That great barometer of UK consumer confidence, house prices, seems to be moving up. A glance at some of the British tabloids today shows that the combination of a very slight rise in house prices and a fourth consecutive monthly rise in the number of people managing to buy their own home is front page news.
Why so?
Housing data has long been seen as a bellwether for economic confidence. Continue reading
Passengers won’t be the only ones checking on the location of emergency exits if the current stream of bad news in the airline industry continues. Shareholders could start to look for them too – because the outlook is distinctly bumpy.
Plans by Ryanair to take over smaller Irish rival Aer Lingus have been grounded by Europe’s competition authorities. It may appeal the judgment but rival Flybe, which stood to gain some of Aer Lingus’ slots at Gatwick, will still press ahead with job losses, cutting around 10% of its UK workforce as it fights to get back into the black. Continue reading
Ageism is a fact of life in the work place. Once you get past 50 it’s way more difficult to find a job than it was at, say, 30. This isn’t necessarily because employers don’t like older people (though evidence suggests they don’t, they’re generally more expensive) but because there are also fewer senior roles around and most of the so-called ‘grey beards’ looking for work tend to have climbed some way up the corporate ladder. But young applicants present problems all of their own.
A friend of mine who works in HR tells me, however, she is fast becoming disillusioned with some young job-seekers she comes across. Why? Because there is so much embroidery, exaggeration and outright dishonesty in some of their CVs.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report has found that although more women are in employment than ever before, major corporations are still not capitalising on their talents. Pay equality is not there either. So why are women still not equally represented in major multinational companies and, when they are, why aren’t they being paid equally?
The report shows much progress still being made but a lot of ground still to make up.
Its co-author Ricardo Hausmann, Director of the Centre for International Development at Harvard University, says countries have to adjust for the fact that marriage and motherhood are not at odds with women’s advancement in the workplace. Continue reading
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