New Sheriff in Town

All us HR types figured we see a shift to employee-supportive legislation once Arnold left, and there is much evidence to support it.

Recent events include the passage of a bill allowing Agriculture Workers to unionize without a secret ballot election.

Pending legislation (AB 325) includes a mandate that employers provide up to 4 unpaid bereavement days and the employee can sue the employer if they feel discriminated against because they requested or took the leave. The bill is in committee.

AB 877 is a Gender Non-Discrimination Act that adds transgender employees to the protected class. Sexual orientation is already protected from discrimination and this law would add gender identity. This bill has passed the Assembly and is now under review in the Senate.

We can recite my mantra in unison: If we hadn't chained women and children to sewing machines for 18 hours a day in airless, locked warehouses, we wouldn't have needed unions and these kinds of laws. Same goes for farm labor, the use of short hoes and such. In the name of profit we have been horrible to our employees for over a hunderd years and now we are paying for the sins of our fathers.

The good news is that in the last 20 years our management techniques have reflected the realization that our employees are the key to our success. If we take care of them, they take care of the customers, and help breed our success.

Now we wait for the tipping point: when the majority of employers are so good to employees that these laws are no longer needed. My experience working with the wide variety of employers I do offers me hope that this point may be seen in the next 20 years.

Deva Vu All Over Again

While attending Cal Poly in the late 60's and early 70's I took a class in Chicano Studies. It was one of my first experiences in learning about something as it was happening -- Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers were organizing in the San Joaquin Valley as I was studying the shameful history of farm labor. I had a classmate who grew up on a farm in Delano, so one day I joined her in picking cotton in the morning and grapes in the afternoon. That was a back breaking eye opener that has stayed with me to this day.

These memories came back yesterday as I heard about cabbage laborers threatening a sit down work stoppage in the Salinas area. I am more aware of the employer perspective than I was in 1970, but still know this is incredibly hard work for $8.00 an hour. As far as I know, short hoes (so a foreman could spot at a glance any worker standing up straight -- and therefor, not working) are gone, along with deductions for rent and food that lowered the hourly wage to pennies.

And now we have heat illness safeguards to protect the workers.

And I also know that unions can be as guilty of greed as any farmer ever was.

Is this cycle ever going to end?

THOSE SUMMERTIME BLUES

Those Cal Poly MBA students I am mentoring as they prepare to enter the wonderful world of work are telling me tales of unreturned phone calls and emails, and of their sense that the beautifully crafted cover letters and resumes they submit are entering some black hole somewhere. And these are student offering to work for free, for heaven’s sake! They just want summer internships. (On a related note, the April edition of the Reader’s Digest includes a quote from a long time HR Director, who says: “People assume someone’s reading their cover letter. I haven’t read one in 11 years.”)

Be glad you’re not a high school student trying to save up for a car or college this summer. The latest word from whoever predicts these things is that summertime work is predicted to be a record low. Only 1 in 4 teenagers will land a job in the coming months as a result of the still-poor job market. The summer employment rate among U.S. teenagers was projected at between 25-27%, a record post World War II low.