It’s an unsettling reality — many of the people who cook and serve us food when we go out to eat don’t have sick days or health insurance.

So, it should be no surprise if the omelet you had at your local diner this morning was prepared by a cook who had the sniffles.

A national survey released today of more than 4,000 restaurant workers, conducted by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, found the majority of employees in food service do just that. (more…)

There are few things I hate more than sending a letter to a company with this salutation: “To Whom It May Concern,”

Even though I’m a writer, I just can’t get the letter-writing juices going if I don’t know who I’m writing to. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so torn about the value of sending cover letters with online job applications. Typically you don’t know who the hiring manager is and there’s no guarantee they’ll even read the letter.

This is why the question of whether to send a cover letter or not with your resume has heated up in recent years. Before the Internet, and the ability to send hundreds of resumes off into the job board ether, there was little debate over whether or not to send a cover letter. You just did.When your resume arrived by snail mail it would have been highly rude and sort of dumb not to send a cover letter. The letter was your introduction, explaining your interest in a firm and a particular job. And chances were, you were able to get the name of a specific person to send the letter to. Can you imagine a mailroom back then with hundreds of letters and no specific recipient name?

Today, all bets are off. Job seekers often send multiple resumes to multiple employers, and companies are inundated with resumes and barely have time to read through those. Some employers don’t expect a cover letter and often there isn’t even a place to include a cover letter for some online job postings. But some employers do still expect one. How do you know whether it’s a good idea to craft such a letter, or whether it’s a waste of time? (more…)

If you want a job today, you have to bring more to the table than a degree and experience.

Can you sing, juggle, tap dance? If so, it might help you land the job you want in Corporate America.

Turns out video killed the boring corporate climbing star.

In the digital age, companies are doing what ever they can to promote their services and products on the web, and more and more firms are realizing video is one of the greatest tools to do that. And few firms have the money to go out and hire real talent. So, they’re turning to a great resource — their own employees. I did an MSNBC column on how employers are using workers as company promotors a while back.

(Hey, even the CareerDiva has been trying to do more videos.)

Rebecca Corliss was hired by Hubspot, an Internet marketing company, in late 2008 not because of her resume but because of her singing talents. (more…)

“It’s one of the most sophisticated job scams I’ve seen lately,” said Susan Joyce, editor and publisher of Job-Hunt.org.

And Christine C. Durst, Co-Founder of RatRaceRebellion.com and a home-based career and Internet fraud & safety expert, has been getting queries from readers about the same swindle as recently as last week.

A job offer that seems to good to be true but this time it’s connected to the website of what appears to be a legitimate company. The name, the flashy graphics, the photographs, they all look real. But they’re not. It’s “corporate identity theft,” proclaims Joyce, and you better not let it nab you. (more…)

I often read human resources industry publications to find out what employers are thinking about hiring and the workplace in general, and yesterday I read a quote in one of these publications that blew my mind.

It was in a magazine I freelanced for many moons ago, Workforce Magazine, and it was titled, “Multiskilled Employees Sought as Versatility Becomes a Workplace Virtue.”

The disturbing quote came from David Lewis, founder and president of OperationsInc., an HR outsourcing and consulting firm in Stamford, CT, and he was talking about what companies were looking for in the people they hired.

“Who are the people who can work under pressure, work harder and earn less, who can take on new tasks, who can be OK out of their comfort zones? Companies need people like this now.”

Harder, faster, multitasker; but don’t expect to be compensated well for it. I thought you guys were already doing that. (more…)

Every year the Forbes list of the richest Americans comes out, and every year we’re astonished at how these individuals can sit atop so much wealth.

Recessions typically have little impact on such fortunes, but for the people who work for these moguls it’s another story.

The top five riches in the United States are:

*Microsoft’s Bill Gates
*Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett
*Oracle’s Larry Ellison
*Walmart’s Christy Walton
*Koch Industries’s Charles Koch.

Since the recession began, all five of the companies where these individual’s derived their wealth have been responsible for tens of thousands of layoffs combined in this country.

Just a few of their billions could have gone to save some of those jobs. I’m not saying that’s what they should of done, but I do wonder how some of these folks sleep at night.

Yes, they give money to charities and that’s a great thing. Just this week, Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg, who is 35th on the list with $6.9 billion, announced he’ll be giving $100 million to Newark, NJ, schools; and earlier this year Gates and Buffett asked the nation’s billionaires to pony up half of their net worth to charity either soon, or after they pass away.

It’s a great gesture, especially during an economic downturn, but waiting for the richest people to die before they’re money can start being pumped back into the economy, and into their pet charities, seems like an ineffective way of really helping the disenfranchised among us now.

I’m thinking if those tens of thousands of jobless workers from Microsoft, Berkshire, Walmart, Oracle and Koch still had their jobs they’d be spending money in their communities, paying taxes, and contributing to the economy right now, without waiting for handouts from the government or the nation’s richest some day.

Psst. Come here. I have something to tell you. Keep this on the down low.

THE RECESSION ISN’T OVER!

I know, you’ve been bombarded with stories about how things are hunky-dory now that the gross domestic product is showing signs of life. But the job recession is anything but done, and if you look at job growth coming out of the last two recessions, turns out, those recessions never really ended either.

So why would the National Bureau of Economic Research declare the recession’s end? The non-partisan group put out a release on Monday stating:

…the committee determined that a trough in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in June 2009. The trough marks the end of the recession that began in December 2007 and the beginning of an expansion.

I’ve been pondering this statement, and the nearly 10 percent jobless rate, and the emails I’ve been getting from readers about how dismal the job market still is. Unable to make sense of it all I started emailing economists late last night to ask them WTF is going on? Some pretty knowledgeable number nerds actually emailed me back to explain the perplexing proclamation: (more…)

Anyone who’s used pain killers knows how helpful they can be when it comes to a host of medical conditions.

But like everything in life, too much of a good thing can sometimes come back to haunt you.

In the past few years, the use of pain killers by employees has exploded, and while you probably won’t be fired for taking such drugs on the job, you need to know they can impact your safety, the safety of others, your job, and potentially your career. (more…)

The whole work-at-home phenomenon may have helped when it comes to work-life balance but it’s done little for fashion.

Yes, I’m blaming telecommuting for the hell so many employees find themselves in when it comes to dressing for work success.

Today, I wrote a column for MSNBC.com on how women are in a Catch 22 when it comes to what they should be wearing to work. We’re either the office slut or the office stuck up bitch. But a big part of this problem stems from the telecommuting trend, according to Nancy Keene, executive recruiter who writes the blog “The Perfect Fit.”

“Think of the sales rep for Hewlett Packard who doesn’t have to go into the office often,” Keene said. That worker, she surmised, has lost grip with office-wear reality.

“It’s all a blur,” Keene continued, “between our personal and our public lives.”

Clearly I’ve lost it. Here’s a video I did this morning of what I wore to my home office today:

(more…)

“The ranks of the uninsured are swelling!” the radio, TV, the Web and newspapers are shrieking today. Many are shocked that the number of uninsured increased to over 50 million last year, according to a Census Bureau report released yesterday.

But it shouldn’t be a total shock. Millions of people are unemployed and have lost their employer-sponsored coverage. It’s not like regular people living on a $300 unemployment check can afford $1,000-plus a month to buy coverage for themselves and their families.

And affording COBRA — the program that lets people buy into their old coverage at a hefty cost — is out of the reach of many who don’t have jobs. It was a bit more affordable thanks to discounts from the federal government, but those have expired for the recently jobless.

Where is the safety net for hard working Americans? There is a pretty frayed one when it comes to coverage for medical care. And things are only getting worse this year. (more…)