Timesizing® Associates
[Commentary] © 2004-11  Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 117 Cambridge MA 02238 USA (617) 623-8080 - *Asterisk means "outside this website" -  HOMEPAGE

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Downsizings - the beat(ing) goes on...
(and we don't mean case-by-case firings for just cause based on individual performance reviews)
Wake up, America!  While you passively accept them or reward them with stock purchases,
mass jobcuts flatten wages, funnel income ever more tightly and strangle consumer spending. 
Below are instances that made the New York Times (NYT), the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), or historical notice.  
Already hip to the dumbness of downsizing?  Savor the simplest, most human, sustainable and market-oriented alternative, timesizing.  

7/23/2011  statewide downsizing of government employees -

• Drown ideology in beer, editorial, Boston Globe, A10.
  ST. PAUL, Minn. - It wasn't the shuttered state parks that prompted Minnesota’s governor and legislature to resolve a budget impasse.
  Nor was it the 22,000 furloughed state employees or the disruptions in services for the needy and the disabled. In the end, it was all about the beer.
  [Nope, there was no end in sight at the time, so this was layoffs, not furloughs; downsizing, not timesizing -
  (and it only ended thanks to alcohol? - America is done for!) ]
  The Minnesota state government shut down July 1, after Democratic Governor Mark Dayton and Republican legislative leaders failed to reach a budget deal. And for days, there was no end in sight. But on July 12, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that hundreds of bars would no longer be able to serve alcohol because state permits were set to expire. With no one on hand to issue new permits, there’d be no beer. The 10,000 places that sell liquor in the state were starting to see a depletion in stock, as inventories cannot be resupplied without a distributor tax stamp. The state had stopped issuing those.
  And then, the unthinkable: Brewing giant MillerCoors was told to pull 39 of its brand labels from all shops, bars, and restaurants because it did not process its registration paperwork in time. The registration was set to expire on July 13.
  Suddenly, Dayton and GOP lawmakers were willing to make compromises. The final budget deal, not much different from where the parties were before the shutdown, was negotiated less than 36 hours later, on July 15.
  Coincidence? Maybe members of Congress, facing a much larger budget problem, should take a breath and have a beer. And thank their lucky stars that they can still have one.

  
  

7/28/2009  economywide downsizing -

• Joblessness: Friend or foe to markets?
  WSJ, C1 pointer to C12.
  Help wanted for market recovery - Are markets taking too rosy a view of unemployment?, by Richard Barley, WSJ, target article C12.
  Joblessness is usually seen as a lagging rather than a leading economic indicator.
  [Well yeah if you've ignored the previous 30 years of downsizing. How in the world did this fallacy arise and take root in mainstream economics? It can only have come from the same kind of disconnected thinking that gave us the title and pre-title to this article. Unemployment GOOD for markets?? Well, I guess if you can imagine "jobless recoveries" you can imagine buyerless markets. These are the same people who hold up overpopulated and ecodisastrous China as The Future, cuz they believe big population means big markets, never mind lack of spending power. It all stems from money-insulated and -insolated investors who believe that any amount of investing power is good for an economy, no matter what percentage of total money supply it reaches. 100%? Nothing circulating? No consumer base? GREAT! So these are the bozos that have been rewarding downsizing companies for decades by driving up their stock prices. They have bought all the bull about lean and mean and rightsizing and unlimited CEO 'compensation.' Because, they, the investors, are the base and foundation of the economy, so give them the whole thing if you can, as quickly as you can. Result? depression. But they own the media and live in gated communities so they can spin it as 'recovery just around the corner' till the cows come home.]
  In the last two U.S. downturns, firms continued shedding jobs for months after the recession was officially over.
  [Does Richard Barley think of maybe questioning the "officially" part? No-o-o.]
  Typically, companies only start hiring in earnest once a recovery is clearly under way.
  [ie: when investors are launched on their next New Economy bubble where they stop thinking of returns for awhile?]
  But this time, unemployment may play a bigger role in determining the timing and shape of recovery. [Because investors have put off reality for so long, there's just a buildup of an unprecedented number of crises.]
  Markets are betting the old orthodoxy still holds sway.
  [But then they've got such an elephantiasis of the money supply, they literally have NO ALTERNATIVE if they want to put it somewhere other than the mattress.]
  Unemployment has climbed quickly. The U.S. rate hit 9.5% in June. That is higher than at any point since 1983 and, up from 5.6% a year earlier, represents one of the steepest annual increases on record. In the euro zone, May's 9.5% rate was the highest in 10 years. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forecasts rates of 10% in the U.S. and more than 12% in the euro zone in 2010.
  [Our current jerry-built economic design has a serious problem with balancing the peacetime centripetal forces on money, and no recent wars have been big enough to alter the general peacetime phenomenon of an accelerating concentration of the money supply in the topmost brackets - they just ain't killing enough advanced-economy population to get the magic wartime (erstwhile plaguetime) labor shortage that alone disciplines the super-rich and spreads out the peacetime black hole of income and wealth to the people who actually need and want to spend most of it. Well, plagues used to work this way too, but our meds got too good. Now our weapons have got too good. Brilliant. Our weapons are enabling the destruction of too few Americans, and our CEOs are enabling the market-demanded creation of too few jobs, despite all their rhetoric about "technology creates more jobs than it destroys." At a time when we should all be living in heaven, these status-laddering robominded number crunchers are holding everyone down in hell. Growth by downsizing? You buy that long enough and you get what we got = The End of Prosperity. Unless... We quit struggling to fill a prehistoric 40-hour workweek and just share the vanishing yet-unautomated employment however short a workweek it takes.]
  
