Timesizing ®  not downsizing
* means outside our website. For HeadlinesFromHell, scan down. We offer a 500-year forecast + design & consulting, & URLs to match your mood -ShorterWorkTIme.com, SWT.me, HopeDuJour.net, DoomDuJour.com, worksharing.info, TMSZ.biz...
TIMESIZING is the missing plan of the *Occupiers, *Greens, Justice-rs, *3dWay, *ClubOfRome, *ClubOrlov, *Bilderbergs, *TOES, *women, *youth... It means cutting workweeks to spread work (& markets), instead of cutting jobs (& markets!). Its emergency form, WORKSHARING, is already saving jobs. Timesizing means more jobs, shorter hours & higher pay cuz you cut labor surplus. See also our time trilogy.
 Unemployed? POed at the older generation for leaving you with all these megaprobs? Bored with the same ol', same ol' "crises"? Well here's one fully developed solution, Timesizing. Its 5 phases provide a pattern for upgrades & an improving regional, national & global future of 500+ years. To save the world, you can't start with hunger - no one with money is hungry. You can't start with poverty (lack of money) - no one with a good job is poor. It all comes down to jobs, & jobs come down to time on the job. Mess up your time arrangements & you mess up your whole society, cuz time counts it all. This is the biggest website on worksharing, with 10 years of quantitative & anecdotal data. We're retro & text-heavy but we load fast. We strive for a commentary "voice" somewhere between Will Rogers & Gilbert&Sullivan. Timesizing is an economic design for sustainable, market-based jobs by making the workweek lower while making high tech higher.
    Sun-Mon, May 19-20, 2013, on Sa-Su's news, another happytalk day in the mainstream media, but to suggest that current re-covery is actually re-coverup & today's 'slow recovery' after mere 'recession' is actually another bubble in the Great Depression Revisited, we bring you today's doom du jour right after the small beginnings of real recovery -

      hope du jourtm  – TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) -
           (free consulting to writers interested in setting novels or plays with higher technology and lower workweeks, 617-620-6851 x.Phil Hyde)
      Google Search newsclips of what the world is doing right - and our latest ranking of leading countries: The core solution is so obvious, no one's noticing it. Usually it's just one item on a list with few realizing it's the ink & paper of the list itself. It's our closest candidate to the "Holy Grail" of economic design, the Single All-Sufficient Regulation, and despite *dismissal by 'experts,' it's the world's most common (but least publicized and yet-to-be fully exploited) response to downturn and it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every recession by businesses and governments. In each case, more jobs would have been lost without the hourscuts or furloughs -
    1. Letterkenny furlough reduced to 11 days, 5/19 The Herald-Mail via herald-mail.com
      CHAMBERSBURG, Pa., USA — ...down from the 14 that the Pentagon advised would be needed, and only half of the 22 days originally anticipated, according to a statement released by the Army Depot... The furlough is scheduled to begin July 8 at the rate of one furlough day per week through the end of the current fiscal year, Sept. 30... Hagel continued by saying that these steps were not enough to close the shortfall of more than $30 billion in the Operation & Maintenance accounts, which are used to pay most civilian employees, maintain military readiness and respond to global contingencies...
      [Then why is he reducing the number of furlough days? At any rate, so far he seems to be cutting the workweek, not the workforce = timesizing, not downsizing.]
      In a note to the workforce Friday, depot commander, Col. Victor S. Hagan encouraged employees to continue to review their personal finances and attend one of the sequestration personal finance and credit management lunch-n-learns conducted by Army Community Service, Carlisle Barracks and held at Letterkenny Army Depot. “I appreciate everyone’s continued support of the Warfighter during these challenging times,” Hagan said... - see whole article under today's date.
      [Omg, Hagel and now Hagan, & a depot called Letterkenny! But they aren't going to get anything close to wartime prosperity by cutting even the bit part that more military spending can play apart from a big labor-shortage-creating war like WW2.]
    2. Hospitalists Work Longer, Patients Stay Longer, 5/20 MedpageToday.com
      NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryld., USA -- Long work hours for hospitalists led to longer patient stays and unnecessary orders, researchers reported here... - see whole article under today's date.
    3. BONUS update - Sys req? World continues to stumble toward replacing downsizing with timesizing by Phil Hyde, swt.me
      • 1st-largest economy, USA, now has over 50% of the states with worksharing programs, as MI, NM, OH & WI enact programs & USA moves toward new part-time "normal" (meaning we should be lowering our legal definition of "full" time as levels of high tech & under-employment get higher - US Postal Service is currently being saved by cutting hours, not locations, & now 1000s of US companies of over 50 employees are cutting below 30-hour workweeks to duck Obamacare premiums = right deed for wrong reason
      • In 2nd-largest economy, 1st-largest population, China, the Hong Kong SAR is discussing a statutory workweek
      • 4th-largest economy, Germany, saved by cutting hours (Kurzarbeit), not jobs &wages &consumer spending &markets &investment
      • 5th-largest economy, France, saved by electing 35-Hours-friendly Hollande & dumping workaholic dinoSaurcozy
      • 9th-largest economy, California, moving to one furlough day a month to avoid layoffs
      • In 9th-largest national economy, 2d-largest population, India, large CITU union is pushing for a 35-hour workweek
      • SWT (shorter worktime per person) has three advocates with economic PhDs inside the Washington DC beltway: Dean Baker of liberal thinktank CEPR publicizes Kurzarbeit constantly; Kevin Hassett of conservative thinktank American Enterprise Institute dishes bipartisan PR with Dean; Bob LaJeunesse of the EEOC penned "Worktime Regulation as Full Employment Strategy" in 2009
      • SWT has an advocate at MIT: Engineering Prof. Nicholas Ashford presented "Crises in Employment, Consumption, Economic Growth & Environment: Can a *Shorter Workweek and Greener Economy Provide Relief?" in March 2013

