The Internet is all a twitter this morning over a gaffe made by the editor-at-large of Time on the Morning Joe show today. But it may be a newly hired, behind-the-scenes producer that takes the fall.

The editor, Michael Halperin, who is also an analyst for MSNBC, said: “I thought he was a dick yesterday,” referring to the President’s behavior during his press conference. Apparently, everyone around the Morning Joe table thought they were operating under a delay and the word “dick” could be cut out. Alas, it was not.

This from Politico.com:

Host Joe Scarborough hoped to prevent the comment from being broadcast, saying, “Delay that. Delay that. What are you doing? I can’t believe… don’t do that. Did we delay that?”

Just minutes later, Halperin quickly apologized to the president and viewers for his choice of words. “Joking aside, this is an absolute apology. I shouldn’t have said it. I apologize to the president and the viewers who heard me say that,” Halperin said.

“We’re going to have a meeting after the show,” Scarborough said.

The meeting doesn’t seem to be about raking Halperin over the coals for saying dick. (more…)

Want to know if you’re a descendant of Genghis Khan?

All you have to do is refer a software engineer looking for a job to DNAnexus, a Silicon Valley-based start up. If they hire the guy or gal you get $20,000 and your full genome sequenced, something that could cost thousands of dollars if you did it on your own.

It’s a unique offer for a unique problem — a company having trouble finding enough workers to hire. In this economy, with 14 million Americans out of work, it might seem strange that an employer would go to such lengths to hire employees, but in some areas of the country and in some sectors, including technology, there supposedly aren’t enough workers to go around.

And surprisingly, companies offering referral bonuses are up overall, according to the Society for Human Resource Management:

In 2011, 63 percent of organizations reported using hiring bonuses, and 41 percent used or were planning to use retention bonuses.

In addition, 66 percent of respondents reported having an employee referral bonus program (up from 59 percent in mid-2010).

“During the economic downturn, many employers reduced staff and asked remaining employees to do more with less. As the job market improves, these organizations are using tactics such as employee referral bonus programs to not only attract proven performers but also help retain the employees who make referrals,” said Kathi Myers, director at Buck Consultants. “Involvement in the hiring process engages employees and strengthens their ties to the organization.”

Such bonuses range from $500 for clerical worker referrals to about $2,500 for executive hires, according to a WorldatWork study.

So DNAnexus’ referral bonus sounds way over the top, no? Well, not to the company’s CEO and co-founder, Andreas Sundquist, PhD. (more…)

There’s a trial going on in Delaware’s Court of Chancery that involves a well-known company going after an ex employee, and it should be a wake up call for all you workers out there who will some day go on to greener employment pastures.

The makers of Gore-Tex, W.L. Gore, are claiming an ex employee, Darrell Long, violated agreements he had signed with the company specifying he would not compete with his former employer or disclose any company secrets. Long is now a product line leader with General Electric and Gore is crying foul against Long and GE.

This from the Wilmington News Journal:

… in the weeks leading up to his
resignation, Long downloaded more than
9,000 documents from his work computer,
many of them confidential filtration
business plans, financial statements and
customer lists, according to public court
filings.

Gore’s case includes wide-ranging — and often unrelated — accusations against Long and officials at GE Energy, including another former Gore employee, Bob Muscat. Gore claims that Long, Muscat and others “plotted” to use confidential documents from Gore to capture the company’s filtration business, court filings show.

Long and GE are disputing Gore’s accusations but this type of dispute is likely to play out more and more in the months and years ahead as employees decide to jump ship. Employers have gotten more stringent in recent years about having worker sign noncompete agreements, and many employees have felt pressure to sign just about anything during the tough economy because they wanted jobs.

Among the flood of forms you get when you’re first hired, or paperwork a boss asks you to fill out as part of a new company policy, a noncompete clause or agreement may be lurking. If you sign it, you could be shooting yourself in the career foot.

