Timesizing® Associates

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Good News, Sept. 11-20, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

9/20/2000  glimmers of intelligence -

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Estée Lauder Cos., NYT, C4.
   ...New York, which manufactures and markets skin care, fragrance and hair care products, plans to open as many as 260 stores during the next few years in an expansion focusing on its Origins, Aveda, and M.A.C. cosmetics lines. Its stores will increase to as many as 500.
   [Just how many more cosmetics do they think a constantly downsizing consumer base can buy? And anyone else noticing how many little hair styling, nails, bridal, florist, pizza and karate storefronts we're getting - and losing? Are we getting desperate and pathetic or what?]

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   Informix planning revamp, layoffs, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, E8.
   WESTBOROUGH, Mass. - ...A database-software maker...will form two independent companies, one for database programs and the other to provide electronic-commerce software that works with rival databases.... Both of the new companies will initially be units of Informix, which hopes to turn them into separate publicly traded firms in the future....
   [Here's a case where the untakeover didn't happen soon enough to prevent the downsizing - see our Informix item among today's downsizings.]

3. Overtime and the law, by Dan Getman of New Paltz NY, NYT, A30.
   Your Sept. 17 news article about "overtime fatigue" correctly identifies many of the problems unaddressed by federal and state laws regulating overtime work (like employers' mandating increasingly unrealistic and dangerously excessive hours of work).
   However, the balance struck by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which generally requires that "time and one half" be paid for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek, is undercut by employers who routinely evade its requirements.
   As a labor lawyer, I am continually surprised by the frequency with which the overtime laws are flouted by small and large companies and even by governments. Any individual working more than 40 hours in a week should be aware that the law provides for double back pay for those shorted and that the employer has to pay for legal fees when the employee wins.
   [This is potentially great news, but the thing that Dan does not make explicit is whether the Fair Labor Standards Act "generally requires that 'time and one half' be paid for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek" regardless of salaried or 'exempt from overtime' or 'management' status. That is the point that needs to be spelled out and not left implicit or assumed. We suspect the answer is Yes, but we'll try to contact Dan and nail him down on this. It may be something that the NY Times edited out of his letter. See also our 9/17/2000 letter to the editor about this same front-page article on "overtime fatigue."]

1. Canada trade setback..., by Elizabeth Olson, NYT, C4.
   The World Trade Organization [WTO] dealt Canada [a loss] with an [official] ruling in favor of France's ban of Canadian building product exports containing asbestos.... The WTO [allowed] France's prohibition, even though such bans are usually not permitted, on grounds it was justified by exceptions for protecting human health.
   [We're getting internationally over-regulated when we have to get special allowances from an international body to ban unhealthy stuff from imports. Usually boringly nice Canada should know better and cut the carcinogenic crap.]

2. Logging under seige, pointer headline (to D1), Boston Globe, front page.
   Maine residents are increasingly intolerant of the environmental impact.
   Paul Bunyan under seige - The state that timber built debates the future of logging - Where to draw the line on 'green' wood, by Beth Daley, Boston Globe, D1.
   ...After years of fighting with environmentalists, timber companies are trying to convince the public that they can cut trees and still be good to nature. So far, more than 2m of Maine's 16m forested acres have been "certified" by outside agencies for following environment-friendly land management. Another 2m acres are under review....

