Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

8/29-30  5 badnews zingers over the weekend -

1. 8/30 Jobs don't kill people, but stress in the workplace can - Overwork is a national problem but we are not doing enough to address it (Robert Karasek, UMass), by Dolores Kong, Bos Globe, C1.
   [Here's the real "Japanese disease" on our shores. Next we'll be tracking "karoshi" = death by overwork.]
   40% of workers say their jobs are "very or extremely stressful"
   50% more is spent on healthcare for workers who say they are highly stressed
   20 days is the average amount of time a worker takes off for a stress- or anxiety-related disorder
   Sources: Northwestern National Life, St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Co., Bureau of Labor Statistics
   [Hey, why don't we just demand the fruits of labor-saving technology and grab a piece of those 6-week vacations they have in Europe instead of these 20 sickdays, so we can PLAN for them. And while we're at it, how about some of that 35-hour workweek a lot of them have? What the hey is work-saving technology for, anyway?! Primitive people in the South Seas only have to work 18 hours a week to get their living, and they live in paradise.]

2. 8/29 Study: Pressure driving law associates out, AP via Boston Globe, B5.
   The pressures of high-powered law firms are causing more and more new associates to leave their firms and profession, a Boston Bar Association Task Force study finds. The study, which will be mailed to bar association members in September, recommends law firms find ways to be more family friendly. "We are in danger of seeing law firms evolve into institutions where only those who have no family responsibilities can thrive," said Lauren Stiller Rikleen, president of the Boston Bar Association and a mother of two.
   The study found that 43% of associates leave their firms within three years. In the most demanding firms, women and minority associates leave in higher numbers. The main reason: too much time working, too little time for family. "There are a lot of lawyers out there who are happy to say, 'I'm happy to work here and earn less money if you let me,'" said Rikleen.
   [Aside from the fact that we don't mind seeing fewer people in this trouble-parasitizing profession, here we have two points illustrated: the survey that came out last year saying that 2/3 of Americans would be willing to take a pay cut to get rid of their job's blank check on their lives, and (2) women are leading the charge, bless'em! - men don't have the sense. Men think they're so GD important cuz they're busy working 60-70-80 hours a week, even in high tech where they're producing the most work-saving technology. We timesizers just think they're idiots for working for nothing on unpaid overtime, and stupidly gamboling backwards in progress into slavery. And if they can't imagine what to do with more leisure, they're pathetic serf-brains, incapable of "getting a life" and constantly needing to be told what to do, just like many citizens under the old Soviet Union ("plees, State Officials, to tell me: vare iss my apartment, vare iss my jop, vut shall I eet, vare iss gurlfrenn for mee?"). What the heck's the difference between relying on the Government for a life and relying on some dumb jock Internet entrepreneurs for a life? And if, at the same time, you're blathering on about Freedom while scared of the most basic freedom, free time, you're a coward and a hypocrite as well.]

3. 8/29  Home is where the beeper is - A century has passed and workers still fight to set boundaries for jobs, by Maggie Jackson, AP via Bos Globe, F4.
   ...California pharmaceuticals executive Lisa Conte revels in her home office: she can tuck her three children, ages 1, 3 and 6, into bed, then work for hours. "If you can get away with not sleeping too much, you can have a whole day's work at night."
   The catch? She's exhausted. "I'm still figuring out how to turn it off," says Conte, CEO of Shaman Pharmaceuticals. "Anyone has access to me any time."
   [No offense to the Coyotes, but isn't this just a new kind of prostitution?]
   Dave Rovner [owner of a flourishing computer consulting firm, NJ-based Strategic Network Designs] is struggling to draw the line too. "It's a compromise when I integrate family and personal and work," he says. "It's challenging to make it work." On vacation now, he reads only the urgent e-mails.
   [And no sexism here, because as we indicated above, men invented this new kind of "Anyone has access to me any time" sado-maso prostitution for themselves.]

