The CEO of one of the country’s largest investment banks has some choice words for any employees upset about the prospect of a smaller paycheck this year.

James Gorman, the head of Morgan Stanley, said that if his workers are so angry about their latest, trimmed-down paycheck, it’s probably time for them to go. Gorman stands in contrast with many of his executive counterparts, who have largely stayed silent on the issue of declining compensation, despite an industry-wide restructuring.

“I say [to disgruntled Morgan Stanley employees], listen, you’re naive, read the newspaper, number one,” Gorman said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “Number two, if you put your compensation in a one year context to define your overall level of happiness, you’ve got a problem that is bigger than the job. And number three, if you’re really unhappy, just leave. Life’s too short.”

Morgan Stanley announced earlier this month that it would cap cash bonuses for 2011 at $125,000 and that its executives — including Gorman — wouldn’t be getting any cash bonuses, according to The New York Times.

Gorman and his employees at Morgan Stanley aren’t the only ones on Wall Street contending with smaller paychecks. Anxiety over the state of the global economy, slow dealmaking and a boost in public anger over the financial industry’s high pay have likely pushed firms to slash their compensation pools to the lowest level since the 2008 financial crisis, the Wall Street Journal reports.

And that’s for those that’ve kept their jobs. All told, Wall Street laid off more than 200,000 employees in 2011 alone.

“The world has changed and the banking industry has gone through a fundamental change and we have to readjust,” Gorman said in the interview.

Many workers have had trouble coming to terms with the new reality. Bonus day at Goldman Sachs last week was a “bloodbath,” one mid-level employee told CNBC, as some workers learned they would be taking home smaller bonuses this year — and some none at all. In addition, the firm cut the pay of some if its senior workers in half.

Investment bankers at Bank of America also found out earlier this week that their compensation would be slashed by 25 percent. That’s part of a larger push to cut total costs at America’s second-largest bank by as much as $8 billion per year.

It seems that City Hall was rather justified in its decision, which could ultimately  save a significant amount of money in terms of medical costs and compensation of its employees. However, I’m curious as to how they went about addressing this plan that would make someone so distraught.

Original Article: Room to Change

Apparently at least one Fort Worth city employee was upset enough about a plan to spend $50,000 to install five showers at City Hall for workers who bike to the office or exercise during lunch that he or she tipped off the Star-Telegram’s Watchdog.

The tip wasn’t necessary; two local TV stations covered the story after the item appeared on a City Council agenda for approval.

The shower and locker rooms will provide two stalls for women, two for men and one that is accessible by people with disabilities. The money will come from the deferred replacement of an air-conditioning system at the Animal Care and Control Center that was scheduled for this year.

The shower project sounds reasonable and wise considering the city is self-insured and is promoting programs and activities to improve workforce wellness.

With a city staff the size of Fort Worth’s (6,200 full-time workers), if just 5 percent of inactive employees begin exercising it could produce savings of $500,000 a year in increased productivity and reduction of workers’ compensation and medical costs, according to a study by the Wellness Council of America and the National Coalition for Promoting Physical Activity.

Opponents of the expenditure, which turned out to be less than $40,000 according to the city facilities manager, argue that the showers will rarely be used since most employees live outside city limits and don’t bike to work.

Actually, more than 60 percent of the general employees live within city boundaries; about 2,500 work in or near City Hall.

It’s the majority of civil service police and fire employees who live beyond the city limits. And guess what? They already have access to city-provided locker rooms with showers.

In recent months, the city has created more than 10 miles of bicycle lanes as part of its Bike Fort Worth plan to help change the commuting culture. It makes sense to provide employee conveniences that might encourage others to use bicycles as a safe alternative to the automobile to get to work.

To bring about this change, bike commuters need a place to change.

How embarrassing this must be for President Obama, whose major speech theme so far this campaign season has been that every single American, no matter how rich, should pay their “fair share” of taxes.Because how unfair — indeed, un-American — it is for an office worker like, say, Warren Buffet’s secretary to dutifully pay her taxes, while some well-to-do people with better educations and higher incomes end up paying a much smaller tax rate. Or, worse, skipping their taxes altogether. A new report just out from the Internal Revenue Service reveals that 36 of President Obama’s executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in back taxes. These people working for Mr. Fair Share apparently haven’t paid any share, let alone their fair share.

Nearly one-third of Obama’s aides make more than $100,000 with 21 being paid the top White House salary of $172,200, each.The IRS’ 2010 delinquent tax revelations come as part of a required annual agency report on federal employees’ tax compliance. Turns out, an awful lot of folks being paid by taxpayers are not paying their own income taxes.

