Collapse - 10/2001

Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

Collapse trends - October, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

10/30/2001 symptom-signalling headlines -

More dispiriting reports on Japanese economy, by Ken Belson, NYT, W1.
...Industrial output in Japan was a stark 12.7% lower in September 2001 than in September 2000, and fell 2.9% from August, the government said today....
With short-term interest rates near zero and the government reluctant to spend more to whet demand, the Bank of Japan...expects Japan's economy, the second largest after that of the United States [but for how much longer?], to contract as much as 1.2% in the year ending March 31, 2002, and slip another 0.5% the next year, with no reappearance of growth before September. The bank also expects consumer prices to fall 1% this year and another 1% next year....
[Ano, declining output and deflation - a classic replay of the Great Depression. Japan, probably the world's most advanced technological society in terms of every conceivable dimension except air pollution control (some of their butt-washing WC's have dashboards that rival 747s', some of their omnipresent vending machines will even wash your eyeglasses, and many of their bus and subway stops are fitted with indicators of your bus or train's progress once it gets three stops away) is leading the world into the kind of depression we are all sinking into because we refuse to understand that long working hours are dysfunctional in a technological world. And government spending won't whet demand any more than it did in 1930s USA - and we can't risk another world war in a nuclear/bioweapon age. Japan either wakes up and takes over world leadership from France in centrifuging the vanishing work (and spending power), or continues to lead the workoholic robot-competing world down the drain of high unused output capacity and low effective demand. And the most flexible and market-oriented work-sharing, income-centrifuging program design yet available is Timesizing.]
Japan labor woes, Bloomberg via NYT, BG, F2.
Japan's jobless rate rose 0.3% to a record 5.3% in September, posting its biggest increase in more than 34 years as manufacturers and retailers cut tens of thousands of staff. 400,000 jobs disappeared from the world's second-biggest economy last month.
[...only a fraction of them specifically reported in the NY Times or the Boston Globe. As Reuther retorted to Ford's "let's see you unionize these robots," "Let's see you sell them cars!"]
The loss of jobs threatens to overwhelm a $3B government plan, approved last week, to hire 450,000 forestry workers, parking officers, and teachers' aides.
[Pathetic. Heroic government efforts and epic impact on taxpayers merely to maintain an obsolete, rigid historical accident of an overblown workweek in a technological age. Wake up, Japan, and lead the world again! You only tanked when you departed from Deming and your own lifetime employment and started copying our suicidally short-sighted downsizing in the late 1980s. It's time to work smart, not hard, and working smart in a technological age requires flexibly sharing the vanishing work (and spreading the funneling income). Timesizing, not downsizing.]

10/27/2001 symptoms - a cluster of depression earmarks -

An economic stimulus bill with corporations in mind, by Gretchen Morgenson via NYT, C1.
[More taxpayer money to concentrate in unspendable megawads in the overstuffed pockets of the top income brackets = the whole reason for downturn in the first place.]
Japan: Deflation continues, Reuters via NYT, C2.
[U.S., behold your future - and your past, 1929-41.]
New-home sales hit lowest rate in over year, by Michael Rosenwald via BG, C1.
[Makes a nice pair with yesterday's 'existing home sales plunge.']

10/26/2001 symptoms - a smorgasbord of depression signals -

US economic woes worsen - Good orders fall; jobless benefits rate up, AP via Boston Globe, C2.
Existing home sales plunge 11.7% in Sept. - Mass. sees figure plummet 32% as attacks take toll, by Michael Rosenwald, BG, C1.
CEOs: It's recession, Bloomberg via BG, C2.
WTO says trade growth will be virtually stagnant, by Elizabeth Olson, NYT, W1.
["straining for positive spin" dept. -]
Economic data suggest slower recovery, by David Leonhardt, NYT, C1.
[but...what recovery?]
["braindead headline" dept. -]
Despite dismal economic news, shares post solid gains, by Michael Brick, NYT, C7.
[Will the headline writer please explain how stock gains can be "solid" in a dismal economy? This is only a demonstration of the fact that the top brackets have sooo much concentrated income, they have no alternative but the mattress.]
[back to "straining for positive spin" dept. -]
As employment crisis grows, second [Twin Towers] job fair helps some, by Edward Wyatt, NYT, A19.

