism but still fall prey to society’s desire to keep us down by squeezing our big buttocks into little outfits?

Can you look hot but still keep up the heat on work? Or should work be the priority?

I’ve written in the past about how religious accommodations were becoming more and more of a contentious issue in U.S. offices and factories, but sometimes cooler heads prevail.

Muslim workers at a plant in Pennsylvania wanted more time to pray, but they couldn’t convey their desire to managers because they could barely speak English.

This from a local newspaper, the Patriot News:

Somali immigrants who quit work at Arnold Logistics in Hampden Twp. because of a “misunderstanding” are back on the job, with accommodation for their daily prayers, a Muslim advocacy group says.

The warehouse and distribution services company has agreed to provide a 15-minute break for Muslim prayer, according to the Pennsylvania office of the Council on American Islamic Relations.

CAIR said 16 machine operators walked off their jobs on Jan. 9 “after a misunderstanding over a new policy which limited personal breaks for all employees to five minutes.”

Madina Hasson of Mechanicsburg, a nurse who volunteers as a community organizer among midstate Somali immigrants, contacted Justin Peyton, director of civil rights for CAIR in Philadelphia.

They met Jan. 11 with Amy Rafferty, human resources director for Arnold Logistics, to explain that five minutes was too short for the daily prayers required of Muslims.

The workers had been unable to make their case because of a “language barrier,” Peyton said Friday.

He said Rafferty “graciously listened” and relayed the workers’ concerns to senior managers, who offered this week to rehire all 16 and provide them time each day for prayer.

It seemed that the workers’ request wasn’t going to disrupt the workplace. But the question still remains — Should religious accommodations be made at all in the workplace?

I address the issue in a past column.

I got a flood of responses to that column.

Here’s a sampling:

Indeed, the issue of “separation of church and state” - the very idea of which is under speculation as it is neither mentioned nor guaranteed in the constitution - seems to be the vortex around which this storm swirls for all religions. When will the United States begin to interpret the Constitution objectively instead of twisting it to fit what a minority group has interpreted it to read to fit their (non)religious beliefs? When will the US begin to seriously revere the rights we fought so hard to protect over the good of commerce, corporate America - giving our lives and rights away to our employers? When will we as a nation be able to honestly say that we really and truly do allow all to practice their religion while respecting one anothers’ religious beliefs and practices? As things sit now, this “respect” and “tolerance” is merely legislated. That’s not authentic respect or reverence.

And..

I enjoyed the “Reconciling Religious Beliefs with Work” article, it was informative and thought provoking. I thought it was unusually news-written coming from you though; it was difficult to sense your position. As an example, I know where you stand on executive compensation, on Chrysler’s new contract with the UAW, on the trade imbalance with China and its impact on day-to-day life, but how do you feel about a religious bearded UPS driver?

And this one…

As I was reading your article I could not help think back to a Bible verse I heard so much in Sunday School. Pray without ceasing, I am now very much sceular in my views and think this kind of work place accommodation is rather wasteful. Not to mention unfair, I as a non muslim (all the accomodations you mentioned in your article are Islamic in nature) have to cover for others to go off and pray? I already get rather ticked when people go missing to smoke. Can you say workplace crusades.

at any rate I wonder if this trend continues I can use my “religious teaching” to “pray without ceasing” to get more breaks?

What’s your take?

If you were dozing off or running up and down the stairs dealing with a child last night when you were watching President Bush’s final State of the Union address you may have missed a brief mention by the President about reforming “Trade Adjustment Assistance”.

“I ask Congress to reauthorize and reform Trade Adjustment Assistance, so we can help these displaced workers learn new skills and find new jobs.”

For those of you who believe you lost your job because positions like yours have gone overseas where cheap labor is king, then you better hit the rewind on your TiVo.

This little known act — little known by workers who need it — provides job training assistance, and a bunch of other help, to workers who have lost their jobs because of offshoring.

