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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

US workers concerned with war

Employers relax job setting during confict

OMAHA, Neb. -- Kris Sands often slips away to the break room at work to watch TV for developments in Iraq that could affect her stepson stationed in Kuwait.\n"I always look to see if it's his unit on television," she said Monday from the Principal Financial Group offices in Grand Island.\nSands is on the clock during her TV breaks, but her bosses don't mind. They are among employers across the nation who say they have relaxed their rules in an effort to help workers with loved ones in the military. Company-sanctioned breaks to check television, radio and Internet reports in some places have become part of the work day.\nIn Virginia, state employees are allowed more liberal use of e-mail during work to keep in touch with relatives or friends in combat zones.\n"The bottom line is that if these men and women can leave their homes, jobs and families to protect our freedom, then the least we can do is to help family and friends stay in touch with them while they are away," Gov. Mark Warner said.\nState worker Carol Thomas, whose husband of 14 years was deployed to the Middle East, sent Warner a note of thanks.\n"If we weren't allowed to do this, I definitely wouldn't be in touch with my husband as much," said Thomas, who e-mails her husband daily. "We're expecting our first child in June, so this means even more to us."\nMost corporate efforts to support war-family employees are probably temporary, said Charles Lamphear, director of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bureau of Business Research. He said he isn't surprised by the extra steps businesses are taking.\n"Any proprietor would be trying to do what they can to show support for their employees in that situation," he said.\nSoon after the war began, State Farm Insurance installed big-screen televisions in the lunchroom of its Bloomington, Ill., headquarters to keep up on the war.

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