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

To increase worker participation, or Works councils share, in the running of businesses, the European Union (EU) has decided that ‘European Committees’, or works councils, should be set up in all multinational firms in the EU. This will apply to all firms with more than 1,000 employees that have branches employing at least 100 workers in two or more EU countries. The works councils have the right to be informed and consulted on all matters that affect the interests of the workers.

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Industrial Conflict

In Britain, the number of working days lost through strikes in 1994 was the lowest since records began in 1891, As the Study Points have shown, there has been a similar trend throughout the west. It has been caused in part by economic insecurity, flexible working, a shortage of full-time jobs and, in Britain, new laws which make it more difficult to strike.

Strikes are the workers’ most powerful, and final, weapon. A firm suffers great losses because it cannot produce any goods or services. However, the workers also lose, as they receive only I a few pounds a week in strike pay from their union. To lessen the effects on their members, unions sometimes call a short strike lasting only a few days.

In addition to strikes, workers can also; take other industrial action. The three main kinds are:

•Non-co-operation. The workers may boycott, or refuse to have anything, to do with, a new working practice of which they do not approve. For example, a new method of keeping records may have been introduced without prior talks with the unions. The workers may refuse to operate the new system.

•Working to rule. There are official rules in workplaces about the conditions and terms of employment. For example, they may specify all the parts that should be checked before a machine is used or all the protective clothing that should be worn for a particular job. In practice, some of these rules are often ignored in the interests of greater speed and efficiency. However, when there is a work to rule, or go slow, all the rules will be strictly observed. As a result, the jobs take I much longer and productivity falls. Shop stewards may take every single complaint and grievance to management, which he or she would previously have settled on the spot. As a result, management time is wasted.

•Overtime ban. Workers may refuse to work beyond the normal hours. Firms that rely heavily on overtime working to keep to their production schedules will be affected. The workers are also affected as they lose

valuable overtime pay.

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Employers can also take industrial action against the work force. Some of their main actions are:

•Closer work supervision. Managers can supervise, or examine, employees’ work more closely and point out the faults.

•Pay freeze. Employers can say that costs have to be cut and, therefore, wages and/or salaries will have to be frozen at their present level for a period of six months or a year.

•Derecognize union. Employers can refuse to talk to a union unless over 50 per cent of employees are members.

•Lock-outs. Employers lock the work place gates or doors to prevent employees entering and stop paying them wages. A lock-out also harms employers as they have to go on paying their overheads and may lose orders and damage the image of the firm.

Factory or office closure. The employers’ final weapon is to close a factory or an office with a long record of conflict. However, the employers may then face a large redundancy bill.

Many disputes are settled peacefully by management and unions. If they cannot settle the dispute themselves, they may call in the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS). This independent body was set up during the great industrial disputes of the 1970s. Some of its main functions are:

•To settle disputes between unions and employers by conciliation.

•To refer unsettled disputes to arbitration with the agreement of all the parties involved.

•To advise both sides of industry on ways of improving industrial relations.

CAS has an excellent record in settling disputes. In recent years, it has not had to deal with so many industrial conflicts, owing to the great decline in both collective bargaining and trade union actions. The number of individual conciliation cases, however, has increased greatly from about 50,000 in 1986 to over 90,000 in 1995. About half of them concerned allegations of unfair dismissal.

About 70 per cent of the cases were withdrawn or settled through ACAS conciliation.

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Employees’ Rights

Employers cannot treat their employees in any way they like. There are dozens of laws protecting employees` rights. If employers break these laws they can be taken before an industrial tribunal, which can award the employee thousands of pounds’ compensation.

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Some of the things an employer must do are:

• Provide employees with a written statement of employment within two months of starting work, unless they will be employed for less than a month. The statement should include:

–the employer’s name

–the employee’s name

–the date employment began

–the amount of pay and the intervals between payments

–hours of work

–holiday entitlement

–sick-leave arrangements

–pension arrangements

–length of notice for ending employment

–job title or brief description

–if not a permanent job, the period for which employment expected to last

–the place of work

–details of disciplinary and grievance procedures

Provide an itemized pay statement showing gross and net pay, statutory deductions for income tax and national insurance, and any pension contributions and voluntary deductions.

Give men and women equal pay if they are doing the same work or work of equal value. Give Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) to an employee who has been off sick for four or more days in a row for up to 28 weeks.

Give guarantee payments of up to Ј14.10 a day to employees who are laid off through shortage of work, for up to five days in a three-month period.