This from the White House website:

Trade Adjustment Assistance provides training and income support to workers who lose their jobs due to imports or a shift in production to certain other countries. In addition, program benefits include job search and relocation allowances, wage insurance for older workers not in training, and a health coverage tax credit.

The site also points out how the program is flawed, unable to reach the goals set out to help the people that need it most. Why? Who the heck knows about it? There are actually several bills on the table right now to reform the Act and give struggling displaced workers even more help, beyond just manufacturing type jobs. That’s a good thing because such assistance is sorely needed. (Here’s a link to a fact sheet about the program and how to get assistance.)

Labor advocates have been skeptical of Bush’s calls for reform in the past.This from the head of the AFL-CIO John Sweeney:

The Bush “reform” proposals eliminate current training programs to help unemployed adults and at-risk youth and transfer funding for these programs to state block grants for unproven Career Advancement Accounts. These block grants will reduce accountability, diminish training funding, and increase outsourcing of public employment service programs. Bush proposals for block grants and individual training accounts have been rejected by a Republican-majority Congress several times already.

Despite the disbelief, I am forever hopeful. It makes sense to provide such training. Would you benefit from it?

It’s way tiny. Really small. But it was an increase.

Yes, union membership in the United States actually rose slightly last year. This is a big deal because for decades now unions have been shrinking like those Shrinky Dinks we used to play with when we were kids.

Here are the numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor:

In 2007, the number of workers belonging to a union rose by 311,000 to
15.7 million, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics
reported today.  Union members accounted for 12.1 percent of employed wage
and salary workers, essentially unchanged from 12.0 percent in 2006.  In
1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the
union membership rate was 20.1 percent.  Some highlights from the 2007
data are:

--Workers in the public sector had a union membership rate nearly five
times that of private sector employees.

--Education, training, and library occupations had the highest unioniz-
ation rate among all occupations, at 37.2 percent, followed closely
by protective service occupations at 35.2 percent.

--Among demographic groups, the union membership rate was highest for
black men and lowest for Hispanic women.

--Wage and salary workers ages 45 to 54 (15.7 percent) and ages 55 to
64 (16.1 percent) were more likely to be union members than were
workers ages 16 to 24 (4.8 percent).

It’s hard to say what’s going on but I’ll have some analysis for you guys later in the day when economists begin to wake up and I can get them on the phone.

Unions have been going into overdrive these past few years trying to recruit more members. And, the disparity among pay between the rank and file and the top dogs at companies has been exploding.

Maybe the combination has created a perfect storm for unions in this country. Only time will tell if this slight increase is a blip or the sign of things to come.

I get tons of letters from readers of my MSNBC.com column asking me for career advice. Depending on what they ask about — a bad boss, the lack of advancement, etc. — I try to help them either based on research I’ve done over my 20-plus years covering labor and workplace issues, or I enlist the help of an array of experts.

But this morning I have a simple piece of advice for all of you out there: DO NOT GO ON FOX TV’S NEW SHOW, “MOMENT OF TRUTH”.

The show debuted last night and I have to tell you it is probably career suicide for many of the contestants that agree to go on it.

On the show contestants are hooked up to a lie detector machine and the host asks them a bunch of really personal questions. When the contestant answers, a sultry voice from off stage says either “True” or “False.” The questions get more personal and intense, and as that happens the contestant gets more and more money. (Here’s a link to a trailer if you don’t believe me. I may be risking matrimonial Hari-kiri sharing this with you because I refused to heed my husband’s insistence that I not watch the show.)

The two contestants I got to see were both asked a few work-related questions, and on national television had to answer them.

One guy is a personal trainer and he was asked if he ever touched a female client more than he should have during a session. It took a while for him to answer, especially since his wife was there. He finally answered “no” to the question, and then the voice said, “false”.

BAM! Career suicide.

The next contestant, his name was George, actually brought his boss with him to the show. (What the heck was he thinking?)

The host asked George if he had ever gone through any employee’s personal belongings. It took him a while to answer, but he said “yes.”

