Blackwell

Do you know where your car was built? A quick glance is available at The New York Times. The American car you drive may have been built elsewhere, while your foreign car may have been built in the good old USA. Now if you really want to get into it, you can find where your engine and transmission was built and where your car was assembled. For the number crunchers there are 255, 917, 664 passenger vehicles in the US, this is determined by a government agency the U.S. Bureau of Transit Statistics. Bottom line, the auto industry employs over 3.5 million people in manufacturing, sales & dealerships and retail auto sales. That's about 2.5% of the US labor market. More information is available at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It just makes good sense to at least check out that car before you buy it. America needs the work. Add a comment Posted 2-13-2012

Tired of paying for your word processing & spreadsheet programs. There is a great alternative called Open Office. I have been using Open Office for over 8 years and it’s free, really free. OpenOffice.org is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. OpenOffice.org is free software. That means you are free to download it, free to install it on as many PCs as you like, free to pass copies to as many people as you like. You may use OpenOffice.org for any purpose without restriction: private, educational, public administration, commercial... Free, really free
Add a comment Posted 2-6-2012

Free Kindle Books-free and legal, plus just about any other ereader is covered. manybooks.net is a site that offers over 29,000 ebooks for free. You can also select books and download directly to your kindle, or any ereader with an internet connection, using their mobile site mnybks.net. I have used this site for several years and have found the list of books quite interesting. My suggestion is to download the recommended books and cruise through them deleting the ones that you are not interested in. Happy reading! Add a comment Posted 2-1-2012

Union Membership in 2011- for those who are into the numbers. The percent of salary and wage workers in 2011 who belonged to a union was 11.8%. A slight decrease from 2010 which was 11.9%.
-Public sector workers had a union membership rate of 37%, while private sector rate was 6.9%.
-Within the public sector, local government workers had the highest union membership rate, 43.2%.
-Among states, New York has the highest union membership rate, 24.1%, while the lowest rate is North Carolina, 2.9%
Read the full BLS report. Add a comment posted 1-30-2012

Terminations caused by Social Media: Does your company have a policy regarding employees using Social Media to discuss matters about their job, employers or work related Issues. Can employees be terminated for posting negative comments about their employer? Be careful, the case history is starting to build. One government agency that is responsible for possible discharge cases is the National Labor Relation Board (NLRB). The Acting General Counsel, NLRB, has issued a report on Social Media. Their report is well worth reading. Posted 1-26-2012

Free Credit Report – Everyone is entitled to a free credit report once every 12 months from each of the nationwide consumer credit reporting companies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. The report is available through www.annualcreditreport.com . The site will allow you to select one or all of the companies that are available. However, you can only request the report once every 12 months for each company. If you request all three you will not be able to request another free report for 12 months. I would suggest that you just ask for one report from one company that way in 4 months you can request a free report from another company and so on. You can and are entitled to one report every 4 months. I realize that some people do not like to put their social security number online, in truth, they already have the information, the web site is secure, and these are the same companies that provide your credit score to anyone who may request it, primarily when you request credit from a company. Check it out, you will be surprised at the amount of information they have about you.

View the YouTube version
Posted 1-20-2012

Unusual fact about Illinois, we are a very unique state and that also adds to the political mess we find ourselves in. When you are wandering around the country or world and ask a person where they are from, they will generally give you a state or sometimes a country. But, not so if the person you are asking is from Illinois. We are the only state in the union where a person from Illinois will always give the name of the city or the region they are from. I even find it true for people who move to Illinois. Illinois is the only state that contains 3 very specific regions; each region is unique in the sense of heritage and politics. This leads people to declare the city or region in which they live, not the state.

I have been doing this totally unscientific research for about 15 years and have found it totally reliable, of course when you ask the next person, just to test this theory you will probably get a “wrong” answer, but keep asking, because 49 out of 50 will give you their city or region. Now you ask how I ever got into this. I learned this valuable piece of information from a class I took at the University of Illinois at Springfield, Center for State Policy and Leadership, a group called “The Third House” actually run the class. So now you know we really are different! Add a comment Posted 2-20-2012