A new survey reveals that quite a few corporations are reading emails of workers, supposedly on the look-out for inadvertent releases of information:

E-mail security is an important issue for most companies because leaks have many competitive and regulatory implications. The Internet makes it possible for leaked information to travel quickly and be replicated endlessly. Sensitive trade secrets or internal strategy information is highly vulnerable to third-party interception and abuse. Companies also have to contend with the risk of falling afoul of complex privacy laws intended to protect confidential information about customers and employees.

It’s hard to wrap my head around this, but when I’ve worked with sensitive information, usually only my boss knew what I knew was sensitive and confidential. So would a general screener know it was confidential? I don’t think so. Sigh. I guess this could mean anyone is reading. It’s just a matter of luck (or supervision) at any given time.

This is the Academia edition.

And how better to travel around college than with a bike. Preferably a cheap bike that you can replace if it gets stolen. You might want to read How to Start Bicycling to Work for practical tips, including how to buy a bike (they disagree with me on the cheap bike point). In any case, it is bike month, after all.

How Green Is the College? is about Oberlin’s efforts with the sustainable house. You’ll have to read the article to figure out how they live with an unplugged fridge.

What happens to adults who have just aged out of foster care while in college? They usually get screwed. No one can co-sign their loans or provide money for books and food. No wonder 90% of children in foster care don’t even attempt college. Western Michigan University provides a Lifeline for Students Left Behind as they age out of foster care.

I received a weird group e-mailing from Wesleyan this week about hearing Barack Obama at commencement. It was odd in that it assumed a certain about of knowledge about what is going on currently at Wesleyan (Bad graduate! Bad graduate not living vicariously!). Evidently Obama was speaking to Wesleyan graduates (I had no idea) at commenement, and apparently in place of Ted Kennedy (I also had no idea). And, now apparently he spoke. The email suggested there were no tickets left, but I could sit on Foss Hill with a blanket if I wanted to. That’s about as likely as me drinking the punch at a party at Eclectic House right now.

I mention this mostly because of a discussion in comments on commencement speakers, how they’re chosen, what they say, and an institution with recent sexual miscoduct allegations choosing Clarence Thomas. This is probably the most sympathetic audience to Barack Obama in the United States. Nothing wrong with that. But it is the university voted something like, “World’s Most Annoying Liberal Arts College”…. 

Today we have the Early Edition of WWN, because my boss loves us and let us leave early–I guess he had a party to go to. Speaking of party, we’re going with a musical theme today.

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I don’t have the heart to try and find art for this post, but there is more evidence that being overweight, particularly being obese, can hinder your career:

“This is not just something on the margins,” says Mark Roehling, Michigan State University associate professor of human resources management and author of an upcoming meta-analysis of 30 studies examining weight-based discrimination in controlled employment settings. “At the obesity level and higher, we have every reason to believe [discrimination] is having a very significant impact on people.”

Weight-based discrimination consistently affects every aspect of employment, from hiring to firing, promotions, pay allocation, career counseling and discipline, according to Roehling’s work.

You’ll have to endure a little advertising at Forbes for the whole article, but it appears the bias is most strongest in hiring, and the bias is strongest against overweight white women.

Flexibility, here defined as flextime or the ability to negotiate arrival and departure times periodically, can be predicted in a number of ways according to a new 2008 National Study of Employers (available in complete form here):

Those most likely to be flexible are employers that:
• are nonprofits;
• are in the finance and in professional services sectors;
• operate in more than one location;
• have fewer union members;
• have fewer hourly employees;
• have more women and more minorities in top positions or who report directly to those in top
positions; and
• have more part-timers.
Interestingly, more flexible employers report less difficulty hiring hardworking self-starters and less
difficulty dealing with the retirement of highly valued employees. It is impossible to separate the
cause and effect here. Does seeing one’s employees in a positive light (as hardworking, self-starters)
and managing human resource issues well (such as the retirement of key staff) lead to or result from
providing greater flexibility?

That certainly fits with my experience. The most flexible places I worked were all nonprofits with multiple locations, no union members, few hourly employees, and many womn in top positions (and minorities, depending on which nonprofit I consider). Other thoughts on flexibility prediction?

This was a big week in workplace weirdness. I found so many articles that my bookmarks overfloweth. But fear not, I have culled out the best of the week’s weirdness to entertain you as we move into the weekend. It’s all about people this time. Because I’m a people person.

