12/01/2000  policy change - We are going to drop this as a specific everyday-watch category and bust it back to only-when-dramatic, and then we'll group it in with our Miscellaneous Evils on our Omens or Collapse page. Why? Because we just thought of a much better category that probably won't be as frequent but that is much MUCH more important, and we need to 'train our eyes' to see it better - makework. This all came about in the shower this morning (12/02) when we thought of what an appalling load of makeword is involved in sales taxes - just think of the little increments of wasted time all over the nation's retail businesses - must add up to billions of hours on the part of millions of people. And the 'captains of industry' have the unmitigated gall to talk about 'efficiency'? Ha! And lest high tech get on its high horse, consider the makework involved in the computer virus industry. Just last night the "faithful guardian of Kate's computer popped up a little alarmist screen that said "Danger! Risk of infection! Your virus checker is over a month old! Time to update!" This is basically institutionalized industrial sabotage. And probably the virus checkers are in many cases the virus writers. "Hey, Joe, we ain't had a big virus scare lately. Better get on it! What'll we call it this time?"

What we have today is nothing more than Makework Capitalism, and with timesizing we can get some real efficiency with Sharework Capitalism. And get some real human progress rolling again. We here at Timesizing.com just don't find that DVD TV and all the other cosmetic "break throughs" of technology in recent years make it for us. We still have all the big old problems, eg: under-employment (cuz our definition of "full time work" is 60-yrs obsolete), poverty (cuz we are stupid enuf to keep saying "oh I don't begrudge Bill Gates his money" - how many $ten-billions will it take before we smarten up?), health insurance, prisons.... Speaking of which, why does it matter? Why can't we just keep adding major problem-tracking indefinitely? The answer is, we only have a limited space for problems on the box menu titled "the problem vs. the timesizing solution" in the middle of our homepage. And some of these nambypamby fines and settlements are about as efficient for keeping us awake to the deterioration of our economy - and waking up others - as sales taxes are to actually getting decent revenues per manhour invested.]

11/28/2000  2 corporate settlements mentioned, totaling $19.5018m -

1. Hancock loses suit filed 17 years ago, by Scott Nelson, Boston Globe, D10.
   ...A federal court decision award[ed] more than $19.5m to Unisys Trust in a...lawsuit...filed in 1983.
   [Filed by Unisys??]
   ..\..[The] dispute involving a group annuity contract written in 1941...arose over whether Hancock, as the life insurer underwriting the group annuity, had a fiduciary responsibility for Unisys Corp.'s retirement plan..\..
   [Article gives insufficient info for 'armchair quarterbacking.' If Unisys Trust filed the suit, was it squawking because Hancock hadn't looked over its shoulder? - which would be stupid - or because Hancock screwed up on investment decisions that were in Hancock's court? - which would make sense. Maybe the court couldn't figure it out either and that's why it took 17 years.]
   John Hancock Financial Services said it will appeal....

2. 9 toy stores fined $1,800 for pricing errors as high as $20, by Bruce Mohl, Boston Globe, D6.
   ...but overall the three chains surveyed did a good job of charging customers correct prices. Of 2,500 items checked at 26 toy stores, inspectors from the state Division of Standards found that 51 scanned incorrectly. Those 51 errors resulted in a total of $181 in undercharges and $45 in overcharges. Only the overcharges resulted in fines.... Overall, the 8 Toys "R" Us stores had the lowest accuracy percentage at 97.01%. The 15 K-B Toy Stores were at 98.14%, and the 3 Disney Stores were at 99.67%....

• Tufts Health settles claims in 3 states, by Liz Kowalczyk, Boston Globe, C7.
  ...with creditors and providers in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine who were left with unpaid bills and claims when the HMO closed its money-losing New England operations in February. ...The plan has not calculated the cost of the settlement, but...one of the largest lawsuits was filed by Bath Iron Works, which will receive $14m to cover medical claims for its workers....

1. Italy's top insurer to pay $100m on holocaust-era policies, by Alessandra Stanley, NYT, A4.
   ROME...- Italy's largest insurance company, Assicurazioni Generali, has agreed to pay up to $100m to Holocaust-era policy-holders [via] the International Commission of Holocaust-Era Insurance Claims, which works on behalf of victims of the Nazi era [and] is made up of international Jewish and Holocaust survivor groups, American and European regulators, insurers and the State of Israel. The Commission will pay out claims to survivors and heirs..\..
   The accord, signed here on Wed. night [Nov. 15] is the first major settlement between European insurers and the...Commission.... Generali...is based in Trieste and owns, among other companies, Migdal, Israel's largest insurer....

