Author: Site Staff

Technology professionals seem to be happy with their jobs, but they are also extremely stressed and likely to recommend careers in other fields to their friends, according to a new report from Dice.com.

The Dice Tech Appeal Index measures a person’s inclination to recommend the information technology field to others as opposed to another industry. Some 1,000 individuals were surveyed, including 565 adults currently working in IT.

For IT companies, there is good news in the survey, which was released Wednesday, October 3. Ninety-one percent of survey participants say they are somewhat or very satisfied in their current job. What’s more, 92 percent of respondents note they intend to stay in the IT field for at least the next six months.

The bad news is that despite the general satisfaction with their jobs, IT professionals are more inclined to recommend a career in other industries to their friends than they were a year ago. Recommending jobs in financial services went up by almost 10 percentage points to 56 percent, as it did for media and entertainment, which moved to 44 percent from 34 percent.

“Although the satisfaction and loyalty levels of IT professionals continue to be strong, we’re seeing evidence of possible retention issues over the long term,” said Scot Melland, chairman, president and CEO of Dice Holdings Inc., parent company of New York-based Dice, in a release.

One key culprit may be work-related anxiety. The study found that 91 percent of respondents associate the work with stress—mostly due to workload, dealing with clients and pace of the job.

The fear of exporting work overseas also weighs on the minds of IT professionals. Forty-six percent of survey participants say they are somewhat or very concerned about offshoring, an increase from 39 percent a year ago.

—Gina Ruiz

So far in the Democratic-controlled Congress, employment-law bills roll through the House and then get stuck in the Senate, where Republicans have a large enough minority to block legislation.

But a measure that would ban workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation is being held up because it lacks enough support in the House.

The Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA) received a hearing in the House Education and Labor Committee in September. On Tuesday, October 2, the panel was scheduled to vote on the bill.

That action, and consideration on the House floor, has been postponed because sponsors have not yet brought enough of their Democratic colleagues on board.

In addition, a few Republicans have co-sponsored the bill, which would prohibit workplace discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. It also would protect those who have changed their gender identity.

That provision may be causing misgivings among Democrats seeking re-election in conservative districts next year. It also prompts fears among employment lawyers that it will subject businesses to new kinds of lawsuits.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts and author of the original bill, introduced a streamlined version September 27 that removed the gender identity provision. The issue was addressed in separate legislation.

“We did not believe the votes were there for a gender-identity ENDA bill,” says Steve Adamske, Frank’s spokesman.

On September 28, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a statement saying she supported including gender identity but that “the new ENDA legislation proposed by Congressman Frank has the best prospects for success on the House floor.”

That spurred a backlash by many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender groups. So, on Monday, October 1, Pelosi, Frank and Reps. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, and George Miller, D-California and chairman of the House labor committee, issued a statement saying the October 2 committee vote is postponed until later this month.

“This schedule will allow proponents of the legislation to continue their discussion with members in the interest of passing the broadest possible bill,” they said.

The business community, however, prefers the streamlined approach. Michael Eastman, executive director of labor law policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, stressed that his organization has not taken a position on gender identity.

And it’s not necessarily endorsing the alternative version. “We plan to be neutral on the narrower bill,” he says.

But the new version assuages business concerns about the original bill, including its potential to erode federal employment-law pre-emption, broaden whistle-blower protections and foster disparate-impact lawsuits, according to Eastman.

“We feel comfortable that the narrower bill would limit opportunities for frivolous litigation and difficult implementation,” he says.

Rather than flatly opposing the legislation at the outset, the chamber is trying to help shape it. One reason the group is taking a cautious approach may be that 46 large companies, including such corporations as Cisco Systems, Coca-Cola, Marriott International, BP America and NCR, are backing the bill. Along with the vast majority of the Fortune 500, they already have inclusive employment practices in place.

But during a House hearing on the legislation in early September, the first business community opposition started to emerge. Employment lawyers raised concerns that it would create a new protected class for gender identity.

