Word: worker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...guest workers arrived last spring with the hope of saving enough money to start a business, buy a home or support extended family. They left behind spouses and children and, in most cases, spent $3000 to $5000 each on recruitment, visa and travel fees. "If I got the 40 hours a week at $6 per hour promised in my contract, I knew I could pay back my debt, send money home and save for the future," says one worker from the Dominican Republic, who also requested anonymity...
...they say the reality of their situation was much different from what they were promised. According to the contracts they signed with Decatur before coming to the U.S., the guest workers were to live in a "very nice newly refurbished hotel with large swimming pool" and assured "[t]ransportation provided to and from work." Instead, the workers say they were put in a half-rebuilt, mold-infested Decatur motel and left on their own to get to and from work. The pool water, according to one guest worker, produced fungal infections on contact...
...Darfur as a ‘genocide’ and acting consistently with their position. When the federal government removes the label of ‘genocide,’ investments can resume.” According to a Boston Globe report last July, the state’s worker pension fund holds investments of more than $300 million in 23 non-U.S. companies doing business in Sudan. That includes $33.3 million in PetroChina, the oil firm from which Harvard announced its direct divestment two years ago. But as of Dec. 31, Harvard still maintained a total...
...Efficient, capable and well paid, Haruko (played by the 33-year-old actress Ryoko Shinohara) is a contract worker who has been dispatched to a struggling Tokyo food-manufacturing company. Efficient and deadly capable, she is totally lacking in interpersonal skills - which in Japan, even more than in other countries, are at least as important as actually being able to do the job. The comedy in Haken - which at times resembles a Japanese version of The Office, minus the meanness - comes from Haruko's clashes with her often incompetent full-time colleagues (one of whom is ironically played by Koutaro...
...Dignity is one thing temps don't have in Japan, where a worker is often still judged by the quality of the corporation to which they've pledged their lifetime loyalty. (Indeed, Japanese will introduce themselves company name first: "I'm TIME's Bryan Walsh.") Haken - a serial drama that began airing in January and ends this month - is popular in part because it inverts the accepted rules of a Japanese office and satirizes the social divide between full-timers and lowly part-timers...