March 29, 2024

New Election Rules a Win for Labor Unions

Business groups quickly denounced the move, saying it limits the time that employers have to educate workers about the impact of joining a union. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has already filed a federal lawsuit challenging the rules.

The rules, which take effect April 30, simplify procedures and reduce legal delays that can hold up union elections after employees at a work site gather enough signatures to form a union.

“This rule is about giving all employees who have petitioned for an election the right to vote in a timely manner and without the impediment of needless litigation,” board chairman Mark Pearce said.

Unions say the old rules allowed companies to file frivolous appeals, stalling elections for months or years. The new rules could help unions make inroads at businesses like Target and Wal-Mart, which have successfully resisted union organizing for years.

But business groups claim the new plan allows “ambush” elections that don’t give company managers enough time to respond.

“This decision erodes employers’ free speech and due process rights and opens the door to rushed elections that will deny employees access to critical information,” said Katherine Lugar, executive vice president for public affairs at the Retail Industry leaders Association.

Most union elections currently take place 45 days to 60 days after a union gathers enough signatures to file a petition. The new rules could shorten that time by several weeks, depending on the situation.

Many employers use the time leading up to an election to talk to workers about the cost and impact of joining a union. But union officials claim the lag time is often used to pressure or intimidate workers against forming a union.

“It’s good news that the NLRB has taken this modest but important step to help ensure that workers who want to vote to form a union at their workplace get a fair opportunity to do so,” said AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.

While union leaders publicly tried to play down the new rules as a modest development, labor experts called the change significant. Unions have seen their ranks dwindle steadily over the last three decades to 11.9 percent of the work force.

“Employers wouldn’t have fought against it so hard if it wasn’t going to make a difference,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

One way employers can currently delay union elections is to raise questions about which workers should be included in a bargaining unit. Supervisors aren’t eligible for union membership, and the company and union can spend months litigating that issue.

Under the new rules, questions about the makeup of bargaining units are resolved after the election takes place.

“This isn’t going to change the world, but it’s one step, and we haven’t had a step towards workers’ rights in a very long time,” Bronfenbrenner said.

The rules were approved by the board’s two Democratic members. Its lone Republican, Brian Hayes, has not yet cast his vote, but he is expected to cast a dissenting opinion sometime before the rule takes effect.

Hayes is so strongly opposed to the plan that he threatened to quit the commission last month, claiming its Democratic members were ignoring longstanding procedures in their haste to finish the rules.

The final rules were scaled back from an earlier version that would have required employers to hand over to union organizers a list of employees’ e-mail addresses and phone numbers.

The board rushed to approve the new rules before the end of the year, when the term of Democratic member Craig Becker expires. The board currently has only three members instead of the usual five, and the Supreme Court has ruled that it can’t issue any decisions with less than three members in place.

Congressional Republicans have blocked President Barack Obama from filling vacant posts on the board, and lawmakers have used procedural tactics to prevent Obama from bypassing the Senate to make recess appointments.

The lawsuit filed by business groups late Tuesday claims the board circumvented its own operating procedures to finalize this rule, and that the rule itself short-circuits safeguards meant to ensure fair elections.

“The blatantly partisan purpose of this rule is to ensure that employers have no time to talk to their workers about unionizing,” said Robin Conrad, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s public policy law firm, the National Chamber Litigation Center.

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Follow Sam Hananel on Twitter at http://twitter.com/shananel

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Online:

National Labor Relations Board: https://www.nlrb.gov/

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Retailers Enliven Catalog Offerings Through Apps

Anthropologie wants to change that, and thinks the tablet is the key. For the holiday season, it has commissioned a new iPad app, designed to give shoppers a flavor of its own store, but also to offer a new way to shop, by allowing people to browse, mix and match items, and view multimedia features in ways not possible in stores, print catalogs or online.

The company is not alone. Many retailers, as varied as Saks Fifth Avenue and Wal-Mart, are putting out new iPad apps in time for the holiday season. These apps do away with scrolling through pages of items online, and aim to make shopping more entertaining.

