If you just bought shares in Facebook or are considering doing so, you probably want to know what the company is doing to keep its employees happy.

At its new headquarters in Silicon Valley, CNBC reports that the social media giant goes beyond just free food and on-site drycleaning (that's so Google).

Facebook employees also can use a treadmill while taking conference calls, walk or bike the faux streets of the complex, get a beer on tap and write something on a literal Facebook wall.

Employees also apparently named the conference rooms, which gives you an insight into the geekdom at work here. Got a meeting? Put on your hoodie and head down to Jar Jar Drinks or Mai Tai Fighter.

Do the employee perks at your office compare to the ones at Facebook HQ? Tell us in the comments section below. 

Forget about business school. If you want to improve your business acumen, the best route may be to study a foreign language.

University of Chicago researchers have found that people make more rational decisions when they think things through in a foreign language, according to a study published in Psychological Science.

Normally people are loathe to risk what they have for the opportunity to make more.  And because of that they will pass up attractive business opportunities, says the study’s lead author, Boaz Keysar, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.

“We show that when people think in a foreign language they take more risks that are beneficial,” Keysar said. “They are less afraid of potential loss and that allows them to take advantage of risks that are worth taking as opposed to frivolous risks.”

As a general rule, humans tend to be quite risk averse, Keysar said.

When you’re mulling a question over in a foreign language you tap into the more analytical side of your brain, he explained. Thinking in your native tongue tends to be more tinged with emotion, especially fear.

To look at the impact of foreign language on decision making, Keysar and his colleagues rounded up 54 college students who were English speakers, but who were learning Spanish. Each student was given 15 dollar bills and told that they would have 15 opportunities to bet one of their dollars on a coin toss. If they won the toss they would get $2.50 back. If they lost, they would lose their dollar.

The bets were attractive because statistically the students stood to come out ahead if they took all 15, Keysar explained.

When the experiment was conducted in English the students took the bet only 54 percent of the time. When it was conducted in Spanish, they took the bet 71 percent of the time.

And that’s because students mulling over a bet in English allowed fear of losing a dollar get in the way of their taking a risk to make more. When they thought things over in Spanish they were better able to analyze the question rationally.

“And you realize that this was done with money we gave them,” Keysar said. “It’s not like they had to take it out of their own pockets. But there was still the thought that ‘I’ve got this dollar in my hand and do I want to risk losing it?’ They were thinking myopically about each bet separately. Somehow when they thought in a foreign language they were able to move back and take the bigger perspective.”

It’s not clear yet how these new findings can be implemented on an individual basis, but Keysar suggests that a company’s teams might use the foreign language test to see if members are making decisions rationally or whether there’s a fear of loss bias.

“You could divide the team into two groups,” he said. “Then have one make a decision in their native tongue and the other in a foreign language and see if they come to the same conclusion. If you see a systematic difference, it’s a good indication that some bias is influencing the decision.”

In order to save taxpayer dollars, the city of Fort Worth, Texas, is considering a nonsmokers-only hiring policy, but the proposal has some city employees fuming.

"We put taxpayer dollars into healthcare for our employees," Mayor Betsy Price says. "Anything that might benefit the health ... and make our employees more productive, we're going to look into that."

KXAS-TV's Marc Fein reports.

Discuss this report on Facebook.

The income gap is widening — among lawyers.

While billing rates for law partners increased in 2011 by around 4 percent, year over year, that good fortune was unevenly distributed. Top earners secured a roughly 5 percent increase, while the bottom of the market eked out just over a 1 percent increase.

Last year, the hourly rate for the highest 25 percent of law partners averaged $873, while the bottom 25 percent earned a comparatively meager $204, according to the Real Rate Report, an annual survey of fees at 4,000 law firms by the Corporate Executive Board Company and analytics firm TyMetrix Inc. The report noted a similar pattern of rate increases for legal associates as well as partners. 

"Rates for lawyers who have traditionally commanded the highest rates are increasing faster than rates for their lower billing colleagues, suggesting a flight to quality and experience," the report said. "[T]he legal market is increasingly bifurcating into two groups of legal providers: one with pricing power and one without."

