Практический курс английского языка = Practical Course of English for Students of Economics. Учебное пособие для студентов экономических специальносте

17.* Render the following in English (50–100 words)

A. В США безработица осталась на отметке 5%

Уровень безработицы в США в текущем году не изменился по сравнению с предыдущим и составил 5%, согласно информации Министерства труда США.

По сравнению с прошлым годом безработица уменьшилась на 0,5 процентных пункта. Официальное количество безработных в стране по сравнению с предыдущим годом не изменилось и составляет 7,5 млн. человек.

Число американцев, занятых в сфере услуг, увеличилось в этом году на 203 тыс. человек, в производстве – на 4 тыс. В отчете также отмечается, что безработица среди афроамериканцев по итогам года упала с 10.3% до 9.5%, среди латиноамериканцев этот показатель снизился с 5.8% до 5.5%. Безработица среди мужчин осталась на отметке 4.3%, среди женщин – выросла с 4.6% до 4.7%.

B. Безработица сокращается, занятость растет

Согласно последнему отчету министерства труда, уровень занятости поднялся незначительно, что свидетельствует о медленном восстановлении рынка труда после разрушений, вызванных на Мексиканском побережье ураганом «Катрина». В то же время потеря рабочих мест, по пересмотренным данным, составила всего 8000, что существенно меньше 35 тыс., о которых сообщалось в предварительном отчете. Несмотря на снижение занятости – первом за последние два года, – уровень безработицы в октябре упал до 5 процентов (ранее он составляя 5.1 процента). Увеличение числа рабочих мест на 56 тыс. разочаровало экономистов, предсказывавших показатель почти вдвое больший – 100 тысяч. Еще одно разочарование: согласно пересмотренным данным, увеличение числа рабочих мест составило 148 тыс., а не 211 тыс., как сообщалось ранее. Барометр инфляции также набирает силу. Средний часовой вырос на 0.5 процента и составил 16.27 доллара (экономисты предсказывали рост на 0.2 процента). Такой быстрый рост вызывает у экономистов серьезные опасения по поводу темпов инфляции, которую Федеральный резерв (ФР) пытается

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сдержать за счет очередного повышения учетной ставки. Ожидается, что такой политики правительство будет придерживаться и в дальнейшем.

;Speaking

1.Which of the following would motivate you to work harder? Choose your top five and rank them in order of priority. Which ones have you experienced?

2. Give a number of benefits provided by companies. Which of the following do you think can be provided in Belarus?

3.Which of the following statements seem to you to be generally true?

Why?

1.People dislike work and avoid it if they can. 2. Work is necessary to people’s psychological well-being. 3. People avoid responsibility and would rather be told what to do. 4. People are motivated mainly by money. 5. Most people are far more creative and ingenious than their employers realize. 6. People are motivated by anxiety about their security.

7.People want to be interested in their work and, given die right conditions, they will enjoy it. 8. Under the right conditions, most people will accept responsibility and want to realize their own potential.

4.Working in pairs or in small groups, discuss the following questions:

1.A recent US survey showed children preferred parents to go out

and earn money rather than spend more time with them. What does this show, in your opinion? 2. Would you prefer a male or female boss? Why? 3. For what reasons might you change jobs? How often would you expect to do so in your lifetime? 4. How much should companies be involved in the lives of their employees? 5. How can businesses help to improve the balance between employees` working and leisure hours? 6. To what extent do you judge someone by their job title? 7. Which would motivate

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you more: a pay rise or a better job title? Why? 8. Why might job titles cause problems among staff?

5. Discuss what you would do and say in these difficult situations:

1.Your colleague applied for a promotion but didn`t get it. 2. You borrowed a colleague’s mobile phone but now it`s stopped working.

3.You invite a client for a meal and they ask if they can bring a friend. You see this as a business rather than a social occasion. 4. You`re staying at a hotel that your host is paying for. It is uncomfortable and you want to move. Your host asks, ‘How do you like the hotel?’

