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Alice Waters: Why Her Waiters Don't Expect Traditional Tips
Tweet Share on Facebook March 16, 2009 Comment (15)Restaurateur and slow-food maven Alice Waters was profiled on CBS' 60 Minutes last night about her "crusade for better food." Waters is interesting for several reasons, including for her choices as an employer.
Waters does not believe that traditional tipping is a just way for restaurant employees to be paid, as chefs and cooks who are integral to the quality of the dining experience don't take part. At her restaurant, Chez Panisse, Waters adds a service charge to every check, and the money is split between staff in the front and back of the house.
The New York Times Magazine covered the issue back in October. From the piece:
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Lose Your Job? There's Lots of Advice Out There
Tweet Share on Facebook March 13, 2009 Comment (7)Here's your guide to some of the recent advice online for the unemployed:
What to do right after you've lost your job:
- Apply for unemployment insurance, and then prioritize your finances, Clark Howard writes. When figuring your financial priorities, consider that you may need to put off paying down your credit card debt (house and food come first), but you may need to hang on to your car for the benefit of having transportation during your job search.
- Look for a LaidOffCamp--or other local community groups and events geared toward networking or job search help.
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March Madness: More Like March Mildness This Year
Tweet Share on Facebook March 12, 2009 CommentEvery year around this time, we begin to see the stories on March Madness and its deleterious effect on employee productivity.
But not this year. Challenger, Gray and Christmas isn't even estimating the effects this year. “In light of the fact that employers and employees have more important things to worry about, we feel that any attempt to estimate the impact of March Madness on productivity would be counterproductive and inappropriate," John Challenger said in a statement.
Not only this--Challenger thinks employers ought to embrace and boost March Mildness this year:
“Companies can use this event as a way to build morale and camaraderie. This could mean putting televisions in the break room, so employees have somewhere to watch the games other than the Internet. Employers could also offset productivity losses by using the Tournament to boost morale. Employers might consider organizing a company-wide pool, which should have no entry fee in order to avoid ethical and/or legal questions."
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Bank CEOs and University Presidents: What's the Difference?
Tweet Share on Facebook March 11, 2009 CommentThere's some noise this week about the salary caps for some TARP-taking bank executives, and the non-capped salaries of university presidents, who often make more than the $500,000 limit placed on bank execs, and are often running institutions reliant on taxpayer funds.
The comparison appears to have first been made by the authors of a commentary for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. Ball State University professors Clarence Deitsch and T. Norman Van Cott pointed to the over-$500,000 compensation packages for many presidents of large public research universities and research-intensive private universities and asked: "Higher education has long occupied the role of scold, with its de facto CEOs being the high priests and priestesses of rebuke toward the business sector. ... The priests and priestesses have been ensnared in their own words. Have any offered to drop membership in their $500,000 plus club?"
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Congress Battles Over Automatic Pay Raises
Tweet Share on Facebook March 10, 2009 Comment (12)This year, members of Congress will see their pay raised 2.8 percent, but they won't have to face the ailing and angry American public's censure with an awkward vote on the raise--they'll get it automatically.
Lousiana Republican Sen. David Vitter is leading an effort to oppose the practice during this ugly economic slowdown. Vitter is reportedly likely to get a vote today on his amendment to repeal the law allowing for the automatic pay raises. “Most Americans don’t have a formula at their jobs set to give them pay increases automatically. Congress shouldn’t either," Vitter said in a statement.
There's a twist, though: Vitter's amendment is included on the $410 billion omnibus spending bill, and CQ reports:
The upcoming vote on Vitter’s amendment is problematic for supporters of the underlying spending measure. A vote against the amendment could put a senator in the politically perilous position of defending automatic pay increases for lawmakers at a difficult economic time for nearly all Americans. If the amendment is adopted, it could prove to be a poison pill, eroding support in both chambers for the yearlong spending measure, and forcing a House-Senate conference.
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Bono Would Have Gone to Fordham, Maybe
Tweet Share on Facebook March 6, 2009 Comment (4)U2 played Fordham University's Bronx campus today in a small, students/staff-only show televised on Good Morning America. Bono told the crowd, “I joined a rock & roll band so I could get out of going to college,” then gave the crowd a rather large boost when he added, “Maybe if it looked like this, and felt like this, things could have been different."
That's music indeed to this Fordham alum's ears. Here's the video:
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Yes, You Should Go Back to School
Tweet Share on Facebook March 6, 2009 Comment (2)To go back to school, or not go back to school, that is the recessionary question. I recently lobbed that toughie at economist Peter Morici and he handled it deftly--if somewhat painfully for this reporter.
His advice: if you're a youngish person who was planning to go back to school anyway--do it now, while the market is poor and the opportunity cost is lower. Do it now and do it smart, as in, get a degree that will pay off in a real, substantive way at an institution that has brand loyalty among the employers you intend to work for. Think degrees in accounting or finance--or schoolwork that will move you toward a useful certification or licensure. If you want to be a teacher, this may be a good time to go get a master's, Morici says. If you're a teacher already, this may be a good time to get an administrative degree.
What degrees are poor investments? "You want to avoid a masters in Journalism," Morici says. ("Whoops," goes this reporter.) Remember, too, that there are plenty of poor MBA degrees. The goal is to find a degree with obvious payout.
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Layoff Trends: NYT vs. WSJ
Tweet Share on Facebook March 4, 2009 Comment (2)Earlier this week, political strategist Mark Penn wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the newest recessionary microtrend is layoffs of professionals--lawyers and doctors and the like. While "America has been losing manufacturing jobs for decades," it's now seeing a new phenomenon of the "wholesale loss of professional jobs," Penn writes.
Penn laments that these professionals "worked and studied hard to get to the next level in life, only to have their jobs and careers wiped out along with so many others."
Today, in the New York Times, we read this:
Unlike the last two recessions--earlier this decade and in the early 1990s--this one is causing much more job loss among the less educated than among college graduates. Those earlier recessions introduced the country to the concept of mass white-collar layoffs. The brunt of the layoffs in this recession is falling on construction workers, hotel workers, retail workers and others without a four-year degree.
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Dentists in Demand: Mountain Dew Mouth and More
Tweet Share on Facebook March 3, 2009 Comment (13)As someone who inherited high-maintenance teeth, I am very sensitive to the significance of dentists. In a recession, we talk so much of job losses and payroll cuts, it's easy to forget that people in many professions provide functions that are vital to our society's health and its ability to function--like dentists.
Three recent headlines are a useful reminder:
- Kentucky dentist Edwin Smith spent $150,000 on a mobile dental clinic to treat the rampant problem of "Mountain Dew Mouth" in Central Appalachia, where Mountain Dew serves as "a kind of anti-depressant for children," ABC News reports. Some parents reportedly put the highly caffeinated soft drink in baby bottles.
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Mark Penn: We're Unprepared for Layoffs of Professionals
Tweet Share on Facebook March 2, 2009 Comment (4)Mark Penn, the political strategist and microtrend columnist for the WSJ, writes today about the newest microtrend--mass layoffs of workers who identify themselves as professionals. Lawyers, engineers, newspaper editors, and so forth.
Penn writes:
We are totally unprepared for this new phenomenon. We have safety nets for the chronically unemployed, for the fast-food workers let go (oddly they may be the only ones keeping their jobs in this recession), and for the manufacturing plants that have been shuttered. The stimulus will create construction jobs galore. But we have nothing for the tens of thousands of displaced advertising creatives and newspaper writers and editors that are among the newly unemployed. They can't build roads -- all they learned how to do was to write ads and draft editorials.