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Yay! There are many work-related implications for same-sex marriage, including receiving benefits through your spouse, so what a relief that the California State Supreme Court has made this decision:

“There can be no doubt that extending the designation of marriage to same-sex couples, rather than denying it to all couples, is the equal protection remedy that is most consistent with our state’s general legislative policy and preference,” said the 120-page ruling.

It said that the state law’s language “limiting the designation of marriage to a ‘union between a man and a woman’ is unconstitutional, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available to both opposite-sex and same-sex couples.”

Analysis at the Workplace Prof Blog is helpful for understanding the implications.

So Ms T suggested that we select an area of expertise for this blog. It was obvious to me in looking at my collection of links that my specialty should be weird workplace news. Ms T also suggested a regular column. Genius! This will force me to do that writing I’ve been neglecting.

Just look for the red stapler when you want your fix of wacky workplace hijinks. I’m going to aim for every Friday.

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In Alabama, father bikes to work and picks his daughter up from school. Apparently this is unusual as only 1,656 out of 1,611,160 residents bike to work.

From a conference this weekend on Islamophobia: 

Marquette University Professor Louise Cainkar presented a paper about hate crimes against those of Arab origin, a category that includes Christians but is often conflated with Muslims in post-Sept. 11 pop culture. In analyzing patterns in the Chicago area, she found that hate crimes were fewest in African American neighborhoods in the South Side, despite the high prevalence of Arab shopkeepers. But anti-Arab hate crimes were highest in “white flight” suburbs. A mosque in a southwestern suburb of Chicago came under a “three-day siege” by neighbors after the Sept. 11 attacks and had to be protected by more than 100 police officers in riot gear, Cainkar said.

Cainkar believes the results showed, in part, that Islamophobia is a cultural phenomenon. The black neighborhoods had a history of community organizing around concepts of race and did not buy into treating Arabs as “the other.”

“Islamophobia can be defeated through work at the local level,” she said.

When you hear that government-funded research involved covering backyards of low-income black families in Baltimore with sludge to check how it interacted with lead, you just have to wonder who wasn’t paying attention to Tuskegee.

“Our hearing will include an investigation of the risks associated with application of sludge in neighborhoods as reportedly took place in Baltimore,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the committee’s chairman.

The head of the Maryland chapter of the NAACP asked Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler to investigate the circumstances of the research and whether participants in the Baltimore study gave informed consent.

“These experiments harken back to the infamous Tuskegee experiments” in which syphilis treatment was denied to black men in order to study the illness, Gerald Stansbury, president of the Maryland Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in letter to Gansler.

Researchers said the families were assured the sludge was safe, but were not told that there have been some health concerns over the use of sludge.

These families were told that the sludge was safe. It is not. It is made from sewage and industrial waste and contains heavy minerals. That doesn’t sound like the families gave informed consent to me.  More disgusting (and I don’t mean the sludge) details here.

If you’re anywhere near Academia, you’ve probably seen a shift away from creating tenure-track positions toward hiring tons and tons of part-time faculty as adjuncts. This is a parallel trend to what goes on in my businesses (and we do know that universities are increasing using a corporate model for management) of hiring “temporary workers” who essentially aren’t that temporary. They could be employed in the same position or even promoted within the company for years.

Looking the other way? Accreditation practices and part-time faculty explores the issue of accrediting institutions ignoring the adjunct phenomenon when they could essentially step up, condemn the practice, and flex a little muscle as most universities do answer in some fashion to accrediting institutions:

As used by some college and university administrations today, the term “part-time faculty” is a misnomer. A large percentage of those designated part-time are actually full-time faculty with part-time pay and few or no benefits. In its glossary definitions of “faculty,” however, the Western senior commission adds an instructive caveat: “Part-time or adjunct faculty [are those] whose major responsibility is not related to the institution in question. These faculty are customarily assigned one or two classes with class-related responsibilities only.” The definition used by the Northwest commission is nearly as limiting and also includes the phrase “one or two classes.”⁵ While we have no evidence that accreditors tally the number of courses taught by individual adjuncts, institutions that regularly employ part-time faculty to teach three or more courses clearly practice outside accepted standards for the Western senior and Northwest commissions.

My neighbor is considered part-time faculty at a local college. She teaches six classes plus labs. That pretty much sums up that part-time misnomer. 

Via Inside Higher Ed

How many times have you had to deal with a customer “service” rep only to find yourself getting the hard-sell on a host of products you don’t want? Sadly, this is not merely becoming common practice, it is now the status quo.

