TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| White-cheeked gibbon born at Adelaide Zoo One of the world's most critically endangered species of gibbon has been born at the Adelaide Zoo, and staff did not even know it was coming. abc.net.au |
Response: Yes, today's workers have less freedom, but it's not all grim Any measure of job quality must look at many factors including pay and working hoursIn his article on the grimness of contemporary work, Aditya Chakrabortty has done a great service in highlighting the worrying trend towards declining autonomy and growing standardisation in work (There's a good reason why so many of us no longer like our jobs. There's not much call for thinking these days, 31 August).As he says, on the evidence of successive skills surveys, people really do have less freedom to do their job in the way they see fit than they did 20 years ago – something that has occurred across all occupational groups. Its decline throws a certain light on all the managerial talk of empowerment.But Chakrabortty then uses this insight to claim that "our jobs are getting worse"; that more people's jobs are becoming "McDonaldised – more routine, less skilled"; that technology deskills; and that outside a small elite who have "permission to think", more workers stand to be "farmed off to regional offices in eastern Europe or India".Autonomy matters. Its decline should trouble managers and policymakers. But it is a counsel of unwarranted despair to believe that everything is getting worse at work across the complex trends of the labour market.Any reckoning of job quality needs some framework of what "good work" might look like. There are different definitions, but job security, pay, working time, intensity, the relationships between colleagues, the development of skills, the sense of fairness in a workplace, the degree of interest work affords – all these are critical, alongside autonomy.Basing one's view of work on autonomy alone is a bit like rating a company on its share price performance: a useful piece of information, but too narrow on its own. A more nuanced picture might note that long-term job insecurity (as opposed to short-term, recession-induced job insecurity) is not notably worsening over time.Most people gained financially over the last decade (unlike in the US, where average incomes have been falling), albeit unequally so. Average working hours have been nudging down. However, work is much more intense and stressful; investment in skills is patchy and lots of people feel overqualified; and, as the article rightly says, people are more tightly controlled. But perhaps most important of all, until 2007 there was almost record employment: the ability to move to a better job is one of the most important ways of making work better.Chakrabortty declares technology to be the source of employees' declining control over their own work. Yes, but. Technology enables some workers to have greater control over when and how they work (eg homeworking, flexible working). It enhances the work of others and makes work more productive. However, it can also deskill by transferring human knowledge to software packages that workers must then follow (thus also enabling more offshore outsourcing).Overall, though, skill levels are rising and "good jobs" at senior levels of the labour market are growing faster than "bad jobs" at the bottom. The agony of modern work is that, having upskilled the workforce, we have yet to find a way of properly using all the new skills.Work & careersPsychologyStephen Overellguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Florida panthers bound back thanks to Texas mates By LAURAN NEERGAARD 2010-09-23T19:34:37ZWASHINGTON (AP) -- In the quest to save the endangered Florida panther, their Texas cousins were the cat's meow. Wildlife biologists moved eight female panthers from Texas - close relatives yet genetically distinct - into south Florida 15 years ago in hopes of boosting reproduction, and the immigration paid off.... hosted.ap.org |
End of dieting for actors Scientists in Germany have created software that enables actors to appear thinner or heavier on-screen. abc.net.au |
Coral bleaching event 'worst since 1998' International marine scientists say the worst coral bleaching in more than a decade has struck reefs across the South-East Asian and Indian oceans in recent months. abc.net.au |