English Unlimited HTL 4/5, Schulbuch mit Audio-CD und CD-ROM

50 Work, work, work 04 LANGUAGE SKILLS EXPLORE EXTRAS Inform the others in your group about your article and describe the bar chart in it. In class talk about the highlighted expressions and compare your definitions. Mini research project. What is the situation for women in Austria? Try to find the following information:   employment statistics   distribution of women among different areas of employment   rights of female employees   inequality of pay (regional differences) Write an article for an English online magazine using the information from 11–13a. In your article, you should:   describe the employment situation of women in Austria.   compare it with other countries.   speculate about future developments. Give your article a title. Write around 350 words.  Writing guide, Article , p. 176. a SPEaKIng 12 b a wRITIng 13 b Listen to Sandra, Alan and Neil from Newcastle talking about their difficulties finding a job. Their story is an increasingly familiar one in the north-east region, where unemployment is generally several percent above the UK average. 1 How old are the people? 2 What qualifications do they have? 3 What’s their problem? a LISTEnIng 14 TCD  1/11 Unemployment 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 much lower (see chart).  The only European countries whose birth rates come close to America’s are France, the Nordics and Britain, and except for Britain they all have excellent child-care facilities . In France the ‘écoles maternelles’ play a big part in allowing women to go out to work, and the Nordic countries are famous for their affordable day-care centres with well-qualified staff. In Finland local authorities must guarantee a place for every child under three. Parents on low incomes get it free; the better-off pay up to €250 a month. The centres are open from 7–8 am to 5–6 pm and provide breakfast and lunch. School hours for older kids are similarly work-friendly, about the same as an adult working day, with a free lunch.  A study by the ILO of child care in ten countries last year found huge national differences. In some countries nurseries are seen as a public entitlement , rather like schools. In others the care of small children is considered a private matter. Most countries come somewhere in between.  How quickly women should return to work after having a child is a difficult question. Clearly they need time to recover physically, to get the baby into a routine and to find child care, so something longer than the basic maternity leave at first sight seems preferable, but it makes it harder to settle back into the job afterwards. If new mothers are off for only a few months, their skills will still be fresh when they return, and their employers find it easier to arrange temporary cover. Germany used to encourage women to stay home for up to three years after having a baby, but in 2007 the government changed the incentives because women were becoming disconnected from the labour market. Data on return rates are scarce, but in some European countries at least a quarter of the women go back to work when their maternity leave runs out, and in Anglophone countries about half the women are back on their child’s first birthday. Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eige tum des Verlags öbv