Mark Fahleson, an employment lawyer with the firm of Rembolt Ludtke in Lincoln, Nebraska, asserted that the definition was vague and too broad, allowing employees to declare a change in their gender identity at will without giving the employer advance notice to prepare for such a change in the workplace. The bill requires that companies provide shower or dressing facilities to accommodate actual or perceived gender.

Even though most major employers welcome homosexuals, they are doing so through voluntary policies. A statute would codify a particular approach for companies to follow and would burden small firms that don’t have the HR and legal staffs to manage compliance, according to Fahleson.

“This would put into law definitions and procedures and remedial schemes that include litigation,” Fahleson says.

Advocates, however, stress that the measure simply extends to homosexuals the same protections that have been put in place for women, minorities and ethnic groups the past 40 years. Currently, an employee can be fired for sexual orientation in 31 states and for gender identity in 39.

Food giant General Mills is one of the large corporations going to bat for the measure. It argues that companies can’t exclude any groups in the search for outstanding employees.

“A culture of respect and inclusiveness is important for retaining top talent and recruiting new stars,” Kelly Baker, vice president for diversity at the company, said at the House hearing. “We believe fundamentally that diversity drives creativity and innovation and links to our success.”

The company is not supporting the anti-discrimination bill as a way directly to improve its bottom line. Rather, it takes an altruistic, perhaps even patriotic, approach.

“It’s the right thing to do for American citizens,” Baker says.
Such sentiment bolsters the confidence of the measure’s sponsors. “One way or the other, we’re going to pass an historic ENDA this Congress,” Adamske says.

—Mark Schoeff Jr.

Recruiters are getting a vital new tool to hire Generation Y workers as job boards begin linking to the social networking site Facebook.

CareerBuilder, Jobster, Yahoo HotJobs and JobsinPods.com are among those developing Facebook applications in hopes of helping recruiters and hiring managers reach out to some 41 million active users of the popular site.

Many experts consider Facebook the leading Generation Y networking platform, not only for its reach but also because of the audience it attracts. Facebook’s fastest-growing demographic is people 25 years or older. More than half of the site’s users are out of college and many are seeking full-time jobs in a career-oriented environment, which makes them a coveted workforce group among employers searching for young talent, recruiting specialists say.

“Facebook is the sixth-most trafficked site in the country,” says Richard Castellini, vice president of consumer marketing at CareerBuilder. “It is a great medium for employers to become more relatable to this important segment of the workforce.”

CareerBuilder launched its Facebook application in late August. It matches Facebook users with job and internship opportunities. CareerBuilder’s technology sifts through Facebook users’ profiles, gathering information such as college major and hometown.

Job boards testing Facebook applications are ahead of the curve, says industry consultant John Zappe.

“It’s a fairly inexpensive way to help their clients—recruiters and hiring managers—gain brand awareness among young, passive job candidates,” Zappe says.

Chris Russell, founder and president of JobsinPods.com, developed a Facebook application because it gives employers additional visibility among members of Generation Y, who typically are defined as those born between the late 1970s and 2000. Launched in March, JobsinPods is an audio job board allowing employers to record podcasts containing information about career opportunities within their companies and distribute them electronically.

The company’s Facebook application was introduced this month and allows recruiters and hiring managers who are members of Facebook to embed their podcast in their personal page. Russell hopes to enhance his Facebook application, making it more interactive and creating a function to allow podcasts to be e-mailed.

“The iPod generation is bored with the conventional communication techniques that employers use to reach them,” he says. “They want something fresh and real, like podcasts, which are very commonly used within this group.”

Jobster also has launched a Facebook application. The Seattle-based job board has partnered with more than 230 companies, including Verizon and Boeing, to create an employer talent network.

“Facebook’s open philosophy makes it easy for job boards to develop applications for the networking site,” says Jonathan Duarte, president and CEO of Go Jobs Inc., a job board and recruiting consultancy in Orange, California. “I anticipate a lot more recruiting specialists will be turning to this tool for reaching Gen Y’ers.”