2. Time Warner settles suit with Labor Department, Reuters via NYT, B3.
   ...agreed to pay $5.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by the Labor Dept. in 1998 accusing the company of illegally denying full-time workers pensions and health benefits by classifying them as temporary workers or contractors....

• Coca-Cola settles race bias lawsuit - Record $192.5m accord requires changes in employment practices, by Sarah Schafer, Boston Globe, D1.
  [Again, the Globe's version is better than its parent's version ("Coca-Cola settles racial bias case - Company to pay $156m and make broad changes" - NYT front page) with a more comprehensive number in the subhead and a simpler itemization of its components.]
  ...The world's largest soft-drink maker..\..agreed yesterday...to settle a racial discrimination suit brought by black workers and agreed to make significant changes in the way it manages, promotes, and treats its minority employees. The company...agreed to
  • pay $113m to thousands of black employees,
  • spend $43.5m to adjust its salaries and
  • pay $20m in attorneys' fees.
  • It will also spend $36m for programs to monitor its employment practices
  The settlement is the largest ever in a US race discrimination lawsuit, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC], which...was not a party [in the case]....

1. Qwest is ordered to pay $350m to AT&T, AP via NYT, C4.
   Qwest Communications International Inc. was ordered by a jury in Austin, Tex., to pay AT&T more than $350m in punitive damages...equivalent to about 75% of Qwest's 1999 profits..\..for repeatedly cutting a fiber optic phone line.... The jury awarded AT&T $1.2m in actual damages....
   [So, 350+1.2= a total of $351.2m damages.]

2. Virginia power concern settles suit, pointer digest (to A1), NYT, C1.
   The Virginia Electric Power Co., accused of violating clean air standards and contributing to acid rain and smog in the Northeast, has agreed to the settlement of a landmark lawsuit that would require it to cut emissions from 8 coal-burning plants by 70%. Officials hope the agreement will set a precedent to be followed by other power companies across the Midwest and the South.

• Deal settles suit against MP3.com - Online music service to pay record maker, by Amy Harmon, NYT, C1.
  The online music start-up company MP3.com agreed to pay $53.4m to the Universal Music Group of Seagram yesterday, in a deal approved by a federal judge minutes before the final phase of their yearlong copyright dispute was scheduled to begin.... [On its side,] Universal... agreed to buy warrants for the rights to buy about 5% of MP3.com's shares, a modest vote of confidence in the company's future....

• Affymetrix found to have infringed patent - 'Gene chip' maker may owe damages to a British rival, by Andrew Pollack, NYT, B14.
  In a decision concerning one of the most important inventions in biotechnology, a federal jury ruled yesterday that...the leading provider of [gene] chips, which are also called microarrays..\..had infringed a patent held by...Oxford Gene Technology..\..covering the so-called gene chips, which are used for the rapid analysis of genes.... Affymetrix officials say, their [Santa Clara, Calif.-based] company will have to pay damages for infringement for only the 17 months between the issuance of Oxford's patent and the acquisition of..\..a license from Oxford..\..obtained...last year when [Affymetrix] acquired a unit of Beckman Coulter Inc. that had a license....

1. Rite Aid to pay $200m to settle shareholder lawsuits, by Floyd Norris, NYT, C4.
   ...class-action lawsuits...by agreeing to pay $200m in cash and securities and by agreeing to help shareholders in their lawsuits against the company's former top management and auditors. The agreement left Martin Grass, Rite Aid's former chairman; Timothy Noonan, its former president; and Frank Bergonzi, its former chief financial officer, to fend for themselves....

2. AT&T settles patent dispute, Bloomberg via NYT, C6.
   ...with Ronald A. Katz Technology Licensing LP [over] interactive voice technology...used in AT&T's calling card, collect calling, messaging and other services..\.. AT&T...agreed to pay and undisclosed sum....

1. Civil judgment against Microsoft, by John Markoff, NYT, C6.
   A federal judge in Connecticutt issued a final judgment yesterday in a private antitrust suit...brought by Bristol Technologies, ruling that Microsoft must pay $3.7m of Bristol's legal expenses. The case centered on a "software bridge" that Bristol had developed to ease the creation of programs that could run on both the Unix operating system and Microsoft's industrial-strength counterpart, Windows NT. Bristol accused Microsoft of unfair business dealings....

2. L'Oreal S.A., NYT, C4.
   ...Paris, the largest cosmetics company in the world, agreed to settle patent infringement claims brought by TriStrata Technology Inc., Princeton, NJ...over a wrinkle-cream formula.