“There’s always been a little bit of a disappointment with the online experience, because the Web site needs to be practical and doesn’t engage the customers as well as the store experience and the catalog,” said Chris Love, director of portfolio management at Anthropologie. “We’re thinking about the iPad as a new channel that needs to be treated differently.”

Just 8 percent of online shoppers own tablet devices, and retailers, on average, have spent an anemic $14,000 on tablet apps, according to Forrester Research. But 60 percent of tablet owners use them to shop and many, especially young people, say they prefer shopping on tablets to smartphones and even computers.

Like magazine publishers, retailers greeted the iPad by putting their print catalogs or Web sites on the device. But now some companies — including Revel Touch, which designed Anthropologie’s app — are reimagining catalogs for the iPad by taking advantage of its touch screen to flip through or zoom in on items and adding video, moving images and connections to social networks.

“They’re ahead of the game in terms of thinking about interactivity and the best way to deploy it in this environment,” Van L. Baker, a research vice president at Gartner covering e-commerce, said about Revel Touch. Other companies with businesses that create catalog apps for retailers include Google, TheFind and Catalog Spree.

On Revel’s Anthropologie app, people can create collages by scrolling through blouses, trousers, dresses, jewelry and purses, and buy the items they choose. Shoppers can see thumbnail views of all dresses or jewelry and touch them to magnify items and make purchases.

“It’s impossible to do this on a desktop with a mouse,” said Mar Hershenson, founder and chief executive of Revel Touch. “The transition of product search has gone from purely a matrix to trying to be more inspirational.”

At Anthropologie, before the app’s introduction, 6 percent of sales came from shoppers visiting the Web site on iPads, triple the portion a year ago, Mr. Love said. He expects the new iPad app to account for 20 percent of sales in a year.

Retailers, who generally pay Revel Touch set-up and hosting fees and a percentage of sales, can automatically change the inventory that appears on the app. Revel plans to personalize catalogs so a cook shopping a home décor catalog would see the kitchen items while someone else sees sofas.

Revel Touch also built an iPad app for Tea Collection, a children’s clothing retailer. It includes a virtual dressing room where people can create outfits; the ability to share outfits with friends on social networks; and behind-the-scenes video of clothing designers’ travel and other sources of inspiration.

“At your computer, you go on and find the right size and it’s very functional and fast,” said Leigh Rawdon, chief executive of Tea Collection. “Now I want to interact with the woman who’s snuggled up in bed in her pajamas, and she can just linger and discover new things.”

Catalog Spree, which includes iPad catalogs for retailers like Nordstrom and Sundance, said its users spend more than half an hour on the app on weekends, almost eight times as long as they spend on the retailers’ Web sites.

“The last major innovation in the retail space was in the late 1870s with the introduction of the catalog,” said Joaquín Ruiz, chief executive of Catalog Spree. “You can bring the objects to life on an iPad and you can’t do that on paper — and you don’t have to chop down a tree.”

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Wal-Mart’s 3rd-Quarter Profit Slips

As several big chains reported third-quarter results on Tuesday, the divide between hard-pressed and prosperous Americans remained a defining characteristic of the retail economy.

“Clearly it’s a bifurcated market,” said Stephen I. Sadove, chairman and chief executive of Saks, in an interview. “The high-end consumer is much more tied to the stock market and the Dow and how they’re feeling about their personal situation, more so than the lower end of the market,” where concerns about gas prices and unemployment were more prevalent.

Over all, retail sales last month were higher than analysts had expected, rising 0.5 percent, according to the Commerce Department, contributing to the third-quarter results reported Tuesday. But Jay H. Bryson, an economist at Wells Fargo, predicted that the growth would soon slow as consumers stop using their savings, rather than their income, to pay for goods.

“Growth in nominal income is relatively weak,” Mr. Bryson wrote in a note to clients, and “the increase in food and energy prices over the past year has eroded consumer purchasing power.”

Wal-Mart, the country’s biggest retailer, said it had posted a quarterly increase in sales at stores open at least a year after nine consecutive quarters of declines in that important measure. But its third-quarter profit took a hit as the retailer chose not to pass on all of its price increases to consumers.