4. ["Well," sez you. "Isn't this because of the much-advertised labor shortage, or even just skill shortage?" Aside from no training and flat wages, here's the phenomenon that puts the lie to that whole CEO snowjob about shortages - ]
   8/29 Toll of age bias: a computer expert's testimony, by Juliet Brudney, Bos Globe, F4.
   Age became John Nimmo's career nemesis in 1991, after GTE laid him off at 59 and forced him to search for another job. Nimmo had worked for GTE for 22 years, and for other high-technology employers.... Despite his background and the shortage of experienced computer professionals according to employers, Nimmo has [given up] job hunting [after 8 years of no success]. "It's no use," he said. "Nobody will hire me at 67 any more than they did at 59."
   ...[Nimmo's fruitless] efforts to resume his career illustrate a pervasive problem that seems to have been ignored or denied for years by business and government leaders. Age-based obstacles block many workers in their 50s and 60s from employment and training in fields needing workers, an enormous waste of human resources.
   The working population is aging.
   [And then there's the gradual trend toward longer lives - but as Russia under its present gangster economy illustrates, that can be easily reversed. So much for our ultimate dream - immortality.
   [And then there's the 17% unemployment rate in the over-50 age range in high tech alone reported last year.]
   Training and employing older workers [is becoming] essential. Pay for older workers is not a problem. Nimmo, for example, asked for no more than 20 hours a week at $50 an hour. Hourly rates for younger contractors with his experience, he says, are at least $100 to $150....
   And, his wife, Carol, reported,..."When he came home and told me he was laid off that April day in 1991, he was very angry, burst into tears. He expected he'd be protected. I kept telling him they were letting people go everywhere, hiring three younger ones for the price of one, although GTE didn't do that as much as other companies.... The hardest part of the loss for him was looking for a job, getting no response."...
   After sending hundreds of resumes with no results, Nimmo began calling people he knew at GTE [with success]. The new GTE job lasted until 1993, when an early retirement offer came onto the table, better than his 1991 termination benefits. "...Someone I knew in personnel [said] 'You're wise to be considering it'".... [But then] it was 1991 all over again.... After his second departure from GTE, Nimmo took a variety of posts, including a part-time job for about a year at a hardware store, at $6.75 an hour..\..
   [Hey, this is certainly a waste of skills for society, but in this guy's particular case, you can't really feel sorry for him financially. He got a $122,000 termination benefit from GTE the first time, plus that even better early retirement offer in 1993. Kinda makes you wonder just what is this guy's beef - unless we go back to our above reverie about "...if [men] can't imagine what to do with more leisure, they're pathetic serf-brains, incapable of 'getting a life'." Good grief, Nimmo, you're financially set for life. Move over and give others a chance. Most of us old guys sho got laid off from high tech only have social security to take care of us, or our ultimate "pension" plan = "dial 800-KEVORKIAN". If you need a purpose, remember that humans are problem solvers. Identify the biggest problem you can think of and get to work! That's what we're doing here at the Timesizing Wire, and if you want to borrow a slice of our problem, there's plenty to go around and we could sure use some help here!]

5. [If this economy is so "booming," how come it's hard times for small theaters?] 8/29 Hard times for small theaters - Even in a booming economy, companies are fighting for survival, by Ed Siegel, Bos Globe, N1.
   [Of course, it may be because we have no time, because we have convinced ourselves that "good times" are compatible with slavery. We're working megahours on a 40-hour/week salary - we have no time for ourselves, our families, our spiritual life, our communities, or going to the little struggling neighborhood theater - but hey, the economy is GREAT!
   [Or, if you want to take the view that a "professional salary" is not just for 40 hours a week. It's PROFESSIONAL, - it's for GETTING THE JOB DONE no matter how long it takes.
   [Boy, have you sold yourself a "bill of goods"! You have given someone else a blank check on your life. That means you have no life, because your life is not your own. You have willingly enrolled in slavery. You have given someone else unlimited control over you. You are truly pathetic.]

[Global labor glut lets American CEOs continue leaving training to others, despite their "tight labor market" whining.]
8/26 A pink slip, then a red carpet - Boston high-tech company to fly in, woo laid-off workers from Canada, by Diane Lewis, Bos Globe, D1.
Faced with a tight labor market and intense competition [but not intense enough to induce them to set up training - remember t-r-a-i-n-i-n-g?], some companies are going to extraordinary lengths to attract topnotch employees. After Boston-based SpeechWorks International Inc. learned that about 40 highly skilled engineers were among 100 workers laid off last week by Nortel Networks in Montreal, the company quickly made arrangements to fly them and a spouse or guest to its headquarters in downtown Boston tomorrow. Once here, the couples will be wined and dined at the firm's expense. The cost of this gala weekend? About $50,000, according to published reports....