The report finds that thousands of federal employees owe the country more than $3.4 billion in back taxes. That’s up 3% in the past year.That scale of delinquency could annoy voters, hard-pressed by their own costs, fears and stubbornly high unemployment despite Joe Biden’s many promises. The tax offenders include employees of the U.S. Senate who help write the laws imposed on everyone else. They owe $2.1 million. Workers in the House of Representatives owe $8.5 million, Department of Education employees owe $4.3 million and over at Homeland Security, 4,697 workers owe about $37 million. Active duty military members owe more than $100 million. The Treasury Department, where Obama nominee Tim Geithner had to pay up $42,000 in his own back taxes before being confirmed as secretary, has 1,181 other employees with delinquent taxes totaling $9.3 million.

They fact that they are loosing bodies is scary, but looking at this from an employee side there are lost of changes about to happen. They are changing how long the medical examiner can hold their position, so employees can make it easier to kick he or she out if something like this ever takes place again. I think that is a very smart idea. They have to be more public with their employees about the changes that they are making. It might be embarrassing for them to be working there right now, so they need to let the media know what is being done to solve the problem and change the work place. AB

“Karen Samford, a 72-year-old postal worker in Texas, has been suspended from her job after admitting she stole and kept literally truckloads of bulk mail over the last decade, MyFoxHouston reports (h/t The Consumerist). Her boss reportedly became concerned with the excess mail in her office and asked if she had stashed any elsewhere, to which she admitted to renting entire storage units to hold the junk mail.”

Call it comp day, compensation communication, or this year, D-Day.

Goldman Sachs employees came to work today and learned how much they’ll be paid above their base salary for 2011, and most of them are not jumping for joy, said people familiar with the matter

European Pressphoto Agency

Some Goldman bankers and traders learned they’re taking home a big goose-egg. Some partners’ total pay was slashed by approximately half, while some employees in its fixed income trading unit saw their total pay reduced by as much as 60%, said people familiar with the matter.

Some bankers are doubly miffed because their stock awards are priced as of the close of trading Thursday, and Goldman’s stock has been on the rise in the past couple of days, meaning the bankers won’t get the cheaper strike price for their stock awards.

Its shares closed under $100 a share through most of November and December, a discount to the company’s so-called book value, but as of mid-day Thursday Goldman’s shares were up 10% over the past day and a half to $107.20. The shares gained over 6% Wednesday, even though the company reported a more than 50% decline in its quarterly profits.

Goldman staffers aren’t allowed to cash in their stock awards for five years. Cash bonuses don’t hit their accounts until the end of January, said a person familiar with the matter.

Goldman’s pay was lower than it has been in most recent years. The company has been in cost-cutting mode, slashing 2,400 jobs in 2011 and reducing compensation and benefits expenses by 21% compared with 2010. The company’s average pay per employee fell to its lowest level since 2008, to $367,000, from $431,000 in 2010.

More than half of Goldman’s employees make less than $100,000 as their base salary, meaning the per-employee average is skewed by the upper echelons at the company, said a person familiar with the matter.

Approximately 50 partners left Goldman in 2011 in a mix of retirements, departures to do other things, and encouraged or suggested exits, said one person familiar with the matter. The 50 is a high number of partners to leave Goldman in one year, but it is on the back of three years where there was a dearth of natural attrition, the person said. Goldman typically has roughly just over 400 partners, and had been running with 480 for a while.

Comp day came and went for Morgan Stanley employees on Wednesday, the day before the company reported an earnings loss today. Bankers there already knew their cash bonuses would be capped at $125,000. One Morgan banker said everyone was quietly dreading Wednesday.

J.P. Morgan Chase employees and top executives began receiving bonus information this week, said a person close to the situation. The majority will know the amounts by the end of this week. The bonuses are expected to be close to amounts doled out last year for the top management, including Chief Executive Officer James Dimon, after the bank earned a record $19 billion for the year. Some parts of the bank will see compensation drop, like the investment bank and asset management, while others area like the credit card unit were up.

BofA also reported its earnings Thursday, a profit gain, but its bankers don’t find out their pay for another week, said a person familiar with the matter.

However sad bankers and traders may be on Wall Street on comp day, Main Street likely isn’t shedding much of a tear. The American median household income is just under $50,000 last time the government checked.

Source: Wall Street Journal

CHICAGO (CBS) — The new, upscale Walgreens store at State and Randolph streets is opening to the public Tuesday morning.

The new store occupies two floors and 27,000 square feet at the former Loehmann’s department store, at 151 N. State St.

LISTEN: WBBM Newsradio’s Steve Miller reports

Walgreens president of health and daily living solutions Joe Magnacca says the new store is part of an effort to rebrand Walgreens as more than just a drugstore.

“We really are trying to leave the drugstore space and enter a totally new territory – we call it a health and daily living space – and we really just believe we’re trying to make life simpler for our consumers and our patients, and I think part of what we’re trying to do is really just step out of the box and really change our approach,” Magnacca said on the CBS 2 Morning News.