• 3Com agrees to pay $259m in a shareholders dispute - Trouble over the accounting for an acquisition, by Floyd Norris, NYT, B3.
  ...People who bought its stock during a 5-month period in 1997 when critics said it was concealing important information about the operations of a company it acquired that year.
  [Another cost of merger mania. Wonder how much the original merger set them back?]
  The stock plunged after the information came out but later recovered.
  [And also, did the original merger push the stock up and ifso, by how much? Maybe this is all just a wash.]
  The agreement...would be the 2nd-largest settlement ever in a class-action case that involved only one company's securities....

• World Wrestling Federation Entertainment, NYT, C4.
  ...Stamford, Conn. [will] take a $7m charge after settling a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of Owen Hart, a professional wrestler. Mr. Hart fell 78 feet to his death in May 1999 when a mechanism on a harness lowering him to the ring opened prematurely.

• Web company will sell assets to settle suit on music files, by Matt Richtel, NYT, C1.
  SAN FRANCISCO...- Scour [= mini-Napster -ed.], an Internet start-up company that was sued by media companies for letting users exchange copyrighted music and video files, has agreed to sell its assets to an online company with financial backing from the five major record labels.
  The online company, Listen.com, which operates a music search site, [yesterday] agreed to pay $5m and 527,000 shares of its stock to buy the assets of Scour.
  [Which leaves 'Scour' doing exactly what with what, exactly?]
  The company said it planned to use Scour's search technology. But...it would not operate a free-music exchange feature like that of Scour, a service that prompted the legal fight against Scour and led it to file for bankruptcy protection in October.
  The action comes one day after Napster, a free music site also sued by the industry, announced it had reached an agreement with the German media company Bertelsmann to become a fee-based service and pay royalties to the major record labels....

1. CBS agrees to settle discrimination suit, by Jim Rutenberg, NYT, C14.
   CBS has agreed to pay $8m to about 200 of its female technicians who said in a class-action lawsuit [filed in 1996] that they had been sexually harassed and discriminated against at six CBS stations.... They also said they were subjected to a work environment generally hostile to women. The women were employed as camera operators, film editors, equipment maintainers and in other technical positions....
   [CBS: Cutting-edge-equipment, Backward Sensibilities.]

2. Microsoft settles WebTV complaint, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...[from the FTC alleging that it misled consumers by saying its TV-based Internet browser gave viewers the same ability to surf the...Web as computer users..\.. Microsoft's WebTV [Networks] unit...agreed to distribute consumer-education brochures and advertising to correct [this mistaken impression]. The Microsoft unit also agreed to reimburse some consumers for long-distance charges they did not expect to incur....

• MicroStrategy settles [2] lawsuits, NYT, C6.
  ...totaling nearly $97m...filed against the company after it came under investigation for misstating its earnings since 1997....

1. Hasbro unit fined for not reporting, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, C9.
   ...Galoob Toys Inc. has agreed to pay $400,000 to settle allegations it failed to report defects and injuries associated with its Sky Dancer doll, the Consumer Safety Commission said. Galoob, which was purchased by Hasbro in Nov. 1998, failed to report 150 injuries involving the Sky Dancer, a hard plastic doll...sold nationwide from 1994 to June 2000..\..that can fly rapidly in unpredictable directions after being launched into the air.... The injuries included eye damage..., a mild concussion, a broken rib, broken teeth, and facial lacerations.... Almost 9m dolls were recalled by Galoob in June 2000....
   [Sounds like a bad concept for a toy. Boy, where do they get these 'toy' designers?]

2. Day-trading firm hit with fine, 2-year ban in Mass., by Beth Healy, Boston Globe, C5.
   State securities regulators have slapped a $25,000 fine on All-Tech Direct Inc. and ordered the New Jersey day trading firm to stop doing business in Massachusetts for two years, saying the company violated terms of an earlier disciplinary action. All-Tech failed to make certain customers stop trading on behalf of other people, including their family members, the Mass. Securities Division said yesterday. Under the order...All-Tech must return Mass. customers' securities or assets, or transfer them to another brokerage account.... The state said a "willful" violation of the latest sanctions could result in a 3-yr prison term....

