PR Newswire US, January 11, 2005, Tuesday

Copyright 2005 PR Newswire Association LLC.
All Rights Reserved.
PR Newswire US

January 11, 2005 Tuesday

HEADLINE: Gevity Institute Study With Cornell University Confirms Link Between People Management And Small Business Success;
Research Also Yields Practical Guidelines For Small Businesses On Best Practices For Finding, Developing, Managing, And Retaining People

DATELINE: BRADENTON, Fla. Jan. 11

BODY:
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Gevity (NASDAQ:GVHR) reported today the publication of the second phase of a landmark study by Gevity Institute and Cornell University researchers on how people management practices affect small business performance.
The study's first phase concluded that employees and employee management are widely recognized as key elements in the success of small firms. However, 90% of the small business owners surveyed said they were unsure of which people management practices could help them achieve the best results for their firms.
Following up on these findings, the second phase of the study, under the leadership of Dr. Christopher Collins of the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, focused more specifically on the relationship between employee management practices and a firm's performance. The study included responses from approximately 300 small businesses in various industries and locations. It yielded answers on the type of people management practices that work best to achieve optimal employee contributions in building a small firm's success.
The Clear Connection Between "Workforce Alignment" And A Small Firm's Success
* Confirming the link between employee performance and a small firm's success, the study showed that "workforce alignment," or having the right people in the right places doing the right things, helped the firm succeed and was a clear characteristic of the most successful firms surveyed. In effect, the investment made by these firms in having an "aligned workforce" was perhaps as crucial as any other investment they have made to grow their businesses.
* The study further confirmed that the most successful firms, measured by sales growth, profitability, market share, as well as other key metrics, were able to use good people management practices to achieve an "aligned workforce."
Best Management Practices
On a more practical level, the researchers also looked at key alternative approaches to the principal elements of people management leading to "workforce alignment," namely, how to find the right people, how to best manage them on a day-to-day basis, and how to retain them. Among the key conclusions were the following:
* To find the right people, the most effective practice is hiring the best talent available that can become long-term contributors to the firm, as opposed, for example, to applicants that "fit the current job best" or fit best with the company's "values and culture."
* To achieve superior employee motivation and retention, the best technique is "creating a family-like community." This succeeds even more than above market salaries and jobs that offer growth and development.
* With regard to day-to-day management of employees the study found that "formal" HR processes and procedures and the institution of professional standards do the best job promoting workforce alignment. Conversely, close monitoring of employees or the use of peer pressure are much less effective.
No Question About It -- Good People Management Boosts Business Success
According to Erik Vonk, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Gevity, "A key benefit of this study is the extent to which it spells out the HR practices that constitute 'good management' and leads to a company's success." Mr. Vonk continued, "Today, Gevity provides employee management solutions such as applicant screening and assessment, job description and performance appraisal development, and HR consultation designed to align and engage our clients' workforces. Needless to say, we at Gevity will continue to apply the knowledge gained from ongoing Gevity Institute studies to achieve the practical, bottom-line oriented solutions that our clients seek."
The Gevity Institute
The Gevity Institute sponsors research in cooperation with prestigious universities and other organizations, sharing quantifiable data on the positive impact that solid human resource practices can have on business performance.
About Gevity
Gevity is a leading provider of comprehensive, fully integrated human capital management solutions to small and medium-sized businesses. Our solutions allow us to effectively become the insourced human resource department for our clients. We create value for our clients by helping them to find, develop and retain talent, manage all human resource related paperwork and protect their businesses from employment-related risks. We deliver our solutions through a combination of highly skilled human resource consultants and our scalable, Web-enabled technology platform.
A copy of this press release can be found on the company's Web site at http://www.gevity.com/ . An executive summary of this study, and the complete Cornell report, is available on the Gevity Institute Web site at http://www.gevityinstitute.com/ .
In connection with the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (the "Reform Act"), Gevity HR, Inc. ("Gevity" or the "Company") is hereby providing cautionary statements identifying important factors that could cause the Company's actual results to differ materially from those projected in forward-looking statements (as such term is defined in the Reform Act) made by or on behalf of the Company herein, in other filings made by the Company with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in press releases or other writings, including in electronic form on its internet web site(s), or orally, whether in presentations, in response to questions or otherwise. Any statements that express, or involve discussions as to, expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, through the use of words or phrases such as "will result," "are expected to," "anticipated," "plans," "intends," "will continue," "estimated," and "projection") are not historical facts and may be forward-looking and, accordingly, such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results or performance of the Company to be materially different from any future results or performance expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors are described in further detail in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K and in other filings by the Company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company cautions that these factors could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed in any forward-looking statements made by or on behalf of the Company. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which such statement is made, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement or statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which such statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for management to predict all of such factors. Further, management cannot assess the impact of each such factor on the business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements.
CONTACT: Anne-Marie Megela, Senior Director, Investor Relations, Gevity
HR, +1-800-243-8489, ext. 4672, or annemarie.megela@gevityhr.com
Web site: http://www.gevityhr.com/
SOURCE Gevity HR

Chicago Tribune, January 9, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 Chicago Tribune Company
Chicago Tribune

January 9, 2005 Sunday
Chicago Final Edition

SECTION: PERSPECTIVE ; ZONE C; Pg. 6

HEADLINE: Global labor tries to fight repression;
With help from consumers, some sweatshop workers make headway in the battle for rights

BYLINE: By Stephen Franklin, Tribune staff reporter.

BODY:
The hours are endlessly long. The pay is just enough to live on. The work is dirty and demeaning. And if you complain, someone waiting by the factory gate gets your job.
This is the world of globalized sweatshops, a sprawl stretching from Mexico and Central America to Asia and other poverty-stricken places where low wages lure companies on the prowl for an even lower bottom line.
But as the shift of jobs from rich to poor nations of the world accelerates, so too does a small and sometimes barely noticeable effort by these workers and others on their behalf.
Here and there workers, against great odds, have spoken out against repression. Companies that once didn't give a hoot about consumers' protests about workers' conditions in far-flung factories do now. And even insensitive, job-hungry governments have realized that they cannot permit the abuse of child workers and still do business beyond their borders.
`They keep on coming'
"Workers face terrible problems and terrible repression, but they keep on coming," said Cornell University's Lance Compa, a lawyer and expert on global labor conditions. "The thing I find interesting is that people don't resign themselves and give up."
In China, where independent unions are forbidden, workers have staged wildcat strikes and won, he said. And in Mexico, small, independent unions that formerly were kept outside the system have been able to "become players," he added.
This doesn't mean, however, that companies' desire to keep workers' wages down and to cancel out their voices has slowed. Nor does it mean that unions have gained a footing in places where a daily bathroom break is a privilege and nobody ever asks about foul-smelling air or machines that cripple.
As long as companies can shut factories and shift them virtually overnight, sure of finding new workers at lower wages, Third World unions are powerless to bargain for better wages or working conditions.
With 1.4 billion people or nearly half of the world's workers earning less than $2 a day, according to the International Labor Office, poverty leads many to swallow their hopes and pride and to take whatever they can get.
It a cruel fact of life, as a recent ILO report noted, that many workers in poor countries either know nothing about unions or doubt that unions could improve their lot.
"It is difficult to identify a lot of concrete advances. You have a few isolated victories in particular factories in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. But they are outweighed by the defeats that workers have faced," said Stephen Coats, the head of US/Labor Education in the Americas Project, a Chicago-based advocacy group.
Yet, like other veterans of the struggles for workers' rights across the globe, Coats can tick off the changes that have benefited workers.
Whereas children once accounted for a considerable share of the garment workers in Central American factories, that is no longer the case, he and others say.
And while Central America labor leaders once were regularly gunned down by death squads or wrongly imprisoned by their governments, such oppression has largely stopped, the result of publicity stirred by labor and human-rights groups.
Still, dozens of labor leaders are killed or injured annually across the globe. And children bear burdens beyond their ages in factories and on farm fields across the globe, harvesting bananas or sugar cane in the Americas or cocoa beans in Africa, experts say.
One reason for hope is that unions have begun to link arms across the globe. A leader in this movement has been the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, which, according to Cornell's Compa, regularly promotes dozens of global campaigns against companies.
Another is that companies are far more sensitive to complaints from consumers in well-to-do countries about how workers making T-shirts or jeans in less-well-off ones are treated.
New attitude needs action
"Ten years ago most companies said they didn't have any responsibilities for those workers," Coats said. "I can't think of any companies that take that position today. The problem is, now they have to put the words in practice."
Companies pay attention to consumers' complaints, said Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee, an advocacy group in New York, mostly because consumers now listen to pleas from groups like his.
"The change in the U.S. has been significant. In the early 1990s, the anti-sweatshop movement didn't exist," added Kernaghan, who has brought attention to his group by publicizing abuses at factories in Central America and Asia.
A mark of the change in attitudes about sweatshops, he said, was the warm reaction he got recently when he took several teenage garment workers from Bangladesh on a speaking tour of U.S. colleges. From campus to campus, the workers explained what it is like to work for 13 cents an hour.
"Everywhere we went, dozens of students raced to talk with us," he said.
Without growing support from the U.S. and Europe, he doubts that much will change for sweatshop workers.
"What we are hearing from the workers is, `Who is going to going to protect us when we get fired?'"