—Gina Ruiz

A judge’s order requiring the federal government to release information on the quality and cost of thousands of physicians could embolden employers to steer employees to better-performing doctors.

Consumers’ Checkbook, a consumer advocacy group in Washington, brought the lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services in hopes of making public every health care claim paid by Medicare. The consumer group initially sought the claims data through a Freedom of Information Act request in March 2006.

The information, which was scheduled to be made public September 21, will be the largest existing data set publicly available about the way doctors practice medicine as detailed by claims paid by Medicare. The group will use the data to measure the quality and efficiency of doctors and plans to launch a Web site that tells consumers how much experience doctors have performing certain procedures.

“This will make the efforts to rate doctors more reliable, more valid,” says Robert Krughoff, president of Consumers’ Checkbook.

The information could be a boon to employers and other groups looking for greater cost and quality transparency in the heath care marketplace.

“We have quite a bit of evidence that many patients have major complex procedures done by physicians that don’t have any experience at all,” Krughoff says. “This can help employees choose physicians for major procedures.”

Making the information public, he says, will encourage physicians to improve.

Though Health and Human Services was named as a defendant, experts believe the ruling, made by U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Washington, will not be appealed by the Bush administration. Last year, in an executive order, President Bush called for greater cost and quality transparency in the health care system, something that the release of this data will achieve, experts say.

“It honestly is a treasure trove,” says Francois de Brantes, the national coordinator for Bridges to Excellence, a program that rewards doctors for improving the quality of their medical care. “There is an unbelievable amount of analysis that can be done with the data that up until today just hasn’t been possible.”

Doctors have staunchly opposed the use of claims data to measure the way they practice medicine. The American Medical Association says Medicare data paints an inaccurate picture because it does not focus on whether a patient’s care led to recovery—only how much the care cost and what it consisted of.

“The AMA is concerned that the indiscriminate release of raw Medicare claims data has the potential to put patient privacy at risk and will paint an inaccurate and incomplete picture of the quality of physician care, misleading patients,” according to a statement by AMA board chair Dr. Edward Langston. “The risks and harm associated with the release of this information far outweigh any potential benefits.”

Consumer groups say the data has limitations but it nonetheless can be used to accurately rate physician quality.

The specificity of the data can paint an intimate portrait of a doctor’s practice, experts say. Without releasing patient information, the data can detail what kind of medicine a doctor prescribed and whether a patient experienced complications or died after surgery. The quality of the Medicare data is noteworthy as well, because it tracks a patient over a long period of time—from when they turn 65 until a patient’s death—when health care use is highest.

The information could eventually subject doctors to the twin consumer demands of high quality and low cost, says Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change.

“This is significant,” he says.

—Jeremy Smerd

Pier 1 Imports soon will learn whether cutting health care benefits for the very employees who deliver what the company calls its signature in-store shopping experience will help resurrect the failing retailer or exacerbate its multimillion-dollar losses.

The predicament of Fort Worth, Texas-based Pier 1, which reported losses that widened to $56.4 million in the first quarter from $23.2 million a year earlier, reflects the quandary of employer-sponsored health care for service businesses whose low-wage employees are the face of the company to customers.

Analysts see reducing health care costs as a short-term savings that would likely harm employee morale, increase attrition rates and lead to deteriorating customer service.

“When you actively reduce costs at a company where the selling environment is such a big part of the brand, you have to be careful that you don’t damage the brand,” says Bryan Gildenberg, chief knowledge officer at retail research and consulting firm Management Ventures. “There’s a much greater risk in the high-touch, high-service model of retail of disenfranchised employees hurting business performance.”

Part of what Pier 1 CEO Alex Smith is calling a “cost-efficiency mission” is to cut employees’ hours in some stores to disqualify them from health benefits.