• Signed, Al Hirshfeld, letter to editor by Al Hirschfeld of NYC, NYT, A28.
  As readers may know, I am a caricaturist and recently brought a lawsuit against Margo Felden Galleries, which has represented me for many years, in order to regain what I considered to be proper control over my artworks. We have settled that lawsuit and entered into a new contract replacing a 1974 agreement.
  In an Oct. 14 Arts pages article, Margo Felden was quoted as saying that our new contract is "very much the same" as the previous one. My view is different: the new contract is dramatically different from the 1974 agreement, and under it I have the control I sought over my drawings not only for exhibition of works in museums but also other rights in my works.
  [We're just taking a wild guess, but could that be Internet rights, for example? Al baby, you're a national institution and a national treasure. If Margo doesn't appreciate that and has started to play games with you, we say she has de-facto ceased representing you and is no longer worthy of your account. It's time to quietly change galleries to someone who knows how to handle a Golden Goose - let alone a national treasure.]

1. MP3.com, music group reach deal, AP via Boston Globe, C6.
   SAN DIEGO - The National Music Publisher' Assoc. and MP3.com Inc. have reached a preliminary settlement that will make more than 1m musical compositions available on the popular My.MP3.com. The 3-yr agreement calls for MP3.com to pay up to $30m to the association's licensing unit, Harry Fox Agency Inc....
   The publishing association had sued MP3.com in March over the use of its members' songs through My.MP3.com, an Internet service allowing users to listen to music from Cds they already own or which they purchase from MP3.com's retail partners. If the settlement is approved by individual Harry Fox Agency music publisher-principals, NMPA will drop the suit....
   [There's GOTTA be better ways for people to 'listen to music they already own' than tying up the Internet! This is comparable to the backwards efficiency of transferring cross-country freight from railroad trains hundreds of cars long all pulled by 2-5 diesel locomotives and drivers, to hundreds of individual diesel transport trailer trucks, hugely out-of-scale on the nation's highways, each FCE (freight care equivalent) pulled by its own fossil-fuel-burning diesel-engined cab and driver. This is but one of thousands of examples of the extreme, inefficient, and artificial makework that both public and private sectors of our economy have got into since we froze the workweek at a pre-technological level in 1940, and made a whole nation desperate to find human work to do in the face of mounting technological efficiencies and output multipliers. We should, of course, be simply sharing the vanishing work, instead of trying to deny that technology is actually efficient with brain-dead phrases like, "But technology creates more jobs than it destroys." Suuure it does. You freeze your workweek after 160 years of shortening it, and technology will force you to create more featherbedding and makework, more superfluous production and consumption, than the environment will be able to long sustain. The only question is, which will go critical first, the environment, or the extreme concentration of wealth occasioned by the desperate job insecurity of the majority of ordinary employees and their consequent failure to get pay raises at anything like the rate of profit-making allowed by the constant inflow of new technology. If neither goes critical, humanity will subspeciate as the rich continue to get richer and split off into isolated islands of different wealth levels, and the poor stay poor. Sort of like the workers and drones, or the Eloi and the Morlocks, in the simplest, two-tiered case. We're assuming it won't be allowed to go that far because of recent population-integrating choices like the American Civil War's abolition of slavery and South Africa's abolition of apartheid. But the only fully developed program to prevent it from happening in the future is Timesizing.]

2. Lockheed Martin Corp., NYT, C4.
   ...Los Angeles, had its $5m offer to settle claims accepted by about 350 residents of Burbank, Calif., who say chemicals from the company's plants made them sick.

• 7 brokerage firms are fined, Bloomberg via NYT, C15.
  Prudential Securities [$10,000], Lehman Brothers [Holdings, $37,000] and five other brokerage firms [Ryan Beck & Co., CIBC World Markets, Fleet Securities, Paragon Capital, and Wheat First Union, now called First Union Securities] were fined $213,000 by the National Assoc. of Securities Dealers [NASD] for improper handling of customer orders....
  The Assoc. said [all seven] had failed to display customer limit orders promptly when each order was at a price that would have improved the firm's best bid or offer in a given security.... [NASD's accusations] came after a SEC report in May that said [this kind of failure] was a widespread problem. The SEC said such practices often went undetected and unpunished because of lax oversight..\..
  Lehman was also accused by the Assoc. of failing to execute orders "fully and promptly" and of trading for the benefit of its own account at the same price as its customers' limit orders without fulfilling them at the same time. Lehman also failed to use "reasonable diligence" to get the best prices for customers, the Assoc. said....

• Roche and Chiron settle one dispute over virus tests, Reuters via NYT, C4.
  Roche Holding AG...agreed to buy the global semiexclusive patent rights for nucleic acid tests for HIV and the hepatitis C virus from the Chiron Corp. It gave no financial details.... The deal ended litigation between Roche and Chiron over nucleic acid patent issues, but Roche would continue to oppose Chiron's European HIV patent.

