The past was better than the future
Marine scientists have discovered that despite modern trawlers being 50 times more effective than their sailing equivalents in the 19th century, they only catch a third more fish.
Stocks of some varieties of fish such as halibut are so decimated that it takes 500 times as much effort to pull them from the sea as it did in 1889.
Britain's fleet of trawlers – mostly powered by sail – netted 300,000 tons a year in the 1880s compared with 150,000 tons now.
The fishing fleet in England and Wales was much larger then but each vessel still netted 80 tons of fish a year. This compares with 110 tons on average per boat now despite advances in technology and far more powerful boats.
The "dramatic" and "worrying" drop is due to extreme and aggressive overfishing and researchers from York University said the problem is "far more profound" then previously thought.Richard Alleyne
Mickey Mouse mortalities: suicides at Eurodisney
Even the moderate unions, however, insist that something has gone desperately wrong behind the scenes in the Magic Kingdom. Over the last five or six years, they say, a younger, mostly French, top management has taken over at Eurodisney, as the parent company is called.
The number of jobs in restaurants and hotels on the site has been sharply reduced, unions say. The number of visitors – attracted by cut-price deals – has increased. The hiring of seasonal workers has been slashed. A whole tier of middle management has been removed or "reduced to secretary status", unions say, leaving lower-level employees feeling undervalued and ignored.
Longer hours and six-day weeks are frequently demanded of everyone from pastry chefs to the "cast members", who earn just above the French minimum wages to play Goofy or Donald Duck in the daily Disneyland parades. The number of industrial accidents on the site has risen to 1,500 a year – one for every 10 employees – a higher rate than in the legendarily accident-prone building trade.John Litchfield
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posted by Tom Nadeau at 12:10 AM
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