10/23/2001 symptoms -

Japan: Trade surplus falls, by Ken Belson, NYT, W1.
...18.3% in September from a year ago, the 15th consecutive decline, as exports to the U.S., Europe and Asia plunged. Shipments of machinery, audiovisual equipment and metals declined sharply after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, when air and sea transportation was temporarily disrupted. Exports fell 11.1% in September, the largest slide in more than two years.
[Time for Japan to kick the habit of export dependency and strengthen its own domestic markets - with Timesizing - a new technology for sharing the vanishing employment and the funneling income as technology takes over more and more routine human tasks, and ever more complicated forms of routine tasks. Japan's problem? The Ford-Reuther paradox - Ford, "Let's see you unionize (i.e., give better pay and benefits to) these robots!" Reuther, "Let's see you sell them cars." Funny, back in 1913 or so Henry Ford pioneered in helping his employees afford their own products with a breathtakingly above-market wage of $5/day. Some time between then and the later 19teens when he was writing anti-Semitic stuff in his Dearborn Independent that was later incorporated into Mein Kampf by Hitler, Ford must have lost it.]
Focus: Part-time workers get bad treatment, by Masuzu Miyazaki, Kyodo News Service via AP-NY-10-22-01 0908EDT via AOLNews.
[This is the fifth...of five new focus articles on the unstable employment situation in Japan in the face of the highest postwar jobless rate of 5%.]
TOKYO...- When her contract was up for renewal in September last year, a...woman part-timer...in the information technology field with a major corporation..\..heard her boss say, "A part-time worker has no right to speak on working conditions when even regular employees don't know what's going to happen to them."...
The company issued last year a notice of change in working conditions to part-timers saying their working hours would be shortened and that they would no longer receive retirement pay or pay raises.... By then, she had worked at the company for 11 years as a part-timer. Although her hourly wage was about one-third that of regular employees, she had the same work load and same working hours.
[Huh? Then how come she's a "part" timer? (Maybe this Japanese reporter just doesn't know the term "temp"?) And how come she's willing to be such a patsy? - unless...jobs are really tough to find, and employees really easy to find, in Japan - and therefore the statutory workweek, if any, far too long for the prevailing level of worksaving technology. (All true.)]
The job market for nonregular company employees [ie: temps?] is rapidly growing as firms are placing part-timers and those on temporary [bingo] employment in jobs that regular employees previously held.... There are many temporary workers who handle the same volume of work and put in the same amount of work hours as regular employees under unfavorable conditions..\..
[Ah, sooo familiar. This is exactly how U.S. employers have been inducing a recession that's finally materialized. And Japanese employers were doing fine with lifetime employment but then they started copying US employers' stupid ways and the Japanese recession materialized a lot faster - a decade before the US one. The whole "revoltin' development" illustrates that we don't really have any choice about workweek reduction - it's happening anyway but in the worst possible fashion.]
A survey by the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecoms revealed that the number of people working in temporary employment...as of February this year...represented a rise of about 36% from the same period last year. The number of part-time workers, meanwhile, was up 7%.... A civic group offering a temporary worker network said those in temporary employment earned 1,704 yen [$15?] per hour in 1994 but the amount dropped to 1,465 yen [$13?] this year....
The reforms Koizumi advocates call for the promotion of diversification in employment....
[Irrelevant, unless he means versatility in labor, i.e., skill versatility in employees. And then the question arises, where are employees supposed to get the time and the money for diversified training, if the developed economy with the second-longest annual working hours (after US) that's been in the tank for ten years? Koizumi needs some such program as Timesizing's overtime-to-training conversion, where the incidence of overtime itself both targets, triggers, paces, and finances on-the-job training. You can't just increase the burden on those with the least resources and expect anything to change. Is Koizumi at all familiar with that grand old piece of American stupidity, the "unfunded mandate"?]
A[nother] temporary female worker...was abruptly told last March that her hourly pay would be slashed from 1,740 yen to 1,300 yen. She had been working in a government office in Tokyo's Kasumigaseki district. Her temporary staff employment agency told her that "bidding prices had drastically dropped due to price competition." The official [told her] she had no alternative but to change her job if she did not want to take the pay cut.
[..If there was any job to change to. Was there? -]
She moved to a new temporary workplace but, when she completed a three-month term of work, she did not get her contract renewed.
[Guess not.]
"I don't get angry any more (because) I am too busy looking for my next job," she said.
[Hmm, Apr-May-Jun ... she's been looking since June-July??? There really are no jobs. No demand for employees. Plus her wording implies she used to get angry. Maybe that was part of her problem in a society where women just don't get angry. It isn't done. Men don't either except in samurai movies and occasional shouting matches after traffic accidents.]
Keiko Tani, deputy chief of Women Union Tokyo, a union that is open to [unemployed?] individuals...warns: "(If companies) thrust pains upon the weak, they would continue the trend toward fewer children and cool off consumption, leading eventually to a social loss."
[Keiko, you don't have to wait that long. Companies are thrusting burdens on the many powerless who are powerless because they are too many - for the number of jobs at the 40-hour-plus workweek level. And so while the media call for more consumption, the vast majority of Japanese just don't have the money to spend. They're not saving. And they're not being contrary. They just don't have the money after the captains of Japanese industry tossed out lifetime employment and started in with dowsizing. Now they've got the same stupid imbalance as US - fewer and fewer overworked and more and more underemployed and unemployed. And those that are still employed are scared into working such long hours that they don't have time to spend their money anyway. No time for vacations or shopping. Gotta keep trying to prove you're indispensable. You're important because you're overworked. Pathetic. France cut to a 35-hour workweek for big companies and their leisure industries and bookstalls are booming. They're the most resistant to the current downturn in Europe. They are demonstrating the general direction of The Solution here. They're only demonstrating a rigid and simplistic form of it but that's better than any other economy is doing. The most advanced and flexible form of The Solution is Timesizing.]