Unlike other industries, the demand for legal services is less vulnerable to economic downturns; fees did rise during the recession, but at roughly half the current rate of increase. What the recession did do was widen the gap between the highest-priced lawyers and the rest of the field. In just two years, 17 percent of lawyers raised their hourly fee by $100 or more, while 12 percent lowered their rates. 

The recession and recovery have also created a larger class of four-figure attorneys. "[B]efore 2006, the $1,000 per hour partner was a rarity," the report observed.

This is no longer the case; since 2009, the number of $1,000-an-hour law firm partners shot up by 75 percent. The report's authors said that demand for finance, corporate and commercial legal services were driving the rate increases at the top of the spectrum. Of these, finance represented the largest contingent with 41 percent of the group.

The report noted that finance and securities lawyers had the largest percentage increase in hourly rates, which it attributed to higher demand for legal work in the wake of Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, increased stock buyback programs and higher borrowing spurred by low interest rates.

Location also made a difference; 95 percent of these top earners were based in New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Related:

States with the biggest wage gap between men and women

Cynthia Stafford, who won $112 million in the California lottery, appeared on CNBC Thursday to offer advice to potential winners of Friday’s Mega Millions record jackpot, now worth $640 million.

She recommended winners take deep breaths, enjoy a little celebration of their success. But she also advised winners to seek out a good financial planner.

“Someone who is good working with large sums of money […] who can protect you,” she said.

Since winning her millions in 2007, Stafford said she has invested in a few online companies and has started her own production company.

Here’s some good news for this summer’s crop of new graduates: If you’re lucky enough to find a summer internship, it’s more likely to be one that’s paid.

According to a report in USA Today, many employers are getting rid of unpaid internships or converting them to paid programs because they’re getting hit with lawsuits that claim interns should be compensated for the work they do. Labor lawyers tell the newspaper that companies are not willing to run the risk of offering them.

Companies offering internships must follow certain rules, according to the Department of Labor. Unpaid internships, for example, must provide training and not simply benefit the company, according to a 2010 Labor Department fact sheet on internship programs. And there are some circumstances under which individuals who participate in “for-profit” private sector internships or training programs may do so without compensation.

Some firms are modifying internship programs by rotating interns among several departments, the article said.

Unpaid internships became more prevalent as employers’ budgets were squeezed during the Great Recession. Workers who had lost their jobs were eager to work without pay, but the set-ups encourage employers to replace low-level employees with unpaid students, Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute told USA Today. (Msnbc.com contributor Eve Tahmincioglu wrote about this issue in 2010).

There are about 1.5 million internships in the U.S. each year, and nearly half of them are unpaid, the newspaper said.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, left, tours a Siemens plant that President Barack Obama touted as a model for public-private partnership.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum hit on a hot-button issue over the weekend when he called President Barack Obama "a snob" for his views on higher education. "He wants everybody in America to go to college," Santorum said.

The Tea Party may have loved the jab, but Santorum's comment touched on a real issue facing businesses that is rarely discussed in education policy debates: a lack of well-trained high-school graduates ready for the workforce.

Experts say the problem is the result of a trend that dates to the Reagan era: a well-intentioned push toward more college-prep at the expense of vocational and technical programs in high schools. 

"We began to focus on book learning, and 'vocational' became a dirty word," said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Center of Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. 

As a result, although Census data show a record 30.4 percent of U.S. adults now have a bachelor's degree or higher, there's a mismatch between the skills many students acquire in those four years and what employers say they need to fill jobs.

Obama responded to Santorum Monday, at least obliquely, saying, "When I speak about higher education we're not just talking about a four-year degree. We're talking about somebody going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job and is now required to handle a million-dollar piece of equipment." 

Drew Greenblatt could use more workers like that. Greenblatt, president of metal fabrication company Marlin Steel Wire Products in Baltimore, said machines in his factory sit idle because even at $30 an hour, he can't find people to operate them.

"This isn't a theoretical thing," he said. "We're in a position where we need more talent, fast." Without workers to operate his equipment, Greenblatt said he'll lose project bids to foreign competitors.

Reams of data show that workers with college degrees earn more than those without, but in the short term, it's grim out there even for many college grads. Popular humanities majors like psychology, marketing and communications just don't deliver in today's job market. Greenblatt said he's currently training an English major to operate equipment.

