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The listening exercises in Business Spotlight Übungsheft (p. 5) are based on the article “Pretending to work” (Names & News, p. 8). Here, we provide you with the audio file and transcript.
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Pretending to work
You’ve probably never thought of paying your company to let you work in the office. What at first sounds absurd is increasingly common in China. The country’s youth-unemployment rate, now at about 14 per cent, has been stubbornlyhartnäckig; hier: anhaltendstubbornly high for several years. However, rather thananstattrather than sit around at home, a lot of young Chinese jobseekerArbeitssuchende(r)jobseekers are paying businesses so they can go to a fake office and pretend to work for them.
“I feel very happy,” 30-year-old Shui Zhou told the BBC. He is one of several people who pay 30 yuan (about €3.60) per day to go to an office run by a business called Pretend To Work Company, in Dongguan, a city near Hong Kong, in southern China. “It’s like we’re working together as a group.” Zhou also says that going to an office every day is better for his self-discipline and self-esteemSelbstwertgefühlself-esteem than staying at home.
Quite a few “pretend-office” companies have appeared recently. What they are offering is seen as a transitionÜbergangtransition service. Instead of just pretending, most of the customers use the company’s computers to look for jobs or start their own businesses. Of course, many also want to create the impression that they are working in order to reduce the embarrassmentPeinlichkeit, Blamage, Beschämung, Verlegenheitembarrassment of being unemployed. The owner of Pretend To Work Company says: “What I’m selling isn’t a workstationArbeitsplatzworkstation, but the dignityWürdedignity of not being a useless person.”