You are a team of Highway and Traffic Controllers. Your management has decided to depart from the traditional office work scenario. You are going to negotiate the best possible form of cooperating in the future. ■■ Work in two groups. Group A, you absolutely do not want any change and want to keep the established system of small offices for groups of three team members each. ■■ Group B, you are in favour of switching to 100% remote work. ■■ In your groups, collect ideas you would like to use to convince the other team. What compromises would you be willing to accept? Write down your ideas using the phrases in 8a. Form groups with at least two members from groups A and B. Have your meeting and try to negotiate the best possible agreement. Don’t forget to use negotiation phrases from 8a. The phrases in Unit 3, exercise 17a, may also help you. Equality and equity at work Do you know the difference between equality and equity? Look at the picture and decide which terms belong to equity and which to equality. Can you think of examples for equality versus equity? What could be reasons for working in atypical forms of employment? Do you think these reasons apply more to specific groups of workers? Why? What other differences exist in the world of work? In small groups, talk about wages, career prospects, areas of employment, etc. Compare your findings with other groups. Work in groups of three. Student A, read the article below. Student B, read the article on p. 204. Student C read the article on p. 206. Make notes on the most important ideas. Look at the highlighted expressions in your text and find out what they mean. Create a list of words and definitions for your classmates. b c a Reading 9 b c 10 a b Baby blues Almost all rich countries provide paid maternity leave, averaging about 20 weeks. Many also offer paid parental leave, which may be available to either parent but is generally taken by the mother, so a number of countries now have separate ‘mommy and daddy quotas’, allocating periods of leave to each parent that cannot be transferred. All this leave may seem rather expensive for employers, but in countries like Finland and Sweden it is accepted. Children are seen as the responsibility of society as a whole. Not all employers are so philosophical. There is anecdotal evidence that small businesses in particular try to avoid hiring women who seem likely to start a family. And it is striking that in all the Nordic countries working women are heavily concentrated in the public sector, which finds it easier than many private firms to accommodate the comings and goings. America is in a class of its own as the only rich country where women get no paid maternity leave at all (though two states, California and New Jersey, offer six weeks at reduced rates of pay). In practice, some 60% of women in jobs that require a college education do get paid while on maternity leave, but most women doing mundane work do not. Until the Pregnancy Discrimination act of 1978 women could be sacked for being pregnant or having a child, and until the Family and Medical Leave act of 1993 they had no right to take time off to give birth. Now they get 12 weeks, albeit unpaid, after which most return to work fairly promptly. Finding child care is entirely up to the parents. It may seem surprising that American women are not put off by all this. They actually produce more children than most Europeans: more than two per woman. The OECD average is only 1.7, well below the replacement rate of 2.1, and in most big European countries the figure is lower. The only European countries whose birth rates come close to America’s are France, the Nordics and Britain, and except for Britain they Language skills Extras Explore 4 Work, work, work 51 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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