Do you find the Confederate flag offensive? One worker did and it led to the suspension of another.

An employee of Delaware’s transportation department was suspended earlier this month for driving his vehicle on state property. Government officials said they found the license plate offensive because it was emblazoned with the words “Red Neck” and also displayed a Confederate flag, according to an article in my local paper this morning.

The worker, Tom Drummond, had the plate on his car for years, and had driven the vehicle to work since he started in 2008. But a complaint from another employee who felt the plate was a form of harassment prompted the state’s action.

I’ve written a lot in the past about how employees have few if any free speech rights when they enter the nation’s factories or offices. Clearly, you can be fired for what ever the heck you say when it comes to politics, but there’s one glaring exception — the government-run workplace. (more…)

A bigwig fraternity at Yale University, which both President Bushes were members of, was suspended for five years.

According to a New York Daily News story that was published yesterday the pledges were chanting:

“No means yes, yes means anal” over and over again. The pledges were also reportedly carrying a sign that read “We love Yale sluts.”

We shouldn’t be to surprised too that these young kids, who are supposed to be among “the best and brightest,” think it’s OK to treat women like trash.

If you are shocked you probably didn’t check out the news yesterday. The airwaves were filled with new heights in sexist behavior. (more…)

I’ve been monitoring the Black Friday deals for a few weeks now as part of a new “Deal of the Day” section I’m writing for MSNBC.com and TodayShow.com, and I fear I may be contributing to what is expected to be holiday shopping hysteria later this week.

Already the airwaves, newspapers, and the Internet are bursting with endless, “never-before-seen” bargains. And whether these bargains turn out to be real or not, consumers can’t help but be caught up in the pre-Black Friday marketing push. I’ve talked to many deal-hunting hotshots in the past week, and they’re getting their game faces and cleats on for the big day.

In 2008, I wrote about a 34-year old Wal-Mart temp worker at a Long Island store named Jdimytai Damour who had hardly any training in dealing with crowds and was crushed to death by shoppers when the doors opened on Black Friday. His father Ogera Charles told me a year after his death that “there were too many people.” Of Walmart and the shoppers, he said, “they both could have done a better job.”

Turns out, retailers and consumers apparently aren’t doing a better job, because worker injuries during special sales events have actually increased in recent years.

Many workers are hopeful things won’t be as crazy, but they’re preparing for the worst. A worker at Sears told me yesterday she’s been asked to come into work at 3:45 am this Friday; and when I asked her how she felt about working she had a bit of fear in her eyes. “It will be okay,” she said, unconvincingly.

That’s why I decided to do a blog post to warn workers of the danger ahead. I’m not being an alarmist folks. Even the government is worried about worker safety amidst the buying bonanza expected this Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, and is warning retailers that if they don’t take precautionary measure to protect workers they are going to be in big trouble. (more…)

Yesterday I met two very smart 16-year-old girls who surprisingly knew little about what’s appropriate in the workplace.

I spoke at a local library about teens and work, and one of the parts of my presentation that intrigued the two teens I met the most was on workplace rights, including everything from being paid what you’re owed to sexual harassment.

I talked to them about minimum wage, and making sure you get paid overtime if you work overtime. And I also told them it was not cool if your manager pressures you to date him, or a co worker sends you sexually explicit text messages.

They both giggled a bit, and the one teen felt comfortable enough to ask me a question about a friend of hers who worked at a fast food restaurant.

The friend, she said, had seen something at work and wondered if it crossed the line. A male manager at the store, who was in his early twenties, told a female worker who was 16 that she had to clean up an area in the kitchen. The girl said she would get to it when she was finished cleaning another section he had asked her to clean but he wasn’t happy with her response.

He said, “you can either clean this up now or you can give me a blow job.” (more…)

Dressing like a terrorist this Halloween season is probably not going to get you a promotion.

In fact, costumes that are in poor taste might even get you in career hot water if you wear one to an office party or Halloween bash where you might see some of your not-so-close coworkers or managers. And your actions could even get others in trouble. (more…)

“Look at her!”

A television reporter, Ines Sainz, covering the NFL was harassed by players for her work attire.