1. [Major frontpage article on the workweek in the Sunday New York Times -]
   As overtime rises, fatigue becomes a labor issue - Labor unions and legislators are concerned, but for different reasons,
   by Mary Walsh, NYT, front page & A28.
   ...Brent Churchill...a lineman on call one stormy weekend for Central Maine Power,...at about noon on Sunday \after\ 2½ days [of work when he had] slept a total of [only] five hours...climbed a 30-foot pole, hooked on his safety straps and reached for a 7,200-volt cable without first putting on his insulating gloves. There was a flash, and Mr. Churchill was hanging motionless by his straps.... The death of a 30-year-old lineman...might have gone unnoticed...but for a coincidence: Mr. Churchilll happened to die at a time of heightened public concern about the expanding work week - a time, in fact, when the Maine legislature had been debating whether to cap the amount of mandatory overtime allowed in the state.
   The bill was not exactly a clarion call for worker ease, placing the overtime limit at 96 hours within any three-week period. The governor had already vetoed two versions, and there had not been enough votes in the Senate to override him. But the outcry over Mr. Churchill's death lent new momentum to efforts to cap overtime. The lawmakers compromised on a cap of 80 hours in any two-week period, and in May, Maine became the first state in the nation to limit the number of hours an employee can be required to work....
   [We believe this is a mistaken statement by a short-memory, no-history American. We believe lots of states passed such laws throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and that this Maine law of 1999 is a rather pathetic evolutionary throwback. We are congratulating ourselves for nothing. The most complete book of hours and workweeks that we know of, "Our Own Time - A History of American Labor and Working Day" by David Roediger and Philip Foner, notes on page 5 that "By 1725, most American colonies had completed the development of Sabbatarian legislation which, with near uniformity but by no means total effectiveness, banned Sunday labor." Note that Brent Churchill was crisped while working on Sunday. Note also that the Sabbatarian legislation was based on the Fourth Commandment of Moses, which dates roughly to 1500 B.C. although since Christians held their big weekly meetings on the day of Christ's believed resurrection instead of the day of God's believed rest from creating, the day of the work taboo shifted from the seventh day of the week (Sat.) to the first day of the week (Sun.) as the "football of history" passed from the Hebrews to the Christians. The article goes on to promulgate the myth of a "tight labor market," which presumably infers a labor shortage. As observer after observer comments, this perception depends more on employers' tighter job qualifications, agism and low-pay offerings than on reality.]
   But [Maine] is not the first [state] to recognize the problem of physical exhaustion on the job in the tightest labor market in almost half a century. ...Elsewhere around the nation...a backlash is building against the new economy's voracious appetite for Americans' time.... New Jersey legislators [voted] in June to ban mandatory overtime in hospitals; the bill now awaits Gov. Christine Todd Whitman's signature....
   The expanding workweek has become a flashpoint for some unions, though not all. Studies show that most employees who qualify for overtime premiums still want the extra hours.
   ["Qualify for"??? - like shafting yourself by worsening the officially denied, wage-flattening national and global labor surplus is a privilege. This must be the acme of human self-deception and self-destruction. Employees are their own worst enemy. Until unions smarten up and get back to where there great-grandfathers were, they'll continue to decline. Where were their great-grandfathers? Check out this 19th-century rhyme on page 7 of Benjamin Hunnicutt's "Work Without End - Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work" -
         Whether you work by the piece or the day
         Decreasing the hours increases the pay.
   And note the juxtaposition of low pay and long hours in sweat shops, the ultimate form of which is slavery. And to comment on Hunnicutt's subtitle - As we are finding out the hard way, if you abandon the fight for shorter and shorter hours in a context of constantly incoming technological efficiency, you also abandon all your rights, because you lose the most basic power the free market can confer, the power of scarcity. Once you become a surplus commodity, you're roadkill. The one thing that labor cannot afford to abandon is shorter hours, as labor should have learned from the last 60 years. They gave an inch by not raising holy hell to get the 30-hour workweek passed and they had the whole thing rolled back to an irrelevant 40-hour workweek with lax or even perverse overtime allowances. They gave an inch by not insisting the 40-hour maximum be observed even during World War II and they had their whole position weakened by the Taft-Hartley Act, passed over a Truman veto in 1947 (see Roediger & Foner's "Our Own Time," page 266). If anyone had any doubt about the accuracy of Dave Barry's sarcastic definition of the US Senate and its applicability to the whole Congress, this should dispell it, "White male millionaires working for YOU." Their smallness, near-sightedness and short-sightedness is breathtaking.]
   This lack of [labor] consensus on whether the workweek is too long or too short is one reason most state efforts to cap overtime have faltered.
   [Until the slaves stop "loving their chains," you can't get rid of slavery.]
   The labor groups now taking a stand on the workweek tend to be those representing either workers with safety issues, like pilots and firefighters [and nurses], or large numbers of women, who often feel the work-time pinch more acutely.
   A strike by telephone workers against Verizon this summer was motivated in large part by overtime issues....