Company executives said they were not confident that Wal-Mart shoppers could afford more expensive goods.

“Our customers are still feeling pressured to reduce expenses wherever they can,” said William S. Simon, president and chief executive of Wal-Mart United States. “Cost increases in numerous categories were not passed on to our customers in the form of increased prices.”

At the other end of the retail spectrum, Saks said Tuesday that its revenue had risen 5 percent, to $692.3 million, from the same quarter a year ago. Its same-store sales, sales for stores open at least a year, rose 5.8 percent.

“Full-price selling is at record levels,” Mr. Sadove said. “We’re now in a less promotional environment than we were before the recession.”

At Saks, profit fell by 51 percent, to $17.8 million, in the quarter. But that was a tough comparison with the third quarter of 2010, when profit was pumped up by a gain related to tax reserves.

Some areas where Saks had placed big inventory bets, like shoes, turned out particularly well in the quarter, he said.

“If you look at it in the first half of the year, our same-store sales were up 13 percent,” Mr. Sadove said. “If you look at the third quarter, it was not quite as strong as you saw in the first half of the year. Maybe that was tempered by the stock market volatility. Having said that, you still had very strong consumption on the part of the luxury consumer — it wasn’t as though it was flailing about.”

Mr. Simon said Wal-Mart shoppers seemed especially worried about food prices — Wal-Mart’s food costs rose 4 percent over the last quarter, though it passed on “substantially less” to consumers via grocery prices.

“We hear from some shoppers that they believe it will be more difficult than ever to afford holiday meals for their families,” he said. “We understand their concern, and we see it every month in our customers’ purchasing behavior.”

In another sign of tight consumer budgets, Wal-Mart’s layaway program for holiday gifts, which it began offering in October after a hiatus of several years, has exceeded projections for the number of layaway transactions so far.

“This is one of the top areas that the customer had asked us to bring back to help meet their needs for the holiday season,” said Jeff Davis, senior vice president and treasurer, in a call with reporters. “What we have seen is, once again, this bevy of activity out there particularly in layaway and the traffic it brings to our stores.”

Wal-Mart said its domestic same-store sales increased by 1.3 percent, above its projections. That compared with a 1.3 percent decline in the same quarter a year ago.

However, profit fell 2.9 percent from a year ago to $3.3 billion, below analysts’ expectations.

Executives said that while visits to Wal-Mart’s stores in the United States fell from the same quarter a year ago, shoppers were spending more each visit. Net sales domestically increased 2.7 percent to $63.8 billion.

Home Depot executives said that although the housing market showed little buoyancy, its customers were spending a bit more on refurbishing their homes.

The average ticket, or amount on a receipt, grew 3 percent in the quarter from the same period in 2010, while transactions increased by 1.2 percent.

Part of that was related to the storms in recent months, with people buying expensive items like generators and roofing supplies. But they were also spending on areas like kitchens. “Our consumers continue to want to maintain their homes,” chief financial officer Carol B. Tomé said in an interview.

Home Depot posted a profit of 60 cents a share on Tuesday, beating analysts’ expectations of 58 to 59 cents a share. Its sales rose 4.4 percent to $17.3 billion, and it had a 4.2 percent increase in same-store sales.

Whether their consumers are feeling pressured or flush now, the retail executives indicated they did not expect things to change soon.

“In the U.S., we still do not see, and do not expect to see in the near term, any meaningful tailwind from the housing market,” said Frank Blake, Home Depot’s chairman and chief executive.

“I feel good about the luxury consumer,” Mr. Sadove of Saks said.

Referring to the Wal-Mart shopper’s dependence on paychecks and government-assistance payments rather than savings, Mr. Davis said that “going forward we really would not expect anything different.”

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Women File New Class-Action Bias Case Against Wal-Mart

On Thursday, the plaintiffs did just that, filing an amended lawsuit that narrows the class from all of the women who work or have worked at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores, estimated at 1.5 million, to those in the retailer’s California regions, estimated to be at least 45,000 current employees and 45,000 former employees.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs said the lawsuit was the first of many that will be filed against the world’s largest retailer alleging discrimination against women in pay and advancement.

