Hurricane Sandy shuttered or disrupted operations for thousands of businesses on the East Coast, and that’s already hit workers’ wallets.

Some companies continued to pay workers, while others decided it didn’t make economic sense, and still other employers are pondering what to do. The Wall Street Journal calls this the “Disaster Dilemma” in an article published today.

This from the piece:

Companies largely excused worker absences immediately after the storm, which left millions without power and tens of thousands temporarily homeless. But as businesses around the region return to normal, managers are grappling with how much, and how long, to pay employees who cannot make it in to work.

Clearly, companies are going to make decisions based on their own financial situations, and also based on their ethics, but employees should know what the law says in these cases before just accepting what bosses decide. Not everyone is going to follow the law, and some employers are just ignorant about it.

Here’s a good overview on your rights from Patrick Bannon, C.J. Eaton, Loren Gesinsky and Barry Miller, all employment lawyers for Seyfarth Shaw: (more…)

Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs executive who caused an uproar earlier this year with his opinion piece in the New York Times exposing the corruption and greed that’s rampant on Wall Street, is about to debut his new book: “Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story.”

Surely Smith will regale us with more in depth explanations of the sickening stories he shared in his oped:

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail.

This disregard for others in the name of money isn’t only the domain of Wall Streeters.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately you’ve probably heard about the tainted steriod injections that have killed 19 and sickened many others.

The problems aren’t only an issue for a lone lax pharmacy that produced the injections. A story in the New York Times today points to rampant violations at drug factories around the country. The first paragraph of the story will make you sick to your stomach:

Weevils floating in vials of heparin. Morphine cartridges that contain up to twice the labeled dose. Manufacturing plants with rusty tools, mold in production areas and — in one memorable case — a barrel of urine.

How does this happen? Clearly, someone, or a group of someones, decides to cut corners all for the good of the bottom line, and it turns out we may be teaching the idea that “greed is good” to students studying economics. (more…)

(Below is a guest post by Emmanuel Conde, a respected IT recruiter and writer. It is part of a series of guest posts I will be publishing on CareerDiva offering a different perspective and expertise on jobs and careers.)

By Emmanuel Conde

I became a recruiter out of necessity.

I was an IT manager and a technical assistant center manger and then a consultant manager, and through these last few roles I was always called upon to do my own recruiting. It was easier for me to search on Monster myself for candidates than explaining what I needed to human resources. So, after so many years of doing this on my own it changed my career.

Now I essentially run a geek dating service.

Recruiting is often like herding cats. If you have never had more than three cats in your responsibility at one time, then you don’t know. I mean cats are great for stuff like ignoring you, allowing burglars to take stuff they don’t use, urinating in places you cannot locate, and running in different directions.

Geeks are like that if you are scheduling interviews for more than one in a day. So, you get them lined up and they can’t find the cell phone charger, or the server room has no signal, or they forgot, or they found a new place to urinate.

And they’re slow to make decisions, even critical career decisions. The problem can be even worse for geeks who are married. (more…)

I know a lot of you don’t take Twitter seriously, but a recent rogue tweet by a once-prominent CEO proves otherwise.

Jack Welch, the former head of General Electric who went on to make a career for himself as a writer for a host of business publications, decided to take his political fervor for Mitt Romney and trash the staff at the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS.

You see, he was apparently upset that the BLS’ unemployment data for September showed a drop in the jobless rate and wrote a tweet that questioned the integrity of the BLS numbers.

Here’s his tweet:

“Unbelievable jobs numbers…these Chicago guys will do anything…can’t debate so change numbers.”

I was particularly perturbed over Welch’s tweet because I know many of the folks at the BLS and they’ve always seemed to have the utmost integrity no matter which administration they served under. But clearly, Welch has a right to say what ever the heck he wants.

But, and here’s the big but, it can end up hurting your career, as it appears to have in Welch’s case. (more…)

The image of the 1950s father epitomized in the Father Knows Best TV series has changed dramatically. Men are increasingly realizing they have to be more involved at home.

But men face a work-life conundrum.

New research released this week, which is part of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, shows young men are more open to new roles. (more…)

(Below is a guest post by Emmanuel Conde, a respected IT recruiter and writer. It is the first in a series of guest posts I will be publishing on CareerDiva offering a different perspective and expertise on jobs and careers.)