   [Phil Hyde found only one of about 20 strikers at the Verizon facility in Andover he visited on Aug. 19 were concerned about anything but job security - but that one was the picket captain.]
   ...women in the company's calling centers complained that they could not break free from work early enough to pick up their children or make dinner for their families.
   [And speaking of slavery, it's creeping back -]
   Firefighters in Connecticut recenty challenged the constitutionality of mandatory overtime, arguing unsuccessfully that it violated the 13th Amendment ban on slavery.
   [We often lose sight of the fact that slavery is a two-part thing - you're not only not getting paid, but there are NO LIMITS ON YOUR WORKTIME. Lincoln's most significant contribution was to ban the unlimited workweek of slavery.]
   Nurses in several New York hospitals now sign protest statements when they start their shifts, creating a paper trail of their mandatory workloads.
   [There's a good start at reviving Americans' consciousness of the importance of limits on work time. The fact that employers have experienced such a slowly growing flood of resumes has spoiled them and lowered their management skills in a host of ways, chief of which is their growing unwillingness to respect shifts and successfully "suture" and coordinate them.]
   Congress has also been grappling with the issue of the expanding workweek...
   [Yeah, "grappling" as in "grappling a carpet from somewhere and trying to sweep the issue under it."]
   ...though much of its effort is aimed not at workers but at helping employers who seek to reduce the associated labor costs.
   • Several attachments to the pending minimum-wage legislation would disqualify technology workers, sales personnel and others from receiving overtime pay.
   • Another provision would allow businesses to reduce overtime payments to virtually all qualifying employees.
   [Just look at this further weakening of the concept of a maximum workweek, and with it the concept of sharing the limited - and constantly technologically diminishing - "lump" of market-demanded human work. This direction has no future, and a slightly increased minimum wage, which like all the other increases will soon be obsolete, is not worth it. If labor doesn't jump on this, their demise will be complete in another generation. Minimum wage was, is, and always will be a bad idea, because it operates completely at the bottom. And the real problem is at the top = the reluctance of people with too much to share their over-muchness. The problem is the employees who allow themselves to get feeling dependent on overtime pay, and the laziness of employers that they encourage by their selfishness - and their, the employees', laziness in not wanting to bother going out and getting skills that would pay them what they think they need during straight time - no overtime required.]
   Labor's fight for relief from onerous working hours dates back more than a century....
   [Another piece of ignorance. Lord, this critical application of the time dimension should be taught starting in elementary school. Page 2 of Roediger & Foner's "Our Own Time" - apart from the 4th Commandment of c. 3500 years ago reducing the workweek from seven to six days, we have - "As early as 1321 the London Weavers' Guild approved 'ordinances' to cut their hours of labor." And they have examples from 1344, 1350, 1389, 1495, 1563... - you get the point. It really is high time we wised up on this whole subject and quit reinventing the wheel. We need an automatic system for adjusting the workweek downward and then alternating it as technological efficiency and population adjust upward. The only complete core system that we know of for doing this is Timesizing. Lord God, it's the year 2000 for Chrissake. When are we going to start thinking dynamically instead of in terms of one-time "permanent" fixes?!]
   ...and [labor's] victories have been hard won. From 1886, when a potent eight-hour movement exploded in street violence in the Chicago Haymarket, it took 52 years for American society to agree on a 40-hour workweek with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938.
   [which itself was a watered-down version of the 30-hour workweek bill that passed the US Senate (but not the House) five years earlier.]
   But now, the strains that the booming economy is putting on workers, especially women, are reopening the debate.
   [A real "booming economy" does not put strains on people. It makes life easier for people. "Boom" implies prosperity. Prosperity implies ease. If our lives aren't easier, it's not a "boom." It's something else. It's something quite different. It's something much worse. "Cursed be they that call evil 'good' and good 'evil'." We are cursed and we are cursing ourselves, and it's because of our failure to focus on the absolute importance and necessity of so many millions individuals in a tightly crowded living space to share - it's because of our still stupidly falling into the Chesterton pan-utopian trap and lazily assuming that our greatest problem has been solved - the problem that we want more than our share (and the deeper problems that we don't know what our appropriate share is or what units it should be counted in or how it can be made dynamic, not static). Timesizing's five phases solves this problem (and these deeper problems), and the five-phase structure can be detached from the time dimension and mapped onto the string of money dimensions thereafter, and even the less familiar value dimensions after that.]
   "Overwork has been an issue for quite a while," said Peter Rachleff, a history professor at Macalester College in St. Paul. "But whether workers have felt it was an issue they could address or not has changed in the last year."... [Here's hopin'. The article goes on to discuss the difficulty quantifying Americans' workload and the invasion of cellphones, laptops and beepers etc, but it's getting late, or rather early - next morning - and it's time to practice what we preach....]