  But that hasn't stopped equity markets rallying strongly, amid growing hopes of an economic recovery this year. That is partly because job losses and other cost cuts have provided a cushion for corporate profits.
  [Never mind apres next quarter, le DELUGE!]
  According to Deutsche Bank's calculations, 82% of the S&P 500 companies to report so far have beaten second-quarter earnings expectations. The snag is that only 50% have beaten sales targets.
  [They manage to have ignored past performance history in favor of manipulable expectations, but somehow they haven't quite managed to ignore sales targets - yet.]
  For the moment, earnings are only being held up by costs shrinking fast alongside revenue.
  [So this is a stylish "faux recovery"?]
  For a true recovery, sales need to start growing, too.
  [Naw, really? Who says?!]
  Rising unemployment may make that harder to achieve.
  [Now whyever would anyone think that? Unemployment doesn't matter - it's all about INFLATION - OH NO-O-O!]
  First, the flip side of better-than-expected corporate profits is real financial and consumer pain.
  [This is not a necessary correlation - this is the dark side of immediate and temporary/unsustainable short-term corporate profits based on a total disregard for one's short-term and long-term markets.]
  U.S. credit-card bad debt, for example, is rising faster than unemployment. [But "debt is goood." Clinton had "too small a national debt as a percentage of GDP"! Now we've "corrected" that - things are PERFECT!]
  Annualized write-offs of securitized credit-card debt hit a record 10.8% in June, according to Moody's. The agency expects that to rise to 12% to 13% in mid-2010.
  ["Eat, drink and be merry..."]
  In Europe, Fitch's U.K. credit-card charge-off index hit a record high of 9% in April. Historically, investors have assumed a one-percentage-point increase in unemployment leads to a one-percentage-point increase in bad credit-card debt.
  [Whoa, a mention of history - but only in the context of Europe, so, forgiveable.]
  But the pace of job losses and scale of debt levels mean nobody is confident [that] previous correlations will hold. Similarly, rising unemployment could hit house prices again, causing further turmoil for mortgage-backed securities.
  [As if they aren't good enough at generating enough of their own toxic and NINJA turmoil.]
  Meanwhile, high joblessness also is likely to weigh on consumer sentiment.
  [Oh who cares about that?! - "quirky consumers!"]
  Nearly 60% of U.S. consumers expect high unemployment to persist over the next several years, the University of Michigan reported Friday. That could shape behavior.
  [Yes, blame the victims! Those d*mn consumers - it's just their negativity that is prolonging this downturn - never mind their whining about joblessness and wagelessness and moneylessness and creditline topout.]
  Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned last week that unemployment could weigh on consumer spending.
  [Ah jess luuuv that maayaan! He is seCH a genius. Think of the years of eddykayshun and fraud he hadda go through to come up with brilliant insights lak thet!]
  That leaves the risk of a nasty feedback loop: Continued downward pressure on sales provides further impetus for companies to cut jobs, leading to more losses on consumer debt -- and more economic pain.
  ["Risk"? We'd say it was a Sure Thing.]
  Write to Richard Barley at richard.barley@dowjones.com

7/23/2009  economywide downsizing -

• Job cuts outpace GDP fall - Break from historical pattern suggests unemployment could weigh on recovery, by Jon Hilsenrath & Deborah Solomon, WSJ, A3.
  [This article exemplifies the tendency of contemporary economists to regard employment as a sidecar to the main economy - an annex - an optional add-on or extra - whereas employment is actually the basis and foundation of all the rest of the economic system including money itself, which symbolizes the average value of an average citizen's average accountable time unit.]
  WASHINGTON - The job market is doing even worse than the overall economy
  [as if the job market isn't the root and trunk of the overall economy!],
  prompting concern inside and outside the government that deeper-than-expected joblessness could persist once the recession ends.
  [I.e., "deeper than" spinnable as ignorable? Note the fantasy that a recession can really end without full employment, that such a contradiction or oxymoron as a "jobless recovery" can ever be anything more than superficial cheerleading rather than deep-structure sustainability.]
  Breaking from historical patterns, the unemployment rate -- currently at 9.5% -- is one to 1.5 percentage points higher than would be expected under one economic rule of thumb, says Lawrence Summers, President Barack Obama's top economic adviser.
  [And what "one economic rule of thumb" would that be, pray tell? Bad writing. These 'journalists' do not tell us until much later (below) - look for "Okun's Law" in bold print.]
  Since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has lost 6.5 million jobs, 4.7% of total employment. The unemployment rate has jumped five percentage points, while the economy [ie: the GDP] has contracted by roughly 2.5%.
  [This is merely an indication of how distorted and rosily biassed our main economic indicator (GDP) still is.]
  In recent days, Mr. Summers, White House budget director Peter Orszag and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke have all talked publicly about the unusual disconnect between growth and employment. Stubborn unemployment could be a political problem for Mr. Obama, who pushed hard for a $787 billion stimulus plan this year and has already been criticized by Republicans for failing to stem the rise in the joblessness.
  [You cannot increase employment by transfering money to the richest. They spend the tiniest percentage of their income of any of the brackets.]
  Though today's disparity between [spindoctored but unfounded] growth and jobs is especially stark, a jobless recovery wouldn't be new [or real]: The past two recessions were marked by firms reluctant to resume hiring right away after demand recovered ["demand" for what and from whom?]. The current disconnect could reflect an unanticipated surge in productivity -- companies finding ways to increase output with fewer workers.
  [Such output would be unmarketable without a parallel surge in employment and wages]
  That could set up the economy to 'grow' rapidly in future years [our quotes]. Rising productivity is the linchpin of economic growth and rising living standards.
  [No-o-o. rising marketable productivity is the linchpin of economic growth and rising employment and wages are the linchpin of rising living standards.]
  But there are darker scenarios. Struggling workers, whose wages also are being squeezed, could drag a fragile economy back into deep recession.
  [This language is getting close to "blaming the victims."]
  "Final demand and production have shown tentative signs of stabilization," Mr. Bernanke told lawmakers this week as part of the Fed chairman's semiannual report to Congress.
  [What if "final demand" b2b is not supported by initial demand c2b? - as the next statement suggests -]
  "The labor market, however, has continued to weaken."
  Job insecurity could lead consumers to further pull back spending, he said, calling it "an important risk to the outlook."
  ["Could" lead? - we'd say "certainly will lead" - it's a given!]
  The latest data imply productivity is pushing higher.
  ["Imply"?? And again, productivity is meaningless unless it's marketable productivity.]
  Macroeconomic Advisers, a St. Louis forecaster, estimates productivity grew at a rapid 5% annual rate in the second quarter. While painful for workers who lose jobs, advances in productivity could help get the economy on steadier footing.
  [Not when management uses advances in productivity to downsize the markets for that same productivity, instead of timesizing the markets, which maintains or upsizes them and gives employees more time to shop.]
  When productivity rose in the 1990s -- thanks partly to technological advances -- the economy boomed, lifting wages.
  [Where's the evidence to back up these assertions? Real wages have been falling since the late 1970s, and there is no evidence that productivity lifts wages, except CEOs' "wages." Quite the contrary, the evidence is all on the side of productivity followed by downsizing (instead of timesizing) depressing wages by worsening the general labor surplus.]
  Some companies are reaping gains as they clamp down on labor costs.
  [Think about it. This is an inherently temporary, market-weakening and company-shrinking strategy to "reap gains."]
  While corporate profits are down from a year ago, many of the biggest companies reporting income figures for the second quarter are ahead of expectations because they have cut costs so aggressively.
  [Or because they have set such low expectations!]
  Caterpillar Inc. this week raised its profit forecast for the year, crediting cost-cutting efforts. The company's second-quarter profits were $371 million, down from $1.106 billion a year earlier, but it said it squeezed operating costs by $4.5 billion from a year earlier. Layoffs and early retirements have reduced its work force this year by 17,100,
  [- reduced its workforce AND its customers' customers, because its workforce IS its customers' customers.]
  15% of the total, and it is instituting "rolling layoffs" in which it has been furloughing workers a few weeks at a time. [Furloughing workers a few weeks at a time is one way of timesizing, not downsizing, and when companies like Caterpillar switch exclusively to that, this recession will bottom out and not a moment before that - except in the imaginations of our concentrated media ownership.]
  "When the economy turns around and demand picks up, we're much better suited to ramp back up because we're not looking at bringing on many new people and getting them up to speed," says Jim Dugan, a Caterpillar spokesman.
  [Economies don't "turn around and demand pick up" UNTIL plenty of companies bring on many new people and get them up to speed.]
  Kellogg Co. said in May that net income for its first quarter rose 1.3% as cost-cutting offset falling revenue.
  [Cost cutting is like governments that sell off public assets - you can only sweeten your accounts once that way, then those assets are gone.]
  International Business Machines Corp. said second-quarter profit rose 12% despite falling revenue. The secret: It is cutting costs by $3.5 billion this year.
  [Keep pouring that profit into the pockets of the top executives and investors who were already spending all they cared to before they got the last $10 million and next quarter you'll have an even harder time cooking the books to pull profit out of the shrinking hat.]
  For now, administration officials are taking a wait-and-see approach, and they insist they have no plans to push new measures to counteract job losses.
  [Thank God if all they can think of is transfering billions to the topmost brackets and tightening the strangulation of spending. They should be stepping through the Timesizing program, starting at Phase One.]
  Officials say the $787 billion economic-stimulus package will have a bigger impact over the next six months.
  [No it won't.]
  The "two-year program that we put in place was one that had gathering and increasing force over time," Mr. Summers said in an interview.
  [Pipe dreams.]
  The disparity between the job market and economic growth has other important implications. For Fed officials, it implies that there will be little upward pressure on prices and wages -- in other words, little inflationary pressure -- giving officials reason to hold off on raising interest rates any time soon.
  [No upward wages for the "bottom" 90% of the population? No increased spending and demand and no recovery!]
  Employers' unusual behavior seems to have intensified as the economy has stabilized.
  [It hasn't stabilized at the deep structure level where downsizing is still common.]
  When the government releases its estimate of second-quarter gross domestic product [GDP] next week, economists expect it will show a contraction of less than 2% at an inflation-adjusted annual rate. During the same three months, employers cut payrolls at an annual rate of more than 4%, eliminating 1.3 million more jobs.
  [At last we get the figures. Bad writing.]
  That kind of disconnect violates an economic rule of thumb called Okun's Law, after the late economist Arthur Okun, which holds that every two-percentage-point drop in the economic[GDP]-growth rate corresponds with a one-percentage-point rise in the unemployment [UE] rate.
  [Fine except is it clear that the rise in UE leads and causes the growth drop?]
  In most downturns since World War II, businesses were slow to reduce their work forces in response to inventory buildups or slowing sales. In the recessions of the early 1990s and the early 2000s, though, businesses moved more quickly to cut early in the downturn and were slow to rehire.
  [Thereby deepening and prolonging the downturns and making them cumulative and making it ever more difficult to define and claim a recovery was occurring.]
  "You certainly have the impression that businesses in general have learned to slash payrolls and employment faster than in the past," said Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman and an economic adviser to Mr. Obama. "There's been a steep decline in business activity without the conventional impact on profits.
  [That's because our brand of capitalism has turned seriously suicidal - we incentivate growth and we incentivate failure - Chainsaw Dunlap destroyed companies such as Sunbeam - all the way to the bank.]
  Somehow, companies have managed to keep productivity higher than you might have thought given economic activity."
  [Again, productivity is meaningless unless it's marketable, and it's always billed as "very hard to quantify" anyway - conveniently enough for CEOs and directors desperate to seem worth the huge salaries and bonuses they keep voting one another.]
  Write to Jon Hilsenrath at jon.hilsenrath@wsj.com and Deborah Solomon at deborah.solomon@wsj.com

