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There are more twins in the "millennial generation" than any other generation, thanks partly to a twin boom in the '90s. The main reason was a new technology called in vitro fertilization, which in its early days frequently produced twins, triplets and other multiple births.

The result? A million "extra" twins born between 1981 and 2012.

And all of them might be hurting the economy.

"Basically we'd prefer people not being twins to being twins," says economist Mark Rosenzweig.

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Rosenzweig's career is built on studying twins. But if he's being honest, he thinks twins are bad economic news.

First, there are the health care costs. Twins are more likely to be born prematurely, which can lead to all sorts of expensive medical problems.

Birth weight matters, too: Rosenzweig did a study based on hundreds of female twins in Minnesota that looked at the effect of birth weight on lifetime earnings.

"The birth weights of twins are on average about 28 ounces lower," he says. "So the earnings result was 16 percent lower, related to the fact that they had lower birth weight."

That's right: on average female twins make 16 percent less money over their lifetimes than non-twins — just because they're born less chubby. And lest you think it's only the girls who are in trouble, multiple studies have also found low birth weight in boys correlates with less educational success, which also means earning less money.

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And then there's the family stress of bringing home two babies.

"The birth of twins, it's usually greeted with a great deal of shock: a two-person stroller, two cribs, two of everything, basically," says twin researcher Nancy Segal, who runs the Twin Studies Center at Cal State Fullerton.

It also means a doubling of other costs, like college tuition. Raising all the extra millennial twins has been hard on many family budgets. And then, if the twins were conceived through in vitro fertilization, there's the cost of having them in the first place; the procedure is expensive.

But despite the cost, Segal doesn't buy the idea that twins are a bad thing for society. She points out twins tend to support each other emotionally, and tend to live closer to each other and to family than regular siblings, which can make them more available to care for aging parents.

And being twins might just help them economically too.

Matt and Mike Gradnani are identical twins and they're really close. They went to college together, they played football and rugby together and they go to bars together. At 25 years old, they live together in an apartment they own together, which they could afford because there are two of them.

"I mean we both kinda felt that it would be smarter in the long run to put money in our own investment, instead of someone else's pocket," says Matt. "And ultimately the two of us could afford a lot more together than we could individually."

And Mike and Matt even co-own a successful business selling real estate. How's that for hurting the economy?

But they're just two of the one million extra millennial twins entering the workforce, and starting families of their own, in the coming years. The ultimate economic impact of all those twins is yet to be known.

twins

FIFA President Sepp Blatter said today that soccer's governing body is not responsible for the working conditions of laborers who are building the stadiums for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

"In Qatar they are working in big companies from Germany, from France, from England and from other European countries and they are responsible [for] ... their workers and not FIFA," Blatter said while on visit to Sri Lanka.

As we reported last year, several workers have died while building the infrastructure for the World Cup in Qatar. Many of those dead are from Nepal.

In an interview on All Things Considered last year, sportswriter Stefan Fatsis noted that "almost 1,000 workers from Nepal, India and Bangladesh alone died in Qatar in 2012 and 2013." One labor rights group estimated at the time that if those conditions persisted, more than 4,000 migrant workers would die ahead of the World Cup. There have also been reports of poor living conditions and of abuse by employers and the Qatari government.

Qatar, like other energy-rich countries in the region, relies heavily on migrant labor to fuel its economy. As we noted in a separate story on Qatar's labor force, the country's 1 million foreigners make up more than 90 percent of its workforce.

In the face of complaints, Qatar's government said it would take steps to address the criticism, but in a report last month Amnesty International said the country was "severely lagging behind on efforts to address the rampant abuse of migrant workers' rights."

Four years ago, FIFA awarded Russia the 2018 and Qatar the 2022 World Cup. The move was criticized almost from the start. There were allegations of corruption, and a FIFA report last month cleared both countries of corruption over their winning bids. Almost immediately, that news was met with derision and soccer's governing body announced Nov. 20 that it will further review the bidding process that gave the two countries the World Cup.

FIFA World Cup

FIFA

Sepp Blatter

Qatar

Thanksgiving kicks off holiday party season, and at office holiday parties around the country, this means co-workers will make merry and mischief.

This time of year, Minneapolis attorney Kate Bischoff is a busy woman.

"I often represent clients who are handling the aftermath of a holiday party when it has gone off the rails," Bischoff says.

This includes, but is not limited to, bosses hitting on interns. There was also the case in which a manager gave a direct report a sexually explicit gift. Perhaps it was a joke, but it resulted in a harassment claim.

