Timesizing, Not Downsizing

Timesizing_® not downsizing
We offer world's 1st 500-year view, dot-com political party, design, consulting, & URLs to suit your mood: ShorterWorkTIme.com, SWT.me, HopeDuJour.net, DoomDuJour.com, worksharing.biz ...

TIMESIZING is the missing plan of the Occupy movement (video). It means cutting the workweek to spread employment (& markets), instead of cutting jobs (& markets!). Its emergency form WORKSHARING is already saving jobs. Timesizing means more jobs, shorter hours and higher pay cuz you cut labor surplus. See our time trilogy & blog.

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, the Timesizing Program. Its 5 phases provide a pattern for upgrades and 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 in English, with over 8 years of quantitative and anecdotal data. We're retro & text-heavy but we load fast. We strive for a commentary "voice" somewhere between Dave Barry and Gilbert&Sullivan. Timesizing is an economic design for sustainable, market-based jobs by making the workweek lower while making high tech higher. Don't miss ironfoot444's *video.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

, while the realization dawns that the Great Depression Revisited today is being spun as an endless 'stumbling recovery' after a mere 'recession,' we reverse the poles and first bring you small beginnings of a real solution (but see doom du jour below in case you still think this recoverup is a real recovery) -

hope du jourtm

– TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) -

(free consulting to writers interested in setting a scifi novel or play in a shorter-hours scenario, 617-620-6851 x.Phil Hyde)

Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - here's our latest ranking of leading countries - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it is the world's most common (but least publicized and never fully exploited) response to downturn, that's reinvented thousands of times a day in every recession by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Wash. State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' - in each case, more jobs would have been lost without the hours-cuts or furloughs -

Work-sharing bill has supporters on both sides [of the political aisle]: Business Comment of the Day, Cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio, USA - ..."This program will let business keep quality employees thru down periods. Whenever you lay an employee off, you risk the chance that they will find a new job. Hiring and training new people is costly. If a company has employees they want to lay off, they are free not to participate in the program." - see whole article under today's date.
[Heaven forfend!]

In our view: Cheers & Jeers - Shared-work programs benefit all; gambling fails to cure fiscal woes, The Columbian via columbian.com
VANCOUVER, Ore., USA - Cheers: To Washington's shared-work program, which benefits employees, employers and the state government during an economic downturn. The program run by the state Employment Security Department lets employers reduce the hours of their full-time employees while those workers collect partial unemployment benefits. Currently, 77 companies and 673 employees in Clark County are participating... - see whole article under today's date.

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.

doom du jourtm = today's headlines from helltm (archives)
- face the bad news here in the context of a sustainable solution (see hope du jour above) -
- editor's comments in [square brackets] – editor: Phil Hyde ecdesignr@yahoo.ca -
- today's headlines from *Porter Sq. Books in Cambridge MA & updating from that cluttered kitchen in Somerville MA -

vanishing RETIREMENT in the news (archives) - no problem with short-time full employment via timesizing -

As costs soar, taxpayers target pensions of cops and firefighters, Wall Street Journal, A1.
[Taxpayers in general, or Onepercenters, who want to break contract with everyone but themselves? - nevermind the damage to the consumer base that ever weaklier supports them. And nevermind the insult to the police, firefighters and soldiers who protect them. They are resolutely suicidal - everyone else first.]

GM plans big buyouts for retirees in pension, New York Times, B1.
GM proposed unloading U.S. white-collar retiree pension assets and obligations using an annuity contract that would reduce future pension risks [LOL] and "save" $26 billion, WSJ, A1 pointer to B3.
[When downsizing capitalism starts breaking contracts right and left, it's finished. Unload your contracts and you unload a big chunk of your consumer markets - and then wonder where they went. As the Good Book says: "Swear to thine own hurt AND CHANGE NOT." Ps.15:4.]

MAKEWORK: too little, too late, too wasteful, too artificial, too military, too eco-stressful, in the news (archives) - all unnecessary with full employment via emergency worksharing & permanent timesizing -

Pentagon will shift 60% oif its naval assets to Asia within the next decade, up from 50%, Wall Street Journal, A1 pointer to B1.
[Oh. Pentagon. Sooo Eempohrtaaant! Nevermind Lao Tzu, Old Boy of Chinese philosophy. Who say: Wisest commander never enter a battle. No need.]

spiraling ECONOMIC DECLINE via $$$ funnel-up (archives) - solved by war, or smarter, timesizing -

Wall Street tumbles 2% on jobs data, NYT, B1.
Grim jobs report sinks markets - Global turmoil... - Sobering data in Europe; bailout for Cyprus - Dow is down for the year after 2714.88-point rout, WSJ, A1.
U.S. blue-chip stocks fall into the red for the year, as the unemployment rate rose to 8.2% after the economy added a less-than-[forecast] 69,000 jobs in May, WSJ, A1:1 pointer to A1:2, B1, B5.
[Just noticed this bit of B.S. = beforehand mainstream economists always pontificate about their sacred Forecasts. When they turn out again to have been desperately optimistic, it's only about "expectations," nothing everso formal as Forecasts, Over-rosy Again.]
The Dow fell 274.88 points or 2.2% to 12118.57, and the S&P ended just above "correction" territory [euphemism alert!]. Gold rose 3.7% to above the $1,600 level, and 10-year Treasury yields fell below 1.5% for the first time amid a flight to safety.

The Fed's job gets tougher as employment stalls, WSJ, B16.
[No, it just gets confronted with its failure to be focused on what it should have been focused on all along: both inflation AND UNEMPLOYMENT, and if it was going to drop just one of the two, it should have been inflation instead of the one it did drop = unemployment. Getting obsessive about inflation and using high unemployment to control inflation is just crazy = it clobbers growth to zero inflation and give Onepercenters the purely symbolic comfort that they still have the same buying power, when they have way WAAAY more dough than they can spend anyway. Meanwhile they're clobbering their consumer base via their employment basement and clobbering Growth despite their worshipful lip service unto It. Another fundamental contradiction in currently still mainstream economics in addition to trying to get Growth alias UPsizing, by DOWNsizing! What complete and total lunacy! "Creative destruction"? Oh please, Saint Schumpeter would be mindboggled at the way self-justifying CEOs have run away with that one, just as Adam Smith would be agape at the way they've magnidistorted his only two, peripheral references to "invisible hand" - to justify their own shortsighted system corrosion.]

Manufacturing declined across Europe and Asia, as the number of jobless in the euro zone climbed to a record 17.4 million...
[So just cut the workweek further, you Dumkopfs! Gawd Almäghty, the Europeans don't even know what they're already doing right!]

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
• makework • the history of the American workweek • 30-hr. bill • business 'cycles' • courses • legislation
• 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 the 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... - meanwhile, if you're a night person preferring work after normal business hours (and you're in the UK), *evening jobs that suit your lifestyle still exist and may exist in your area

For over eight 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
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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?!
America's Massive Pervasive Makework | Letting off steam | Opus Errata
Timesizing Courses | Website History | Website Reactions
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