The typical Walgreens layout is likely branded within the average Chicagoan’s mind – the photo counter and a checkout counter with an assortment of cigarettes in the front, the pharmacy counter in the back, and aisles of non-prescription drugs, cosmetics, toiletries, greeting cards and big bags of candy in between.

But at the State and Randolph Walgreens, the first sight will be a sushi bar, where chefs are preparing the sushi live before your very eyes. A station for fruit juice shakes and a barista bar will also be available, along with a beer, wine and spirits section featuring tastings.

The juice bar will also offer malted milk shakes, in a throwback to the soda fountains that Walgreens for which Walgreens was once well-known.

A manicure and beauty bar will also be among the offerings.

Meanwhile, pharmacists will be moved out front from behind the counter to consult with patients out front, Magnacca said.

The store is tailored specifically toward downtown Chicago, he said.

“Now we’re really trying to localize our stores; to make sure that we’re putting the best store forward in every community, so State and Randolph is quite different from the stores we’d have in New York,” Magnacca said.

The 22,000 square-foot Walgreens is the largest new-format store in the system, and will employ 60 full-time staffers, Magnacca said.

On Monday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Gov. Pat Quinn were on hand for the gala ribbon-cutting at the store.

“This is not your mom and dad’s drug store,” Emanuel said. “This is not, when they said, go down to the drug store and get x, they did not think sushi and expresso in the x column.”

Deerfield-based Walgreens is not saying how many stores similar to the new State Street store it is considering, but said it’s scouting former Borders bookstore locations across the country.

Plans already have been released for a two-story Walgreens at the old Borders at 2817 N. Clark St., in the East Lakeview neighborhood. Renderings from the architectural firm Hirsch Associates LLC showed plans for two-story “Wellness Experience” store at the site with more space and features than a typical Walgreens store.

Walgreens spokesman Rob Elfinger said in November that the company did not have a lease on the Clark Street property.

(Entry By: Annalisa Alzona)

(Dana Schleyer)

How Much Money Do Apple Store Employees Make for Apple?

The new Apple Store at New York’s Grand Central Terminal is designed to showcase the computing giant’s best-selling products amidst “very modest alterations to historic elements.” Given the location and majestic surroundings, it’s a safe bet the new Apple Store will pull in a bundle for the company.

Apple’s staggering success with its 300-plus retail outlets is the envy of the industry. The company reportedly generates nearly $4,500 in annual retail sales per square foot of retail space where its products are sold, excluding online sales. That’s in contrast to the annual sales per square foot plus online sales of companies like Tiffany ($3,070), Coach ($1,776), and Best Buy ($880).

Now Asymco’s Horace Dediu has broken down what those boffo numbers and others from Apple mean in terms of how much revenue Apple pulls in per Apple Store employee.

It turns out that in 2010, Apple Store revenue was $481,000 per employee. It’s at about $320,000 per employee through three quarters of 2011, according to Dediu. That projects to a dip from 2010′s record numbers to $427,000 in revenue per employee for this year, though one would expect fourth quarter Apple Store sales to spike due to the holidays.

View SlideshowSee all (50) slides

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By comparison, JC Penney pulls in about $124,000 in revenue per year per employee. Apple’s clearly doing something very, very right. And even more right on a company-wide level—Apple reported sales of about $1.8 million per employee and profits of nearly $430,000 per employee for its fiscal 2011.

But what about compensation for said employees? Is Apple particularly generous when it comes to its retail employees, considering the gold mine of a cash cow they’re a big part of making so profitable?

The answer to that is, well, not so much. Dediu reckons that the average Apple store employee creates sales at the rate of about $278 per hour. Wages for those employees, however, range from $9 to $15 per hour for salespeople and can reach $30 per hour for Genius Bar staff.

Oh, and Apple Stores don’t do commissions.

Salespeople people outnumber Genius Bar staff at Apple Stores. But even assuming that half of staff is making the upper limit of $15 per hour as salespeople and the other half is making the upper limit of $30 per hour as Genius Bar docents, it would still mean Apple is pulling in about $11 and change per dollar it pays its Apple Store employees (and again, that’s assuredly a low-ball figure).

Is the level at which Apple compensates its retail workforce in relation to how much revenue it generates an outlier in the world of big retail? Because it sure seems like it. Maybe Apple’s non-compensation retail overhead is so high that all of these numbers are misleading. Or maybe Apple just knows that it can get lots of people to work at Apple Stores for $9 an hour.

Dediu refers to the giant gap between the cash Apple hauls in and what it pays its retail staff as Apple Store workers’ “productivity.” We’d guess there’s probably another word for it, somewhere outside of the economist’s lexicon.