In its June ruling in Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the Supreme Court did not determine whether the women were discriminated against it. Rather, in its 5-4 decision, it concluded that the plaintiffs had not met requirements that the class have a question of law or fact in common.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said the case involved “literally millions of employment decisions.” The plaintiffs, he added, were required to point to “some glue holding the alleged reasons for all those decisions together.”

The origins of the lawsuit date to 1999 when Stephanie Odle was fired after complaining that she was discriminated against because of her sex. She said he had discovered that a male employee with the same job and less experience was making $10,000 a year more than her.

Her boss explained that the man had a family to support.

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Netflix Secures Streaming Deal With DreamWorks

The Netflix accord, which analysts estimate is worth $30 million per picture to DreamWorks over an unspecified period of years, is billed by the companies as the first time a major Hollywood supplier has chosen Web streaming over pay television.

It is also a bet by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the animation studio’s chief executive, that consumers in the near future will not distinguish between the two. “We are really starting to see a long-term road map of where the industry is headed,” Mr. Katzenberg said in an interview. “This is a game-changing deal.”

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, added: “You’re seeing power moving back into the hands of content creators. When a company like DreamWorks ends a long-running pay TV deal — when a new buyer in the space steps up — that’s a really interesting landscape shift.”

The DreamWorks contract comes as Netflix is trying to navigate a dense thicket of challenges. Competition from the likes of Apple, Amazon and Vudu, a streaming service owned by Wal-Mart, is increasingly fierce; Dish Network, which plucked Blockbuster out of bankruptcy earlier this year, on Friday announced a Blockbuster-branded streaming and DVD-by-mail service.

As a “tidal wave” of Netflix competitors enter, said Michael Nathanson, a media analyst for Nomura, “in the short term it will probably be good for the price of content,” because more bidders mean that media companies can charge more for the rights to stream movies like “Avatar” and shows like “Modern Family.”

More important, “in the long term it may accelerate changes in consumer behaviors,” Mr. Nathanson said, as more people choose to watch more video online.

Access to movies and TV shows is what matters most to Netflix, and Hollywood, after helping to build up the company with generous deals, is starting to play hardball. Next February, Netflix is expected to lose the right to stream films from Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures Entertainment, as a result of a failed renegotiation with the premium cable channel Starz.

But Netflix’s biggest challenge at the moment is self-inflicted. This summer, in an attempt to raise cash to license more streaming content, the company increased the price for its combination Internet streaming and DVD service, angering customers. On Sept. 18 it abruptly said it would split up the two services, frustrating fans of both.

About one million of its 25 million customers in the United States are believed to have dropped the service in this quarter. The company has lost half of its value — about $8 billion worth — over the last two months.

Mr. Katzenberg said he was confident about the direction Netflix was heading, calling the company’s decision to split streaming and DVD “a very tough and very strategic call that will ultimately prove to be the right one for long-term success.”

“Could it have been handled better? Absolutely,” he added. “But there are always bumps when you’re looking around a corner.”

Netflix will begin streaming DreamWorks films starting in 2013. The studio plans three releases that year: “The Croods,” a prehistoric comedy; “Turbo,” about a garden snail; and “Peabody Sherman,” an adaptation of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” characters. Titles from the DreamWorks library, including “Kung Fu Panda” and “Antz,” will become available over time, the companies said.

The so-called pay TV window is one of the entertainment industry’s most important business tools. In the past, HBO has paid steep licensing fees of about $20 million per picture for exclusive rights a few months after films arrive on DVD. But Netflix — capitalizing on a consumer shift to streaming content on computers, tablets and Internet-connected televisions — has been making similar deals, albeit mostly with smaller suppliers.

Brooks Barnes reported from Los Angeles, and Brian Stelter from New York.

