In honor of the Bastille Day on Tuesday, July 14, and the fact that the French manage to work less (and gripe more about work) than just about any other country in the industrialized world, here are some workforce odds and ends for you to ponder:

• Jack Welch at SHRM, plus eight: Never mind that Jack Welch spoke to the Society for Human Resource Management annual conference in New Orleans more than a week ago, and that his talk has been widely reported by the small army of journalists, bloggers and Twitter users who attended (including yours truly). No, never mind all that because what Neutron Jack had to say isn’t news until The Wall Street Journal says it is news, as it did Monday when the newspaper finally reported on his speech a full eight days late.

The Journal’s better-late-than-never hook to the Welch speech is that the former General Electric CEO had “some blunt words for women climbing the corporate ladder: You may have to choose between taking time off to raise children and reaching the corner office. ‘There’s no such thing as work-life balance,’ Welch told the SHRM conference June 28. ‘There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.’ ”

That may sound like big news to The Wall Street Journal, but frankly, I’ve heard Welch talk about that before in other speeches, and although I mentioned it in my blog post on his SHRM speech the day he said it, it didn’t strike me then, just as it doesn’t strike me now, as the big deal that the Journal made it out to be. In my book, this is simply the Journal trying to play catch-up when they are a week late and several dollars short.

• RIP, talent-shortage hype: Remember all the overblown blather about the great talent shortage we were going to have due to the retirement of the baby boomer generation en masse? I had fun on numerous occasions skewering that silly piece of conventional wisdom (starting back in 2007), and I keep finding more and more evidence that older workers are hanging on to their jobs as long as they can.

Here’s the latest: a study by Golden Gateway Financial that shows that the number of respondents who planned to retire before age 70 dropped from 67 percent before the financial crisis to 40 percent today. Yes, you can point to the recession as a big reason for this, but as I pointed out on several occasions, baby boomers were headed this way even before the economic downturn. It’s just another reason why boomers are so hard to get a good handle on, especially when it comes to workforce planning.

• Public hirings and firings are a difficult business: It’s always tough working as a major-league coach or manager, and part of it is from the very open process in which these executives get hired and, usually, fired. Just this week, Washington Nationals manager Manny Acta got canned, and his departure, although public, lacked some of the fireworks and histrionics  I’ve written about before.

It’s one of the reasons why big-league managers and coaches get compensated as well as they do (although not nearly as well as most CEOs). Few have the career success that guys like Phil Jackson achieve, so for most major-league managers, the nice pay is simply some upfront compensation for the public abuse that inevitably comes when that day of public reckoning finally arrives.

So RIP, Manny Acta. Too bad your big-league managerial career wasn’t longer, but it could have been worse: You could have been employed and fired by Al Davis.

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