"You don't need a four-year degree to run our sheet metal fabrication robots, but you do need to know geometry, how to read a blueprint [and] how to use a tape measure," he said.

"We have a lot of people who are in high school who could be doing a vocational track, who could be learning these technical skills, but they're not," said Neal McCluskey, an education analyst at the Cato Institute.

As recently as the early 1980s, American high school students had the choice of taking college prep or technical classes. This two-track system still thrives in countries like Germany, a country considered a role model by experts who study labor and education issues.

But Germany's success can't be replicated here for a couple of reasons. Reintegrating a technical track into high schools nationwide is culturally unpalatable, Carnevale said.

"Politically, it's tough," he said. "The majority of Americans always say everybody doesn't need to go to college. Then you say, 'Do your kids need to go to college?' and they say, 'Yes.'" 

Two-year technical schools and a growing number of community colleges offer education in hands-on fields like health care technology, mechanics or nursing, where job shortages are rife, but students and parents often overlook this option, said John Challenger, CEO of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "There's kind of a cult of the four-year college degree. … It's not right for everybody," he said.

Germany's two-track educational system also works because it's integrated with apprenticeship programs, a rarity in American industry. "A lot of companies that had built up great trade apprenticeship programs dismantled them," Challenger said.

"Employers are always looking to get someone else to pay," said Gary Burtless, a senior fellow in economic studies at The Brookings Institution. He said some cities now promise to educate the local workforce, just as they often offer tax breaks as an incentive, to lure companies into building factories or other facilities within their borders. 

In Charlotte, N.C., manufacturer Siemens opened a factory to produce gas turbines. The company worked with local Central Piedmont Community College to design a curriculum teaching would-be workers how to operate the equipment. Obama touted the partnership last month in his State of the Union address.

Initiatives like this are helping to balance the disconnect between jobs and skills, but experts say kids should get an earlier start  learning the skills they're going to be using for the next four decades or so. Waiting until college to learn skills like applied math or equipment operation, puts many American students at a disadvantage, especially when they may have to shoulder the cost of higher education.

"We know in general that people learn better when learning is applied. For a kid whose prospects going to college are already tough, ... Algebra Two doesn't connect them to the real world," Carnevale said. "[We're] leaving all these kids behind."

Do you think everyone should go to college? Let us know on Facebook.

John Bailey

The founders of Panjia Co. (from left to right): Jonathan Shriftman, Nora Dweck, Ankur Jain, Jake Medwell, and Daniel Pourbaba.

With last month’s employment report showing signs the economy may finally be recovering, a group of business leaders who survived the great recession joined a crop of young entrepreneurs who are optimistic about their future despite it at the Kairos Global Summit on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange this weekend. 

Buried in the positive numbers of last month’s jobs report was a stubbornly high unemployment rate among young Americans. More than 10 percent of Americans ages 25 to 29 are without a job, two points higher than the national average. But the young college entrepreneurs who gathered in lower Manhattan are not fearful of the scarce job market into which they will graduate, because many of them already own their own companies. 

In its fourth year, the Kairos Global Summit is hosted by the Kairos Society, a global network of college entrepreneurs, along with the New York Stock Exchange and the United Nations. 

The summit brings together more than 300 college entrepreneurs from at least 20 countries to meet and discuss their own ventures and other ideas on the cutting edge of business. The summit also hosts business executives from companies such as Cisco and General Electric to mentor the students and provide feedback for the ideas and companies the aspiring young business leaders represent. 

Ankur Jain, the 22 year-old chairman and founder of the Kairos Society, says the goal of the summit is to bring together young people with drive and ideas with leaders who have the experience and ability to mentor them. 

“The annual summit is where we bring together 350 of the world’s top college entrepreneurs with some of today’s most influential leaders,” says Jain.  “We strive to help companies grow and impact people around the world.” 

Jain founded the group while studying business at Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and has entrepreneurship in his family – Ankur’s father, Naveen Jain, worked early on at Microsoft and made billions founding the companies InfoSpace and Intelius. 

Making an impact
A number of conference attendees emphasized that their goal as entrepreneurs was not just to make money, but to make an impact as well. 

Michael Cantalino is a senior at Boston’s Northeastern University where he studies entrepreneurship. He runs business operations for Jola Venture, a company that seeks to market solar food dehydrators in Africa and allow farmers to better preserve and market their crops. 

