Postmen a thing of the past
Never before has a single company sacked so many people in the Netherlands, writes nrc.next in reaction to yesterday’s announcement by TNT that it will sack 11,000 postal workers. As a result of dwindling quantities of post and competition from cheaper organisations, TNT has to save EUR 395 million to survive.
 
“This is unique,” commented Paul Klep, professor of economic and social history at the University of Nijmegen, on TNT’s impending mass redundancy plans. At the end of the 1980s tens of thousands of miners lost their jobs but they worked for different mines and the redundancies were spread across a number of years. In 1996, electronics company Philips sacked 10,000 employees but then too the redundancies were phased.
 
The unions feel they have been sidetracked, as the company did not wait for them to propose an alternative plan. The best the unions can hope for is to extend the period in which the reorganisation takes place so that fewer people will be forced out of a job. What seems certain is that the friendly neighbourhood postman as we know him will be a thing of the past in five to ten years’ time.

Mexican flu more dangerous than people think
Till now, the general public has not worried much about the Mexican flu pandemic; wrongly so, according to AD and Trouw. Research in the US and the Netherlands has revealed that, in ferrets, the virus penetrates more deeply into the lungs than normal flu, making the sufferers sicker.
 
Another problem is that the virus is transferred on airborne droplets, which means more people could become infected without actual contact with a flu sufferer. The third worrying factor is that the virus could mutate. A girl in Denmark has already been diagnosed with a variant which is resistant to current medicines.
 
According to the National Institute for Public Health, when the disease reaches its climax there could be 17,000 cases in the Netherlands. To date, there have been 77,000 cases worldwide and 332 deaths. One reason for the disease’s relative innocuousness thus far is because of the season. Professor of molecular virology Ron Fouchier expects Mexican flu to show its real face in the winter. “Our research is all the more reason to go out and get a flu jab.”

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