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from Photographers Blog:
Quiet work amidst the reeds
By Herwig Prammer
The light is soft and warm, yet I am astonished at how cold it is. The thermometer says minus 15 degrees Celsius, but it feels far lower. In the car I did not recognize how strong the wind was blowing from the north.
Ernst Nekowitsch makes thatched roofs from reeds that grow along the shore of Lake Neusiedl, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Vienna, Austria. He tells me to have a look around. I will find his workers out in the reeds, he says.
So I climb up on the roof of my Land Rover and try to position myself in reeds higher than my vehicle. When I see the harvesters with their machines on the expanse of frozen water, I wonder why I cannot hear them. It is so quiet here. There is just a swoosh of reeds swaying in the wind. I take my cameras and walk along the grooved lanes the harvesting machines cut through the reeds. It is more difficult than I expected. The ground I cover is a 15-centimeter-thick layer of ice as smooth as glass. Sometimes you can even see the lake bed.
A young woman stops her small tractor with balloon tires and welcomes me. Julia, the daughter of Ernst Nekowitsch, explains that she is actually a beautician, but in the winter she helps with the harvesting and in the summer she joins her father roofing. Her father has leased more than eight square kilometers (3.1 square miles) of reeds at the lake, and usually they harvest two to three square kilometers (1 square mile) each year – assuming it is cold enough and the ice on the lake is thick enough to bring on the harvesting machines. Nearly all of the reeds are exported, most of it to the Netherlands. Here on Neusiedlersee we have the largest reed belt in Europe besides the Danube delta – always enough work, she laughs, as she starts her tractor again.
from Africa News blog:
World Cup Bonus for Workers
Soccer City in Johannesburg will be home to the opening and the final of the FIFA World Cup this year. On Monday, the men and women who helped build the stadium were given letters that assured them of two free tickets to the opening match.
120 000 tickets will be distributed to construction, community workers and children as part of a FIFA initiative to make sure that regular South Africans, who would normally not have the opportunity to go watch a World Cup match, can see their soccer heroes in the flesh.
Father of three, Zola Mdinmgi, said he will be taking his wife to the opening game on the 11th of June. "She knows too much about soccer. I'm too excited. It will be a big event for South Africa. It will also be nice to be here with my partner," he said.
Thoziswa Maliwa shared the same sentiment and said she will be taking her boyfriend to the opening." I'm so happy. Welcome to Soccer City."
Organising Committee CEO Dr Danny Jordaan described the structure as, "not just a stadium, but a monument of this country."
What do you think of the new upgraded Soccer City? Is it a monument to the country? Will South Africa turn heads come June 11th?
Just about the only thing FIFA has got right of late.
from Commentaries:
Lower Opel costs to help government aid
General Motors' decision to scrap the sale of Opel rests on the carmaker's calculation that the hole in its European unit's finances is not as deep as previously feared.
Governments should welcome the lower demands on taxpayers with open arms. But there is still some horse trading to be done to get everyone on board.
GM's chief executive Fritz Henderson is due to present his plans for Opel next week. He has good reason to be bullish.
GM's previous forecast that Opel needs $3.3 billion to keep going until 2011 appears to have been sharply revised. Some in the industry think the amount required could be nearer 60 percent of that figure -- some $2 billion.
Like other carmakers, European scrappage schemes and improved economic conditions have allowed Opel to significantly reduce its inventory. Cars that were sitting on the tarmac have been sold, putting much-needed cash back into the carmakers' coffers.
Moreover, GM itself is doing better than originally expected in the United States since emerging from bankruptcy in July. This has given it the confidence not only to scrap the sale of Opel to a consortium led by Magna, the Canadian auto parts maker, but also to repay the remaining 900 million euros on a bridge loan from the German government.
Earlier concerns about GM using U.S. taxpayer funds to prop up its units overseas seem to have eased. Henderson is now confident he can dip into GM's U.S. pocket to shore up Opel.
from India Insight:
Pricol killing: Labour at the receiving end?
The killing of a manager at a factory in Coimbatore by workers, sparked off by the sacking of dozens of their colleagues, can in no way be condoned, but it raises questions on the state of labour in India in a time of economic pain.
Roy George, a 47-year-old vice president at Pricol, was attacked by workers wielding iron rods after 42 employees were dismissed from a unit of the auto parts maker.
These employees were fired after they disrupted work, company officials say. A senior official was quoted as saying George was targeted because he was "weaning away" employees from a union that was leading the protests.
Pricol workers have been agitating for over two years against the hiring of contract workers and on the non-payment of pay and other benefits. The firm has said these strikes have hit profitability and they could shift base.
The Tamil Nadu government in June prohibited the firm from employing temporary workers in core operations and ordered it to hike wages, implicitly validating the demands of the workers.
If one reads Pricol's latest annual report, the firm itself blames the economy for its poor financials. There is no mention of an impact from labour unrest.
The International Labour Organisation, in its fundamental convention, says workers must have protection against harassment for being members of a trade union.
from MediaFile:
Shock! Offices lose productivity to Facebook -study
We think you saw this one coming: Employers are losing a whopping 1.5 workers per 100 in employee productivity to the social networking phenomenon that is Facebook.
This number was uncovered by the clever folk at Nucleus Research, who surveyed 237 randomly selected office workers. They discovered that some of you spend more time than you probably should poking, adding and making inane comments on friends' pages.
In fact some of you may be horrified to learn that Nucleus is advising corporations to consider restricting Facebook access at work to reclaim that productivity -- all the more important in a global recession and rising unemployment they say.
Among the findings from Nucleus' interviews with said randomly selected workers:
- Nearly two-thirds of those who have Facebook access visit the site during working hours.
- Those who visit Facebook at work do so for an average of 15 minutes each day.
- 87 percent of those who use Facebook at work couldn’t define a clear business reason for using it.
- Of those who do visit Facebook at work, 6 percent never use it anywhere else, meaning one in every 33 workers built their entire Facebook profile during work hours.
- There are also serious security concerns as IT departments can't monitor Facebook messages.
It wasn't immediately clear if Nucleus's survey took lunch-break time into account (some people might only visit Facebook during break-time). Either way, one imagines if a survey of 237 workers can ever be used as an adequate sample, then there will be a lot of unhappy workers out there in the office world, should all those IT departments take Nucleus' advice. As Nucleus concludes in its press release:
Companies should evaluate their Facebook policy and the cost to the organization in allowing access to Facebook, as today blocking Facebook may actually result in a 1.5 percent gain in productivity.