6/04/2009  economywide downsizing -

• Steel maker plans deep layoffs in Spain, by David Jolly, NYT, B6.
  AcelorMittal, the world's largest steel maker, said Wednesday that the Spanish government had granted it permission to lay off a major part of its work force in Spain, another sign of retrenchment in a country that already has the highest jobless rate in Europe...18.1% in April, and nearly double Europe's average of 9.2%..\..
  The government approved a business plan giving the company the flexibility to temporarily lay off as many of its 12,000 Spanish employees as it needs to reduce European capacity in line with falling demand for steel.
  The layoffs would run until the end of the year and could be extended to June 1, 2010, if economic conditions warrant.
  [Unemployment insurance -]
  All laid-off workers will receive at least 90% of the gross salaries, with part of that amount paid by the government.
  The company did not say how many employees it intended to idle, but it said it could cut the total hours worked at maximum, by 40% at its Spanish plants....
  [ArcelorMittal - and Spain - should quit screwing around with unemployment insurance and other corporate and government backbends and just institute fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against under-employment - aka timesizing. Hold the private sector's feet to the fire to employ and finance their own markets on a sustainable, ongoing, fluctuating-workweek basis = 'timesizing.' Arcelor is already practicing primitive timesizing in the Ukraine (see 6/04/2009 #2).]

1. The ripple effect of 400 layoffs - Following the ripples between an Etobicoke factory and a 70-year-old woman in Trinidad, THE TORONTO STAR, A1.
   [Click *here for The Ripple Effect: Interactive Graphic - Trickle-down economics: The economic turbulence created when Owens-Illinois closed.]
   Stephen Harris delivers flowers for 20 florists in the Hamilton area and has felt the effects of the closure of a glass container plant in Etobicoke. [photo caption]
   How does an economy crash? It takes more than plant closures and company layoffs, even dozens of them. It is the secondary fallout from those closures - usually unseen, often far away - that wreak true havoc.
   A factory closes its doors in Etobicoke, a 70-year-old woman shortens her grocery list in Trinidad.
   A machinist loses his job in Oakville. A Mississauga hairstylist loses a colouring session. A restaurateur loses a weekly dinner, a travel agent loses a yearly booking, a charity loses a monthly donation.
   On Sept. 30, the world's largest manufacturer of glass containers, Owens-Illinois Inc., closed its plant on Kipling Ave. in Toronto. About 400 employees lost their jobs.
   They made more than $20 per hour preparing Owens-Illinois containers to be filled with food, juice and alcohol. Many have only high school diplomas; many are immigrants. In a city in which manufacturing jobs have become endangered, their futures are uncertain.
   But they are not the only victims of the shutdown. The Kipling plant did business with the makers of boxes and machines, with electrical contractors and trucking companies. Its employees spent on restaurant dinners and after-work drinks, vacations and gifts, homes and cars.
   The closure of the plant was not the butterfly wing-flap that caused calamitous damage to a seemingly unconnected firm.
   Yet, in ways big and small, obvious and imperceptible, it affected dozens of recession-battered companies: multinationals like Ford, from which laid-off Amey Liddell was planning to buy a new sedan; local manufacturers like Oakville's Northpoint Industries, which annually sold the plant about $300,000 worth of packaging equipment; stores like Jean's Flower Shop, which lost about $150 when six laid-off workers bought a single funeral bouquet together instead of each purchasing their own.
   The struggles of Jean's Flower Shop hurt Stephen Harris, whose company delivers its bouquets. The struggles of Steve's Delivery hurt its six employees. Their struggles affect the golf courses they play, the airlines they fly, the contractors they hire.
   "If we start cutting ... it's like a chain reaction," says Jorge Gonzalez, a former forklift operator at the Owens-Illinois plant.
   This is the ripple effect: the layoff-to-cutback, cutback-to-layoff cycle that connects unwitting strangers as it produces and sustains a recession.