• New York State to get $25m in vitamin antitrust case, by Joseph Fried, NYT, C6.
  ...out of the $255m that six leading vitamin producers will pay to most states in the latest settlement of cases stemming from a decade-long international price-fixing scheme, the state's attorney general said yesterday.... The total settlement is divided into three parts:
  1. $118m to 21 states for higher costs to consumers as a result of the price-fixing;
  2. $30m to 47 states for hgher charges the states themselves paid for vitamin products; and
  3. $107m to businesses, like farms and retail stores, that were penalized by higher wholesale prices for products containing vitamins....
  Officials said that the six companies agreeing to make the payments were
  1. Hoffman-LaRoche, a unit of the Roche Group of Switzerland;
  2. BASF, based in Germany;
  3. Aventis of France;
  4. and thee Japanese companies, Takeda,
  5. Eisai and
  6. Daiichi.
  Most of these companies settled a criminal antitrust case brought by the U.S. Justice Dept. by agreeing last year to pay a total of nearly $1B in fines, an amount the department said at the time represented the largest criminal fines in American history. And in another settlement that a federal court approved in March, all the companies agreed to pay a total of $242m to purchasers of bulk vitamins, including makers of food, beverages and animal feed. But in those settlements "not one penny was to go to consumers"....
  [So, though it's none too clear from this rather Merke-y article, we gather that it mentions three separate totals here and there, namely, 255+1000+242= $1497m grand total= $1.497B.]

• [C.R. Bard gets $13.3m in settlement, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, D16.
  ...[A Murray Hill, NJ-based] maker of medical devices...yesterday received a payment...from [Natick, Mass.-based] rival Boston Scientific Corp. in connection with a [1997] patent-infringement case [involving] an esophageal dilation catheter....

• Fox News and TheStreet.com reach settlement on lawsuit, AP via NYT, B3.
  ...against TheStreet.com and its co-counder James J. Cramer, after the [latter] canceled a program on the Fox News Channel [after Fox took exception to Cramer touting his own shares on Fox - and this isn't the first incident].... The terms of the settlement include a promise by TheStreet.com not to produce a similar show for another network before May 1, 2001 [and by] Mr. Cramer to make only occasional appearances on other networks until then. TheStreet.com will also make a contribution of $10,000 in Fox's name to the Eric Breindel Foundation, a group that gives journalism awards. Mr. Cramer will make a similar donation of an undisclosed amount.
  [This Cramer's a beaut. Investors beware.]

• American Home to pay U.S. for production violations - FDA finds problems at 2 drug factories, by Melody Petersen, NYT, C18.
  American Home Products...agreed to pay the federal government $30m after regulators found that the company had repeatedly violated manufacturing regulations at two of its drug factories...in Marietta, Pa., and Pearl River, NY....

1. Big hospital manager settles two fraud suits, by Kurt Eichenwald, NYT, A22.
   The Quorum Health Group, the nation's largest hospital management company, has agreed in principle to pay $95.5m, in civil penalties to settle two lawsuits that accused it of defrauding federal health care programs like Medicare. Both suits involved an arcane accounting practice known as cost reporting, which has been at the center of widespread criminal and civil investigations in the hospital industry....

2. Mitsubishi Motors is fined, by Miki Tanikawa, NYT, W1.
   A Tokyo court has ordered [them] to pay a fine of...about $37,000, the maximum penalty, for failing to report repairs of defective automobiles to the Transport Ministry and failing to disclose the cases to the public. The company eventually recalled 620,000 cars and trucks.

• SEC settles cases with 4 brokerages, Reuters via Boston Globe, E2.
  ...over charges they had inadequate procedures for supervising brokers with questionable backgrounds working in remote branch offices...
  1. Signal Securities Inc. of Fort Worth,
  2. Prospera Financial Services Inc. of Dallas,
  3. D.E. Frey & Co. Inc. of Denver, and
  4. First Colonial Securities Group Inc. of Boca Raton, Fla....
  Each supervisory failure...involved a broker with a disciplinary history or one about whom customers had complained. The brokers were involved in [e.g.,] unauthorized...trading, stealing more than $3.5m in investors' money, and "churning" [=] excessive trading in customers' accounts that can generate big commissions.

