Economywide (macroeconomic level) -

• USA today
  Twenty states have worksharing programs, to quit straining for bogus makework to forever fill an arbitrary 1940 workweek of 40 hours and just share the diminishing unrobotized human employment.
  USA, 1938-40
  The early Depression saw Republicans using voluntary worktime reduction.  On 3/15/1932, the President's Organization on Unemployment Relief published findings to the effect that, of 6,551 respondents among 25,000 companies surveyed, 59% used workweek reduction for work spreading.  Republican Pres. Herbert Hoover made shorter hours part of his "nine point economic program" later that year.  Sen. Hugo Black (D-Ala. and a conservative Democrat at the time - he started in the Ku Klux Klan and finished as a liberal justice on the U.S. Supreme Court) pushed a 30-hour workweek bill through the Senate on April 6, 1933.  FDR, deluged with protests from near-sighted businessmen and jealous of his own elected role as savior of the nation, blocked it in the House - until he changed his mind two years later and brought it out five years later as a 44-hour workweek in 1938, with a two-hour-per-year reduction thenceforth - too little too late but still effective in cutting unemployment one percent for every hour's workweek cut (1938-41: 19,17,15,13% with an extra 3% from makework & war prep in '39-40 to 10% in '41, see exact figures).  But then World War II started for the US in 1941 - Lend Lease (Mar.11) was even before Pearl Harbor (Dec.10), so merchants’ preferred 'cure' for labor surplus, namely wartime production (plus killing and maiming workers), took over and obscured the freezing of the workweek at the 1940 level in 1941 - and...ever...since.

• Germany today
  Germany surfed the last dip in the global downward spiral with its federal worksharing program, called "short time" or *Kurz-arbeit. Its unemployment is already back down to its 1992 level.
  This against a background where the west-German unionized sector has a 35-hour workweek while the east-German unionized sector still works a 38-hour week for the same pay. Overall, German employees are averaging 37½ hours a week. However, Germany, France, and the rest of Europe (including Britain) still have high unemployment because (A) they include more dependency in their unemployment rates and (B) they have not yet focused on timesizing and let unemployment automatically control how much shorter the workweek should adjust. They have also failed to implement automatic overtime- and overwork-to-training&hiring conversion. Like the rest of the world, they're still kicking and scratching to avoid the obvious and inevitable solution - sharing and spreading the vanishing work - and spending power, and consumer confidence, and marketable productivity, and sustainable investment....

• France, 1982-2001
  Driven by high unemployment, the French Left planned a one-hour-per-year reduction between 1982 and 1987 from the 40- to the 35-hour workweek level, but got indefinitely stymied at the 39-hour level in 1983 by political turmoil. However, double-digit unemployment forced the French Right (the center-right UDF party = Union pour la Démocratie Française), to introduce a voluntary work-spreading program in 1996. This 'Robien Law' offered stepped 7-year taxcuts to companies who would voluntarily hire, or not lay off, 10 or 15% (more) employees and cut their workweeks 10 or 15% to make or save the jobs for them. Pay arrangements were left to individual companies and in the event, they went equally three ways - about a third kept pay the same, a third cut pay the corresponding 10 or 15%, and a third came out somewhere in the middle. Only one hundred and five firms took advantage of the offer between its start in August and the following January, so unemployment kept rising to a high of 12.6% in 1997.
  So the Right was thrown out of office and the French Left, between spring 1997 and spring 2001, designed and implemented the originally planned additional four-hour cut off the still-prevailing 39-hour workweek as it prepared for, and implemented, the whole four-hour cut at once but stepped it in by sector and company size, to achieve the world's first nationwide 35-hour week. Similar to the American experience 60 years earlier despite primitive design and implementation, France still succeeded in cutting one percent off its unemployment rate for every hour's cut in its workweek, going from 12.6% unemployment in 1997 to 8.7% in the spring of 2001, before the weight of the US-led recession began to drag it, among the last in Europe to succumb, back up to 10% unemployment. And despite their failure to standardize the link between threatened layoffs and worksharing via workweek adjustment, France's business climate improved (see 4/07/2001 #1).
  Then the unstrategically perfectionistic French left fractionated their vote for President and got "Gangsta" Chirac and "Attila" LePen in the final heat instead of Chirac and timesizing Jospin. Ergo Chirac again, who eventually morphed into "Sarcophagal" Sarcozy, one of these suicidal dummies who wanted to copy the USA in its "Lost Decade" - like UK's Blair and Oz's Howard and now, still racing to the bottom behind the 300-ton gorilla, Canada's Harper. But in late 2011, French unemployment went up and Sarcozy started looking to copy the high-employment worksharing of Germany (see 1/03/2012 #4).