By Emmanuel Conde

All the good IT jobs are going to India! Or are they?

We live in an age of fictionalized sensational sound bites on TV. What an undue influence some of this has on our children, and let’s face it, since the television was accepted into our homes we have all felt this influence.

Ask an American kid what they want to do for a living, and you will hear answers based on what TV shows they like. Crime Scene Investigators might be in demand in a few places, but is every wide eyed child going to cut the mustard?

What we do not see are a lot of real world job heroes sensationalized on the boob tube. How do you make an IT geek look good in tights and a cape? It won’t happen! So, we look to our news announcers in their sound-bite worlds saying there are millions of American IT jobs going unfilled. We have to retool our workforce damn it! Well, they don’t generally say damn it, but I do.

There is nothing more boring than watching some geek do geek stuff on TV. Who is there left to influence our young people to step up and take IT careers seriously? The nerds on the TV show, Big Bang Theory are as close as we have come in the USA to glorifying nerds, but they are not IT geeks.

Still, they are inaccurate in their depiction anyway; shouldn’t there be more than one Indian guy? Take a look at the cast and I would challenge any American university to present a ratio of only 25% of a class of science majors who are immigrants. Indian? Yes a lot are from India. Where have all the good IT jobs gone? They are still there, waiting to be filled. (more…)

I love that Waylon Jennings song, “Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.”

Here’s one part of the song I found poignant today:

Them that don’t know him won’t like him and them that do,
Sometimes won’t know how to take him.

Unfortunately, cowboys aren’t the only ones with this problem. It’s also the case for female scientists. No one knows how to take them either.

A Yale study released Monday found there are a whole lot of people in science who just won’t give women a break when it comes to pay and career opportunities. They just don’t get or respect gals who pursue science as a profession.

The researchers at Yale asked “127 scientists to review a job application of identically qualified male and female students and found that the faculty members – both men and women – consistently scored a male candidate higher on a number of criteria such as competency and were more likely to hire the male.” (more…)

(Part one of a two-part blog series on Anne Marie Slaughter and the notion of “Having It All.”)

When Anne Marie Slaughter wrote her now infamous The Atlantic article titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” she wasn’t naive about how the piece might stir up women.

She wanted to question the status quo, and possibly help inspire change.

But for everyone out there who may have interpreted her article as a narrative meant to inspire women to give up their careers for motherhood, she says, you were wrong.

And for those who thought she damaged the women’s movement’s progress leveling the workplace playing field, she says, get over it.

It’s time to move beyond the tired mommy wars, and the notion that women should be afraid to point out the flaws in the U.S. workplace for fear of rocking the boat.

It’s time to “make work choices in a different way” and not condemn women, or men, who want flexibility at work, stressed Slaughter during Families and Work Institute’s Immersion Learning Experience session held this week at JPMorgan Chase. (more…)

The media is up in arms today over the revelation that a thief was rewarded millions for snitching on other thieves.

A former corrupt banker ended up reaping the benefits of a law that encourages whistleblowers in the workplace. But sometimes don’t you have to take some bad in order to do greater good?

Here’s how the story played out, according to a Wall Street Journal article today:

Bradley Birkenfeld, 47 years old, began cooperating with U.S. authorities in 2007 while still at UBS. He provided prosecutors with detailed descriptions of the bank’s efforts to promote tax evasion and confessed to running errands for rich clients, including one instance when he sneaked diamonds into the U.S. in a toothpaste tube.

Yes, it makes me sick to my stomach to know this guy is going to end up on easy street because he was sleazy. Alas, we can’t pick and choose the whistleblowers who get the big bucks for snitching. The law says nothing about keeping the money out of excons’ hands. (more…)

This blog post may not be written by me even though it’s me.

I need to warn all of you out there that you can’t believe everything you read. I know that’s odd coming from a journalist, but in today’s Web world you have to question everything you read.

Case in point, work-at-home hucksters have reached a new low.

I wrote a story a while back about the best and worst jobs out there, and some unethical scammer somehow was able to take my story and put in bogus information about a work-at-home company and make it look like the article was coming from MSNBC.com and written by me.

The bogus article is located at this Web address: http://msnbc.msn.com-articles8.us/jobs/ It clearly looks like it’s coming from MSNBC.

Here’s an excerpt: (more…)