The guy’s boss winced at that answer, and you could tell he started to regret his decision to join his employee on this little known show. He probably has to fire him now.

George, who is possibly the soon-to-be former marketing manager at a racetrack, was then asked if he ever wondered if he had a gambling problem.

My friends, this was one of the most painful moments I’ve ever witnessed. It’s like a career writer’s worse nightmare, to actually be there to watch a major career blunder in real time. Usually you guys call me after the fact and I try to help. But there I was watching this guy careening to job doom and I couldn’t do anything. Yelling at the TV was futile.

So, George, who works at a racetrack, answered, “yes”, yes, he has wondered if he had a gambling problem and indeed admitted in front of the world that he has had one for a long time.

People!! Is money really worth this public humiliation? If you do this you better hope you get lots of cash because you may soon be struggling to find a job.

There’s an interesting column in the Wall Street Journal today by Jared Sandberg that looks at the mistake conundrum. Do you admit you made a mistake and learn from that. Or do you deny, deny, deny, and even find a fall guy to take the blame?

I know, it’s oh so painful to admit you’re wrong. We all struggle with this, some more than others. But I’m here to tell you a career with no mistakes is probably a boring, not so successful one.

Sandberg uses examples of people who moved up the corporate ladder even though they possessed an extreme inability to say I’m sorry. But based on the many CEOs and top level executives I’ve interviewed over the years, that tactic is the wrong way to go if you want a fulfilling career…and you want to be able to look yourself in the mirror.

In my book, “From the Sandbox to the Corner Office” I ended up devoting a whole chapter to CEO mistakes. Why? Because it was something almost all the 55 CEOs I interviewed had in common. They made boat loads of mistakes, big ones, costly ones, life changing ones.

And you know something, they seemed oddly proud of those mistakes.

One of my favorite mistake stories comes from Terry Lundgren, the CEO of Macy’s:

When his boss was on a buying trip with the rug buyer in India, he called Lundgren to tell him he had come across some beautiful glass bowl chandeliers called Hundis he thought would be perfect for his department. The buyer for Bloomingdale’s which like Bullocks, was part of the Federated Department store chain, was buying the lamps and Lundgren’s boss thought he should purchase them as well.

Lundgren had assumed he was getting a small shipment of the new lamps but ended up with a 40-foot container of glass bowls that had no electrical wiring or mounts to attach the bowls to the wall. It turned out Bloomingdales in New York had access to a manufacturer that was going to convert the bowls into working lights, but Lundgren did not have the same type of low-cost resource on the West Coast to transform his 1000 glass bowls. He did have a local company make about 50 lamps but they were expensive to make and ended up not selling well. As for the remaining 950 glass bowls, “we had to throw them away.”

The debacle ended up costing Lundgren a lot of money, he can’t recall how much, but he realized he should have asked his boss many more questions when he got that initial call. “He was my boss. I was respectful of him. I said, ‘okay, thanks very much.’ They sound interesting. I had no idea what I was getting into. In hindsight neither did he. If I said, ‘send me a photograph and asked him about the electricity,’ even my boss would have realized the issue. You need to be responsible for doing your own research before you make a decision. It was, after all, my department.”

Lundgren told me he learned a lot from all his career faux pas. This particular mistake taught him to “question and research every idea, even if it’s coming from you boss.”

Have you learned from your mistakes? Or are you one of the infallibles?

We all think of Martin Luther King, Jr. as an advocate for racial justice. But he was also an advocate for economic justice.

He was about to embark on his second mission, beyond desegregation, that included a battle for worker rights in the shape of better wages and better working conditions for the working poor. The next movement – the Poor People’s Campaign.

“This is a highly significant event,’’ King said in 1968, ‘‘the beginning of a new co-operation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity’’

Right before King was assassinated, he took up the battle of sanitation workers in Tennessee who were fighting for better working conditions.