      Shorter hours are happening anyway, but not the best way which maintains personal income and *vital consumer spending via emergency worksharing and sustainable timesizing. We simply can't perpetuate a pre-computer 40-hour workweek forever into the age of robotics. It may be fun to sneer at those who believe in the "fixed lump of labor fallacy" based on the obviously infinite amount of work to be done, but there ain't an infinite amount of money to pay for it, and without pay, it ain't work - it's just hobby. We need to take charge of this workweek-trimming process, systematize it and make sure it happens in a way that absorbs the surplus of jobseekers, gets employers bidding against one another for good help, thereby harnesses market forces to flexibly maintain and raise wages and spending, leeches money out of the huge black hole of income and wealth in the top 0.01%, and gets those trillions back into circulation. Shorter hours is a strategy that is reinvented hundreds of times a day across the U.S. in this recession and thousands of times a day across the world in both public & private sectors, in every industry, and in a variety of ways. Many countries and U.S. states already have worksharing programs to cushion the transition to permanently shorter workweeks that automatically adjust to our rising levels of productive technology in the Age of Robotics. These programs currently are designed to be temporary. Here's what their permanent program will look like when they finally succumb to the inevitable.
Features:  • missed a recent hope/doom du jour?   check out past hopes/dooms du jour
• design features  • bibliography  • site map  • LINKS   • time trilogy • I • II • III   • the big question  • the big goal  • blog
• makework  • the history of the American workweek  • 30-hr. bill  • business 'cycles'  • courses  • legislation  • guarantee 
• contradictions in mainstream economics  • class in America  • growing disparity  • worst case plan  • economic design 

