Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

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Timesizing News in Feb. 1-15, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

2/15/2001  beams of intelligence -

• Businesses cut inventories in December, AP via NYT, C18.
  Businesses, coping with dampened demand...are laying off workers, reducing shifts to curb production and deeply discounting merchandise. "The big December production cuts were successful in reining in the growth of inventories," Ken Mayland of ClearView Economics said....
  Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, said on Tuesday that the economic slowdown over the last few months was more sudden than most businesses had anticipated. That, he said, resulted in a "backup in inventories despite the more advanced just-in-time technologies that have in recent years enabled firms to adjust production levels more rapidly to changes in demand."...
  [Presumably there would be a lot more layoffs and a lot faster descent to recession if many companies were not reducing shifts. One thing that Greenspan said (from Reuters text of his Senate monetary policy testimony, 12:12 02-13-01 via AOLNews) that he needs to say and think about a lot more often was -]
  When consumers become less secure in their jobs and finances, they retrench as well.

• S. Korea panel expects to shorten work week this year, by Jason Neely, Reuters 02:12 02-13-01 via AOLNews.
  SEOUL -...Korea has a 44-hour statutory work week which labour groups want reduced to 40..\.. A recent easing in South Korean unions' feisty opposition to change could pave the way for a shorter work week in the first half of 2001, ...chairman Chang Young-chui [of the] Tripartite Commission...which was set up in 1998 to iron out disputes between govenrment, management and labour..\..said on Tuesday [2/13]. "There's already basic agreement on a 40-hour, five-day work week," Change told reporters. "Talks now are focused on how to implement this in various sectors."...
  

2/11/2001  weekend beams of hope -

• Unpaid Fridays paying off for workers and their bosses - Cost-cutting move taken in stride, San Jose Mercury News 2-10-01 via Scott Thibodo.
  Librada Ramirez is planning to hit Reno. Mike Nault is thinking about going skiing or hiking. Mike Duran may spend a day on Angel Island.
  What's spurring this wave of home improvements, day trips and outdoor adventures?... Several [San Francisco] Bay Area companies have asked employees to take up to five days off this quarter, trying to cut costs without laying off..\.. It might just be the silver lining to the impending economic downturn.... The days are unpaid unless employees use vacation time to cover them.
  [And for anyone who's still into "The devil finds work for idle hands to do!" please consult the above list. The only potentially devilish item on it is Reno, whether it means gambling or divorce.]
  National Semiconductor Corp. in Santa Clara confirmed Friday that it has asked its workers to take five days off by the end of May, following similar moves by Applied Materials Inc. of Santa Clara and Charles Schwab Corp. of San Francisco.
  [National Semiconductor we hadn't heard before. Applied Materials we caught on 2/09 immediately below and Schwab on 1/31/2001.]
  Workers appear to be taking the unexpected leave in stride.
  [...except at Schwab? - where charges of illegality have popped up, presumably because somebody complained?]
  Some say that's because this has happened before in the valley, as recently as 1998 and as far back as the 1970s.... It's similar to work furloughs at factories back East, said Barbara Estes, a senior principal in the San Francisco office of William M. Mercer Inc., a human resources consulting firm - except white-collar workers are affected by these [West Coast] furloughs....
  HP sets example..\.. It's unclear where the practice started.... Hewlett-Packard Co. has been credited as being the first tech company to adopt the practice. HP employees took off Fridays for five months in 1970, said spokesman David Berman. Back then, many were happy to do so to avert layoffs. The same thing goes this time around. Few seem worried about the loss of a week's pay.
  [Better to lose a week's pay than a good job and possibly a whole lifetime's pay. This is exactly the idea behind Timesizing, Not Downsizing. Plus, if we keep up this idea that our importance derives from working 24/7 on somebody else's agenda, we'll never be able to compete with the onrush of robotization = the real 24/7 workhorse, and we'll keep running harder and harder for less and less, as we have been the last 30 years since the baby boom replenished the kill-off of World War II. Time to smarten up and work less for more bucks, not more for less. Starve the job market for a change and quit flooding it. No it is NOT starving now - the barrage of talk about "tight labor market" that you hear is the whining of spoiled employers who have diluted and deflated our supposedly low unemployment rate to support astonomical pay and perks for them, peanuts for everyone else (unless you happen to be skilled in the latest hitech fad).]
  Ramirez, a process technician at Applied Materials, said she doesn't mind being asked to take some time off. "We've been working hard. It's time to take vacation," she said....
  Voluntary program. Duran simply slept in Feb. 2, the first of three Fridays he has off from his job in corporate communications at Charles Schwab. But the San Francisco resident plans to get out on the town next time around [or] head to Angel Island [or] spend the day with his 3-month-old niece. But...he's taking the days off, even if it's voluntary [i.e., unpaid]. Schwab initially asked employees to take off three Fridays on a mandatory basis then switched that to voluntary for legal reasons. "It's going to turn into a four-day weekend, which will be nice," he said about Presidents' Day weekend....