The Observer, January 9, 2005, Sunday

© 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited
The Observer

January 9, 2005

SECTION: Observer Business Pages, Pg. 12

HEADLINE: Business: Mammon: Counting the cost of sexism: Women are still second-best in the City - and we all pay the price, Julie Mellor, head of the Equal Opportunities Commission, tells Heather Stewart

BYLINE: Heather Stewart

BODY:

CLIENT TRIPS to lap-dancing clubs; ribald banter in the office; and the thickest glass ceiling anywhere in the country: the Square Mile is notorious for having a less than enlightened approach to its female employees.
But Julie Mellor, the straight-talking chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, believes City bosses themselves are the losers, squandering the talents of thousands of potential employees. And this week she plans to tell them so.
'I think the City as a sector has a very significant reputational risk in terms of being able to recruit the people they need in the war for talent,' Mellor says. 'There's a risk for the whole sector that the best are being pulled down with the worst.'
At a conference on the role of women in London's economy this week, she will warn financial services firms that 'discrimination costs, and equality pays'.
Average earnings for women in the City are as much as 40 per cent lower than those of their male colleagues - twice the gap in the economy as a whole. 'I do think that the City's got a particularly big problem,' Mellor says.
She singles out three issues: a lack of flexibility about family-friendly working practices, which tends to prevent women from moving up through the ranks if they want to care for children or other relatives; pay discrimination; and the City's old-fashioned macho culture. 'The level of harassment indicated by the number of cases brought is absolutely appalling,' she says. Her language is uncompromising, and she's angry that some of Britain's most profitable, outward-looking firms are still giving women a raw deal; but Mellor is no bra-burner. Immaculately turned out and urbane, with a neat turn of phrase and a 20-year career in human resources behind her, she has made herself business-friendly.
Instead of speaking the language of women's rights and feminism (though she says she is 'definitely' a feminist), she has set herself the task of telling businesses up and down Britain that overcoming inequality in the workplace is not just good for women - it's good for the economy.
'We start in the real world: I know I came in (to this position) very clear that our job was to make it easier to deliver equality and reap the benefits,' she says in her modest office in Westminster, where she has spread notes across her desk so she can pepper her arguments with facts and figures.
Fighting unreconstructed sexism, harassment and prejudice is part of her job, but she says there are more subtle problems to tackle. 'Sex inequality is due to a lot more than discrimination, so you always need to look well beyond that.'
She believes her best chance of progress will come from appealing to business leaders' hard-nosed self-interest. She quotes Marks and Spencer chairman Paul Myners (who also chairs Guardian Media Group) at a recent Treasury summit: 'The stock market would not allow the waste of capital in the way we tolerate the waste of female talent and ability'.
It's not just the City Mellor has in her sights: what she calls the 'under-utilisation of women's skills' extends from the top to the bottom of the economy. Britain has already invested in educating women, and employers take an enlightened approach to bringing women into the workplace: the rate of female participation is one of the highest in Europe. But when it comes to the race to the boardroom - or the top of the pay-scale - women tend to fall behind, particularly if they choose to have children.
'It's all about caring: the fact that there are 18 million parents and carers who are at work can't be ignored. The failure of public policy and employer practices to adapt to that is part of why we have the pay gap and are failing to use women's skills.'
Improving childcare is part of the battle, and Mellor welcomes the government's promise to increase the availability of care and extend after-school clubs. A working mother herself, she rejects the argument that it is better for children if their mothers stick to traditional gender roles. 'People don't want to abandon their families; quality of life is important. I think it's about choices: it's up to parents and carers.'
Recent research for the EOC found that when women return to work part-time after having children, they often have to step off the career ladder, and watch their pay and status suffer as a result. A third of women working part-time are doing jobs that are below their skill level. 'We've got to change low-paid, low-skilled part-time work with high-skilled, well-paid part-time work,' she argues.
Mellor knows she is lucky to have an enlightened employer - the EOC practises what it preaches by allowing her to work part time and take the school holidays off, while Parliament is not sitting, to look after her son and daughter.
Back in the office for the new year, flexible working will be one of three areas in which she will be launching major campaigns, together with discrimination against women in pregnancy, and what the EOC calls 'occupational segregation' - the divide between 'women's jobs' and 'men's jobs' that sees girls heading for the four Cs (caring, catering, cleaning or clerical work) without thinking about being an electrician or a brickie.
The EOC is encouraging women to start thinking about traditionally male-dominated job options as early as their school years. Careers services should be ensuring that pupils get as much information as possible about potential jobs, and offering girls work experience in men's jobs and vice versa.
'Where you see the real issue is where we have skills shortages, like in construction, plumbing, engineering and IT: the proportion of women and men doing different jobs is so extreme, no wonder we have skills shortages. Both employers and young people are hungry for change here,' says Mellor.
Until there are many more women plumbers - and fund managers - Mellor expects to continue opening the EOC's chequebook to back anti-discrimination cases, in the City and across the economy.
Meanwhile, Britain's bosses can expect to hear a lot more about the economic arguments for smashing through the glass ceiling.
Profile:
Name Julie Mellor
Born 1957
Education Winchester County High School for Girls; Brasenose College, Oxford; Cornell University (Eleanor Emerson Fellow in Labour Education)
Career equal opportunities manager, TSB Group 1989-91; director, British Gas, 1992-96; consultant, 1996-99; chair of the EOC since 1999, and board member of National Consumer Council
Hobbies theatre, travel, food and family
Family one son, one daughter

The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2005, Friday

Copyright 2005 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education

January 7, 2005, Friday

SECTION: SPECIAL REPORT; Pg. 12

LENGTH: 485 words

HEADLINE: Personnel: Pay Gap Widens Between Public and Private Universities

BYLINE: EUGENE MCCORMACK

BODY:
The modest salary growth experienced by academics in the past year will probably be mirrored this year, experts say.
Salaries earned by college and university faculty members grew by 2.1 percent, on average, during the 2003-4 academic year -- the smallest annual increase in more than three decades, according to an annual report by the American Association of University Professors.
Faring slightly better were administrators, whose pay increased 2.5 percent last year, according to a survey of administrative salaries sponsored by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.
In the current year, administrative salaries will grow by a similarly modest amount, predicts Kirk D. Beyer, an adviser for the human-resource association's salary survey.
Without the lure of financial incentives, it is likely that colleges and universities will once again face a challenge in hiring workers and in keeping and rewarding current employees.
The main factors limiting salary growth will continue to be soaring health-care expenses and tight budgets. Nationally, health-insurance premiums rose 11.2 percent in 2004 -- the fourth consecutive year of double-digit increases, according to a study of public and private companies by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
Mr. Beyer predicts an increase of about 10 percent in the coming year. "If you have a 10-to-15-percent increase every year for five years, you've doubled the cost of that benefit," says Mr. Beyer, director of human resources at Gustavus Adolphus College.
Mr. Beyer and Ronald G. Ehrenberg, who wrote the AAUP report, say that salaries at public institutions have fared the worst. "The salaries of faculty in public colleges have declined precipitously compared to private faculty, and I expect that the decline will continue in the upcoming year," says Mr. Ehrenberg, who is a professor of industrial and labor relations and economics at Cornell University. "The publics don't have the resources to keep up."
The hard blows that salaries have taken in public higher education have forced at least one university system to appeal to its state government. The University of California, citing the rising cost of health benefits and an increasing lack of competitiveness in luring professors, has asked in its 2005-6 budget proposal for an extra $87-million to ease its growing personnel crisis.
Mr. Beyer and Mr. Ehrenberg agree that the improving stock market will enlarge institutions' endowments and increase academic pay. Mr. Ehrenberg, however, predicts that the rebound will most help the wealthiest private universities, creating an even greater divide between faculty salaries at those institutions and at poorer private and public universities.
"What is happening in higher education is mirroring what is happening in the rest of our society," he says. "We're just becoming more unequal."

Dayton Daily News (Ohio), January 6, 2005, Thursday

Copyright 2005 Dayton Newspapers, Inc.
Dayton Daily News (Ohio)

January 6, 2005 Thursday

SECTION: NORTH MIAMI VALLEY; Pg. Z9-2

HEADLINE: SchoolHeadlines

BYLINE: From staff reports

BODY:
...
HEALTHCARE EXECS CHOOSE TROY GRAD
TROY - Meena Bharwani, a 1995 graduate of Troy High School, recently received the Foster G. McGaw Scholarship, a national scholarship awarded by the American College of Healthcare Executives to graduate students of health service administration.
Bharwani is in the second year of Xavier University's health services administration graduate program. She is studying for a master's degree in health services administration and an MBA. Bharwani earned a master's degree in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University and a bachelor's degree in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In July, she will begin a twoyear administrative fellowship with Premier Health Partners in Dayton and will work for the COOs of both Miami Valley Hospital and Good Samaritan Hospital.
Bharwani is the daughter of Govind and Dolly Bharwani.

