Liking a page does not grant the page admins access to your status updates, friends list, or other information on your wall or profile if it is not already visible to Everyone. They will have access to your name, profile picture, gender, networks, and Facebook username and uid; these are always visible to Everyone.
Additionally, the page admins have access to aggregated demographic information on their entire fan base. This includes the percentage of fans in each gender & age range, and the number of fans by country, city, and language setting, but only for at most the top 20 countries and cities and only where the number is significant. The demographic information does not identify individual fans, and is not available at all for pages with less than 30 fans. See this blog post for an example of what is shown.
As you noted the page can post content to their Wall which will appear in your News Feed, however you can use the X in the upper right corner of any such content to hide all of the page content from your News Feed and still Like the page. The page can also send you Updates, which appear in a subtab under Messages.
Facebook has a history of introducing changes that have unannounced privacy impacts, so keep that in mind and do not count on their current practices staying the same. In fact you can be sure that there will be changes over time.
Best Answer
A work status defines someone's job or occupation of the day if it doesn't involve a company.
It appears that they were widely used by the community under some "Interest" or "Community" pages and were finally merged and sorted by Facebook under a more descent category, "Work status".
I didn't find a complete list but stumbled upon some of them.
And their respective icons:
Feel free to complete the list.