1. Aetna agrees to settlement, AP via NYT, C31.
   ...The nation's largest insurer..\..has agree to pay $82.5m to settle a class-action shareholder lawsuit accusing the insurer of misleading investors [in] failing to disclose problems that the company, based in Hartford, was having in mid-1997 relating to its purchase of U.S. Healthcare....
   [Here's another area of takeover-related problems besides downsizing.]

2. Testing lab admits obstructing probe, AP via Boston Globe, E2.
   ...Caleb Brett USA Inc. agreed to pay a $1m fine \for\ trying to derail a federal investigation into how doctored data allowed up to 300m gallons of substandard gasoline to be sold in the New York metropolitan area....

• Credit card company settles over ads, Bloomberg via NYT, C8.
  The MBNA Corp. agreed today to pay as much as $7.8m to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing the company, the world's No. 3 credit card issuer [after ? ?], of luring consumers with misleading advertisements about low-rate cards. MBNA will pay up to $6.5m - plus $1.28m in lawyers fees - to reimburse customers deceived by ads about how much they would save by transferring their credit card balances to an MBNA account, consumer lawyers said in federal court [because] the bank's ads did not disclose that new purchases would not carry the low interest rate promoted in the ads. Under the settlement, the 1.8m people who signed up for the 6.9% introductory rate will receive $3.57 to make up for the lost savings promised.
  [Well, they won't receive it unless they're simply mailed a check for that amount, because if they just get mailed a couple of pages of small print ostensibly telling them how to apply for the refund - and possibly that they should dig up and send in copies of their credit card statements around that period - they ain't gonna bother for an average of $3.57 - and as usual, the only people who are going to make out on this 'righteous crusade' are the lawyers.]

• Ex-chief to pay bulk of claims for Sotheby's, by Vogel & Blumenthal, NYT, front page.
  Moving quickly to settle civil claims that it had cheated auction buyers and sellers for years, the board of Sotheby's last night approved payment of its half of a $512m settlement.... The bulk [$156m] of the Sotheby's payment [$256m] will come from its majority shareholder and former chairman, A. Alfred Taubman.... In addition to the $256m that each house [Sotheby's and Christie's] must pay, the two [auction] houses must split the costs of notifying buyers and sellers [and] administrative expenses....

9/23/2000  1 corporate fine mentioned, totaling $45.5m -

• Judge orders pilots' union to make payment to airline,
  Bloomberg via NYT, B5.
  ...The Air Line Pilots Association..\..at American Airlines and its leaders must pay the airline $45.5m in damages for ignoring a judge's order to end a 1999 work stoppage, a federal court has ruled.... The [amount] represents how much..\..Judge Joe Kendal of Federal District Court in Dallas...determined that the job action cost American between the time he issued his back-to-work order and the time the job action ended..\..
  [Hey, at least he didn't make it retroactive, as so many over-zealous rulings are doing these days (see for example the first of today's "glimmers" - 9/23/2000). However, it should be completely outside the Courts' power to interfere with strikes and work stoppages, and eventually it will be. Why? See commentary below.]
  During the job action, which occurred in Feb. 1999, pilots called in sick to protest American's acquisition of [regional] Reno Airlines Inc., a move they saw as a threat to their pay and jobs. The stoppage forced American to cancel 6,600 flights and cost AMR about $250m....
  [As the global technology infusion and labor glut intensify, employers globally get more and more spoiled, bored, short-sighted and self-destructive. They get "beyond" day-to-day management and need the stimulus of Big Deals, buying and selling subsidiaries and whole companies, jerking around hundreds and thousands of people, to support their weakening self-importance.
  [Unfortunately employers' self-destructiveness takes employees down with them. Employees repeatedly try to stop and reverse the process, but the system is stacked against them. In this case we have an example of an unjust fine levied by a Court outside its powers - as those powers will have to be defined in the long term if there is to be a "long term." The current global holocaust of mergers and downsizings will eventually spread the current decade-long Japanese depression across the globe, as the rich tighten their grip on their unimaginable hoards of spending power without the time or need to spend it and get it back into circulation, and the people they have drained it from, starve and die - all for lack of a sensible and flexible centrifuge mechanism like Timesizing. It's not even a matter of redistribution. It's simply a matter of reinvestment in your own markets at the relatively colossal levels necessary for sustainability.
  [It may be the dawn of the Third Millennium but humanity still has no market-oriented guidance system for targeting and sizing that relatively huge reinvestment process. However, that reinvestment is best guided, initially, by the market-determined incidence of overtime and that's exactly how Timesizing does it.]

