DailyFinance, September 29, 2010, Wednesday

DailyFinance

September 29, 2010, Wednesday

DailyFinance

People@Work: Plugging the Gap Between Jobs and Skills

By DAVID SCHEPP

Despite the lingering recession and high unemployment, a vast number of employers worldwide are having difficulty finding workers they need to fill specific jobs. In the U.S., 52% of companies report problems attracting critical-skill employees, while nearly the same number say it's tough to find high-performing, talented workers, according to a recent survey by workplace consultancy Towers Watson and WorldatWork, a nonprofit research organization.

With some 15 million Americans unemployed, it's seemingly incomprehensible as to why companies can't find the talent they need. Part of the problem is that many laid-off workers simply lack the skills needed by employers, says Christopher Collins, professor of human resource management at Cornell University's ILR School.

Some of the hottest jobs that need to be filled in the next 10 to 15 years require technology skills that aren't gained, say, at traditional manufacturing jobs. "Part of it is retooling," Collins says. Workers need to take existing career and life experiences and pursue additional training to become better qualified.

A Worthwhile Effort

That can take time, however. For example, training to become a radiologic technician, an in-demand profession, requires about two years of schooling at a community college or technical school, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And many states require that graduates be certified. Still, the effort can be handsomely rewarded. The mean hourly wage for radiologic techs is $26.05, or $54,160 a year, according to BLS data from May 2009, the most recent available.

Lack of specific skills isn't affecting only seasoned workers' ability to find work. Recent college graduates, too, may find they need additional training. Taking courses in programming and operating large mainframe computers can do a lot to boost graduating seniors' job prospects, says Roger Norton, dean of the School of Computer Science and Mathematics at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

"If a student has on their resume that in their undergraduate curriculum they took some courses in enterprise computing, they are going to get a job," Norton says. "They are going to get very many offers," he says. "There's that much of a shortage."

Students graduating with degrees in computer science, information technology or information systems earn initial salaries of $60,000 to $80,000 a year, Norton says, adding that many graduates also receive signing bonuses of as much as $10,000.

Lacking Interest in 'STEM'

Further, he says, it doesn't take exceptional intelligence to successfully complete such training. Students in Marist's computer science program aren't that much smarter than those in other parts of the college, based on students' average SAT scores, Norton says.

"I don't think there's a lack of aptitude or ability," he says. Rather, it's a lack of interest among students to study science, technology, engineering or mathematics -- known as STEM. "Those are the areas the U.S. is falling far behind everybody else," Norton says. Less than 10% of students in the U.S. go into those particular areas, whereas in India and China, 75% of students are pursuing educational opportunities in STEM fields, he says.

Why aren't young people interested in pursuing such jobs? "It's a perception thing," Norton says. STEM studies just doesn't appear "cool" to many young Americans. But in developing countries, finding a well-paying job is the focus in career choice.

Conversely, the lack of qualified workers in developing nations has less to do with the stigma of STEM areas, but rather is tied to rapid economic growth, says Mike Steinmetz, vice president/general manager of the Manpower's Midwest division. There simply isn't the pool of trained workers to fill jobs in countries such as Brazil and Argentina.

Big Blue Steps Into the Breach

In an effort to attract more students to STEM studies and expand the pool of talent it needs, IBM (IBM) seven years ago began the IBM Academic Initiative, which provides resources to academia such as free software and computing capacity, among other items.

IBM needs graduates adept at taking on the challenges facing society, business and government, "and to be able to apply technology and come up with innovative solutions. . .to solve those problems," says Kevin Faughnan, director of the IBM Academic Initiative.

Big Blue has no way of measuring whether its efforts are producing results, other than anecdotal feedback from college faculty, which generally provide favorable results, Faughnan says.


Sponsored Links Another effort on the part of IBM, known as Smarter Planet, aligns the company's business plan with the growing green movement. "Green is of great interest to young people," Faughnan says, "so you're finding students who, maybe, didn't want to go into engineering or science-related fields are interested in that." Moreover, he says, the appeal is across the board -- from state universities to Ivy League colleges.

IBM believes the initiative is one tool that's helping to attract younger people to STEM studies. (The company also has an initiative for K-12 students, known as TryScience, that introduces students at an early age to science.)

Still, with just 10% of American youth pursing STEM studies, reason for concern remains, Faughnan says. "The more science- and technology-oriented individuals we have," he says, "the better the economy [and] the better that society will be as a result."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 26, 2010, Sunday

Copyright 2010 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

September 26, 2010, Sunday

Coke merger worries workers

No word on how many jobs will be eliminated; Company expects to save $280 million in deal with major bottler.

BYLINE: Jeremiah McWilliams; Staff

It's a hot topic at Coca-Cola and its biggest bottler these days. When the dust settles, who will have a job, and where?

As Coca-Cola Co. plans to merge its North American business with that of bottler Coca-Cola Enterprises this year, talk of coming shake-ups --- either jobs moving or being eliminated --- has floated around the Coke tower on North Avenue and bottling plants in the Atlanta suburbs.

Coca-Cola has said the deal will generate annual cost savings of about $280 million over four years, concentrated in manufacturing, information technology and infrastructure including real estate. The company has not said how much of those savings will be in the form of job cuts.

The deal awaits only approval by CCE shareholders --- expected to be granted at a special meeting Friday --- and an OK from the Federal Trade Commission and Canadian regulators.

Tom Pirko, president of California consulting firm Bevmark, said he does not believe Coca-Cola executives have decided how many jobs will be eliminated. But "if you take those two words --- streamline and cut costs --- that means fire employees," he said.

"Everybody is really up in the air," said Nelson Calderon, an eight-year employee of Coca-Cola Enterprises. "No-body feels safe over there. The company has not sat down with us to explain how things are going to come down. That creates anxiety. Everybody is walking around not knowing what to expect."

CCE's footprint in Atlanta will change when the deal is done. The company employs about 1,400 people at its headquarters. After the deal, it says it will employ about 140 there, with the rest transferring to Coca-Cola Co., Co-ca-Cola North America or Coca-Cola Refreshments USA, Coca-Cola's name for its wholly-owned bottling operations.

CCE employs 59,000 people in North America and about 3,800 in metro Atlanta.

"You can assume over time that our presence in the United States, in terms of employees, will go down a bit," CCE chief executive John Brock told analysts in June.

UBS analyst Kaumil Gajrawala said the strategy behind the deal has more to do with capturing the growth of North America than with cutting costs. Coke has said that gaining control of North American bottling will give it more flexibility and efficiency in distributing its drinks.

Gajrawala predicted that only a small percentage of the cost savings will come from job cuts.

A variety of changes will start unfolding when the CCE deal closes, said John Sicher, editor and publisher of trade journal Beverage Digest. For example, Coke will form seven regional sales units in the U.S., combining Coke's and CCE's current regional units. It will also create new national sales teams.

"Coke wants its customers to have an easier time dealing with Coke than in the past and fewer people at Coke to deal with," Sicher said. In addition, the product supply operations of
Coca-Cola and CCE will be merged into one organization.

Coca-Cola, which has about 4,000 employees at its Atlanta headquarters, has given few public details of how its work force might change after the deal. It wants to remake its distribution system to clean up a tangled network that involves different plants for soft drinks and juice, as well as different sales forces and customer service personnel.

Morale on North Avenue is "hide-under-your-desk bad," said one former Coca-Cola communications executive who keeps in touch with several colleagues still at Coke. Another former executive who still does business with Coke said morale is poor, but perhaps not as low as in 2000. After thousands of layoffs were announced that year, a Mon-ster.com blimp circled the Coke building.

Coca-Cola spokesman Kenth Kaerhoeg acknowledged that employees have reacted with varying degrees of con-cern. But he said the general consensus is that the deal in Coke's flagship market will make the company a better place to work.

Kaerhoeg said Coca-Cola's targets for savings will involve job cuts, but new openings will also be created. Most people in the current North America teams at Coca-Cola and CCE will see "minimal change" in roles and responsibili-ties, he said.

"We expect minimal impact on associates during 2010," he said. "We have committed that all employees will know their role in the new organization as soon as possible" after the transaction closes.

"The best thing that we can do is ensure that we have direct and transparent communication with our people," Kaerhoeg said.

Coca-Cola's work force in the United States has expanded and contracted dramatically in the past decade.

In 2000, the company laid off about 5,200 people. About 1,750 of the cuts came in the U.S. Then, in 2003, Co-ca-Cola meshed the operations of three separate business units in North America: Coca-Cola North America, the Minute Maid Co. and the soda fountain business. The company dropped 1,700 jobs in the United States.

The company added 1,800 U.S. employees in 2006 primarily because of acquisitions and the consolidation of bot-tling operations. The company's domestic payroll hit a decade-high of 13,200 in late 2007.

Coca-Cola trimmed its U.S. work force by 1,500 jobs in 2008 and 2009. Coca-Cola has outsourced jobs in information technology for several years, and did the same with its security force in 2009. It is currently holding many positions open instead of hiring new employees, although it is not in an official hiring freeze.

The company's U.S. territory had about 11,700 employees at the end of 2009. The company did not provide a cur-rent headcount this month.

The Teamsters union is trying to organize 330 workers at CCE's plants in Marietta and College Park, and Co-ca-Cola's takeover of those bottling operations is a big part of the union's pitch.
"The prospect of arbitrary layoffs is real for these people," said Ben Speight, organizing director for Teamsters Lo-cal 728. "It's a potent threat."

