European Union officials take three times more sick days off work than an average British worker in the private sector, research by The Telegraph suggests.
According to official figures, European Commission officials took an average of 14.6 days off sick last year, with one in seven staff absent for more than 20 days.
By contrast, a survey by the Confederation of British Industry found that British staff working in the private sector took around five sick days a year.
European officials even outstripped Britain's civil servants and public sector staff, who took half as many days off work.
Peter Bone, a prominent Eurosceptic Conservative MP, said the figures were "disgraceful". He said: "I'm appalled at the waste of money. It is unbelievable that they are taking so much time off. However, nobody in truth would notice whether they are there or not. They have no real job, they are just pushing bits of paper around and costing taxpayers billions of pounds." EU officials are well paid, according to British figures, 16 per cent of administrative staff at the commission earn more than 100,000 or £84,000 a year, paid at low "community" tax rates of around 20 per cent.
The high wages comes on top of annual holidays of 24 days as well as seven days off for public holidays, and this year eight "non-working" days out of the office when the Brussels institutions are closed in summer and at Christmas.
Many commission staff are also eligible for a "flexitime" scheme that gives an extra 24 days off work every year for those that put in an extra 45 minutes a day in the office.
The holiday and flexitime allowances meant that in 2010, many EU staff were entitled to 66 days or a quarter of the year off work, without taking time off sick.
A spokesman for the European Commission said: "We don't have high sickness absence rates.
"The standard comparison is percentage of working days lost to sickness. While this varies very slightly from year to year, for the Commission it is generally 3.5 -3.7 per cent." "We find that in fact the commission compares very, even extremely, favourably to national administrations. That is the inconvenient truth."
15 comments:
US economy, the world’s
largest, grew at its fastest pace in almost two years in the three months to
September 2013." Not when you add a real GDP price deflateor, or when you look at real factors such as part time work. Ben just gets to leave on his last day claiming that he has solved the US economy problems, simply by printing money. As the economy begins to collapse again Yellen will undo that taper, and the nonsense will be able to begin again; but as long as Ben gets to say he was the taper man, thats all that matters.
Outgoing US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said he was cautiosly optimistic about growth prospects but stressed that America’s economic recovery remained incomplete.
“The combination of financial healing, greater balance in the housing market, less fiscal restraint, and, of course, continued monetary policy accommodation bodes well for US economic growth in coming quarters,” Mr Bernanke told the American Economic Association.
“But, of course, if the experience of the past few years teaches us anything, it is that we should be cautious in our forecasts.”
Mr Bernanke, who last month announced that the Fed will begin tapering by $10bn (£6.1bn) to $75bn its monthly bond-buying programme, steps down as head of the central bank on January 31 and will hand over to Janet Yellen.
In a speech likely to be his last as head of the world’s most powerful central bank, he said: “I see some grounds for cautious optimism abroad as well. As in the US, central banks in other advanced economies have taken significant steps to strengthen financial systems and to provide policy accommodation.”
Economists argue that ending emergency unemployment insurance will have an adverse impact on the economy, mostly because people dependent upon the program tend to immediately spend most if not all of the benefits on goods and services.
Thomas Perez, the labor secretary, said on Friday that the Obama administration was planning to throw its full weight behind the push to restore the extension in unemployment benefits, which he described as "a critical lifeline".
Obama will host Americans who have lost their long-term unemployment benefits at the White House on Tuesday.
"When Congress first past this version of emergency unemployment compensation in 2008, and the president [George W Bush] signed the law, the unemployment rate was 5.6%, and the average duration of unemployment was 17.1 weeks. Today, the unemployment rate is 7%," Perez said. "The average duration of unemployment is now 36 weeks."
Betsey Stevenson, a member of the White House's council of economic advisers, said that while the broad economic outlook was positive, the long-term unemployment rate – currently 2.6% – has remained enduringly high. "To put that in perspective, [during] average or normal times we'd expect to see an unemployment rate that was below 1%."
Steny Hoyer, the Democratic House minority whip, said the Senate would vote next week to expedite a bipartisan bill to reintroduce the benefits program for three months. If the bill passed, he hoped Republicans in the House would be open to negotiation.
“For Congress to let this program expire while our jobs recovery is still continuing, in my view, is reckless and irresponsible,” Hoyer said. “The long-term unemployed are facing one of the toughest job markets ever.”
The Senate bill is being brought by senators Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and Dean Heller, a Nevada Republican – the two states with the highest unemployment rates.
If Heller and all 55 senators in the Democratic caucus support a measure to bring the bill to an early vote, only four Republicans will be required to cross the aisle to reach the requisite 60 votes.
Congressional sources lobbying for passage of the legislation say they have identified seven Republicans they hope to convince to support the bill. They will be targeted, on Capitol Hill as well as in their home states, over the next week.