AScribe Newswire, January 4, 2005, Tuesday

Copyright 2005 AScribe Inc.
AScribe Newswire

January 4, 2005 Tuesday

HEADLINE: Ready and Able to Change: Companies Move Away from
Traditional Organization Model

BODY:
HOUSTON, Jan. 4 [AScribe Newswire] -- Today's competitive business environment has led to the emergence of an organizational model that reflects a very different kind of company -- one that thrives on its ability to continually anticipate and quickly adapt to change.
----------------------
As the manufacturing sector has declined, and the service sector has increased, there has been a gradual move away from the traditional bureaucratic organizational model of many companies. Organizational behaviorists such as Rice University's Brent Smith have seen the emergence of a new type of organization - one that is less hierarchical, highly fluid, and that requires a particular set of skills in its corporate leadership.
"Organizations have faced increased pressures to be more agile," explains Smith, an associate professor of management and psychology at Rice's Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management. "Given the rapid pace of globalization, technological innovations, increased competition and the diversification of the workforce, firms, particularly in high tech and consulting fields, have had to react quickly and continuously."
In this rapidly changing and competitive world market, many companies have organized themselves into what Smith identifies as "dynamic" structures - highly flexible organizational models often centering on customers or projects with fewer mid-management levels than classic or non-dynamic organizations. These new models, according to Smith, have demanded a particular brand of leadership and employee profile.
In a dynamic company, everything is fluid and ambiguous, Smith says. Job descriptions, if they exist, may only be based on what employees' particular assignments are at a given time. There may be few, if any, contractual agreements with employees. Overall, the concept of a dynamic organization is antithetical to what typically is considered the primary characteristic of a traditional organization. And that is stability, Smith says.
"A leader's key role in such an organization is to promote a culture within the company that will hold it together," he explains. "This requires structural mechanisms and cultural values that emphasize the importance of adaptability and change."
Smith also stresses the necessity for leaders of dynamic organizations to pay attention to external market forces and help cue the company to whatever impending changes are necessary. He Smith points to the experiences of Xerox and IBM: "Xerox failed to pay attention to the market and lost 50 percent of its market share to foreign competitors, and IBM almost lost out on the personal computer market," he says. "They were too bureaucratic and not close enough to their customers."
Smith also argues that leaders need to understand the type of employees and skill sets that are better suited to a dynamic organization. Employees in dynamic organizations, for example, need a high level of stress tolerance, self-esteem and confidence, and a general lack of anxiety. According to Smith, they should be attracted to jobs which offer a great deal of variety and change, and in the absence of job security, they should be paid well and provided with development opportunities.
"In filling positions in a dynamic organization, leaders should focus on identifying people who are self-starters and capable of setting and monitoring their own goals," Smith says. "They also should look for prospective employees who have strong relationship-building skills, which are generally more important than in a traditional company."
The move away from traditional bureaucratic organizations began in the 1970s when many companies developed the team approach based on what researchers had learned about designing jobs. While the notion of dynamic organizations emerged from this concept, Smith notes that the development of self-managed work teams was an attempt to enhance worker satisfaction, not necessarily to make organizations more responsive to the market.
The need for companies to be financially more competitive was responsible, in part, for the downsizing and re-structuring of the 1980s and '90s. And while those efforts did make companies somewhat more dynamic, Smith says, "they were really short-term solutions and sometimes hurt companies in the long run."
The bigger lesson for companies, Smith says, is not just that they may need to make changes in response to one particular set of circumstances, but that they and their firm must be able to continually anticipate change and be more responsive to their market's environment.
"A dynamic organizational model isn't necessarily appropriate for every company," he concludes, "but a company will only be successful at managing change if change is part of its structural capability and culture."
Prior to joining the Jones School, Smith was on the faculty at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Johnson School of Management from 1998 to 2001. A graduate of the University of Tulsa where he received bachelor degrees in psychology and sociology, Smith earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees in organizational psychology from the University of Maryland.
- - - -
To learn more about this research, contact Smith at smithb@rice.edu or 713-348-5386, or Debra Thomas in the Jones School at dthomas@rice.edu or 713-348-6343.

CONTACT:
Debra Thomas, dthomas@rice.edu, 713-348-6343

Newsday (New York), January 4, 2005, Tuesday

Copyright 2005 Newsday, Inc.

Newsday (New York)

January 4, 2005 Tuesday
ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY; Pg. A42

HEADLINE: Wage hike bad for economy?;
Some experts say the increase from $5.15 in '97 to $7.15 by 2007 may hurt small businesses

BYLINE: BY CARRIE MASON-DRAFFEN. STAFF WRITER

BODY:
Just what effect will the increase in the state minium wage have on businesses in New York State?
Economic prognosticators are split on the issue. The rate, $5.15 since 1997, rose to $6 an hour Saturday and will jump again in stages to $7.15 by 2007. The overall increase will be 39 percent.
"It's a fairly large increase," said Lawrence Kahn, a professor of labor economics and collective bargaining at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Ithaca. Kahn, for one, believes the increase could hurt businesses.
The state Senate last month overrode Gov. George Pataki's veto of the bill, after a similar move by the Assembly in the summer. Pataki had said the hike would hurt small businesses and force employers to cut jobs.
While most studies of the effects of federal minimum-wage increases in 1990 and 1991 didn't turn up widespread unemployment among teenagers, the largest group earning minimum wage, the 39 percent hike in New York State could produce a different picture, according to Kahn. "Most of the other minimum-wage [increases] that have been studied have not been that large. It's possible that this would have some negative effects, especially on the most vulnerable workers."
But Martin Melkonian, professor of economics at Hofstra University, said that, overall, minimum-wage increases benefit the economy by raising employment.
"Low-wage workers, when given an increase, are likely to spend it all," he said. "As a result, there is going to be an increase in demand throughout the economy. As others get an increase in demand for their labor, there is going to be an increase in employment."
What's more, Melkonian points out, when you factor in inflation, the minimum wage has actually dropped since the 1960s. "What this legislation is going to do is restore the minimum wage to roughly where it used to be," he said.
Others weighing in on the increase also were divided.
Daniel Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party, which lobbied six years for the increase, estimates the hike will mean more money for 175,000 families on Long Island and 275,000 in New York City. "We're thrilled," Cantor said. "This was a long overdue raise."
But Richard M. Bivone, president of the Nassau Council of Chambers, argued that the increase will hurt. Local businesses are already locked in a struggle with chain-store rivals, and that battle will worsen because of higher expenses, he said.
"It's hard when you have competition," he said.

The New York Times, January 2, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

January 2, 2005 Sunday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 1; Column 5; National Desk; Pg. 12

HEADLINE: Labor Board's Detractors See a Bias Against Workers

BYLINE: By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

BODY:
The rulings of the National Labor Relations Board have poured out one after another in recent months, with many decisions tilting in favor of employers.
The Republican-dominated board has made it more difficult for temporary workers to unionize and for unions to obtain financial information from companies during contract talks. It has ruled that graduate students working as teaching assistants do not have the right to unionize at private universities, and it has given companies greater flexibility to use a powerful antiunion weapon -- locking out workers -- in labor disputes.
And in a decision that will affect 87 percent of American workers, the board has denied nonunion employees the right to have a co-worker present when managers call them in for investigative or disciplinary meetings.
The party-line decisions have been applauded by the Republican Party's business base, which sees them as bringing balance after rulings that favored labor during the Clinton administration. But some academic experts on labor relations say the recent rulings are so hostile to unions and to collective bargaining that they run counter to the goals of the National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 law that gave Americans the right to form unions.
''These decisions come close to or even match the Reagan board in their intensity and vigor in promoting employer powers,'' said James A. Gross, a professor at Cornell University who has written several books about the board. ''They are pressing the outer limits of what could be a reasonable or legitimate interpretation of the balance between employer prerogatives and worker rights. In my mind, this is fundamentally inconsistent with the purpose of the National Labor Relations Act, which is to encourage the practice and procedures of collective bargaining.''
Robert J. Battista, the labor board's chairman, denied that the panel was stretching the law to help corporations.
''All the cases that we've decided have been well reasoned,'' Mr. Battista said. ''They're certainly consistent with the act. I wouldn't characterize them as pro-business or pro-union. I'd like to say they're pro-employee.''
The board's defenders say it is merely continuing a long tradition of swinging back and forth: toward management when a Republican is in the White House and toward labor during Democratic presidencies.
''After eight years of a liberal Clinton board and an extremely liberal general counsel, there is of course going to be some turning back toward a conservative agenda,'' said Randel Johnson, vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits at the United States Chamber of Commerce. ''The board has turned a corner here, but it's not a wholesale reversal of the case law in favor of the business community.''
Several recent board decisions, Mr. Johnson pointed out, have reversed Clinton-era rulings that overturned precedents set by Republican boards. In a case involving I.B.M., the board voted 3 to 2 to overturn a Clinton board ruling that gave nonunion workers the right to have a colleague accompany them to investigative or disciplinary meetings with supervisors. The Clinton-era ruling was a reversal of a 1980's decision.
In a case involving Brown University, the board reversed a Clinton-era ruling involving New York University -- a reversal of a 1970's decision -- that gave graduate student teaching assistants the right to unionize.
Mr. Battista said, ''What we did restores the precedent that has been time-honored and had never been overturned by a court or by Congressional action.''
Labor unions say the reversals will make it much harder to organize workers at a time when the percentage of Americans belonging to unions is declining.
Jonathan Hiatt, the general counsel for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said, ''The notion that in 15 or 20 recent cases the Republican majority has changed board law in ways that take away worker rights, deny workers protection in organizing and collective bargaining, and give employers more latitude, that is really striking and very political.''
The labor board has five seats, and the president appoints members to five-year terms. For much of 2004, Republicans had a 3-to-2 majority, but two members stepped down in December, resulting in a 2-to-1 Republican majority until the seats are filled.
Unions are alarmed by the board's decision to hear several cases that question the legitimacy of card checks, one of labor's most successful tactics in adding members recently. In the procedure, companies agree to grant union recognition after a majority of workers sign cards saying they want a union. By agreeing to card checks, companies waive the right to hold a secret ballot to determine whether workers favor organizing.
With pro-business groups saying union organizers sometimes intimidate workers, Mr. Battista said, it was time to take a critical look at card checks.
But the board's Democratic members vigorously objected. ''The issues raised by the petitioners were settled 40 years ago,'' they wrote. ''To revisit it serves no purpose but to undermine a principle that has been endorsed time and again by the board and the courts.''
Many unions say unionization elections are less fair than card checks because they involve expensive and bitter campaigns in which companies often fire and intimidate union supporters and warn that plants may close if they become unionized.
Charles Craver, a professor of labor law at George Washington University, said the board's conservative tilt would hurt unions, but less so than the conservative tilt of the federal judiciary, which he said was increasingly unfriendly to labor.
''I think we have a labor board as conservative as any time since the Reagan board,'' Professor Craver said. ''It really troubles me because we're revisiting a lot of cases that have been fairly well settled.''
In October, the board upheld a company's decision to fire a worker who had asked a colleague to testify before a state agency to support her claim of sexual harassment by a manager. The National Labor Relations Act prohibits employers from retaliating against workers who engage in concerted activity for mutual protection, but the board found that the fired woman was acting only in her interests and not for mutual protection to safeguard other workers from harassment.
''Taken one by one, I do not think these are the kinds of decisions that make one sit back and say, 'This is outrageous,''' said Theodore St. Antoine, an emeritus professor of labor law and former dean of the University of Michigan Law School. ''At the same time, I have to concede that once more we're in the nibbling process. While none of them consist of a great big bite, the cumulative effect is to decrease the capability of unions to organize.''
In September, in a case involving a trucking company that said it was ''in distress'' and ''fighting to stay alive,'' the board ruled that such claims did not trigger an obligation for management to furnish financial information to the union. Traditionally, when companies in contract talks say they cannot afford what the unions are seeking, they are required to provide information detailing their financial condition.
The same month, the board ruled that disabled janitors could not join a union with able-bodied janitors, on the grounds that the disabled workers' relationship with their employer was ''primarily rehabilitative'' and not a traditional employee-employer relationship.
''We haven't got a particular agenda,'' Mr. Battista said. ''Nor are we attempting to press the outer limits of management rights. We're trying to strike a balance between union rights, management rights and employees' rights.''

