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7/24/05

ON THE JOB
30% of workers admit to playing hooky

Summer is here, the beach beckons, and US workers are playing hooky.

Such are the findings of a poll of 2,202 US workers commissioned by Hudson, the professional staffing firm. The survey found that 30 percent admitted to taking a sick day when they were not truly sick. Most - about 49 percent - said they just needed a break from the daily demands of work. Twenty-two percent took a day off to care for a sick relative.

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Who's most likely to feign illness? Those between 18 and 29, and people who earn less than $20,000 per year.

"Surprisingly, of those who played hooky, two in five, or 41 percent, said they believed their bosses knew they were not actually sick," said the report. "Generally, women were more likely to think they were getting away with the practice than men." Fifty-three percent of the women thought their employer believed their excuse of not working compared to 46 percent of the men, the report said.

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"With the busy pace of today's working environment, employees are taking matters into their own hands to combat stress and take care of their families, often with the tacit approval of their manager," said Alicia Barker, vice president of human resources at Hudson.

The study also found that:

• 29 percent of the men polled had called in sick when they were not.
• 31 percent of women did.
• 24 percent of people ages 40 to 49 have played hooky and most needed to take care of a sick relative.

WORKPLACE
Canton firm practices 'fair' employment

At Equal Exchange, equality begins in the workplace.

The Canton firm, which buys coffee from developing countries at fair market value, is among a handful of employers whose employees are worker-owners who elect the chief executive, decide the firm's direction, and share in profits.

Of the firm's nine board members, six are employees and three are outsiders. Board members, who are also elected, serve three years.

"A warehouse worker who is on the board is there to represent the organization as a whole and not the job he holds," said Rink Dickinson, one of the firm's two chief executives and a cofounder. "This model is rare, but it is beginning to evolve internationally."

Founded in 1986, the firm sells organic and gourmet coffee, tea, sugar, cocoa, and chocolate bars. The items are grown by 28 farmer co-ops in 14 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Under the fair trade certification system, farmer cooperatives must work for the good of their entire community, seek to minimize the impact of farming and harvesting on the local environment, and their leaders must be elected by co-op members.

In accordance with that model, Equal Exchange developed its own method of "fair" employment 19 years ago. Under that system, financial statements are posted on bulletin boards, the top executive earns no more than three times the annual wage of the lowest paid employee, and workers share equally in profits. By contrast, the average chief executive in the United States earns 300 times the lowest paid worker at his or her firm, according to United for a Fair Economy, a Boston nonprofit.

"At a lot of organizations, people do not even know if their employer is profitable," said Dickinson. "If the company is private, they may not have access to this information. Even if the company is public, they might not have control over the information or how it is reported. That doesn't happen at Equal Exchange."

DISABLED STUDENTS
Boston gathering aims to improve job climate

Fifteen years after the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act, disabled workers are still struggling to gain more than a toehold in the business world.

Certainly, the act has had a huge impact on the country's 50 million Americans with disabilities. The law has led to the installation of railings, ramps, parking for handicapped people, curb cuts, and technical devices that can assist people with disabilities in their daily lives and work.

And the law has helped thousands in their quests for viable jobs. But less than a week before the 15th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the unemployment rate for the disabled is 40 percent.

Last week, the quest for decent jobs with decent pay continued when corporations and universities gathered in Boston to discuss ways to assist college students with disabilities find jobs. The reason for the meeting: While other college students flock to university career services before graduation, students with disabilities rarely rely on such services.

"As a result, they lack career components like internships, mentoring, resume writing, and critical experiential education building blocks and that unfairly renders them uncompetitive versus their peers without disabilities," Tara Susan Hartman-Squire, a spokeswoman for the college students who helped sponsor the meeting, said in a statement.

Among the companies and colleges that came together last week to discuss the issue and encourage participation by students and corporate hiring were: Merck & Co., Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, IBM, NASA, Motorola, Harvard University, Bentley College, Babson College, Northeastern University, and Middlesex College. The conference was hosted by Merck Research Laboratories.

Deborah Dagit, chief diversity officer for Merck, the New Jersey pharmaceutical firm, said that over the next few years a changing workplace and a tightening labor market could force employers to more aggressively recruit people with disabilities.

Studies suggest, however, that companies have a long way to go. For example, a 2003 report by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, found that just one in four US companies employs workers with disabilities.

LAW SCHOOL GRADS
Private practice pay in Hub tops US median

Law school graduates in Boston will earn a median salary of $125,000 if they choose private practice, according to the National Association of Law Professionals.

NALP's report, "Jobs & JD's: Employment and Salaries of New Law Graduates," is based on data supplied by 178 accredited law schools that represented 92 percent of law grads in the class of 2004.

"In Boston, there are a lot of big firms," said Judith Collins, director of research for NALP in Washington, D.C. "That higher concentration of big firms has made Boston's median salary for new graduates higher than the overall median for the country."

Overall, 56.8 percent of new graduates in Boston chose private practice last year; 17.8 percent chose judicial clerkships; 13.1 percent are working in business, 5.6 percent took government jobs, 3.7 percent took positions at public interest organizations and the rest either chose to work in academia or did not supply information about the employer, said Collins.

When the association looked at private practice salaries across the country, it found that the median income was $80,000 for grads who landed work at law firms and $60,000 for graduates in business and industry.

In all, 56.2 percent of US law graduates chose to work in private practice, 11.7 percent are working in government, 11.1 percent are judicial clerks, and 4.9 percent are working in public interest jobs. By contrast, 12 percent went to the business sector. The remaining graduates - about 4.3 percent - chose jobs in the academic sector as teachers or academic administrators.

Diane E. Lewis can be reached at .

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