roof over one’s head
Bosses of top British companies will have made more money by lunchtime on Thursday than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year, according to an independent analysis of the vast gap in pay between chief executives and everyone else.
The chief executives of FTSE 100 companies are paid a median average of £3.45m a year, which works out at 120 times the £28,758 collected by full-time UK workers on average.
On an hourly basis the bosses will have earned more in less than three working days than the average employee will pick up this year, leading campaigners to dub the day “Fat Cat Thursday”.
Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said it was outrageous that bosses were picking up “salaries that look like telephone numbers” while workers were “suffering the longest pay squeeze since Napoleonic times”. …
Tim Roache, the general secretary of the GMB union, said the pay gap between bosses and workers was “simply obscene”.
“Does anyone really think these fat cats deserve 100 times more than the hard-working people who prop up their business empires?” he said. “Workers who have to scrimp and save to feed their families and put a roof over their head – and like most of Britain’s working population will now be feeling the pinch after the festive period?” (Skip the rest)
今回取り上げる表現は、a roof over one’s head です。意味のイメージはつくかもしれませんが、この表現は比喩を用いています。"a roof over one’s head” を直訳すれば「頭上の屋根」になります。
Cambridge Dictionary で確認すると、“a place to live” とあり、「すみか」を指すことがわかります。同書に例文があり、“She gave him enough money to get a roof over his head.” となっています。
よって今回の記事にある “Workers who have to scrimp and save to feed their families and put a roof over their head” を訳すと、「家族にすみかを与え、養うために切り詰めた生活をしなければならない労働者」となります。(OkaUchi)