Dehydration is not a new technique, but Cantalino says it can be inefficient using just the open air and sun. Jola Venture seeks to use its solar dehydrators to speed up the process and let farmers get more out of the crops they harvest. 

Cantalino, born and raised in Bergen County, N.J., says he has always had an independent and entrepreneurial nature, but has sought to harness it toward positively impacting the world’s less fortunate since doing development and microfinance work in India and the Dominican Republic. 

Based on his experience, he believes that volunteering is not enough. He thinks impoverished regions can only truly be helped by offering services and goods – like Jola’s solar dehydrator – that change the economy. 

“Four billion people on Earth live on less than two dollars a day,” he says. “Not only is that a huge part of the world’s population but it’s a big market. If we want to stick around on this planet, we have to get that 4 billion involved.” 

The company is testing the product now in Cameroon, where Cantalino plans to move in September. 

Pushing the cutting edge
Some of the conference’s attendees were alumni who are already making an impact in the business world. 

Shakeel Avadhany participated in the group’s 2009 conference while studying as a materials engineer at MIT. Today, just three years out of college, he is the CEO of Levant Power, a company poised to play a critical role in the future of the suspension and automotive industries. 

The company has designed and patented technology that generates energy from the bouncing motion of a vehicle’s suspension. While in college, Avadhany was riding in a car on a bumpy road and the idea came to him to generate energy from the movement of a car. 

Current electronic suspension systems consume energy, but Levant’s technology, called GenShock, can power a car’s electronic suspension and event input power back into the vehicle. 

When Avadhany attended the Kairos Summit in 2009, he was still building the technology into a business. He remembers the valuable experience of meeting business leaders such as former Boeing president and CEO Phil Condit and Dupont CEO Ellen Kullman. 

Karios expedited the industry interest and got me in front of some of America’s CEOs who were part of the 2009 conference,” he says. “Being there, learning from them, sharing my story and hearing their feedback really kick started industry interest when the mentors took interest in Levant and me as an enterprising entrepreneur.” 

Today, Levant has 20 employees and a 20,000 square foot testing facility in Boston. The company counts major car manufacturers and defense contractors as clients and is in a position to impact the automotive industry. 

Other alumni have returned with entrepreneurial experience to share. Andres Blumer and Ryder Fyrwald are summit alums who became involved in Kairos while studying business at the University of Southern California. Fyrwald is one of the Kairos Society’s founders. Fyrwald and Blumer are employees number nine and 10, respectively, at Humantelligence, a consulting and analytics company that seeks to help companies better relate with their employees. 

While they did not start the company themselves, Fyrwald says being involved with Kairos made him value working for and helping build a small company. And if being involved with Kairos helped lead them to Humantelligence, they have led Humantelligence back to Kairos: Their boss Scott Kaufman, the company’s founder, was one of this year’s mentors. 

Kaufman, who studied international business and entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, founded the company in 2010 after coming up with the idea that behavioral software could help companies better relate to their employees and increase productivity. 

Kaufman, now in his 30s, says it is rewarding to offer his experience and advice to young men and women aspiring to succeed in starting their own ventures. 

Entrepreneurs in a down economy
Jain says that the young men and women at the conference are actually starting as young entrepreneurs at a good time because a down economy is a laboratory for entrepreneurship. 

“Many great companies were founded during recessions,” he says. “It’s not until a recession until companies figure out who has built it well and who hasn’t.” 

For his part, he is in the process of starting his own company. The company, called Panjia Co., seeks to take proven, early-stage technologies and help them grow in new markets. 

His partners in the venture include Jake Medwell, another co-founder of Kairos, and Jonathan Shriftman. Medwell and Shriftman have backgrounds in starting companies as well – like the fixed-gear bicycle company Solé that they founded while in college at USC. 

Starting a company from scratch is a difficult endeavor even for a person with plenty of experience. For college entrepreneurs and recent college graduates starting companies, there is no doubt that many, if not most, will not succeed. But Ankur and the other Kairos members hope forums like this weekend’s Summit will give young entrepreneurs tools and experience to at least prepare them well. 

“Being an entrepreneur,” says Scott Kaufman of Humantelligence, “is one of the best career paths if you can stomach the madness and inevitable ups and downs.”