About 18,000 of CCE's employees in North America are covered by collective bargaining agreements. They expire at various dates over the next four years, including 55 this year. When ownership changes hands, the new owner --- Coca-Cola, in this case --- is required to negotiate with the union about terms and conditions of employment, said Richard W. Hurd, professor of labor studies at Cornell University.

John Dickerson, who started working at CCE in 2004, said few workers expect Coca-Cola to shut production plants. The question, he said, is whether current workers will keep their jobs.
"Everybody's like, 'Wow, what's the next step?' " he said. "We want to make sure we've got a place in the company come October."

How we got the story

As Coca-Cola nears completion of its takeover of North American bottling operations, AJC reporter Jeremiah McWilliams looked into the effect on workers at both Coke and bottler Coca-Cola Enterprises. Both companies have a major presence in the Atlanta area, with thousands of employees. He talked to trade journalists, equity analysts, former employees and industry experts, as well as representatives of Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Enterprises, to get a sense of what employees might expect in the coming months.

LOAD-DATE: September 26, 2010

Slate, September 23, 2010, Thursday

Slate

September 23, 2010

Slate

Mind the Gap

Why women need the Paycheck Fairness Act.

By Heather Boushey

In a New York Times op-ed Wednesday, Christina Hoff Sommers at the American Enterprise Institute contends that the Paycheck Fairness Act is a waste. The act has passed the House and will likely come up for a vote in the Senate soon, and in mounting her timely attack, Sommers joins with a vocal minority that includes Michelle Malkin, as well as groups such as the National Federation of Independent Businesses, House Minority Leader John Boehner, and more surprisingly, the moderate Republican senators from Maine, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe.

Sommers claims that the proposed law "overlooks mountains of research showing that discrimination plays little role in pay disparities between men and women, and it threatens to impose onerous requirements on employers to correct gaps over which they have little control." But Sommers is the one overlooking mountains of research that demonstrate just the opposite. She also displays little understanding of how the legislation would work once it becomes law.

The Paycheck Fairness Act will ensure that a law already on the books—the Equal Pay Act of 1963—is adequately enforced. It gives women the right to know what their male colleagues earn so that they'll also know whether they're experiencing discrimination. Sommers says the bill "isn't as commonsensical as it might seem," but this pretty much defines common sense. If I don't know how much the man sitting in the cubicle or on the shop line next to me earns, I cannot know whether I'm earning a fair day's pay.

Remember Lilly Ledbetter? After nearly two decades of employment at Goodyear, a colleague left her an anonymous note with her salary and the salaries of three of her male colleagues. She was stunned to find out that she was earning less for doing similar work. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court. She won, but the justices ruled that she couldn't get her back pay because the discrimination began 20 years ago. Ledbetter didn't sue earlier because she didn't know about the pay disparity; to the court, that didn't matter. Congress has since fixed this problem—with the support of Sens. Collins and Snowe. Yet to this day, employers can retaliate against an employee who merely wants to know what her colleagues earn (and yes, that includes firing).

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Sommers claims that women don't need the proposed law's protections. She acknowledges, as she must, that among full-time, full-year workers, women earn just 77 cents for a man's dollar. But then she says that the 23-cent shortfall does not take into account differences between men and women, such as experience, education, or job tenure.*

She's wrong. Let's start with education. Earlier this month, we learned that women earn more Ph.D.s than men. For some time now, women have earned more bachelor's degrees and are more likely to attend community colleges. Sommers points to a new study that found that "young, childless, single urban women earn 8 percent more than their male counterparts," and she notes that this is "mostly because more of them earn college degrees." That's true. But it doesn't make Sommers' point that women don't need protection from pay discrimination. As I explain here, to compare a group of women who are on average better educated with a group of men who are on average less educated is to compare apples to oranges. Of course these women earn more as a group.

The American Association of University Women tackled the pay gap question by looking at workers of the same educational attainment—same kind of college, same grades—holding the same kinds of jobs, and having made the same choices about marriage and number of kids. They found that college-educated women earn 5 percent less the first year out of school than their male peers. Ten years later, even if they keep working on par with those men, the women earn 12 percent less.

This last statistic counters Sommers' tired argument that women make choices that lower their pay. The AAUW study is part of a vast body of additional research. For example, Cornell University economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn show that 40 percent of the total gender pay gap cannot be explained by the choices women make that could affect their on-the-job productivity, such as hours of work or experience.

Sommers also argues, based on the 2009 analysis of wage-gap studies commissioned by the Labor Department under Secretary Elaine Chao, that women "tend to value family-friendly workplace policies more than men, and will often accept lower salaries in exchange for more benefits." What is stunning about this claim is that, in fact, when you look at the data, women actually get these kinds of perks less frequently. How can women be "trading" wages for benefits if they're getting fewer benefits? That's not a trade; it's a raw deal.

Consider workplace flexibility. Researchers find that women—and, in particular, mothers—are actually less likely to have access to workplace flexibility than men. Nor does the flexibility they do get explain the motherhood pay gap. In a careful empirical study, two sociologists, Paula England at Stanford University and Michelle Budig at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, found that interruptions from work, working part-time, and decreased experience can explain no more than about one-third of the gap in pay between women with and without children. And "mother-friendly" job characteristics explained far less.

Sommers' straw man is that the Paycheck Fairness Act will hold employers' feet to the fire for "the lingering effects of past discrimination," leading to an avalanche of lawsuits against well-intentioned and innocent employers. Sen. Collins, too, said she is concerned about imposing "excessive litigation on to the small-business community." Sommers imagines the law taking a monkey wrench to the market—suddenly suspect would be the higher pay universities give business school professors compared with social-work professors. That's an example that may make sense to readers. Surely universities shouldn't be forced to artificially inflate the salaries at social-work school. But it strains credulity to imagine that the law would have this attenuated effect. If businesses are worried about more litigation, maybe that's because women armed with knowledge about pay gaps would be more likely to bring suits that have merit to enforce the laws that already exist.

And in fact, supply and demand often fails—oddly, in ways that lower women's wages. For example, there's a significant nursing crisis in this country. We do not have enough of them, and not enough young people are entering the field. Yet, nurses are paid well and many people would like to join the field. So what's the problem? Last year, nursing schools turned away 55,000 qualified applicants because they cannot recruit enough well-trained professors to teach them. As it turns out, nursing professors earn less on average, than nurses who nurse. Nursing schools need to pay their faculties more not because of the comparison with business schools, but because that's what the market demands. It seems that Sommers' argument is that markets function for business school professors, but not nursing school professors. Give me a break.

Sommers' core dismissal of the Paycheck Fairness Act is that it's a throwback to "1970s-style gender-war feminism." But that's just a thinly veiled effort to make a needed shoring up of our anti-discrimination protections sound radical. Women can see through it.

Correction, Sept. 24, 2010: The original sentence miscalculated the amount of the pay gap. (Return.)

US Fed News, September 18, 2010, Saturday

Copyright 2010 HT Media Ltd.
All Rights Reserved
US Fed News

September 18, 2010, Saturday

Penn State to Award Four Honorary Degrees at Upcoming Ceremonies

CEO Norman R. Augustine, labor economist Ronald Ehrenberg, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, and journalist and legal scholar Linda Greenhouse will receive honorary doctorates from Penn State at upcoming commencement ceremonies, Penn State's Board of Trustees announced today (Sept. 17).

Augustine, the retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp., will receive an Honorary Doctorate of Science. A former member of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology and a five-time winner of the Department of Defense's Distinguished Service Medal, Augustine also has served on the faculty of P

Princeton University. He is the author of The Defense Revolution and Shakespeare in Charge.
Trustees also agreed to award an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters to Ronald Ehrenberg and Wolf Blitzer.

Ehrenberg directs the Higher Education Research Institute at Cornell, where he has served on the faculty for 35 years. In 2005, he was named a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Cornell's highest award for undergraduate teaching. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Human Resources and has authored more than 145 papers and a noted textbook, Modern Labor Economics: Theory and Public Policy.

In addition, Ehrenberg has worked with faculty, administrative groups and trustees at numerous institutes of higher education on tuition and financial aid policies, faculty compensation policies, faculty retirement policies and other budgetary and planning issues.

Blitzer anchors CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and is known for his in-depth reporting on interna-tional news. He has covered American elections, the Middle East, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iraq War, as well as other major stories since he began his career with Reuters in 1972. His work has won a number of prestigious awards, including two Emmys.
Blitzer also has authored two books. He joined CNN in 1990.

Greenhouse, who has covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times and is one of only two non-lawyer ho-norary members of the American Law Institute, will receive an Honorary Doctorate of Law. Greenhouse currently serves at Yale Law School as a senior research scholar in law, the Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and as the Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law. She also writes a biweekly column on law.

She has been awarded the American Law Institute's Henry J. Friendly Medal and the Council of the American Phi-losophical Society's Henry Allen Moe Prize for writing in the humanities and jurisprudence. For any query with respect to this article or any other content requirement, please contact Editor at htsyndication@hindustantimes.com

LOAD-DATE: September 18, 2010

Science Magazine, September 17, 2010, Friday

Science Magazine

September 17, 2010, Friday

Science Magazine

Is Narcissism Good for Business?