Ventura County Star (California), January 1, 2005, Saturday

Copyright 2005 Ventura County Star
All Rights Reserved
Ventura County Star (California)

January 1, 2005 Saturday

SECTION: BUSINESS AND STOCKS; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1184 words

HEADLINE: Women trim wage gap in lean years

BYLINE: Louis Uchitelle

BODY:
High-paid men more prone to layoffs
New York Times News Service
Ever since the 2001 recession sent the economy into a prolonged period of weak hiring, hundreds of thousands of men and women have gone through some variation of Tom and Marie DeSisto's experience.
Concerned that he might be laid off as Verizon cut staff, Tom DeSisto, 54, accepted an early retirement package, giving up a manager's salary of more than $100,000 a year. Now he earns half that as a high school math teacher in Waltham, Mass., while Marie DeSisto, 50, brings home $63,000 as the supervisor of nurses in the same school district.
In contrast to her husband's downsized pay, Marie DeSisto's salary has risen 75 percent over the past five years as she moved from a nursing job in Framingham, another Boston suburb, to responsibility as supervisor for a growing staff of school nurses in Waltham.
That pattern of improving employment prospects and rising wages for women -- while many men stood still or got hurt -- has done as much if not more than class-action lawsuits, quotas and equal opportunity laws to narrow the gap between men's and women's pay.
Working women now earn just over 80 percent of what men do, up from 62 percent 25 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It turns out that almost half of that gap closed during two comparatively short periods of relatively hard times, totaling about six years. Those periods correspond with the recessions and cutbacks in the work force that marked the opening years of the last decade and the current one.
The gains for women have stuck. As the economy improved in the second half of the 1990s, women did not continue to move ahead, but they held their own, chiefly because so many men, like Tom DeSisto, failed to get back into the work force at the same pay levels as before.
"Everyone's image of how they wanted to close the gender gap was for women to catch up with men in pay, without men going backward," said Rebecca M. Blank, dean of the University of Michigan's School of Public Policy. "Now it is clear that for substantial groups of people in the labor market, that is not how it is closing."
Economic shifts
The dynamics reflect profound shifts in the economy. Men are more vulnerable than women to layoffs, mainly because they predominate in industries that are walloped in downturns, particularly manufacturing. Then, too, the large influx of nonworking women into low-wage jobs in the 1990s, caused in part by the overhaul of welfare, depressed the median wage of women as a whole. That influx has stopped, and the median wage responds by rising.
College-educated women, having entered the labor force in large numbers for nearly 30 years, are showing up everywhere now, which gives employers the opportunity to fill more executive, administrative and professional jobs with well-trained and hardworking women who are paid well, but often not as well as men in those jobs.
Still, as women take these upper-end jobs in growing numbers, the pay level of women as a whole is pulled up. Observing this phenomenon, Francine Blau, a labor economist at Cornell University, declares that the wage gap is closing mainly because of "the rising educational attainment of women who work full time."
That may be an important ingredient, but wage data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the closing of the gap in pay between men and women accelerated in the so-called jobless recoveries, when employers cut staff or froze hiring during recessions and continued to do so into the ensuing economic upswings.
Americans have experienced two jobless recoveries since World War II. The second may still be in progress, although recent evidence suggests it could finally be yielding to an improving job market. Before the first, in the early 1990s, recessions invariably ended in hiring surges that benefited both men and women and in roughly equal fashion.
For some specialists, like Betty Spence, president of the National Association of Female Executives, the fact that women still earn lower pay offers an opportunity to employers bent on cutting labor costs. "Corporations tend to lop off the highly paid guy at the top," she said, "and replace him with a woman who is just as competent and is willing to work just as hard for less pay."
Segregation remains
For others, like Barbara R. Bergmann, a labor economist at American University in Washington, the spectacle of women gaining ground in harder times is vivid evidence that most occupations are still largely segregated by sex and that men's occupations, while often higher paying, are also more vulnerable to business cycles.
Men, for example, still hold most of the best-paying jobs in manufacturing, which has been particularly hard hit in recent years. Women, by contrast, are ensconced in white-collar occupations that tend to ride out job cuts almost untouched. These include education, healthcare and civil service employment.
Bergmann recognizes that this backdoor route to wage equality may not be the most desirable path. "We would prefer that pay converge in a strong economy," she said, "but however it happens, we should be happy it is happening."
As for the DeSistos in the Boston suburbs, Marie is working her way up the pay scale while her husband, Tom, is starting a new career as a high school math teacher earning $50,000, half his old pay.
"I'm teaching the basics at the start, algebra and geometry, moving along with the kids," he said. "You work with freshmen and sophomores and as the years go by, you teach them trig and higher math."
Early retirement
Tom DeSisto, a civil engineer, had 30 years at Verizon and its predecessors, Bell Atlantic and before that, AT&T. He had expected to work at Verizon into his 60s. But management, bent on downsizing, offered enhanced early retirement packages, with the clear message, DeSisto said, that layoffs would ensue if the retirement offer was undersubscribed.
It was not. Last year, 21,600 people took early retirement at Verizon, a number of them men like DeSisto with enough tenure to qualify for lump sum pension payouts in the high six figures. After nine months of unemployment, he took the teaching job in the school system that employs his wife.
Marie DeSisto went back to work as a nurse 11 years ago, when the youngest of the DeSistos' three children was 10, working first in the Framingham schools where her salary rose in time to $36,000 -- and then to $56,000 when she shifted to the supervisor's job in Waltham five years ago.
Her salary has risen annually ever since, partly through raises but also in recognition of a recently earned master's degree in nursing and business administration.
But what truly drives the expansion of school nursing and the rising pay, in her view, is the growing incidence of health problems among students, now that more disabled and ailing children are accepted into the public schools. Her staff has expanded to 16 nurses from nine when she arrived.
"I like to hire nurses with master's degrees and experience," she said. "They are in buildings where they are the only ones with medical knowledge."

