Wal-Mart Stores Inc. could limit health and benefits costs by hiring fewer unhealthy workers, reducing subsidies for spouses and cutting payments to retirement accounts, a senior executive of the company said in a memo.

The retailer's employees are getting "sicker than the national population" and aging faster, causing benefits costs to grow faster than sales, M. Susan Chambers, executive vice president for benefits, said in the memo to Wal-Mart's board. Wal-Mart posted the 27-page document on its Web site after The New York Times reported about the memo Wednesday.

"The memo is a cesspool of legal violations," said Jeffrey Winikow, a Los Angeles employee-rights lawyer. Even if the company accepts none of the questionable suggestions it contains, the memo will furnish plaintiffs' lawyers evidence to argue WalMart discriminates against some workers, he said.

The memo -- acquired and publicized this week by Wal-Mart Watch, a nonprofit group allied with labor unions -- virtually guarantees that the retailer, which already is fighting class-action lawsuits over its hiring and promotion practices, will face a slew of new discrimination claims, Winikow said.

Americans' dreams of early retirement, interrupted by the 2000 stock market bust and the 2001 recession, live on. They have been revived in part by the economy's rebound, soaring home values and the ambitions of baby boomers -- although often accompanied nowadays by the realization they'll still need additional income.

A Merrill Lynch survey last year found that 77 percent of more than 3,400 baby boomers polled planned to work in some capacity in their retirement, with second careers in the mix for some, including 13 percent who intended to start their own businesses.

Money worries aside, starting a new career is within reach for most people, said Steve Vernon, author of the retirement book "Live Long and Prosper."

"The barriers are more psychological than financial," said Vernon, a consultant of Watson Wyatt Worldwide. "People get used to a certain level of (guaranteed) income. Also, a lot of people can't seem to find the motivation to make a change."

Registered nurse, $48,090

Customer-service representative, $26,240

Sales representative (in nontechnical wholesale and manufacturing), $42,730

Truck driver, heavy and tractor-trailer, $33,210

Maintenance and repair worker, general, $29,370

Bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerk, $27,380

Executive secretary and administrative assistant, $33,410

Secretary (not legal, medical and executive), $25,290

Carpenter, $34,190

Automotive-service technician and mechanic, $30,590

Police and sheriff's patrol officer, $42,270

Licensed practical and licensed vocational nurse, $31,440

Electrician, $41,390

All other sales and related workers, $35,170

Computer-support specialist, $39,100

Plumber, pipefitter and steamfitter, $40,170

These days, that lack of a college degree is likelier to mean a steep hit to earnings. "Increasingly, the days of blue-collar jobs that have lower educational and skill requirements but pay an outstanding wage are disappearing," said Jerry Rubin, vice president of Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit research group that works with foundations and federal and state agencies to create job training programs.

Blog this: U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.

About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks -- blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.

When the economy began to slow at the end of 2000 and employers believed they didn't have to offer such perks, concierge services at work faded. But in recent months, employees are in shorter supply and companies are realizing that the service is a unique selling point, said Joyce Gioia, president of the Herman Group, a North Carolina think tank that focuses on work trends.

Commercial (and some residential) real estate companies pay Charm City a monthly fee to keep a concierge in their building and use their services. From there, tenants can call the concierge to help with business and personal services including auto detailing, birthday cakes, limousines, flowers, gifts, shoe repair, corporate magicians or impersonators for events and restaurant recommendations.

When employees come down with the flu or other illness and still go to work, it's called "presenteeism," as opposed to "absenteeism," explains The Early Show medical correspondent Dr. Emily Senay.

Although it's done out of job dedication in many cases, it really doesn't help to have an employee in the office who is spreading an infection to others, in addition to not being able to work as well due to their own illness.

The new animated short, "Big Box Mart," features an "unsuspecting consumer" who loses his highly skilled factory job because the work is being transferred to a lower-wage economy overseas. The worker ends up as a janitor at a mega-retailer. "Big Box Mart" debuted late Thursday during NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." Shortly after that, at 9 p.m. PDT, the animation became available on MSN Video and at JibJab.com.