Look, I don’t mind a company trying to make money. If they don’t make money, they go out of business and I lose my internet, and that would seriously piss me off.

But in these days of behemoth companies, it seems that they have learned that they can take advantage of our dependence on them to the point where they ignore a customer’s needs  and instead force their reps to try to sell all sorts of worthless crap, enforcing this policy with everything from Walmart gift cards to threats and Office Space-like forms.

All of this can be very debilitating to the customer service reps as well. It is very difficult to take pride in your work when it is systematically stripped of all that is noble and just–namely, helping someone in need and making them happy.

I can’t help but think that the time is getting ripe for a large, powerful company to finally say “Screw the money. All we need is love.” I think they’d be surprised at how much more profitable they become.

Airline Passenger Complaints Soaring. In fact there are 60% more complaints than last year. US Airways had the most, and Southwest had the least.

I love stories like this perhaps a bit too much for my own good.

David Sneath has worked at a Ford Motor Co. parts warehouse for 34 years, but it didn’t take him any time at all to walk out once he discovered he had won a $136 million Mega Millions jackpot.

“I yelled to the boss, ‘I’m out of here,’” Sneath said Thursday after going to state lottery headquarters in downtown Lansing to pick up his first $1 million check.

He plans to buy a cottage on the lake and a new fishing boat. Possibly get laser surgery for his vision. Maybe go back to school and finish his degree. He’s 60 years old.

Or not. It’s hard to tell in the article.

Kelly Services case goes to jury describes an interesting case in terms of workplace rights and religious affiliation. An employee at Kelly Services claims she was not promoted because she was not part of a religious group to which other Kelly Services employees belonged.

Some summary from attorneys:

“We live in a culture of blame, don’t we?” asked Kelly Services attorney E. Joseph Connaughton. “The coffee’s too hot, there’s a lawsuit. Our kid doesn’t make the sports team, there’s a lawsuit.”

“We have juries who can say, ‘Enough is enough,’” Connaughton continued, asking jurors during his closing argument Thursday in the federal court case in Sacramento to find that Nevada City resident Noyes, 59, was dealt with fairly at work by her office manager, then a member of the Yuba County-based Fellowship.

Attorney M. Catherine Jones, representing Noyes, said her client should have been promoted to software development manager and that Kelly Services “needs to be punished” for its indifference to Noyes workplace rights. Jones said Fellowship members were favored in hiring, promotion and pay at the Nevada City office where Noyes worked.

Finding Health Insurance if You Are Self-Employed is an article with a number of resources for the self-employed. You know the problem, right? For self-employed people, health insurance costs more and covers a lot less.

Notes from an Intergenerational Conversation is a brief chat between a Gen X author and Gen Y author, and covers any number of workplace issues including, What’s up with Gen Y’s sense of entitlement? and Why won’t Gen X mentor Gen Y?

A Marked Increase in the Number of Pregnancy Discrimination claims analyzes the situation from a legal and historical point of view.

This article, Air NZ passengers fumigated, brought back some childhood memories. I’ve flown to New Zealand twice, and was fumigated twice, which means someone came on the plane once it landed in Auckland, sprayed us with some unknown chemical, and locked the doors while the chemical settled over us. It was very freaky. This is supposedly unusual (fumigation) nowadays because of biosecurity clearances. Remind me of the fumigation incidents when I get cancer.

Cats sell books on-line

A couple of on-line retailers will rent you a textbook for your college class. This post on Treehugger Renting College books: Greenwash or Choice? argues that renting on-line is sort of like buying your books used and selling them back. A discussion ensues that is more interesting than my summary here.

At one point, I bought all of the books that professors required and suggested. Then I just bought the required books. Then, just the main book. Then I checked out the books in the library and used the copies on reserve. Much cheaper. What is funny in the particular Treehugger discussion is the Blame the Publisher attitude for the problem as if the bookstore wasn’t making a huge profit in their buy back program. But then I work for publishers.

Apparently the summer 2008 job market for teens is not so great:

Not a great summer option for teensNearly half of hiring managers say they have no plans to hire any seasonal workers this year, according to a study of 1,100 companies released today by SnagAJob.com, a job site for hourly positions. When asked why they wouldn’t be hiring, 31 percent of those polled said they didn’t have the budget. And a report put out this month by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University states that “the summer 2008 job outlook for teens looks particularly bleak.”