Posting of records not best option.
Byline: ON THE JOB by Dan Grinfas For The Register-Guard Question: We want to recognize the employees with good attendance records and give a "heads up" to those with problem absenteeism. Is it legal to post staff attendance reports so that everyone may view them? ...

'Net key tool to improve government.
Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard As part of his campaign to boost taxpayers' "customer satisfaction" with state government, Gov. Ted Kulongoski on Monday publicized efforts to streamline bureaucracies for greater ease in doing business with state agencies. While running for governor and during his first...

Third-party screening: weeding out the 'bad apples'.
NATIONAL REPORT--The U.S. Department of Justice reports that one out of every 32 adults is a criminal, and that two-thirds of criminals end up being rearrested within three years after release from prison. If you hire applicants with criminal records, you might end up in trouble because...

The uphill struggle for workplace health.
As Congress changes OSHA's direction, states are taking charge of protecting workers' health and safety. Today's typical Americans - busy and health conscious - demand that their local grocery store be well stocked with lean, easy-to-cook meat. As a result, the number of poultry processors in this country has...

Leaps and Bounds.
Dance medicine has made progress in preventing injuries and their mounting cost, in creating new joint replacement techniques, and in further understanding the biomechanics of the dancing body. Here are some of the findings concerning those issues that were reported at the Boston Dance Medicine Conference held last year...

PEOs: Counting People, Lowering Costs.
Professional employer organizations, once known as employee leasing companies, are gaining in popularity for their services in workers' comp, safety, risk management, and loss control. Professional employer organizations, or PEOs, have long been recognized for their role in outsourcing human resources services. But little attention has been...

Conventional wisdom: underwriting insurance for trade shows presents a unique risk-management task.
Risk is rarely one-dimensional. The convergence of different threats on a single carrier is becoming increasingly common. They compound, yielding greater potential insured losses. For these reasons, catastrophe risk modeling analyses cannot be limited to known factors, as they have been in the past. One catastrophe can...

Fair, fast settlements unsettle a hidebound bureaucracy: a pair of astute compensation managers move aggressively against problem claims and raise the bar for their peers.
New Yorkers have a reputation for being tough-minded, no-nonsense types. But when it comes to workers' compensation claims management, it took a California girl to improve the thinking of one New York-based company. When executives with ABM Industries Inc., a New York-based company that provides janitorial services...

Giving care to hospitals: the innovative Caregiver Safety Accreditation cuts the costs incurred by a hospital consortium.
As administrator of the Hospitals Self-Insurance Fund of Missouri, Chris Miller had a problem. The HSIFM is a consortium of 15 healthcare institutions that self-insure their workers' compensation coverage through a self-insurance trust and the group's loss histories were not good. Over a period of about four...

Health reform--that's the ticket: injecting some competition into the health insurance marketplace and simplifying transactions.
If you think it's a hassle trying to figure out what's covered under your health insurance plan, you're not alone. John Zubak, Harvey Mitgang and April Stiles, the founders of VIIAD, thought there had to be a better way--a way to simplify the health insurance transaction between...