"It was not even close to the line," Bischoff says. "This manager jumped over the line with gusto."

“ If people used common sense, I wouldn't have a job.

- Jon Hyman, employment attorney

And then there was the case that involved a manager's idea of an after-party.

"He took his team across the street to a different venue, where there was some exotic dancing, and in certain circumstances, employees don't feel they can say no to their boss," Bischoff says.

Bischoff says meting out alcohol at parties using vouchers can limit some liability at the office holiday shindig. It also helps to remind employees of basic judgment and rules of conduct. Not that it will necessarily be heeded.

"If people used common sense, I wouldn't have a job," says Jon Hyman, a Cleveland employment attorney who also handles holiday party legal cleanup.

He even has his own experiences with office holiday mishaps.

"Co-workers passed out on toilets with a bottle of whiskey between their legs," Hyman says. "I've seen stuff stolen from restaurants by people who have had too much to drink. You know, art lifted right off the walls."

Hyman recently tweeted about another holiday memory, from his student days working at a T-shirt warehouse. His co-worker took maximum advantage — first at the open bar, then on the dance floor and eventually with the CEO's wife.

"He actually stripped down to his underwear," Hyman says. "When I originally wrote the tweet I wrote 'grinded with,' but I mean she was not a willing participant — it was 'grinding on' the CEO's wife. And that was his last day working at the company."

Hyman froze as colleagues pried the man off the boss's wife.

"I was dumbfounded," he says. "I didn't know how to react or what to do."

Freada Kapor Klein, an expert on human resources and sexual harassment, says almost always it's the booze that makes baseline workplace dysfunction combustible.

"So we have alcohol-fueled problems," Klein says, "be they racial bias, be they sexual harassment, be they intolerance or stereotyping — whatever is underlying in the company culture already just gets completely amplified."

But Amy Maingault, director at the Society for Human Resource Management, says company culture may not always be the root cause. She says sometimes individuals just act badly.

She agrees, though, that alcohol can turn small problems into big ones, fast, and that it creates other legal liabilities for employers.

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"If the employer is serving alcohol, and they're the people paying for the alcohol, they do incur some liability if that person causes injury to themselves or to others driving home after the party," Maingault says.

Of course, not all regrettable party incidents result in lawsuits or investigations. Most times it might just be awkward coming to work the next day.

Take Stephen Larrick. Three years ago, he was a new college grad working at City Hall in Central Falls, R.I.

Larrick did standup comedy in college, so his boss insisted that he roast everyone at the holiday party. He demurred, the boss insisted, and Larrick ended up on stage before about 100 municipal employees.

"They introduced me as Steve from the planning department," Larrick recalls.

Larrick dug for material about people he hardly knew and who didn't know him.

" 'So our director of public works is here. I don't know if everyone knows this, but the director is a bit of a neat freak. Yeah, he's such a neat freak, he's even considering cleaning up the city,' " Larrick says. "Boom, fell flat. I'm standing up there and feeling very awkward in front of a bunch of colleagues."

In this instance, Larrick says, alcohol actually helped. That and a shared sense of haplessness.

"We were all kind of in the awkward together," he says.

Larrick made it back to work the next day. In fact, he's now a manager and plans to attend the office party again this year. But this time, he won't do standup.

holiday party

Holidays

Black Friday shopping at brick-and-mortar stores in the United States was down about 7 percent from a year ago, according to ShopperTrak, but more purchases on Thanksgiving Day nearly made up the difference. Meanwhile, online retailers recorded double-digit year-on-year increases in sales.

ShopperTrak says Friday store sales hit $9.1 billion, but that shoppers spent $3.2 billion on Thanksgiving — a 24 percent increase for sales on that day from over last year. Overall, it represented a 0.5 percent drop from last year.

The New York Times says: "ShopperTrak, a consumer analytics firm based in Chicago, warned that its estimates were preliminary, and that shifting spending patterns meant that holiday sales were now dispersed over a longer period. Retailers have been offering deep discounts well before their sales on Friday, and many stores moved the start of those offers to Thursday evening."

A separate survey by IBM showed a 9.5 percent jump on Black Friday and a 14.3 percent increase on Thanksgiving Day for online sales over the same period last year.

Amazon.com saw a 24 percent increase in sales over the two days and it predicts that its Cyber Monday sales will show an even bigger increase.

The National Retail Federation is predicting that this will be the strongest holiday shopping season in the last three years.

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Thanksgiving

Black Friday

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