1. Bayer to pay $14m in pricing case, AP via NYT, C6.
   A U.S. unit of the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer A.G. has tentatively agreed to pay federal and state governments...to resolve accusations that it lied about the wholesale prices of certain drugs, including those to treat AIDS....

2. Paper makers settle price-fixing lawsuit, Bloomberg via NYT, C28.
   ...Kimberly-Clark, which is based in Dallas and is the world's top tissue maker \e.g.\ Kleenex facial tissue and Scott paper towels - and other commercial tissue manufacturers [e.g.] Fort James Corp., North America's No.1 tissue maker, and Georgia Pacific, the No.2 U.S. forest products company..\..have agreed to settle a price-fixing lawsuit for $56.2m.... The suit asserted that [they] had conspired to raise the price for tissues, toilet paper, paper towels, paper napkins and other items.... Plaintiffs in the class-action settlement..."substantial commercial entities"..\..will receive $18m in cash and $38.2m in coupons redeemable for 15% of the cost of commercial tissue products....

• DaimlerChrysler settles over recall, AP via Boston Globe, C2.
  ...paid federal regulators $400,000 to settle a dispute over whether [they] delayed two recalls last year...one of the largest penalties ever collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. [In] the first...a seal could degrade and lead to leaks [in the fuel line of certain LH sedans]. The other recall...involved a clutch line problem on [certain] Dodge Rams.... NHTSA determined that DaimlerChrysler [knew about the problems] but did not announce a recall...for a few months.... No injuries resulted from the defects.

• RealNetworks and Streambox settle lawsuit, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
  ...Streambox Inc., [accused] of violating the copyrights of content providers \has\ settled a lawsuit \with\ the no. 1 maker of software for playing video and audio online... Streambox has agreed to modify future software products [to comply] with RealNetworks' copy protection technology.... Streambox, which makes software programs that allow DVD-quality video to be delivered to cable...and DSL modems, will also pay RealNetworks an undisclosed sum. Both companies are based in Seattle.

• FTC wins $37.5m verdict in Web site billing scam, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, C2.
  ...against three Calif.-based adult Web site operators...Kenneth and Teresa Taves and Dennis Rapaport and their businesses J.K. Publications Inc., MJD Service Corp., Herbal Care Inc., and Discreet Bill Inc. The defendants bought access to lists of more than 3m creditcard numbers from Charter Pacific Bank in Agoura Hills, Calif. [but] instead of using the lists to confirm that potential customers had valid cards, the defendants charged cardholders for services they never used....

• Harman [International Industries] ordered to pay Bose $5.7m to settle suit, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, C9.
  ...A maker of high-end stereo systems under such brand names as Infinity and JBL said a judge ordered it to pay...damages to rival Bose Inc. in a patent infringement lawsuit over...plastic ports incorporated in some stereo speakers....
  [Then gee whiz, maybe there really is something special about Bose speakers! Naughty Harman!]

1. Provident [Mutual Life Insurance] to pay $45m in policyholders' suit, Reuters via NYT, B3.
   ...to 200,000 of its policyholders who say they were misled over the performance of their life insurance policies. [They] bought nonvariable cash-value life insurance policies between 1984 and 1996 [in which they say,] among other things, that the insurer misrepresented the cost of the policies..\.. The settlement is the latest in a series of payouts by life insurers, totaling several billion dollars, concerning accusations that insurers misled customers, or sold them inappropriate products, in the 1980's and 1990's....
   [Note the gradual demise of the principle of "caveat emptor" = "let the buyer beware" - in other words, it's the buyers' problem if they're stupid enough or sucker enough to get rooked. Guess the idea is that sellers are getting so smart and so technical and complicated, that buyers can't reasonably be expected to figure it out any more. Notice that this diminishes greatly the ability of buyers to validly choose between different products in the marketplace in many areas. Buying melons at the supermarket that you can still feel and smell is one thing, but then there's the complexity of modern automobile tires where you need Consumers' Reports (mentioned as early as 1927 in Arthur Dahlberg's "Utopia through Capitalism") and government action when incidents of failure mount up to force a product recall (as with Bridgestone), and then there's predatory lending where mortgage companies shake down vulnerable buyers where you need massive government intervention. As these market failures mount up, there goes the adequacy of the totally unregulated "free market" and of Ayn Rand's (and the Libertarians') brave new world. On the other hand, you can certainly get hyperprotectionism - the stifling effect of too much, too soon regulation. So, an economic design must take care to inject the minimum necessary regulation at each step. Timesizing does so by means of an initial phase that lets the participating population define the problem(s) and pace and size the solution(s).]