Give women 14 weeks’ unpaid maternity leave regardless of length of employment or hours of work. Give women who have worked for the business for two years Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP) of 90 per cent of their weekly earnings for the first six weeks and, at the time of writing, Ј52.50 a week for the remaining 12 weeks. These payments must be made even if the woman is not returning to her job. Provide a written statement of reasons for dismissal. Employees are entitled to receive at least one week’s notice (or pay instead) after one month’s employment and a maximum of 12 weeks’ pay for 12 years of employment or more. Give redundancy pay to employees with at least two years’ service. This ranges, according to age, from half a week’s to one and a half weeks’ pay for each year of employment, up to a maximum of 20 years. Observe the Health and Safety Regulations of 1993, based on a European Union (EU) law, which makes it compulsory for employers to treat health and safety as seriously as any other aspect of their business by assessing risk and taking suitable action. The regulations include most of the provisions of the Health and Safety Act of 1974.

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•Give part-time workers the same employment rights as full-time workers.

•Treat disabled workers no less favourably than other workers under the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995. This applies only to businesses employing 20 people or more.

An employer must not:

•Discriminate against employees because of their race (see Unit 74).

•Make deductions from pay, except in a few cases allowed by law or by a contract of employment or when an employee has given written con sent, e.g. for trade union subscriptions or National Savings.

•Stop an employee from joining a trade union or dismiss an employee for belonging to a union.

•Stop an employee taking time off for public duties, e.g. as a magistrate or as a member of a local council.

•Employ children under 13 years of age, except in some family businesses.

•Dismiss a woman because she is pregnant.

•Dismiss an employee for refusing to work on Sundays.

•Dismiss an employee unfairly.

The main reasons for which an employer can dismiss an employee are:

•misconduct

•inability to do the job

•redundancy, if the employee’s labour is no longer needed.

If the dismissal was for misconduct, the employee must know that he or she was committing an offence, and a warning has to be given so that the employee has a chance to put a case, or to put right his or her behaviour. If it was for inability to do the job, it must be shown that adequate training and supervision were provided and that a more suitable job was offered instead. If it was for redundancy, the employer needs to show that he or she gave as much notice as possible and that the method of selection was fair.

Unit 6

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

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Sex Discrimination in Japan

The management techniques of Japanese business firms are admired around the world – yet more than 70 percent of these companies refuse to accept applications from female college graduates. According Japan’s

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labor ministry, less than 20 percent of the nation’s businesses offer men and women equal opportunities on the job. Overall, women hold only 6.2 percent of all executive positions in Japanese companies.

Japan’s 22 million working women represent 40 percent of the I country’s paid labor force; however, women account for only 6.4 percent of the nation’s scientists, 2.4 percent of its engineers, and 9 percent of its lawyers. Women’s wages average only about half as much as men’s, in good part because most women are restricted to traditionally female (and lesser-paying) occupations such as teaching and clerical work. Akiko, a 23-year-old office worker at a trading company, is fairly typical of Japanese women in the work force. Like most female college graduates, she serves as an assistant to the men in her office, bringing them tea and handling their errands.

These work patterns must be viewed in the context of a culture that regards women’s place – especially married women’s place – as being in the home. In a 2000 survey of Japanese women 20 to 59 years old, only 17 percent felt that the desirable lifestyle for women was to work indefinitely. Most respondents (55 percent) favored “withdrawing into home life” and reentering the labor force at some later time (ideally on a part-time basis).

Despite the continuing importance of traditional gender-role socialization, Japan has been influenced by the international movement for women’s rights. In 2001, after seven years of public debate, Japan’s parliament—at the time, about 97 percent male— passed an Equal Employment Bill which would encourage employers to end sex discrimination in hiring, assignment, and promotion policies. One key target of the new law was severe restrictions on overtime and late-night work by women; these restrictions have prevented many women from entering or advancing in their chosen occupations. However, Japanese feminist groups remain dissatisfied because the Equal Employment Bill merely requires employers to ‘endeavor’ to achieve sexual equality and lacks strong sanctions to prevent continued discrimination against women.

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Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment – the demand that someone respond to or tolerate unwanted sexual advances from a person who has power over the victim – made headlines in 1991 during the Senate hearings on President George Bush’s appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. In the course of the hearings, Anita Hill, a law professor, accused Judge Thomas of having sexually harassed her when she worked on his

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start. He had persistently asked her for dates, she said, and made offensive sexual comments when she refused. Thomas denied the accusations and was eventually confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. We will probably never know for sure who was telling the truth. But what scandalized many women was the fact that the Senate Judiciary Committee evaluating Judge Thomas’s appointment initially ignored the charge of sexual harassment. The public learned of Professor Hill’s accusation only because it was leaked to the press; the all-male Senate committee apparently saw the issue as insignificant.

