Men and women are from different planets

1=agree strongly, 2=agree, 3=it depends, 4=disagree, 5=disagree strongly	Your opinion
Men are better drivers than women
Women are more faithful in relationships
Women are inefficient in the business world because they tend to be too emotional
Men and women are born with identical natural abilities
Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little
Men find it difficult to express their emotions except when their football team scores a goal
If more women were in position of power, there would be fewer wars in the world
It is more important for women to take care of their appearance than it is for men
Men are from Mars and women are from Venus

Section 4 Work, unemployment, welfare

Trust in God and do something

Mary Lyon

Activity 1. Vocabulary expansion. Familiarize yourself with the words and word-combinations and compose sentences of your own.

If you commute to work, you live outside a city center and travel to work there everyday. If you do this you are a commuter. Teleworkers are people who work from home using phones, computers and fax machines. This is teleworking or telecommuting.

It took Julie an hour to commute home and she would come back tired and frustrated.

The report says that 85% of British commuter traffic is by car, 40% of which is devoted to commuter traffic.

Teenagers nowadays dislike the prospect of commuting and would rather go abroad to work, at least for a time.

One of the major difficulties for teleworkers has been the psychological effect of moving from a sociable to an unsociable environment.

Apart from the salary, employers may offer a benefits package containing a number of fringe benefits or more informally perks, such as a company car. A lot of people find work by looking at job ads in newspapers. A few people are headhunters. Headhunters search for executives with specialist skills and try to persuade them to leave their current job to go to work for a new employer.

…Brian Pearse, the banking expert headhunted by the Bank of England to give it re-direction.

Local government managers have none of the other commercial fringe benefits: car, bonus schemes, health insurance and so on.

If someone is told to leave their job, especially if their employers say they have done something wrong, they are dismissed. More informal ways of talking about a dismissal are to say that a person has been fired or sacked or given a sack. If an organization gets rid of employees because they are no longer needed, it lays them off or makes them redundant. Companies doing this sometimes talk about downsizing, rightsizing or letting employees go. They may say that they are overstaffed: they have too many employees and need to make cuts in the payroll or the workforce, the total number of people they employ.

Thousands of federal employees in the US face the prospect of being laid off because of the budget crisis.

Lochheed Missiles’ management says it has to reduce its payroll by 2,000 positions by the end of the year.

When employees have no choice, the redundancies are compulsory. But where employees can choose to leave, redundancies are voluntary. The payroll can also be reduced by natural wastage, with employees leaving over a period of time for the usual reasons: retirement, moving to another job, and so on. When a lot of redundancies are involved, journalists talk about jobs being cut or axed, with massive layoffs. People who are laid off may receive compensation in the form of a redundancy payment, pay-off or payout, redundancy pay.

British Satellite Broadcasting staff will today be given the details of their redundancy payoffs, if as expected, widespread job cuts are introduced.

Unemployment benefit or jobless benefit is also called the dole. People receiving it are on the dole. If you lose your job you join the dole queue.

Another 29,000 people have joined the dole queue, stretching it to 2,753,400.

Jobless people looking for work are job-seekers or job-hunters and in Britain receive money from the state called job-seeker’s allowance. Welfare covers things like unemployment benefit, sickness benefits and state pensions. The welfare state refers to all the things provided by a government such as the benefits mentioned above. If you live on welfare, you depend on the welfare system for money to live.

Activity 2. Read the text and dwell on the job interview procedure.