Here are 2011′s most unusual (and very candid) excuses for being late to work, rounded up from hiring managers themselves:

• “My cat had the hiccups.”
• “I thought I had won the lottery.” (She hadn’t.)
• “I had to take a personal call from the state governor.” (Turned out to be true).
• “I got distracted watching the TODAY Show.”
• “My angry roommate cut the cord to his phone charger, so it didn’t charge and my alarm didn’t go off.”
• “I believe my commute time should count toward my work hours.”
• “A fox stole my car keys.”
• “My leg was trapped between the subway car and the platform.” (Also turned out to be true.)
• “I wasn’t late because I had no intention of getting to work before 9:00 a.m.” (Employee’s start time was 8:00 a.m.)
• “I was late because of a job interview with another firm.”

What’s your best late to work excuse?

To read the entire story, visit

http://thehiringsite.careerbuilder.com/2012/01/13/2011s-strangest-late-to-work-excuses/

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims the discount tire dealer didn’t hire a single female applicant between 2008 and 2010 for 1,300 positions as tire installers, mechanics, assistant managers and similar positions, reports The Buffalo News. Of the 800 employees who work these jobs, only one has been a woman since at least 2008, the lawsuit further claims.

Mavis hired men over female applicants with better qualifications and experience, the lawsuit charges. A full review was impossible, however, because Mavis failed to maintain a file of the applications, which is a violation of federal law.

The issue of bias against female mechanics isn’t limited to Mavis. The Impact Fund, a nonprofit civil and human rights watchdog group, recently sent qualified male and female applicants to 20 nationally-known car repair outlets in the Bay Area, and found that the men were preferred 47 percent of the time, and the women 20 percent. At shops with immediate positions to fill, men were favored in 60 percent of incidences, and women in 15 percent of them. In other words, the shops were four times as likely to hire the man.

“What surprised me more than anything else was not so much that men were preferred,” Brad Seligman, the executive director of the Impact Fund, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “but by how much they were preferred and just how overt the discrimination was.”

In one instance, the employer told a female applicant straight out: “We do not hire women.”

The suit against Mavis seeks employment of the female applicants at the jobs they were wrongfully denied, as well the recovery of their past and future wages.

Story by Claire Gordon. Read the full story here:

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/02/01/tire-dealer-charged-with-bias-against-women/

 

In a series of linked studies, German researchers found a messy desk can actually lead people towards clearer thinking. The study found that visual and mental clutter forces human beings to focus and make clear simple choices and that messiness induces a need for simplicity.

 Writes Jia Liu of the University of Groningen in a paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research, ‘Messy desks may not be as detrimental as they appear to be, as the problem-solving approaches they seem to cause can boost work efficiency or enhance employees’ creativity in problem solving.’

 So… what’s on your desk?

ODDBALL INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Glassdoor.com, a jobs and career community, compiled a list of quite unique and interesting interview questions asked of job candidates throughout 2011.

Here are some of MGO’s favorites:

• If Germans were the tallest people in the world, how would you prove it? (Hewlett-Packard)
• Room, desk and car — which do you clean first? (Pinkberry)
• Would Mahatma Gandhi have made a good software engineer? (Deloitte)
• Please spell “diverticulitis.” (EMSI Engineering)
• How would you get an elephant into a refrigerator? (Horizon Group Properties)
• Are you exhaling warm air? (Walker Marketing)
• How would you cure world hunger? (Amazon.com)
• Is your college GPA reflective of your potential? (Advisory Board)
• Just entertain me for five minutes; I’m not going to talk. (Acosta)
• If you were a Microsoft Office program, which one would you be? (Summit Racing Equipment)
• What do you think of garden gnomes? (Trader Joe’s)
• Name 5 uses of a stapler without staple pins. (EvaluServe)
• How many different ways can you get water from a lake at the foot of a mountain, up to the top of the mountain? (Disney Parks & Resorts)
• Given 20 ‘destructible’ light bulbs (which breaks at certain height), and a building with 100 floors, how do you determine the height that the light bulb breaks? (Qualcomm)
• If you could be a superhero, what power would you possess? (Rain and Hail Insurance)

See full article at http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/top-25-oddball-interview-questions-2011/

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received a record 99,947 charges of employment discrimination in 2011, according to a report released today.