Timesizing means full employment without makework, falling wages, or rising price levels.
 How? By adjusting the workweek down & up - instead of firing & hiring - based on a comprehensive blueprint for a green economy & a new worktime economics where, 100 years from now, people will be...
  • repeating our basic economic slogan - "No Overtime Alone!" - in other words, if a manager 'needs' overtime (OT), s/he either hires temps or makes sure the skill bottleneck behind OT gets opened up by setting up OT-targeted training
  • asking one another, "What's the workweek this month?" - in other words, work pressures are dynamically shared as incoming technology cuts their duration but boosts their stress
  • accommodating workoholics while blocking inflation, by unleashing "love to work" incentive (deflationary) while capping the money motive (inflationary), & balancing the two...
    • For over nine years (1999-2004 and 2009-), we at the Timesizing Wire have been tracking what's rancid beneath the "recovery" via the top 2 U.S. newspapers, the Wall St. Journal on the right & the New York Times on the left with occasional input from the London Economist on the right, the Boston Globe on the left, Canada's national paper, the Toronto Globe & Mail, and regional papers around Ottawa & Québec. We pick up timesizing stories mainly from Google News Search. From 2005 to 2008, we paused to establish a Canadian branch when the USA failed to dump the kamekazi Bush regime, and now that the US is back to the slower Democratic rate of self-deterioration, we've resumed our daily updates.
            Timesizing’s 3rd way is centrist and deep green, not just light or pinkish green like the Green Party's grocery list of ad hoc, unintegrated & unprioritized issues. Timesizing satisfies the right with smaller government and bigger firmer markets & the left with a simpler stronger social safety net that makes the right clean up their own recessions instead of continuously inducing them by privatizing and concentrating profits & nationalizing and centrifuging losses. Our Timesizing solution is based on working models, American history (especially 1933), on economic design, on ecology, and on worktime economics, linguistics, Limits to Growth, and Buckminster Fuller.  The deep green center is the future, and we strategize for the next 100-500 years, not just the next quarterly report or four-year presidential term. Our site is always under construction. *Asterisked links take you *outside our site.

    the problem, vs.
    the timesizing solution
             (in deteriorating stages)                               (in stepped enhancements)                    
  • long workweek; short vacation
    		•
    clue 1
  • electronic democracy vs PACs & lobbyists
  • downsizing; makework
  • market reinvestment vs corporate welfare
  • takeovers;  bankruptcy;  prison
    • clue 2
  • job&wage insurance vs gov't jobs programs
  • unemployment;  homelessness
  • geared to problem vs emotional guesswork
  • vanishing retirement;  disability
    • clue 3
  • plugging leaks vs Stinnes and Malthus
  • suicides;  headlines from hell
    		•
  • transitions vs abrupt cures worse than disease

    • Pie in the sky?  Click on Design Solutions for rebuttals of Impractical!  Unconstitutional!  Socialist!  Uncompetitive!  Inflationary!  Anti-small business!  Lump of Labor Fallacy!...
    And did we mention the Working Models?

    For details, see our social-software manual, in simple language -


    This numbered, first edition is available from *Amazon.com.


    More angles on Timesizing
    (Join the SWT=shorter worktime E-LIST by clicking where indicated on the *SWT Action Page - see *samples)
    Bibliography | Audiences | Research Priorities | Phil's Bio
    Politics |The Forgotten Republican Key to Small Government | Sayings
    Investment Advice | Why should I be forced to stop work at a certain #hrs/wk?!
    World's 1st dot-com political party | America's Massive Pervasive Makework | Letting off steam
    Timesizing Courses | Opus Errata | Website History | Website Reactions

    Flag Counter
    Flagcount & pageviews since 25Nov/12 - website founded May/98; daily updates Jan/99-Nov/04 (42,340 'hits' by 7/7/02) & Jan/09-present
    This website, best viewed with *Mozilla Firefox, *Netscape or *Explorer, is dedicated to the memory of *John Kowal of Buffalo NY & Brookline MA, our feistiest friend.  The website is under constant micro-enhancement & experimentation.
    • free consulting for any novelists/scifiers/playwrights interested in setting a story in a world of timesizing or its successor-programs
    • basic setup & scanning by *John MacMillan of Billerica MA, USAF Ret. & former MA GOP webmaster, & edit software by *Hot Dog Pro
    • logo scanning by *Rob Firmin of Berkeley CA and *Kate Jurow of Somerville MA and *Paula Archer of Belmont MA
    • website tips from Denise Traver, NPS Ret. & webmaster of *HitTheTrail.com & Kim Buchheit of *Buchheit Creative Services
    • tactics by *Lao Tzu and *'Obvious Adams' (Robert Updegraf)
    If we have more text & less graphics than you'd like, here's some background.
    News tips, commentary requests, questions, comments?  Email us at ecdesignR@yahoo.ca, or Return to Top
    * An asterisk (*) before a hotlink means *hotlink will take you outside our website.