2. A look inside ... the ripple effect, by Daniel Dale and Brett Popplewell, THE TORONTO STAR, A8-9.
   Owens-Illinois Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of glass containers, shut down its plant on Kipling Ave. on Sept. 30, 2008, throwing about 400 employees out of work. Those employees now are struggling to make do with less money in their pockets, in turn affecting other businesses such as restaurants, car dealers, hair salons and delivery services. Some have even had to stop sending money to relatives in their native lands [oh horror! - their native lands may have to 'find their own feet' and stand on their own feet in the ecological age - parasitizing other economies does not sound like a sustainable strategy]. [photo caption]
   How does an economy crash? It takes more than plant closures and company layoffs, even dozens of them. It is the secondary fallout from those closures — usually unseen, often far away — that wreak true havoc. A look inside ...
   THE BUSINESSES
   NORTHPOINT INDUSTRIES
   When the Owens-Illinois plant on Kipling Ave. shut down last September, Oakville's Northpoint Industries lost about $350,000 in annual revenue.
   Northpoint, a 22-employee manufacturer of automatic packaging equipment, was also hurt by the closure of two other Owens-Illinois plants in Canada last year. It eliminated its afternoon shift in December, laying off seven employees.
   "I think of that as seven families," says vice-president operations John Ingleson.
   With business down between 25 per cent and 30 per cent, Northpoint cannot afford to fill vacant positions, says founder and vice-president manufacturing Steve Constantin, 43.
   The loss of business also means that Constantin, a married father of three, has cut his personal spending.
   "I'm just like anybody else. I'm trying to protect everything I have ... and your employees are going through the same thing, so it's not like you want to be flaunting things or doing things or enjoying yourself and going places while they're suffering or you're making cutbacks."
   FLUKE TRANSPORTATION
   The trucks of Hamilton's Fluke Transportation Group made between 10 to 15 deliveries per day from the Owens-Illinois plant to bottling companies across the GTA.
   When Fluke executives learned of the pending shutdown, they sought new customers to minimize the damage. Six months after the plant ceased operating, Fluke vice-president Kevin Hagen said business was still down about 4 per cent. He later said the company had managed to replace the lost business.
   "There certainly is a ripple-down effect," says Hagen. "When our customers go down, we go down."
   The company did not lay off any of its 140 drivers, but reduced spending in other ways. Plans to hire new drivers and buy new trucks have been postponed.
   "We're trying to hang on and be responsible in whatever way we can," Hagen says.
   "That means three-year-old trucks which might have been turned in for new trucks by now are being driven on into their fourth year."
   THE NEIGHBOURS
   THE MUSKET RESTAURANT
   In the 30 years he has operated The Musket Restaurant, Helmut Enser has never seen his business this bad.
   "We're still here, but sometimes the people, they are not," says the German-born restaurateur.
   At lunchtime on St. Patrick's Day – traditionally a busy day for bars – there were only four people in the German-themed pub and eatery. A short walk from the plant, it had been well used by Owens-Illinois employees.
   "I had to cut back on my staff's hours by about 20 per cent," says Enser, 67, as his wife serves a meal prepared by his son to one of the customers. "With a big business like Owens-Illinois gone, you feel it very fast. All of a sudden you're down."
   With revenue also down 20 per cent, Enser orders less food. His 17 servers, cooks and other staff take home fewer tips.
   December was the slowest month he can remember. It did not help that The Musket lost one more piece of business that month – the annual Owens-Illinois Christmas party.
   BUNS MASTER BAKERY AND DELI
   Every weekday, about 15 Owens-Illinois employees walked a block to Buns Master for lunch. "Even if they each spent $5, so $75 a day, that added up over a week," says owner Shafiq Jamani, 29.
   With sales down 30 per cent, Jamani has reduced his monthly purchasing of food supplies from $30,000 to $18,000, hurting his suppliers. And he eliminated eight to 10 hours from the weekly schedules of four employees. He and wife Shama, who works with him, have also begun "penny-pinching" in their personal lives.
   "Retail is totally different now. Growing up, I worked for my father and my uncle. They were able to buy a house, afford a mortgage, buy a Honda Accord (with) cash. Now we're buying on finance. If we're buying a mattress, we're financing."
   He loves his job. But he has reconsidered the long-term ambitions he held when he bought the store in 2005, now contemplating a "three-to-five-year game plan to build up the business and then sell.
   "I would like to renovate ... but I don't have the cash to do it."
   THE EMPLOYEES
   DANIJELA CABRAJA
   Danijela Cabraja, 29, was laid off from Owens-Illinois last June. Her husband, 36-year old John Muzzatti, received a pink slip from the plant three months later.
   "My husband and I were talking about having kids. That was put on hold," she says.
   So too were basement renovation plans, a spring trip to Croatia and countless smaller purchases. All told, Cabraja and Muzzatti figure they have withheld more than $10,000 they would normally have poured into the economy – money they used to spend at businesses like Jack Astor's, their favourite restaurant, Ren's Pets Depot, where they bought treats for their bulldog, and Home Depot, where Muzzatti acquired supplies for the now-postponed renovation.
   When a former colleague's daughter died last month, Cabraja, Muzzatti and four other former workers from the plant jointly bought a $100 bouquet of roses and carnations from Jean's Flower Shop in Hamilton. In better times, they would have made separate purchases.
   "We would normally have spent $250 for everybody," says Cabraja.
   JORGE GONZALEZ
   Every month for 10 years, Jorge Gonzalez sent $400 home to his mother in El Salvador. It allowed the 65-year-old widow to buy food, medicine, clothes, electricity, water and anything else she needed to survive.
   After his September layoff, Gonzalez had to halve his remittance.
   "She's having a tough time," Gonzalez, 44, says of his mother. But so is he.
   With a 2-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter, Gonzalez has been forced to cut back on his grocery bills, toys for his children and insurance on his car.
   If he does not find work soon, he will have to make further reductions. But he is concerned his cutbacks are hurting others.
   "If we start cutting ... it's like a chain reaction," he says. "For maybe every 1,000 people who cut their cell phone maybe someone will lose their job for that. That's not good."
   When Gonzalez was working, he dined every week with friends and colleagues at Astoria Shish Kebob House on Danforth Ave. No longer.
   DYNESE ROTHWELL
   After Dynese Rothwell was laid off from Cooper Automotive and then lost a subsequent job at Ajax Precision Manufacturing, she decided to find work outside the auto industry. "I wanted something with more stability."
   In 2007, she was hired by Owens-Illinois.
   That job gone, Rothwell, 41, no longer visits her dentist: without benefits, she cannot afford him. She gets her hair cut at the Young and Beauty Spa every two months rather than every three weeks.
   She no longer plans to buy a Honda sedan at a local dealership. And because she will not be able to make her annual trip to Trinidad, from which she emigrated in 1988, she will deprive Mississauga Travel of a regular customer.
   She plans to attend college to train as a worker for a social agency, but her outlook is gloomy.
   "You need something to look forward to and you realize you have nothing. There aren't many avenues for you right now."
   Her stress is compounded by her worries about her mother and sister in her native Trinidad, whom she supported with $100 weekly remittances. Those have stopped.
   GRACE SAMUELS
   Dynese Rothwell's 70-year-old mother Grace lives in the central Trinidad town of Couva. She supports a 43-year-old daughter, who is unable to work for health reasons.
   The $100 she received weekly from Rothwell helped pay for food and other essentials.
   "She's understanding. She understands I can't afford it anymore," says Rothwell, who immigrated to Canada in 1988. "But it makes things more difficult for her."
   Rothwell describes her mother, who does not work, as poor. With Rothwell out of work, she is substantially poorer.
   Samuels suffered a minor stroke last year. She has high blood pressure.
   Rothwell worries that she will not be able to help her sister if her mother falls seriously ill.
   "I'm hoping and praying nothing happens. It's a little bit overwhelming."
   THE RIPPLES CONTINUE
   ASTORIA SHISH KEBOB HOUSE
   Managers at Astoria Shish Kebob House on Danforth Ave. say fewer regulars are sitting down for meals. Regulars like Jorge Gonzalez.
   The downward trend is "nothing dramatic," says director of operations Peter Keris. The restaurant has not cut employees' hours. But it has refrained from hiring staff for the summer, its busiest period, and now buys less pork from supplier J&W Foods of Scarborough.
   Steve Trougakos, part-owner of J&W Foods, says revenue is flat – but that this is only because the company managed to find new restaurant clients in the past year.
   "Otherwise, we'd be down. Our old customers are down about 10 per cent, that's for sure. Astoria is one of them. A lot of restaurants are feeling the pinch. We would be too if we hadn't expanded."
   Declining sales to restaurant customers like Astoria, however, have forced the company to buy less meat from supplier Olymel of Montreal, which ships pork to J&W Foods direct from its Cornwall slaughterhouse.
   JEAN'S FLOWER SHOP
   "Funeral business is not down, particularly," owner Bill Dalton says with a chuckle, "because people are still going to die in a recession."
   But fewer people are buying flowers for birthdays and anniversaries, "things that are maybe not a necessity." Overall business is down 10 per cent, forcing him to begin to consider reducing employees' hours.
   "If it stays like this much longer," he says, "we're going to have to make some serious changes."
   Dalton acquired the shop about 40 years ago from his mother, the Jean of its name. Four of his 14 employees have worked there more than 25 years.
   "A big family," says Dalton.
   But one facing difficult new pressures in a city in deepening economic trouble.
   U.S. Steel Canada, formerly Stelco, announced a "temporary" closure of its Hamilton mill in early March.
   "When the announcement came," Dalton says, "everybody started saying, 'Oh, jeez, what's going to happen to me?' That's when we really noticed that our day-to-day business wasn't there."
   Which meant less business for the company that delivers its bouquets.
   STEVE'S DELIVERY
   The transmission in one of Stephen Harris's delivery vans broke in early March. He will not get it fixed, and he will not rush to buy another van.
   "I'm not hard-pressed to replace it," he says, "because of how things are going."
   Harris, 60, and his six employees deliver flowers for 20 shops in and around Hamilton. He is paid per delivery; when Jean's Flower Shop suffers, so does his.
   Since December, he says, business is down 20 per cent from the same period last year.
   His 10-year-old company once had four drivers on the road daily. Because he now needs only three, sometimes two, he has eliminated eight to nine shifts per week and laid off one part-time employee.
   His three remaining part-timers are Stelco pensioners working so they can "take an extra holiday, or pay for their golf." They will not experience hardship, he says, if he makes further cutbacks. And the positions of his three full-timers are secure.
   But his seasonal business will get worse before it gets better.
   "After Mother's Day," Harris says, "it really falls off."

