Gals! If you don’t think you’re worth more money why would anyone else think you’re worth more money?

I just read two reports this morning about employees and their expectations for raises this year, and it turns out male workers are pretty optimistic.

One study released this week by Adecco Staffing found that:

Men are more confident than women that a bonus, raise or promotion is in their future. More than half of all men (52 percent) expect to ask for OR receive a raise, bonus or promotion at work in 2012, compared to just 37 percent of women.

And jobs website Glassdoor reported earlier this month that: (more…)

I’m going to do my best not to be too pushy in this post. I don’t want to come off as a domineering white gal and scare you off.

Turns out white women and black men experience more of a blacklash when they exhibit dominant behavior than black women and white males.

Seriously! New research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, found this the be the case: (more…)

Did you tweet today about your sister’s heart attack, or write a Facebook post about the anniversary of your father’s death from lung cancer?

What if your boss sees it?

Yesterday the government released data on workplace discrimination and not surprisingly the numbers spiked last year.

Disability and age bias charges increased, and the total number of complaints hit a record at nearly 100,000 total filed, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That’s a continued influx of charges rising steadily for the last few years.

What I thought was most interesting about the data was a whole new category on the EEOC’s Charge Statistics list: GINA.

No it’s not bias against B actresses. It’s charges under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, aka GINA. (more…)

“Whatever car commercial I just saw, Kelly Clarkson is FAT. Put on a blazer and hide those piggy arms. You live in the spotlight, honey.”

“Kelly Clarkson is fat now. yes. fat. stop with excuses that she just gain a “lil weigh” n bla bla bla. plz. are u blind? she’s fat. F-A-T”

“Kelly Clarkson stop singing you fat cow”

These are some of the women-empowering tweets I came across on Twitter this morning. I started looking into Kelly Clarkson today after reading a few stories about her concert at Radio City Music Hall Saturday and how she took ongoing criticism of her looks and turned it to her advantage. (more…)

I wrote a story for MSNBC.com this week about Newt Gingrich’s daughter working as a janitor when she was 13, an age that the Department of Labor says is illegal to hold such a job.

The Republican presidential candidate had mentioned his daughter’s first job as part of his talking points on how poor kids in schools can take the jobs from adult janitors as a way to learn a better work ethic. As for child labor laws, he’s called them “stupid”.

I spoke to Gingrich’s daughter Jackie Gingrich Cushman about the janitorial job she held in the early 1980s at a local church, and she told me she was very proud of the gig. And, she said, she hoped she was working legally at the time.

“Cleaning bathrooms taught me a lot,” Cushman said, adding that she worked many menial jobs, including being a rollerblading waitress for the Sonic Drive-In chain in high school. Such experiences, she added, helped her value hard work and “appreciate and value the people that do the work as well.”

Before the story ran, I emailed Gingrich’s press team to find out if they knew Cushman’s job may have been illegal and his press secretary R.C. Hammond wrote: “Can they work as a clerk in the library?” I figured maybe he didn’t understand my question and emailed back: “I was specifically referring to Gingrich’s comment that his daughter worked a janitorial job at age 13.”

I didn’t get a reply back before we published the story late Wednesday night, but today I got another email from Hammond: (more…)

Americans aren’t likely to fight for a lunch break. But citizen lunchers from many other nations would, and do. Take workers in Hong Kong.

Last week, about 1,000 securities brokers and traders, and restaurant employees, protested at the headquarters of the Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd. over a proposed reduction in their lunch break from 90 minutes to an hour, according to Bloomberg.

An hour!? Workers in this country hardly get a few minutes and they don’t seem too upset about it. Most of you are actually eating at your desks. About 65 percent of employees here either eat at their desk or don’t take lunch breaks at all, according to a survey by Right Management, an HR consulting firm.

“Lunch patterns allow us to infer a few things about the North American workplace; and one thing that we already know is that the pressure for productivity and performance can be relentless,” said Michael Haid, senior vice president of talent management at Right Management. “Employees may feel they have to apologize for stepping out, but in the long run this kind of company culture does not help improve performance or engagement.”

And executives aren’t a great example either. (more…)

This time of year, parents across the country hope their kids don’t end up bringing home serious colds and flu from school. They send their children off to their classrooms with hand sanitizers, tell them not to kiss their little buddies, and fill them with vitamins.

But parents don’t seem to think twice when they take the little buggers to places like McDonald’s and Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Maybe they should.

Turns out many of the workers at these places that offer food and fun for kids don’t get paid sick days. That means workers, most of which are making fairly low wages, have to choose between coming to work sick or staying home and missing a day or week’s pay, depending how sick they are.

So, what choice do you think most of these employees — who handle the food your kids are chowing down on — would make? They’re coming to work sick! (more…)

When it comes to social media and your career, you should curse at your own risk.

I recently got some interesting statistics on profanity and social networking sites. Turns out 47 percent of Facebook users have cursed on their walls, according to social media tracking company Reppler.

I wasn’t totally surprised having read a lot of cussing on Facebook and Twitter, and maybe having dropped an “F” bomb or two.

The Reppler data also found:

* 80% of our users who have profanity on their Facebook Wall have at least one post/comment with profanity from a friend.
* 56% of the posts/comments with profanity on a user’s Facebook Wall come from friends.
* Users are twice as likely to use profanity in a post on their Facebook Wall, versus a comment. Whereas friends are twice as likely to use profanity in a comment on a user’s Facebook Wall, versus a post.
* The most common profane word is derivations of the “f-word”. The second most common profane word is derivations of the word “sh*t”. ”B*tch” is a distant third.

And guess who curses the most? (more…)

You’re all costing your employers too much money in health care costs and they’re done being nice about encouraging you to get healthier.

The wife of a Las Vegas casino dealer recently wrote us at MSNBC upset that her husband was asked by his managers at the hotel where he works to take a biometric health assessment test. Such tests typically include a health professional taking an employee’s blood and then having it tested for an array of ailments.

The reader wrote that her husband would be fined $500 if he refused to take the test. Such assessments, she added, were “an egregious violation of my husband’s medical privacy.” She’s contacted the Nevada Department of Labor and the ACLU in order to get help to fight the requirement.

Unfortunately, the couple may not have a legal leg to stand on if the dealer doesn’t allow them to prick his finger.

About 70 percent of larger employers now conduct employee health assessments, and more and more are considering taking the stick approach to workers who refuse to take such exams. (more…)

The jobless figures from the Department of Labor this morning offered some hope. The overall unemployment rate dipped to 8.5 percent, the lowest level since 2009.

What wasn’t hopeful was growth in the number of people holding multiple jobs.

It’s one of the stark realities of today’s job market. Good-paying jobs are being lost, and many aren’t being replaced. As a result, some workers are finding they need more than one job to make ends meet — or at least keep up their standard of living, said Ellen Ernst Kossek, a human resource professor at Michigan State University’s School of Labor & Industrial Relations.

More than 7 million Americans are working two or more jobs today, up from 6.8 million in 2010, and 6 million in 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (more…)