Today the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in what some say is the biggest case of its term, and certainly the most important one for workers. Depending on the ruling, it could be the largest class action suit ever, potentially covering a million women who have worked for or hoped to work for Wal-Mart.

It’s a case that deserves attention whether you are a Wal-Mart shopper, a Wal-Mart hater, a Wal-Mart employee or shareholder — or just wonder about the power of big business in America. For many companies and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce all are lining up with Wal-Mart on this one, hoping that the case will not be allowed to be certified as a class action.

Here’s a quick look at the Wal-Mart sex discrimination case:

The Atlantic has a great piece that explains its significance: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/03/welcome-to-wal-mart-the-biggest-case-of-the-term/73061/.

The Washington Post’s coverage leading up to today’s oral arguments include a piece that notes that for the first time the U.S. Supreme Court is one-third female, which could give the plaintiffs “a symbolic boost.” The Post also supplies a timeline and many other details about this case indicate Wal-Mart is likely to win.

I have edited a few stories based on the facts of this case, the best of which was reported and written by Dana Knifht at the Indianapolis Star. It told of Melissa Howard’s allegations on how she was mistreated and passed over for promotion during her years as a Wal-Mart employee. While most  have left the retailing giant, lead plaintiff Betty Dukes who still works there as a greeter a decade after the sexual harassment and discrimination suit was first filed.

However the Supreme Court rules, the women who dared to take on Wal-Mart are brave heroes to challenge a corporate giant to change and improve women’s lives and livelihoods.

Given my fascination with unusual careers, it’s a wonder I don’t work as a mermaid or a fortune teller at a show in Florida. Maybe because I don’t swim well enough!

Circus performers fascinate me, and I try to write about them at least once a year. So do other careers with animals, whether they’re beagles or whales or snakes. I’ve written about costume designers and pet photographers; magicians and a “chief troublemaker.”

My latest look into an offbeat career: Elvis impersonators who are older than Elvis Presley was when he died. They keep their sex appeal but some say they face subtle age discrimination too. The article is on the AARP Bulletin Today website.

My friend, Patricia Kitchen, money and careers writer at Newsday, wrote about strange occupations on Long Island and New York City – including a pet fish veterinarian, men’s underwear designer and a professional whistler who’s performed at Carnegie Hall. Cue sound of me whistling appreciatively.

I’ve always wanted to write about professional bull writers or cowboys on the rodeo circuit. Some day I’ll sell a story about people who spend a lot of their time in the sky or gazing at the sky and get paid for it. Or a piece on all the unusual jobs that are connected with film-making: stunt artist, credits artist, dialect coach and many more. Or a series on the buskers, street performers and subway artists.

I keep a list of weird work and keep hoping to find a media outlet that wants me to write a weekly column by that name.

For those who crave more strange and surprising careers, pick up two books by photographer Nancy Rica Schiff, Odd Jobs and Odder Jobs, both portraits of some freaky fields.. A site called JobProfiles lists 37 including oyster floater.  Or check out Newsweek’s piece on 10 weird jobs that pay $100K or so – from airplane repossessor to flavorist.

Hope everyone finds a little bit of weirdness in their work this week! Just don’t step on my blue suede shoes when you do.

What’s the weirdest work you’ve ever been paid for? And what kind of odd jobs shall I add to my list?

When I think about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, I sometimes feel the horrible tightening the throat gives when it cannot draw in enough oxygen. I picture flames and fire devouring the fabric and the wooden walls, and two workplace friends, young women who barely speak English, jumping to their deaths from the New York City factory.

The fire, which killed 146 women working in a New York City garment factory, was for years the worst workplace accident on record. Many of them were Jewish or immigrants and their deaths set off an array of activism that led to new workplace safety laws.

Why is this Triangle tragedy still relevant today, one-hundred years after it happened?

Because immigrant workers still find themselves toiling in unsafe conditions in meat packing houses, in a Los Angeles garment factory and on corporate farms that spray heavy pesticides or other chemicals and then send workers right in to pick.