4/11/2009  economywide downsizing -

• Layoffs have ripple effect on economy, by Doug Schorpp, Quad-City Times via qctimes.com.
  Locally, companies like Deere & Co., Alcoa, HNI and Sears Manufacturing combined have laid off hundreds of workers.
  “It definitely has a ripple effect in any economy,” said Greg Rivara, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Employment Security. “When one segment of the economy falters, it will affect others, whether it be a supplier or the restaurant that the workers used to patronize when times were better.
  “It is important for a community to recognize, everything is tied together and does affect the other. It can be a challenge to stay positive.”
  Mike Whalen remains optimistic despite obvious downtrends in his industry. He is the founder and president of Heart of America Restaurants & Inns, a group of more than 30 restaurants and hotels in the Midwest, including The Machine Shed, Johnny’s Italian Steakhouse, Thunder Bay Grille and Gramma’s Kitchen in the Quad-Cities.
  “January was the worst month I have seen in the hotel business,” he said. “I think we were down 25 to 26 percent, but now it is coming back. When you are down 26 percent in January, for a hotel, that is catastrophic. That is just plain ugly.
  “The national restaurant figures are down. The quick-casual (restaurant) industry is hit the most. McDonald’s and other fast-food places have done better. But as people are told we are not going to have the next Great Depression, we will see this area come out of it.”
  “For the people who lost jobs, my heart goes out to them,” Whalen said.
  “I think I will appreciate things —when the economy gets better — more than I have in the past.”
  [Don't hold your breath.]

  [sidebar]
  Layoffs hit home
  Skip McGill, president of United Steelworkers Local 105, is right in the thick of things these days, monitoring layoffs at some of the companies his bargaining unit represents, including Alcoa Davenport Works.
  He feels for the people out of work and really can identify with their plight. His wife, Sue McGill, was laid off in November from her job as an office manager at a doctor’s office.
  He said her medical office merged with another one and thus, did not need two office managers....