The New York Times, December 31, 2004, Friday

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

December 31, 2004 Friday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section C; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1

HEADLINE: Gaining Ground on the Wage Front

BYLINE: By LOUIS UCHITELLE

BODY:
Ever since the 2001 recession sent the economy into a prolonged period of weak hiring, hundreds of thousands of men and women have gone through some variation of Tom and Marie DeSisto's experience.
Concerned that he might be laid off as Verizon cut staff, Mr. DeSisto, 54, accepted an early retirement package, giving up a manager's salary of more than $100,000 a year. Now he earns half that as a high school math teacher in Waltham, Mass., while Mrs. DeSisto, 50, brings home $63,000 as the supervisor of nurses in the same school district.
In contrast to her husband's downsized pay, Mrs. DeSisto's salary has risen 75 percent over the last five years as she moved from a nursing job in Framingham, another Boston suburb, to responsibility as supervisor for a growing staff of school nurses in Waltham.
That pattern of improving employment prospects and rising wages for women -- while many men stood still or got hurt -- has done as much if not more than class-action lawsuits, quotas and equal opportunity laws to narrow the gap between men's and women's pay.
Working women now earn just over 80 percent of what men do, up from 62 percent 25 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It turns out that almost half of that gap closed during two comparatively short periods of relatively hard times, totaling about six years. Those periods correspond with the recessions and cutbacks in the work force that marked the opening years of the last decade and the current one.
The gains for women have stuck. As the economy improved in the second half of the 1990's, women did not continue to move ahead, but they held their own, chiefly because so many men, like Mr. DeSisto, failed to get back into the work force at the same pay levels as before.
''Everyone's image of how they wanted to close the gender gap was for women to catch up with men in pay, without men going backward,'' said Rebecca M. Blank, dean of the University of Michigan's School of Public Policy. ''Now it is clear that for substantial groups of people in the labor market, that is not how it is closing.''
The dynamics reflect profound shifts in the economy. Men are more vulnerable than women to layoffs, mainly because they predominate in industries that are walloped in downturns, particularly manufacturing. Then, too, the large influx of nonworking women into low-wage jobs in the 1990's, caused in part by the overhaul of welfare, depressed the median wage of women as a whole. That influx has stopped, and the median wage has responded by rising.
College-educated women, having entered the labor force in large numbers for nearly 30 years, are showing up everywhere now, which gives employers the opportunity to fill more executive, administrative and professional jobs with well-trained and hardworking women who are paid well, but often not as well as men in those jobs.
Still, as women take these upper-end jobs in growing numbers, the pay level of women as a whole is pulled up. Observing this phenomenon, Francine Blau, a labor economist at Cornell University, declares that the wage gap is closing mainly because of ''the rising educational attainment of women who work full time.''
That may be an important ingredient, but wage data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the closing of the gap in pay between men and women accelerated in the so-called jobless recoveries, when employers cut staff or froze hiring during recessions and continued to do so into the ensuing economic upswings.
Americans have experienced two jobless recoveries since World War II. The second may still be in progress, although recent evidence suggests it could finally be yielding to an improving job market. Before the first, in the early 1990's, recessions invariably ended in hiring surges that benefited both men and women and in roughly equal fashion.
For some specialists, like Betty Spence, president of the National Association of Female Executives, the fact that women still earn lower pay offers an opportunity to employers bent on cutting labor costs. ''Corporations tend to lop off the highly paid guy at the top,'' she said, ''and replace him with a woman who is just as competent and is willing to work just as hard for less pay.''
For others, like Barbara R. Bergmann, a labor economist at American University in Washington, the spectacle of women gaining ground in harder times is vivid evidence that most occupations are still largely segregated by sex and that men's occupations, while often higher paying, are also more vulnerable to business cycles.
Men, for example, still hold most of the best-paying jobs in manufacturing, which has been particularly hard hit in recent years. Women, by contrast, are ensconced in white-collar occupations that tend to ride out job cuts almost untouched. These include education, health care and civil service employment.
Ms. Bergmann recognizes that this backdoor route to wage equality may not be the most desirable path. ''We would prefer that pay converge in a strong economy,'' she said, ''but however it happens, we should be happy it is happening.''
Men who work full time still earn nearly 20 percent more than women who do. The score is $693 in median weekly pay, adjusted for inflation, to $560 for women, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. The median means that half of the workers in each sex earn more and half earn less.
The current $133 weekly gap has narrowed from $260 in 1979. But $62 of that progress, or 47 percent, has been compressed into the two periods of stepped-up labor cost-cutting that started with the 1990-1991 and the 2001 recessions.
In the latest episode, total employment has not yet risen back to its prerecession level. The economy is reviving, but hiring has not improved as much. Employers appear to be still engaging in what David H. Autor, an economist at Harvard University, calls ''the cleansing effects of hard times.''
Men's pay during these cleansings has stagnated or dropped, while women's pay has continued to rise, although more slowly than in good times. Jared Bernstein, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, argues that men's pay would still be 25 percent higher than women's, as it was in 2000, if men's pay had continued to grow at the 1995-to-2000 pace, when the economy boomed and employers hired in droves.
That prosperous five-year stretch was no help at all in closing the wage gap. These were years in which high-technology companies and dot-coms prospered, and they were big employers of well-paid men, whose high wages pulled up the median for their group.
Just as this was happening, women's pay was held down. The surge in hiring brought thousands of women from welfare into low-wage jobs, and their presence became a drag on the median wage of women. The wage gap even began to widen a bit, but starting in 1998 manufacturing jobs disappeared in large numbers, and that blow to well-paid blue-collar men pushed down the median pay of all men.
The convergence in pay, of course, also reflects the underlying achievement of women in recent years. They are graduating from college in greater numbers than men and pushing into high-end occupations once dominated by men. The share of women, for example, in ''executive, administrative and managerial occupations,'' as the labor bureau calls this category, is more than 46 percent today, up from 40 percent in 1990 and 32 percent in 1983. And there are similar or even greater gains in various administrative and professional ranks.
Women are also gradually pushing into high-paid blue-collar occupations, despite continued sexual segregation, and each step forward helps to lift the median pay of women vis-a-vis men.
Volvo Trucks North America, for example, is one of the few manufacturing companies that is hiring these days, adding 1,117 people this year at plants in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland.
Enough of these hires are women to lift their presence on the assembly lines, where union wages apply, to 15 percent from 13 percent in 2003, the company says.
Driving tractor-trailers on long hauls across the country is another bastion of high-paid men's work that women have been trickling into lately.
Of the 3,800 drivers at C.R. England, for example, 10 percent are women, up from zero in the 1980's, said Dean England, chief operating officer of the family-owned company based in Salt Lake City.
Not many people are able to adjust to the rigors of a lifestyle that keeps them on the road for weeks at a time, Mr. England said. The driver turnover rate at his company is 100 percent a year, but for those who can handle it -- men and women -- the pay averages $40,000.
''They are mostly middle-aged women,'' Mr. England said, ''and they come to us because they are sick of having to work so hard at service jobs that pay only $10 an hour.''
As for the DeSistos in the Boston suburbs, Marie is working her way up the pay scale while her husband, Tom, is starting a new career as a high school math teacher earning $50,000, half his old pay.
''I'm teaching the basics at the start, algebra and geometry, moving along with the kids,'' he said. ''You work with freshmen and sophomores and as the years go by, you teach them trig and higher math.''
Mr. DeSisto, a civil engineer, had 30 years at Verizon and its predecessors, Bell Atlantic and before that, AT&T. He had expected to work at Verizon into his 60's. But management, bent on downsizing, offered enhanced early retirement packages, with the clear message, Mr. DeSisto said, that layoffs would ensue if the retirement offer was undersubscribed.
It was not. Last year, 21,600 people took early retirement at Verizon, a number of them men like Mr. DeSisto with enough tenure to qualify for lump sum pension payouts in the high six figures. After nine months of unemployment, he took the teaching job in the school system that employs his wife.
Mrs. DeSisto went back to work as a nurse 11 years ago, when the youngest of the DeSistos' three children was 10, working first in the Framingham schools where her salary rose in time to $36,000 -- and then to $56,000 when she shifted to the supervisor's job in Waltham five years ago.
Her salary has risen annually ever since, partly through raises but also in recognition of a recently earned master's degree in nursing and business administration.
But what truly drives the expansion of school nursing and the rising pay, in her view, is the growing incidence of health problems among students, now that more disabled and ailing children are accepted into the public schools. Her staff has expanded to 16 nurses from 9 when she arrived.
''I like to hire nurses with master's degrees and experience,'' she said. ''They are in buildings where they are the only ones with medical knowledge.''

Israel Faxx, December 21, 2004

Copyright 2004 Electronic World Communications, Inc.
Israel Faxx

December 21, 2004

SECTION: Pg. NA ; ISSN: 1074-2255

HEADLINE: 44% of Americans Favor Curtailing Some Muslim Liberties.

AUTHOR-ABSTRACT:
THIS IS THE FULL TEXT: COPYRIGHT 2004 Electronic World Communications, Inc. Subscription: $ 129.00 per year. Published daily (5 times a week). 10010 Southwest 162 Street, Miami, FL 33157.