Narcissists, new experiments show, are great at convincing others that their ideas are creative even though they're just average. Still, groups with a handful of narcissists come up with better ideas than those with none, suggesting that self-love contributes to real-world success.

Narcissism and creativity seem to go hand in hand. Creative people often appear self-important, hungry for attention, and unconcerned with others' ideas and opinions— all traits narcissists share. Think of Pablo Picasso, famous for his iconoclastic paintings but infamous for declaring, "I am God." Like Picasso, narcissists often rise to positions of importance in art, business, and other endeavors, suggesting that they have ability and ideas that others do not.

But do they really? Psychologists Jack Goncalo and Sharon Kim of Cornell University and Francis Flynn of Stanford University paired up 76 college students and asked one person to develop and pitch a concept for a movie to the other. The ideas were not stellar; one of the more creative, Goncalo says, involved a mafia family run by a young woman. But when pitched by the most narcissistic students (as evaluated by a 16-item questionnaire called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory), the ideas impressed the person evaluating the pitch roughly 50% more than did those from the least narcissistic pitchers. (The researchers judged the response to the ideas by how strongly the evaluator agreed with statements such as "it is unlikely that anyone has come up with a movie idea like this before.")

But two independent raters were not so easily wowed. Having only seen the movie pitches in written form, they found the narcissists' ideas to be about as creative as proposals from non-narcissists. The difference, the researchers say, was in the pitch itself: narcissists were more enthusiastic, witty, and charming—all traits, according to past research, that people associate with creativity.

To find out if narcissism might still be a boon to businesses, Goncalo, Flynn, and Kim divided 292 other students into teams of four and asked them to draw up proposals to improve the performance of real businesses and other organizations. Teams made up of three or four narcissists came up with incremental proposals and failed to generate and discuss many ideas, but so did teams with no narcissists. The teams that generated the most ideas were half narcissist, the researchers will report this November in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Goncalo says he's not sure why this particular group makeup generates the most ideas, but it could be because narcissists can help get ideas on the table. If there are too many of them, however, there may be too many egos in the room, preventing anything from getting done.

The research "addresses a very important topic in a clever and sound way," writes psychologist W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, Athens in an e-mail. Ideally, he says, businesses could focus on the narcissistic traits that work and leave the less desirable traits behind. Self-promotion, for example, is a valuable skill, but it benefits everyone to realize how much it can distort perceptions of quality.

Hotel Interactive, Inc., September 17, 2010, Friday

Hotel Interactive, Inc.

September 17, 2010, Friday

Hotel Interactive, Inc.

Engage Your Employees; Connecting to their jobs and co-workers will help businesses get results.

After more than a year of worries over layoffs and downsizings, hotel employees may need some encouragement from their managers.

“People are scared out there,” said Samuel Bacharach, professor and Director of the Bacharach Leadership Institute at Cornell University. “People in your organizations are worried. They’re worried about the organization’s future, but they’re also worried about their future. In that world, our challenge is to engage them.

Think of that contradiction,” he continued. “The problem we’re faced with in a world of uncertainty is people are afraid to act on the one hand, but on the other hand they understand that they need to act. Engagement to my mind is a mechanism or process that will help us overcome this contradiction. It’s a way of getting people to act in spite of hesitation.”

In a world of uncertainty, Bacharach said, engagement will result in employee retention, commitment, problem solving, innovation and satisfaction.

“Engagement makes stumblers, dreamers, muddlers and bureaucrats into proactive players,” said Bacharach.

Bacharach shared his insights this week during the webinar “Employee Engagement During Challenging Times.” He is the author of books including Get Them On Your Side and Keep Them On Your Side and has worked with hotel companies such as Starwood and InterContinental Hotels.

“We’ve got all these wonderful terms, but how do we make these terms into a concrete reality?” he asked. “How do you make engagement policy and training part in parcel of your organization?”

The good news is that everyone can be trained to engage people. Managers can develop skills to mobilize employees and then sustain momentum.

“The key to employee engagement is training your leaders at all levels of the organization,” he said. “It is not a state of mind that is going to come from a spiritual reawakening. It’s based on leadership and supervisory training. If you’re going to wait for your leaders to get a charisma injection, you’re going to be waiting for Godot.”

The first step is understanding what “engagement” means. Engagement is a mindset, he said. It’s the notion that employees are connected to their jobs and their co-workers.

Employees who are engaged are both present — they feel they are respected and making an impact — and enterprising. These are employees willing to take action and challenge themselves. They reflect on situations rather than make knee-jerk reactions, they innovate and take risks, persist in a job without burning out and are self-critical without relying on an evaluation system.

“We want people to challenge themselves, not that we simply challenge them,” he said. “You can’t all the time check that someone is challenging himself. We want them to challenge themselves.”

At the same time, managers have to make sure employees don’t “go wild with total self-expression,” he said. Managers put the appropriate constraints on employees while still allowing them to be proactive. Employee engagement results in stretching the envelope without tearing it.

Bacharach warned of areas of potential disengagement. Office politics can throw up obstacles, as can interpersonal relationships with other people. Employees also need to feel they have a good sense of how to do their job, as well as where their career is heading. Most people will not be working at the same job for the next 30 years, and “people want to be in situations where the organization is investing in their resume.”

One area that isn’t the challenge that it used to be is working across geographic regions. That’s because smart leaders are using Twitter, Skype and Flickr to communicate and share ideas. Bacharach called these social media sites underused as mechanisms for engagement.

Bacharach offered four rules for supportive leadership:

First, engage employees in dialogue. Leaders should listen with curiosity, pace the conversation to take in what you hear, reflect with accuracy, question for exploration and provide feedback for development.

Second, partner with them to set goals. Goals should be measurable, operational and attainable, and managers should help prioritize them, and develop deadlines as well as an action plan.

Third, be an ally in taking on obstacles. Identify external blocks such as resources, environment, resistors; identify internal blocks such as worries, fears, self-doubt; align goals of those you lead with the organization’s agenda; and help overcome blocks by using the techniques of listening, questioning and feedback.

Finally, leaders should encourage skill development. Encourage employees to learn new skills and give them a chance to practice them. Then sustain support until new skills have been internalized.

Congressional Documents and Publications, September 16, 2010, Thursday

Copyright 2010 Federal Information and News Dispatch, Inc.
Congressional Documents and Publications

September 16, 2010, Thursday

Hinchey, Hall Continue Push to Ensure Local Workers Used for Construction Projects at West Point

Washington, DC - Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and Congressman John Hall (D-NY) this week urged U.S. Secretary of the Army John McHugh to use Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) for major construction projects at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point in New York. PLAs, which are agreements to use a certain percentage of locally-based workers, would create local jobs, encourage greater partnerships between the USMA and local communities, ensure high quality workmanship on projects, and increase the likelihood that complex projects will be completed on time and within budget.

In June Hinchey and Hall wrote the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to establish the use of PLAs at West Point. A recent response from the Army's Chief Counsel has indicated that the Army is in the process of issuing guidance on the use of PLAs. Today's letter asks Secretary McHugh to ensure that any guidance issued incorporates the use of Project Labor Agreements in a manner that ensures local workers will have priority on construction projects at West Point.

"I've been working to ensure that local construction laborers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians and other trades-people are employed whenever construction projects are needed at West Point," said Hinchey. "The use of PLAs at West Point would create local jobs, strengthen our region's economy and the partnership between the Academy and our local communities, and ensure that major projects are completed on time and within budget. We have a highly-skilled workforce right here in the Hudson Valley and we should not be awarding major contracts to firms from other states and regions of the country."

"West Point is a great symbol of this region and our Nation, the use of Hudson Valley workers for construction projects is a needed boost for those having difficulty finding jobs," said Rep. Hall. "Those who live here have a vested interest in West Point having a successful future. The Army does not need to look anywhere else for workers, the Hud-son Valley workforce is strong, willing and able to provide the skilled labor needed to complete key projects around the region."

Last year, President Obama signed an Executive Order to promote the efficient administration and completion of federal construction projects through the use of PLAs. "It is the policy of the federal Government to encourage execu-tive agencies to consider requiring the use of project labor agreements in connection with large-scale construction projects in order to promote economy and efficiency in Federal procurement," noted the President. This Executive Or-der overturned a previous directive of the Bush administration prohibiting the use of such agreements for federal con-struction projects. While Obama's directive encourages the use of PLAs, it does not mandate their use. Hinchey and Hall are working to ensure that PLAs are used by the USMA.

A March 2009 study published by School of Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell University concluded, "Project Labor Agreements make sense for public works projects because they promote a planned approach to labor relations, allow contractors to more accurately predict labor costs and schedule production timetables, reduce the risks of shoddy work and costly disruptions, and encourage greater efficiency and productivity."