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Business Briefing | MEDIA: Disney Reorganizes Its Retail Sales System

The Walt Disney Company said that it would reorganize its approach to mass-market retailers and named a movie distribution executive to lead the effort. The executive, Robert Chapek, formerly president of distribution for Walt Disney Studios, will take over as president of Disney Consumer Products, succeeding Andrew P. Mooney, who resigned as chairman of that division on Tuesday. Mr. Chapek’s first assignment will involve working with Disney’s various units to create a more consolidated way of interacting with retailers like Wal-Mart. Disney currently handles merchandising in a decentralized fashion. The company’s movie studio controls DVD sales. Disney Consumer Products manages apparel, toys and publishing. Another group oversees packaged video games. That means three different Disney teams typically interface with Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers. Disney’s goal is to increase efficiency by having one point of contact.

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Discounts at Sears Holding Fail to Raise Sales

The Sears Holdings Corporation posted a quarterly loss on Thursday as it failed to stop a prolonged sales decline despite offering more discounts, which hurt profit margins.

Stock in the company, the parent of the Sears department stores and the Kmart discount chain, sank to its lowest level in two years. The company’s shares closed down 8.2 percent, at $55.23.

Separately, Gap reported quarterly profit on Thursday that beat analyst forecasts even as sales fell at stores open at least a year, known as same-store sales.

Sales at Sears Holdings have fallen every year since 2005, when the investor Edward S. Lampert formed the company by merging the two chains.

Gary Balter, an analyst at Credit Suisse, said that essentially, the message from consumers to Sears was “we will shop there, but not at the prices you wish to charge as we won’t pay full price for substandard service and unwelcoming physical facilities.”

Analysts have criticized Sears for relying too heavily on cost-cutting to raise profit, rather than upgrading stores and improving customer service.

It faces tough competition from retailers including Home Depot, Lowes, Wal-Mart Stores, Target and Best Buy, and it has been losing market share in appliances and apparel.

Higher costs also hurt Sears Holdings, which said it would lay off about 250 employees in support and field roles. Two months ago, the retailer laid off 700 employees who worked in the appliance sections of its Kmart stores.

It is also closing 29 stores and seven product repair centers, while converting 14 Sears Grand stores to Kmarts. The company said there could be more job cuts from those actions.

In the second quarter, Sears sales fell 1.2 percent to $10.3 billion; analysts had expected $10.5 billion. Sales at stores in the United States open at least a year fell 0.7 percent, with those at the namesake stores down 1.2 percent and Kmart flat.

The company blamed the lackluster sales numbers on weak demand for consumer electronics at both Sears and Kmart.

It took bigger discounts to increase the sales of appliances, apparel and home goods. Sears will add exclusive apparel brands with TV celebrities like the Kardashians and Sophia Vergara.

The net loss at Sears Holdings widened to $146 million, or $1.37 a share, from $39 million, or 35 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, the loss was $1.13 a share. Three analysts expected an average loss of 64 cents, according to Thomson Reuters.

Gap, meanwhile, said its fiscal second-quarter net income was $189 million, or 35 cents a share, versus $234 million, or 36 cents a share, a year earlier. Net sales rose 2 percent to $3.39 billion. Same-store sales fell 2 percent.

Gap was expected to make 33 cents a share on revenue of $3.34 billion, according to Thomson Reuters. The company recently forecast fiscal second-quarter profit of 33 to 34 cents a share and already disclosed the 2 percent decline in same-store sales.

The company has lost about a quarter of its market value this year as investors have questioned its ability to increase sales after several quarters of losing market share.

Some of the company’s merchandise has missed fashion trends, forcing markdowns to move inventory, especially in the main Gap brand stores.

Same-store sales at Gap North America fell 3 percent in the quarter, while international same-store sales fell 4 percent. That compares to a 3 percent increase a year ago.

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App Makers and Twitter Feel Strains

The relationship between Twitter and the outside developers that build its apps is a little like the one between sharks and the small fish that latch onto their backs — beneficial for both, until it isn’t.

Lately it has hit rough waters. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Twitter’s relationship with the developers, and although neither Twitter nor the agency would comment, two people briefed on the inquiry said that it questioned whether Twitter had been anticompetitive when it bought or regulated some apps.

