Feeling ill? Well, staying at home would seem to be the sensible course of action. Yet for many, going to work while sick has become the norm, even a necessity in the face of the pressures placed on us by the organisations, which employ us.
In many cases, illness is no longer a valid reason for not working; rather, it is something that people must put up with and get over. Sick days are for wimps.
One casualty of the oil price downturn could be the megaproject.
For years, as conventional oil reserves depleted and became increasingly hard to find, oil companies ventured into far-flung locales to find new sources of production. Extracting oil from these frontier areas required advanced technology and a lot more capital: Ultra deepwater, Arctic offshore, heavy oil sands, and increasingly, the Lower Tertiary.
At first glance, it seems an almost inexplicable paradox. A right-wing British government has invited companies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party – and in one case, the Chinese military – into the heart of the UK’s strategically vital energy infrastructure. The nuclear deal between Britain and China goes against the advice of the security services, the military, and the US government.
The giant Ivanpah solar power plant in the California Mojave Desert recently detailed how much natural gas it burned to generate power when the sun wasn’t sufficient – the equivalent to 46,000 tons of CO2 emissions in its first year, according to reports.
Along with its impacts on wildlife and its receipt of federal incentives, news of the CO2 emissions has renewed criticism of the 377-megawatt facility, which supplies 140,000 California homes during peak hours of the day.
Management fads are fun, and one that keeps resurfacing is hating on HR — aka Human Resources.
We can all think of times when HR has caused us a special kind of pain and suffering — payroll screw-ups, pointless performance reviews, unintelligible procedures, anyone? It makes sense that you cannot spell “hurt” without “H” and “R,” and when we see the anti-HR mobs baying for blood, it’s easy to pick up a placard and/or blunt object and join in the fun.
The Volkswagen emissions scandal may have fatally undermined the credibility of claims that corporations care about being benign and useful participants in society. When a company can top the list of car firms in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index one week and then be caught using sophisticated software to avoid compliance with environmental regulation the next, we have to question if the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has any meaning at all.
Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, commenting last week on the recent environmental re-approval of the Carmichael coalmining project, sought the moral high ground against the government’s critics, claiming that there is “a strong moral case” for mining and exporting coal to poor countries.
In return, Bernie Fraser, a former head of the Reserve Bank who last month resigned as chair of the Climate Change Authority, blasted Frydenberg’s argument as “nonsense” and “obscene”.
Adam Goodes cuts a striking figure on and off the field. Only weeks out from his AFL retirement, Goodes has sparked controversy as he commences his new role as a David Jones brand ambassador. The key role of a brand ambassador or celebrity endorser is to symbolically embody the core identity of the brand – to literally be the “face” of what the brand stands for.
When cleaners for Myer last week called the retail giant out for underpaying them, it was not the first time.
Myer supplier Spotless hired the cleaners as independent contractors, and subsequently assigned them to work for Myer. The department store released a statement pointing this out and arguing it was Spotless that was their formal employer.
We love the brand and we are willing to invest our life savings in it. After all, this is a well-known franchise with hundreds of stores so it must be good. The franchisor says it is offering a proven business. It has given us a disclosure document containing many pages of information and we have tried to read the franchise agreement. There is also a lease. To be honest, we can’t really understand all the legal jargon. We just want to get started on running the business. Besides, won’t the Franchising Code of Conduct protect us?