[Global "tight labor market" sees a million desperate, skilled Brazilians applying for 10,000 jobs, with no hope for the unskilled.]
8/26 Brazilians eagerly seek a big bank's entry-level jobs, by Simon Rivero, NYT, C4.
SAO PAULO, Brazil, Aug. 25 - Unfazed by the overwhelming odds against attaining a modest desk job at Banco do Brasil SA, Latin America's largest financial institution, Marta Oliveira submitted a job application today at a bustling downtown branch here. "I need stability in my life," said Ms. Oliveira.... [She joins] as many as a million people, or one of 160 Brazilians, who are competing this month for about 10,000 jobs at Banco do Brasil, a 191-year-old Government-run institution.... The bank has a work force of 72,000, making it one of the nation's largest employers....
Cause for concern [graph caption] - The national unemployment rate in Brazil has almost doubled since 1995 [to over 8%]....
For the majority of Brazilians who are not qualified to work at Banco do Brasil, the nation's unemployment problems may seem even more daunting. A recent Government study showed that 36 million people, or half of the work force, completed only the equivalent of junior high school or less. An example of how this large number of Brazilians is squeezed came in June, when the government of Sao Paulo created 50,000 openings in...jobs like street sweeping, cleaning train tracks, and watering public gardens. The jobs pay...less than $78 a month and include a m onthly supply of staple foods like beans and rice.
About 450,000 people applied. Those selected were heads of families, senior citizens and people who had been unemployed...the longest....

8/25 In bid to avoid default, Ecuador seeks debt plan, AP via Boston Globe, C2.
QUITO, Ecuador - Hoping to avoid default of part of a crushing $13 billion foreign debt load, Ecuador's chief loan negotiator was expected to meet with creditors to hammer out a restructuring plan of a $98 million interest payment that comes due next week.... [Ecuador is] struggling through its worst economic crisis in 70 years....
[Let's see, 1999 - 70 = 1929! - the end of the Roaring '20s.]

["Enjoying the cab ride to the suicide parlor" - the average full-time workweek has now crept back up to 47 hours a week, 1920-level, but this article has a lot of fun language about our self-complicitous relapse into slavery - ]
8/22 'Oops, I forgot to have a life', by Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, F7.
...The first lady [Hillary Rodham Clinton] has become the spitting image of the overworked, multi-tasking, juggling American. She's doubled her productivity. She's even vacationing in two different places....
The fact is that we are all suffering from "work creep."... I am old enough to remember when people talked about the 9-to-5 economy. Today the hip numerical way to describe the economy is 24-7....
Quitting time has become a relic of the past....
The average full-time work week is now 47 hours long, and that doesn't count hours we spend working at home or commuting.
Meanwhile, in just one year, American productivity went up 2.6% as we learned to do two, three, four things at once. By now we have adjusted our speed so it seems normal to multitask during downtime.
[ - just as last century, we had to fight the overwhelming impression that we were just part of the machines. That is probably NOT what Thoreau meant when he said, "Let your affairs be as two or three, and not as a hundred or a thousand."]
How many people cell-phone [as they] commute [and] go hiking with pagers?... It isn't just the hours that have changed. It's the attitude. The work heroes of the 1990s aren't the Trumps but the young Internet entrepreneurs who work, eat [and] sleep in their offices.
[80-hour weeks on a 40-hour salary. Yet more "charity for the rich." Yet unpaid work is slavery. Maybe just as the worst kind of censorship is self-censorship, the worst kind of slavery is self-imposed slavery.]
...I clicked onto an article about a handful of young men pushing their on-line startup company down the runway toward Internet liftoff. In hiring new people...they worry about the "drag coefficient," the things that could keep down their employees' speedometer. A spouse counts as one drag, two kids a double drag.
[Are these the new "family values", i.e., a family is a negative drag? This may be fine in an age of overpopulation, but we have also extended it to the workforce - to employers, employees have generally become a drag. So they downsize, and downsize....]
In the land where Work 'R Us, we proudly repeat the new ritual exchange when Americans greet each other on the street. "How are you?" "Busy. How are you?" "Busy." We are no longer "Fine, thank you." We are busy.
[Was it Lao Tzu who said, "Cursed be he who must always be doing"? We've really doomed ourselves if we've identified importance with busyness (regardless of what that busyness is doing).]
But...in...that oxymoron known as a home office..\..in the land of work creep \be\neath the 24-7 and the high-tech hype [there's a] sense that something has gone awry. The work world has changed not just for those who want to keep up with the bills or the Joneses [ie: real-world things], but for those who ["need" to] keep up with technology [ie: stuff that's supposed to just serve the real-world things]. [Now] even in good times, the luckiest of workers remains insecure about a future..as planned for obsolescence as this year's software.
[That's it! We've gone from last century's trauma of fighting the overwhelming impression that we are just part of the machine, to a new trauma of confusing ourselves with this year's (or last year's) software version. We've let planned obsolescence run amuk and apply to ourselves. Maybe we should remind ourselves of sci fi's ultimate fantasy: gradually designing for ourselves 'voluntary mortality' or 'optional mortality', i.e., immortality. In sci fi, planned obsolescence for humans was always a nightmare, as in Soylent Green and other tales.]
In the fast-forward workplace, you stay up to speed or fall behind [and get discarded]. In an economy that expects more productivity [though God knows who's going to be left to buy it! - "robots don't buy cars"], the real gap between the overworked and the underemployed grows wider....
Remember the poster of the 1980s, 'Oops, I forgot to have children'? Here's the poster of the 1990s, 'Oops, I forgot to have a life.'...
[This is added support for our notion that we've go to balance the work before we can balance the wealth. Try to do the second thing first, as we have been, and we just create dependency. Timesizing first, then income- and wealth-sizing. Prioritize the split into "people with time and no money, and people with money and no time." That's the split that's been causing the great cyclical depressions.]