Such legal documents can preclude you from going to work for a competitor or even keep you from starting a business in a similar industry; and they are more popular than ever. “Employers are still holding the cards,” said Barbara Poole, CEO of Employaid, an online resource for employees and HR executives. “This is an era of distrust - employees of corporations and vice versa.” (more…)

Job stimulus proposals don’t get a lot of support these days even though there are 14 million people out of work and a jobless rate of 9.1 percent. But maybe people would think differently if they considered the men and women who sacrificed their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don’t know if you heard, but 33,000 of them will be heading home in the next year and they’ll be heading into one of the worse job markets in decades, a job market that’s even crummier for them.

The unemployment rate for veterans of the Gulf War, including those who served from September 2001 until today, is now 12.1 percent, up from 10.6 percent in May of last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the numbers for younger male vets between ages 18 and 24 are even worse, about 21 percent joblessness; not to mention those coming home with injuries. About 25 percent of these veterans report having some sort of disability as a result of recent wars, much higher than the 13 percent among all veterans.

Thanks to medical advances, soldiers are able to survive devastating injuries that may have killed them in previous wars, experts say, and that’s creating a large pool of disabled vets looking for jobs once they return home. They are also struggling with hidden disabilities, such as traumatic brain injuries and mental health issues.

“Disabled vets have a lot of unique challenges, and they have a hard time finding jobs,” says Paul Rieckhoff, executive director with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

He estimates that the jobless rate among his 100,000 members is in the double digits, with no sign of relief.

Often times vets whether disabled or not, especially those who enlisted at a young age and have little private sector work experience, have a tough time adjusting to civilian life again and finding jobs. And vets who left jobs behind to go off to war sometimes come back and find their jobs are gone, even though there are laws that are supposed to fight against such actions.

President Obama’s announcement last night that thousands of vets will be returning home was good news for many people out there, but it could end up a recipe for disaster for the many more military men and women that will be returning home if they can’t find work. (more…)

Once upon a time, I thought most jobs would never be automated, but today I wouldn’t be surprised if any gig ended up on the robot trash heap.

Case in point. Last night I was watching Reno 911 and Lieutenant Dangle was doing a roll call briefing and informed his deputies that the suicide hotline would now be automated.

“And, uh, we’re automating our suicide hotline, by the way. We’re going to an automated system,” Dangle said.

And the deputies’ responses:

“Working that line was a real bummer.”

“So depressing.”

I laughed for a second, then thought, “hey, it could happen.”

Dire predictions are being made about a host of different jobs, and it’s not good news for the stubbornly high unemployment rate that many of us are still waiting to decline. (more…)

The Supreme Court derailed attempts by over 1 million women who worked at Walmart, past and present, to sue the retail giant for alleged unfair treatment when it came to wages and advancement at the company.

And the reasoning by the justices in the court opinion has got me scratching my head. They don’t think the women would be able to prove the retailer discriminated because Walmart didn’t have an explicit policy of discrimination.

Helloooo, a company would have to be pretty stupid if they actually wrote down, “hey, let’s deny women better pay and promotions whenever we get a chance.”

This from the opinion when it came to the women’s burden of proof:

The first manner of bridging the gap obviously has no application here; Wal-Mart has no testing procedure or other companywide evaluation method that can be charged with bias. The whole point of permitting discretionary decisionmaking is to avoid evaluating employees under a common standard. The second manner of bridging the gap requires “significant proof ” that Wal-Mart “operated under a general policy of discrimination.” That is entirely absent here.

This is a key part of why the high court decided, in a 5-4 decision that the women could not move ahead. This from MSNBC.com:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled for Wal-Mart in the largest sex-discrimination lawsuit ever, overturning an earlier decision that gave class-action status for female employees seeking billions of dollars…who claimed they were paid less and giving them fewer promotions at the company.

Getting class-action status would have given the women a greater voice.

Discrimination claims made by the plaintiffs in the case, led by Betty Dukes, and going back nearly a decade, point to alleged far-reaching bias behavior at the nation’s largest retailer. The 9th Circuit Court granted class-action status in 2009. Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in the United States with more than 2 million employees, appealed to the Supreme Court. Wal-Mart is not yet disputing individual claims of bias, but says it’s unfair to allow a class-action suit across so many of its stores in so many different states. They’d prefer to fight such bias claims one worker at a time.