In May, hourly employees were told the number of work hours needed to receive health care benefits would increase. The next month, Pier 1 executives raised the number of stores it would close from 60 to 100. Then employees in Ohio, Colorado and Texas were told they would not be allowed to work enough hours to receive health care.

One assistant store manager in Ohio who makes $11 an hour and has worked at Pier 1 for several years feels betrayed.

“They are slashing the throats of the people who have been there the longest,” says the assistant manager, who spoke on condition of anonymity because talking to the press could mean termination. That employee’s hours were cut to 22 hours a week on average from 32 hours a week. Meanwhile, the company has hired part-time employees at $7 an hour who are working 31 hours a week—one hour shy of the 32 needed for health care benefits.

Pier 1 declined to comment or to confirm the policy changes, saying the company does not discuss personnel matters publicly.

Balancing part-time and full-time labor costs is common in retail. Annualized savings from cost reductions—which also include layoffs at the company’s Fort Worth headquarters, refining the management structure and closing 100 stores—will amount to $150 million, Smith told analysts during a recent conference call.

Cutting labor costs may be the norm for troubled retailers, but it is also a sign of desperation, says Leon Nicholas, a retail analyst at Global Insight, and is reminiscent of last-ditch efforts of defunct retailers Caldors and Bradlees. The problems of Pier 1 are compounded by what he sees as a lackluster strategy to sell more goods.

“Unless the fundamental problem is employee costs, [cutting those costs] doesn’t fix the fundamental problem,” Nicholas says. “Pier 1 hasn’t addressed fundamentally how to compete with Wal-Mart and Target at the bottom end and the boutiques at the higher end. They’re in the middle, which is no place to be in retail.”

—Jeremy Smerd

A company offering a new type of liability insurance is hoping to cajole employers into moving a step closer to sending employees overseas for medical care.

Provided by the newly formed, Barbados-based AOS Assurance Co., the patient medical malpractice insurance is intended to resolve the question of what happens when modern medical care promised by a developing country lands patients in a byzantine legal system. Patients who find themselves injured by a doctor in a foreign country may have little legal recourse abroad. The malpractice insurance is intended to provide some financial compensation for their injuries, says Paul Laverty, an AOS director.

The insurance costs 76 cents to $8.15 per member monthly and pays a maximum of $100,000 to $1 million per covered person. Employers can offer it to employees directly or through the company’s health insurer.

“I like to think of our coverage as travel insurance,” Laverty says. “You wouldn’t go out of the country without travel insurance. You shouldn’t travel overseas for medical care without our product.”

Though a handful of hospitals in India, Singapore and Thailand meet international standards for quality and safety, large employers have not yet sent employees overseas for medical care. Laverty says executives are concerned that if something goes wrong, employees would have little legal recourse in foreign countries and could expose employers to civil lawsuits.

“An employer is interested in cost savings,” Laverty says. “Our piece is filling the gap of the litigation component. It would help the employer mitigate their own risk.”

The product, which is being managed by insurance services company AIG, has been available for about a month. Laverty says a number of large health insurers and employers have expressed interest.

It’s doubtful that medical malpractice overseas would subject employers to legal liability, since employers are not usually sued for medical malpractice in the United States, says Tiffany Santos, an attorney with Trucker Huss, a San Francisco firm specializing in employee benefits law.

If anything, says David Frazzini, a principal at Mercer’s health and benefits business, the insurance is an incentive offered by employers looking for employees to voluntarily seek medical care overseas. The insurance doesn’t replace the rights of patients who get care in the United States. He said the insurance could be of interest to companies looking “to dip [their] toes in the water.”

The insurance would only be valid if a patient sought medical care from a board-certified physician practicing at a medical facility accredited by the Joint Commission International, Laverty says

—Jeremy Smerd

In yet another problem with data security and job candidates, San Francisco-based retail giant Gap Inc. on Friday, September 28, disclosed that a laptop computer with personal information for some 800,000 job applicants had been stolen.