1/23/2009  economywide downsizing -

• The ripple effect of layoffs - Company layoffs keep piling up. With so many people out of work, it can have a huge ripple effect. Sadie Babits has the story of one man who is dealing with the effects of unemployment in Portland, Ore.
  by Sadie Babits, 1/22 American Public Media [Radio] via marketplace.publicradio.org.
  KAI RYSSDAL: Earnings reports are tricky to parse even in the best of times -- forget about when everybody's feeling stressed.
  Google is today's case in point. The search engine that would rule the world reported better than expected profits today. But expectations were pretty low. In fact, today's the first time Google's profits actually fell from a year earlier. Still made money. Just not as much.
  Today the Commerce Department reported the number of people filing for first-time unemployment benefits has risen to a 26-year high. That's 589,000 new people signing up for state assistance, either online or in-person, in just a single week.
  Layoffs don't affect just those who lose their jobs, though. From Portland, Ore., Sadie Babits has this story about the ripple effects of so many people being out of work.
  SADIE BABITS: David Bunker has had a string of bad luck lately. Last October, he lost his job as a sales manager at a title insurance company in Portland. This week on his way to a job fair, he got rear-ended. His car was totaled.
  DAVID BUNKER: Being unemployed, it's opened up a whole, I guess, set of challenges that I haven't faced before.
  Finding fulltime work has become a fulltime job. And Bunker is competing with some 174,000 other unemployed Oregonians.
  BUNKER: I mean, I've been through quite a few recessions, and I've never experienced this many professional people out of work.
  At 44, David Bunker is tightening his belt. He and he wife have cut the extras out of the household budget. Gym membership? Gone. . . . Vacations? Postponed. . . . Cell phone service? Reduced.
  BUNKER: Really keeping an eye on the gas I'm spending driving around. Renegotiating terms on credit cards and/or loans that I have.
  And he's nixed one of his favorite things -- going out for sushi.
  BUNKER: Definitely sushi is out of the question now because it's an expensive item.
  Restaurants are feeling the ripple effect of the David Bunkers of the world who are now eating at home.
  SOUND OF MIO SUSHI RESTAURANT: Hello! Two?
  This is Mio Sushi in Portland's Hollywood district. Jay Park is a waiter here. He says regulars aren't coming in.
  JAY PARK: Customers that usually come twice a week, they started coming once a week. Sometimes they don't come at all.
  Mio Sushi hasn't laid anyone off yet, but according to Oregon's state economist, when someone like David Bunker loses his job, there's usually at least one other person who also gets laid off. We find those people in a visit to a regional employment office.
  The place is packed just minutes after the doors open. Amy Vander Vliet is the regional economist here. She says the latest state unemployment rate -- 9 percent for December -- is the highest rate since the mid-1980s.
  AMY VANDER VLIET: And the unemployment rate tends to be a lagging indicator. So we're in for higher unemployment in the months to come because I don't think we've hit bottom yet.
  In fact, computer-chip maker Intel announced this week it's closing a plant in suburban Portland. Another 1,000 people will be looking for work.
  For Marketplace, I'm Sadie Babits in Portland.

  Second comment on above Marketplace [NPR] segment, By Yuppie Scum.
  I was so distraught when I heard Sadie Babits' story about that poor, poor man in Oregon. I mean, NO SUSHI? Postponing a vacation? A less expensive cell phone plan? OH THE HORROR! How can I get this man's address? I'd like to start a SUSHI fund in his honor. How could we let this kind of poverty continue in the wealthiest nation on Earth?
  [Certainly has a point. But then, the end of empire starts from pretty luxurious heights. Maybe Sadie Babits' next story will relate more closely to millions more Americans who are belt-tightening at subsistence levels.]
  

3/08(sat.)/2008  2 economywide downsizing articles -

1. Sharp drop in jobs adds to grim economic picture - Fed offers new low-cost loans for banks as credit tightens and stocks fall - Even the usual optimists on Wall Street concede that there's big trouble, by Edmund Andrews, NYT, front page & A9.
   WASHINGTON, D.C. - The worst fears of consumers [=consumer base], investors [=investment crowsnest] and Washington officials [=puppetshow - again we ignore employees and job seekers = the employment basement] were confirmed on Friday, as deepening paralysis on Wall Street collided [ah, paralysis, being stationery, can't "collide" with anything, Ed] with stark new evidence of falling employment and a likely recession.
   In a report that was far worse than most analysts [=cheerleaders] expected, the Labor Dept. estimated that the nation lost 63,000 jobs in February. It was the second consecutive monthly decline, and the third straight drop for private-sector jobs....

2. End to the good times (such as they were), by David Leonhardt, NYT, front page.
   If history is a reliable guide [and what else do we have?!], the recession of 2008 is now unavoidable.
   The dismal jobs report released Friday showed overall employment to be lower than it was three months ago. Every time such a slump has occurred since the early 1970s, a recession has followed - or already been under way.
   And if the good times have really ended, they were never really than good to begin with. Most American households are still not earning as much annually as they did in 1999, once inflation is taken into account. Since the Census Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s, a prolonged expansion has never ended without household income having set a new record.
   [But unlike previously, every one of those records since 1970 was based on the wage-stagnation-motivated, spreading, further-wage-depressing, child-neglecting phenomenon of the two-income family with both parents working.]
   For months, policy-makers [WHAT policy making do they do? - they only have ONE policy = interest rate cuts - how much "making" can that take???] and Wall Street economists [what do these cubicle-fillers get paid for???] have been predicting [=praying, there's nothing of scientific prediction here], and hoping, that the aggressive [ooh, sooo macho! but still floppy] series of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve would keep the economy growing, despite the housing bust. But the prospect seemed to diminish almost by the hour on Friday: 8:01 a.m. - Fed announced yet another measure to unlock the credit markets...
   8:30 - Labor Dept. released the poor jobs report... Even the one 'good' news in the report was a mirage. Unemployment fell to 4.8% from 4.9 in Jan., but only because more people stopped looking for work and thus were not counted as unemployed by the government.\.
   8:31 - economists at JPMorgan Chase reversed last week's assessment that the economy was still growing and said a recession appeared to have started earlier this year...
   9:30 - markets opened and stocks fell, recovered and fell again - S&P500 closed down 0.8%....
   Over the last year, the number of officially unemployed has risen by 100,000, but even that comes with a caveat: there are also 600,000 more people who are working part time because they could not find "full-time" work [our quotes], according to the Labor Dept....
   [So shorter hours is happening anyway, but in the worst, wage-zeroing, market-weakening way instead of the best, wage-raising, market-strengthening way.]
   