BODY:
By Israel Faxx News Services
In a study to determine how much the public fears terrorism, almost half of respondents polled nationally said they believe the U.S. government should -- in some way -- curtail civil liberties for Muslim Americans, according to a new survey released by Cornell University.
About 27 percent of respondents said that all Muslim Americans should be required to register their location with the federal government, and 26 percent said they think that mosques should be closely monitored by U.S. law enforcement agencies. Twenty-nine percent agreed that undercover law enforcement agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations, in order to keep tabs on their activities and fund raising.
About 22 percent said the federal government should profile citizens as potential threats based on the fact that they are Muslim or have Middle Eastern heritage. In all, about 44 percent said they believe that some curtailment of civil liberties is necessary for Muslim Americans. Conversely, 48 percent of respondents nationally said they do not believe that civil liberties for Muslim Americans should be restricted.
The Media and Society Research Group, in Cornell's Department of Communication, commissioned the poll, which was supervised by the Survey Research Institute, in Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The results were based on 715 completed telephone interviews of respondents across the United States, and the poll has a margin of error of 3.6 percent.
"Our results highlight the need for continued dialogue about issues of civil liberties in time of war," said James Shanahan, Cornell associate professor of communication and a principal investigator in the study. He noted: "Most Americans understand that balancing political freedoms with security can sometimes be difficult. Nevertheless, while a majority of Americans support civil liberties even in these difficult times, and while more discussion about civil liberties is always warranted, our findings highlight that personal religiosity as well as exposure to news media are two important correlates of support for restrictions. We need to explore why these two very important channels of discourse may nurture fear rather than understanding."
Researchers found that opinions on restricting civil liberties for Muslim Americans vary by political self-identification. About 40 percent of Republican respondents agreed that Muslim Americans should be required to register their whereabouts, compared with 24 percent of Democratic respondents and 17 percent of independents. Forty-one percent of Republican respondents said that Muslim American civic groups should be infiltrated compared with 21 percent of Democrats and 27 percent of independents.
On whether mosques should be monitored, about 34 percent of the Republicans polled agreed they should be, compared with 22 percent of Democrats. Thirty-four percent of Republicans said that profiling of Muslim Americans is necessary, compared with 17 percent of Democrats.

The New York Times, December 21, 2004, Tuesday

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

December 21, 2004 Tuesday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section B; Column 3; Metropolitan Desk; PUBLIC LIVES; Pg. 2

HEADLINE: A Voice for Labor, Deftly Applied

BYLINE: By ROBIN FINN

BODY:
SURE, Denis M. Hughes considered behaving like a stereotypical labor czar and throwing a fit last summer when his chronic ideological sparring partner, Gov. George E. Pataki, bestowed a courtesy call confirming his imminent veto of a raise of the state's minimum wage. He was outraged. This was legislation he had spent two years shepherding. But the tantrum is not his modus operandi.
Mr. Hughes, an electrician-turned-president of the New York State A.F.L.-C.I.O., has a leprechaun's physique and a diplomat's temperament. Wry understatement is his best weapon. So he quietly told Mr. Pataki he was disappointed, hung up and got cracking on a Senate override. It worked.
The minimum wage is to rise in January, and again in 2006 and 2007. Mr. Hughes, 54, is not gloating. That would be bad for labor's image, something he's evangelical about improving. Anyhow, at 5 feet 8 inches, gravity-defying hairline included, boorishness is a physical impossibility. Rants and raves aren't an option. And corruption? Not winked at on his watch: At the last A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention, he sponsored an ethics resolution as proof.
None of this is accidental. Neither is the presence of what seems an out-of-context photograph, of Fidel Castro taking batting practice, amid the otherwise on-message decor, like George Meany's desk and a pictorial homage to Gov. Al Smith, in his office on Lower Broadway.
''I keep Fidel here to remind me of the absurd nature of absolute power,'' says Mr. Hughes, carefully sipping hot coffee from a paper cup. ''There he is, in his best fatigues, interrupting a professional ball game just because he can.''
''Absolute power is something I'll never have,'' he observes, not unhappily. ''What I do is borrow power from the people who have it, and use it for the common good. That's the greatest thing about this job: no moral conflicts.''
His definition of the common good is progressive legislation tailored to lighten the load of people low on the economic scale. A timely example is the Dec. 6 legislation raising the state's minimum wage to $7.15 an hour by 2007, from $5.15.
These days Mr. Hughes lives comfortably and gratefully in what he considers maximum-wage territory, making $160,000, wearing nice suits and traversing the state in a union-leased Buick. But he recalls starting out as an electrician's apprentice in the late 60's, earning $2.25 an hour. Fresh from the Navy, he lived with his parents on Staten Island. He had to, even after he got his first union raise, to $2.75.
''There's nothing like a raise in pay to increase your dignity,'' he says, though he's not campaigning for one. ''To me, $160,000 is plenty.'' His salary enabled him to send his daughter to Fordham and lets him dabble in a lifelong indulgence, motorcycles. He exercises his orange Harley Sportster on weekends with a pack of electrician pals but is not, nor was he ever, a Hell's Angel: ''I don't think I'd pass the initiation.'' Insufficient flamboyance.
Mr. Hughes does not achieve his desired legislative results by throwing his weight around. He doesn't weigh enough, not even with a union membership of 2.5 million, the largest in the nation, for ballast. To compensate, he has become a deft and tenacious coalition builder, and consequently a behind-the-scenes arm-twister of Albany's lawmakers since being elected union president in 1999. His role model for tenacity, the baseball slugger Hank Greenberg, occupies wall space right below his antihero, Mr. Castro.
''Hank Greenberg was tough, and toughness is something I need very badly in this job,'' he says. ''Labor legislation is in jeopardy, and we needed this minimum wage to re-establish the precedent for legislation that speaks to the needs of working men and women.''
THAT the 700,000 minimum wage earners affected by it tend to be non-A.F.L.-C.I.O. members is beside the point. An economic ripple effect is the point.
''That's kind of the beauty of the whole thing,'' he says, ''that by doing something for people outside of organized labor, we've given ourselves a chance to provide a wage floor, a basement level so to speak. That's the self-serving side of it. Working the fight for a minimum wage was a good thing.
''We're issue-oriented, and we exploit political situations for the public good. I can't be partisan. The whole reason for doing this is to get progressive legislation passed.''
About his rift with the governor: ''I can't take it personally. I can't be unpleasant.''
Mr. Hughes grew up in a thoroughly unionized Irish-Italian clan. One grandfather was a boilermaker, the other a carpenter. His father worked for the Department of Sanitation, his mother was a keypunch operator and his uncles were pipe fitters and carpenters.
He chose electronics because, of all the building trades, it struck him as one with ''more thinking and less lifting.''
''In my neighborhood,'' he said, ''being in a union was considered a major economic move. Getting into the electricians' union was like being accepted at an Ivy League college.''
Not that Mr. Hughes, who lives with his wife in Rockland County, ignored college. Over 20 years, he accumulated a patchwork of credits from Empire State College, City University of New York, and Cornell, enough to receive a bachelor's degree in industrial labor relations.
He worked his last on-site job, as a project manager at Pier 17 in 1985, the year he joined the union's administration as its political director and assistant to the president. But he'd still be penciling in ''electrician'' as his occupation on his tax return if his accountant hadn't made him switch to ''labor leader.'' He didn't argue.

Plain Dealer (Cleveland), December 21, 2004, Tuesday

Copyright 2004 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

December 21, 2004 Tuesday
Final Edition; All Editions

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. C1

HEADLINE: Youngstown paper, strikers dug in;
No talks planned in 5-week walkout against Vindicator

