"Research" shows that some people would sacrifice a lot -- even their daily showers -- in order to telecommute. Really? Please, let them telecommute. Or send soap with a company logo on it -- it's all about engaging the worker to promote productivity. 

Just when things seem so depressing -- long-term unemployment, lack of help for the poor, fighting around the world, comes a little Valentine's Day love from the public relations machine that cranks out totally silly press releases. 

This one is so "charming" that I can't resist passing it along.

According to TeamViewer, a company that provides software for telecommuting, people are so eager to telecommute that they'd give up texting, social media, shopping, chocolate, a salary increase, vacation days -- even their spouses, in order to telecommute.

I think telecommuting is wise for these people who'd be willing to give up their spouses, salary increases or vacation days for telecommuting. That way their bosses won't see how stupid they are and they might keep their jobs. Just a thought.

TeamViewer bases its "research" on a survey of 2,500 adults conducted by Harris Interactive and then goes on to say that the survey is not based on a probability sample and there is no way to estimate any theoretical sampling error. 

Nobody's knocking telecommuting. Lots of people work at home, get a lot done and manage, also, to shower, love their spouses and eat chocolate. And if someone throws in a load of wash in between conference calls, it's all good. Don't forget stain remover for that chocolate.

"While the results of this survey may seem amusing, these findings show that telecommuting will be a force to be reckoned with in the future,” Holger Felgner, Team Viewer's general manager, said in the press release. “TeamViewer gives people the freedom to work from anywhere at any time and on any device."

Next Sunday, 14 suburban churches will hold a day of prayer for the unemployed and underemployed. The timing couldn't be better. Congress is still trying to figure out how or whether to fund continued unemployment benefits even as Pennsylvania is imposing new rules that will limit eligibility for benefits.

I'm going to publish the prayer here with the urge that all places of worship consider incorporating it into their services.

Spearheading the effort is Cheryl Spaulding, who heads Joseph's People, a network of support groups for the unemployed that she and a fellow member of St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in Downingtown started nearly two decades ago in the throes of an earlier recession. Spaulding said she hopes the prayer service will help people remember the unemployed and as well as those who have taken jobs well below their skills and experience just to make ends meet.

"These people are being forgotten," she said.

Her belief is that society and government wants to overlook these casualties of the recession, particularly the long-term unemployed. I've met people who have been out of work for more than two years. They are not lazy or incompetent. The average length of unemployment is now 40.1 weeks, down from November, but up from a year ago. There are 12.8 million unemployed Americans, and the number nearly doubles if people forced to work part time because they can't find full time work, and people too discouraged to look for work are included.

I'm planning to cut out this prayer and hang it up on my desk, so I can pray for the people I've written about, especially one woman who moved to Las Vegas in hopes of making a brighter future. She and her boyfriend ended up living in a car in a Good Will parking lot.  Haven't heard from her lately, but I hope she's OK.

It might be useful for congregations to ask anyone who has been out of work or who has a family member out of work in the past year or so to raise a hand, prior to the prayer.  You can click here to go to the page of the organization sponsoring the day of prayer.  St. Joseph's plans to collect prayer requests from congregants who are seeking work, or who hope for success at a job interview, and then send those requests out via email to the congregation's prayer circle.

The prayer, and the introduction to it, are below:    

It costs money to have a global workforce, and the way to offset that cost, writes Mercer, the huge human consultancy, is to try to "localize" compensation. In other words, try to get American employees, as much as possible, to accept the same pay, or close to it, as the locals receive (i.e. less).

Today the company put out a list of 12 pointers for expatriate staff. I thought it was interesting. Some issues raised were to consider whether the employee is in the expat assignment to perform critical strategic functions or to prepare for advancement in the company. Compensation for those two categories of workers may follow different philosophies. Mercer also suggests paying attention to how currency fluctuations impact compensation and to how families adjust. Also important, the company said, is a developing a plan to transition the returning expat into American corporate culture. Obviously, job one is to make sure there's a safety plan in place, given all the weirdness in the world.

I'm copying Mercer's pointers and commentary here:

Mercer’s action items for employers with globally mobile employees are:

When an employee badmouths her company on Facebook, is it grounds for dismissal? It depends, is the answer from the National Labor Relations Board.  The cases detailed by the NLRB make fascinating reading.

Here's the NLRB press release web site. Some highlights:

To help provide further guidance, NLRB Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon has released a second report describing social media cases reviewed by his office.

The Operations Management Memo covers 14 cases, half of which involve questions about employers' social media policies. Five of those policies were found to be unlawfully broad, while one was lawful and another was found to be lawful after it was revised.

