Boys and girls, standard economists have not leveled with you. They have a gigantic blind spot right in the middle of their theory. They not only neglect worktime as a control variable but they assume the workweek and lesser variables (including the workday, workmonth, workyear/vacations and worklife) are constants. They completely ignore the economic history of workweek shortening that went on worldwide for a century and a half between the late 1700s and 1940. And now, with people living longer and a smaller relative workforce, the pressures are on to eliminate mandatory retirement, i.e., to decontrol the worklife unit. Note the cover story in the 9/04/99 issue of The Economist magazine, "Let old folk work." This heightens pressure to rationalize controls on the shorter units, particularly the workweek, which, swayed by the USA, has been legislatively frozen at the arbitrary 40-hour level in most of the industrialized economies since 1940.

Standard economists' rationalization for dismissing any serious thinking about aggregate worktime, especially with regard to any heretical thoughts about (oh nooo) worksharing, is known as the Lump of Labor Fallacy critique. It's a skein of sophistry that sets up a straw man and knocks him down. They accuse worksharing advocates of assuming a fixed fund of employment (which they misname "labor") with no specific timeframe and then they knock it down in the long term. Worksharing advocates, of course, assume nothing. They observe not a fixed fund, but a shrinking fund of employment in the immediate term (Marshall's "market term") in which people are getting laid off - otherwise, there'd be no layoffs. They advocate, with Lincoln Electric, Nucor, Volkswagen and other companies who value stability, morale and a full skillset over dramatic/ heroic Rambo tactics, sharing the shrinking fund of employment and keeping everyone employed rather than putting the whole burden on a few who are fired, and then a few more, and then a few more.... In the one case, the strategy spreads and worsens the corporate downturn. In the other case, the strategy cushions and contains it.

It is this second strategy, worksharing - in tandem with automatic reinvestment thresholds - that the Timesizing approach represents.

For more details, see our campaign piece, Timesizing, Not Downsizing, which is available online from *Amazon.com and at the Harvard Square Coop, 3rd floor econ or mgmt secs, Cambridge, Mass. 02138 USA