6.Describe the most common methods that companies use to recruit people in your country.

1.How do companies ‘fire’ people? Is it easy for companies to do so or do employees have rights in that situation? 2. How powerful are trade unions in your country? Are strikes common? 3. What types of discrimination exist in your country? On the grounds of sex, ethnic group, age, disability? Are these laws against discrimination? How effective are they? 4. What factors do you think motivate employees? 5. Remuneration such as bonuses, perks, share options, performance related pay? Or empowerment through, for example, increased responsibility, the freedom to work flexibility, the chance to update and widen skills? Or are there other factors which motivate?

;Writing

1.Write a short account (about 200 words) of the factors that have been or will be important for you in your choice of a job.

2.Write an advertisement for any job which will convince applicants that it really would provide equal opportunities for both men and women.

3.Comment on the following statement (150–200 words):

‘It is not real work unless you would rather be doing something else.’ Sir James Barrie (1860–1937), Scottish dramatist and novelist

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Unit VI

W O M E N I N B U S I N E S S

; Lead-in

Study the three charts below and answer the following questions:

1.In which managerial functions can you find the highest percentage of women directors?

2.What are the two main factors which make women feel unequal to men at work?

3.Which industry has the highest number of women managers?

4.Which industries have the smallest number of women managers?

5.What do you think about career opportunities for women?

6.What do you know about gender stereotypes?

Song of the shirt

% of British managers who are women (by industry)

Construction

Accountancy*

Finance and insurance

Food, drink & tabacco

Chemicals

Printing and publishing

Textiles and clothing

0,00 5,00 10,00 15,00 20,00 25,00 30,00

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Good with people

% of British managers who are women (by function and status)

Personnel

What makes women feel unequal

More difficult to prove themselves

Domestic commitments

Difficulties with child care, returning to work, flexible working

Fewer opportunities in senior positions

Male attitude

; Reading

Text 1

Read the text and explain the meaning of the words and phrases highlighted.

The Spare Sex

Though women make up over 40 per cent of the western workforce, the firms they work for promote very few of them far. In America and Britain alike, women hold about 2 per cent of big-company board seats. Where women do get to run big companies, it is not by climbing the ordinary corporate ladder. The lone female chief executive of a Fortune 500 company, Manon Sandier, of Golden West Financial, a Californian savings

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bank, shares the post with her husband. They bought the bank together. Katharine Graham, chief executive of The Washington Post Company until taking the chairmanship last year, inherited the firm from her father.

Talented women are not the only losers when companies fail to hire them or later refuse them promotion. Assuming that most women are potentially as good at filling executive jobs as most men (quite a big if: we come to it later), those companies are limiting their pool of available management talent by around half. Of recent graduates, 52 per cent in America and 44 per cent in Europe are women. The company that fails to recruit them now will find its pool of middle managers inferior to that of a wiser employer in a few years’ time; likewise, which matters more, its upper management ten years later, if (as is likely) it goes on displaying the same bias further up the ladder.

A 1990 survey of women quitting large companies, carried out by Wick, a Delaware consultancy, found that only 7 per cent wanted to stop working altogether. The rest planned to join other firms, to work as freelance consultants, or to start their own businesses. When BP carried out a similar exercise among graduate trainees recently, the leading reason women gave for going was not marriage or motherhood, but dissatisfaction with their career prospects. At one Johnson & Johnson unit, departing female managers complained that they had felt isolated from their male colleagues.

Could it be that this lack of esteem is justified? Given the chance, would women really be as good at running large firms as men? Most research on the way gender differences affect women’s careers lies within the murky disciplines of comparative psychology and organizational behaviour. A lot of what it says is too contradictory or anecdotal (or sometimes obviously biased from me outset) to carry much weight. Yet some findings ring true.

First, people who work in large organizations have an innate tendency to hire and promote those who resemble themselves. ‘Our managers are all white, middle-aged men, and they promote in their own image,’ says one woman.