2. [Another reader weighs in on the For-Employers-Only labor shortage in high tech -]
   How to fill more high-tech jobs, letter to editor by Jeri Basko of Lebanon ME, Boston Globe, H6.
   I read with interest the article "High-tech job vacancies go unfilled," (Page A1, Sept.3). The job vacancies are the fault of the companies themselves for not being more open-minded to alternative work schedules.
   The companies exclude hard-working moms (and dads) who would like to be in the work force but are not available from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. [let alone to 9 or 10 pm these days! - ed.], Monday through Friday. Part-time, telecommuting, and job-sharing schedules would broaden the pool of workers....
   Employers, if you want hard-working and loyal employees, stop looking for the job hoppers and look for a mom (or dad) who is home with the children and wants to be back in the work force in less than a full-time capacity.
   [Amen. And with our wave after wave of work-saving technology, "full time" should by now have come down to 20 hours a week anyway, but we were too stupid and cowardly to seize it over the last 60 years as the workweek got frozen at 40 and transformed from a maximum to a minimum.]

3. Tennessee ends some abortion curbs, AP via NYT, A28.
   The Tennessee Supreme Court has struck down parts of the state's abortion law as overlyl burdensome to women, including a two-day waiting period and mandatory counseling....

4. New group files 3 'green' bills [in Boston suburb of Brookline, Mass.], by David Scharfenberg, Boston Globe, City 7.
   
   1. instructs the town to purchase five fuel-efficient, electric-hybrid vehicles.
   2. calls for a study of "green energy," electricity produced in an environmentally friendly manner [with a view to] the citizens of Brookline combining their buying power and contracting with a company that produces electricity in such a way.
   3. calls for the drafting of a "no net loss of trees" bylaw that would require developers to replace any trees they tear down. Fred Perry, president of Brookline Greenspace Alliance, a local environmental group, wrote the...proposal and says it would play an important role in reducing the town's emissions.

5. A student in full: The best way to test, letter to editor by Walt Gardner who taught for 28 yrs in L.A. Unified School District, NYT, A18.
   Re "How tests can drop the ball" (Lessons column, Sept. 13):
   To avoid the intrinsic unfairness of standardized tests that is a direct result of their construction and interpretation, schools need to look seriously at performance-based assessment of learning [which] provides a far more authentic and comprehensive view of what students have actually achieved over the course of the school year than any standardized test possibly could.
   Whether in the form of compiling portfolios of of student work, engaging in monthlong projects that integrate several subjects or using open-ended test items that demand demonstration of understanding, performance-based assessment is far superior to the present system.

9/15/2000  glimmers of hope -

1. [1 UNtakeover]
   U.S. Industries says it will spin off two businesses, Reuters via NYT, C3.
   ...[A seller of] consumer building products for homes [plans] to spin off its lighting and industrial tools businesses...the Lighting Corp. of America and Spear & Jackson..\..by the end of the year [- done] as a taxable dividend to shareholders....