If you’ve heard one joke, you’ve heard a million about Hillary Clinton’s endless colorful pantsuits. Even she jokes about them.

And this outfit to the bottom left is what the Wall Street Journal calls “wearable” clothing for the average women that came out of designer shows this week at Fashion Week.

What the heck’s a working women to do?

Men have their work uniforms, dark suit and tie for days when the big boss is in the office, or for job interviews; and khakis and a polo shirt for casual day.

But women have an endless array of outfits to chose from. But chose at your own peril. The risks of picking the wrong get up are looking slutty, dowdy, or ridiculous. And any of these adjectives can sometimes even hurt your career.

Not only that, women have to consider changing their looks as they move up the ladder. One high-powered corporate woman I know recently told me a promotion she got sent her shopping for better-looking clothing. She felt she had to look more put together and just couldn’t throw anything on anymore.

Her solution, a bunch of simple, but tailored dresses she bought at Marshalls. It was easier, she surmised, because she didn’t have to spend the time matching tops with skirts and pants, or jackets.

Still, even a dress can have its problems. If it’s too low cut, you’ll end up the office tramp. But if it’s too high cut, suddenly your the uptight bitch.

Or maybe we should just stop caring about such labels altogether gals! All this focus on what we wear is taking our eyes off the prize. Women still make up less than 13 percent of the corner offices, according to Catalyst, a group that helps promote women in leadership.

How about we all start donning this number:

But you probably don’t want to do this:

Someone should make an app for my iPhone that allows you to search a data base of employers who have come under fire by the government for employee mistreatment. If there were, fewer people would probably get sick from tainted food.

One of the biggest food recalls in history is going on right now. And guess what? The company responsible has a history of treating it’s workers badly.

Wright County Egg, an Iowa company, has had to recall more than 300 million eggs nationwide because of salmonella. The owner of the firm, Jack DeCoster, was called the “poster child” of worker mistreatment in a 2006 article in Boston magazine titled: “The Invisible Harvest Exploitation. Coercion. Poverty wages. New England has its own Grapes of Wrath, and it’s happening now. Inside the hidden world of the migrant farm workers who put food on your table.”

If any of you knew this, would you have eaten his eggs? (more…)

If you haven’t heard about the latest American, take-this-job-and-shove-it hero, you will soon.

Steven Slater, a flight attendant for JetBlue, was so angry at a customer who hit him in the head with his luggage when the plane landed that he cursed him on the loud speaker, grabbed a beer, pulled the cord on the emergency-evacuation slide, jumped on and headed home.

He was soon arrested, but his story shines light on more than just disgruntled workers in this economy. Slater, 39, is a prime example of the hardships Generation X faces. You know, that group born roughly between 1961 and 1981 that no one really talks about. Lately it’s all about the struggling Baby Boomers and Gen Yers, but the plight for Gen Xers is just as bad, and many are at their wit’s end. (more…)

If you work at Google and one of the founding employees of the mega search engine company starts calling you “obsolete” and “too old to matter,” your days may be numbered.

That’s what Brian Reid, Google’s vice-president of engineering, is claiming happened before he was fired at age 54 from the company. He worked at the tech giant from 2002 to 2004 and detailed a host of old-guy bashing comments on the part of Google employees in his suit against the company.

This former Stanford professor who said he got great reviews, believes Google, based in Mountain View, CA, gave him the axe because of his age.

His case was thrown out by a lower court because the direct manager who fired him never said a disparaging word about Reid’s age, at least not to his face. Even though other Google staffers made fun of his age, the court viewed those comments as “stray remarks,” and not relevant to Reid’s case.

Well, the state’s highest court ruled yesterday that those stray remarks may indeed matter and the case is now moving forward, much to the chagrin of employers across the country. (more…)

If you walk around your office or factory this morning, you probably could point out the perverts, mean idiots and potential abusers in your midst.

The workplace jerks are rarely kept hidden. Often times, even the people in human resources know Bob has a porno problem, or Sue starts cursing and throwing things when a project fails.

Why then is it so difficult to rid the work environment of these people, especially in a tough economic environment when so many people are getting laid off? I often hear from readers that all the good employees were let go but for some reason the higher ups thought it was a good idea to keep the one toxic worker. (more…)