At the same time, the apps built by third-party developers have become a thriving corner of the tech industry. In the last six months, investors poured $500 million into developers of Twitter apps, while companies, including Wal-Mart and Salesforce.com, collectively paid $1 billion to buy such start-ups. According to Twitter, 750,000 developers have built one million apps, up from 135,000 developers and 150,000 apps a year ago.

The boom in apps, though, has fueled longstanding tensions between Twitter and the developers over whether they are partners or competitors.

When Twitter was introduced, the service was bare-bones. So the company encouraged developers to build apps for things like posting photos and using Twitter on smartphones.

The apps used Twitter’s technology, often free, and Twitter became successful early on largely because the apps made the service more helpful and easier to use. But Twitter can transform overnight from partner to competitor by building its own apps to do whatever the developers’ apps do, or by simply acquiring a developer’s app, which it has done several times.

To try to mend its relationship with developers and encourage them to keep building apps that improve Twitter, the company is inviting them to town hall-like sessions, and last Monday it unveiled a developer Web site with a blog and discussion forums. Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo, has personally called some app developers to reassure them that Twitter does not intend to tread on their ground.

The argument has sometimes been a tough sell. Just last month Twitter acquired TweetDeck, a desktop application for active users, and added tools to automatically shorten links and post photos. That means Twitter now competes with other apps that do similar things, like Seesmic, Bitly and Twitpic.

Twitter has sparred with one app company in particular, UberMedia. That company, which has received a request for information from the F.T.C., makes several Twitter apps that were shut down earlier this year because Twitter said they had security problems. It also tried to buy TweetDeck before Twitter snapped it up. UberMedia declined to comment for this article.

“There’s some uncertainty within Twitter as to whether developers are a help or just parasites,” said Adam Green, who advises Twitter developers and builds political Twitter apps.

Joe Fernandez, chief executive of Klout, a Twitter app for marketing, took a different view. “I believe they honestly care about developers building successful businesses and they want to help us,” he said. “Sometimes there are missteps, but I do believe their intentions are good.”

Ryan Sarver, head of Twitter’s platform, said Twitter did not communicate clearly enough early on about which apps it intended to build and which it hoped developers would build. Twitter must build consistent apps for its users’ sake, he said.

“In the early days, all the clients except Twitter.com were built out by ecosystem companies, mainly because Twitter was so focused on keeping the lights on,” Mr. Sarver said. “But we learned that in order for us to really grow, we had to start taking over that core experience.”

The symbiotic relationship between Twitter and its apps is common in the tech world. Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook grew quickly in part because they let developers use their technologies to build tools. But the pitfalls are also familiar, because the developers are at the mercy of the bigger company.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 18, 2011

A photo caption in a previous version of this article misspelled the last name of a creator of @WalmartLabs. He is Anand Rajaraman, not Rajaram.

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Bucks: Why Most Investors Don’t Measure Returns Correctly

Carl Richards

Carl Richards is a certified financial planner in Park City, Utah. His sketches are archived here on the Bucks blog and on his personal Web site, BehaviorGap.com.

At least four things make up what I like to call our personal human capital: money, time, skill and energy. But when it comes to investing, we almost always focus on money and ignore the other three.

Last week I saw what can happen when I don’t allocate my own human capital wisely.

I had been spending a lot of time on Twitter, where I was having great conversations that were very helpful for my work. It represented an investment of time that had indeed paid off.

But when I caught myself interrupting a conversation with my 9-year-old son to check if someone had responded to my Twitter message about Wal-Mart, I was reminded that all investments represent a tradeoff. And in this case, the cost of using Twitter to advance my work was clearly too great for me personally.

There’s an old saying that you should take a look at your checkbook and your calendar to see what you really value as opposed to what you say you value, because the calendar and the checkbook never lie.

Dollars and cents are easy to count in the checkbook. Happiness, on the other hand, isn’t a line item in the ledger. It’s much more difficult to say we’re happier today than yesterday because we coached our children’s sports team instead of staying at the office an extra hour. But what about 10 years from now when our children talk about that great summer when you coached their team? Will we regret that lost hour at the office?