The full text of the letter from Hall and Hinchey to U.S. Department of the Army Secretary John McHugh is ap-pended below.
September 15, 2010
The Honorable John McHugh
Secretary
U.S. Department of the Army
1600 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-1600
Dear Secretary McHugh:
As members of the West Point Board of Visitors and representatives of New York's Hudson Valley, we are writing to request your assistance and consideration in establishing the use of Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) for major con-struction projects at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point in New York.
As you know, last year President Obama signed Executive Order 13502, which reversed a previous Bush Adminis-tration Executive Order, and encourages the use of PLAs for federal government construction projects. In the next fiscal year, there are three major construction projects being planned at West Point that would meet the cost threshold for PLA consideration. We strongly urge you to support the use of PLAs for these construction projects.
In response to our letter to the Army Corps of Engineers in June regarding this issue, the Army's Chief Counsel in-dicated that the Army was in the process of issuing guidance to all Corps Directorates of Contracting regarding PLAs. We strongly believe PLAs are effective tools that should be applied widely. At West Point, using PLAs will foster a more active partnership between the USMA and the local, civilian communities in our districts, where many members of the Academy's staff live. In addition to increasing the use of local workers, PLAs have also been effective in ensuring that projects are completed in a timely manner and within budget. Further, partnership agreements with the Hudson Valley Building and Construction Trades Council have helped to ensure the highest quality of work from our local tradesmen and tradeswomen and been utilized successfully in a wide range of major local construction projects.
We are deeply proud of the heritage and importance of the USMA at West Point, as we know you are as a former member of the Board of Visitors. We are also confident that implementing President Obama's Executive Order and utilizing PLAs for upcoming construction projects would help ensure the highest quality of work at West Point and strengthen the relationship between the Academy and our local communities.
Thank you for your attention to this matter. We look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Maurice D. Hinchey John Hall

LOAD-DATE: September 17, 2010

NBC New York, September 2, 2010, Thursday

NBC New York

September 2, 2010, Thursday

NBC New York

P. Diddy Sued for Age Discrimination by Longtime Employee

Longtime employee claims bias

A 51-year-old music executive known as "the Mom" or "Auntie" at Bad Boy Records is suing Sean "P. Diddy" Combs for $12 million claiming that she was fired for being old and disabled.

Francesca Spero says in her lawsuit that she is "renowned for launching the careers of various urban music figures, including Combs," but had a falling out with him after being laid up with hip surgery in 2008.

"Francesca Spero opened the door for Combs' career and, now that she's 51, he showed her the door at Bad Boy," said her attorney, Laurie Berke-Weiss of the law firm of Berke-Weiss & Pechman.

Spero says that she first met Combs, in 1988 and began working for him a decade later -- during his "Puff Daddy" phase. She says that she helped sign new song writers, get music clearances for corporate endorsements, execute Bad Boy's $38 million deal with Warner Brothers and produce the MTV reality show "Making the Band."

Their partnership, however, began to fall apart two years ago when she underwent surgery to treat a hip misalignment, and he allegedly said she could no longer "run around" and earned too much money for "someone who could no longer keep up with his fast-paced lifestyle," according to her lawsuit.

Eventually fired this March, Spero said her replacement was a woman about 10 to 15 years younger who "lacked the skill set and experience Spero brought to the position."

Combs' spokesperson could not be reached for comment.

Spero does admit to checking herself into a substance abuse treatment facility in December 2008 after problems with prescription pain killers and alcohol, but said until then she had been clean and sober since 1987 -- when she was treated for opiate addiction. She said she told two Bad Boy employees about her relapse and treatment.

First Published: Sep 1, 2010 8:21 PM EDT

Bloomberg Businessweek, September 9, 2010, Thursday

Bloomberg Businessweek

September 9, 2010, Thursday

Bloomberg Businessweek

Sounding the Alarm for Firefighters' Pay

Union President Harold Schaitberger is trying to protect pay and benefits threatened by strapped municipal governments By William Selway and Holly Rosenkrantz

The Obama Administration had a choice: It could send Cabinet secretaries to the June 2009 U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Providence or skip the gathering to please the International Association of Fire Fighters. The mayors lost. The Administration bowed out after the firefighters union's president, Harold Schaitberger, placed a call to Vice-President Joe Biden's office to say the union planned to picket the event in support of Local 799's six-year contract fight with the city. Schaitberger is "an eloquent, masterful advocate for the work that we do," says Paul Doughty, who heads the local. The White House declined to comment.

A former lobbyist, Schaitberger, 64, has become one of the most powerful labor leaders in Washington, and he will need all of his string-pulling prowess in the months ahead. Facing severe budget pressure and underfunded public pension systems, local government officials are laying off firefighters, skirmishing with the 300,000-member firefighters union over pay and benefits, and seeking to roll back compensation they say taxpayers can no longer afford. Schaitberger says that he understands cities' hardships. "Our future is only going to be as good as our employers are healthy," he says. "I'm concerned about never wanting to kill the Golden Goose."

The union faces multiple challenges. More than one-fifth of U.S. cities surveyed by the National League of Cities, a lobbying group, have reopened contracts to claw back compensation from public employees, including firefighters. Miami city officials have approved across-the-board cuts of $76.9 million in salary and benefits, and the IAFF and police union have filed three lawsuits to block the move. Of 669 Miami firefighters, 115 received more than $150,000 in pay, overtime, and bonuses last year, according to city figures.

Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee have resorted to shutting fire stations temporarily or taking trucks out of service to cut costs. Philadelphia's closings, which began last month, are intended to save $3.8 million, mostly by cutting overtime. Firefighters' pay played a key role in the 2008 municipal bankruptcy of Vallejo, Calif., a city of 115,000 near San Francisco. Its fire and police contracts called for raises of more than 10 percent just as the housing crash hammered tax collections. The average firefighter's pay and benefits were set to hit $193,000 a year before the town went bust.

Such pay levels are creating a national backlash, says Lee Adler, a professor of labor law at Cornell University, who has worked on behalf of unions. "You create a bit of jealousy from that," he says. Schaitberger says the big paychecks reflect overtime pay and that cities would rather pay more to existing employees than hire new ones and assume higher benefit costs.

Schaitberger became a firefighter in 1966 and was elected IAFF president in 2000. He has learned how to deploy his union's political muscle when necessary. "The firefighters' endorsement is one of the most sought after—if not the most sought after—on the labor front," says Chris Lehane, a Democratic political consultant who worked for former Presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry. They provide candidates with thousands of volunteers, and they're regarded as heroes after September 11, Lehane says.

The IAFF's political action committee led all public-sector unions with $2.7 million in contributions to federal candidates during the 2008 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. "We live and die by politics," Schaitberger said. In 2007 and 2008 the union spent $323,000 against Republican Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani, according to Federal Election Commission records. Schaitberger says the former New York mayor left the city's fire department ill-prepared for September 11 and decided to reduce the recovery operations at Ground Zero too soon. "We are willing to hold our friends high and to go after our enemies," he says.

Schaitberger says his union hasn't ignored the fiscal crunch facing cities, pointing out that union members have accepted unpaid furloughs. At the same time, he is pushing for national legislation requiring U.S. states and municipalities to grant police, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel collective bargaining rights.

Ellis Hankins, executive director of the North Carolina League of Municipalities, says such a law would increase the financial pressure on cities. "When it's time to cut the budget, these long-term agreements just box in elected officials," Hankins says.

Schaitberger says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has assured him he'll try to pass the measure, which the Senate stripped from a supplemental war-funding bill that the House approved in July. Regan Lachapelle, a spokeswoman for Reid, declined to comment. Still, it's a safe bet that Schaitberger won't be letting the subject drop anytime soon.

The bottom line: Firefighter union chief Schaitberger is fighting to protect pay and pensions from city budget cuts.

Selway is a reporter for Bloomberg News. Rosenkrantz is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

Marketwire, September 9, 2010, Thursday

Marketwire

September 9, 2010, Thursday

Marketwire

Leaders With Strong "Soft Skills" Get Better Business Results Than Those Who Drive Hard for Results at All Costs

New Study Shows That Boards and Committees Should Search for "Self-Aware" Leaders and CEOs -- and Discount "Bluster"

DENVER, CO--(Marketwire - September 9, 2010) - Everyone wants to stack the deck in favor of success when selecting CEOs and top executives. But not all Boards and committees agree on the leadership style and personality that lead to success.

Will it be hard-driving, "results-at-all-costs" type who gets the results that are needed, or a self-aware "people person" with strong interpersonal skills?

Many accepted perspectives -- and even conventional wisdom -- are wrong, according to a new study by organizational consulting firm Green Peak Partners in collaboration with a research team at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

The study, "What Predicts Executive Success?," is based on a deep analysis of the styles, backgrounds and track records of 72 senior executives at public, venture-backed and private equity sponsored companies.

A key takeaway is that soft values drive hard results, according to J.P. Flaum, Managing Partner, and Dr. Becky Winkler, Principal, at Green Peak Partners. The study findings do not suggest that "pushover" or "weak" executives get good bottom-line results. Strong bottom-line performance is most likely to come from executives who are emotionally intelligent and self-aware.

"Companies and their investors need to put more effort into evaluating the interpersonal strengths of potential leaders. Those qualities often aren't revealed by standard tests and interview techniques. Therefore, what's really needed is a change in focus: Boards, private equity general partners and management teams need to focus not only on what executive candidate does but also how they do it," said Mr. Flaum.

"Our findings directly challenge the conventional view that 'drive for results at all costs' is the right approach. The executives most likely to deliver good bottom line results are actually self-aware leaders who are especially good at working with individuals and in teams," said Dr. Winkler.

Mr. Flaum and Dr. Winkler are available for interviews to discuss the study's findings and the implications in more detail. For instance, they can elaborate on why...

• "Bully" traits that are often seen as part of a business-building culture were typically signs of incompetence and lack of strategic intellect. Such weaknesses as being "arrogant," "too direct" or "impatient and stubborn" correlated with low ratings for delivering financial results, business/technical acumen, strategic intellect, and, not surprisingly, managing talent, inspiring followership and being a team player.

