If you were listening to many of the speakers at the convention in Denver this week, you’d walk away thinking all we need is a Democrat in the White House and presto — unions will make a stunning resurgence in the United States.

Alas, it’s not that easy. Yes, union membership took a nosedive during the Bush years, but the numbers also dropped during the supposed pro-union Clinton years.

Whenever the Labor Day holiday rolls around, you get lots of media writing about unions. It’s a natural I suppose. But the stories are all pretty similar. Either we’re writing about the demise of unions in this country, or we’re writing about how the government has taken the teeth out of union organizing because of anti-union legislation.

But rarely do the stories focus on the responsibilities workers have in helping unionization reemerge.

I’m not disregarding what pro-business politicians do. The latest news from the Bush administration is that the president is contemplating signing an executive order that would knock the feet out from under unions. Bush wants to force unions to use secret ballots when they attempt to unionize a large government contractor, but labor unions prefer an open card-check system so everyone knows who’s saying yes or no to creating a union.

This doesn’t help unions but it’s only a tiny part of what’s keeping organizing down.

Saying that a Democrat in the White House will be union nirvana is simplistic, maintains Gary Chaison, professor of Industrial Relations at Clark University.

“The amount of organizing that needs to be done requires more than changes in rules,” he explains. “Unions have to devote themselves wholeheartedly to organizing and selling the process of collective bargaining.”

Basically, if they can’t convince workers that union representation is a good thing then unions are screwed.

When unions exploded in the 1940s, it was anything but easy to go up against powerful businesses, but a passion among workers helped drive labor’s heyday. It also helped that there were job shortages created by World War II giving workers a bit more bargaining power.

Let’s face it, unions typically thrived during tough times for working stiffs. They were getting so shafted that they needed to turn to someone, something for help.

Indeed, workers face hard times right now. With globalization, shrinking paychecks, loss of pensions, and the increasing price tag for health care, you’d think employees would be eager to sign union cards.

Maybe workers believe government and employers will finally give them a break, so they don’t see the need for unions.

The Democrats have been touting the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation they believe will bolster unionization by making the organizing process easier.

“A key point is that even if the Act was somehow passed by a Senate with at least 60 Democrats and signed by a President Obama, unions would still have to do so much work,” Chaison says. “The Act makes it easier and cheaper and faster to organize, by allowing unions to prove majority support by signed membership cards rather than a secret ballot elections, but unions would have to organize about a half-million new members each year just for the percent of the workforce in unions, presently at around 12 percent, to stand still and not fall further. To increase by one percentage point the unions would have to organize about a million new members each year. The cost of organizing each new member is about $1500, so the cost of organizing would be huge and it is estimated to consume about a third or more of unions’ operating budgets.”

It would all be much easier if workers got so pissed off at their employers that they all just headed over to union halls across the country and asked to sign up.

The question is, would enough Americans ever want to?

Did you all happen to catch Bill Clinton’s speech last night?

I know, it’s little more than great political theater, but there was one nugget that rung true:

American workers have given us consistently rising productivity. They’ve worked harder and produced more. What did they get in return? Declining wages, less than ¼ as many new jobs as in the previous eight years, smaller health care and pension benefits, rising poverty and the biggest increase in income inequality since the 1920s.

The guy didn’t just pull that out of his charismatic hat.

He may have gotten an advanced look at a new book to be released next year called “The State of Working America” put out by the Economic Policy Institute. A press release on the report was embargoed until today, but I’m guessing Clinton’s handlers got a glimpse of it early.

Here are the findings in a nutshell:

The men and women of the America workforce were incredibly productive, but more than in any previous cycle, the economic fruits of this growth eluded them. Unless current trends take an unexpected new direction, this will be the first business cycle ever recorded in which America’s middle-class families will end the cycle with less real (that is, inflation-adjusted) income than they had at the beginning.

It’s a disturbing trend and one I’ve written about before. But it’s a phenomenon that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention or stir up that much anger among the very workers who are getting screwed at a time when wealth is pouring into the pockets of a small minority in this country.

More from the Institute’s research:

Although the economy has expanded by 18% since 2000, most Americans’ household income does not reflect that growth. Quite the opposite: real income for the median family fell by 1.1% from 2000-2006. A small increase in the median family’s hourly wages (1%) was more than wiped out by the 2.2% drop in annual work hours. Moreover, whatever wage growth occurred since 2000 was based on the momentum from the 1990s recovery—wages did not improve at all over the 2002-07 recovery.

