Health Foundation report also predicts people in poorest areas will be three times more likely to die by the age of 70

A record 3.7 million workers in England will have a major illness by 2040, according to research .

On current trends, 700,000 more working-age adults will be living with high healthcare needs or substantial risk of mortality by 2040 – up nearly 25% from 2019 levels, according to a report by the Health Foundation charity.

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Women with symptoms are being penalised, National Education Union’s annual conference told

The UK’s biggest teaching union is to lobby for menopause training to be made mandatory for all school leaders, saying women with symptoms are being penalised for sickness absence and disciplined on competency grounds.

Older staff were at greatest risk of “capability procedures”, delegates at the National Education Union’s (NEU) annual conference in Bournemouth were told, while others are being forced out of their jobs, affecting not only their income but their pensions.

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Employees in England, Scotland and Wales can now request flexible working from first day in new job

Employees will have the legal right from Saturday to request flexible working from their first day in a new job.

Previously, it only applied if someone had worked for their employer for 26 weeks or more.

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Women still being paid 91p for every £1 a man earns, analysis shows, with gap stubbornly high in public sector

• Women are all over the big screen – but pay gap persists in the UK cultural sector

The gender pay gap has reduced to its lowest level since reporting became mandatory for businesses in 2017. However, women are still being paid just 91p for every £1 a man earns, according to analysis of official government data.

Almost four out of five companies and public bodies are still paying men more than women (78.4%) although the median pay gap reduced slightly from the previous year to 9.1% in 2023-2024, the lowest level since mandatory reporting became law in Great Britain in 2018.

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Readers respond to an article about quitting the rat race, with some saying their generation was handed an untenable position and others saying the struggle is nothing new

I can understand the disillusion expressed in Leila Latif’s article ( The soft life: why millennials are quitting the rat race, 2 April ). We’re conditioned to compete academically and then are turned into a world of work where the reality is a painful shock to the system. Many are robbed of our highfalutin dreams fast. The lucky few will find genuinely fulfilling work with remuneration to match.

It’s easy to work like a possessed being when you enjoy what you do and are purpose-driven. Working long hours, often unpaid, is an act of altruism that keeps the public sector afloat, as any clinician or teacher will confirm. It is much harder to sustain this in a role that you don’t enjoy, or that doesn’t align with your values: dissonance is destructive and the suffering will be your own.

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A week’s break would have made a huge difference to me when my mum had cancer – and so would recognition of carers’ vital role

For the first time, employees in Great Britain are going to have the right to time off work for caring responsibilities . This change, which comes into effect tomorrow, will affect about 2.5 million people who are juggling employment with caring for long-term sick, disabled or elderly loved ones. I know first-hand why carer’s leave is sorely needed. For about four years, I balanced paid employment with caring for my mother, finally resigning from work altogether when her cancer became terminal. I was fortunate to have kind employers who allowed time off, but the right to care for our loved ones shouldn’t rest on goodwill. It should be enshrined.

Plenty has been written about the difficulties that working parents face, but working carers are almost entirely overlooked. We experience so many of the same challenges: the stress of being pulled in two directions, the anticipation of accidents or emergencies, and the guilt of never doing our job nor our care to the best of our abilities. But in some ways it’s worse, because the person we love is suffering, not learning and growing. And some people are struggling under the double burden of childcare and eldercare. It’s exhausting and hard. It’s also incredibly lonely. While parents have photos of offspring on their desk, carers are left out of the camaraderie. For us, there is no workplace chatter about the people in our care; no photos, no news about sports days or exams. We’re invisible.

Emily Kenway is a social policy doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, and author of Who Cares: the Hidden Crisis of Caregiving and How We Solve It (Wildfire, 2023)

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We often wind up with feelings of obligation towards our work, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But ask yourself: would your employer think the same?

I work for a small company; there are just three of us . My boss, who is the owner of the company, hired me to manage it while she stepped back before having her first child. She’s since had a second child. At the start, I loved my job. It represented security after several rocky years . But as time has gone on, I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with my job and the industry I work in. I desperately want to leave.

I’ve been working on a side gig for 12 months in my free time and it’s starting to take off. If I had extra time to spend on it, it would make a huge difference. My dream would be to take a part-time, mindless job to help pay the bills , but I feel trapped in my current position. My boss is stressed. She’s struggling to cope with parenthood and being the main breadwinner in her household. If I left, I would put her in a difficult position. While we’re not close friends , we have become friends of a sort over the years, and I am aware of how much she has to deal with at home. Of course, I could just wait and see how things pan out, but every day I get more fed up and depressed about having to do a job I resent and am bored by.

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This is a policy that could make a radical difference – as long as it’s not watered down like the green prosperity plan

It will cost jobs. It will harm the UK’s competitiveness. It will make the labour market less flexible. For those with long enough memories, the push back against Labour’s plans for a new deal for workers has a familiar ring to it. The same arguments were wheeled out before the national minimum wage was introduced a quarter of a century ago. All proved groundless.

Confounding the doomsters and gloomsters of the late 1990s, the minimum wage has raised the pay of millions of Britain’s lowest-paid workers by an average of £6,000 a year without lengthening dole queues. It has been described by one thinktank as the most successful economic policy in a generation.

Larry Elliott is the Guardian’s economics editor

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Trade bodies are setting out rules to avoid ‘unacceptable’ behaviour, but part of the problem is how we view work itself

An old, cruel joke claimed David Beckham wore headphones at all times so a voice could remind him to “breathe in, breathe out”. Some things that should come naturally don’t.

You might think that a code of conduct for adult professionals attending a work-related social event, reminding them to “be considerate and respectful to each other” and “refrain from any unacceptable conduct” (defined elsewhere in the code), falls into the same category of advice as Beckham’s breathing tips.

Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre

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