The commission obtained $455.6 million in relief through its administrative program and litigation in 2011.

For the second year in a row, the commission resolved more charges than it took in with 112,499 resolutions. That was 7,500 more resolutions than in 2010 — an increase of 7 percent. That leaves 78,136 pending charges, a 10 percent decrease in inventory, the first year the agency has seen a reduction since 2002.

The charges were related to these four key areas, which add up to more than 100 because some charges were in multiple categories:

•    Race discrimination – 37,334 charges or 37.4 percent of all charge
•    Sex discrimination – 28,534 charges or 28.5 percent
•    Age discrimination – 23,465 charges or 23.4 percent
•    Disability discrimination – 25,742 charges or 26 percent

The agency’s enforcement of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) produced the highest increase in financial relief among all of the statutes. The administrative relief obtained for disability discrimination charges increased by almost 35.9 percent to $103.4 million compared to $76.1 million in 2010. Back ailments were the most frequently cited impairment under the ADA, followed by other orthopedic impairments, depression and diabetes.

as reported by NAPBS’ Thursday letter

Because Frederick Taylor is listed in California as a state-approved school, he said, “I thought, ‘It can’t be completely bogus.’” In fact, he got his M.B.A. via the Internet in just a year, for less than $5,000.

That may not have been quite the bargain it seemed to be, though. “I did not realize that it did not carry the same weight as Berkeley or Stanford,” said Malakar, who emigrated from India. “But it was not a complete waste.” Malakar said his M.B.A. helped him get a job as director of product management at a software company in Cupertino.

Shakila Marando, a 33-year-old doula from El Cerrito, is seeking a bachelor’s degree in management from Frederick Taylor. Although she has been a student for nearly a year, she has never spoken to a teacher, she said. “They e-mail you a package of reading materials to read with a multiple-choice exam that is open book,” said Marando, who is from Tanzania. “For me, it is very convenient and I can work full time and read a little bit on the side. It is pretty easy.”

For Malakar, Marando and hundreds of students like them, it matters little that Frederick Taylor has no library or dorms; or that some states, including California, Michigan and Oregon, refuse to hire its graduates for many civil service jobs; or that its degrees are worthless for most professional licenses or teaching certificates.

Education experts say California leads the nation in unaccredited schools. Frederick Taylor is one of nearly 1,000 unaccredited or questionably accredited colleges and vocational schools that have been operating in the state without regular inspections or evaluations of educational quality, which is required under a state law that has rarely been enforced. State approval is basically a license to operate. Accreditation comes from national or regional agencies that review curriculums and educational standards.

“There are a lot of schools that beg the question ‘What exactly is going on in California?’” said Eyal Ben Cohen, managing director of Accredibase Limited, a company based in London that monitors diploma mills. “California has very weak oversight procedures as far as allowing an institution to operate within its borders. An institution within California can obtain a license very easily.”

Based in a cramped office on the second floor of a nondescript office building in Moraga, Frederick Taylor is run by Mansour S. Saki and Zhilla Nayeri Saki. Saki’s own curriculum vitae lists a Ph.D. from the C.S.M. Institute of Graduate Studies, which forfeited its accreditation in 2004.

Zhilla Nayeri Saki lists a doctorate in business administration from the same institution. Both are listed among Frederick Taylor’s six-person faculty, along with the couple’s 32-year-old daughter, Maryam S. Boller.

Selling diplomas over the Internet is a thriving business. The Sakis live in Orinda in a three- bedroom home with an assessed value of $1.1 million, according to property records.

The California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education is responsible for overseeing schools like Frederick Taylor, which was named for a late-19th-century management consultant. But in interviews, state officials conceded that many unaccredited schools had operated with state approval for decades without regular inspections. Frederick Taylor initially received approval to award degrees in 1994, but state records do not show that it was ever inspected.

In October, state officials renewed the school’s application to operate, again without a visit.

“They received approval because the eight-page application that they filled out was in compliance with the law,” said Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the state Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the postsecondary education bureau.