• Japan cut to a nationwide 40-hour workweek in the late 1980s and is now exploring worksharing systems at the company, city and prefecture (compare Swiss canton) levels.

• South Korean trade unions were demanding timesizing (work-sharing via cuts in working hours) instead of more downsizing as early as 1999 (The Economist, 2/20/99, p. 38-39) and the nation is now ending a seven-year process of cutting its workweek from 44 hours to 40, staged by size, large companies first. See articles on 11/10/2011 #3 and 6/30/2011 #1.

Corporations (micro-economic level) -

• Larger Corporations - Nucor, Lincoln Electric... - pls. patronize our timesizers; they are our future if we have one -

  • *Nucor Corp. {NUE.N} of Charlotte, N.C. (a rustbelt company) is the nation's No. 3 but most profitable steel producer - "Nucor remains strongly committed to not laying off or furloughing employees in periods when business is down.  During the past 20 years, Nucor has not laid off a single worker due to lack of work.  The result is a committed team of Nucor employees that looks ahead to a bright future."  From The Nucor Story (Nucor Cp.), p. 16.  Nucor's secret?  Tremendous worktime and wage flexibility.  Nucor coasts on a 3-day workweek and an $8/hour wage.  When contracts come in, it expands to as much as a 7-day workweek and a $22/hour wage.  It is arguably the most flexible and survivable corporation in the world. It has very few layoffs.

  • *Lincoln Electric of Cleveland, Ohio (a rustbelt company with 3200 U.S. employees) manufactures welding equipment - To glean more innovative suggestions from employees, Lincoln instituted a lifetime guarantee of employment in 1959 - so employees would not fear innovating themselves out of a job. Lincoln has not had a layoff since, though their workweek ranged from 55 hours a week to 32 over a two-year period in the early 1980s and has made several shorter trips below 40 since then. Lincoln has a 3-year mutual approval period before they give a new employee their lifetime employment guarantee, in return for which they ask three things -
    1. acceptance of the principle that everyone sacrifices together, starting at the top
    2. willingness to accept job reassignment
    3. complete cooperation (no unions)
    Lincoln Electric reinvests massively in its products and its employees. It distributes to employees a substantial merit bonus annually. Lincoln employees have high levels of productivity and morale and the highest pay of any rust-belt employees in the world. Lincoln has not had a layoff since 1959 when the lifetime employment guarantee was extended to the entire company after 8 years of testing. (The company does not extend the guarantee to subsidiaries.)
    See update in article on 5/12/2009 #1 and Frank Koller's 2010 book on Lincoln Electric, *Spark: How Old-Fashioned Values Drive a 21st Century Corporation: Lessons from Lincoln Electric's Unique Guaranteed Employment Program.

  • *Marvin Windows and Doors of Warroad, Mich. (4,000 employees at 10 sites nationwide as of Dec/2011)
    Adopted a 32-hour workweek to save jobs. See stories on 12/08/2011 #2 and 9/25-26/2011 #1 and 9/20-21/2009 #2.

  • *SAS Institute of Cary, N.C., has a 35-hour workweek - see NYT article on 11/21/2009 #2. Author Carl Honoré ("In Praise of Slow") notes employees of software giant SAS maintain a 35-hour work week instead of the standard 40. "The rest of the time, the staff are encouraged to go home," Honore says. "Their CEO is a crusader of the idea that working less makes you more productive." See 1/27/2004 #3 re SAS (and 10/02-04/2004 #4 re Carl). Coincidentally, an unrelated firm (we believe) in Pittsfield ME named SAS Shoemakers appears on our 'miracle CEOs' webpage - see 12/18/2003 (and distinguish SAS Institute also from unrelated SAS Airlines of Sweden).

  • *BMW (Bavarishe Motor Werke) in Bavaria, Germany, has no overtime [premium?] pay and working hours fluctuate with demand, but job security is guaranteed (see "BMW shows the way," 9/03/2004 Straits Times, Singapore).