Start building a network early on in your career. You can do this by joining professional organizations, but you have to keep building and maintaining your relationships. For women who are working, this is hard. You are spending long hours at work, so it's difficult to go to a networking event, workshop or seminar at night. But we recommend that women build those relationships by attending these conferences and workshops. It could be meetings of alumni of their college, in-house training offered at their company or a networking reception. You should get to know your colleagues in the industry.

Also, networking is relationship building, so when you meet someone, it is best to nurture that relationship, even if you believe that the person can't do anything for you in the here and now. You may be surprised by how they can impact your career down the road or vice-versa.

You should be connecting over outside activities. Women sometimes have a tendency to talk shop at business events. At Pace, we offer a workshop called "Schmoozing," which is about the art of small talk. You have to learn how to schmooze, since that's the beginning of networking. Schmooze first, and then the networking and professional activities will follow, whether you want them to or not.

1. Tissue Engineers
2. Gene Programmers
3. Pharmers
4. Frankenfood Monitors
5. Data Miners
6. Hot-Line Handymen
7. Virtual Reality Actors
8. Narrowcasters
9. Turing Testers
10. Knowledge Engineers

The Windsor Knot is a thick, wide and triangular tie knot that projects confidence. It would therefore be your knot of choice for presentations, job interviews, courtroom appearances etc. It is best suited for spread collar shirts and it's actually quite easy to do.

So, with little slack in the job market, fatter paychecks ought to be close behind, right? Not this time. Salary increases have yet to bounce back in proportion to the strength of the overall market. And two recent surveys indicate that wages will rise only moderately in the coming months. Publishing company BNA's Wage Trend Indicator, which tracks private salaries and wages on a quarterly basis, predicts only a slight rise in third-quarter pay. More disheartening news comes from a recent survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, which projects average salaries to exceed inflation by only 1 percent in 2006, less than the 2.4 percent worldwide.

"Companies feel under such cost squeezes that they are looking at other alternatives than raising wages," says Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. That means holding a vacant position longer, for example, to wait for a more experienced candidate who won't require expensive training, or filling open jobs with less expensive, younger workers.

Similarly, you are likely to be more satisfied if you take a job where your work schedule is flexible, you don't have a long commute, you work fewer hours or you have a more senior position.

"The most important thing, if you can pull it off, is to get job security," says Andrew Oswald, an economics professor at England's Warwick University. "In international data and U.S. data, it is the single strongest correlate with overall job satisfaction."

Yet none of these changes is a cure-all. While a promotion or a more secure job is desirable, it's unlikely to bring a large, permanent increase in your level of happiness. As with a big pay raise, you will quickly adapt to your improved circumstances -- and you may end up only marginally happier than you were before.

"People need to drive safer. It's discouraging to note that last year, transportation incidents were the leading cause of on-the-job deaths – accounting for about one out of every four fatal work injuries in 2004. We urge law enforcement officials to crack down on those that break traffic laws. Speeding, ignoring work zone safety warnings, running red lights and stop signs, distracted driving, and more all contribute to the continued deaths of workers on the road. These workers include policemen and women, emergency personnel, fire fighters, utility workers, truck drivers and those in sales," noted ASSE President Jack H. Dobson Jr., CSP.

He said ASSE is also urging employers to review their driver safety policies, which could include not requiring workers to conduct business on a cell phone while driving, mandating the use of a seat belt and developing work schedules that allow employees to obey speed limits and to follow applicable hours-of-service regulations.

I had buttercup666 stand in my neighbor's cubicle and take a picture of me hard at work. Then I straightened the photo, undistorted it, and cropped it to the area in the doorway. I took it to Kinko's where they printed it onto vinyl, and grommeted the top with a kit that [info]matrushkaka bought me. The result: The Work Blind.