In today’s episode of Business English Impulse Podcast: Will I still have a job? Annie and Clare have a conversation about the past and future of work. They look back at the experiences we had in the 1970s and 80s when computers first took over jobs and draw parallels with what is happening today. Listen to the podcast, turn the subtitles on if needed and then look at some of the vocabulary and expressions
VOCABULARY
Despair
- Adjective
- to not have any hope about changing your current situation.
- The early 1980s were marked by despair as so many people lost their jobs and struggled to find new ones.
- Don’t despair! We still have another month to increase sales.
- A clear marker of depression is one’s lack of hope or level of despair they feel about their life.
Gizza job
- Short for ‘Give me a job’ in Liverpool.
- Clare talks about an old TV show where the man from Liverpool would say ‘Gizza job’ to say ‘give me a job’.
- Gizza job. I can do that.
- I’ve been looking for work for ages. Gizza job.
Disproportionately
- Adverb
- Used to say that something is too large or too small compared to soemthing else.
- Women are going to be disproportionately affected by AI in the first years as many of the jobs being replaced are administrative.
- The prices there are disproportionately lower than anywhere else, but the quality is not the same.
Blue-collar
- Adjective
- Used to talk about workers who do manual labor or work that requires strength.
- Used to describe people who do not work in an office.
- Blue-collar refers to the color of the clothes that they usually wear to work.
- This is a blue-collar neighborhood and most people work at Michelin.
- I don’t like politicians who like to present themselves as being blue-collar when they were raised in upper-class families.
White-collar
- Adjective
- Used to talk about people who work in offices and typically have a university degree.
- White-collar comes from the color of the collar of their dress shirts that they wear to work.
- Although in the past we were worried about technology replacing blue-collar jobs, now we are worried about programs taking over white-collar jobs.
- Graduates who come from white-collar families have an advantage when looking for work because they tend to have more contacts that kids who came from blue-collar families even though they have the same level of education.
Mortgage
- A loan frm the bank to help pay for your home.
- In 2009, the mortage crisis began and millions of people lost their homes.
- It’s much more difficult to be accepted for a mortgage in Spain than in the US.
ENGLISH IMPULSE PODCAST
Now that you have listened to Business English Impulse Podcast: Will I still have a job?, take a look at some of our other episodes:
English impulse: Bro, that’s cringe
Well-being English Impulse: Weather moods