If looking odd in positions of power is women’s first big barrier to top jobs, feeling odd in them is the second. ‘People come up to you at a party, and say ‘Aren’t you bright?’ It isn’t a compliment’, says a female director at a London investment bank. Men are expected to be assertive. Women are not, and often do not feel happy being so.

Made to choose between being thought pushy and being actually selfeffacing, women tend to choose the latter. Within mixed groups, even highly qualified women put their views less forcefully than men, and listen much more than they talk. Strident counter-examples Margaret Thatcher is an obvious one – leap to mind just because they are so rare.

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If a firm does genuinely want to use the talents of women more effectively, how should it go about it? The watershed dividing different employers’ approaches is positive discrimination. Some use quota schemes. At Pitney Bowes, an American office-equipment manufacturer, 35 per cent of all promotions must go to women, 15 per cent to non-whites. Some companies even tie managers’ pay to their fulfillment of such schemes.

Positive discrimination can hurt the women it is designed to help. Bosses compelled to hire women to fulfill some quota are unlikely to take seriously. If you feel people are just there because you had to have them, then you work around them, not with them. Then they feel un- der-utilized, because they probably are’, says Nancy Green, a personnel manager at Monsanto.

The real change in the way companies think about women managers will come when they change the way they think about jobs. Most women want to have children. Raising a family requires time off, and shorter working hours, for somebody, either husband or wife. To keep good women, firms need to find ways of giving them those things, yet using them efficiently. That normally involves letting women with small children work flexible hours, not requiring them to relocate or travel at a moment’s notice, or even letting them share their jobs with someone else. In exchange, women may have to accept lower pay, or slower promotion, until they return to full-time work.

1. Complete the following statistics.

a. Women make up more than ... of the western workforce, but, in the US as in the UK, hold just ... of seats on the boards of large companies. b. Women account for ... of recent graduates in the US and … of re-

cent graduates in Europe.

c. A survey carried out by Wick revealed that ... of women leaving large companies left not because they wanted to stop work but because.

2. The text can be divided into some sections, give each a separate heading. Read each section in turn, noting the main points. When you have finished, compare your notes in small groups.

Text 2

Read the text. What is it about? Define the topic sentence of each paragraph. Put down key words of each paragraph.

Women Directors in the USA

Women directors are becoming more and more common in the US. There was scarcely a handful, mostly female relatives of corporate founders; now the number exceeds 400, and is steadily growing. It is generally conceded that most of today’s women directors are able women bringing

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expertise and business acumen to their jobs. This is not surprising. Most women now old enough to serve on boards had to fight their way up the corporate ladder. They had to be not only equal, but better than their male colleagues in order to survive.

The advantage of women directors is that they can serve as women’s representatives. This is important to US companies, which are increasingly sensitive to women’s place in business, and are groping for ways to deal with it. Nevertheless, not all women directors see their role in this light. One well-known woman has confessed that she disliked the idea of ‘special interest directors’. ‘I don’t feel I should represent the woman’s point of view’, she said. She believed she represented the stockholders and the public.

Yet, even this woman was forced to admit that she played a ‘kind of consciousness-raising role’ on her boards. She found herself pointing out to board members, for example, that as more women worked, the number of valuable people unwilling to uproot themselves would increase. Therefore, corporations would have to change the environment in which they hired, trained and promoted employees.

Many women agreed that their presence on a board acted as a kind of pressure on other members and management as a whole. Because a woman is on the board, it automatically gets reports on women’s issues and executives know that such reports will receive sharp scrutiny by at least one board member.

An important advantage of women directors, it is claimed, is that they can take a different perspective from male directors – an outside view. Male directors tend to eat at the same club and mingle with other corporate executives. Women are usually more involved with family relationships, buying for the home, the education of children, volunteer activities and so on; they can take a different view from men who tend to become exclusively involved with their work life.

