NEW WAYS TO WORK

Six-month long vacations? Factories and offices designed by the employees themselves? These are just a few of the innovations now being tried by business firms in Europe and the United States to combat the increasing dissatisfaction of employees at every level with the quality of their working lives, despite higher salaries, more attractive fringe benefits, and improvements in on-the-job-safety and comfort. In addition to the widely reported boredom of the assembly line, a growing number of white-collar workers see themselves as conscripted into a slave army of paper pushers. Such long-sought benefits as the five-day, forty-hour week, the fixed vacation, and the standard length of service pay raise are no longer enough to compensate many industrial and office workers for the drabness, lack of recognition, impersonality, and apparent pointlessness of their jobs.

(adapted from the book "Words you Need")