Pictures of carousing can come back to haunt you.

An injured worker in Arkansas was denied an extension of disability benefits after his former employer and insurance company unearthed pictures from social networking sites that showed him "drinking and partying," according to the judge who turned down his appeal.

Nearly three years ago, Zackery Clement suffered a hernia when a refrigerator fell on him. His insurance company and his employer, a furniture and appliance retailer, paid for medical expenses and disability payments. When Clement applied for an extension of those benefits, he was turned down by a judge and the workers' compensation commission. The insurer and the retailer had submitted pictures of Clement taken from Facebook and MySpace, arguing that the pictures proved his injuries were healed.

Clement took his case to the Arkansas Court of Appeals, which ruled that the photos of him — one of which is captioned "drinkin" — were acceptable evidence of his recovery. The decision of appeals judge David Glover included a lengthy timeline of Clement's injury and rehabilitation, which included three surgeries, along with the observation that Clement tested positive for THC at one point during his treatment.

Glover said the photos called Clement's credibility into question.

"We find no abuse of discretion in the allowance of the photographs," he wrote. "Clement contended that he was in excruciating pain, but these pictures show him drinking and partying."

Carlos Osorio / AP

The General Motors headquarters in downtown Detroit.

By Colleen Kane, CNBC.com

With common factors such as traffic, crowds, noise, grime, and crime, cities are generally not perceived as oases of calm.

But what makes one city more stressful to live in than the next? To gauge the stress of residents in American cities, data cruncher Sperling’s Best Places considered the 50 largest metropolitan areas (which includes suburbs). The team considered the following factors: divorce rate, commute times, unemployment, violent crime, property crime, suicides, alcohol consumption, mental health, sleep troubles, and the annual amount of cloudy days.

There wasn’t much variance in several categories. For alcohol consumption per month, each of the top 10 cities ranged from 8.7 to 14 drinks per month; for days per month with poor mental health, the metro areas ranged from 2.9 to 4.3; and for days per month of poor sleep, the range was 6.9 to 8.2.

The data behind this list does not paint a cheery picture. The Sunshine State, in particular, seems much less sunny — dismal, even. What follows are the five metropolitan areas that fared the worst using the above criteria.

5. Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Michigan
Population: 1,918,288
Divorced: 11.4%
Commute time – minutes: 27
Unemployment: 15.7%
Violent crime per 100,000 population: 1111.2
Property crime per 100,000 population: 4,152.4
Suicides per 100,000 population: 9.6
Cloudy days annually: 180

Standout factors: The Detroit metropolitan area is in the 100th percentile for violent crime and property crime. It also ranks in the 97th percentile for poor mental health days per month, though it is in the second percentile for alcohol consumption per month.

4. Jacksonville, Florida
Population: 1,374,303
Divorced: 12.3%
Commute time – minutes: 28.0
Unemployment: 10.4%
Violent crime per 100,000 population: 557
Property crime per 100,000 population: 3,772.4
Suicides per 100,000 population: 13.9
Cloudy days annually: 139

Standout factor: Jacksonville is in the 95th percentile for divorces.

3. Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall, Florida
Population: 2,472,015
Divorced: 11.5%
Commute time – minutes: 33.2
Unemployment: 12.5%
Violent crime per 100,000 population: 733.3
Property crime per 100,000 population: 4,678.3
Suicides per 100,000 population: 9.3
Cloudy days annually: 117

Standout factors: Metropolitan Miami is in the 97th percentile for property crime, and 95th percentile for violent crime, but is in the fourth percentile for alcohol consumption.

2. Las Vegas-Paradise, Nevada
Population: 1,908,008
Divorced: 13.2%
Commute time – minutes: 27
Unemployment: 14%
Violent crime per 100,000 population: 763.4
Property crime per 100,000 population: 2,921.9
Suicides per 100,000 population: 18
Cloudy days annually: 65

Standout factors: Las Vegas-Paradise is in the 100th percentile for divorces, but it had the least cloudy days of the 50 cities analyzed.

1. Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida
Population: 2,780,818
Divorced: 12.3%
Commute time – minutes: 28.3
Unemployment: 11.2%
Violent crime per 100,000 population: 500
Property crime per 100,000 population: 3,387.2
Suicides per 100,000 population: 15.5
Cloudy days annually: 127

Standout factor: Tampa is in the 97th percentile for suicides.