In an interview on Thursday, Reed told the Guardian he had been in discussion with some Republican senators over the holiday period and was “hopeful” the measure would pass. “They’re weighing it,” he said of his Republican counterparts. “That is my sense. They understand that they have constituents who worked hard, got laid off, and are still looking for work.”
The Fed is printing $75 billion a month down from 895 billion a month. All that money goes to the rich and super rich as they are the only ones holding assets whose prices go up with all the printing.
So while we print $960 billion a year for the rich, Congress decided to cut $25 billion in unemployment benefits and $5 billion in food stamps for 47 million Americans in 2014.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost $6000 billion but Congress found enough money for that (compared to $738 billion for the Vietnam war in similar 2011 dollars). The 30,000 drones planned for American skies by 2020 will cost $1000 billion which Congress has no problem funding that. NSA costs at least $75 billion a year and that is fine with Congress. The Department of Homeland Security costs $60 billion a year and Congress has no problem funding it. But Congress is its wisdom cut $25 billion from the unemployed and $5 billion from food stamps in 2014.
That reminds of the Mandela saying:
“If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care for human beings,”
To be fair, America does not care for its own citizens either. Many of its atrocities are committed on US citizens.
The US government has the power to create money debt-free and interest-free. It is utterly insane for the US govt to borrow money or pay interest on borrowed money. One hundred years ago the US govt abdicated its responsibility to manage the US money supply by giving that power to The Fed which has abused that power to enrich the bankers who run the Fed, the corporatists who run industry and politicians who enable them.
The Republicans in America are attempting to achieve what the Conservative and Liberal coalition is implementing in the UK : a structural adjustment programme.
This is an ideogically driven programme which is not concerned by logic or economic experience. Such programmes were imposed upon third world countries by the IMF. Even the IMF have publicly admitted that structural adjustment austerity programmes do not help economies but damage them.
Austerity programmes delay economic recovery. Economies recover despite them,
Zappa was a brilliant composer/musician and a witty iconoclast who spared no one. He wasn't, however, a communist nor really a lefty - he was more of a anarcho-libertarian.
FZ quotes:
The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else’s life.
......
"I've come to the conclusion that there's only one party in this country and it's divided into two parts: Republicans and Republican wannabes. Republicans stand for evil, corruption, manipulation, greed- everything that Americans think is okay after being conditioned to it during the eighties. Republicans stand for all the values that Americans now hold dear. Plus they have more balloons than God, and for a nation raised on cartoons, that tells you something. Anybody with balloons, they're okay. They don't tell you what kind of crippled people had to blow those suckers up. The Democrats have no agenda, and when they speak on any topic, they want to sound as Republican as possible while still finding a way to retain the pork. "
.....
The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It’s moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that’s happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe … When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view, and if that code happens to be very, very right wing, almost toward Attila the Hun…
....
Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.
.......
Government is the Entertainment division of the military-industrial complex.
Separatist parties dominated snap elections in Catalonia in November, with politicians who favour the region's “right to decide” taking some two thirds of the 135 seats in the Catalan parliament.
"Contrary to some reports, there are a number of legal and constitutional options which allow this referendum to take place in Catalonia," Mas said in a letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which was sent in December, but made public on Thursday.
"I am confident I can rely on you to encourage the peaceful, democratic, transparent, and European process to which I and a vast majority of the Catalan people are fully committed," he added.
He also said that Catalonia - which accounts for more than 20 percent of Spain's GDP - is wealthy enough to be a net contributor to the EU budget.
He sent similar notes to the EU's 26 other capitals and to 45 leaders of non-EU states.
The Catalan referendum, if it happens, is to take place less than two months after Scottish voters say whether they want to leave the UK.
As with Scotland, it is unclear whether an independent Catalonia would be required to re-apply for EU membership.
If it does, it might make Catalans more reluctant to pursue independence.
Currently, opinion polls indicate that around 55 percent of Catalans want to leave Spain.
EU leaders have so far remained silent on whether they would endorse the move.
EIS was launched in 1994 to help stimulate investment into small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Under the original terms of the scheme, individuals could invest up to £1m in any tax year and receive tax relief of 30pc.
The scheme was expanded in 2012 and the investment cap raised to £5m. Businesses employing up to 250 staff are eligible for relief.
Uptake has increased by 87pc since the scheme was first launched, with more than 20,000 businesses raising upwards of £9.5bn over the past two decades.
Demand has soared in the past year. Almost 1,500 businesses used EIS for the first time during that period, up 41pc on the year to the end of March 2011.
No Saints is a hospitality and entertainment business, based in Milton Keynes. The company was started in 2010 by Stephen Thomas, who previously founded and ran Luminar, a FTSE-250-listed business and largest chain of nightclubs in the UK.
EIS was launched in 1994 to help stimulate investment into small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Under the original terms of the scheme, individuals could invest up to £1m in any tax year and receive tax relief of 30pc.