For more, see PCMag’s slideshow of Apple’s new Grand Central Terminal store above.

http://news.yahoo.com/holidays-bring-employee-issues-businesses-154155563.html

By JOYCE M. ROSENBERG | AP – Thu, Dec 8, 2011

NEW YORK (AP) — Some of the stress that small business owners feel around the holidays may come from employee issues.

For example, several staffers want to take the same days off. Parents want to leave early so they can catch their kids’ holiday recitals. Some employees want to install religious displays in their cubicles, and others feel offended.

A look at these situations, and how to handle them:

THE TIME OFF ISSUE

Owners often get multiple requests from staffers for the same day off. Some of those requests were made months ago, but there are often procrastinators who plead for time off at the last minute. Owners may feel sympathetic, but they also need to be sure that the work gets done. And the latter needs to be the priority. So if one or more staffers already have dibs on the day and you can’t afford to let anyone else be off, others may unfortunately have to be disappointed.

But there’s a larger issue to be considered. How do you grant vacation or other paid time off? Do you have a written policy, or deal with time off on an ad hoc basis? And as part of that policy, do you spell out how you handle multiple requests?

Making your policy up as you go along means you’re likely to have resentful employees. For instance, if you OK one staffer’s vacation on a first-come, first-served basis, but on another occasion decide that a more senior employee should get the day off.

Helene Wasserman, an attorney with the labor law firm Littler Mendelson in Los Angeles, says employees need to be treated equally. And not just to keep morale up. You might not think anything untoward about handling time off in an uneven manner, but Wasserman says a disgruntled employee might see it as unequal treatment and use it as evidence in a discrimination suit in the future. “Innocent actions can frequently become perceived as something sinister,” she says.

Along that line, if you allow one staffer to leave early for school events or even to do some shopping, you’ll need to offer a similar opportunity to leave early to other staffers.

But let’s say you have employees who you’d like to reward for their hard work by letting them have an early departure time. And you don’t offer it to workers whose performance you’re not happy with. Wasserman advises against such a practice, and notes again that unequal treatment, even if you have the best of intentions, could be interpreted as discrimination.

She also recommends, “Don’t be a Grinch.” Be a little more flexible about work time during the holidays as long as it doesn’t hurt your productivity. Just be sure to keep track of everyone’s hours to be sure everyone is treated equally.

HOLIDAY DÉCOR

If you decorate your company’s premises for the holidays, keep it secular, Wasserman advises. That means you shouldn’t display a Nativity scene. The reason is concern for employees’ feelings — not everyone is comfortable with a religious display. And, they could also feel discriminated against.

But Christmas trees and wreaths, holiday lights and figures of Santa Claus and reindeer are considered secular and acceptable in the workplace, according to a directive from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2008.

What if employees want to display a Nativity scene or other religious items on their desks, cubicles or work area? Wasserman recommends that owners allow their workers to use such décor. She likens the items to religious jewelry and says, “you don’t want to squelch personal expression of religion.” The fact that these items are being displayed in a worker’s personal work space takes them out of the areas used by other employees. Therefore, religious displays aren’t being sponsored by the company.

Wasserman also recommends that if you’re having a party or other celebration to mark the season, be sure you call it a “holiday” party and not a “Christmas” party.

The woman, Natalie Johnson, has filed a complaint with the Federal Employment Commission, saying that her religious beliefs prevent her from recognizing transgender people, according to KSAT.

Johnson, 27, was employed at the River Center Macy’s in San Antonio until last week. She said a teenager caught her attention because the teen was shopping for women’s clothing, but Johnson was convinced the shopper was male.

When Johnson spotted the teenager in the women’s dressing area, Johnson told her she could not change there.

“I had to just be straightforward and  tell him, ‘You’re a man,’ and of course that … really got him steamed,” Johnson told KSAT.

The teenager’s friends argued with Johnson, reportedly telling her that Macy’s allows transgender people to change in the dressing room of the gender they identify with.

“I made my choice the other day,” Johnson said. “I refuse to comply with this policy.”

Macy’s did not answer ABCNews.com’s request for clarification on its policy regarding transgender customers and where they can try on clothes, but Macy’s senior vice president of corporate communications and external affairs Jim Sluzewski issued the following statement:

“Macy’s is very proud of our philosophy of diversity and inclusion, and we welcome all customers into our stores. This includes customers of all races, ethnicities, ages, genders, faith traditions, countries of origins and lifestyle preferences. We strive to ensure that each customer is able to shop in a discrimination-free environment.”

Asked if she would handle the situation the same way if given another chance, Johnson said she would.

“There are no transgenders in the world. A guy can dress up as a woman all he wants. That’s still not going to make you a woman,” Johnson said. “If you’re a man going into the women’s fitting room, I will kindly escort you to the men’s fitting room.”