This from The National Archives:

During a heavy rainstorm in Memphis on February 1, 1968, two black sanitation workers had been crushed to death when the compactor mechanism of the trash truck was accidentally triggered. On the same day in a separate incident also related to the inclement weather, 22 black sewer workers had been sent home without pay while their white supervisors were retained for the day with pay. About two weeks later, on February 12, more than 1,100 of a possible 1,300 black sanitation workers began a strike for job safety, better wages and benefits, and union recognition.

Who knows what he would have done for workers’ rights at that volatile time in our nation’s history.

Worker rights have come a long way since his death. But they still have a long way to go. Minimum wage is still horrifically low. Safety is still a major concern for many workers. And discrimination in the workplace is still rampant.

What do you think King is thinking as he sits on the Mountaintop?

“If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”.

That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” “If I do no stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.

I’m not quite sure how rebate checks to people who already have jobs is going to really rescue our sputtering economy.

President Bush is expected to unveil his ideas for helping all of us, but the centerpiece seems odd to me…tax rebate checks.

Buying more junk for our already packed homes isn’t going to help the many people I talk to who can’t find jobs, or are struggling in jobs that don’t pay enough to keep up with ballooning prices. I’m sure a rebate could go to pay those escalating mortgage payments for the many people who went adjustable and got burned. But even that is a temporary fix. The Democrats want to extend unemployment benefits. But that too is a temporary fix.

I’ve been through many ups and downs in the economy during my many years covering the business world, and there is little that past presidents or Congress have been able to do to bail us out during those rough spots.

I think it’s fair to wait and see exactly what the President has in mind, but I’m not hopeful at this point.

To cry or not to cry, that is the question.

Every women in business, politics, basically any situation outside of the home, will come to a point in her life when she wonders if crying will doom her career prospects or take her down a notch when it comes to garnering respect from others. Many of the executive women I’ve interviewed during my career have told me they always saved their tears for the company bathroom, or held emotions in until they got home.
Hillary Clinton threw caution to the wind when she got a bit teary on the campaign trail and reporters like me are still talking about it. (Sorry for that.)

But I just felt compelled to ask you all about your opinion of the Oliphant cartoon I include up to the left. You can also see it more closely here.

It shows Clinton crying in front of the a host of world leaders, and a terrorist or two. It’s hard to tell. She’s saying: “You guys are mean!.”

And, in a small bubble at the bottom left, there’s a tiny cartoon of Clinton’s hubby bill saying, “This is when PMS goes nuclear.”

OK, what’s your take?

Is this just what women will always be subjected to? Should we become enraged, or laugh it off?

Several months ago, a reader of my career column on MSNBC.com was upset at my use of the word “black” in a story I wrote. She wondered why I did not use “African American” in the piece instead.

She wrote in an email:

So many times we subconsciously allow our own personal prejudices and feelings to slip through in our daily activities.  Was this one of those times or was it just a grammatical error?  I’d like to know.

I explained to her that Associated Press style calls for us to use “black”, but I also felt compelled to speak a little bit to her comments about “our own personal predudices.”

So, in an email back to her I wrote:

I’d like to think I am not prejudice but I’m old enough to know we all have our silent prejudices.

One of my favorite passages on discrimination is by Sartre, the French philosopher — “…There are people who are attracted to the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth. And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not even suspect, but the very form of the true–that thing of indefinite approximation. It is as if their very existence were perpetually in suspension. They want to exist all at once and right away. They do not want acquired opinions, they want them innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which . . . one never seeks but that which one has already found, in which one never becomes other than what one already was.”

Knowing this, if we can come to terms with our fear of the unknown and still treat people with the utmost respect then we’ve truly helped the world in our own small way.

Unfortunately, the world has a long way to go.

I was shocked when I read recent statistics from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that found racial harassment complaints in the workplace are higher than than they’ve ever been — at least in EEOC recorded history. I address the issue in my column today.

It seems mind boggling, especially given what’s happening in the political arena. It makes you wonder about our nation’s silent prejudices as a black man makes historic inroads to the presidency.