The scheme was expanded in 2012 and the investment cap raised to £5m. Businesses employing up to 250 staff are eligible for relief.
Uptake has increased by 87pc since the scheme was first launched, with more than 20,000 businesses raising upwards of £9.5bn over the past two decades.
Demand has soared in the past year. Almost 1,500 businesses used EIS for the first time during that period, up 41pc on the year to the end of March 2011.
No Saints is a hospitality and entertainment business, based in Milton Keynes. The company was started in 2010 by Stephen Thomas, who previously founded and ran Luminar, a FTSE-250-listed business and largest chain of nightclubs in the UK.
The US economy is losing up to a billion dollars a week because of the “fiscally irresponsible” decision to end long-term unemployment benefits, a Harvard economist said on Friday.
Professor Lawrence Katz based his assessment on official forecasts of the impact to the economy of 1.3 million jobless Americans losing benefits
The benefits, which apply to people who are unemployed for longer than six months, expired last week after a bipartisan budget deal on federal spending for the next two years failed to include a reauthorisation of the program.
Democrats have launched a sustained push to reintroduce the federal program, and a Senate vote on a bipartisan bill to restore the benefits for three months is expected early next week.
On Friday, Democrats in the House of Representatives released a state-by-state breakdown of Labor Department figures, showing the number of people who lost federal benefits when they expired on Saturday. The 1.3 million affected Americans are losing on average $305 per week. In total, Democrats said $400m had been “taken out of the pockets” of job seekers across the country.
“That would mean there is almost a billion dollars we are losing from the economy because of not extending unemployment insurance benefits,” Katz said in a conference call organised by House Democrats.
He later told the Guardian that the calculation was based on the “multiplier effect” of cancelling the benefits program, which had been forecast by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Applying the CBO’s estimated multiplier effect to the $400m per week being lost in benefits, Katz said, translated into a cost to the economy of between $600m and $1bn.
“It is actually fiscally irresponsible not to extend unemployment benefits,” he said. “The long-run cost to the taxpayers will be much higher from disconnecting people from the labour market.”
Economists argue that ending emergency unemployment insurance will have an adverse impact on the economy, mostly because people dependent upon the program tend to immediately spend most if not all of the benefits on goods and services.
Thomas Perez, the labor secretary, said on Friday that the Obama administration was planning to throw its full weight behind the push to restore the extension in unemployment benefits, which he described as "a critical lifeline".
Obama will host Americans who have lost their long-term unemployment benefits at the White House on Tuesday.
"When Congress first past this version of emergency unemployment compensation in 2008, and the president [George W Bush] signed the law, the unemployment rate was 5.6%, and the average duration of unemployment was 17.1 weeks. Today, the unemployment rate is 7%," Perez said. "The average duration of unemployment is now 36 weeks."
Betsey Stevenson, a member of the White House's council of economic advisers, said that while the broad economic outlook was positive, the long-term unemployment rate – currently 2.6% – has remained enduringly high. "To put that in perspective, [during] average or normal times we'd expect to see an unemployment rate that was below 1%."
Steny Hoyer, the Democratic House minority whip, said the Senate would vote next week to expedite a bipartisan bill to reintroduce the benefits program for three months. If the bill passed, he hoped Republicans in the House would be open to negotiation.
“For Congress to let this program expire while our jobs recovery is still continuing, in my view, is reckless and irresponsible,” Hoyer said. “The long-term unemployed are facing one of the toughest job markets ever.”
The Senate bill is being brought by senators Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and Dean Heller, a Nevada Republican – the two states with the highest unemployment rates.
If Heller and all 55 senators in the Democratic caucus support a measure to bring the bill to an early vote, only four Republicans will be required to cross the aisle to reach the requisite 60 votes.
1. How many neurons did the researchers find in the brains they analyzed?
"We found that on average the human brain has 86bn neurons. And not one that we looked at so far has the 100bn. Even though it may sound like a small difference the 14bn neurons amount to pretty much the number of neurons that a baboon brain has or almost half the number of neurons in the gorilla brain. So that's a pretty large difference actually," explained Herculano-Houzel.
So, according to this new research, the human brain likely has somewhere around 85 billion neurons.
2. speed of thought is inherent. so intelligence varies from one person to another.
t has always been found that so called intelligence is supposedly to be inate, but that like everything the more that you work at it the better you get at using it. As someone that was reckoned to have wasted my inate ability ( school report 1959 ), I can attest that determination/application is just as important, if not more so. The old adage about the Tortoise and the Hare comes to mind, it has also been an observation of mine that so many people said to be brilliant and clever, are so narrowly focussed on their specialization. So much so that in many other ways they are practically idiots, who do not have a clue as to how to do many things that ordinary people consider simple. Often thought that if we could go back in time to say study people such as Archimedes would it be a revelation to us, or would he be standing on the shoulders of previous giants in his own Genius ?
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