• When evaluating a senior-level candidate, a company should spend as much time exploring how he or she gets things done as what he or she claims to have accomplished. There are limits on the degree to which someone can improve his or her basic ability to interact well with others.

• "Self-awareness" is a primary driver of an executive's effectiveness. A high self-awareness score was the strongest predictor of overall success. Executives whose interpersonal skill scores were low also scored badly on every single performance dimension.

• Experience at many companies is not an indicator of success. In fact, it correlates with low ratings. A candidate who has changed jobs frequently is often trying to outrun a problem -- or he or she often lacks perspective on the outcome of his or her leadership decisions.

• Candidates with multiple siblings tend to be better leaders than those with none or one. Executives with more siblings were rated highly in their ability to manage people and drive results.

To learn more about the study, or to arrange an interview with J.P. Flaum or Becky Winkler, please contact Katarina Wenk-Bodenmiller of Sommerfield Communications, Inc. at 212-255-8386 or Katarina@sommerfield.com.

About the Study

The study, commissioned by Green Peak and conducted by a research team at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, involved 72 senior executives across 31 companies, half of them with C-level or President titles, who were assessed by Green Peak between 2005 and 2008. As Dr. John Hausknecht, Cornell Assistant Professor, stated, "We know very little about what predicts executive success -- it is extremely rare to gain access to detailed pre-hire candidate information and short- and long-term indicators of executive performance for this many individuals. Much of what has been written about the predictors of executive success is based on personal anecdotes or conventional wisdom rather than scientific evidence."

The study consisted of two phases. In the first, the executives participated in Green Peak Partners' extensive executive assessment program, which is based on an in-depth four-hour interview. The evaluations probed the executives' backgrounds -- family, education, early-career and recent professional experiences -- and mapped a series of qualities, including leadership styles and technical competence. In the second phase, interviews were conducted with the executives' bosses between April and October of 2009 to determine how well the executives performed on the jobs for which they were hired. Through statistical analyses, performance was simplified into two categories -- the ability to drive results and the ability to manage talent. One of the important outcomes of the study has been the reinforcement of the belief that an executive's experiences and leadership style are directly linked to his or her performance.

• Companies ranged in size from $50 million to $5 billion in annual revenue.

• The top industries represented were retail (31 percent), technology (26 percent) and finance (17 percent).

• Average work experience was 22.4 years.

• 29 percent were CEO candidates.

• 17 percent were female.

• 10 percent attended an Ivy League University.

About Green Peak Partners

Green Peak Partners is a premier organizational consulting firm, with offices in five North American cities, dedicated to expanding the talent and leadership capability of client companies at both the individual and team level. Green Peak helps investors and their companies secure a competitive edge by backing the best people and fully leveraging their leadership talents. Green Peak serves leading private equity firms, their portfolio companies, other private companies and outstanding public companies. The firm offers the best in talent assessment, executive coaching and senior-level facilitation in the country. For more information on Green Peak Partners, please visit http://greenpeakpartners.com/.

MSNBC, September 7, 2010, Tuesday

Copyright 2010 MSNBC.com
All Rights Reserved
MSNBC.com

September 7, 2010, Tuesday

Labor strikes losing ground in tough economy

Labor strikes - seen as one of the key bargaining chips unions have had to get good wages and working conditions from employers - may some day end up only in history books.

BODY:
When Karl Fendelander, 27, got one of his first real jobs as a warehouse worker for a manufacturing company in Reno, Nev., a lot of people were giving him dirty looks at work. He was sent there by a temp agency and was unaware that the bulk of facility's regular workers were on strike.

At the end of his shift, an older employee told him about the work stoppage and suggested, strongly, that he not re-turn.

"I read about scabs and strikes in high school, but I didn't know this was something that happened in contemporary settings often," said Fendelander, who heeded the worker's recommendation.

Indeed, labor strikes - seen as one of the key bargaining chips unions have had to get good wages and working con-ditions from employers - some day may end up only in history books. Not great news after Labor Day weekend, when we're supposed to be celebrating the social and economic achievements of working stiffs everywhere.

The number of major U.S. strikes, including those involving 1,000 workers or more, fell to just five in 2009, the lowest level since 1947, when the Department of Labor first began tracking the data.

Readers, are you job-hunting again? We want to hear from you.

"The bottom line is that unions know the strike weapon just doesn't work that well anymore, especially in a tough economy," said Phillip Wilson, president of the Labor Relations Institute.
The decline of the strike, however, didn't just start with this recession.

As the economy has become more globalized over the last few decades and the stream of jobs going overseas to lower labor cost nations, "employees have become more fearful of losing their jobs and less willing to call a strike to begin with," said John Budd, program director of the Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies at the Carlson School of Management.
Employers have also become more aggressive in bringing in replacement workers, he added, and adding to the problem is the growth of the temporary work force in this country.
"All these factors have conspired against unions and workers in terms of the viability of the strike," he maintained. The attitude nationally, he said, has largely "moved to the individual and not group solidarity."

A lot of it may also have to do with younger generations who had little exposure to the organized labor movement, and have no qualms about crossing a picket line.

"People aren't as familiar with union values as they might have been 30 years ago when there was a much higher union density," said Richard Hurd, professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University's ILR School.

The U.S. union membership rate in 2009 was 12.3 percent, down from 20.1 percent in 1983, the earliest year available with comparable data, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And finding people willing to cross a picket line of striking workers, often called scabs, is easier during troubled economic times, noted Hurd, because jobs are hard to come by and public support often wanes.

Some management advocates see the diminishing of strikes as more of an awakening by organized labor that strikes actually jeopardize job security for workers.

"The recession has impacted employers in a negative way," said Sheryl Willert, an attorney with the Defense Re-search Institute, a national organization of defense trial lawyers and corporate counsel. "Even if you're not going to get significant pay increase, or benefits, or have increased deductibles, it's better to have those jobs or benefits in some form rather than going off the job and trying to cripple the employers."

But many labor advocate believe there are some employers who are using the bad economy as an excuse to slash the pay and benefits of their employers and boost their companies bottom lines and in turn their paychecks.

"Some corporations have enormous amounts of money now and they're strangling the recovery," said Stephen Lerner, director of banking and finance for one of the nation's largest labor unions, the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU.
"CEO pay is up, share prices are up, but they're not paying people, they're using temp workers, and they're not hiring," he said.

But Lerner doesn't think traditional strikes will necessarily rectify the problems.

"What workers are finding is there are many different ways to put pressure on corporations to behave responsibly," he said. Putting pressure on pension funds, banks and stock holders, he explained, as well as embarrassing companies by garnering wide-spread community support, helps to broaden the issue beyond just the workers.

Clearly, employers have strong bargaining power in a tough economy, but workers are also very committed to pro-tecting their livelihoods.

After 16 janitors were let go from a luxury building in Los Angeles owned by J.P. Morgan Chase,
five of them staged a three-day hunger strike on Aug. 24.

"They haven't gotten their jobs back but it did get attention," said Mike Chavez, a spokesman for the SEIU United Service Workers West, representing the janitors at the building.
Unfortunately, much of the press coverage of the hunger strike and the rally held by union workers supporting the laid off janitors focused on the traffic snarls that resulted not the workers' plight.

Joe Burns, a labor negotiator and attorney who is a strong advocate of strikes, thinks this is par for the course.

"All these methods of shaming employers, while good and helpful, haven't been able to harm the employer enough to revive trade unionism," explained Burns, author of fourth coming book "Reviving the Strike: How working people can regain power and transform America."
Unions, he continued, have abandoned the tactics that made them strong in the first place. While he believes more aggressive approaches by employers that began in the 1980s, and a legal system that's often been pro business, has taken the punch out of strikes, he puts the onus on unions and workers.

"The main problem facing the labor movement is not the laws or courts, or economics," he said. "It's basically our way of thinking. Without the powerful strike, there will be no stabile basis for a strong prosperous working class in this country."

Since his day as a scab, Fendelander faced his own problems with employers, including not being paid over time he was owed at a restaurant he worked for.

Fendelander, who is now an editor for an online college directory, WorldWideLearn.com and is happy with his employer, has come to see the value in strikes because of his past experience.
"Without the ability to strike, workers don't have a lot of control," he said.

LOAD-DATE: September 8, 2010

WSKG, September 7, 2010, Tuesday

WSKG

September 7, 2010, Tuesday

WSKG

A Community Conversation: 20th Anniversary of the ADA

Originally broadcast Tuesday, September 7, 2010 on WSKG Public Radio

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 is a civil rights law that required businesses, buildings, public transportation, and other services to accodate people with disabilities. It also addressed discrimination against people with disabilities in the workplace.

Title I of the ADA states that a qualified individual with a disability shall not be discriminated against. This applies to job application procedures, hiring, advancement, workers' compensation, job training and other aspects of employment. Title II prohibits disability discrimination by all public entities and the local and state level. Title II also applies to public transportation provided by public entities. Title III says that no individual may be discriminated against on the basis of disability with regards to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation. Public accommodations include most places of lodging, recreation, transportation, education, and dining. Under Title III, all new construction after the effective date of the ADA must be fully compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines. Title IV of the ADA amended the Communications Act of 1924 and requres that all telecommunications companies in the United States take steps to ensure functionally equivalent services for consumers with disabilities, most notably those who are hearing impaired and those with speech impairments.

