Employers

For graduating college seniors, the job market is, well, awesome, dude: Hiring is up sharply and corporate competition for the class of 2006 is hot. But for employers, the real challenge isn't getting the freshly minted grads to sign on. It's getting them to stay. Employers and hiring experts say the younger generation no longer approaches the first job as a nest for the next 10 or five or even three years.

Health insurance premiums for American workers and their employers continue to rise faster than inflation and wages, straining companies' ability to offer coverage and leaving a growing number of workers uninsured, according to a survey released Tuesday. Premiums rose by 7.7% in the last year, more than double the rate of inflation or increase in income, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust, which sponsor the report.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed a bill that would have required farm labor contractors to include on pay stubs the names and addresses of the growers whose fields their farmhands work. The legislation, by Assemblyman Juan Arambula (D-Fresno), sought to help farmworkers track down liable growers when fly-by-night contractors cheat them.

A month before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to unveil a plan to make healthcare more affordable and accessible, Senate Democrats proposed Tuesday taxing both workers and employers to cover an estimated 4.2 million of 6 million uninsured Californians.

In anticipation of tough talks next year with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on how to extend health insurance to more Californians, the state Assembly leader on Thursday proposed requiring all but the smallest businesses to help pay for their workers' insurance. The plan from Speaker Fabian Nunez, a Los Angeles Democrat, comes a week after the Democratic leader of the state Senate announced a similar proposal and days ahead of one expected from the Republican governor.

Employers have recently tried every carrot they can think of -- including cash incentives and iPods -- to persuade employees to quit smoking. Now some are trying the stick. Pointing to rising health costs and the oversized proportion of insurance claims attributed to smokers, some employers in California and around the country are refusing to hire applicants who smoke and, sometimes, firing employees who refuse to quit.

Isabela Putzlacher doesn't think of herself as a pioneer. She's too busy building a dental practice from scratch, in a town that itself is being pulled from thin air, to waste much time on her place in local history. When Mountain House Dental opened its doors in January -- with one dentist, one assistant and an office manager -- it brought the first private-sector jobs to this new town, where the San Francisco Bay Area meets the Central Valley. Three jobs down, 21,997 to go.

Last week's court decision permitting United Airlines' parent to dump its pensions on the federal government is part of a sweeping trend that could make the nation's employers more competitive, but at the cost of leaving workers and their families bearing big new risks. In a nutshell, a broadening swath of corporate America is retreating from the safety-net business and is shifting responsibility to employees.

Nearly every day, immigrants newly arrived from Mexico pick up job applications at Car Wash on Sunset. Owner George Garcia insists that they provide proof, such as Social Security or green cards, that they are authorized to work. What he does not do is pick up the phone to see if the documents are phony. "I run a business," he said. "Why is it my job to kick people out? It is not my responsibility to figure out who is legal and who is not legal. It's their job to stop them at the border."

Finally, a business magazine has asked a question on many folks' minds: "Is Your Boss a Psychopath?" The magazine is Fast Company and its answer to that question is: Yes, your boss might very well be a psychopath. After all, many of America's legendary titans of industry exhibited symptoms of psychopathy -- folks such as Henry Ford, Armand Hammer, even Walt Disney. Psychopaths are people who are amoral, ruthless, pathologically selfish and utterly unburdened by qualms of conscience.