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Business Weekly brings you the best of the week's Business Daily programmes.

Business Weekly

Business Weekly Archive: Work, Death & Football

20/02/2010

Work, Death & Football

BBC World Service - Business Weekly Archive, Work, Death & Football

The not-for-profit US companies which supply human bodies to academics and scientists.

There's big demand for human bodies and tissues, from scientific companies and medical schools. In America, not-for-profit companies which supply bodies are expanding. Is it an unsavoury trade?

There is a demand for human bodies, organs and tissues, for use by medical schools and by scientific companies. 

In America, there is a semi-commercial element to the supply of this demand. Not-for-profit companies offer financial support to families of the dead, arranging for the processing and transport of bodies or tissues, as well as final cremation. But is this a deeply sensitive area where business should not go? 

Lesley Curwen speaks to Michel Anteby, a Professor at Harvard University, who has done research into the companies offering these services, and to Brent Bardsley, executive vice president of Anatomy Gifts Registry, part of the not-for-profit Anatomic Gift Foundation. 

And are trade unions on the rise again? Steve Evans talks to the heads of a South African union for call-centre workers and the European unions about the future. Why did they declined and can they really stage a comeback? And, indeed, should they come back?

Also, soccer is a multi-billion dollar business, fuelled by the passion and the money of fans. But concern about insolvencies has been growing. The English Premier League is one of the richest sporting series in the world. Yet English football is riddled with clubs which seem to be permanently on the brink of bankruptcy. The BBC's Theo Leggett reports on where all the riches go - on transfer fees and players' wages.

Plus, the cost of disgrace. What is the Tiger Woods brand now worth? Our regular business of sports commentator, David Goldblatt takes a look at the economics of the world's richest sportsman.

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