2. Sudan: 4,435 slaves bought, by Elizabeth Olson, NYT, A6.
   A Swiss aid group...Christian Solidarity International..\..said it bought the freedom of 4,435 slaves in southern Sudan this month, bringing the total freed to 38,000. ...It paid $33 for each slave.
   [Good. Now where are you going to put them so they don't get recaptured? Is this not sort of like trying to save the world by immigrating everybody to America? And there's also this concern -]
   ..\..CSI has been criticized by the United Nations and rights groups, who say buying slaves encourages captors to seize more people....
   [And also these concerns, expressed yesterday in "27 million slaves," letter to the editor by Charles Jacobs of Boston's American Anti-Slavery Group, 9/14/00 NYT, A26 -]
   You report that modern-day slavery, though it is found in every corner of the world, is not widely known (editorial, Sept.9). How have our super-advanced information industries simply not noticed 27 million slaves?
   I believe that modern-day slavery is ignored because it's not "our" story: the middle-class public finds in neither its victims nor its oppressors people like themselves. Slaves are prisoners of commerce, people from the lowest rungs of their often pre-modern societies, hard for first-world activists to bond with.
   The fight for a single standard of human conduct will be the fight for humanity's future.
   [And that includes standardizing timesizing to save our livelihoods and our consumer base, instead of near-sighted downsizing.]
   If "universal human rights" means anything, it will mean that Americans, who nearly tore our nation apart over the issue of slavery, will not rest until this ancient scourge is no longer practiced anywhere by anyone.
   [But freedom is always and only at least two-way, freedom from and freedom for. Once they're "freed from" slavery, there have to be paying jobs for them to be "freed for." (Hey, Big Frank, remember Dave Demson saying this in theology class at Emmanuel College in 1960s' Toronto? Little did we think it would ever have a practical application!)  And in a world where there are more and more mechanical slaves taking over more and more of the work, that means we have to share the vanishing employment and earnings. Better to admit that it's vanishing and focus on a good, wage-supporting way to share it than continue our failed 60-year experiment in trying to generate enough makework to keep us all spinning our wheels at an outdated level of worktime per person (40 hours a week was outdated even by the time it was legislated in 1940). The first and only automatic mechanism for adjusting the workweek downward as our levels of technology advance upward is Timesizing.]

3. The Green Party - A victory for Nader, by Drummond Ayres, NYT, A23.
   ...A federal court in New York has rejected an effort by MasterCard to stop his parody of its "Priceless" advertising campaign, finding on Tuesday that the company had not proved it was being harmed by the Nader spot....

4. A dwindling faith in deregulation, by Neela Banerjee, NYT, C1.
   ...After [a] 1997 power shortage, Wisconsin Electric...began to support a go-slow approach to deregulation.... Lately \now that\ electricity shortages...threaten several other regions..., the rest of the country has been drawing the same conclusion. Just like Wisconsin, several other states have lost their early [true belief] in the instantaneous, smooth creation of a free and fair electricity market. Deregulation has faltered as surging consumer demand outstrips the supply of electricity, and regulators and utilities scramble to cope with successive...price volatility and power failures....
   [And that goes for air travel too, where we've seen price volatility and massive flight cancellations this summer (e.g., from United), and it goes for phone service too, where we've got slamming and spamming and junk mail and robotic directory assistance to waste time on now - much of it desperate attempts to earn a livelihood in a world that has no smooth automatic way to adjust workweeks downward as our levels of technology advance upward.]

1. 2 UPsizings, totaling 500 + unspecified new jobs -
   1. Lowe's Co., NYT, C4.
      ...Wilkesboro, NC, the No. 2 US home-improvement chain, [will] build an $80m regional distribution center in Findlay, Ohio, that [will] employ more than 500 people [by] October 2001.
   2. Panda Energy International Inc., NYT, C4.
      ...Dallas, a privately held electrical generation company, [plans] to build a $350m power plant in central Illinois by late 2003....