3/26/2006  1 economywide downsizing article -

• The interview - Parsing the pink slip and its consequences, by Anna Mundow, interviewing Louis Uchitelle, Boston Globe.
  As recently as 1989, the Oxford English Dictionary defined "layoff" as "a spell of relaxation; a period during which a workman is temporarily dismissed or allowed to leave his work." Millions of laid-off Americans know better. In "The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences" (Knopf, $25.95), Louis Ouchitelle estimates that since the early 1980s, at least 30 million people have been laid off in the United States.
  Uchitelle, who writes about economics for The New York Times, traces the erosion of job security and the effects of layoffs on workers, companies, communities, the economy, and ultimately, on our democracy....
  Q. How did layoffs become a fact of life?
  A. Gradually.
  [And cyclically - last big wave was in the 1920s.]
  When we started to face foreign competition [in the 1970s] there was resistance to layoffs even among management.... Among workers, bargaining power declined even before global competition set in....
  [Because the postwar babyboomers were growing up, entering the job market, and replacing the labor kill-off of World War II and restoring the labor surplus of the Depression - thus killing the heightened bargaining power of the wartime and postwar labor shortage - or rather, labor balance, but perceived by ever-whiny employers as a shortage.]
  We can't avoid layoffs, we can't deny the global economy.
  [We can certainly avoid layoffs by cutting hours instead of jobs, and we have denied the "global economy" many times in the past with tariffs, and are still doing it in various ways, such as our massive zea maize (corn) subsidies. And no advanced economy today got where it is under so-called "free trade."]
  But we've taken it too far.
  [Implying that we have actively taken it this far, and can take it less far - thus contradicting his two previous statements of powerlessness.]
  Q. Are layoffs really a "debilitating condition" and a "festering national crisis"?
  A. Layoffs are a statement to the laid-off that they have no value. That's damaging to mental health, and in that sense it's a debilitating national condition.
  Q. Don't layoffs make companies more competitive?
  A. There's growing evidence that the most efficient and competitive companies are the ones that avoid layoffs. Southwest Airlines is the outstanding example, virtually the only airline that is profitable and one of the very few that haven't had layoffs....
  [And Nucor Steel and Lincoln Electric....]
  Layoffs destroy the sense of teamwork, community, and identity with the company that generates success.
  [Not to mention loyalty.]
  Q. How did "The Disposable American" turn into such a human story?
  A. I felt drawn to the people who had this experience and who couldn't solve what was happening. I could see it going on all around me. Economists kept citing data showing that things weren't that bad. But new studies show that job tenure is declining, so finally the data are catching up with the phenomenon.
  [In other words, the phenomenon is finally getting so cumulatively bad that not even the cleverest econometricians can hide it with their carefully designed and selective statistical "data," so designed and selected why? because guess who supports their university employers and guess who they like to identify with?]
  Our justification is that the world has changed and all you have to do is change with it. But it turns out that the good jobs are not out there, that the number of job openings is less than the number of qualified workers....
  Q. Is there a way back to job security?
  A. I wrote about what has happened for 8 chapters. Then I had to write "Solutions." But there really is no way back.
  [And here we see the time blindness of English-speaking economists and talking heads. They've completely forgotten our long history of workweek reduction alias worksharing alias workspreading alias wage-spreading alias investing-money-to-spending-money conversion alias consumer-base-strengthening alias monetary-circulation-acceleration alias economic dynamization.]
  ...If we recognized that when you count disguised layoffs, 7-8% of the...workforce is being laid off, that would upset us.... If we moved back \from\ our society of individualism...toward a communal society we might then find uses for government that would make fuller employment a reality. That's the best I can do.
  [Well, Uchitelle has already done better than that. He's unwittingly suggested a use for government that is pretty basic; namely, counting the whole problem to wake ourselves up instead of disguising it; in other words, redefining unemployment to include the whole problem of non-self-support (which would include welfare, disability, homelessness, prisons, forced retirement, forced self-employment with or without clients, and possibly, deaths within six months of forced retirement). And then, here are some other uses for government that could realize fuller employment. Government could let this more meaningful unemployment rate control the workweek, in the sense that, as long as unemployment is too high or rising, the workweek could be reduced by, say, an hour a year. And simultaneously or prior to this, government could encourage automatic overtime-to-training&hiring conversion throughout the grassroots of the economy and up&down the corporate hierarchies. These are the two essential ingredients for replacing downsizing, aka layoffs, with timesizing.]
  Q. You say that "democracy itself is in jeopardy." How?
  A. If we have income inequality, if class differences are greater than ever, isn't that anti-democratic? Layoffs contribute to that.
  [Lame response. Income inequality is the unactionable term for income concentration. Talk about classes and class warfare is hackneyed and easily dismissed. Let's talk about unlimited concentration of value, whether market-demanded working hours per person, income per person, wealth per person, or credit per person. Let's talk about the possibility that the concentration of money can get so intense that it slows the circulation of money, because the wealthy have far far more than they can possibly spend. And let's devote some research to proving or disproving this possibility.
  [And let's talk about how money therefore changes from spending money to investing money as it gets distributed up the income brackets. And the possibility that this can go so far as to vacuum the spending power out of the markets for the productivity in which the huge new concentration of investment money would like to invest - but can't because that productivity is - surprise! - encountering weakening markets. And therefore the possibility that the unlimited concentration of money can go beyond a point where it ceases to be constructive or even neutral, and starts to become destructive ... SELF-destructive.
  [And let's talk about the tendency of the wealthy to gather to themselves all the important decision-making power in society, and their concurrent tendency to insulate and isolate themselves from any negative consequences of any of their decisions, for example, by surrounding themselves with yes-men. And thence the possibility that very little negative, or course-changing, feedback can get through to them. And therefore that as there is less and less of a vital system function, feedback, the whole system loses adaptability ... and survivability.]
  Q. Why is there not more public outrage at enormous CEO salaries?
  A.You've got me there.
  [Two suggestions. The whacky American "rugged individualism" that wants to identify with Bill Gates even when they're sleeping on the street. And ... the concentration of media ownership means there's a lot of outrage that just never gets reported. Protests at the Republican - and Democratic - political conventions in summer/2004 for example....]

3/23/2006  1 downsizing of 13,000 jobcuts made it into La Presse of Montreal -

• GM wants to rid itself of 13,000 employees, La Presse, 1>7.
  The automaker is offering severance packages of up to US$140,000.

1. Cable & Wireless PLC, WSJ, D4.
   ...unveiled a recovery plan for its struggling UK operation that includes cutting as much as half of the unit's workforce.
   [Their first mistake = cutting employees and associated markets instead of working hours per employee.]
   The UK fixed-line telecom company...plans to reduce significantly the number of customers it serves in the UK as part of a realigning of the business to focus on large corporate customers and public institutions.
   [Their second mistake = cutting customers directly. With recovery plans like this, who needs suicide plans? Every other lazy corporation is focusing on large customers too - competition there is gaining intensity, while small markets are becoming totally unserved. And public institutions? They require tax revenues to grow - and meanwhile all these moronic CEOs are trying to avoid paying taxes. This "recovery" plan is actually a recession plan.]
   C&W...expects to cut its UK headcount from 5500 to 3500 or even 2500 within the next 4-5 years and plans to reduce its customer base to about 3,000 large customers from 30,000 at the end of February....
   [So, cuts of up to 5500-2500= 3000 jobs - which in turn will have a recochet effect on their large customers and make them smaller.]
   CEO John Pluthero....
   [Pluto, god of death. This aptly named CEO is making a hero of Pluto, and the planet of that name has recently been demoted from planet status.]

2. [unspecified cuts]
   British American Tobacco PLC, WSJ, D4.
   ...closed two factories last year.

1. Job cuts and falling ad sales send Tribune profit down 38%, Bloomberg via NYT, C6.
   The Tribune Co., publisher of The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune...cut 900 jobs and is closing a plant as advertisers defect to the Internet and newsprint costs rise. Sales of both newspaper and broadcast ads declined....

2. Paramount cuts 120 jobs after merger, by David Halbfinger, NYT, C6.
   Paramount Pictures, the unit of Viacom Inc. that agreed to acquire DreamWorks SKG for $1.6B, [has] completed the deal and [is] laying off about 120 workers. The largest cuts will be in Paramount's domestic distribution staff. The largest cuts will be in Paramount's domestic distribution staff.
   25 mid-level Paramount workers in several departments were dismissed on Wed.; another 95 or so are expected to be let go next week, out of a total of 2,000 Paramount employees....