  • *Volkswagen (VW), automobiles -
    • Wolfsburg, Germany - Early in 1994, to avoid 30,000 layoffs in their headquarters town here, VW reduced the company workweek from the 35 (five 7-hr days) to the 28.8-hour level (four 7.2-hr days) and pay to the 32.5-hour level.
    • Sao Paulo, Brazil - In Dec/98, Volkswagen's 20,000-worker Ancieta factory here saved jobs despite the 25% collapse of Brazil's car market by cutting hours and pay to the level of a four-day week. Along with attrition, this was hoped to cut the firm's wage bill by roughly 15%, in return for which the firm would invest $600m to build the successor to its Polo small car. (Economist, 1/09/99, p.59).

    
    

• Smaller firms and organizations - a few examples only of the hundreds from our worksharing and primitive timesizing collection of articles (scan to bottom for multi-year archives) - pls. patronize our timesizers; they are our future if we have one -

  • *American Community Insurance Co. (AC) of Livonia, Mich.   Writes AC account executive Victoria McGonigle in a 7/18/2003 email, "AC has a 36 hour work week and allows flex time for all employees.... [In] visiting the home office...I saw a company with little turnover, many employees with over 10 years employment, and HAPPY workers. They bend over backwards to do a good job..\.. I count my blessings each and every day."

  • *American Optical, St. Louis branch, Missouri, 1975, was faced with a drop in sales and the need to cut costs and was looking into laying off four of its tightly knit workforce of 40 people. When they heard this, the employees banded together and went to plant management and said, "Don't do it, we'll all take a paycut so nobody has to lose their job." The plant manager could hardly believe it but he agreed, adding that he would cut hours proportionately because he didn't need the productivity anyway. The result was a 10% workweek cut instead of a 10% workforce cut. Everybody took a small hit but everybody kept their jobs. And we suspect that some if not all appreciated the new 36-hour workweek anyway. But isn't this kind of employee fellow-feeling uncommon? More common than you'd think. A well-known example is the network of "digits" aka former Digital Equipment Corp. employees celebrated in "Employee network outlives firm - Digital alumni serve as resources for one another," by Martha Mangelsdorf, 6/29/2003 Boston Globe, p.G1.

  • Local companies honored: *Basic Energy Services Inc. of Midland TX, 12/03/2010 Odessa American via oaoa.com MIDLAND, Tex. - ..Basic joined forces with Workforce Solutions Permian Basin to implement a shared work plan to supplement employee income and reduce the impact of company downsizings... - For more details, see 12/3-4/2010 #1.

  • At *Brockton Hospital, Brockton, Mass., nurses approved an hours cut to save jobs. Rather than the layoff of 86 nurses, the staff agreed to reduced hours and pay cuts. The agreement between the Massachusetts Nurses Association and the hospital not only saved jobs but also gave supervisors the ability to adjust staffing levels to meet daily patient volume. For more details, see 2/29/96.

  • *Flexsteel Industries, Inc. announces revised expectations for third quarter operating results, Business Wire BW2567 MAR 15,2001 21:00 EASTERN via AOLNews.
    DUBUQUE, Iowa...- Flexsteel Industries, Inc. (Nasdaq:FLXS) announced today that it...anticipates revenue to be approximately 10% less than [its] record March 2000 quarter of $75m..\.."due to the continuing lower sales in our vehicle seating business, and during the last 45 days there has been a slow down in both our residential and commercial incoming orders," said Flexsteel President and Chief Executive Officer, K. Bruce Lauritsen.... In addition to identifying additional sales growth areas, the Company is focusing on inventory management, minimizing capital expenditures, reviewing credit exposure and has implemented reduced work hours in an effort to retain the team that performed well to produce the record sales and profits of the prior year....
    CONTACT: Flexsteel Industries, Inc., Dubuque; Timothy E. Hall, 319/556-7730 x392; KEYWORD: IOWA.

  • *Hooker Furniture of Martinsville, Va., routinely steps its workweek down to 35 hours and draws on a whole palette of primitive but effective timesizing techniques when business slows, thereby avoiding layoffs and the whole traumatic and output-cramping cycle of firing&hiring and the costly training that goes with it. We featured recent Hooker stories on 6/21-23/2003 #1 and 5/29/2003 #1 and 4/02/2003 (from 3/29).

