#working lives

[thoughtlessarse]

Dutch have longest working lives in EU despite part-time culture - DutchNews.nl

The Dutch may be the part-time champions of Europe, but their working lives are also longer than those of any other EU nationals, according

The Dutch may be the part-time champions of Europe, but their working lives are also longer than those of any other EU nationals, according to new figures from Eurostat. The European statistics agency calculates that the Dutch work for an average of 43.8 years, which is six years longer than the average EU resident. The state pension age in the Netherlands is 67. EU residents work an average of 37.2 years, but more than 40 in six countries, including Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Ireland and the Netherlands. The shortest working lives – at less than 33 years – are in Italy and Romania. Europeans are, however, working longer. In 2015, the average career lasted less than 35 years and has lengthened steadily since then, with a dip during the coronavirus pandemic.

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This month I've been employed for 40 years in the same department at the university hospital.

[stratharchives]

Digitisation of the Scottish Oral History Centre collections

Since its foundation in 1995 the Scottish Oral History Centre (SOHC) has initiated a wealth of oral history projects, many of them with occupational health themes. Preservation of the Centre’s sound recordings began in 2015, when over 500 compact cassettes were archived. Those relating to the medical humanities - about half the collection - have now been digitised and transcribed with the help of Wellcome Trust funding.

The oldest set of recordings, Conversations with workers at the former Linwood car plant, were gifted to the SOHC by Clifford Lockyer, who had worked as a personnel officer for the Chrysler car plant at Linwood, Renfrewshire, before the plant’s closure in 1981. 

More recent oral histories include David Walker’s Chemical workers (2004-2005) which sought to capture the human experience of working within the British chemical industry; and the extensive Coal miners and dust-related disease, for which over fifty coal miners in Scotland, South Wales and the North East of England were interviewed by associates of the SOHC, among them Sue Morrison, Neil Rafeek and Hilary Young. The recordings form part of an ambitious study to reconstruct the story of miners’ lung since the 19th century, published in 2007.

Two further oral history projects relate specifically to how asbestos affects Scottish working lives and communities. One of them, Graeme Naylor’s Asbestos: the impact on the workers and their families in Inverclyde during the period 1945 to 1980, is preserved in transcription only. The other is the pioneering Asbestos-related diseases in the West of Scotland, which underpins the book ‘Lethal work: a history of the asbestos tragedy in Scotland’ (2000) by Ronald Johnston and Arthur McIvor, director of the SOHC. Much of the sound of the project survives.

For a complete listing, consult the SOHC Archive catalogue.

Conversion work on other components of the SOHC archive, notably Neil Rafeek’s interviews with women in the Communist Party in Scotland from the 1920s onwards, will continue as part of the ‘Unlocking our Sound Heritage’ project at the British Library.