My, How Times Have Changed

My son is 3.

While he watches waaaaay1 less television than I did growing up, he does catch an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse most mornings.

It’s nice that he is getting to know the same characters I knew as a kid, but when I finally sat down and watched the show the other day, I noticed an unusual change in the attitude of a couple of the characters. The Clubhouse was visited at separate points in the episode by the old Mickey-and-the-Beanstalk Giant and by Pete, Mickey Mouse’s foil from the old cartoons. Unlike the dastardly or dopey bad guys of my youth, though, the characters were both generally helpful and nice, if unwittingly causing a problem or two.

Things change.

And, just like the differences between the cartoons I grew up with and those my son is watching, Disney offers a great example of how things change in HR, as well. Over labor day, the Walt Disney Family Museum posted a link to “The Ropes at Disney’s” – a superbly-detailed employee handbook for the men and women (but mostly men) at Disney’s animation studio in 1943. It doesn’t take many pages of drawings to realize there’s not going to be any sexual harassment section to this doc.

I can only imagine the current handbook is even more unrecognizable to its predecessor than those bad guys I grew up with are to my boy.

Still, it would be great to see more handbooks as tailored to their audience as Disney’s was back then.

1. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. . . [↩]

Current Employment is a LexisNexis Top 25 Blog!

I received word from the powers-that-be over at Lexis Nexis that Current Employment has been selected as one of the top 25 Labor & Employment Blogs of 2011 by the LexisNexis L&E Community!

I’m honored by the selection, particularly to be mentioned next to the blogs that I go to for my L&E news, like the Connecticut Employment Law blog, the Delaware Employment Law blog, the Ohio Employer’s Law blog, Lawffice Space, and WorkMatters.

There are two other blogs that I am astonished are not on the list, both of which are better than this little site, IMHO. So when you’ve exhausted all the news here, and up there, you should check out the Employer Handbook  by Eric Meyer, and the Labor Relations Today by Seth Borden.

Thanks so much for reading Current Employment, and a special thank-you to all those who voted.

I’m Still Here!

Hey, everyone! I will have a new post coming soon; I have been grinding out some actual legal work the past few days. You know, for clients. Who pay.1

Anyway, I will have a flurry of posts up very, very soon (like tonight. ish.). Just sit tight, okay? Okay. Thanks.

To prove that I’m working hard, I’ve uploaded this webcam picture of me. Note the rolled-up sleeves and dedicated grimace.

- Tim

1. Freeloading blog readers. . . [↩]