1. Kraft plans to cut jobs and plants - Dining out hurts company growth, by Melanie Warner, NYT, C1.
   Americans are spending more at restaurants and less at the supermarket. Now Kraft Foods, the world's second-largest food company, is paying the price.
   Kraft...announced a second revamping yesterday, one that would eliminate 8,000 jobs, or 8% of the workforce, and close 20 plants. The overhaul comes on top of 5,500 layoffs and 19 plant closures that were announced two years ago....
   [Well, here are 8,000 people and their dependents who will slow down their spending now in both restaurants and supermarkets.]

2. Time Inc. to cut 100 more jobs as it focuses on web business, by Katharine Seelye, NYT, C7.
   Time Inc., after eliminating 105 jobs just before Christmas, is moving to cut about 100 more, including up to 10 at its flagship, Time Magazine.
   [Total 205.]
   Both editorial and business-side employees are being cut at several of the company's domestic magazines. About 40 business-side employees were notified yesterday that they were losing their jobs, as were 26 editorial employees who are not in the Newspaper Guild.
   About three dozen other editorial employees who are protected by the Guild are being offered buyouts ad will have until Feb. 13 to decide whether to accept them. If not enough Guild-protected people take the buyouts, there will be layoffs, executives said. The company employs about 13,400 people....
   Two of the titles most affected will be Time and Money magazines. But there will be cuts across the board, including at other Time Inc. brand names like Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Real Simple....

12/10/2005  1 overview:

• The jobs recovery looks good, until a closer look is taken, NYT, B3.
  A substantial rebound... But the economy did better after previous recessions (graph captions)

10/21/2005  3 downsizings, totalling 3400 +? jobcuts, made it into a regional paper today:

1. Ford posts $284m US loss, has announced 2750 layoffs, plans 'significant' plant closings (Ottawa Citizen.E2)
2. Imperial Tobacco to snuff out Ontario plants - 650 jobs lost as Montreal company moves cigarette production to Mexico from Guelph (555) & Aylmer (80), & Montreal QC (Ottawa Citizen.E2)
3. Sears Canada slips into the red - first qtrly loss in over 3 years on costs to fire unspecified # of employees & pay for stock-based compensation (Ottawa Citizen.E2)

9/06/2005  1 downsizing of 10,000 jobcuts made it into t (NY Times):

• Volkswagen/Germany will cut 10,000 jobs (t.C1) - hey, what happened to VW's timesizing? - in 1994, they avoided 30,000 layoffs & saved their HQ town of Wolfsburg (& a lot of good customers!) by cutting their workweek from 35 to 28.8 hrs & spreading the reduced amount of work among all their employees - now VW is acting more like GM which promoted the decline of its HQ town, Flint, Michigan, & US automaking in general, by downsizing 74,000 employees in the early 90s, instead of timesizing & keeping all these employees - & consumers - going

9/02/2005  1 downsizing of 35 jobcuts, made it into t (NY Times):

• 35 news staff cuts in NYC by Newsday (t.C5)

6/28/2005  2 downsizings, totalling 7700 potential, unspecified actual, jobcuts made it into u (USA Today):

1. 7700 jobcuts threatened as autoparts supplier Lear plans to move 5 N.American & Euro plants to cheap-labor countries (u.1B) - never mind effect on diminished consumer base
2. unspecified jobcuts & high unemployment protested by 10,000s of S.Africans in Johannesburg (u.5A)

6/27/2005  1 downsizing of unspecified jobcuts made it into a regional paper:

• 1196 US employers reported 'mass layoffs' (over 50 people) last month nationwide, mostly in film & video production & temporary services (arizona republic.D1)

5/24/2005  1 downsizing of 4000 threatened jobcuts made it into regional papers:

• 4000 (20%) threatened jobcuts by BBC in London trigger strikes by 3 unions (vancouver sun.A11, boston globe.A8)

5/19/2005  1 downsizing of unspecified jobcuts made it into the Toronto Globe&Mail:

• unspecified cuts as Connors Bros. Income Fund moves food pkg plant fm Athens AL to Augusta GA (toronto globe.B13) - more dysfunctional owners making more dysfunctional economic decisions

5/14/2005  2 downsizings, totalling 472 actual, 26000 potential, jobcuts that made it into j (WSJ) or t (NYT):

1. 472 jobcuts by Alaska Airlines as ramp services outsourced to Menzies Aviation Grp (t.B4)
2. Pentagon urges closing of bases, cutting 26,000 jobs - 180 sites listed - opposition is intense (t.front page)

5/13/2005  1 downsizing of 150 jobcuts made it into t (NYT):

• 150 jobcuts as DSM, Dutch maker of drug ingredients outsources Belvidere NJ plant to Scotland (t.C3)

5/12/2005  1 downsizing of 2500 jobcuts made it into t (NYT):

• 10% workforce cut (2500 jobs) as National Australia Bank cuts costs (& mkt share) 'to regain mkt share', instead of just trimming 10% of its workweek (48 minutes a day for everyone, including top executives), re-investing overtime savings in overtime-targeted training & hiring, & keeping everyone together working, earning & banking 90% as much as before (t.C6)

3/23/2005  3 downsizings, totalling 4400 jobcuts that made it into j (WSJ) or t (NYT):

1. 12% workforce cut (2100 jobs) as Bank of Ireland counters decline in profits from lending & meets growing competition by trimming employee-consumers, instead of just trimming 12% of its workweek (55 minutes a day for everyone, including top executives), re-investing overtime savings in overtime-targeted training & hiring, & keeping everyone together working, earning & buying 90% as many wireless services as before (t.C4)
2. 2000 jobcuts by Alcoa (t.C4)
3. 300 cuts when Pfizer cuts Holland Mich. plant in late 2006 (t.C4)

12/08/2004   1 megadownsizing, totaling 4,440 lost jobs in NY Times (t) -

• Colgate to cut jobs and use savings to spur sales, by Eric Dash, NYT C1.
  Colgate-Palmolive, the consumer products company, said yesterday that it would close about a third of its factories and cut more than 4,400 jobs over the next four years as part of a major restructuring to effort to increase profit margins.
  [Each American CEO is in a competition to cut the national consumer base by cutting his own workforce = the illusion of short-term smart and longer term aggregate suicide.]
  The company plans to use the savings for advertising and product development as it seeks more robust growth in an industry that has been battered by rising raw material costs and increasingly tough competition.
  [How stupid can you get!? Trying for more robust growth by destroying jobs and wages and fueling the weakening of your domestic consumer base and your own best corporate markets (your own employees)?!]
  Colgate [is beginning] more than 100 initiatives...including the centralization of its back-office and purchasing operations and a 12% reduction of its 37,000 jobs [which comes to exactly 4,440 sacrificed jobs, and consumers]....
  [No alternative? Nonsense! The alternative is drop the melodramatic self-mutilation and just trim 12% of the corporate workweek (58 minutes a day for everyone, including top executives), re-invest overtime savings in overtime-targeted training & hiring, and keep everyone together working, earning and buying 88% as much Colgate toothpaste and Palmolive soap and detergents as before. As Lincoln Electric says, "Everyone sacrifice together, starting at the top." Whereas the current corporate "wisdom" is basically Jimmy Jones' style "Suicide, everyone else first."]