Because 850 construction workers, 450 farm workers and 100 miners died in workplace accidents or injuries, and another 1,000 self-employed workers lost their lives to their livelihoods, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2009 data.

Because workers at discount stores have been locked inside the store for hours to conduct inventory, with no escape possible if an emergency occurred.

Because workers who forget the travails of the past are likely to repeat them.

Read more:

The New York Times CityRoom blog has a great series of articles and vignettes on the Triange Shirtwaist.

Station WNYC has a collection of photos, recollections and other information on the fire.

PBS’ documentary Triangle Fire can be viewed online, and it has a timeline of the deadliest workplace accidents from the 1860s to three in 2010.

The Huffington Post shares seven books related to Triangle – including a graphic novel.

The NEA shares some educational and teaching resources, including articles from the Washington Post and elsewhere.

Question authority. Question your coworkers too.  Ask questions to achieve clarity and goals and solutions. Ask questions even if you’re the big boss – and especially if you’re a leader managing a team of exceptional specialists.

That’s the theme from my first story for Fortune.com , which is online this week. (I’ve written for Fortune magazine for almost a year – my latest piece on invisible promotions was out in early February.)

The story was prompted partly by a handful of business books that encourage more active questioning to achieve better ideas. Among them Brainsteering by  Kevin P. And Shawn T. Coyne; The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande and especially Seven Strategy Questions by Robert Simons, which inspired my Fortune.com story.

His questions are really intended for the brass at companies with hundreds of employees – not freelance writers who run a small seasonal ice cart to give teens jobs. But I still like two of them in particular: “How committed are your employees to helping each other? ” and “What critical performance variables are you tracking?” Simons, a professor at Harvard Business School, said the questions can lead to making great choices and a clearer shared vision and strategy for success.

I like that notion – for myself, my little company, Mity Nice and every leader. But I wrote the piece also as a visible reminder of the importance of curiosity for every career, from janitor to genius. After all, Albert Einstein said: “The important thing is not to stop questioning.  Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”

My curiosity almost never leaves me, and as a journalist it is an essential piece of whatever success I achieve. Here’s a small sampling of my favorite questions:

• What are you the best at? Where can you really shine?
• Why is that? Why is it important?
• Please put that in context for me. What’s the trendline / back story?
• Who else do I need to talk to to get the full story?
• So what else do I need to know about this subject?

Of course, I love many of the questions posed by people inIn particular I listen to Nancy Hickey, chief administrative officer at Steelcase and her “If I had a magic wand to solve this problem, what would you like me to do with it?”

Maybe the magic wand is using great questions to delve deep into each other’s expertise and problem-solving abilities. How does that sound to you?

So what questions do you ask at work and at home that make you more effective or engaging? And how do you use questions as a worthwhile tool your job? What’s the one question you ask all the time?

While everyone’s thinking basketball pools this week, I can’t help but consider all the other bets placed in newsrooms and offices around the country – from babies to Wall Street to snoring on the job.

