I have a new blog site. You can find it at www.wordonemploymentlaw.com. You will notice a few changes now and other changes as time goes on. For the most part, however, it will continue to provide substantive employment law and human resources content, as well as the attempt to draw employment lessons from current events and popular culture.

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A cartoon posted by Cultural Offering and one posted by Eclecticity caught my eye. They have a common theme. Check them out for a laugh, albeit a sad one.

What would be in your perfect world? Execupundit has a perfect world that sounds pretty good — almost perfect.

As the following video clip demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt, some employers have been able to operate as though there were no recession at all. If we could all be as smart, maybe as lucky, the economy would be roaring back. Eat your hearts out!

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It’s no exaggeration to say that workplace violence is any employer’s worst nightmare, whether or not there’s resulting litigation. Given today’s economy, the risk of the nightmare has increased.

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CEOs are making lots of news with emails. Yesterday, I posted about the Michelle Obama-Cheeta email forwarded by a Nashville CEO. Today’s post is about a CEO’s email to employees that’s not deemed offensive in the way the Obama-Cheeta email was, but offensive nonetheless.

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Straight from the Volunteer State comes a clear message to all employers and employees: “Don’t do this!” A sub-message might be: “Fix your CEO’s computer so he can’t forward emails to anyone!”

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There’s a growing body of evidence that layoffs — or even “persistent perceived job insecurity” — can adversely affect employee health and life expectancy. A recent New York Times article details the travails of laid-off steelworkers in New York. If an employee has a heart attack and dies after being laid off, is the employer liable?

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Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it’s unlawful to discriminate on the basis of sex or gender. So, an employer can’t give better jobs to men, use sexual stereotypes to make job decisions, etc. Can an employer use women instead of men to, let’s say, deal with other women because women do that better than men?

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The current recession has already made permanent changes in the private sector’s employer-employee relations. Its now beginning to make those changes in the public or government sector. The private sector overreacted by laying off hundreds of thousands of employees but has now discovered that it can operate with fewer employees. The government at all levels is out of money and can no longer afford to pay police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, and a host of other public employees whose work we take for granted.

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