I love holidays but always find that part of the price I pay for taking off is that a bunch of stuff has stacked up in the interim. So, here are a few interesting workforce odds and ends that you too might have missed while we were out celebrating Labor Day and the end of summer 2009:

• Employers get focused on Twitter. There has been a lot written about social networking in the workplace, so it’s a little surprising that some employers are just now getting focused on workers using tools like Facebook and Twitter, as this story from the San Diego Union-Tribune points out.

The story discusses how Petco, the San Diego-based pet supply chain, adopted a three-page policy in November, modeled after what IBM is doing when it comes to employees and social media.

“Petco intranet manager Daniel Sundin said the policy bars blogging and using social media at the office unless required as part of an employee’s job,” the Union-Tribune story said. “The policy says employees are personally liable for what they write and are precluded, in part, from sharing sales numbers and proprietary information or using the company logo without permission.”

That sounds like a reasonable, level-headed workplace policy to me, but Petco’s intranet manager also made this point: “[A]lthough restrictions are needed … companies ignoring social media’s power miss the big picture. That’s just a head-in-the-sand thing,” Sundin added, “and you’re a dying company if you’re doing that.” Truer words have never been spoken.

• Life is a bitch if you’re unemployed. Northern California’s San Jose Mercury News has been following a group of jobless Silicon Valley workers who have just graduated from simply being out of work and are now long-term unemployed. “More than six months after being laid off,” the newspaper says, “the three Silicon Valley workers we’ve been following in our Pink Slip 2.0 project have turned a corner and joined the growing ranks of California’s long-term unemployed. Swelling more than 150 percent from just a year ago, this ill-fated group has ballooned to its highest level in more than 20 years.”

And, here’s an observation from the Mercury News story that should frighten anyone who wonders what might happen if they get a pink slip.

“People don’t believe there’s a job out there for them anymore and they give up on themselves,” says Janice Shriver, a labor market consultant with the state’s Employment Development Department. “The long-term unemployed used to be people difficult to place because they were maybe ex-offenders, or homeless. Today it’s government workers and chemists and engineers.”

• Underemployed? That’s not much fun either. For my money, few regional newspapers have done as good a job of following how the Big, Bad Recession has affected the local economy as well as The Miami Herald, and this Labor Day story about the plight of South Florida’s underemployed, people who have jobs but have lost pay and/or hours, is a good example.

“As bad as the unemployment numbers are—10.7 percent in Florida—they don’t tell the whole story,” the Herald story says. “While hundreds of thousands of Floridians have lost their jobs because of the Great Recession, thousands more have taken big hits to their paychecks because of limited work hours or a shortage of jobs that use their skills. Economists call this underemployment, (and) the full extent of underemployment may be impossible to measure. But we do know this: In addition to the 9.7 percent of workers across the nation who were unemployed in August, another 5.8 percent were working part-time because they couldn’t find a full-time job. If those people were counted as unemployed, the jobless rate would be 15.5 percent.”

Those are sobering numbers, and they are mirrored in just about every city, state and community across the nation. They’re also a grim reminder that regardless of the little bit of positive economic news we’ve seen lately, the sober truth is that the recovery and job growth we’re all hoping for is still a ways off.

That’s the hard message of Labor Day 2009, like it or not.
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