10/22/2001 weekend symptoms -

[A cheerleading "survey" firm strains to make a silk purse out of sows' ears.]
The tough get going! say 90,000 U.S. manufacturing insiders, PRNewswire 10/21/2001 15:00 EDT via AOLNews.
CHICAGO...- Despite the continuing bleak news about the U.S. economy, International Survey Research found that a 90,000 person sample of U.S. manufacturing employees registered confidence in the future of their company.
[And then they go on to contradict that by saying that only 50,400 (56%) registered such confidence. What a crock -]
The study revealed that 56% of employees are not "worried about the company's future," a 5%...improvement over a year ago.
[Then check the next contradictory statements -]
It has been well established [by U.S.-sponsored surveys - ed.] that U.S. employees are the most productive on earth. They also work more hours per year than any other culture.
[Ah no, lots of third-world nations have longer hours annually. "Work hard, not smart" Americans only work longer hours that any other country in the developed world. And if Americans were really the most productive in a way that counts (the most efficient), there'd be no need for them to work more hours per year than any other culture. Anybody can produce a lot by working long hours. The message of long hours is, Americans are not efficient workers and they don't have job security, because chronic anxiety can be the only reason for such compulsive, family&community-dissing behavior during an age of unprecedented work-saving technology. Only the truly efficient can produce a lot by working short hours. And watch how this bizarre survey outfit strains to put a triumphal and universal spin on a braindead "don't rock the boat" response of only 44% of returned surveys -]
So when 44% of the manufacturing insiders in the world's most productive economy believe their "companies are doing an effective job of responding to changes in the marketplace," it seems clear that although the going did indeed get tough, the tough got going....
[First off, the conclusion has nothing to do with the premise. Secondly, if American companies were doing an effective job of responding to changes in the marketplace, changes dominated by the burgeoning of labor-saving technology, then American companies would have the shortest annual working hours in the developed world instead of the longest, and they'd have the smallest prison population instead of the largest in the developed world, since the crime rate reflects under-employment and scarcity of training.]