On September 25, 2008, President George W. Bush signed into law the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA). This gave broader protections for disabled workers by making changes to the definition of the term disability, clarifying and broadening that definition which broadened both the number and tupes of persons who are protected under the ADA and other disability nondiscrimination laws.

Guests for this program:

Robert Hanye, President and CEO for the Association for Vision Rehabilition and Employment, Inc. in Binghamton, NY.

Wendy Strobel, Director of the Northeast ADA Center at Cornell University; and John Robinson, General Manager for WCNY's AXXESS Productions. Mr. Robinson is also the subject of the PBS documentary "Get Off Your Knees: The John Robinson Story," and the author of "Get Off Your Knees: A Story of Faith, Courage, and Determination."

The New York Times, September 6, 2010, Monday

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

September 6, 2010, Monday

That '70s Feeling

BYLINE: By JEFFERSON COWIE.

Jefferson Cowie, an associate professor of labor history at Cornell, is the author of ''Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.''

BODY:
Ithaca, N.Y
TODAY we celebrate the American labor force, but this year's working-class celebrity hero made his debut almost a month ago. Steven Slater, a flight attendant for JetBlue, ended his career by cursing at his passengers over the inter-com and grabbing a couple of beers before sliding down the emergency-evacuation chute -- and into popular history.

The press immediately drew parallels between Mr. Slater's outburst and two iconic moments of 1970s popular cul-ture: Howard Beale's ''I'm mad as hell'' rant from the 1976 film ''Network'' and Johnny Paycheck's 1977 anthem of alie-nation, ''Take This Job and Shove It.''

But these are more than just parallels: those late '70s events are part of the cultural foundation of our own time. Less expressions of rebellion than frustration, they mark the final days of a time when the working class actually mat-tered.

The '70s began on a remarkably hopeful -- and militant -- note. Working-class discontent was epidemic: 2.4 million people engaged in major strikes in 1970 alone, all struggling with what Fortune magazine called an ''angry, aggressive and acquisitive'' mood in the shops.

Most workers weren't angry over wages, though, but rather the quality of their jobs. Pundits often called it ''Lordstown syndrome,'' after the General Motors plant in Ohio where a young, hip and interracial group of workers held a three-week strike in 1972. The workers weren't concerned about better pay; instead, they wanted more control over what was then the fastest assembly line in the world.

Newsweek called the strike an ''industrial Woodstock,'' an upheaval in employment relations akin to the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. The ''blue-collar blues'' were so widespread that the Senate opened an investigation into worker ''alienation.''

But what felt to some like radical change in the heartland was really the beginning of the end -- not just of orga-nized labor's influence, but of the very presence of workers in national civic life.
When the economy soured in 1974, business executives dismissed workers' complaints about the quality of their occupational life -- and then went gunning for their paychecks and their unions as well, abetted by a conservative polit-ical climate and the offshoring of the nation's industrial core. Inflation, not unemployment, became Public Enemy No. 1, and workers bore the political costs of the fight against it.

Though direct workplace confrontations quickly dropped off, the feelings that had fueled them did not. Analysts began talking of an ''inner class war'' -- more psychological than material, more anxious than angry, more about self-worth than occupational justice.

''Something's happening to people like me,'' Dewey Burton, an assembly-line worker for Ford, told The Times in 1974. ''More and more of us are sort of leaving our hopes outside in the rain and coming into the house and just locking the door -- you know, just turning the key and 'click,' that's it for what we always thought we could be.''

Johnny Paycheck, a country singer, understood. Throngs of working-class people may have gathered around juke-boxes to raise a glass and chant the famous chorus to his most famous song, but they knew that his urge to rebellion was really just a fantasy: ''I'd give the shirt right off of my back / If I had the nerve to say / Take this job and shove it!''

Similarly, in ''Network,'' Howard Beale, a TV news anchor played by Peter Finch, became famous as ''the mad prophet of the airwaves.'' But while he and his audiences may have been yelling, ''I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!'' the tag line was more a psychological release than a call to arms. After all, at the end of the film, Beale, already in suicidal despair, is murdered by his employer for meddling with the system.

The overt class conflict of the late '70s ended a while ago. Workers have learned to internalize and mask powerlessness, but the internal frustration and struggle remain. Any questions about quality of work life, the animating issue of 1970s unrest, have long since disappeared -- despite the flat-lining of wages in the decades since. Today the concerns of the working class have less space in our civic imagination than at any time since the Industrial Revolution.
Occasionally a rebel shatters the silence. Like Steven Slater, though, they get more publicity than political traction. Many things about America have changed since the late '70s, but the soundtrack of working-class life, sadly, remains the same.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: September 6, 2010

The Post Standard, September 6, 2010, Monday

Copyright 2010 Post-Standard
All Rights Reserved
The Post Standard (Syracuse, NY)

September 6, 2010, Monday

A doctor who will picket for patients Dr. Nave is believed to be America's only union president who's a doctor

Dr. Dennis J. Nave is as equally at home on the picket line as he is wearing a lab coat and treating patients.

Nave, 55, is president of the Greater Syracuse Labor Council, which represents 40,000 workers in 62 area unions. The AFL-CIO believes that he may be the only doctor in the country who also is president of a labor council.

Joining a union gives doctors a collective voice to negotiate change and fees with insurance companies, Nave said.

"We're not looking in any way to gouge the public. We're looking to be advocates for our patients," he said.

"It's very frustrating as a physician to practice medicine when you have all these roadblocks and you want to provide this care for people," he said.

Union membership overall dipped slightly in 2009 to 15.3 million, or 12.3 percent of the workforce. That's down from 12.4 percent the previous year.

Membership among doctors, dentists, optometrists, pharmacists and surgeons grew 3.6 percent to 962,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Union growth among health-care professionals has been spawned by the desire to wrest control of patient care from insurance companies, said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of Labor Education Research at Cornell University.

"They've now become real employees. They don't believe that they have the thing that matters the most to them, which is the quality of care," she said.

Union membership across the country is much more diverse than in the past, stretching across many occupations from child-care workers in day-care centers to engineers at Boeing. Workers in factories or construction, traditional union strongholds, now represent a third of all union workers, Bronfenbrenner said.

Nave is as passionate about being a union leader as he is in being a doctor, and the conference room at his medical practice shows it.

A banner for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 1149 hangs on the wall. The room is also decorated with a jumble of anatomical models and posters of hearts, muscles and skin conditions.

Nave is the youngest of three children in a family of Italian descent. He was born on Court Street and grew up a block away.

He and his wife raised their five children in a house off James Street. With the children grown, the couple recently downsized to a smaller house in DeWitt.

Nave graduated from Syracuse City School District, Syracuse University and Upstate University Health System. His medical offices are on Court Street.

He sprinkles his conversation with stories of unions pushing for equal pay for workers regardless of skin color or union members working overtime seven days a week in the 1950s to make enough polio vaccine in two weeks to vaccinate the entire American population.

"I think unions are a part of the history and part of the fabric of America. They were the early entrepreneurs of social justice," Nave said.

One of Nave's grandmothers was a union member in the garment industry in New Jersey, and his father was a member of the union at the Millbrook Bakery in Syracuse.

One of Nave's earliest memories is of attending a cigar-smoke-filled meeting at the Greater Syracuse Labor Council in the old Labor Temple Building on Franklin Street.

"I don't know what they were talking about, but I know they were talking freely about it," he said.

As a child, he worked in his grandparents' grocery store on State Street in what is now Little Italy. From the age of 16, he worked every holiday and summer vacation to earn money for
college.

While in college, his father got him a job at the bakery earning $4.25 an hour, good money for a college kid. The job was in the union, and he paid union dues.

One summer, though, that good wage was put in jeopardy when the workers threatened to strike and the company planned to staff the plant with managers.

One day a Teamster came into the plant's lunchroom, Nave said.

"I know you folks are all concerned about a strike," the Teamster said. "And somebody else is going to be making the bread and the doughnuts and the bread crumbs, but just remember, it's going to sit there on the loading dock. The Teamsters aren't going to cross your picket lines to ship that."

The contract was resolved without a strike. Nave kept his job. He said it showed him the power of unions joining together for a cause.

In 2002, fed up with what they saw as the heavy-handedness of insurers, Nave and other doctors in Family Medicine Associates joined the Federation of Physicians and Dentists. In 2006, the local affiliated itself with Teamsters Lo-cal 1149, which also represents workers at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Lysander. That June, Nave spoke to 7,000 Teamsters at their
convention.

The doctors' union, now called Central New York Physician Teamster Alliance, represents about 300 local doctors.

Central New York's union leaders said Nave impressed them. He asks pointed questions at labor meetings, and is willing to listen to them.

In 2007, Nave became the spokesman for the labor movement in Syracuse when union leaders elected him president of the Greater Syracuse Labor Council.

"He's very active," said Richard Knowles, subdistrict director of the United Steelworkers of America.

"He'll come to a picket line. He'll go to a memorial. He'll show up at a rally. He's not one that hides behind the title or shows that he's too good or better than anybody else. He's in the thick of things," Knowles said.

Nave's expertise has been helpful to unions organizing health care workers and in contract negotiations with hos-pitals, said Mark Spadafore, of the Service Employees International Union 1199 Health Education Project.