2. [1 UNtakeover]
   Conexant [Systems] to spin off Web unit, Reuters via NYT, C6.
   A modem chip maker's...board approved a plan to spin off its Internet infrastructure business.... Tentatively set [for] January 2001 [the] IPO...will be followed within six months by a tax-free distribution of the remaining shares to Conexant shareowners.

3. Tighter limits sought on pilots' work hours, NYT, A20.
   WASHINGTON...- The nation's major airlines said [yester]day that the Federal Aviation Administration should tighten restrictions on how many hours a day a pilot could work. They also said the agency should repeal a "regulatory loophole" that allows crews to ferry empty airplanes at the end of the day without regard to how many hours a pilot had already flown....
   Pilots are now limited to 16 scheduled hours a day, but the [FAA] said in 1995 that it would like to shorten that to 14. As air traffic delays have worsened, pilots' workdays have stretched, even if the number of miles they fly has stayed constant.
   [Human fantasies of omnipotence (or masochism) - no sleep needed - roll on. First doctors, now pilots. Physicians, heal yourselves and get some rest - a lot of rest - before you work on us. And pilots - we really don't want to be on board with a pilot who's on his 16th hour of work.]

1. Ireland: population growing, by Brian Lavery, NYT, A13.
   ...its 10th successive year of population growth, reaching a total of 3.79m people...the highest level since 1881 [but still less than before the 1840s potato famine - ed.]. Immigrants outnumbered people leaving the country for the fifth year in a row, by 42,300 to 18,200. Irish returning from abroad accounted for 43% of immigrants, the largest single group.
   [So nice to see the great world "everybody move to the U.S." solution reversed for a change.]

2. Making history at the polls, Selma [Alabama] elects a black mayor, by David Firestone, NYT, A18.
   ...James Perkins Jr., a former computer consultant...in...a city of 21,000 famous for its bloody response to the civil rights marches of 1965 that led to the Voting Rights Act....

3. Republicans' request to cut debt surprises Democrats, by Lizette Alvarez, NYT, A15.
   WASHINGTON...- With the demise of their large-scale tax cut, Republican leaders in Congress met [yester]day with Pres. Clinton at the White House to discuss unfinished legislation and request that he set aside 90% of this year's surplus to pay down the national debt....
   [Don't tell us that actual Republicans are manifesting signs of intelligence?! All we can ask for now is that 100% of the "surplus" be used to pay down the debt, that the whole process be automated, and that we hear no more about a bogus "surplus" until the national debt is zeroed or at least down to pre-Reagan levels in the billions instead of the trillions.
   [Follow-up story on 9/19, "House passes Republican debt-cutting bill," NYT, A18 - "The House voted overwhelmingly [last]night to commit 90% of next year's federal surplus to reduce the national debt...." - slimeballs! - what about this year's surplus?! - "...and to make it harder to use Medicare or Social Security surpluses for tax cuts or other programs...." This shouldn't even have been thought of in the first place!]

4. Amtrak reports record ridership [and revenues], by Raphael Lewis, Boston Globe, A2.
   ...Officials announced yesterday that more than 6.3m passengers rode Amtrak trains in June, July and August as the airline industry announced its was reeling from the highest number of delays and canceled flights ever....
   [We looove trains, especially steamtrains.]

1. [1 UPsizing]
   Texas Instruments Inc., NYT, C4.
   ...Dallas [will] hire 200 engineers in France during during the next two years to work at the company's Villeneuve-Loubet site, near Nice in southern France.

2. ["good, but..."]
   Japanese economy expands for 2nd consective quarter, by Miki Tanikawa, NYT, C4.
   [...but that's not saying much considering the depth to which it tanked. Furthermore, bare-faced makework was a big part of it -]
   Japan's economy expanded 1% in the April-June quarter..., a stronger-than-expected performance driven by higher government and consumer spending.
   ["Driven" by gov't spending or simulated by gov't spending?]
   The result reported by the Economic Planning Agency translated into an annual growth rate of 4.2%.... Japan, the world's second-largest economy, has been struggling to overcome the worst prolonged downturn since the end of World War II....