BYLINE: Alison Grant, Plain Dealer Reporter

BODY:
Youngstown - This hard-off Mahoning County city is weathering its first newspaper strike in 40 years, and neither side appears to have much give left.
Local 34011 of the Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America rejected the Vindicator's "best and final offer" by a 99-36 vote on Dec. 8. No new talks are scheduled in the five-week walkout.
The Guild said it accepted four years of concessions - wage freezes, the elimination of shift differentials, employee contributions to health insurance premiums - only to have the company ask for more.
The newspaper's general manager, Mark Brown, said the company has been losing money since 1997. Standing before a row of hulking letterpresses, a printing technology so old that fewer than 2 percent of U.S. dailies still use it, Brown said the company "started trying to raise money" for better presses more than 10 years ago.
In a region with a history of rugged corporate-labor clashes going back to John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, the dispute doesn't seem likely to fade politely.
"People will say you have very militant unions," said Youngstown State University Professor John Russo, "but this town also was brought up with some of the roughest management types in labor history."
The showdown is being carefully watched in an industry in which strikes are rare and often bruising. A 1990s confrontation with two Detroit papers ended with workers returning to their jobs under essentially the same contract they had rejected five years earlier, while the papers lost a combined 288,000 subscribers and more than $100 million.
Brown, 45, is spending long days in the Vindicator's mailroom. He even sleeps in the plant, on an air mattress.
The paper has kept publishing, and he said circulation has risen by 50 since pickets went up.
The Guild accused the Vindicator of ignoring customer requests to cancel; Brown disputed that.
Before the strike, it had reported a daily circulation of about 70,000 copies, and on Sundays about 25,000 more than that.
Those still working include managers, temporary workers and members of two unions whose contracts did not expire - pressmen and composing room workers - as well as 11 Guild members who resigned from the union and returned to work soon after the Nov. 16 walkout. No Guild member has gone back since; 171 editorial and circulation employees remain on strike.
The family-owned publication also is using nonunion editorial workers from out of state. Three papers owned by Advance Publications Inc., which also owns The Plain Dealer, have reportedly lent employees. Those papers had no comment. At least one other company is reported to have provided some help, and the Youngstown Business Journal said college students were being offered jobs.
The replacements arrive in vans with tinted windows while guards stand sentry. Brown agreed to an interview in an ink-scuffed lunchroom near the presses, saying the newsroom was off limits to protect the identity of temporary workers.
Between six and 10 editorial employees from other papers have come to Youngstown, he said.
The union reported they are getting $20 an hour, more than the $713.20 a week earned by top-scale Vindicator reporters - in addition to their salaries from their hometown papers and a stipend for food and housing. Brown said the Vindicator is paying out less than it cost to employ union workers, counting benefits.
The strike shows signs of taking a toll. Delivery glitches have cropped up, and the paper depends more on wire-service copy than before the strike. A local store owner, Bea Lindsey, said she's gotten two issues delivered to her house in Youngstown since mid-November.
Loaned employees are in the tradition of newspapers helping each other when hit by floods and hurricanes. But they've also been used to weaken strikers, said Kate Bronfenbrenner, a Cornell University specialist on labor organizing. The industry, she said, "has a long history of breaking unions, there's no question. These family businesses are the worst, because they take it all very personally."
Brown said he will not hire permanent replacements and vowed that the Vindicator will remain union.
The Vindicator tapped outside help so editorial and circulation employees would have a paper to come back to, he said. "They label them strikebreakers. I label them job savers."
Solidarity in Youngstown
Sympathy for the strikers is strong in a community where the United Steelworkers of America gained an early toehold at Youngstown Sheet and Tube and other "Little Steel" plants, and where a 1966 mass resignation of nurses was the first concerted labor action by that profession in the country.
Union membership is denser here than practically anywhere in the country -25 to 30 percent of the population, Russo said.
But Youngstown today is a region of double-digit unemployment - 13.3 percent in November - still trying to recover from a steel economy collapse that began in 1977.
"Times are very hard," said Lindsey, who runs Howard's News and B&B Ladies Unique Boutique with her husband on downtown's half-deserted Federal Plaza.
Drivers toot their car horns at parka-clad strikers stomping off the chill outside the Vindicator a few blocks away. Police Chief Robert Bush stopped by once and rolled down his window to take a copy of the Valley Voice, a weekly strike paper that was out, the union proudly noted, 72 hours after pickets went up.
Between shifts on the picket line, strikers congregate at headquarters around a table strewn with the Valley Voice, pizza slices on paper plates and a freshly oiled chainsaw for the pallets of wood outside.
Scrawled signs list contributors - the Tri State Marine Corps Ladies Auxiliary, Rising Sun Baptist Church, Great Harvest Bread Co. - and donations - "Wood!!!" "Homemade soup!" "Delicious cookies!"
The local's president, Anthony Markota, says morale is high. They hit the street Friday with 51,000 copies of the Valley Voice after a noontime rally outside the Vindicator's gray stone offices that featured the snapping drums of a 32-member squad from the Ebeneezer Church of God in Christ.
A lot is at stake
Brown said he had made no strike preparations and was surprised by the union's decision to walk. He called the fight "suicide" in a region where competitors in Warren and Lisbon, Ohio, Sharon, Pa., and other cities are eager for a bite at advertisers.
The union agreed that the stakes are high. "I don't think this company has the wherewithal to withstand a long strike," said Linda Foley, president of the international Guild.
Forty years ago, an eight-month strike at the Vindicator involved all unions. It was several months into the walkout before the paper resumed publishing. Even then, it came out sporadically. Times have changed.
The international Guild recommended that Youngstown workers accept the Vindicator's latest offer.
When they voted it down, though, the Guild closed ranks. It is providing each striker $300 in weekly strike pay and health coverage. It also has sent a representative to try to encourage negotiations.
"I'm convinced that we will get past this in Youngstown," Foley said, "and that we will reach a settlement."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: agrant@plaind.com, 216-999-4758

GRAPHIC: GUS CHAN THE PLAIN DEALER Youngstown Vindicator circulation department employee Michael Lyden saves his cap from a sharp wind last week on a picket line outside the newspaper. Lyden and other members of the Newspaper Guild went on strike against the Vindicator over wages, benefits and what they called a breakdown in trust with newspaper managers.
GUS CHAN THE PLAIN DEALER John Bassetti splits blocks of maple to stoke the barrel used to warm strikers outside the Vindicator. Bassetti got the wood from a tree removal service. "The guys, they were sympathetic to our problem," the sportswriter said.
GUS CHAN THE PLAIN DEALER Vindicator General Manger Mark Brown says the newspaper has lost money for seven years.
GUS CHAN THE PLAIN DEALER Signs and an umbrella await pickets at the strike headquarters of Youngstown Newspaper Guild Local 11. Vindicator General Manager Mark Brown said he has hired temporary replacements so that employees would have a paper to come back to. "They label them strikebreakers. I label them job savers," Brown said.

Hartford Courant (Connecticut), December 19, 2004, Sunday

Copyright 2004 The Hartford Courant Company
Hartford Courant (Connecticut)

December 19, 2004 Sunday
3 STARS/FINAL EDITION

SECTION: CONNECTICUT; Pg. B1

HEADLINE: TEACHER PACT RAISES IRE;
OBJECTIONS VOICED OVER TWO BENEFITS

BYLINE: MARYELLEN FILLO; Courant Staff Writer

DATELINE: NEWINGTON --

BODY:
Most contractual health benefits are far from controversial or cutting-edge. But two newly negotiated additions to this town's teachers contract are both.
Effective July 1, 2005, school district employees covered by a new three-year pact will be eligible for medical insurance for same-sex partners and contraceptives coverage.
The addition of those benefits -- especially the same-sex medical insurance coverage -- drew public opposition after the school board and union approved the contract and the details were publicized in late October. "I still can't believe that the school board would agree to a benefit that is morally questionable," said Helen Swiatek, president of the Newington Seniors Club.
Swiatek is one of dozens of residents who signed a petition and attended town meetings to oppose the contract's new provisions, especially the benefits for same-sex partners.
School board members, pleased to cap yearly raises at 2.5 percent and happy about co-pay concessions they say would save taxpayers $270,000, were taken aback by criticism of the new benefits, estimated to cost $80,000.
"This is the best deal we could get," said Councilman Thomas Bowen, who served as the town council's liaison on the school board's negotiating committee. "The teachers came into negotiations wanting two things, contraceptive coverage and same-sex health benefits. The lower wage increases and the increased insurance payments they agreed to in return offer taxpayers dramatic savings. There were no winners or losers. It was not groundbreaking legislation."
As of this month, the district will become one of 22 school districts out of 166 in the state to offer same-sex insurance coverage to teachers. State and national teachers' organizations say the addition of domestic partner benefits, while becoming more common in private business, is still the exception rather than the rule in teachers' contracts.
One reason might be that most teachers' unions try to keep the status quo rather than relinquishing anything that affects all members in exchange for new perks that benefit only a few.
"This is not something that is common as far as we can see," said Janet Bass, spokesperson for the American Federation of Teachers. "Insurance is so expensive and most boards are trying to get unions to pay more. We don't see it as any kind of trend. We see our members just trying to preserve what they have.''
William Perkins, a New York City labor and employment attorney and professor at Cornell University, said the addition of such benefits at a school district level raises interesting questions about the union, especially as bargaining groups fight to keep the benefits they already have.
"It is unusual that a bargaining unit would take on higher costs that are going to affect all of its membership in order to obtain a benefit that will be used by so few," he said. "It is contrary to every trend and may become an issue in the future for the union itself."
Gay and lesbian advocacy organizations agree there is still no overwhelming trend in terms of school districts providing such health coverage, but hail the gains that have been made over the past several years.
"It's low cost, high return," said Daryl Herrschaft, deputy director for Worknet, Workplace Project at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which advocates equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. "These districts are creating an atmosphere where people feel welcome and productive and have a reputation as a diverse employer. Those benefits far outweigh the cost.
Neil Bomberg, public policy director for The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), added that while his agency focuses primarily on student issues, school districts that offer such benefits to their teachers and other employees should be applauded for making "a positive statement."
"It is positive for all, not only because of what it affords those teachers and other school employees who can take advantage of such benefits, but because of the positive message it sends to students about fairness and equality," Bomberg said.
Officials both for and against the contract have played down any subjectivity regarding same-sex relationships, instead focusing on other aspects of the benefit they feel are not right. Town council member Rick Carbray, the sole town official to vote against the contract, argues that it was not "the time" for the town to offer such benefits.
"I still have a moral issue with it, concerns over discrimination," he said. "Why isn't [medical insurance] being offered to heterosexual couples who are not married?"
Carbray criticized those council members who did not agree with the contract but instead support it because they did not want to go to binding arbitration, the next step in the contract process, if the council did not back the school board proposal.
"Stratford went to binding arbitration, Branford is going and in both cases the same-sex insurance was part of the package," said Carbray.
In August, an arbitration panel upheld the Stratford council's decision to reject a contract for municipal workers that would have extended health and other benefits to domestic partners of gay and lesbian employees. In Branford, officials are waiting for a decision from an arbitration panel considering a wage increase for teachers and whether health-care benefits should be provided for same-sex domestic partners.
"The board says it isn't going to cost much, but they don't know how much the domestic partner insurance is going to be. I'm not comfortable with taxpayers paying for a benefit that you can't put a number on," said Carbray. "I surmise they truly felt that because there were already some school districts with this in place, that they were not trendsetters and weren't expecting any concerns."
School board Chairman Brian Giantonio said he has had many comments supporting the board's decision to add the new benefit. He emphasized that as a group, the board felt it was in the best financial interest of the community. He stressed the board was limited in what could be shared with the community because the negotiating process forbids any public discussion. He'd like to see some kind of bargaining process that provided the public with more immediate information.
Union officials have said little about the two demands they introduced and stuck to through the deliberations.
Teachers' union President Joan Mastrocola called the inclusion of the benefits "the right thing to do," but declined further comment. Board members maintain the approved teachers' contract, also supported by the town council, is a solid one that was objectively negotiated and will ultimately benefit taxpayers.
Teachers have said little since the contract was approved, although some have privately shared concerns that the union may have gone too far in terms of trading off one benefit for another. Others, including teachers from other districts where such benefits are not offered, are encouraged, saying the time has come to provide for all.
"It the fair thing to do," said one gay teacher from a nearby school district. "It's just what's right. And years from now as more and more gays and lesbians come out, we'll all look back and say 'What was the fuss all about?'"