The remaining cases involved employees who were fired because of Facebook comments they had posted. Several firings were found to be unlawful because of the unlawful policies. Even so, one of those five firings was upheld because the employee’s posting was not work-related.

The report underscores two main points made in an earlier compilation of cases:

• Employer policies should not be so sweeping that they prohibit the kinds of activities protected by federal labor law, such as the discussion of wages or working conditions.

• An employee’s comments on social media are generally not protected if they are simply gripes not made in relation to employee group activities.

The Acting General Counsel has asked regional offices to send cases to them as it tries to devise a consistent approach. To date, about 75 cases have been forwarded to the office.

The challenge is that the National Labor Relations Act was written before the existence of social media. Decisions in three cases pending before the board will give further guidance as the law around social media develops. Information on the three cases can be found here, here, and here.

The problems with Philadelphia's workforce system, designed to find jobs for the unemployed, go well beyond the system's tangled and confusing organizational chart described in a report by Pew Charitable Trust's Philadelphia Research Initiative released Wednesday.

"The city suffers from a talent mismatch,” said Pew's project director, Tom Ginsberg. Job openings require workers with skills, yet one in three applicants at CareerLink need to be referred to city-run adult-literacy courses for basic mathematics, reading and writing.  At a time when the unemployment rate in the city tops 10 percent, this lack of basic readiness amounts to a crisis.

The Pew report, as explained in my story for philly.com, details lackluster job placement rates and low-employer engagement.

Yes, the numbers are bad, but the challenges are immense, said Edward Sikina, a Philadelphia Workforce Development Corp. employee who manages the CareerLink office at Suburban Station, one of five in the city. His is one of the most successful, according to an earlier report commissioned by the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board and the Philadelphia Workforce Development Corp.  Of the city's five centers, his consistently places the highest percentage of jobseekers at the lowest cost per client in jobs commanding the highest wages. 

Even so, only 46 percent who came through the door got jobs, the report said. The report is available on the PWDC's website.

“The competition out there is tremendous,” Sikina said, noting that the job developers in his office must face off against “temp agencies, companies that have their own systems, Monster, Hot Jobs, Indeed, all the job boards. It’s all those job sites and just piles of resumes that companies are receiving.”

Even so, his office has formed a successful partnership with the Center City District to help them hire the teal-coated customer service representatives who patrol Center City streets. His office also developed a specialty in health staffing, a consistently strong sector in the city and region.

Sikina said that generating jobs for CareerLink clients is tough, particularly in this economy and particularly in the public workforce system, which must accommodate the jobless who can’t find work on their own and who aren’t sought after by private-sector recruiters. “The labor market will pick and choose who they want,” he said. “We are left with the people who are hard to market.”
  

Ironically, Sikina and some of his staff may need to use CareerLink's services themselves. 

As part of a reorganization effort, the Philadelphia Workforce Development Corp., which employs Sikina and a good percentage of career counselors and business development officials in the CareerLinks, will no longer have a role in the centers. On Friday, the Workforce Investment Board posted a request for bids to run the centers, with the change to come in the spring or summer.

Mark Edwards, who heads PWDC. will keep his job and become the head of a newly formulated PhiladelphiaWorks Inc., which will supervise the contract with the new provider. Edwards said that his past experience will similar transitions leads him to believe that at least 70 percent of the PWDC employees will wind up with the new contract holder, but there are no guarantees.

"It has us in limbo," Sikina said. "You can't throw the baby out with the bath water."    

To read the complete report, click here. 

No wonder Nate Greiner lost his job as a media buyer in 2009. When the economy tanked, consumers stopped consuming, advertisers stopped advertising and nobody needed Greiner to negotiate deals for advertising time on broadcast television. When Greiner's agency lost a major client, Greiner was laid-off.

"I loved working there," he said. "Everybody had a good work ethic. Everyone was on the same page." Greiner keeps in touch with the company, R2CGroup/Cmedia, in Exton, hoping that he might be able to return when the economy picks up. That's not happening yet.

Meanwhile, Greiner spent four months working as a plant manager in his family's sausage making business in Connecticut.  But families are complicated, so for the moment, that's not an option. Plus, his wife has a secure job not too far from Greiner's home in Exton.

But, Greiner can see himself owning a small food-manufacturing business, putting his marketing smarts to good use  to promote a small array of products. His idea is to begin with just a few items, do them very well, and then expand. In terms of his job search, he spends about half his time looking for media buying jobs and the other half researching what it would take to run a business like his father's.