Several themes illustrating the key sociological concepts came together in the Hill–Thomas episode. First of all, the social structure of the Senate was (and is) extremely unbalanced in gender terms: Of 100 senators in 1991, only two were women. Second, in part because of this social structure, women lacked the power to insist that issues important to them be taken seriously. This is part of a broader cultural pattern in which male harassment of women is not treated as a major problem. Indeed, women are reluctant to report instances of harassment; existing patterns of functional integration fail to offer procedures for responding to women’s complaints. In addition, functional links between school and workplace, and between one workplace and another, discourage women from speaking out when to do so would mean losing a valuable work recommendation. When faced with reports of harassment, it is functional for men in positions of power to ignore comparatively powerless women. One result of the Thomas hearings was to make many women resolve to take political action to make sure that their voices were heard, that more women were elected to Congress, and that men would take seriously the hardship that sexual harassment causes women.

Sexual harassment is a particular problem in workplaces and in relationships of unequal power. It takes place because men (harassers are usually, though not always, men) abuse their power, and because our culture denies that this is serious—suggesting in effect that “boys will be boys.” Sexual harassment can be limited to sexual jokes in a classroom or on the job that make women feel uncomfortable. It is more serious when a woman’s professor or boss or co-worker makes a sexual advance, especially when the woman has clearly indicated that such attentions are unwelcome. It is extremely serious when a woman’s refusal of a sexual advance results in punitive treatment or denial of a promotion. This is also illegal, although male-dominated judges and grievance committees have been slow to enforce the law.

Sexual harassment causes difficulties not just when women who reject sexual advances are penalized, but whenever women work in an atmosphere where they fear they must either tolerate harassment or lose their

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jobs. Harassment illustrates the fears – small and large – that women in our society are forced to live with because of the unequal power relationship between men and women. The Hill–Thomas case suggests that women’s fear of speaking out is realistic, given the gender inequality built into the social structure.

Sexual harassment is not as extreme a crime as rape, but the underlying problems are similar. Both are products of a culture that encourages male sexual aggressiveness, and both have been dismissed by the “powers that be” because of the comparative powerlessness of women. It is still difficult, for example, to get date rape (forced sexual intercourse with a person the victim went out with voluntarily) taken seriously as a crime. Men, who have the power through the legal system to define what constitutes rape, typically consider this sort of assault trivial or even blame the victim for having provoked it. In one famous case of date rape, the boxer Mike Tyson was convicted of raping a contestant in the Miss Black America beauty pageant. In an echo of the Hill–Thomas case, thousands of Afri- can-American church women were startled to hear the head of their religious denomination say that Tyson should be given a light sentence or set free – and some other ministers backed him up. As the women noted, all the ministers were male. Even though women were a majority of the church members, the men dominated the leadership of the church.

Text 3

Combining Career and Family

In describing their future family life, however, both sexes tend to follow traditional gender roles. When asked whose job comes first, most say the husband’s does. Both sexes are unanimous in declaring that primary care of children is the wife’s job. Although young women hope their husband will share household chores equally, most young men express only willingness to ‘help’ – a word that implies, not taking their share of the responsibility, but assisting with tasks that are really the wife’s responsibility.

Although both sexes anticipate having careers, males and females hold different attitudes toward work. Male students see their future in terms of a steady line of work and achievement. Most have clear ideas about where they want to go and how to get there. They expect to work for the rest of their lives and to be the main providers for their families, even if their wife works. By comparison, women seem tentative and vague about their career goals. They want to work, but see their career plans as depending on the needs of their husband and children. They expect their careers to be interrupted or even halted at various times.

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In short, neither sex anticipates a symmetrical marriage in which husband and wife assume equal responsibility for supporting the family and raising the children. If compromises need to be made, both sexes assume that the wife will sacrifice her career for the family (and the husband his family life for his career). Given the fact that women usually earn less than men and that the workplace is not structured to accommodate family commitments, these expectations may be realistic.

The American workplace is not designed for people who want to make equal commitments to their family and their job. The law does not guarantee American women maternity leave, and very few companies offer men paternity leave though one of the first bills that President Bill Clinton signed into law required large companies to offer their workers unpaid leave for births, adoptions, and family emergencies. Although more than half the mothers of small children work, few employers provide any form of child-care assistance (such as on-site day care or allowances for babysitters). The federal government’s support for day care has been minimal. Because caring for children is still seen as women’s work, the burden of trying to balance work and parenthood falls on women. Our culture still expects men to be part-time parents, just filling in for Mom now and then.

There are alternatives. In Sweden, where nine out of ten women ages twenty-five to thirty-four work, the government provides public day care for all children. Parents of either sex who choose to stay home with a newborn or newly adopted baby are guaranteed eighteen months’ leave, receive social security payments corresponding to their current salary, and must be given their old jobs back when their leave ends. The government also requires employers to allow parents time off to care for a sick child and the option of part-time work while children are preschoolers. Either parent may take advantage of these programs, or mothers and fathers may take turns. Of all the industrial nations, only the United States and South Africa do not provide new parents with some form of support. But the structure of the workplace does not tell the full story; cultural forces also come into play. Even in Sweden, few men take advantage of paternity leave, and those who do often are ridiculed by their co-work- ers. As a result, most women today hold two full-time jobs, one at the workplace and one at home.

