Tag: WORK

A woman who lost her job after ignoring her boss' sexually explicit text messages has been awarded $30,000 by a Canadian court. The woman, Lisa McIntosh, worked as a truck driver at an aluminum company in British Columbia, where she was briefly involved in a consensual relationship with Zbigniew Augustynowicz, the company's owner. During the relationship, the two would exchange text messages on ...

Well, it looks like Wall Street's finally cleaning up its game. Don't misunderstand; investment bankers will still find new and unctuous ways to make money in a thin economy. But, from now on, employees at one gilded corporation will be forced to use slightly less colorful language when sending celebratory e-mails about their year-end bonuses. According to the Wall Street Journal, bigwigs at ...

Take this as yet another reason to be careful about what you say and do at work. Chances are that your IT guys are digging a little deeper than they should. A survey conducted by Cyber-Ark Software found that 41-percent of IT pros admitted to "abusing" their administrative privileges. This means using passwords to access HR records and customer databases and finding other confidential ...

Remember when, not too long ago, "guru" was one of those corporate words du jour? We had "Web gurus" and "customer service gurus" and inspiration-gurus-at-large. These self-styled titles were hot like UGGs, and fell out of vogue almost as quickly. [Ed. Note: Yes. Out of vogue. Dead. Kaput.] Well, now people have taken to "ninja" as the cool new nom de whatever, and it's a broad enough trend that ...

Once a bastion of laziness, the office cubicle may no longer be safe from workers' oldest enemy: work. According to Asiajin, a team of researchers from KDDI Corporation, one of Japan's largest cell phone companies, recently developed a technology that would let your boss remotely monitor your every move. The cornerstone of the monitoring system is deceptively simple: a cell phone equipped ...

The year 2000 loomed over the world way before 1999 -- see Prince songs, Y2K concerns, and even hordes of science fiction movies set before the end of the millennium. But on January 1, 2000, nothing much changed, jet packs didn't suddenly appear, and we didn't all get rad Jetsons-style hair. While we can't speak for our readers, launch any member of the Switched staff through time from 1999 until ...

We often forget that online retail outlets aren't staffed by bundles of fiber-optic cable or powered by magic. No, it takes real flesh and blood human beings to find your goods, pack them up, and ship them out. And during the holiday season it takes many more workers than normal. Every December, Amazon hires up to 1,000 additional workers for its largest "fulfillment center" in Coffeyville, ...

Alert notifications have turned the average PC desktop into a collage of digital post-its. Be it Facebook telling us about a new ditty written on our wall or a reminder about an office meeting in 10 minutes, visual alerts exist, in theory, to help us deal with the pandemonium of everyday life. They're supposed to keep us on top of things, up to date, and organized. A new study, however, suggests ...

During tough economic times, businesses want to tighten belts, and prospective employees clamor for any position, even if it's unpaid. Combine that with the ease of communication afforded by the Internet, and a whole new niche in the job market emerges: virtual internships. According to CNN, businesses, particularly small ones, are tapping into new pools of employees around the world by hiring ...

We've heard plenty of stories about people losing jobs due to inappropriate posts on Facebook, but this is the first time we've heard it suggested that a person was disciplined for Facebook addiction. Sources have suggested to the Staten Island Advance that Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino, Jr. was transferred from his post in the Forgotten Borough to a Brooklyn court, due, at least ...

Large corporate offices make a habit of blocking certain Web sites -- particularly personal e-mail, video sharing, and social networking sites. But, according to a recent survey compiled by Robert Half Technology, it appears that smaller businesses are locking out employees, too. The survey of 1,400 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from across the U.S. found that 54-percent of companies ...

Perhaps Australian airline Jetstar should look across the Pacific a little more often. If it were to have done so, it would have noticed stateside corporations' prevalent bans of social networking sites, and potentially saved themselves from some considerable embarrassment. According to News.com.au, a woman identified only as Elizabeth has complained to the airline of a male flight attendant ...

For some reason, people will risk total embarrassment and unemployment to watch porn at work. Of all the places we'd rather not think about people thinking sexy thoughts, a factory that makes pizzas has to be near the top. According to the Leinster Leader, three employees at the Green Isle Foods plant in Naas, Ireland were fired at the end of September for "improper use of the company's IT ...

We know it. You're sick. Everybody you know is sick. Hell, we're so sick, we've replaced our coffee breaks with coughing breaks. Whether the swine flu, allergies, or the mysterious 'crud,' maladies are first and foremost in the public consciousness these days, and the raging debate over health care isn't doing much to allay concerns. With that in mind, the Wall Street Journal has launched its ...

At the taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation (NSF), investigations of employees' inappropriate use of Internet pornography have skyrocketed over the past year, The Washington Times reports. According to foundation records obtained by the Times, out of 10 closed misconduct investigations last year, seven involved online pornography. The NSF, with over 1,200 employees and an endowment listed ...