"The idea of running my own business appeals to me," he said. "I like getting my hands dirty in all the aspects -- manufacturing, production, human resources, accounting, regulations."

Greiner thinks his best bet is to figure out how to buy a distressed business and then build it back up. It's better, he says, than inventing something out of whole cloth, and he's not interested in franchising. The trick, he said, is convincing the owner of a distressed business to lower the price enough to make it affordable for him to buy.

"A lot of them are in denial about how much their businesses are actually worth," he said.

• Nathan Greiner
• Hometown: Exton
• Profession: Media buyer, plant manager
• Experience: Developed media campaigns for various companies, conducted market research, handled marketing data analysis. Directed and coordinated production, pricing, sales and distribution for a food company. Hired and managed staff.
• Education: Providence College, bachelor's degrees in marketing, sociology.
• E-mail address: mrnate8@hotmail.com
• Nathan Greiner's resume
• Nathan Greiner's LinkedIn profile

Read past profiles in the Looking for Work series. This is the last profile in the series. Check the Inquirer on Dec. 25 for an update.   

_{The Inquirer is not endorsing this individual as a job candidate; potential employers should do their own background checks.}

Contact staff writer Jane M. Von Bergen at 215-854-2769 or jvonbergen@phillynews.com.

Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction, but marketing and communications manager James Baraldi is turning to fiction to cope with the truth -- that after 27 years of service to one company, he was laid off in January 2010.

"Most writers have a book in their drawer," said Baraldi, who worked for Bunzl Philadelphia, a food service distribution company. This one is officially fiction, but it talks about the experiences of a man who works in a company for years and then loses his job.

Baraldi, of Drexel Hill, started his career as a journalist, working for trade magazines, but then moved into marketing. In Bunzl and its predecessor company, he found very satisfying work. He built up the company's marketing department from nothing, designing sales materials, brochures and catalogs where none had existed. Then as the web came into play, he helped move these same materials online, even helping to set up dedicated sites for the company's largest customers, among them Rita's Water Ice and Wawa. 

Luckily, his wife is employed as a teacher, so he continues to have health benefits. He spends 80 percent of his time looking for work, and has had a dozen interviews. But, he said, his previous salary seems to deter employers from hiring him, even though he'd be willing to work for far less. "I've been applying like crazy," he said. "I can't even get under-employed."

One day, he was in Center City at a wedding and he and a relative were looking at the skyline. Baraldi said he pointed to every skyscraper -- he had applied for jobs in each one. Picking up on the wedding theme,  he said, "I guess I'm always the bridesmaid, never the bride."

Besides his own situation, it depresses him that so much talent is going unused as the nation's economy simply doesn't create enough jobs.

These days, he keeps looking for work, but he admits his novel writing has slowed.

 "I'm trying to get a happy ending to this story." 

Update as of late December, 2011: Baraldi is still looking for work.

• James Baraldi
• Hometown: Drexel Hill
• Profession: Marketing communications manager
• Experience: Developed corporate and customer e-commerce sites and trained external and internal customers on ways to utilize e-commerce. Developed sales brochures, catalogs and other marketing materials. Wrote newsletters. Eliminated inventory through special marketing program. Created a vendor support program.
• Education: Temple University, bachelor's degree in communications
• E-mail address: jhbaraldi@verizon.net
• James Baraldi's resume.
• James Baraldi's Linkedin profile

Read past profiles in the Looking for Work series. The series continues here on Fridays. 

_{The Inquirer is not endorsing this individual as a job candidate; potential employers should do their own background checks.}

Contact staff writer Jane M. Von Bergen at 215-854-2769 or jvonbergen@phillynews.com.

Having spent most of his career in purchasing, Kevin T. Anderson knows how to negotiate a good deal. "It takes stubbornness and being nice," he said.

 "I don't want to talk about golf. I don't want my green fees paid. That's not my job. I don't want to go out to lunch, and I wouldn't say this,  but I wouldn't want to go out with you anyway. I don't want to wine and dine and I hate golf," he said. "It's the price. I just want better prices."

Anderson knows how carefully sales people try to find out what the purchasing agent likes, anything to give them an edge over their competitors. "Eagles tickets," he said. "That was hard to turn down, but I did it."

Anderson lost his job in 2009, but he hasn't forgotten the key elements of doing the work -- elements that apply even to personal purchases. For example, he helped someone shop for a flat-screen television that was being offered at a tremendous discount, significantly more than any place else. That raised questions for Anderson. "You have to pay attention to the specs," he said. Sure enough, after persistent questioning, he discovered that the product being offered was different by some obscure detail, except it wouldn't be obscure once the television was installed.