Boston Globe, December 18, 2004, Saturday

Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe

December 18, 2004, Saturday THIRD EDITION

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. E1

HEADLINE: LABOR UNDER FIRE
UNIONS WORRY NLRB WILL END ORGANIZING TOOL

BYLINE: By Diane E. Lewis, Globe Staff

BODY:
Nearly six weeks after its efforts to unseat President Bush failed, the American labor movement is anxiously awaiting a federal decision that could seriously impede union organizing.
Labor's concerns revolve around card-check recognition, an organizing tool that lets unions form bargaining units after more than 50 percent of a workforce signs membership cards. As part of the process, employers agree to recognize the union. Card-check recognition is not new, but unions have used it more in recent years because they can sign up workers faster. It also helps them avoid time-consuming and costly union elections, labor specialists say.

But after spending $45 million to support the unsuccessful presidential bid of Democratic nominee Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, labor now fears that Bush appointees to the National Labor Relations Board will restrict or eliminate its right to use card-check recognition in certain circumstances. In June, the board agreed to review two cases that challenge the use of card checks. A decision on those cases is expected soon.
"If the board decides to make card check illegal, that would reverse the entire history of the board, the National Labor Relations Act and its practice," said Kate Bronfenbrenner, a labor professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
The national AFL-CIO has enlisted the help of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat. He is sponsoring a prolabor bill that would permit unions to be certified after it is confirmed that a majority of workers have signed cards. The bill, the Employee Free Choice Act, faces an uphill climb in a mostly Republican Congress.
Massachusetts AFL-CIO president Robert Haynes met with 49 other labor leaders and organizers this week to discuss the board and ways to strengthen organizing. "We are looking for options in Massachusetts that support organizing," said Haynes. The group also is looking for a legislative solution to what might be a negative ruling.
Card checks are a critical part of labor's arsenal at a time when membership represents 12.5 percent of the total US workforce, down from 35 percent in 1945. Labor has used it to organize hotels in Boston, casinos in Las Vegas, and hospitals across the country.
Celia Wcislo, president of the 10,000-member Service Employees International Union Local 2020, credits card-check recognition with helping her union organize health workers in the state's prison system a few years ago. The healthcare union also used it in the '90s to organize 600 workers employed by trustees of Boston Health and Hospitals, now the Boston Public Health Commission.
She said some employers would rather go along with card-check recognition than risk getting embroiled in an organizing drive that could hurt the firm's reputation or affect profits.
The US Chamber of Commerce, which opposes the practice, considers the card-check agreement a crutch that allows unions to boost their flagging ranks. Randy Johnson, vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits at the chamber in Washington, D.C., said some unions threaten and coerce workers who refuse to sign the cards. He said the business group favors secret-ballot elections.
But labor specialists say union elections are often fraught with problems. "Increasingly, unions have moved away from NLRB-sponsored elections because they are so difficult to win," said Thomas Juravich, director of the labor center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "Card checks allow them to move quickly. The other problem with the election process is that it can take years to get a contract. So, workers wind up feeling that justice is being delayed."
Even after workers win an election, employer appeals can cause the process to drag on for many years. In addition, election results must be certified by the labor board, a process that can take weeks, even months.
Unions worry that the card-check decision will follow on the heels of a series of recent rulings that have gone against labor. The Friday after Thanksgiving, for example, chairman Robert J. Battista, Peter C. Schaumber, and Ronald E. Meisburg, all Bush appointees, found that temporary workers employed by an agency cannot join the same union as regular employees without permission from the agency and the company where they work. That decision reversed a 2000 ruling by a Democratic board.
In other decisions this year, the NLRB has ruled that graduate students at private universities are not workers and, as a result, cannot organize a union.
The board has also said that disabled workers employed by rehabilitation programs cannot form bargaining units.

Diane E. Lewis can be reached at dlewis@globe.com.

HRMagazine, December 1, 2004

HRMagazine

December 1, 2004

SECTION: No. 12, Vol. 49; Pg. 118; ISSN: 1047-3149

HEADLINE: SHRM, Foundation pull together best, brightest; Inside SHRM; Society for Human Resource Management

BYLINE: Bates, Steve

BODY:
In opening the Society for Human Resource Management's (SHRM) first Strategic HR Conference in Los Angeles on Oct. 12, SHRM Board Chair David B. Hutchins, SPHR, CEBS, CCP, noted that "the term 'strategic HR' has come to symbolize the holy grail of HR."
Keynote speakers and educational session leaders sought to help the more than 500 attendees better understand strategic HR throughout the three-day conference. SHRM plans to hold the event annually.
Strategic Keynoters
Acclaimed business author Jim Collins opened by declaring that the HR profession is driving the most successful companies in the world.
Collins told the HR leaders that the key question they should be asking is "not how to get a seat at the table. The question is how to see that what you do is the No. 1 seat at the table."
Organizations that are built to succeed over the long term and that move from good to exceptional do so because they embrace certain core principles.
These principles are the stuff of HR, according to Collins: making decisions about who should lead before deciding where they should lead, and finding and supporting leaders whose ambition is focused on the company's success, not their own. Research shows that "every one of those good-to-great companies first focused on who. Every question can be shifted from a 'what' question to a 'who' question," Collins said.
The second principle is leadership that goes beyond bottom-line results and encompasses such traits as vision and courage. These leaders have "a genuine streak of personal humility," but at the same time "a terrifying will on behalf of the company." Their intense ambitions are for the sake of the company, not their own compensation or reputation, Collins said, consistent with their core values.
Corporate governance expert Richard C. Breeden told attendees that HR professionals have a crucial role in ensuring that their organizations are run in an ethical manner, even if this role creates conflict with their CEOs and boards of directors.
Breeden, a former chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a former corporate monitor for the failing telecom giant WorldCom Inc., said that for any corporate compliance system to be effective "it is critical that it be based on a strong HR department."
Breeden recounted startling discoveries of abuse by former executives of WorldCom, since reorganized as MCI. He noted that despite layoffs, pending fraud charges and close to $ 80 billion in exaggerated earnings, top officials of the company continued to expect sweet deals in salary improvements and buyouts while WorldCom was sinking.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"You are at the epicenter" of the struggle to keep management and other employees on the path of honesty, transparency and responsibility, Breeden told HR leaders.
Though HR professionals cannot be expected to go on crusades to uncover wrongdoing where no indication of unethical or illegal action exists, they must create a culture of ethical behavior.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"A company cannot be an ethics-free zone." HR must do the best it can to keep that message in front of executives and all employees, said Breeden.
Switching from ethics to coping with change, cultural anthropologist, author and speaker Jennifer James told attendees that as life and the workplace become increasingly complex and the rate of change increases, conveying HR's message to management and employees can seem nearly impossible. It doesn't have to be, though.
"We've never seen anything like this. The learning curve is straight up" and likely will remain that way, James said.
People and organizations resist change, with resistance typically greatest right before a breakthrough. She cited as examples the battles on behalf of women's suffrage, people with disabilities and homosexuals.
The good news, James said, is that HR can anticipate good things happening in the workplace. "Many of the programs you've been suggesting for years," such as productivity improvements, greater attention to work/life issues and developing a more flexible workforce, "are about to break through."
Wrapping up the conference, speaker and author Ram Charan said that HR professionals can ensure their companies achieve profitable growth.
"Organic growth is a people game, which is your game," said Charan. "This one belongs to you and not the CEO." But he added, "Is your organization fit for growth and execution?"
Key questions to determine whether a firm is ready for growth include "Do you learn from failures?" and "Do you actively take risks?"
He exhorted HR leaders to identify growth leaders early and reward them appropriately. In addition, he said that HR professionals must ask themselves if they have the discipline to execute strategies for sustainable growth.
Thought Leaders
Dovetailing with SHRM's Strategic HR Conference was the SHRM Foundation's Thought Leaders retreat, held Oct. 14-15 in Los Angeles. Created by the SHRM Foundation in 1999, the annual retreat brings together leading HR experts and accomplished practitioners. The invitation-only event featured frank and stimulating discussions of HR's difficulties and opportunities in working with CEOs and boards as well as with rank-and-file employees toward the goal of maintaining ethical organizations.
Participants also debated what an HR leader should do if his or her CEO and board don't want or expect HR to be involved in crucial business decisions. Some said the answer is to leave such an organization; others encouraged ways to demonstrate how HR can and does contribute to the bottom line.
Discussion included how organizations can follow corporate governance legislation and regulation-and meet or exceed the goal of fostering and ensuring ethical performance.
A single act by a single executive rarely can be blamed for the collapse of an organization's credibility or financial viability, said Patrick Wright, a professor of HR studies and director of the Center for Advanced Human Resources Studies in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. Accounting and consulting firm Arthur Andersen "didn't lose its reputation in a day. It was a step-by-step process of sacrificing values for greed."