Gap says the laptop was recently stolen from the offices of a third-party vendor that manages its job applicant data for Gap. Gap also says that contrary to its agreement with the vendor, the information on the laptop was not encrypted.

The laptop contains personal data for about 800,000 people who applied online or by phone for store positions at one of Gap’s brands between July 2006 and June 2007. The affected individuals applied for store positions with the company’s Old Navy, Banana Republic, Gap and outlet stores from the U.S., Puerto Rico and Canada. The laptop did not contain Canadian applicants’ “Social Insurance” numbers, Gap says.

Gap says it has no reason to believe the data contained on the computer was the target of the theft or that the personal information has been accessed or used improperly.

“Gap Inc. deeply regrets this incident occurred. We take our obligation to protect the data security of personal information very seriously,” Gap chairman and CEO Glenn Murphy said in a press release revealing the theft. “What happened here is against everything we stand for as a company. We’re reviewing the facts and circumstances that led to this incident closely, and will take appropriate steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.”

Gap spokeswoman Cynthia Lin declined to name the vendor involved. But one of Gap’s vendors, San Francisco-based recruiting software firm Taleo, issued a statement Friday saying that it was not the vendor in question.

Taleo representative Krista Canfield says Taleo had begun to receive inquiries about Gap’s data breach.

“We just wanted to make sure people were clear, and people understood that we were not involved,” she says.

Lin confirmed that Taleo was not involved.

The Gap incident comes on the heels of a security snafu at Internet job board titan Monster.com disclosed in August.

Gap says it has begun notifying the job applicants whose Social Security numbers were included in the information on the laptop and is offering them a year of free credit monitoring services with fraud resolution assistance, along with a dedicated 24-hour helpline. In addition, the company is posting information and updates at Web site it set up for the purpose, www.gapsecurityassistance.com.

—Ed Frauenheim

Related content: Data Breach Laws: A Wake-up Call for HR

UAW officials on Friday, September 28, distributed details of their tentative agreement with General Motors to local union presidents.

During a press conference at UAW headquarters in Detroit after those meetings, UAW president Ron Gettelfinger said the agreement has “unprecedented product guarantees” and a moratorium on outsourcing.

Here are official details on the tentative agreement between the UAW and GM:

• GM agrees to new-vehicle programs at 16 U.S. plants.

  
  

• GM will initially fund the UAW’s health care trust fund with $29.9 billion, with an additional $5.4 billion in future years.

  
  

• GM will provide the trust an additional backstop of as much as $1.6 billion over the next 20 years.

  
  

• Workers get a $3,000 signing bonus to approve the contract.

  
  

• Instead of pay raises, UAW rank and file get bonuses equal to 3 percent, 4 percent and 3 percent of their annual pay during the second, third and fourth years of the contract.

  
  

• New hires in noncore, nonproduction jobs would get paid between $14 and $16.23 an hour.

  
  

• New hires get a 401(k) plan instead of the traditional UAW pension plan. GM will create a cash balance defined benefit plan for entry-level workers, by which it will deposit 6.4 percent of workers’ wages into a portable retirement plan, which will accrue interest tied to the 30-year U.S. Treasury bond.

  
  

• GM agrees to bring in-house 3,000 jobs that now are outsourced to contractors.

  
  

• GM agrees to hire 3,000 temporary workers as full-time hourly employees.

  
  

Filed by Philip Nussel of Automotive News, and Jessica Marquez of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.

UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said early Thursday, September 27, that he expects contract agreements with Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC to follow the pattern set with General Motors.

“We expect this will basically be the same agreement we’ll get at the other companies,” Gettelfinger said in an interview with WJR-AM radio in Detroit. “There’s some modification, but for the most part, it will be a pattern agreement.”

It might not be that easy.

Unlike GM, Ford and Chrysler have different CEOs from the ones who negotiated the last UAW contract in 2003—Alan Mulally is now the Ford CEO and Bob Nardelli is heading Chrysler. Chrysler also has new ownership with Cerberus Capital Management LP now holding an 80.1 percent stake.

