So now it's just a matter of taking worksharing to the federal level and redesigning it from temporary to permanent funding. This can be done by shifting its financing from the unemployment insurance fund and the associated strain on taxpayers which gets worse with every new wave of worksaving technology as we try to maintain a pretechnological 40-hour workweek forever, and instead, shift financing to a 100% corporate tax on overtime profits (relative to hiring more employees) tied to a 100% tax exemption for reinvestment of overtime profits in overtime-targeted hiring, and training if needed. First we use this approach to enforce the widely ignored current standard of 40-hours a week. Then we loosen up that 40-hour figure which has been rigidly frozen since 1940 despite waves of technology, and adjust it gradually downward at a rate of an hour or two a year every year that unemployment is too high to squeeze out natural, market-demanded employment on everyone like toothpaste. If the workweek gets too short to manage, we alternate weeks. This process gets government and the taxpayer OUT of their current roles of artificial employer and charity of last resort (or has it become first resort?!). Instead, it marketizes these roles - they become the job creator and trainer of last resort only in cases of private-sector failure = where a company refuses to reinvest its overtime profits in hiring and training. In these cases, government and the taxpayer step in to do the OT-targeted job creation including any needed training that the company should be doing - and they tax the non-complying company at 100% of their overtime profits in order to fund that OT-targeted job creation.

The proliferation and maintenance of the state programs into the federal-program era may be useful and even essential. States with more acute un- and under-employment can lower their workweeks and initiate reinvestment in jobs at a faster rate than the federal program. It's OK for a state workweek to be lower than the federal workweek level, but it's not OK for a state workweek to be higher than the federal level. In other words, as the federal workweek adjusts downward, it carries all state and territory workweeks down along with it. (12/17/2009/ph3 drawing on suggestions in Timesizing, Not Downsizing, 1998)