Layoffs, Women and Men....Food Safety..

The layoffs during the current economic tsunami are stinging more than women, according to a NYT report.

Today BBC reports.....The economic crisis could increase the number of unemployed women by up to 22 million this year, the International Labour Organization (ILO) says. In a report assessing employment trends for women, the ILO warns that they will not escape the downturn. The global crisis began in the financial sectors of the world's richest countries, in jobs traditionally dominated by men. But unemployment is now spreading well beyond these sectors, the ILO says. Jeff Johnson, author of the report, says: "The sectors that were initially impacted the hardest, which were finance, insurance and real estate, construction and manufacturing were often dominated by male workers. "But as this crisis has played out, it's hit other sectors of the economy, service orientated sectors wholesale retail trade which in many industrialised economies are dominated by females." Jobs disappear As consumer confidence wanes, more traditionally female jobs such as waitresses, shop assistants, are all disappearing too. The ILO is especially worried about women in the developing world, working in agriculture, or as domestic servants, on a piece meal basis. They have no social protection and are especially vulnerable during an economic downturn.
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NYT has a stomach-churning story titled "Food Safety Problems Slip Past Private Inspectors."

.....An examination of the largest food poisoning outbreaks in recent years — in products as varied as spinach, pet food, and a children’s snack, Veggie Booty — show that auditors failed to detect problems at plants whose contaminated products later sickened consumers.In one case involving hamburgers fed to schoolchildren, the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in California passed 17 separate audits in 2007, records show. Then an undercover video made that year showed the plant’s workers using forklifts to force sickly cows into the slaughterhouse, which prompted a recall of 143 million pounds of beef in February 2008. “The contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education,” said Mansour Samadpour, a Seattle consultant who has worked with companies nationwide to improve food safety.