Some women directors are willing to acknowledge that they owe their directorships to their sex in the sense that there was the initial decision to include a woman on the board. To this extent they are symbols of corporate response to social change, as well as being working directors, of course.

Today, the 400 or so women directors represent only 2.7 per cent of the 15,000 directorships of major corporations. It may be many years before women’s presence will make a significant impact upon boardroom decisions, but that time will surely come.

1. In which countries of the world is it now possible, and increasingly common, for women to ‘get to the top’ in the business world? Can you name countries where it is virtually impossible for them to do this?

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2.What factors make it easier and more common in some countries for women to become directors of companies?

3.What qualities can help a woman to reach a top management position? Are these qualities the same as those a man would need?

4.Why is it not surprising that women directors in the US are generally very able?

5.For what reason are many US companies only too glad to have a woman director on their board?

6.In what sense, according to the text, is it possible that women might be more ‘objective’ in their business life?

7.Women directors are ‘symbols of corporate response to social change’. Explain the meaning of this statement.

8.To what extent does the author come to any kind of conclusion regarding future prospects for women directors in the US?

Text 3

Read the text and identify the problems discussed in it. Be ready to answer the questions given below.

Last Hired, First Fired

Women have come a country mile, no doubt about it, since the days—not so long ago—when the job world was an all-male preserve. Nowadays women are walking police beats, running giant computers, and even booting home racehorses. But the sad truth is that women are still by no means equal in the job market—they may well, in fact, be losing ground!

Women still have a very long way to go before they attain either equal employment opportunities or equal pay. And the recent recession has even caused women to lose some of the gains they had won in a balmier economy. It’s the old sad story of women being the last to be hired and the first to be fired. For example, New York City’s fiscal crisis has caused one-third of its women municipal workers to lose their jobs, including more than 60 per cent of the city’s 618 women police officers.

But the problem isn’t limited to New York City. Throughout the country, unemployment and underemployment are dramatically higher for women than for men. In 2000 unemployment for white men was 5.7 per cent (depressing statistic in itself), but it was 7.3 per cent for white women and more than 13 per cent for minority women. Not included in these official figures are the unemployed domestic and parttime workers

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The earnings gap between men and women has actually widened over the past twenty years. Women holding full-time jobs average a salary, 43 per cent less than earned by men; whereas twenty years ago, women earned 36 per cent less than men. Incredibly, women college graduates earn less than men who have not finished high school.

And despite the publicity given to the occasional woman oceanographer or auto mechanic, women are still fairly concentrated in the traditional fields of clerical and service work. Although the number of women professionals has grown, significantly, the growth has been mainly in the low status areas of noncollege teaching and nursing, where women have always predominated.

One sometimes hears the argument that higher unemployment and lower wages for women are not really serious problems because women work only because they want to. Nothing could be further from the truth. Women work because they need the money, because they have to support themselves, because they are heads of households, or because their husbands do not make enough money to cover expenses and meet high prices. Women, as well as men, have compelling economic reasons for working. They need and deserve well-paying and meaningful jobs.

Obviously, a great deal has to be accomplished before we reach this goal. First of all, we must realize that a reordering of the economy to provide full and equal employment for women – and for men—will benefit our entire society. Every time we reduce unemployment by 1 per cent, we pick up $16 billion in tax revenues and saved unemployment benefits. And by employing all the women who want to work at jobs that utilize their full potential, we will be making use of valuable talent presently going to waste.

Full employment guarantees for women who seek jobs but can’t find them and greater availability of quality day-care centers would also help women with young children get off public-assistance rolls.

1.Why do women appear to be losing, not gaining, ground on today’s job market treadmill?

2.What kind of jobs do American women do nowadays?

3.What makes the author think that women are losing ground in the job market?

4.Is there an earnings gap between men’s and women’s salaries?

5.What reasons compel women lo seek jobs?

6.How would full and equal employment for women benefit US entire society?

7.What is the role of day-care centers and after-school programs in providing women with jobs?

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