The office pools around Newsday and at the Detroit Free Press, where I worked for years, focused on the date a coworkers twins would be born and when an office renovation might be finished. There was the election results pool and the annual predict the year-end close of the Dow Jones Average. We bet on the Red Wings performance and when the Dow would cross 10,000 for the first time.
So when I saw the new CareerBuilder.com research on March Madness, I immediate focused on the strangest office pools ever. Staffers bet who would win the National Spelling Bee and how long a colleague could keep binder clips attached to his body. They has pools on the next pope and who would win the typing contest and whether someone at work could eat a three-pound bowl of mayonnaise. (I wonder if the loser had to clean up any spills or messes on that one.)
A number of the bets revolved around management or habits, CareerBuilder’s survey showed. Some team created a pool on how many words a very quiet boss would say in a meeting. (The answer was 11.) They bet on how many people would call in sick on the day a new video game debuted and how long two coworkers would date and what time a colleague would fall asleep at her desk.
In earlier surveys on the subject, who would be fired first and who would win a promotion came up. So did how often a coworker would show up late, or the number of crying spells someone would have. (Since colleagues could influence the tears, either by cheering the woman up or tearing her apart, that one seems especially unfair and unkind to me.)
CareerBuilder’s surveys, conducted by Harris Interactive, this year queried  3,910 U.S. employee who work full-time; its margin of error is +/- 1.57 percent.
Workers Twitter posts show they have office Lotto pools, bet on obscure economic indicators – and the entertainers in American Idol.
The biggest office pools, of course, revolve around the Super Bowl and March Madness, the annual college basketball playoffs in March and April. Almost one-fourth of workers have guessed the Super Bowl winners with colleagues, CareerBuilder reports, while one-in-five workers say they have played the brackets for basketball winners. The March Madness pools are far more likely to attract men, 28 percent of them playing versus  11 percent of women. Midwesterners are the most likely to succumb to March Madness, at 27 percent, CareerBuilder reports.

One researcher suggested not everyone enjoys such predictions.  Some may find the experience unpleasant or even anxiety producing especially when the outcomes are hard to see, according to Washington University at St. Louis’s Stephen Nowliss. They could bow out because the odds are not weighted fairly in most office pools, giving an unfair advantage to those who just pick the favorites, according to The Numbers Guy Carl Bialik’s WSJ.com piece.
Basketball has its place, but some offices prefer competitions in Scrabble or a ping pong tournament or a pool on how many babies and pregnancies will pop up in the year. I like the baby bets – since afterward everyone gets a chance to burp or hold the grand prize.

What’s the best office pool you’ve seen or experienced? And how do they help office camaraderie and morale?

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Feel split on who to root for in the playoff games? Academics may have loyalties divided among a half dozen universities. Read more in my Washington Post Capital Business article .

The photographer within the photo on a sunny day. Photo courtesy of Bigfoto.com Continue Reading »

Some days you just need to shove aside your to-do list and ignore your deadlines and go straight for the heart of the matter. Today is just such a day.

After watching an hour of televised news reports on the horrible tsunami and earthquake in Japan and reading some stories and tweets on this disaster, I need to turn off the horrific news and focus on how I could help. I can’t run off to northern Japan and cover the story or help the injured and homeless. Nor can I reach out to victims’ families with cards or emails, though I will be attempting to contact my family’s exchange student, Yoshitaka, soon to see if he and his family are all right.

Yet in this interconnected world, there is much I can do to offer help and support, now and in the weeks ahead. I just heard President Obama say he offered “our Japanese friends whatever assistance is needed.” And I know that assistance will be as varied as it is valuable.

Here’s three things I’m going to do today and tomorrow to reach out with compassion:

1. Share the new Charity Navigator list of best causes to help with the Japanese tsunami and earthquake as widely as I can. This means emailing it to editors at five or six newspapers. This means sharing it on social media, right here and however else I can discover. (Ideas on this are welcome.)
2. Go to a Japanese restaurant or Japanese supermarket this weekend, spend a good chunk of money there – and then express my solidarity and hope that their families are safe. Yes, I’ll need to finesse how I say this, to make sure it’s a message of comfort and kindness, said with respect and a little restraint.
3. Place a reminder on my calendar so in two months time, I will return to consider how I will help. I may donate (again) to a cause helping with the rebuilding of Japan or find an article that I can write about those who are aiding in relief. By then, much of the media coverage will have subsided and the needs will be clearer.

As I sit here, worried and distracted from my deadlines, it seems like there may be different kindnesses I could undertake, but these are right in front of me and use my talents. These are what I can visualize now.

Your two or three actions may be far different – and I would love to hear what you’re doing, and what else we all could do to help. Because in times of natural disaster or horrific situations, we all need to increase our generosity and connectivity. The time we take for kindness may delay a few work projects, but that is a small price to pay to help Japan – and my readers with their generosity.