Timesizing®
© 1998-2010 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire™, PO Box 622, Cambridge (Boston) MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080  –  France's experience  –  Homepage
Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt of the University of Iowa, with his masterful Work Without End, 1988, is our major history source for this page. Check out the mind-boggling variety of early designs.

Less work and more pay - what a crazy idea!  It'll NEVER happen!
- except for all those pesky working models...

Well, overlooking for a moment the fact we halved the workweek and (because of that reduction of labor surplus) doubled and tripled wages across the first three-quarters of American history (1776-1940 from 84 to 40 hrs/wk), there are a number of tough, competitive corporations that have been timesizing (cutting workweek instead of workforce) for decades with tremendous success and without downsizing.  The tremendous flexibility lent these firms by even their primitive forms of timesizing eliminates their compulsive dependence on growth.  Thus, literally thousands of them independently re-invent timesizing, not downsizing in every American, Japanese and European recession.  In the early Depression, the Industrial Conference Board, on the basis of a survey of 1,718 business executives in late 1931, estimated that fully half of American industry had shortened hours to save jobs - including Kellogg's, GM/Tarrytown, Sears Roebuck, Standard Oil/NJ, Ford, Hudson Motors, the American Cotton Manufacturers, the American Legion....  And this has quietly happened in every downturn since.  The reason is that many employers want to retain their corporate skill set, morale, employee innovation rate and their own best markets and customers' customers (= their own employees), and many employees don't want to see their colleagues and friends lose their jobs. 
Timesizing can be applied at any level, and here are some working models, at the macro (economies), micro (corporations) and nano (individuals) levels, current and historical -

Economywide (macroeconomic level) -

Corporations (micro-economic level) -

Individual persons ('nano-economic' level) -

Hundreds of thousands, probably millions of individuals, have cut their workweek for various reasons. Here are two examples -
  • 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). Friend Phil Hyde can testify that Paul has gone from a chilled-out exterior (only) to both a chilled-out exterior and interior. Paul retained full benefits, and raises since 2000 have since brought his salary back nearly to its Y2000 100% level.

  • Colleague *Kate Jurow (actually Phil's constant friend and occasional wife) has been cut, for budgetary reasons, from 'full' time (40 hrs/wk) to ¾ time (30 hrs/wk) by her client, HP-Compaq-DEC. Although she is frequently asked to take on more projects, she must in each case remind her 'suitors' that they have cut her, indefinitely, to ¾ time. Like Paul, she generally takes Fridays off.

  • 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.

For more details, see our laypersons' guide Timesizing, Not Downsizing, which is available online from *Amazon.com and at the Harvard Square Harvard Coop, 3rd floor, Mgmt and Economics sections, Cambridge, Mass.

Questions, comments, feedback? Phone 617-623-8080 (Boston) or email us.

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