But fighting as a group is the whole point. The one-suit-one-woman approach isn’t enough to change a culture of bias that is endemic throughout Corporate America.

“Class actions are the most effective way to overcome systematic and traditional forms of employment discrimination,” said John Mahoney, an employment attorney for Tully Rinckey in Washington, D.C. And, he added, it would be “ineffective and time consuming to try their cases individually. It will be a strain on the judicial system and drag on for years.”

If that’s what Walmart was looking to achieve, they gained a huge victory towards that today.

I’m feeling pretty popular this morning because I got five job offers in my email over the weekend.

Don’t be too jealous of me. All five offers are for the same job, even though the emails supposedly came from five different people. And all the five offers are unsolicited. I did not apply for any jobs at this company. If you’ve read any of the past stories I’ve written about job scams you’d know unsolicited offers are often scams.

These emails point to a huge problem on the Web. It’s easy for scammers, and legitimate companies, to find you, and there are few places people can go to figure out if they’re about to fall prey to a huckster. Even reporters have to work pretty hard to figure out what the heck is going on.

So, I put on my big reporter’s hat this morning to do some digging on these email “job offers”. (more…)

There’s an odd war of words going on in the world of organized labor, and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal appear to be on two different sides.

The two newspapers had very different accounts of a worker movement at Walmart that has recently surfaced and is trying to get better wages and benefits from the retail giant. The group is called Organization United for Respect at Walmart, or OUR Walmart.

Yesterday a story in the Times called OUR:

a new, nonunion group of Wal-Mart employees that intends to press for better pay, benefits and most of all, more respect at work.

But today, a story in the Journal on OUR called the group:

a new, union-financed organization and the latest salvo in the long and so far fruitless efforts by U.S. labor unions to organize the 1.4 million U.S. workers at the world’s largest retail chain.

Even the headlines of the two stories were diametrically opposed:

Times: Wal-Mart Workers Try the Nonunion Route

Journal: Wal-Mart Is Facing Latest Salvo From Union

No, the reporters of these stories haven’t lost their minds. Times reporter Steven Greenhouse, and Journal reporters Miguel Bustillo and Kris Maher are all very good at what they do. But the problem here points to how loaded the word “union” is in our country. (more…)

It’s 9 a.m., do you know how many hours of work you’ll put in today?

There’s one basic axiom in the for-profit workplace — employees get paid for the work they do. But for some reason companies just can’t seem to get this simple concept.

Walmart got bitch slapped yet again on Friday for its employment practices, this time for not paying workers who worked off the clock, which is against the law; and not paying employees for 15 minutes rest breaks, which was a provision in the retailer’s own handbook.

And it’s just not Walmart trying to take a few shekels out of workers’ paychecks. Best Buy is also facing allegations that it misclassified managers who were actually doing hourly work but not getting paid overtime when they did it. The company has come under fire for its pay practices in the past, more than once.

States and the federal government have been cracking down on such infractions recently, but workers need to step up and demand to be paid what they’re owed. To that end, the Department of Labor has introduced an app to help you keep track of your own hours. That’s how bad they think it’s getting folks. (more…)

In the past few months, I’ve gotten 151 emails from PR sources with the word “happiness” placed prominently. Either they were pitching a book about career happiness, or a study on workplace happiness, or they had an expert who could offer advice on finding happiness at work.

Recent books in those “happy” emails: “The Seed: Finding Purpose and Happiness in Life and Work“; “The Happiness Advantage“, “Bliss Every Day: A Guide to Find Peace and Happiness,” and “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose.”

And I got an email last month from a sweet woman I met in New York a while back named Karen Salmonsohn that said: “Be patient. Your rainbow is coming.”

Happiness seems to be everywhere in the career space. You can’t go twenty minutes on Twitter without someone tweeting a famous quote or a saying about happiness; and there are whole companies that offer services to employers to make workers happy. An employee’s happiness is supposedly tied to a company’s bottom line. Who knew.

Companies could save some money on these happiness gurus by just paying workers what they’re worth and treating them like human beings. But I digress.

All this happiness is sort of bumming me out. That’s why I was so excited when I heard a respected mental health expert on the radio this morning dogging all the happiness hype. (more…)