"When you have a doctor there saying you need to do this, it's very powerful," Spadafore said.
He also offers his expertise on health-care costs to other unions during negotiations.
Nave said his concerns go beyond health care to the quality of life for everyone in the community.

"It breaks your heart to see people struggling. I don't think that should be that way in the United States of America," he said.

Contact Charley Hannagan at 470-2161 or channagan@syracuse.com

GRAPHIC: PHOTO Michelle Gabel/The Post-Standard DR. DENNIS NAVE,president of the Greater Syracuse Labor Council, is shown in an examining room at his Lyncourt office.

LOAD-DATE: September 8, 2010

Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, September 6, 2010, Monday

Copyright 2010 Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
All Rights Reserved
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (New York)

September 6, 2010, Monday

Mott's strike rages on with no end in sight

BYLINE: By, Matthew Daneman and Emily Shearing

BODY:
You might spend today watching the annual Labor Day Parade wind through downtown Rochester or grilling white hots on what is typically the send-off to summer.

Close to 300 workers from the Mott's plant in Williamson, Wayne County, are spending Labor Day the same way they have the past 105 - on strike.

And roughly 175 western New York apple growers are nervously checking the chemistry on their ripening McIntosh crop, which will be ready to pick any day now.

"We're certainly concerned as an industry, when our apples rely on (the Mott's plant) as much as it does, what their capacity is and what they'll pull out of this area," said Jim Allen, president of the New York Apple Association. "Any-thing less than normal could end up being an issue to the whole region."

The workers at the apple processing plant walked off the job May 23 over proposed cuts in pay and benefits, and the strike has since stretched into one of the longest in recent area history.
"It's amazing people have stood out for so long," said Stuart Appelbaum, national president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc., the Texas-based owner of Mott's, has painted the cuts it's seeking as being in line with its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to maximize profits. The company says the $21-per-hour average wage of plant workers is too high for the Rochester area.

The union has talked in terms of its fight being a front line in a larger battle for the American middle class.

"What is going to stop any other employer in western New York from asking the same things Dr Pepper Snapple Group did?" Appelbaum asked. "When an employer has said we have problems and we need help, we're willing to work that out with the employer. This case it's just the opposite. When a company is profitable, we don't expect them to wring more concessions out of workers."

Dr Pepper Snapple posted a profit of $555 million in 2009.

Union and company officials held fruitless talks more than a week ago. No new talks are scheduled.

Strike pay

JoAnn Budd of Williamson has worked at Mott's for 24 years with her husband, Tim. But on a hot morning last week, she was stuck outside the plant cleaning up after a night crew of strikers and alternating between sitting in her camping chair and walking the picket line with a sign that read "Corporate Greed." "No one wants to be out here," Budd said. "We want to work for our money. If they cared about us, we wouldn't be out here. They want to take money from us to put in the stockholders' pockets."

In lieu of their paychecks, the strikers are living off approximately $200 a week in strike pay plus unemployment benefits. With five children to care for and a recent bout with stomach cancer, Budd said a major issue for her was access to health insurance - the cost of which would have gone up sizably under the company's proposed contract. Budd said she has had to skip two doctor's appointments because she has no health insurance while on strike.

"I hope and pray every day (the strike) will be over," she said. "These are families out here."
Lyla Velez, who has worked at the plant for 29 years with her husband, Robert, said the longer the strike goes on, the more workers Mott's will lose. "They're going to look for other jobs," said the Sodus resident. Of Mott's, she said, "All they need to do is come back and talk to us."

Sitting in a circle of camping chairs with a cooler in the back of a pickup truck along the side of Route 104, strikers Bob Wenzel, Wayne Vermeulen and Chris Couperus tried to remain positive. Wenzel described his days on the picket line as monotonous. "We just want to go back to work," he said.

The workers don't argue they were underpaid. "These are good-paying jobs, we don't contest that," said Wenzel, who has worked at Mott's for 11 years. "You'll be hard-pressed to find anyone's that been here less than 10 years."

Growing cycle

Rebecca Givan, assistant professor of collective bargaining at Cornell University, said the Mott's strike has lasted long enough that workers can't escape feeling the hardship. "They have to have a strong resolve when the strike fund may be depleting and family may be hurting."

But, she added, "Right now no one's showing signs of compromise."

The strike is on a collision course with the state's apple-growing cycle, with this year's crop ready for harvest about 15 days early because of last spring's unseasonable warmth, Allen said.
While Mott's has indicated it plans to run the plant as usual, he said, "Quite honestly they haven't been tested under these labor issues."

New York's apple trees produced 32 million bushels in 2009, with about 16 million bushels being processed into products including applesauce, juice and cider. And more than 8 million bushels of those production apples went to the Williamson plant, Allen said.

The growers said last month they would cross the picket line to deliver their apples to the plant.
"We've been called scabs, not supporting the union," Allen said. "When it comes time to harvest, you've got to harvest. It's a tough situation. We feel bad for the people not working. It's not a situation the growing community wants to be in. But the disagreement is between labor and the manufacturer."
MDANEMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com
ESHEARING@DemocratandChronicle.com
Background
The Mott's strike began May 23 after the company imposed terms of its most recent contract offer, including a $1.50-per-hour pay cut, a 20 percent reduction in the company's contribution to workers' 401(k) retirement plans, and a pension freeze for current workers and pension elimination for future hires. The Williamson plant makes products in-cluding applesauce, apple juice and Clamato juice.

LOAD-DATE: September 7, 2010

Yahoo News, September 3, 2010, Friday

Yahoo News

September 3, 2010, Friday

Yahoo News

Elite B-Schools Keep on Building

The Yale School of Management crams students and faculty into 19th-century homes and former astronomy buildings linked by a rabbit warren of basements in New Haven. It's a far cry from the 40-acre Boston-riverfront campus housing Harvard Business School, which has a chapel, a health club, and its own art collection.

To catch up, Yale will erect a $180 million structure designed by Lord Norman Foster, the architect of London's "Gherkin" tower. "You can't be in a dump if everyone else is in a spectacular building," says Sharon M. Oster, the dean at Yale, which has begun preparing the construction site.

Elite business schools in the U.S. are locked in an arms race of sorts, constructing bigger and more elaborate campuses to attract applicants and professors and climb higher in magazine rankings, says Matthew Spiegel, a Yale professor of finance. New buildings mean more office space for faculty and more classrooms for profitable executive education programs. Larger schools can also enroll more students, who pay up to $80,000 annually in tuition and room and board.

While falling endowments at universities across the U.S. have forced construction cutbacks, business schools have been immune from the retrenchment, says Ronald G. Ehrenberg, an economist at Cornell University. "Graduates of business and law schools are often the wealthiest alumni," Ehrenberg says. "It is easy to raise the funds to build buildings from donors to those schools." To finance its new complex, for instance, Stanford Graduate School of Business secured $105 million, the largest gift in its history, from Philip Knight, the alumnus who heads athletic shoemaker Nike.

The building boom for top management schools was triggered in 2002, when the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School dedicated its $140 million Jon M. Huntsman Hall in Philadelphia. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business began using its $125 million Charles M. Harper Center in 2004.

This year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management will open new facilities in Cambridge. Stanford's B-school also will expand into a new building next year. Yale, Columbia University in New York, and Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., are raising money for similar expansions.

It's a self-reinforcing pattern: Better buildings enhance student satisfaction, and that can spur future alumni giving, making management schools even richer and better able to build even more-impressive campuses, says Robert J. Dolan, dean of the University of Michigan's Stephen M. Ross School of Business. Michigan opened a new, $145 million building in January 2009.

The bottom line: Despite cutbacks in many college programs, top-tier graduate business schools are in the midst of a building boom.

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Compensation Cafe, September 3, 2010, Friday

Compensation Cafe

September 3, 2010, Friday

Compensation Cafe

The Value Gap

Bored at work The Cornell University Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS) recently published a research paper exploring the correlation between employee satisfaction and the bottom line.

It turns out there isn’t a direct correlation, which supports that assumption that making your employees happy for the sake of happiness won’t lead to profit.

There is, however, an indirect correlation between employee satisfaction and the bottom line that can be measured. Leaving out the more technical details, which are available in the report, it goes like this:

* Satisfied employees stick around longer.
* They gain valuable experience, meaning they can work a problem more effectively and provide better – not necessarily more enthusiastic, but more knowledgeable - customer service.
* Customer satisfaction tends to be higher when the workforce has sufficient experienced employees who don’t have a chip on their shoulder.
* Customers buy more and tell their friends.

It seems overly simplistic (and fairly obvious) but the point is, just keeping your experienced employees from hating you and leaving has a positive impact on the bottom line beyond the cost savings of not having to replace them.

Which is nice. But common sense dictates that satisfaction and retention alone aren’t enough to drive outrageous performance, which is needed if companies want to transition from the cost cutting strategies of the last year or so to creating value.

There’s a missing piece, which is passion. Or engagement, or drive, or commitment or whatever you want to call it.

Consider Jay, an experienced senior technical architect and father of four near the top of his pay range. He’s pretty satisfied where he is, albeit frustrated by office politics that prevent progress on what he feels are critical issues. Because his salary is high and two of his kids are nearly college age, he's not interested in offers to do something more interesting for less money. Of course, his tepid monetary satisfaction won’t stop him from accepting a more lucrative offer, but he’s not an immediate flight risk.