2. Microsoft told to pay million to small rival [Bristol Technologies] - Judge in Connecticut talks of 'classic bait-and-switch' tactics, by John Markoff, NYT, B1.
   ...Bristol [which developed] a "software bridge" intended to ease the creation of programs that could run on both the Unix operating system and...Windows NT, ...accused Microsoft of an unfair effort to change the terms of their business relationship after Windows NT gained a foothold in the market and Microsoft lost its incentive to foster the use of Unix....

3. $250,000 fine [vs. Merrill Lynch] for being short on capital for 3 days, Reuters via NYT, B3.
   ...in 1998, a violation of the [New York Stock] Exchange's rules to protect investor funds. A "computational error" caused Merrill's broker-dealer subsidiary to fall short of the exchange's capital requirements by $962m-3B in the midst of the Asia financial crisis in October 1998, the Big Board [=NYSE] said. The Merrill unit was required to have at least $3B in cash on hand to handle noncustomer-account activities like making markets in stocks, purchasing Treasury securities and financing ongoing operations.

4. Employer's English-only policy brings a settlement of $192,500, NYT, A9.
   A St. Louis manufacturer [Watlow Electric Mfg] agreed...to settle a civil rights suit brought by the Equal Opportunity Coommission on behalf of eight Hispanic workers who were required to speak only English while on the assembly line.
   [Could it not be dangerous if they didn't? Could they not then be sued by OSHA for unsafe practices? This is starting to shape up as a Catch 22 = damned if you do, damned if you don't, no-win situation for companies = government over-regulation and micromanagement that puts businesses in an impossible position.]
   The settlement was the largest involving an English-only policy since the agency began tracking the practice among employers four years ago.... There is no federal law specifically prohibiting businesses from adopting English-only rules. Rather, the EEOC has sued to overturn some by invoking Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a provision that bars employment discrimination based on national origin. While the agency deems some such policies to have a sufficient basis - to help maintain job safety by ensuring clear communication, for instance - the suit against Watlow said that its employees had been unfairly disciplined for speaking Spanish to one another. One woman, it said, was fired simply for greeting another employee in Spanish....
   [Yes, but what was the background? This could have been a situation where the non-Spanish-speaking employees were being frozen out of a sub-group in a taunting way. We would argue that this is an improper extension of Title VII and an example of suffocating government micromanagement. The EEOC needs to get its big nose out of this area.]
   Watlow conceded no wrongdoing, saying it was settling to avoid costly litigation. Ed Jepson, a lawyer for the company, said that a third of the Batavia [Ill.] plant's workers were Hispanic and that the English-only rule had been adopted to improve communication on the assembly line. It never applied to any worker who was away from the line, Mr. Jepson said. "The company was having trouble with productivity and quality control because people weren't talking to each other," he said. "This is a company that values diversity and encourages diversity"..\..
   [So a company that is trying to do the right thing, and trying hard, is getting burned.]
   "Companies are finally learning a lesson about what they can and can't do with respect to requiring workers to speak English," said Jose J. Behar, the agency's main lawyer on the case....
   [We suspect that what Watlow has learned is, not to bend over so far to hire minorities, and if these kinds of costs repeat, to close its U.S. operations and move all the associated jobs out of the country - possibly to a Hispanic economy such as Mexico where everyone can be expected to speak the same language without government involvement of any kind.]
   The suit...stemmed from a 1997 staff meeting where management distributed a two-page "performance initiative," said Mr. Behar, of the EEOC. Among ways to improve productivity, the document listed a ban on employees' speaking anything but English while working. The move provoked instant opposition from a handful of employees, three of whom were suspended and eventually fired for refusing to comply, Mr. Behar said.
   [Behar is condemning himself out of his own mouth.]
   Ultimately, he said, all but one of the eight workers involved in the suit left the company.
   [Another issue here is the nature of work. Work is where you give up control of your time in exchange for money. That's why we need to limit worktime and respect those limits - to get balance - to guarantee a large and expanding time in our lives when WE have control and not somebody else. Work is where we are tied in to other people and aren't just living for ourselves. Note the article implies that a majority of the Hispanic workers at Watlow understood this and had no problem with it. The long-term result of this over-zealous and over-extended application of a law barring employment discrimination based on national origin is a louder "giant sucking sound" as American jobs fly out of the country because of politically correct catering to the oversensitive and unrealistic expectations of a minority of newcomers - a case of the "squeaking wheel" getting far too much "grease" to operate smoothly.]

Click here for corporate fines/settlements in -
May-Aug/2000