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Women managers in the United States are paid 81 cents for every dollar earned by male managers, according to a government report released Tuesday.
The 19-cent wage gap marks a slight narrowing from a study seven years earlier that showed women managers making 79 cents for each man’s dollar, said the report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The study compared U.S. Census Bureau data from 2000 to 2007. Get the full story »
New York’s bedbugs don’t discriminate. They’ve infested dorm rooms as well as posh offices on Park Avenue, as Winston & Strawn discovered this week.
The Chicago-based law firm is dealing with an infestation of bedbugs at its New York office at 200 Park Ave., the MetLife Building. As of Friday morning, the landlord had not resolved the problem. Get the full story »
Eight Illinois companies were among the 100 companies nationwide deemed best by Working Mother magazine, whose 2010 list opens a window onto a widening array of corporate assistance programs.
Tuition assistance, a concierge service to help with errands, leadership training for women, assistance for employees with special-needs children, paid maternity and paternity leave, and extensive flexible work arrangements were among the benefits at the top 10 firms. Get the full story »
From USA Today | Women earned 82.8 percent of the median weekly wage men do in the second quarter of 2010, the smallest pay gap ever recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The dramatic gains in the last decade — women earned 76.1 percent of men’s wages in the same period a decade ago — has been attributed, in part, to hits men’s wages are taking in the recession. Get the full story >>
Employees talk outside the scene of a workplace shooting at the Kraft facility in Philadelphia. (For the Daily News/ Joseph Kaczmarek)
Minutes after a woman was suspended from her job at a Kraft Foods Inc. plant and was escorted out, she returned with a handgun and opened fire, killing two people and critically injuring a third before being taken into custody, police said.
The shootings occurred shortly after 8:30 p.m. Thursday inside a northeast Philadelphia plant where workers for the nation’s largest food manufacturer, headquartered in Northfield, makes cookies and crackers. Get the full story »
A crowded CTA car on the Red Line. (Red Eye photo)
Just take some deep breaths, Chicagoans.
Chicago ranked eighth on Portfolio.com’s listing of the “Most Stressful Places in America,” with a stress index of 4.366. Detroit was deemed the most stressed-out metro area in the nation, with a stress index of 9.026 points.
Nos. 2 through 7 are Los Angeles, Cleveland, Riverside, Calif., St. Louis, Mo., New York and New Orleans. Get the full story »
Northern Trust Corp., McDonald’s Corp. and State Farm Insurance Cos. made the list of Black Enterprise magazine’s “40 best companies for diversity.” The three companies also made the list in 2009. Get the full story »
Strained by rising health care costs and the sour economy, U.S. employers are pressing workers to shoulder the added burden alone as employees pay higher insurance premiums and more out-of-pocket expenses for their medical care.
The average employer-provided family health plan now costs workers nearly $4,000 a year, up 14 percent from last year, according to a survey by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust.
That is the largest annual increase since the survey began in 1999 and a marked change from previous years when employers generally split the cost of rising premiums with their employees.
Productivity in the spring fell by the largest amount in nearly four years while labor costs rose, signals that companies may have reached the limits of squeezing more work out of fewer workers.
Corporate America must increasingly find ways to accommodate employees who need to take time off to take care of a sick or dying spouse or parent, experts say.
An estimated 48.9 million people, or 21.2 percent of the U.S. population, already provide care to an adult annually, according to a 2009 study by the National Alliance for Caregiving. But that number is expected to increase. Get the full story »
From the Chicago Sun-Times | The average raise for Chicago workers this year was 2.6 percent, slightly higher than the 2.4 to 2.5 percent national average, according to report from Lincolnshire-based Hewitt Associates. Get the full story>>
Hyatt Hotels Corp. faced the wrath of religious leaders Tuesday as hotel workers called for a boycott of three Hyatt branded Chicago hotels.
“I think it is immoral. It’s immoral. It’s immoral for Hyatt to be treating its workers the way they are treating them: A year without a contract,” Rev. Calvin Morris boomed into a microphone outside Hyatt’s downtown headquarters. “We’re going to boycott these hotels, and we do so with good conscience.”
The world’s largest group of Jewish Clergy, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, has pledged its support for the worker-led boycotts, which with the addition Tuesday of Hyatt Regency Chicago, Hyatt O’Hare and Park Hyatt in Chicago, now number 10 at Hyatt properties across the country. Approximately 250 rabbis, cantors and other Jewish leaders have also signed a pledge in support of the boycotts. Get the full story »
The number of workers who died on the job fell by 17 percent last year to the lowest level in nearly two decades, as workers logged fewer hours during the recession, the Labor Department said Thursday.
The 4,340 workplace fatalities recorded in 2009 was the smallest total since the Bureau of Labor Statistics first began tracking the data in 1992. It’s the second straight year that fatal work injuries have reached a historic low, following a 10 percent drop in 2008. Get the full story »
Following a string of suicides at its Chinese factories, Foxconn Technology Group raised workers’ wages and installed safety nets on buildings to catch would-be jumpers. Now the often secretive manufacturer of the iPhone and other electronics is holding rallies for its workers to raise morale at the heavily regimented factories.
The outreach to workers shows how Foxconn has been shaken by the suicides and the bad press they have attracted to the normally publicity shy company. The latest suicide — the 12th this year — occurred August 4 when a 22-year-old woman jumped from her factory dormitory in eastern Jiangsu province. Get the full story »
With cell-phone related crashing costing $43 billion a year and average claims costing companies an average $100,000 more corporate fleet managers are tightening policies on texting and talking on the phone while using company cars.
Now, about 63 percent of its companies have a written policy prohibiting the use of phones and other wireless communication devices while driving. Of companies that ban the practice, 32.7 percent bar any electronic device, while 67.3 percent say employees may use hands-free but not hand-held devices.