Wanda’s situation is slightly different. She used to earn more as a consultant but has three kids and appreciates the flexibility of her current job. She’s diligent and punctual but doesn't feel challenged. Still, despite bouts of boredom she’s satisfied with her work life balance and is also not an immediate flight risk.

Both Jay and Wanda are competent, conscientious and complacent – the 3 C’s of stagnation when taken together - but neither of them are passionate about their work. There are several signs:

* They aren’t shy about stating their opinions but they avoid conflict.
* They respond promptly and superficially to direct requests but don’t go out of their way to help others.
* They produce high quality output as a matter of course but don’t try to exceed their goals.
* They have friends at work but they don’t actively mentor or seek out new communities or information.
* They don’t complain about work but they also don’t rave about how great their company is.

Should we fault them for their lack of passion? Maybe. But if they work for a company where passion is neither encouraged nor rewarded, we can’t really blame them for going with the flow.

There's no dire scenario here. Both Jay and Wanda are satisfied enough to stay in their current jobs and their work has a positive impact on the bottom line. That's the good news.

The bad news is that there’s a sizable gap between the value they add today and the value they could add as thought leaders, mentors, evangelists.

That's the value gap and everyone's got one, although few companies try to bridge the gap by assessing people's skills and interests, encouraging their passion and helping them maximize their potential.

Great companies mind the gap.

Network World, September 3, 2010, Friday

Network World

September 3, 2010, Friday

Network World

About that "new research" that says CEOs got rich by firing workers...

We need more excess, not less.
By John Cox

It was a made-for-viral-Internet-meme: a report issued just before Labor Day, with the title "CEO Pay and the Great Recession", from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), complete with an illustration of a tophat-and-tails CEO brandishing a $12 million check "for laying off >3,000 workers."

After that, you didn't really have to read it. And judging from the firestorm of media and blogger coverage, not to mention the reader comments, few did. Even fewer asked who wrote the report, and why, and whether the study and its conclusions were actually valid.

If you wanted a bit more from the report, you could just read the helpful "1. Key Findings," which condensed all those baffling complexities about corporate governance, social values, shareholders and boards, business decisions, government policies, the economy, and the web of interrelationships among them all down to sound-bite-ready nuggets.

Just add outrage.

And outrage was added. In full measure. Media of all stripes "reported" on the report. The reporting usually took the form of regurgitating the Key Findings. Thank heavens for copy-paste: "CEOs of the 50 firms that have laid off the most workers since the onset of the
economic crisis took home nearly $12 million on average in 2009, 42 percent more than the CEO pay average at S&P 500 firms as a whole."

Network World's Paul McNamara briefly commented in his Buzzblog that it was "worth noting new research that quantifies what we would all suspect to be true: Bosses at big companies bank bigger bucks the more vigorously they wield the payroll ax."

I have to confess that I never suspected this. Perhaps because I can't see the connection between the two. A CEO decides he wants "more" and thinks he can get it by firing X number of people? Is there a formula for figuring that out? Like, "If I fire 3,000, I'll increase my bucks by $1 million per year." Why stop at 3,000?

Lots of media sites gave the report a local or special-interest twist. At CIO.com, for example, Meridith Levinson concluded that the report, which is about CEO compensation and layoffs, had an important lesson for IT managers: "But there's a surefire way IT professionals with management responsibility can improve their pay: Fire people."

Apparently, Levinson read the report's section on HP CEO Mark Hurd -- who fired 6,400 employees, before being shoved out himself, and reaped a going-away-present of "$12.2 million in cash and stock worth about $16 million" -- and concluded that since HP makes computers, then people who manage computers for a living could increase their take-home pay by firing their staff.

Setting aside the several logical discontinuities here, even the IPS authors acknowledged, weirdly, that Hurd's millions are the result not of a conventional compensation package -- annual salary, bonuses, and various stock benefits -- but of a specific "severance package."

Let's start with who published the report: the Institute for Policy Studies. You could be forgiven for imagining a group of tweedy wonks delving into arcane areas of, like, policy. The IPS website, just a click away, is fairly clear on its perspective and goals. You know: the agenda. Here it is: "Washington’s first progressive multi-issue think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) has served as a policy and research resource for visionary social justice movements for over four decades — from the anti-war and civil rights movements in the 1960s to the peace and global justice movements of the last decade."

In other words, it has a specific perspective and frame of reference when it comes to public policy. "Progressive" usually means "left-of-center" though more typically "way-way-left-of-center." This doesn't mean the new "research" is wrong, necessarily. But it does mean the research isn't value-free.

The IPS study implies that the alleged connection between increased layoffs and increased CEO compensation is directly tied to the ""worst economic crisis since the Great Depression" -- the mess we're in now. In fact, the relationship of executive compensation and layoffs is something that's been a fertile research field for well over a decade.

Take, for example, a 2005 paper, "Corporate Downsizing and CEO Compensation," by Alexandros Prezas, Murat Tarimicilar, and Gopala Vasudevan.

This study found a "large increase in CEO equity-based compensation in the year prior to and the year of the downsizing." That would seem to support the IPS study. But the results of the downsizing, and the impact on the CEO's stock-based incentives and hence his compensation, varies. The sample of downsizing firms showed "small improvements in operating performance." But these improvements were mainly in firms with relatively low equity-based compensation plans.

A separate measure, financial returns in the period following the downsizing, are somewhat higher for downsizing firms, but typically for the larger firms, for those that hire a new CEO in the year of the downsizing, that have higher leverage, and that have better operating performance.

What does it mean? That's what I asked one of the authors, Professor Vasudevan, at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Charleton College of Business. "In our study also we find that CEO's who lay-off [workers] do not make any extra compensation," he replied via email. "In fact, the stock price typically is negative around the layoff announcement and the long term stock price performance is also quite poor. This would imply that these CEO's do not make any extra compensation following the layoff."

That's also the broadly similar conclusion of an even earlier study, in 1998, by Kevin Hallock, Cornell University: "Layoffs, Top Executive Pay, and Firm Performance."

Here's how Hallock began his now-12-year-old paper: "The popular press and some policy groups [IPS?!?] are increasingly reporting stories of firms with highly paid CEOs that fire thousands of workers only to see large increases in the firm stock price (and their own wealth) and their pay in the following year." The great thing about short memories is you can always be outraged by the same thing, because you always think it's a new outrage.

Hallock's purpose is "to document whether there is empirical [emphasis in original] evidence for the notion that CEOs [who] are heading firms that let workers go are more likely to see increases in their own pay in the following year for making these decisions."

The conclusion: no.

"Once firm-specific fixed effects [for example, the size of the company] are controlled for, the CEO pay premium for laying off workers disappears." He adds, "In addition, there is a small negative share price reaction [ie, the stock price drops] to layoff announcements."

According to Vasudevan, "The study by Kevin Hallock...looks at this [issue] exactly like the IPS study does and finds that, after controlling for other factors such as firm size, the CEO's of layoff firms do not make any extra compensation."

"There is a very strong relationship between the size of the firm and top management pay," he says. "Larger firms (based on sales, assets) tend to pay their CEO's more money. Hence the Hallock [study], and most academic studies, control for firm size and other variables in a regression. The IPS study does not."

The result is a report that at best states the obvious -- CEOs earn a whole lot more than their janitor -- and at worst is misleading, to give momentum to a variety of federal economic and tax policy changes favored by IPS. On page 13 of its report, the IPS authors lay out their principles of "economic fairness" and then starting on page 15, a scorecard of how well a flock of provisions and proposal further these principles.

One, mandated by the new federal financial reform law, requires all corporations to report the median annual total compensation of all employees, and document the ratio beteween CEO and employee pay. "This provision could boost efforts...to limit [CEO] pay excess via tax and procurement policies."

But there could be other, far more harmful effects. A higher CEO-employee pay ratio implies that the CEO is getting paid far more than the lowest paid worker, so IPS would envision a lower ratio as being desireable. But Vasudevan points out there are other ways to achieve a lower ratio: simply cut the lowest paid U.S. workers by off-shoring and out-sourcing these jobs to, say, India. "The CEO might look like a good guy, with a lower ratio, when he is actually getting rid of the low-paid employees and sending those jobs away," he says.

One actually sound proposal, which seems to be missing from the IPS list, is one that ties a CEO's equity-based compensation (stock options and other stock-based schemes) to a multi-year time frame. "The top management have to hold on to their stock and option grants for at least three years," says Vasudevan. "The idea is that forcing CEO's to hold on to their shares will ensure that they are not able to 'flip' them and perhaps leave the company if things don't work out."

One example of a compensation program that seems to be working is the one for Ford CEO Alan Mulally. Here's how a Reuters story summed it up earlier this year:

"Ford Motor Co Chief Executive Alan Mulally's total compensation rose almost 6 percent to $17.9 million in 2009 as the automaker posted its first annual profit in four years despite a severe recession that drove domestic rivals into bankruptcy. Mulally, who is credited with spearheading a turnaround of Ford without seeking a U.S. government bailout, earned $1.4 million in salary after accepting a 30 percent cut from 2008, and received no cash bonus for the second consecutive year. He received most of his compensation in the form of company stock."

The Reuters story continues: "The only major U.S. automaker not to file for bankruptcy last year, Ford's stock massively outperformed the auto sector and the U.S. equity market in 2009, rising more than four-fold. By contrast, the S&P 500 was up about 23 percent."

"Massively outperformed." The excess of success.