This performance contrasts sharply with the previous business cycle. From 1989 to 2000 hourly wages that grew 4.7% and annual work hours that expanded 4.1% were the biggest factors that generated real income growth of 10.5% for middle-income families.

Not everyone was left out of the party this time around:

The growth that economic statistics report may have seemed imaginary to most American families, but it was very real for another group. The people at the very top 10% of the income ladder reaped the lion’s share of the rewards of economic growth, more than 90% of all the growth from 1989 to 2006. And the higher up the ladder they started out, the greater the rewards.

For the bottom half of that top 10% (the 90th to the 95th percentile) income grew 32%. But in the rarefied air of the top 1%, income more than tripled (203.7% increase) – and in the top 1% of that top 1%, incomes more than quintupled – increasing by 425% to an average income of $30.5 million for that group in 2006.

“While most Americans were struggling, the good times were rolling among the top 10%,” said co-author Lawrence Mishel. “We have seen a large scale skimming of the benefits of growth from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 10%, and especially to the top one percent and, even more so, the top one-tenth of a percent.”

It was nice to hear a politician point out some of the things the authors uncovered.

But Clinton’s words got me thinking about a book I recently read “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” by Steven Greenhouse, the labor writer for the New York Times.

He offers some ideas for weapons to combat wage stagnation:

“There are many strategies to address this problem, among them a higher minimum wage, greater unionization, and keeping unemployment low to increase workers’ bargaining power.”

Unfortunately, he also points out that too often the plight of the average working stiff doesn’t get a high enough priority.

“The nation’s politicians, news media, and public discourse have largely ignored the struggling worker, except every four years when presidential candidate descend on factories in Iowa, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, with TV cameras in tow, and lend an ear to the concerns of the poor working man.”

Hopefully, when the conventions are done, the campaigning ends, the elections are over, and a new president is sworn in, “the concerns of the poor working man” and woman won’t just fly out of the Oval Office window.

There’s nothing wrong with using the Internet for your job search but don’t use it as a crutch.

I recently got the results of a survey that showed many of you are spending an average of 50 hours a month on the Web searching for work.

The survey by Kelton Research, commissioned by job-search website RiseSmart, found:

*Among jobseekers who use the Internet in their job search, 58 percent of respondents searched online at least an hour per day.

*Of those respondents who searched online at least an hour per day, the average time reported searching online is 2.5 hours per day.

*Among jobseekers under 35, nearly 40 percent spend 2+ hours per day searching online.

*Nearly 1 in 3 workers (32 percent) who are currently employed are spending at least an hour a day online in job searches.

*1 in 10 online jobseekers search for 4+ hours per day.

The one statistic I was looking for was not in the release the company sent me. I wanted to know how many of these Internet job-seeking junkies had actually gotten a job as a result of all this surfing.

I emailed to find out.

This is the reply I got from a spokes person for RiseSmart:

“Sorry, we only asked about the time spent searching — not the results.”

There in lies the problem. Since the Internet is really a new phenomenon, all of us are still treating it like it’s something from outer space. It’s interesting that we’re sitting in front of our computers all day and surfing the Worldwide web, but what we get out of it is still the secondary story.

When it comes to people who just sit in front of their computers, career expert Randall Hansen says, “I just want to scream at them, ‘have you actually talked to someone lately?’”

Hansen with Quintessential Careers thinks job seekers spend a few hours at the computer searching Monster.com and the rest, and they think that’s enough. “They feel they’ve accomplished something so they now can go to the beach or pool for the afternoon,” he quips. This is a bad thing, he explains, because then they don’t feel compelled to engage in what really gets you a job, networking. Yes, actually talking to people, calling people, having lunch or drinks with people.

So, step away from the computer. You never know what you might find…maybe a job.

Did you ever read a blog and wonder, “how the heck did she start blogging?”

Well, I was recently interviewed by web marketing consultant Jack Humphrey who writes Friday Traffic Report.

Here’s a “webside chat” he conducted with me about my blogging roots:

It includes all you wanted to know and maybe some things you didn’t need to know about the CareerDiva.

If you’ve been watching the Democratic Convention this week you’ve probably gotten an earful from the pundits on how the Obamas need to sound more like regular Joes. The talking heads keep pounding away at how they need to dispel their “elitist” image. They both went to Harvard for god’s sake! How horrible!