Click here to see all of America's most stressful cities on CNBC.com.

More from CNBC.com:

Homes of New Tech Titans

Urban Mansions

Up-and-Coming Retirement Cities

Phil Skinner / AP

Jackie Gingrich Cushman, daughter of Newt Gingrich, speaks at a news conference at the Georgia state capitol last month. Gingrich said in a debate this week that his daughter worked as a church janitor when she was 13.

During the Republican presidential debate this week, Newt Gingrich shared a story about how his daughter worked as a church janitor when she was only 13.

“I was actually proud of my clean bathrooms,” Jackie Gingrich Cushman said in an telephone interview Tuesday, referring to the janitorial job she held at the First Baptist Church in Carrollton, Ga., in the early 1980s. “I learned work has value.”

But that work may have been a violation of federal child labor laws that her father has denounced as “stupid.”

Cushman was 13 when she took the part-time, minimum-wage janitorial job, scrubbing bathrooms two days a week using cleaning supplies and a bucket. She said working as a janitor was a "great experience."

Asked if she was working legally as a janitor for the church, Cushman said, "I certainly hope so." 

But based on child labor laws in effect now and in the 1980s, 13-year-olds are not allowed to hold janitorial jobs, said Michael Hancock, assistant administrator for policy in the wage and hour division of the U.S. Department of Labor. There are no exemptions for religious organizations and their employees when it comes to child labor laws, according to the agency.

"I definitely see it as a child labor violation," said Reid Maki, coordinator of The Child Labor Coalition, when asked about a 13-year-old working as a janitor. "When you put a kid in a situation that’s designed for adults you're asking for trouble."

Gingrich’s reference to his daughter’s youthful employment is part of an ongoing narrative for the former House speaker: Poor kids should start toiling as early as 9 years old so they can learn what it means to make a living. “I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job and learn someday to own the job,” Gingrich said in the debate Monday.

Research has shown that teens who have jobs early in life are more likely to build a strong work ethic. But handing over adult jobs to kids might not be the right way to do that, particularly because there are tasks younger kids are not allowed to perform under U.S. law, including janitorial services.

Under the law 13-year-olds can:

• Deliver newspapers.
• Work as a baby sitter.
• Work as an actor or performer in motion pictures, television, theater or radio.
• Work in a business solely owned or operated by their parents.

It's fine for 14- and 15-year-olds to work a janitorial job in many types of retail and service establishments. There are restrictions at these ages as well, however, under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

“They can’t work as janitors in any manufacturing establishment or industries that are deemed too hazardous for the employment of such youth,” according to the Labor Department.

A spokesman for Gingrich seemed unconcerned when informed that 13-year-olds are not allowed to work as janitors.

"Can they work as a clerk in the library?" press secretary R.C. Hammond responded by email.

Gingrich has proposed getting rid of age limits as a way to help build work values and save money because kids can do similar work for less pay than higher-paid adults.

"It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods in trapping children … in child laws which are truly stupid," Gingrich said in November talk at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, according to the Los Angeles Times. "OK, you say to someone, 'You shouldn't go to work before you're 14, 16 years of age.' Fine. You're totally poor. You're in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I tried for years to have a very simple model. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school."

Not everyone agrees.

“Substitution of child labor for adult labor is never an economic bargain,” said Hugh Hindman, professor of labor at Appalachian State University, and author of “Child Labor: An American History.”

“Not only are adults with full-time jobs earning living wages displaced by kids with part-time jobs earning minimum wages, but the competition between children and adults will also depress the wages of those adults who hold on to their jobs,” Hindman said.

Gingrich makes some important points about poor children, however, he said.

“Opportunities for the kind of freelance jobs that teach responsibility and provide pocket money, baby-sitting, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, etc., are disproportionately skewed toward middle- and upper-middle-class kids,” he said. “Poor kids do need this kind of opportunity, but I'm not sure janitorial service is the ticket.”

Jeylan Mortimer, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who has researched the impact of work on teens and found it helps them build confidence and interpersonal skills, supports any attempts to help adolescents get jobs.