It may help to think of life in units—units of time, units of energy and so on. Each day, you take some of your units and exchange them for units of money. You then take those units of money and spend them on something. But every time you exchange a unit, there’s a tradeoff, and we often fail to look past the immediate return to the potential long-term consequences.

Going back to my Twitter dilemma, I still really like using it and believe it’s valuable. But every time I spend time on Twitter, it means I can’t invest those units, my human capital, somewhere else. So I find myself asking much more often, “What do I value more? A random discussion with a stranger or a conversation about the sunset with my 9 year old?”

You can substitute anything for my Twitter example. But the point remains that when it comes to our human capital, we’re not very good at judging the value of the tradeoff or even considering it in the first place.

Last week, on Harvard Business Review’s Web site, Umair Haque pointed out that “The ‘best’ investment you can make isn’t gold. It’s the people you love, the dreams you have, and living a life that matters.”

We live in a world where some ugly things can happen, but amazing things can happen, too. And it’s usually because of people investing something other than money. When tornadoes hit the country earlier this year, the stories that stood out were neighbors helping neighbors.

I didn’t hear one story of a stock portfolio digging someone out of a destroyed house.

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Wal-Mart Case Is a Blow for Big Cases and Their Lawyers

The court’s decision will not just make it harder to bring big, ambitious employment class-action cases asserting discrimination based on sex, race or other factors, legal experts said. In the majority opinion, the court set higher barriers for bringing several types of nationwide class actions against a large company with many branches.

In its majority opinion, the court essentially said that if lawyers brought a nationwide class action against an employer, they would have to offer strong evidence of a nationwide practice or policy that hurt the class. In the Wal-Mart case, the court wrote that the plaintiffs had not demonstrated that Wal-Mart had any nationwide policies or practices that discriminated against women. The opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, noted that Wal-Mart’s official corporate policy opposed discrimination, while the company gave the managers at its more than 3,400 stores considerable discretion over pay and promotions.

“In a company of Wal-Mart’s size and geographical scope, it is quite unbelievable that all managers would exercise their discretion in a common way without some common direction,” Justice Scalia wrote.

Heidi Li Feldman, a professor at Georgetown Law Center, said similar reasoning might make it tougher for plaintiffs to bring a class action against a mortgage lender accusing it of having a nationwide policy of defrauding borrowers. “A big mortgage broker might say, ‘At the national level, we have policies to abide by all of the rules and regulations that are applicable, and we delegate a lot of discretion to our branches,’ ” she said.

The ruling was widely hailed by business groups, some of which filed amicus briefs urging the court to limit class actions.

“We applaud the Supreme Court for affirming that mega-class actions such as this one are completely inconsistent with federal law,” said Robin S. Conrad, executive vice president of the United States Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center. “Too often the class-action device is twisted and abused to force businesses to choose between settling meritless lawsuits or potentially facing financial ruin.”

The ruling will push plaintiffs’ lawyers into filing fewer huge class actions and more cases on behalf of individuals or smaller groups, lawyers said. That will raise costs and give lawyers less incentive to take on class actions and other complex litigation. The Wal-Mart case, for example, has stretched for a decade, with lawyers and the legal foundation that brought the case expecting to receive some portion of the back pay for 1.5 million current and former Wal-Mart employees if they eventually won the case in court or reached a settlement.

The Supreme Court decision “strikes a blow to those who face discrimination in the workplace to be able to join together and hold companies, especially large companies, accountable for the full range of discrimination they may be responsible for,” said Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center.

In his opinion, Justice Scalia said it was unacceptable to allow employment discrimination lawsuits to proceed as huge class actions when monetary awards would be based on a broad formula per plaintiff, without having an individual assessment of how much each plaintiff had suffered.

He wrote that to allow that to happen in the Wal-Mart case, the largest employment class action in American history, would have been hugely unfair to Wal-Mart because it might have had to pay out damages without many of the plaintiffs demonstrating how much they were injured.

Paul Grossman, a lawyer in Los Angeles for the Paul Hastings firm who represents many employers, including Wal-Mart, in employment lawsuits, said employers were seeing many unmeritorious class-action cases. “Now you need a real class action with similarly situated people where common issues predominate,” he said.

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