march-2013

Happy Danes
Now we know why the Danes usually rank as the happiest people.
According to Statistics Denmark, Danes are working about three
hours a week less than the already low 37 they had previously
calculated. “We significantly overestimated the number of hours
that Danes are working,” Sven Egmose, the head of Statistics
Denmark, informed Politiken newspaper.
In the past, numbers were reported yearly by employers who
gave bulk figures on their entire workforce. The new measurement
looks at the monthly hours for which individual employees are paid.
In a response worthy of a politician in the TV show Borgen, Harold
Børsting, head of the Danish trade union confederation says the drop
in hours was a positive trend because it showed that Danish workers
were productive at work.
Hours after Statistics Denmark’s announcement, German Labour
Minister Ursula von der Leyen pleaded for solutions to workplace stress,
citing new study Stress Report Germany 2012,
which claimed that stress was responsible
for Germany losing 59mn days of work
in 2011 and €6bn a year.
According to the study, 43% of
workers believe that their jobs have
become more stressful in the past
two years. Notably, stress has
increased more than 80% in the last
15 years. Causes of stress include an
increased focus on multi-tasking and
emails interrupting workflows.
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Park life
Residents of Moscow may soon be enjoying new parklands thanks to
City Hall’s decision to plant greenery on many disused construction
sites. Noting President Putin’s new eco-bent, Moscow’s construction
investment committee has cancelled leases on six undeveloped sites
around the city and is landscaping them instead.
The new parkland includes a site in the middle of the Moscow Ring Road
that was leased to a company in 2000 to build an automotive services
complex. In January 2012, when Putin was Prime Minister, he ordered
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin to turn wasteland that was once the site
of the Rossiya hotel, into a park. But can Moscow afford all this new
greenery when there is such a shortage of homes? Vedomosti newspaper
reports that the authorities have a plan to develop a 20km² district in
Molzhaninovo, in the north of the capital, into a satellite town with an
industrial park, transport hub and other infrastructure, creating up to
70,000 local jobs. The €3.6bn project will take at least five years to build. GETTY IMAGES
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