“The employment market for high school students has collapsed, largely as a result of competition with adults for teen jobs, and teen employment is now at its lowest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began compiling the data,” said Mortimer, author of “Working and Growing Up In America.” 

The December unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds was 20.3 percent, well above the 8.3 percent overall jobless rate. For blacks in that age group it's 42 percent.

Mortimer isn't big on proposals she’s hearing from the stump to fix the problem.

In addition to displacing adult workers, it would “likely expose teens to difficult, and possibly hazardous, work conditions, lots of bending and lifting, exposure to harsh cleaning agents, etc.," she said.

She suggests creating a program where students can assist teachers or tutor at schools depending on their achievement level, and that wouldn't displace adult workers but would relieve "overworked educators."

As for Gingrich's daughter, she sees value in all types of jobs when it comes to helping kids learn about work, but she maintained that unskilled labor may do the most character building.

“Cleaning bathrooms taught me a lot,” Cushman said, adding that she worked many menial jobs, including being a rollerblading waitress for the Sonic Drive-In chain in high school. Such experiences, she added, helped her value hard work and “appreciate and value the people that do the work as well.

Blueseed

A California startup company wants to dock a vessel off the coast to house foreign entrepreneurs.

By Brooke Donald, The Associated Press

A California startup company wants to dock a vessel off the coast to house foreign entrepreneurs who have dreams of creating the next Google but can't get visas to work in the United States.

"A lot of people say, 'I'd like to go to Silicon Valley' but there is no way for them to do it," said Max Marty, Blueseed CEO and co-founder.

The ship would give foreign entrepreneurs a place to build their companies only a short boat ride from high tech's hub.

Marty, the son of Cuban immigrants, thought of the ship after listening to international classmates at the University of Miami business school lament about having to leave the U.S. after graduation.

Politicians have wrangled with the immigration issue, but efforts to change the system have stalled.

Last July, President Barack Obama said during a Twitter town hall he wanted to make sure talented people who studied in the U.S. were able to stay to create jobs.

"We don't want to pay for training them here and then having them benefit other countries," Obama said.

But Blueseed founders don't expect any real reform from a bitterly divided Congress during an election year in 2012.

"Our solution is an entrepreneurial solution," said Dario Mutabdzija, Blueseed's president.

The ship would accommodate about 1,000 people and be docked in international waters southwest of San Francisco Bay.

It would be registered in a country with a reputable legal system, maybe the Bahamas or the Marshall Islands, Marty said. Residents would be subject to the laws of that nation.

Residents would be ferried ashore with temporary business or tourist visas, which are easier to get, to meet with investors, collaborators, partners and others.

"Yes, we live in an interconnected age with Skype and other video conferencing. But if you want to grow a company, physical interactions are of paramount importance," Mutabdzija said.

The ship would be a remodeled cruise ship or barge that Blueseed leases or owns. It would have all the high-tech amenities expected of a startup incubator and the look of employee-friendly Internet giants Facebook and Google, famous for their modern campuses complete with gourmet cafeterias, exercise facilities and an environmentally-sustainable design.

A live-work space would cost about $1,200 a month.

Critics deride the ship as a publicity stunt, and say investors would be better served contributing to ventures that help Americans create businesses.

"I would say the whole thing is a perfect metaphor for how in corporate America the practice to grow talent and incubate business locally is drifting away — quite literally," said Bob Dane, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for limited immigration.

But supporters of foreign entrepreneurship say immigrants are responsible for some of the most successful businesses in the world and if the U.S. doesn't try to attract them, others will.

"The ship may sound like a crazy idea but it illustrates how seriously flawed the immigration system here is," said John Feinblatt, who runs Partnership for a New American Economy, which advocates for immigration reform.

The organization published a report in June that said 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children.

Feinblatt said countries including Chile, Singapore and the United Kingdom have programs to attract immigrant entrepreneurs.

"While the U.S. is driving people away, other countries are welcoming them with open arms," he said. "If you miss out on them, you miss their talent, their ideas and ultimately the jobs that they create and the taxes that they pay."

Christopher S. Bentley, a spokesman with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the agency has not seen the proposal and it's premature to comment.

Blueseed's idea has started gaining steam.

Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, announced he would lead Blueseed's financing search.
Blueseed wants to raise $10 million to $30 million over the next year and a half. The goal would be to launch in late 2013.