Добавил:
Upload Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз: Предмет: Файл:
УМК 3 РГФ new 1.doc
Скачиваний:
119
Добавлен:
08.11.2019
Размер:
8.5 Mб
Скачать

Letter To The Editor

MADAM, – You have had a lot of letters about working people being unco-operative. You have not had any that I have seen about why people like me are unco-operative.

I read your paper in the public library – I can’t afford to purchase it every day. It is the same for a lot of ordinary working people like me. So you don’t get much of what we think.

I am 50 years of age. I started work at 15 years of age. I will work, if I am lucky, until I am 65 years of age. I might live to 70, but I will be lucky if I can work to 70 because, even if I am able and willing, the bosses don’t want us. So I shall have the old-age pension. I have not been able to save. In all my working life the money I have got will amount to about £160,000. That is the highest it could be.

I saw in your paper that the Chairman of Bowring’s Insurance gets £157,000 a year. And of course he gets a free car, free drinks, trips abroad with his wife, etc. He gets in a year as much as I get in all my working life. The differential is a bit wrong somewhere. Or what about your reports about wills? Often you see someone, a stockbroker, for example, leaving £500,000. That is his savings, not what he lived on. It would take me 500 years to earn that little lot. Something wrong with the differential there too.

I am not a communist or an anarchist. I believe there must be differentials. But the trouble is the differentials are all wrong, and there’s too much fiddling at the top.

We know the papers and the telly and radio give one side of the story. We know the other. You don’t. Or you don’t want to. So there will be a fight. We might lose a round or two. But we will win in the end. And if we have to fight to win instead of being sensible on both sides, the losers are going to suffer a lot.

You can call this unco-operative. Try bringing up three kids on my pay and see how you like it. There’s plenty for everybody if it’s shared reasonably. And if, as my mate says, we want to try and have the bridge and Beaujolais as well as beer and bingo, what’s wrong with that?

Yours faithfully,

JAMES THOMSON

Beaujolais: a kind of expensive wine

The Duties Of The Boss

As nearly everyone knows, the boss has practically nothing to do except to decide what is to be done; to tell somebody to do it; to listen to reasons why it should not be done, why it should be done by someone else, or why it should be done in a different way; to follow up to see if the thing has been done; to discover that it has not been done; to ask why it hasn’t been done; to listen to excuses from the person who should have done it; to follow it up again to see if the thing has been done, only to discover that it has been done incorrectly; to point out how it should have been done; to wonder if it is not time to get rid of a person who cannot do anything right; to reflect that he or she probably has a wife or a husband and a large family, and that certainly any successor would be just as bad, and maybe worse; to consider how much simpler and better the thing would have been done if one had done it oneself in the first place; to reflect sadly that one could have done it right in twenty minutes, and, as things turned out, one has had to spend two days to find out why it has taken three hours for somebody else to do it wrong.