Top Tenz
To raise awareness of the huge amount of unpaid labour millions of people do for their families and loved ones, as part of Carers Week, those nice geeks at the Office for National Statistics have used the latest Census data to look at the headline figures about carers in the UK. They found that there are over 5 million carers, they are more likely to be women over 50 years old, and being carers is likely to negatively affect their health and their employment prospects.
The real life star man, Captain Chris Hadfield, made fantastic use of social media during this time on the International Space Station, with regular tweeting as well as sending back some gorgeous photos of our little planet.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that this recession has led to an unprecedented fall in wages. On average therefore, we have all lost £1,300 this year. Another report, this time by the TUC, found that wages in some areas had fallen by as much as 10 per cent.
And this is directly related to the inequality of wages and income. This blog looks at how you can measure inequality and asks a seemingly easy question ‘Just who is rich anyway?’ The answer though can be difficult in that it might just be us.
As you know, we at Surviving Work don’t shy away from some tough topics, and it seems as though you are coming with us some way on that. More people than ever before are talking about . . . gulp . . death and how they feel about it. But what we aren’t doing is turning that into any kind of action, like writing a will or planning a funeral.
For those currently obsessed about the depressing weather to summer ratio, here is some research on how the European nations see their summer break. This year, we are all much less likely to be going abroad (no shocker). But surprisingly, us Brits are less likely to be ‘weather worriers’ who want an exact weather prediction when they book their getaway.
British workers, those in the public sector particularly, are feeling more insecure and stressed at work than at any time than they’ve been for the last 20 years. The researchers found that people are working harder and that “work intensification” – which was previously rife in the early 1990s – is back.
This post lets you into a few secrets of ‘menu engineering’ which is the way that restaurants set out their menus and describe the dishes in ways that make you want to eat them. In my case a picture of a large plate of chips would work equally well.
Our new guru is Harold ‘Hal’ Spielman, the 86 year old who is the new whizz on dating. His guidance: “‘Cut your toenails – you never know when you’ll get lucky!’
And finally some words of wisdom on surviving work from those loveable geeks at the IT Crowd.