The big problem, and lots of so-called experts have hammered away at this, is they are both too damn articulate. It makes people nervous.

Am I living in the Twilight Zone?

What happened to respecting and revering intelligent people?

Both my parents, who were immigrants and could barely speak English when they arrived in the U.S., always stressed how important it was to educate yourself and become well spoken.

While it may be unfashionable in the political sphere these days to look too smart, I’m here to tell you you better take off your dunce cap when you have an interview for a job.

When hiring managers go out for drinks you know what they talk about? The dummy they interviewed that week who couldn’t put two words together. I’m not talking about people with an accent, but born and raised Americans who don’t think they need to invest time in growing their brains by reading the newspaper, or the Web, to find out what’s happening in the world. It’s a global marketplace! Look that up if you have to.

Who do you think is going to want to hire you if you can’t add value to a company?

Even burger flippers looking to move up the food chain should be honing their skills, taking classes, reading and keeping their minds sharp.

Why? People may not mind having a dummy as a president but they don’t want to hire a dummy for their company. This isn’t government folks. Heads will roll in the business world if a dummy screws up…usually.

And in today’s economy, you want to look and sound as smart as possible if you want to land the gig.

I came across this great list of interview speech tips on Monster’s UK site.

Here’s are some of the highlights:

Non-words: Filler words such as “um,” “ah,” “you know”, “OK” or “like” tell the interviewer you’re not prepared. A better strategy is to think before you speak, taking pauses and breaths when you lose your train of thought. Everybody utters an occasional “um,” but don’t let it start every sentence.

Grammatical Errors: The interviewer may question your education when you use incorrect grammar or slang. Expressions such as “ain’t” “she don’t,” “me and my mate “so I goes to him” aren’t appropriate. Be sure you speak in complete sentences and that tenses agree. The interview is not the venue for regional expressions or informality.

Sloppy Speech: Slurring words together or dropping their endings impairs the clarity of your message. To avoid slurring and increase understanding, speak slowly during an interview. Make a list of commonly mispronounced words, and practice saying them into a tape recorder before the interview. Some common incorrect pronunciations include “init” for “isn’t it”,” “wiv” for “with” and “somethink” for “something.” And of course avoid swearing.

Yes, no swearing. Those English are so elitist.

UPDATE

Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley have all announced layoffs in the thousands.

Do you all know what else they have in common?

All three of these investment banking companies’ CEOs made the Associated Press’ top ten highest-paid, head honcho list.

Last year, Merrill’s CEO John Thain made $83.1 million; Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein took home $54 million and Morgan Stanley’s John Mack brought in a hefty $41.7 million.

Clearly the financial sector is struggling.

This from Financial Week:

In April and May, financial services companies announced plans to cut a total of 39,000 jobs, the highest number since last August, when the credit crunch first started belting bank’s bottom lines, according to John Challenger, CEO of outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas. So far this year, there have been 66,000 announced cuts in the financial services sector through the end of May—equal to 43% of the 153,000 layoffs recorded in all of 2007.

This means deep pain for all those workers who saw the financial world as a secure career. But obviously the pain isn’t being felt by the guys in the cushiest corner offices.

And we’re not just talking finance.

This from USA Today:

Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, (GM) announced this month the company had to close four plants that make trucks and SUVs because of lagging demand as fuel prices soar. That followed the posting of a $39 billion loss in 2007, a year when its stock price fell about 19%.

And Wagoner? His pay rose 64%, to $15.7 million.

This type of disparity always gets me scratching my head. What the heck were the board members of these companies thinking? They are the ones who decide to hand over buckets of money.

Isn’t this a good time for CEOs to at least look like they’re feeling some of the belt tightening? Seems more ethical, no?

UPDATE “When it comes to fairness, it looks bad and it is bad,” says business ethicist Jared Harris, about fat CEO pay at a time of cuts among the rank and file.

I’d like to know what you all feel about this. Do these lavish payouts for bigwigs undermine Corporate America and our society as a whole? Or is this just the way a free market should work?

There’s that uncomfortable moment when a friend experiences a loss. You want to say just the right thing; help them feel better for just a moment. But you’re at a loss for words.

Many people feel the loss of a job profoundly. While it’s not like loosing a loved one, the grief process can be similar, experts say.

