Younger workers are nearly twice as likely as older workers to steal office supplies -- and more than twice as likely to see nothing wrong with the practice, according to the staffing firm Spherion's April survey of more than 1,600 employed adults.
Overall, 18 percent of the workers said they had taken office supplies for personal use within the last year. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 24 percent said they had filched, compared with 13 percent of workers age 50 and older.
At least some of the offenders may have felt guilty: Nine of 10 surveyed workers said it was wrong to take office supplies for personal use. But the guilt turned out to be age-related: 17 percent of the younger-than-30 workers saw nothing wrong with taking what wasn't theirs, while only 7 percent of workers 50 and older agreed with that sentiment.
DOMESTIC-PARTNER BENEFITS MILESTONE:
Of the nation's Fortune 500 companies, 253 offer health benefits to same-sex domestic partners and 430 include sexual orientation in their nondiscrimination policies, according to the seventh annual State of the Workplace report by the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-advocacy group.It's "a historic first," said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, noting that policies that didn't exist 25 years ago now are practiced by a majority of the nation's largest corporations.
For the record, the first U.S. employer to offer health insurance benefits to same-sex partners was the New York weekly The Village Voice in 1982.