  • *NES Enterprises (Novelty Excellence Service), Carlstadt, NJ - manufacturer of hat linings; Sheldon Salkovitch, president - trimmed workweek to 4 days and then to 3 days in late 2008, early 2009 to minimize layoffs

  • *Swann-Morton Ltd. surgical blades in Sheffield, England, is a small company similar to Lincoln Electric in terms of reinvestment, employee involvement and annual bonus. Its 280 employees have a 35-hour workweek, 10-week vacation, private health care, 28% annual distributed profits and 50% ownership of the firm. Its current managing director is Mick McGinley and its sales director is Mike Johnson. Like Lincoln Electric, Swann-Morton reinvests massively its products and processes, and has a track record of multiple "firsts." It supplies 95% of the National Health's scalpels in the UK and has 75-80% of the EU and Australia-New Zealand markets. It snubs management fads like out-sourcing and JIT manufacturing. It promotes from within. Its management style is focused on keeping enough work for people to do. It makes as many as possible of its own machines and maintains a large company orchard in Cambridgeshire to supply employees with their own fruit. It has kept growing while most of Sheffield's industry collapsed. (There are thousands of smaller firms like this in the U.S. too but they never get any media. It's all chance mentions and word-of-mouth. The big profit-funneling firms parasitize the stable markets that these small profit-recycling firms provide via massive reinvestment in their employees.) The Economist tries to deflect interest in its article on the firm by misleading leftist labeling (4/14/2001, p.54: "Trotsky and the Third Way - Socialism and profit tend not to mix. But every rule has exceptions"). However, it ruefully concludes that founder Walter Swann "'could be a socialist one day and a capitalist the next.' He evidently discovered the Third Way before Tony Blair was born." Swann-Morton's last layoffs were in the 1940s "but most eventually got their jobs back."

  • *Technitrol Inc. warns of lower Q1 earnings on sector downturn, Reuters 17:05 03-15-01 via AOLNews.
    PHILADELPHIA, Pa...- [The] electronics parts maker...expects to see first quarter earnings of 54-56 cents per diluted share, falling short of analysts' estimates, becaues of a downturn in the electronics sector.... Chief executive James Papada said the company has terminated all temporary employees, instituted a hiring freeze, shorter workweeks and rolling plant shutdowns [probably rotating weeklong plant idlings], as well as cut back on travel and outside consulting.
    [No permanent employees were laid off.]

  • Bonus - The 30/40 Plan® - Ron Healey, a management consultant in Indiana, has registered 30/40 (30 hrs work for 40 hrs pay) as his trademark. Ron has a number of plastics companies actually doing the 30/40 Plan®, not to relieve labor surplus but to draw upon an untapped reservoir of quality employees, mainly persons with families who can handle a reduced workweek but not a 40-hour one, and who appreciate the full-time pay and benefits.

  • Note also the hundreds of working models, mostly of worksharing, on our Timesizing news page and its archive (accessed by links at bottom of that page). Note that we define worksharing as temporary adjustment of the workweek, usually funded from an unemployment insurance fund. We define timesizing as permanent adjustment of the workweek funded from a sustainable source such as a tax on overtime (preferably with an exemption for reinvestment of overtime profits in OT-targeted training and hiring).
    (Everyone in New England/USA always asks about *Malden Mills in Lawrence, Mass., and Aaron Feuerstein (pronounced "fewer steen"), its celebrated owner. The answer is that, although Mr. Feuerstein did the right thing and carried his employees through the crisis when his PolarTec® plant burned down, he did not connect any elements in the rescue to a worktime-adjustment scheme. It was a one-time discretionary chunk of charity, and as such, praiseworthy. We do list a few examples of great tho' non-timesizing CEOs, and Mr. Feuerstein is our first example.)

Individual persons ('nano-economic' level) -

• In Y2000, Paul Simmons of Somerville, Mass., negotiated with his employer, Financial Times - InterActive Data (FT-IDC) of Bedford, Mass., for a four-day, 80%-salary, workweek so he could pursue his many hobbies (such as gardening) and interests (such as the Somerville Conservation Commission). Paul retained full benefits, and raises since 2000 have since brought his salary back nearly to its Y2000 100% level.

• Phil Hyde, though blessed with numerous temporary and/or part-time gigs since being laid off from his last permanent, (much-more-than) full-time job in 1993, has been living on savings and IRAs and working on this website and his 3-4 books since then.

Historical View

• *Kellogg's of Battle Creek, Mich., breakfast cereals, for over 50 years offered a 30-hour workweek option. When they started it in 1930, it was 30 hours work for 35 hours pay, to provide jobs for the heads of 300 more families in their headquarters town, but within 5 years, pay was back up to the 40 hour level, a true 30/40 plan. (Far-sighted W. K. Kellogg himself retired in the late 1930s and the company gradually slid back to a 40-hour week, completing the process in 1986. Full story in *Ben Hunnicutt's Kellogg's Six-Hour Day (Temple Univ. Press: Philadelphia, 1996).

