Weekly HR/employment blogosphere roundup for February 28, 2005

This feature is continuing to be popular. For me, a nice weekend activity; hopefully for you, something to look forward to on Monday morning.

Occasional forays into the outer blogosphere — far beyond the HR/Employment galaxy — may occur unexpectedly at times. Travel with me. . .

Phillip Wilson, at Laboring Away at the Institute, has this: “Another Management Perspective on Future of Unions”

Phillip links to an excellent and biting critique of the current state of the union movement in the US by Peter List of the North American Employer’s Group: “The Labor Movement is Brain Dead (and it’s time to pull the plug)”

Phillip says he wouldn’t “go as far as Peter in pronouncing the labor movement ‘dead’ [because] unions are still quite strong in certain industries and geographic locations - construction trades, northeast and west coast, public sector, etc.

I agree with Phillip.

Here in St. Louis, construction unions are still quite dominant in commercial construction, the Machinists recently struck the auto dealers, the grocery strike last year was a big deal, and we just got a settlement of a symphony musician strike, of all things! Not quite the last rites for organized labor here.

Plus, there are still plenty of employers that don’t “get it” about treating people right. Would their employees benefit from unions? I dunno. But they ought to ripe for the picking — if the unions had a decent “product” to sell.

And the Economist magazine, no radical rag, has a story headlined: “Capitalists are grabbing a rising share of national income at the expense of workers.” That would seem to be a situation that would be fertile ground for a labor revival, but again . . .

This article is an excellent, well-organized and well-written analysis. Union leaders who consider it biased and one-sided would do well to read it carefully and consider what their response is to each of the many fine points made. It’s not so easy to refute them, methinks.

LaborProf Blog has this: “NLRB Recent Developments”

This is drawn straight from the NLRB website; but it’s still useful to see a blogger making it acessible to his audience, particularly since the RSS feed makes it much easier for us newsreader freaks to find, compared to having to go to the NLRB site.

As Dennis Kennedy would say, “if it’s got no feed, I won’t read” (Not a direct quote, but pretty close — actual quote: “There are also some well-known blogs that do not have feeds. Those blogs cease to exist when you become “feed-dominant.”).Hopefully this will be a regular feature from the LaborProf.

Catherine, at CathColl.net has this: “Quantifying human resources”

Catherine very nicely abstracts the cover article in the January 2005 issue of HR Magazine, which “lists five human capital measures (cited by PricewaterhouseCoopers) that consistently correlate with a business’s overall success strategy.”

The issue is the development of measurements of the success of a business in efficiently and effectively using “human capital.” Such measurements ought to correlate with long term business success, and to be considered along with more traditional measures when evaluating a company for investment purposes — as well as in business planning.

My favorite zinger sound bites:

“[C]onvincing the securities and analysis industries of the value of human resources management will probably be a tough sell, since the industry as a whole has considerable HR problems as evidenced by recent considerable lawsuits involving Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch.”

“The big question for HR professionals . . . is how they can convince more analysts – whose main interest in human capital often begins and ends with their compensation packages – to see the light”

Diane M. Pfadenhauer’s Strategic HR Lawyer has this useful post: “Workplace Violence Prevention Resources”

Rightfully scaring us into maintaining unyielding vigilence, Diane writes:

Over the past few years our heightened national security has made the workplace, particularly in major cities, almost impossible to enter without clearing some sort of security system. All of these barriers notwithstanding, there still remains a threat either from internal employees or visitors who seemingly have a reason to be in a particular location and are therefore able to pass through these security systems.

Diane links to a number of sites that may be helpful in developing workplace violence prevention policies.

The BostonWorks.com Job Blog has this: “The yay-me file”

It links to the original post over at Slacker Manager about the simple, but potentially powerful, power-of-positive-thinking trick of keeping “a file of good stuff you do.”

One reason for keeping such a file: “The yay-me file reminds you that you aren’t always lame and that you make good decisions and you do good work.”

If you’re a manager, think about keeping such positive items about your reports — along with the negative ones — for use at appraisal time.

Ross Runkel’s “LawMemo Employment Law Blog” sends us to a wonderful audiovisual tutorial on RSS feeds, in the post: “Automatic Updates Made Easy”

If you haven’t yet set up a newsreader to take advantage of RSS feeds, and maybe don’t quite understand why you should, this demo by Alex Barnett will show you the “how and why” of RSS (with a lovely British accent to boot!)

Stream-of-consciousness digression follows: Sometimes (often) as I blog, I want to use metaphors, idioms, or references that I realize may not be meaningful to readers, particularly younger ones. I often Google them to see what turns up — and to see if I can find a useful explanatory link.

So when “How and Why” just popped into my head a moment ago, taking me back to the science book series of that name from my ’60’s childhood, I Googled — and lo and behold, I found this very nostalgic (for me) gallery of “How and Why” book covers. Truly, I say unto you, anything and everything is on the web, you just have to know where to look.

Findlaw Modern Practice’s Ask the IT Guy by Chuck Linebauch has this: “Storing Email Fax Files and USB Flash Drive Usage”

I perked up at the mention of the USB flash drive because I just started using one myself. For those who don’t know, it’s a memory device that plugs into a USB port, can store tons of data, and is about the size and shape of my pinkie finger.

The ready availabilty of these drives (mine cost around $50.00 at an office supply store, for 256 mb) means great convenience for loyal mobile workers like me, and great danger from disloyal workers who can steal valuable data this way. The “IT guy” references one software solution to allow network security to monitor and control such usage of USB ports.

I have noted before that IT security, with its implications for trade secret protection, should be a high priority for many organizations, and HR has an important role to play, by helping to establish and enforce IT policies.

Legal researchers note that Tom Mighell at Inter Alia posted this a few weeks back:“Tools to Make Dumb Legal Researchers Smarter”

Tom refers to “the debut of Smart Tools on Westlaw, a set of enhancements that offers you suggestions or alternative searches based upon the terms you enter.” Also automatic spelling correction, like Google has, asking: “You dummy, did you mean ____?”

I vigorously disagree with this comment by Tom: “Great tools, but I’d prefer less tenor sax with my demonstration.” I love tenor sax! Funky blues jam! In fact, I think I’ll watch and listen to that demo again . . . .

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