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If you are a supervisor in your workplace and you die at work, there is a 10% chance that it was murder. If you’re not in management, the chances of your case being a murder drops to 7%. Gizmodo crunched the statistics on the 4,547 American workplace deaths in 2010 and found some other interesting tidbits:
Overall, “Transportation and material moving occupations”—people who work operating vehicles—dominated the death list, with 1,115 killed on the job. Only seven percent of them were murdered.
The 45-54 year-old bracket made up the plurality of deaths, with a full quarter. 16% of them plummeted to their demises.
The deadliest state to work in? Texas, with 456 fatalities. The safest? New Hampshire, with only 5. West Virginia won the explosion death contest, with 34—likely from all that coal mining, which is extremely dangerous and explosion-prone.
Happy Labor Day! Link -via the Presurfer
Psst!
Want to earn more money? The secret to earning more money in the workplace
is ... to be mean.
That's right: a new study found that agreeable workers earn significantly less than their meaner counterparts.
The researchers examined "agreeableness" using self-reported survey data and found that men who measured below average on agreeableness earned about 18% more—or $9,772 more annually in their sample—than nicer guys. Ruder women, meanwhile, earned about 5% or $1,828 more than their agreeable counterparts.
"Nice guys are getting the shaft," says study co-author Beth A. Livingston, an assistant professor of human resource studies at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
400 Excuses & Lies For The Workplace – $9.95
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The title of this article, Cutting Edge Office Wear, is intentional word play. It ties in with the fact that thirty-five years ago, I predicted that there would be a fashion trend of clipped, torn or ripped clothing in the future. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and ‘70s, it was not hard for me to imagine an unstoppable, outward radiation from the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury district across the U.S. of hippy lifestyle habits as well as clothing styles. Here in grey are original drawings from 1975 showing future office employees wearing patched and ragged businesswear. Colored drawings are from 1983.
Of course, everyday clothing has been marketed looking faded, pre-worn, and pre-torn for quite a while now. But ripped dresses, sports coats and trousers as office wear, as I predicted decades ago, have not yet shown up on the racks of Macy’s or The Emporium. While office wear has not succumbed to the “torn” trend I feel it is close to succumbing to it. For example, expensive business and evening jackets for young women are now sold with rough edges and fringes.
There are conflicting factors now that affect office wear style trends. The adoption of Casual Friday policies in many companies tended to relax office clothing standards in general, and some high tech companies in Silicon Valley during the High Tech Boom even went so far as to endorse an office apparel policy that could be described as Wear Whatever Is Comfortable. You could basically wear at work what you would wear at home, above and beyond underwear or pajamas.
Yet fear of job loss, which has accelerated rapidly as the ranks of the unemployed has continued to swell, has undercut any feeling of being relaxed at work! Many employees, as described in Barbara Ehrenreich’s excellent book, This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation (2008), remain at jobs that they dislike, in fear of being fired and losing what increasingly matters most in their life – their health benefits.
Thus, some of my old predictions of ever-increasing laxity and casualness in work wear standards may have been halted in their tracks! A new office outfit that morphs sweatpants with formal office wear seems less likely to happen now than it did a few decades ago.
Nonetheless, I still stand by my prediction of the eventual adoption of the office jumpsuit (1983), because of the idea’s extraordinary practicality.
Ideally, the spectrum of acceptable office wear should expand, not contract. Clothing that tends to feel cool and fresh during hot summer weather like cutoffs, short pants, and miniskirts could in theory offer style cues to designers looking for ideas for sophisticated office wear.
It would be nice to think that nothing should prevent the design of imaginative, bold office wear statements by top fashion designers. A frankly whimsical clothing line, As Above-So Below, could be a big seller. Or perhaps not.
Maybe I need to acknowledge that in 2010, American office workers are more often than not hunched down, cowering in fear inside their cubicles, not wishing to stand out. They do not want to even think of making a single mistake on the job, and prefer to toil quietly without upsetting their boss. A frank and bold office clothing style – one that earlier seemed possible at least in my imagination – cannot as easily be pictured today. Plus, since the early 1980s when I designed my As Above-So Below clothing line, numerous humorless and puritanical laws have been passed – for good and understandable reasons — to deal with sexual harassment problems at the office. An employee would not wish to show up in court to defend him or herself against sexual harassment charges, wearing one of my suits!
Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website..
Sleeping while at work is generally considered to be unacceptable behavior by most U.S. employers. With some types of work falling asleep can be dangerous, while with other types such as office work, falling asleep implies one’s failure to be available for productive work during a specified time. There is no tradition in this country of a post-lunch or afternoon Siesta. Yet dozens of studies agree that the U.S. is a sleep-deprived nation. A National Commission on Sleep Disorders, 2003 reported: “Sleep deprivation costs $150 billion each year in higher stress and reduced worker productivity.”
In the early 1980s I tried to imagine desks that would accommodate an employee’s need for a quick nap. While I was working on these designs, the American office itself was changing. The purpose and design of the desk was being redefined. The Computer Revolution had arrived.
Here, an employee takes a break from working on her Mac Plus. She climbs into her soft, comfortable and soundproofed File Cabinet Sleeping Quarters for a quick nap.
more …
The "mockumentary" short film Sign Language is unexpectedly heart-warming.
"My workplace is wonderful, and I want to share it." These
are the opening words of Ben – a man who holds a sign for a living, and
loves his job more than almost anything. But today is his last day. What happens next?
The film was made for a short film competition on workplaces. See it and the other competitors, and vote for your favorite. Link
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by longbird.
You may think you have a difficult, greedy, egotistical boss, but you haven’t met anyone like the boss who locked his employees inside a factory, or the boss who paid in script only redeemable at his stores, or the one who made his employees analyze animal poop. Then there was Bryant and May who decided to save money on the material they made matches from.
They had a better idea. They had been making their matches with the extremely flammable but otherwise safe red phosphorous. But there was this other kind, white phosphorous, that was way cheaper. And there was absolutely no downside.
Oh, except it would literally eat your face off when you handled it.
The description of what happened to the employees may make you queasy. Read about all six horrific bosses at Cracked. Link
Ever wonder just how much that meeting will cost your employer? By entering the estimated average salary of everyone in the meeting, the number of employees and when the meeting started, you get to watch just how much money is wasted on these pointless get togethers. I can’t wait until this becomes an iPhone app you can stealthy bring to the meeting with you.
Link Via BoingBoing