A good friend of mine recently called to tell me her office would soon be going through serious layoffs. She was obviously worried she might end up on the chopping block, but didn’t anticipate the agony she’d face even if she wasn’t pink-slipped.

The Friday before the official layoff notices went out her office was enjoying a bit of gallows humor.

She sent me this email: The joke is not to answer the phone on Monday. Kind of like “The Ring.”

If you haven’t seen “The Ring,” it’s a great, creepy movie about a bunch of people who die because they answer a phone after watching this cursed, creepy video.

Anyway, once Monday came all the humor went out the window when my friend arrived at the company parking lot and people were walking out of the building holding cardboard boxes and crying.

She dreaded walking into the building and thought of reasons to head back to her car and home instead of facing the music. Thankfully, she wasn’t one of the workers on the layoff list, but some of the people she had grown close to in her department were. One particular young woman who had been with the company for two years had just heard she was being let go and she wasn’t taking it well.

My friend told me she just didn’t know what to say to her and found herself tearing up when she saw her colleague’s reaction.

She assured her things would work out and gave the woman her personal email address just in case she needed her for any reason.

My friend kept saying she wished she could have said more or done more.

Well, in reality, this isn’t a time to get into “do” mode. It’s a time to allow the laid off worker to be sad and grieve, says Thierry Guedj, workplace psychology expert and professor at Boston University.

“The person is in shock so you don’t want to get them in a space of ‘let’s do something about this now,’” he advises.

The best tact is to offer help down the line. You can say, Guedj suggests, “This is going to be a very hard time but I want you to know I’m going to be there for you. I’m going to open my Rolodex to you when you feel better and are ready to start looking for a job. I know a lot of people and I can serve as a reference to you. I have only good things to say about your work and your work ethic.”

He bases his advise on the many people he’s helped after they’ve been laid off. Those individuals have told him this kind of approach by coworkers helped them the most.

What was least helpful, he adds, was colleagues who decide to feed the flames of anger.

“People start taking sides and get mad at whoever the boss was that made the decision assuming they knew why someone was cut. They try to come up with some sort of explanation but end up having a mini fit with the person who’s been laid off, trying to help them by getting them angry about a boss, or gossiping about a management team. This can all be destructive,” he says.

Come on. Admit it. We’ve all done that. “The bastard! They’re screwing you.” This, it turns out, doesn’t help anyone.

And there’s sometimes the jerk in the office who has little empathy and tries to point out what the worker did wrong to get them on the layoff list.

Guedj strongly advises against this type of pseudo constructive criticism.

So, bottom line, give them a shoulder to cry on and don’t try to fix things, at least not right away.

“Sometimes it’s easier to be angry and take sides with the person than be with them in their sadness,” he points out. “Just accept being sad with the person and don’t feel you have to do something either destructive or productive.”

When did welders, pipe fitters, and carpenters start to get such a bad rap?

At some point, getting a skilled trade went from being a smart idea to a stupid idea. Suddenly, it was all about getting a college degree…the only road to career bliss.

Well, it’s time we put the skilled trades back up on a pedestal. Why? There are jobs to be had!

There’s a great story in the Wall Street Journal today titled: “Skilled Trades Seek Workers.”

When’s the last last time you saw a headline that anyone was actually looking for workers?

From the article:

Even as the economy slumps and unemployment rises, strong demand for power plants, oil refineries and export goods has many manufacturers and construction contractors scrambling to find enough skilled workers to plug current and future holes.

With the shortage of welders, pipe fitters and other high-demand workers likely to get worse as more of them reach retirement age, unions, construction contractors and other businesses are trying to figure out how to attract more young people to those fields.

Their challenge: overcoming the perception that blue-collar trades offer less status, money and chance for advancement than white-collar jobs, and that college is the best investment for everyone.

The reality is not everyone goes to college. In fact, the majority of people in the United States never even get a four-year degree.

Jobs in the trades pay well and they can be very fulfilling.

Many years ago I wrote a story for the New York Times about a woman who decided to become a pipefitter after years of working as a hotel manager. She had always wanted to be a welder, even back when she was a teenager, but her teachers in high school actually discouraged her.

‘’When I asked to take the welding or shop classes, they said it wasn’t for girls,'’ Nannette Cooper told me back in 2000. So, she took courses like shorthand and typing. ‘’I hated it, but I figured you just have to follow the rules,'’ she said.