10/20/2001 symptoms -

Japan supermarket losses, by Ken Belson, NYT, C2.
Japan's largest supermarket, Daiai Inc., lost 3.9B yen ($32.2m) in the six months ended Aug. 31, as shoppers continued to forsake its groceries for discount and convenience stores.... Three other large Japanese chains have closed in the last 18 months.

10/19/2001 symptoms -

Students graduate to uncertainty - Firms trim campus recruiting following attacks, downturn, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, C1.
...The nation's unemployment rate hovers at 4.9%, a level that doesn't reflect the bulk of post-attack layoffs....
[From chart -]
Employers expect to hire 19.7% fewer new college graduates in 2001-02 than they hired in 2000-01, according to a report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers [NACE]. ...Decreases by region:
West 44.8%
Northeast 18.5%
Midwest 17.6%
South 7.3%
Source: Poll of 439 employers conducted between 7/23 and 8/25...by NACE....
[Compare cover article of Boston Sunday Globe's Careers 2001 section, "Get noticed - Today's tight market means more competition for fewer jobs," by Michael Rosenwald, 10/21/2001 BG, 3.]

10/14/2001 weekend symptoms -

[Diane Lewis is losing it, featuring the race to the bottom -]
Survey: S. Koreans put in most work time, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, J2.
[Diane Lewis is supposedly a labor-friendly reporter but here she is asking exactly the wrong question -]
Who works longer hours?...
[And featuring the rhetoric of the short-sighted who have forgotten that the most basic freedom is free time -]
"In free market nations like Taiwan, where there is a strong entrepreneurial spirit, long work weeks are the norm," said Tom Miller, group senior VP of RoperASW and director of the global consumer study.
[Of course, he then slips and reveals that long hours are actually characteristic of economic anxiety -]
"In countries like Turkey and Egypt, economic survival often depends on working long hours."...
[And so it does in sweatshop- and slave-based economies too, Tom. We have captured the data from the accompanying chart on our looong workweeks page.]

10/13/2001 symptoms -

Employers 'using attack to shed unwanted staff', by Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles, The Independent (UK) 12 Oct 2001 via RadioTony.
[Takes a Brit to get honest enough to disclose the extent of emergency timesizing throughout our economy? -]
...Across the hospitality industry, anywhere between one and three million people are estimated to have lost their jobs. Even those who are still nominally working have had their hours cut from a "full" 40 hours [our quotes - ed.] to the equivalent of just two or three days a week. Most are either immigrants with limited prospects for finding other jobs, or former welfare recipients who cannot go back to the old regime of state subsistence [i.e., subsidies, i.e., welfare] because it has been abolished [i.e., time-capped]. These are the makings of a major social and economic crisis.
What both unions and respected economic number crunchers are beginning to suspect, however, is that 11 September was not the inevitable trigger for lay-offs so much as a pretext to shed workers that employers had been itching to get rid of anyway.
[And even so, there is a grimly useful side to this tragic chain of events. We had been in a downward spiral that the media and "experts" were denying - partly out of fear of worsening it. We were like the management consultants' "frog in the water" story where the frog jumps in a pot of cool or even warm water on the stove and, never alerted by sudden discomfort, stays in till he boils to death. Sept. 11 has created a sudden discomfort, and alerted, the "frog" now has a better chance of jumping out of the water in time to save himself. The problem, of course, is that we are back in the same kind of "expert"+ media ignorance and denial of the deep-structure problem as existed in 1929, when only " four guys" knew what was going on and they couldn't sway it. The underlying problem is that the concentration of income and wealth has passed a point of diminishing returns so that henceforth, "the more concentration, the less circulation." But something seems to be blocking general research into, and dissemination of information about, this problem, even though in the form of the "marginal efficiency of capital" etc., it was an oft-mentioned corollary of the neo-classical economics of marginalism, which was independently invented by at least five economists between 1850 and 1890 (Gossens, Jevons, Walras, Menger and Marshall). The block stems from what Fred Hirsch's book "Social Limits to Growth" would call the competition for "positional goods." In other words, there's a huge humanity-wide pecking order that gets visible only near the top, and the "usefulness" of uncapped income and wealth, despite its unspendable vastness (e.g., Bill Gates' $50-55,000,000,000 currently, is to stake out a position near the top of this pecking order). Timesizing.com accommodates the "need" for such an uncapped dimension of competition by nudging it over into a still-safe area, the area of reinvestable income and wealth. This nudging is accomplished in Phase Two and Phase Three of the Timsizing program. And initially it is hours-based, though eventually it becomes directly currency-based. In other words, in the Timesizing program, you can work, or your corporation can work you if you're willing, any number of hours per week up to all 168 if and only if your overtime earnings and the firm's overtime advantage is completely reinvested in making the overtime unnecessary in future (i.e., if and only if it is reinvested in training and hiring in the areas affected by overtime). So what we have called the "area of exponential competition" moves from the concentration of personal unaccountable income and wealth at the levels that make Osama bin Laden (and Bill Gates if, God forbid, he should get religion and get certain enough of his opinions to kill for them) to a concentration of income and wealth that is accountable to a corporate mission. And of course, corporation missions have startup accountability to government at the time of incorporation and ongoing responsibility to markets. Bin Laden is accountable only to a "black market"; that is, a market which is officially denied by every government, but unofficially supported by many Arabs (speaking Arabic as a first language) and Muslims (following Islam in non-Arab speaking economies such as Pakistan and Indonesia), and possibly by many others among such groups as neo-Nazis, skinheads, anarchists, and militia-members like McVeigh. Black markets of some kind are always going to exist, and the only effective response to them is the response of Reagan to terrorism. Quit wringing your hands and "give terrorism an address" becomes "Assign black markets the closest national-economy address you can" - and apply pressure to that economy/ies.]
The airline and the hotel industries were both [already] hurting because of the slide in economic fortunes that began last year.

