Around the employment blogosphere (again)
The first edition of this feature, which I floated in this post a couple of weeks ago, drew quite a bit of interest, so now I am back with more.
I’ll start with a very interesting blog, with an unusual name, that I discovered only because it gave this blog a nice plug, including it in a place of honor on a very short blogroll. It’s called Coyote Blog: Dispatches From a small Business.
The author of this blog runs a business that operates campsites as a concessionaire to the U.S. Forest Service, as I understand it. While he comments on a variety of subjects, and includes Wily Coyote images for entertainment, he has written several very good and useful posts on employment issues, including a series of three posts (starting here) describing his experience dealing with the US Department of Labor.
A punchy intro:
Many times I have heard other small business owners say that the DOL is not “fair”. If you were to ask me if I think they are fair, I would answer “yes” and “no”. If you want to know if DOL employees are generally honest, well-intentioned, and law-abiding, my experience is that they are. However, if you expect, as a business owner, that the DOL will act as some kind of neutral court of law, in which you and your workers have equal status and equal rules of evidence, then you are in for a surprise. The DOL is not on the employers side and doesn’t really pretend to be.
This should not come as a surprise to you. Young lawyers out of school generally don’t seek out lower government pay scales with a vision of helping businesses manage their cost structures. They join the DOL because they are interested in defending downtrodden workers against rapacious capitalists who seek to exploit them (etc. etc.) The main mission of the DOL is to enforce labor laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). However, overlaying this mission is a strong institutional culture that mission 1A is to defend workers against employers. Read more
“Coyote” has also written a nice bit on “Disputing Unemployment Claims”
Next, take a look at Nobscot’s Weblog , by B. N. Carvin, CEO of Nobscot (a reader of this blawg).
This is an interesting piece: “Thinking Strategically”
[U]nderstand your business and think and act in accordance with your company’s business objectives. Human Resources is the people side of the business and people extend through all facets of running an organization. . . . Every decision we make directly or indirectly affects the success (or failure) of the business. . . .
“But I am acting strategically,” you say, “I minimize risk to the company. I make sure we are in compliance. I recruit applicants using psychologist tested behavioral interviews. That’s all strategic!” Well, yes and no. There certainly is a strategy element to all of this but it is strategy relative to the human resources world. To become fully strategic we need to become better at acting strategically relative to the business world. . . .
[M]any of our actions serve only to hinder the overall business goals. I get frustrated when I hear HR people say things like, “My stupid CEO wants me to cancel the compliance training and replace it with sales training. Why doesn’t he understand how important compliance is?” Maybe because if the company is not making enough sales there will be nothing to worry about complying with!
If we stop focusing only on HR Best Practices and begin to focus on Business Best Practices we will be once and for all truly acting strategically. Read more
This Nobscot piece also refers to an article by Carvin along similar lines: “A Balanced Approach To Human Resources”
A few tidbits from this excellent article:
Pick up any business periodical and you will read about successful CEOs creating employee friendly work environments. Contrast that with the Human Resource department’s actions. The greatest mistaken assumption in Human Resources is that when HR strictly enforces policy they are acting in accordance with the CEO’s wishes. If it is pointed out that the CEO is generous, kind hearted and flexible with employees, the mistaken HR Manager proclaims that it is his job to protect the CEO from himself.
Many CEOs would be appalled if they knew how their HR departments were protecting them. . .
When an HR associate thinks about risk, it’s not uncommon to focus solely on tangible litigation risks. Litigation risks are extremely important and the HR Manager must take his risk management role seriously. But it is important not to become blinded by risks. One must remember that because there is a risk of something bad happening, it doesn’t mean that it is going to happen. The chance that the negative outcome will occur must be considered along with the pros and cons associated with each possible course of action.
CEOs are good at determining when to take a risk and when to play it safe because they have to deal with gray-area issues every day. Read more
Finally, Rafael Gely emailed me to introduce his LaborProf Blog
Good work, with some interesting stuff, including:
“Mel Gibson? No . . . Des Moines? Yes.”
According to Business Week, “progressive companies and easier lifestyles are lurking women away from the coasts and into this mid-size Iowa city.”
“Challenging Neo-classical labor market economics” (book review of “Monopsony in Motion: Imperfect Competition in Labor Markets,” Alan Manning (London School of Economics) )
“Why do Americans work so much?”
A couple of different perspectives on the work/leisure tradeoff.
As you might suspect, this is just scraping the surface of the fascinating labor/employment/HR stuff that’s out in the blogosphere. Our subject-specific blogroll at right keeps growing. Periodically, I will continue to point to posts of interest from this diverse bunch of academic, corporate, and legal bloggers.