Frederick Taylor charges $5,212 for a bachelor’s degree or a master’s in business administration. The academic requirements are less stringent than those at accredited universities. Full-time M.B.A. students at the University of California’s Haas School of Business at Berkeley, for example, must complete 51 semester units of course work. Frederick Taylor requires 32 units.

In a brief interview recently, Saki defended his school’s quality but said he had no plans to apply for accreditation from an organization recognized by the United States Department of Education.

“Licensing organizations and the civil service department in Michigan are entitled to set their own selection policies,” Saki said in a subsequent e-mail. “For some reasons, they have decided to disallow graduates of state-approved schools to join their organizations.”

Two people who were listed as faculty members on Frederick Taylor’s Web site and its course catalog said they no longer worked there when they were contacted by phone.

One of them, Pamela Berkman, a production manager at John Wiley & Sons, was listed as a faculty member but said she had not taught at the school for at least five years. Robert Deer, who teaches marketing and business courses in Florida, said he was hired to teach at Frederick Taylor about a year ago but had not been contacted to teach a class.

“I would not have applied for the job if I had known they were unaccredited,” Deer said.

Deer’s and Berkman’s names disappeared from the faculty list soon after a reporter contacted them about the school.

Saki said his school had as many as 500 students, many from Europe, Asia or Africa. He declined to elaborate on how foreign students were recruited or how many American students were enrolled.

A branch of Frederick Taylor University, called Frederick Taylor International University, joined with recruiters based in India, China and other countries to enroll students, most of them from abroad. After officials in Hawaii found the school had failed to notify students that it was unaccredited, and falsely claimed it was licensed by the state, among other state violations, the school was closed in 2001 and ordered to pay a $35,000 fine.

California regulators say they concern themselves only with whether schools abide by California law, in keeping their promises to students.

“The only thing we can go by is what they have been doing in California,” Heimerich, the consumer affairs spokesman, said. “If they are compliant with California law, then what standing do we have to take any action against them?”

Given the state’s history of lax oversight, it now faces the enormous challenge of completing roughly 1,300 compliance inspections by its stated goal of fall 2013.

“The former staff had more of a consultant role,” said Joanne Wenzel, the deputy bureau chief of the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education. “Now we are trying to bring them into compliance to regulate them” and make sure they follow state laws. “There weren’t a lot of teeth in the old law. We have moved away from that in the new law. We’ve gone to a consumer protection stance.”

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/15ex1)

The settlement announced Wednesday with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is part of a national government crackdown on hiring policies that can hurt blacks and Hispanics.

EEOC officials said the company’s policy of not hiring workers with arrest records disproportionately excluded more than 300 black applicants. The policy barred applicants who had been arrested, but not convicted of a crime, and denied employment to others who were convicted of minor offenses.

Using arrest and conviction records to deny employment can be illegal if it’s irrelevant for the job, according to the EEOC, which enforces the nation’s employment discrimination laws. The agency says such blanket policies can limit job opportunities for minorities with higher arrest and conviction rates than whites.

The company has since adopted a new criminal background policy and plans to make jobs available to victims of the old policy if they are still interested in jobs at Pepsi and are qualified for the openings.

“I commend Pepsi’s willingness to reexamine its policy and modify it to ensure that unwarranted roadblocks to employment are removed,” EEOC Chairwoman Jacqueline Berrien said in a statement.

Pepsi Beverage spokesman Dave DeCecco said the company’s criminal background check policy has always been neutral and that the EEOC did not find any intentional discrimination. He said after the issue was first raised in 2006, the company worked with the EEOC to revise its background check process “to create a workplace that is as diverse and inclusive as possible.”

“We are committed to promoting diversity and inclusion and we have been widely recognized for our efforts for decades,” DeCecco said.

He said the new policy would take a more “individualized approach” in considering the applicant’s criminal history against the particular job being sought.

Pepsi Beverages is PepsiCo’s beverage manufacturing, sales and distribution operating unit in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Under the settlement, the company will provide the EEOC with regular reports on its hiring practices and offer antidiscrimination training to its hiring personnel and managers.