It may be time to break the rules. At least contractors and unions are banking on it. The shortage of skilled trades workers is expected to reach a fever pitch in the years to come as the Baby Boomers retire, and companies are doing what they can to get the word out about how a job getting your hands a little dirty isn’t all that bad.

Some firms, according to the Journal article, even enlisted the help of Mike Rowe, the hunk host of the Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs”, a show that highlights jobs none of us want to do.

Not surprisingly, marketers for the skilled trades are focusing on the benefits of the trades, and there are many, including good pay and security. But the jobs, many of them, are dirty.

Knowing that, and if you feel you can handle a little dirt under your nails, this career avenue is a great one for career changers, or for kids who don’t want to take the college route.

Come on! Get dirty!

What if you got a chance to briefly live your career nirvana? Would you do it? Keep in mind, it may end up being painful. At the end of this dream you’d have to return to the job you do everyday just for a paycheck.

I came across a TLC show this weekend called “The Singing Office”. Yes, another reality show. Don’t tune out yet. It actually got me thinking.

Basically, the premise of the show is two hosts go into two different workplaces, they pick out five people that can hold a tune, and then send the five individuals to a singing boot camp where they will all work together on one song and perform it on stage. (Take note HR training folks out there, it’s a cool idea for team building.)

The hosts — Melanie Brown, a former Spice Girl and ‘N Sync’s Joey Fatone — are two second rate performers themselves, which seems to make the show even more endearing.

The episode I watched included a match up with workers from Aquarium of the Pacific and a mattress superstore called Sit ‘N Sleep.

Throughout the show the employees are interviewed about their experience being in boot camp, the interaction with coworkers — some of which they never even talked to — and their career aspirations.

The moving moment for me came when natural born performer Matt, the mattress store manager, talked about how incredible being chosen to perform on the show was:

“The worst part for me will be when this is over. I’m just eating this up. This is just awesome for me.”

“But I’ve got children so selling mattresses pays the bills.”

Matt was all smiles as he danced around the stage with a guitar, and suddenly I found myself getting a bit misty.

I felt bad for the guy, but understood where he was coming from. Sometimes we make sacrifices for our families. That’s just how it goes. But I hope Matt doesn’t give up after this one tiny taste of his dream.

More and more today, I meet people who’ve got their noses to an unpleasant or uninspiring grindstone during the day, but do what they love at night or on the weekends.

I know, who the heck has time for that? But some people make it work.

A colleague of mine, Marci Alboher, wrote about these types of people in her book “One Person/Multiple Careers” and she says many individuals that do this often have a “incredibly curious and restless nature.”

Hopefully Matt will continue to feed his curious and restless machine, and won’t let his experience fade into the black career hole of “if only.”

Forbes just came out with their list of the highest paid women CEOs in the United States.

While these women saw their paychecks jump 13 percent last year, it made me sick to read there are still only 13 women among the 500 CEOs at this nation’s biggest companies.

13! That’s less than twenty.

13 women.

487 men.

That’s 2.6 percent.

This is pathetic!

Something is terribly wrong if women, after all these years, have barely been able to break the highest glass ceiling of them all.

Maybe we need to take a page from Norway. The government there told corporate bigwigs they had to include women on their boards or face being shut down.

I wrote about this last year:

The 500 companies listed on Norway’s stock exchange face being shut down unless they install women on their boards over the next two years in a radical initiative imposed by a government determined to help women break through the “glass ceiling”.

Norwegian companies face a two-year deadline to ensure that women hold 40% of the seats of each company listed on the Oslo bourse. New companies have to comply now with the rules and the government is considering extending the law to family-owned companies as well.

The requirement came into effect at the start of this year after companies were given two years to embrace the demands voluntarily following the passing of the law in 2003. State-owned companies are already obliged to comply and now have 45% female representation on their boards.

This makes sense. Corporations throughout the world have been run by men for years, and the Good Old Boys network that has developed will not be broken up without a fight. Yes, they’ll let a few token women — 13 in the U.S. it turns out — in to their little group, but why would they hand over power if they’re not forced to?

Look, it’s great to hear that Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, made $12.7 million last year, but most of the corporate riches for top dogs poured into the pockets of men.

While these bloated CEO paychecks also make me sick at a time when the average working stiff is struggling to make ends meet, I can’t help but think we may all benefit if there a few more of the so-called nurturing gender sitting on gold and running the corporate show in the corner office.