The Rockland Business Women’s Network will host a seminar for women looking to boost their sales skills Oct. 8 in New City.

Adrian Miller, president of Adrian Miller Sales Training and author of the book “The Blatant Truth: 50 Ways to Sales Success,” will present the noontime seminar, being held at Pasta Cucina restaurant, 253 S. Little Tor Road.

All Rockland and vicinity business women are welcome, the group said.

Cost is $25 for members who register by Oct. 7; and $35 for members at the door and non-members.

For more information and to register, call 845-398-3098, or  go to www.rbwn.org for online registration.

If you brown bag your lunch and then store it in a communal refrigerator until lunchtime, chances are high that you’ve been a victim of the occasional theft of your prized midday meal.

Like socks in the dryer, sandwiches, yogurts, salads, even leftovers packed in Tupperware can suddenly go missing, without so much as a crumb on a coworker’s face to help the suddenly lunchless chump nail the culprit.

Well, those days may soon be over. A Manhattan-based designer has developed the Anti-Theft Lunch Bag: “Regular sandwich bags that have green splotches printed on both sides. After your sandwich is placed inside, no one will want to touch it,” according to the designer’s Web site.

The bags aren’t yet available, but you can send an e-mail to the designer, Sherwood Forlee, who will advise when they might become available.

A faltering U.S. economy combined with a continued gap in pay between the sexes is putting the squeeze on women, their families and their careers, according to a recently released report by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.

The report, titled “Women and Their Families Are Being Squeezed,” notes that households headed by women saw median incomes fall 5.4 percent to just shy of $25,000 between 2000 and 2007. In comparison, during the same period, gasoline prices rose 145 percent.

Further the committee, headed by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., found that women are facing higher unemployment, having lost 298,000 jobs since December. Female unemployment rose to 5.2 percent this year from 4.1 percent in 2000, and there are now 3.8 million unemployed women — 1 million more than when President George W. Bush took office.

Among other findings, the committee found the subprime mortgage crisis is affecting female homeowners to a greater degree than males. Women were 32 percent more likely to receive high-cost subprime mortgages than their male counterparts, despite on average having higher credit scores, putting them at greater risk of losing their homes.

Read the report’s full findings by clicking here.

Whether you agree or disagree with Sarah Palin’s politics, one thing is certain: The Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate has reignited a debate among women about what it means to have it all.

That’s the topic of the next People@Work column, which publishes tomorrow. Look for it here at LoHud.com in the Business section.

Last week’s federal unemployment report noted that the nation’s unemployment rate rose to 6.1 percent largely due to huge jobs cuts at the nation’s larger employers.

The economy lost 84,000 jobs last month, the U.S. Department of Labor reported Thursday.

A new report, however, notes that small employers, those with fewer than 50 employees, added 20,000 jobs last month, according to the ADP National Employment Report and ADP Small Business Report.

ADP is Auto Data Processing Inc., the New Jersey-based provider of payroll and other computerized-transaction services.

Last month’s 20,000-job increase isn’t nearly enough to offset the job cuts at large employers, those with more than 500 employees, which chopped 28,000 positions, or medium-sized employers, those who employ 50 to 499 workers, which cut 25,000 jobs.

The ADP report noted, however, that August’s increase in small-employer jobs followed a 46,000 jump in July.

On the down side, the report said, two sectors of the economy most strongly affected by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown — residential construction, and home sales and mortgage lending — “showed  little lessening of the recent strain on employment in these industries.”

Workers in the state got a boost this week from Gov. David A. Paterson after he signed the state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN.

The new law, which is similar is some respects to the federal WARN Act, requires private employers with 50 or more employees to give them and the state Department of Labor 90 days notice, prior to a mass layoff or plant closing.

Failure to do so, the Labor Department said, could result in fines of up to $500 a day for each violation.

The new law also gives the department’s commissioner authority to order relief, including back wages and unpaid medical benefits, for employees who don’t receive the required notice.

The federal WARN Act differs from the state law in that it only applies to companies that employ 100 or more workers and requires only 60 days notice to those workers. The federal law also lacks an enforcement mechanism, which requires workers facing job loss to sue their employers privately.

New York’s law closes that loophole, the agency said, which has allowed employers who fail to provide workers with a timely WARN notice to escape liability for their violations.

“For too long, workers in New York, given no notice in the face of immediate layoffs, have been unintentional victims of a federal law with limited enforcement provisions,” said state Labor Department Commissioner M. Patricia Smith.

The legislation will ensure that more workers in the state are given sufficient notice prior to losing their jobs, Smith said.

“Just as important,” she said, “those employers who don’t play by the rules will be sanctioned accordingly.”

Though job cuts ebbed a bit last month, the tapering off wasn’t sufficient to keep the summer of 2008 from going down as having the largest number of job cuts since 2002, analysis released this week shows.

August job cuts jumped 12 percent compared to a year ago, totaling nearly 89,000, according to the latest Job Cut Report released Wednesday by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.

Employers so far this year have announced 667,996 job cuts, a 29 percent rise from last year’s eight-month total of 515,855, Challenger said.

With just four months remaining, this year’s job cuts are just 100,000 shy of last year’s total: 768,264.  At the current pace, job cuts will surpass last year’s 12-month total by the middle of October and could exceed 1 million for the first time since 2005.

“Hopes of a late summer reprieve in layoffs were dashed by heavy downsizing in the automotive and government sectors,” said John A. Challenger, the Chicago-based employment firm’s chief executive.

“We have not seen this level of summer job cutting since 2002,” he said, “when the country was still struggling to recover in the wake of the 2001 recession and September 11.”