About 73 percent of major employers report that they always check on applicants’ criminal records, while 19 percent do so for select job candidates, according to a 2010 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management.

But increased federal scrutiny of such policies has led some companies to reevaluate their hiring process. Pamela Devata, a Chicago employment lawyer who has represented companies trying to comply with EEOC’s requirements, said there has been an uptick over the past year in EEOC charges over the use of background checks.

“The EEOC has taken a very aggressive enforcement posture on the use of criminal background and criminal history,” Devata said.

The commission held a special meeting on the topic last summer, and Devata said employers have been expecting the EEOC to issue more specific guidance.

EEOC officials have said, for example, that an old drunken driving conviction may not be relevant to a clerical job, but a theft conviction may disqualify someone from working at a bank.

Julie Schmid, acting director of the EEOC’s Minneapolis office, said the EEOC recommends that employers consider the nature and gravity of offenses, the time that has passed since conviction or completion of a sentence, and the nature of the job sought.

“We hope that employers with unnecessarily broad criminal background check policies take note of this agreement and reassess their policies to ensure compliance” with antidiscrimination laws, Schmid said in a written statement.

To read more, please visit http://news.yahoo.com/pepsi-beverages-pays-3-1m-racial-bias-case-163722194.html

Introduced by Assemblyman Michael Allen (D-Santa Rosa/San Rafael), California AB 1450 would add Chapter 2.5 (commencing with Section 1812.50953) to Title 2.91 of Part 4 of Division 3 of the Civil Code and Chapter 3.95 (commencing with Section 1046) to Part 3 of Division 2 of the Labor Code, relating to employment.

California AB 1450 would add protections for unemployed jobseekers to existing law that contains provisions defining
unlawful discrimination and employment practices by employers and employment agencies. The bill would make it unlawful, unless based on a bona fide occupational qualification or any other provision of law, for:

An employer to knowingly or intentionally refuse to consider for employment or refuse to offer employment to an individual because of the individual’s status as unemployed, publish an advertisement or announcement for any job that includes provisions pertaining to an individual’s status as unemployed, as specified, or direct or request that an employment agency take an individual’s status as unemployed into account in screening or referring applicants for employment.

An employment agency to knowingly or intentionally refuse to consider or refer an individual for employment because of the individual’s status as unemployed, limit, segregate, or classify individuals in any manner that may limit their access to information about jobs or referral for consideration of jobs because of their status as unemployed, or publish an advertisement or announcement, as described above with respect to employers.

If passed, California AB 1450 would also subject an employer or employment agency who violates the new provisions to civil penalties that increase as the number of violations increase:

1. An amount not to exceed one thousand dollars ($1,000) for the first violation.
2. An amount not to exceed five thousand dollars ($5,000) for the second violation.
3. An amount not to exceed ten thousand dollars ($10,000) for each subsequent violation.

The full text of California Assembly Bill No. 1450 (AB 1450) is available at:  http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/asm/ab_1401-1450/ab_1450_bill_20120105_introduced.pdf.

To read more, please visit http://www.examiner.com/workplace-issues-in-san-francisco/california-ab-1450-would-prohibit-discrimination-against-unemployed-jobseekers

Geisinger Health System’s smoke-free health policy will go into effect on Feb. 1, according to KKTV.com.

“Not only do we want to practice what we preach, but we also want our employees to feel healthy, we want our patients and visitors to feel that they are in a healthy environment. So it’s an overall commitment to the well-being of all those people,” Geisinger spokeswoman Marcy Marshall told the Vancouver Sun.

Those exposed to second hand smoke will be exempt from the test, which screens applicants for cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, snuff, nicotine patches, nicotine gum and cigars.

For those who fail the test, the hospital says applicants can reapply after six months, KKTV.com reported.

According to CNN, Pennsylvania is among 19 states that allow employers to screen job applicants for signs of smoking.

While there’s certainly an incentive to keep employees healthy for work, the economic benefit of having non-smokers on the payroll is also notable. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts a $3,391 price tag on each employee who smokes: $1,760 in lost productivity and $1,623 in excess medical expenditures.

For the full story click http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/05/hospital-quits-hiring-smokers_n_1187028.html