8/20 Imports push trade deficit to a new high [$24.6b] - More worry that US lives beyond its means, by Melody Petersen, NYT, C1.
[No, Melody, more worry that free trade is just too simple and stupid for today's world. See also next article below.]

[The World Trade Organization is beginning to be recognized for what it is: an insidious, standards-blanking autocracy bending all nations to the barbarism of the most backward.]
8/19 Stiffing American workers - Beware the World Trade Organization, by Mark Weisbrot of Washington's Preamble Center, Boston Globe, A19.
...Something big happened 4½ years ago when the WTO came into existence, and our own membership was ratified by Congress [with little discussion of the implications - another reason for referendums]. But the consequences of this action are only now beginning to be understood outside of narrow policy circles.
The new bureaucracy of the WTO was given the authority to determine whether national laws on such matters as environmental protection and food safety violate international trade rules....

• Our Environmental Protection Agency['s ability] to regulate the content of gasoline in order to reduce pollution [is now severely limited by the WTO].... In 1997, the WTO ruled in...favor [of Venezuela's right to weaken our EPA's ability to enforce our federal air quality standards for the sake of Venezuela's producers of lower-quality gasoline .]
• Another WTO ruling last year undermined our Endangered Species Act. We have attempted to protect endangered sea turtles from extinction by requiring that shrimp fishing boats install devices that allow the turtles to escape the nets. The law applied to all shrimp sold in the United States, but the WTO ruled that this was unfair to other countries.

8/18 Chile: economic plan, by Clifford Krauss, NYT, A12.
In an effort to ease the worst recession of the decade, the Government is putting final touches on a $90 million economic stimulus package to create 63,000 jobs in the next four months. It will be the second jobs program announced in the last two months. Unemployment has risen from 6.1% to 11% during the last year.
[Nationalizing job creation? Crazy! All that needs nationalizing at our stage of economic evolution is the workweek. Unless we share the natural, market-determined work, NOT try to create artificial work, we'll never gain the fundamental correspondence between production and consumption that all further human progress is based on.]

[Scientists prove the exact metaphor for our present economic stupidity - matter pulled into a black hole.]
8/17 Scientists find matter pulled into black hole, Reuters via NYT, A14.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - Astronomers said today that they had found direct evidence for the first time of matter's being pulled into a black hole....
[Lets hope this triggers some maverick economist somewhere to come up with direct evidence, for the first time, of the world's money being pulled into a black hole, thus demonstrating, without a shadow of ignorability, the much-ignored neo-classical economic doctrine of "the marginal efficiency of wealth." Or as we always put it, the more concentration, the less circulation.]

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