10/12/2001 symptoms -

As earnings plunge, the market's P/E ratio sets a record, by Floyd Norris, NYT, C1.
The bubble burst a long time ago, and now stock market valuations are far more reasonable. So goes the Wall Street line.
But a look at the numbers raises questions about that happy conclusion. The price-earnings ratio of the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index reached the highest level ever yesterday, at 35.99. That figure, based on reported profits over the last 12 months, exceeded the record of 35.82 set on April 12, 1999.
How can that be? Share prices are down a lot from the peak in 2000, but so are profits....
[And even so, people have been buying stocks the last few days and driving the stock market back up. Why? We subscribe to the belief that - they have no alternative. We've concentrated sooo much money in sooo few hands, proportionally, in this country, that there's no alternative to the Giant Money Sponge, the stock market. But in 1929-1932 and beyond, there were many such stock market "recoveries." When will we ever learn? You can't base on secure stock market on insecure employment. Stocks rest on jobs, not vice versa.]
Cantor details aid to survivors, Bloomberg via NYT, C2.
...Cantor Fitzgerald, the trading firm that lost 700 employees in the World Trade Center attack [and] which handled about a quarter of the trades in the $3 trillion government bond market before the attack, stopped paying the salaries of the missing employees on Sept. 15.
Soon after [after an outcry of criticism,] the company said it would pay a quarter of future profits to the families, without giving details..\..
The company \now says\ the victims' families w[ill] receive...a share of the partnership's profits for five years. The company said 25% of the money that would have been distributed to partners would be distributed to families of employees killed in the attacks over five years, or until they reach $100,000 each....
[25%? Why not 75%? $100 grand? Why not a million? What does it take to make people who have sooo much money that it functionally means NOTHING, to open up? They can't possibly spend it in a hundred lifetimes, yet not even the biggest tragedy of any firm at the WTC can make these grasping wretches generous?]
Each [family] will get a life insurance payment of double the victim's salary up to a maximum of $100,000..\.. The company [also] said the victims' families would receive health insurance for 10 years....

For earlier collapse stories, click on the desired date -

Dec.1-10/2000.
Earlier Y2000 months accessible via links at bottom of Dec.1-10/2000 page.

Dec.16-31/99.

Dec.1-15/99.
Earlier 1999 months accessible via links at bottom of Dec.1-15/99 page.

Dec/98.
Earlier months accessible via links at bottom of Dec/98 page.

Questions? Comments? email timesizing@aol.com).

TOP | HOMEPAGE