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild characterizes the state of gender relations in America today as a ‘stalled revolution.’ The work force has changed, women have changed, but most workplaces and many men have not changed in response.

The most visible sign of the stalled revolution is the phenomenon that has come to be known as women’s “second shift.” Growing numbers of women work an eight-hour shift at their jobs and then put in another full shift at home, cooking, cleaning, and caring for children. From her own

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research and other time-use studies, Hochschild calculates that working women do fifteen more hours of work a week than their husbands do. This adds up to an extra month of twenty-four-hour days each year. Even when husbands are willing to put in as much time on child care and housework, women feel more responsible for the functioning of the family and the home. Women are the ones who keep track of doctor appointments, arrange for children’s visits with friends, and call from work to check on the baby-sitter. Women do more of the daily jobs, like cooking and cleaning up, that lock them into fixed routines. Men take care of the car, the yard, and household repairs – nonroutine chores that are less frequent and often can be done whenever time permits. Most of the time men spend working at home is devoted to the children, not the laundry. Moreover, men are more likely to do ‘fun’ things with the children (such as trips to the zoo), while women more often perform such routine child-care tasks as feeding and bathing. Just as there is a wage gap in the workplace, so there is a ‘leisure gap’ at home. Husbands sleep longer and have more time to watch TV or pursue hobbies. Wives talk about sleep ‘the way a hungry person talks about food’

Hochschild suggests that women give in to their husbands on the “second-shift” issue because they are locked into marriage in a way that men are not. For one thing, women earn less than men and so have more of an economic need for marriage. For another, marriage is less stable than it used to be, and divorce is more economically damaging to women than to men. To make matters worse, many divorced mothers receive little emotional or other support from traditionally minded friends and relatives.

Hochschild sees the ‘stalled revolution’ as the result of colliding social forces. On the one hand, new economic opportunities and needs have drawn women into the work force, which puts pressure on men to share the second shift. On the other hand, the wage gap between men and women and the high rate of divorce lead women to hold on to their marriages—and men to hold out on sharing housework. Hochschild suggests that many modern women feel doubly oppressed by men, not only on the first shift (where the boss is male, privileged, and better paid than they are) but also on the second shift (where husbands opt out).

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Pay Equity

What can be done to close the gap between the earnings of women and men? In the 1980s, pay equity—also known as comparable worth – has emerged as a controversial solution in the effort to alleviate the secondclass status of women within the paid labor force of the United States.

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Pay equity calls for equal pay for different types of work judged to be comparable through measurement of such factors as employee knowledge, skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions. Pay equity goes beyond the idea of “equal pay for equal work” by encouraging equal pay for different (but comparable) work.

Theoretically, this doctrine sounds straightforward, but it is not so simple to effect. How exactly does one compare jobs in order to determine standards of equtable pay? Should a zookeeper be paid more than a child care worker? Does our society pay zookeepers more because we value caretaking for animals more than caretaking for children? Or do zookeepers earn more than child care workers because the former tend to be male while the latter are generally female?

Women’s work is undervalued and underpaid in American society. From a conflict perspective, women earn low wages because they labor within a tradition that treats them as temporary and supplementary workers, devalues women’s work, and views low wages as sufficient for female workers. Efforts to address the issue of wage discrimination have resulted in legislation and increased public awareness, yet women’s salaries remain far lower than those of men. The federal Equal Pay Act of 1963, which mandates equal pay for equal work, applies to a relatively small proportion of female workers: those who perform the same job under the same roof as male coworkers. Although these women’s wages have increased as a result of the Equal Pay Act, most female workers remain segregated in a few occupations in which there are no male workers doing the same jobs with whom these underpaid women might compare themselves.

In some instances, pay inequity is difficult to defend. For example, in Arlington County, Virginia, entry-level gardeners working for the county must have a high school diploma and one year’s experience before being hired. They earn $13,927 per year to start. By contrast, the position of entry-level Library Assistant I requires two years of college or two years of library experience, yet the pay is only $12,598 per year. Of the entry-level librarians, 93.4 percent are female, while 87.5 percent of the gardeners are male. Such data are cited by advocates of comparable worth, who insist that we need a more equitable way of evaluating jobs to determine their value.

Although sex discrimination is one obvious explanation for the lack of pay equity, other explanations are possible. Employers commonly cite the influence of labor market supply and demand on wages in various occupations. ‘You can’t measure productivity of jobs or the intrinsic worth of a job,’ argues Owen Johnson of Continental Bank. ‘Women are disproportionately found in relatively few jobs in our society, and there is an oversupply of women in certain occupations. This oversupply typically results in low wages.’ Johnson’s comment appears questionable,

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