 "I knew something was wrong," he said.

Being a purchasing agent means becoming expert in many obscure subjects. In one job, springs, castings and fasteners need to be purchased, with a knowledge of ferrous and non-ferrous materials. In another job, it's valves, electronic components and piping connections. In all jobs, particularly in those involving the government, attention and adherence to contract specifications are extremely important,  Anderson said.

In his last job, Anderson switched gears entirely, becoming a computer technician and driving all over the place repairing computers for huge companies such as Wal-mart. He'd work all night sometimes to have the computers up and running before stores opened. "I fixed everything under the sun," he said. To him, his ability to pick up that job when he had no prior experience in it is proof that he can learn anything.

That being said, though, he'd like to return to purchasing where he adopted the professional goal of always trying to save his company the equivalent of his salary -- either by working a price break or by pursuing better terms for shipping or delivery. He has also found it very satisfying to improve company purchasing systems, so that items purchased are attributed to the right projects.

"Otherwise, how do you know you are going to make money on the job?" he said. 

Update as of December 25, 2011: Anderson is still looking for work.

• Kevin T. Anderson
• Hometown: Langhorne
• Profession: Purchasing agent, computer technician
• Experience: Purchased many different types of products. Revamped purchasing systems, computerizing them and developing new systems for inventory control and just-in-time delivery.
• Education: Philadelphia Community College, course work. American Production and Inventory Control Society, certification
• E-mail address: jgka@verizon.net
• Kevin Anderson's resume
  

Read past profiles in the Looking for Work series. The series continues here on Fridays.

_{The Inquirer is not endorsing this individual as a job candidate; potential employers should do their own background checks.}

Contact staff writer Jane M. Von Bergen at 215-854-2769 or jvonbergen@phillynews.com.

Karen T. Watson is so organized that she alphabetizes her spices, and that, she says is the trait that makes her such a good executive assistant.

Growing up, Watson used to visit her mother on the job. Her mother was a file clerk in City Hall and Watson was so impressed at how well she did her job. "You gave her a name of a file, and she'd give you a number," Watson said. "She was that sharp. She was a very orderly person and she never forgot anything."

That kind of organizational ability was an inspiration to Watson, who pursued the same career.

One of the pleasures of the job, she said, is turning a mishmash of notes and paperwork into a readable, clear document. "I love the idea of creating a new document," she said. 

Beyond that, she loves the physical sensation of typing. "Typing calms me," she said. "They say music calms the savage beast. When I'm typing, it just calms me." 

A common theme in Watson's story is an ability to adjust, despite an initial feeling of being overwhelmed. During the first week on any job, everything seems confusing, but soon names, places and procedures click in. "Once I'm acquainted, everything runs smoothly," she said. Her favorite jobs involve a feeling of mutual respect between her managers and herself. Given that, she's willing to do anything to help.

Since she was laid off in the spring of 2010, she's been grabbing whatever temporary assignments she can from Manpower Staffing Services, including one four-long stint at Citizens Bank. She also offered her services to private clients.

Her last fulltime job was as an administrative secretary to a real estate company. When the housing market collapsed, she was laid off -- not because her administrative skills weren't up to par, but because the other secretary had more years of experience in the field of real estate and the company could only keep one of them. It was a decision Watson understood, even though it hurt her.

Over the years, most of Watson's bosses have been men and many of them have been excellent managers. But at a recent Manpower assignment, Watson worked for her first female boss. What surprised and delighted her was her boss's willingness to bring her coffee, instead of vice versa. But that coffee thing isn't an issue for Watson. "I like to cook," she said and she's more than willing to put on a pot of coffee. "And I'm a stickler for cleanliness. I like to make sure everything is where it should be."

Update: As of December 2011, Watson is still looking for work. 

• Karen T. Watson
• Hometown: Philadelphia.
• Profession: Executive assistant
• Experience: Prepared reports, spreadsheets and presentations. Organized mailings, Arranged meetings, handled administrative tasks, prepared contracts.
• Education: High School graduate.
• E-mail address: karen.theresawatson@yahoo.com
• Karen Watson's resume
  

Read past profiles in the Looking for Work series. The series continues here on Fridays.

_{The Inquirer is not endorsing this individual as a job candidate; potential employers should do their own background checks.}

Contact staff writer Jane M. Von Bergen at 215-854-2769 or jvonbergen@phillynews.com.