• *Ford Motor Co. - "Of the Ford employees 32% now are on the full 5-day week; 18% are working four days; and 50% are still on the 3-day week." Wall Street Journal, Apr. 28, 1931. All the Detroit car companies have used timesizing instead of downsizing in every recession since cars were invented, to retain their skill set. Timesizing is independently invented in every recession for this purpose - see American Optical (recession of mid-1970s) above under Smaller firms.

• "WASHINGTON - Operating schedules in many manufacturing establishments were cut still further and the number of part time workers increased in July, the monthly employment bulletin of the Federal Employment Service reported today." New York Times, Aug. 2, 1931. Quoted in "Oh Yeah?" (Viking: New York, 1932) p.26.

“But the unions will never go for it!”  Oh yeah?

• Local 76 - *Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, Powell River, B.C., Canada - Julie White, chap. "Reduced overtime and 40 hours" in Working Less for More Jobs (CEP: 1999) -
  "Your neighbour's laid off. How do you feel coming home at night knowing that the double shift you just worked was his job?" - worker....
  Local 76 saved jobs by reducing overtime and by moving from 42 to 40 hours for shift workers. As a result, all of the [89] workers who were laid off returned to work. As well, other announced lay-offs were cancelled and further cut backs at the [Pacifica Papers pulp and paper] mill have been absorbed without further lay-offs....
  In April 1997, overtime dropped from 7% to 1% and stayed there. Over two years the overtime rate has remained below 2%. This is the lowest rate of overtime at any mill in B.C. [province] and probably in the whole [of Canada].... "At first your pay checks are a little smaller and you miss the money. But let's face it - overtime is just that: it's not necessary work, it's above and beyond your regular pay check. If you're relying on it to make ends meet, there's something wrong." "You become accustomed to working 16 to 20 hours (overtime) every two weeks - that's just part of your lifestyle. You take that away and you'll find something else to fill your time, which is what a lot of guys have done. They're not really interested in staying down there. Most of the guys have families at home and that's more important." "I could never see myself going back to working some of the hours that I used to work. You get a bit caught up in it. If you sit back and look at it, you shake your head."
  In December 1998, shift workers moved from 42 to 40 hours a week. This is the only CEP local in B.C. where all the shift workers are on 40 hours. As a result, 22 new positions were created at the mill.

• *Disneyland Paris, (entertainment) theme park - "...Four of the seven unions representing workers at the Disneyland Paris theme park west of the capital agreed Thursday [4/15/99] to reduce their hours from 39 to 35, part of a government plan to cut the nation's high jobless rate. Salaries will remain the same.... The agreement, which concerns some 10,000 park employees, is scheduled to take effect on June 6. Under the new agreement, some part-time workers will be offered full-time positions. Park management said the shorter workweek will create 600 new jobs by May 2000. The law, passed last May by the Socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, calls for businesses with more than 20 employees to institute the 35-hour workweek by Feb. 1, 2000. Smaller companies have two more years to comply. Disneyland will benefit from tax cuts and other incentives offered to businesses that act before the deadline." AP via AOL News, 4/16/99, 10:59 EDT.

• In the 1970s, there was an *All Unions Committee to Shorten the Workweek, headquartered in Chicago.

• In 1964, labor leader *Walter Reuther advocated "fluctuating adjustment of the workweek" at the United Auto Workers convention in Atlantic City. He envisioned the workweek varying inversely with unemployment, which is one of the anchor design concepts in the Timesizing program (see Phase 4) - the other is automatic overtime-to-training&hiring conversion (see Phase 2 for overtime per job, Phase 3 for overwork per person). Note that there are "fluctuating work week" provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act ("FLSA" or the "Act"), 29 U.S.C. § 201 et seq. (1994) in relation to employees such as sheriff's deputies and jailers who are paid as "salaried employees" under these provisions - we have not checked this reference to fluctuating workweek but insofar as the salary concept has been used as a blank check on employees' lives, this reference is not necessarily futuristic or sustainable. Ditto the concept of *fluctuating-workweek overtime.

• In 1933, a 30-hour workweek bill passed the U.S. Senate thanks to support from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) headed by *William Green. The AFL fought the next 5 years to get the bill passed the House and enacted into law but against the insidious propaganda campaign of the New Deal that portrayed the shorter-hours forces as "defeatist" and "sharers of unemployment," they succeeded only in getting a 44-hour workweek in 1938, 42 hours in 1939, and 40 hours in 1940, which along with the 40¢/hr minimum wage constituted the 40/40/40 plan.