And last year, Chrysler was unable to get midcontract health care concessions that GM and Ford negotiated in 2005. A few months later, DaimlerChrysler AG put Chrysler up for sale.

Labor negotiators at Chrysler and Ford said they are waiting to hear which automaker will be next to work out a new contract with the UAW. Spokespeople for both automakers said Thursday they had not heard from the union.

“The decision is totally up to the union,” Ford spokeswoman Marcey Evans said.

Gettelfinger said he would begin meeting with his top officials Thursday afternoon to discuss the situation with the other two automakers. He expects the pace of negotiations with the companies to accelerate soon.

“There’s no reason at this point why we can’t get both of those done at the same time,” Gettelfinger said. “If we run into difficulty at one or the other, then we’ll make a decision. I would hope we could do that. I’m not saying that’s what we will do.”

A Chrysler spokesman said the company had not seen details of the union’s agreement with GM. He declined to comment on any elements of the deal that have been reported.

Filed by Dale Jewett and Philip Nussel of Automotive News, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.

Members of the United Auto Workers walked off the job shortly after 11 a.m. EDT Monday, September 24, in the first nationwide strike against General Motors since 1970.

The strike is a sharp turnaround in the contract negotiations that had been extended beyond the contract deadline of September 14. Reports over the weekend noted that the two parties were working on an all-important trust to manage retiree health care costs, which are estimated to be between $90 billion and $105 billion.

But in a press release issued Monday at 1:40 a.m., union president Ron Gettelfinger said GM failed to address concerns among union members about job security. It is widely believed among observers that in exchange for the creation of a health care trust, which was seen as a concession by the union, GM would ensure the stability of the workforce at its U.S. plants.

“We’re shocked and disappointed that General Motors has failed to recognize and appreciate what our membership has contributed during the past four years,” Gettelfinger said in the press release.

It remains unclear how many of the 73,000 UAW members left their posts. This is the first unionwide strike against GM since 1970 and the first work stoppage by the union since a 54-day walkout in 1998 at a parts-making facility in Flint, Michigan, that cost GM $3 billion.

GM spokesman Dan Flores said in a statement: “The bargaining involves complex, difficult issues that affect the job security of our U.S. work force and the long-term viability of the company. We are fully committed to working with the UAW to develop solutions together to address the competitive challenges facing General Motors.”

Despite the strike, the union said it would remain at the negotiating table with GM.

Past experience may have created different expectations for each side. Last year, GM and the UAW established a $15 billion health care trust for retirees through 2011. Retirees, for the first time, are expected to pay $792 in annual health care costs they weren’t paying a year earlier. The savings equaled $3.1 billion—enough to help GM make a profit. The UAW saw it as a concession that would be returned in kind; GM, on the other hand, saw it as precedent, says Kristin Dziczek, senior project manager at the Center for Automotive Research in Detroit.

“The UAW, going in, was like, ‘We’ll help you on health care if you give us job security and other things,’ ” she says. “And GM’s position is, ‘You’ll help us on health care and you’ll help us on a lot of other things.’ And that’s a hard place to be.”

Negotiations also appear to have reached an impasse regarding the future of the union’s jobs bank (in which GM pays workers during a layoff or pays them to perform “nontraditional work” like community service); the creation of a two-tier wage system; and the outsourcing of non-production jobs to third parties, which the UAW agreed to do at a plant in Dundee, Michigan, operated by the Global Engine Manufacturing Alliance.

The GEMA plant, which makes engines for Chrysler, Mitsubishi and Hyundai, has UAW-represented contractors who work alongside UAW line workers. The unprecedented arrangement breaks the longstanding union tradition of having all employees at the same plant work under the same contract agreement.

That concession, made in 2001, could come back to haunt the union as it takes the unusual step of calling its first nationwide strike in 37 years.

—Jeremy Smerd