1. Applied Materials asks employees to take Fridays off without pay, by Therese Poletti of Mercury News, via Silicon Valley In-Depth News 2:02 am PST Thursday Feb.8 2001 via Joe Polito of 32 Hours: Action for Full Employment, Toronto.
   ...The world's largest chip maker has asked its US employees to take most Fridays off without pay, at least until the end of April, as part of efforts to cut costs, according to industry sources.... The industry sources, who asked not to identified, said the company is starting a series of "work stoppage" days, in which most of Applied's US employees will take a Friday off without pay..\.. Applied employs about 7,000 people in the Bay Area and 22,000 worldwide....
   [This is a development on the strategy reported on 1/31/2001 below on the part of Schwab, which asked non-client-linked employees to take any three of the next five Fridays off without pay -]
   Online broker Charles Schwab Corp. recently required many employees to take Fridays off without pay, although the San Francisco-based firm later made the time off voluntary amid possible legal questions..\..
   [But lest we assume that Applied Materials got the idea from Schwab -]
   Applied and other Silicon Valley companies used a similar approach to cut costs in previous industry downturns. Applied most recently told employees to take some Fridays off in the 1998 chip downturn.... Staffers at Silicon Valley firms with more cyclical businesses are more accepting of such measures [than San Francisco employees] because they are meant to avoid layoffs. Employees at Hewlett-Packard Co. are seeing their pay raises deferred for three months, and top executives there have given up some of their bonuses, as the sluggish economy hits computer sales..\..
   The shortened work week is just one of several cost-reduction measures the Santa Clara[-based Applied Materials] is expected to discuss with investors Tuesday, when it releases its fiscal Q1 earnings. Amid a downturn in the chip industry, Applied is also reducing the number of temporary workers at its Austin manufacturing plant, freezing regular hiring and cutting salaries for top executives by 5-10%, said the industry sources.... Late last month, the company warned that its Q1 earnings and revenues will be below Wall Street's expectations, as demand for semiconductors slowed late in 4Q00....
   Analysts said that because Applied is the bellwether for the chip equipment industry, it is likely that other chip equipment makers will follow suit, with the goal being to cut expenses as much as possible before having to resort to layoffs of permanent staffers....

2. Sweden engineering unions agree moderate pay deals, Reuters 06:10 02-08-01 via AOLNews.
   ...Metal workers' union Metall, civil engineers' union CF and white-collar engineering workers group SIF said they would accept various packages of wage hikes and reduced working time.
   • Metall accepted a package of wage increases and working time reduction totalling 8.5% for its 220,000 members in a deal running until March 31, 2004. ...Metall Chairman Goran Johnsson told a news conference, "We set four goals for the wage agreements - higher real wages, shorter working hours and competence development and working environment..\.. The agreement...includes these four goals."
   • SIF accepted a deal on behalf of its 100,000 members for a 5.5% wage increase over the 30-month period, plus shorter working hours estimated to cost employers an additional 1.5%.
   • CF members, who number 30,000, agreed to a 5.5% wage hike plus a reduced working hours package worth 1.5%....
   [So while American, Canadian, British and Japanese CEOs are turning their economies into 3rd-world basketcases by downsizing their workforce and concentrating as much income as they can under their own few mattresses, certain countries in the euro zone are actually inching their way into a real future with timesizing - cutting hours, not jobs. And here's another euro-zone mention -]

3. ECB repeats price risks balanced, growth robust, by Tomasz Janowski, Reuters 17:26 02-08-01 via AOLNews.
   FRANKFURT...- The European Central Bank [ECB] on Thursday [2/08] said in its February monthly report that despite the dampening impact of a sharper-than-anticipated slowdown in the U.S. economy..., the euro zone should emerge largely unscathed.... It repeated that the 12-nation single currency bloc, albeit not totally immune to external influences, would be mainly driven by domestic factors: Strong business and consumer confidence, employment growth and tax cuts....
   [And the Europeans themselves constantly neglect to mention their own reduced workyear and workweek relative to the sado-masochistic English and Japanese speaking world, which naturally spreads the diminishing human employment as technology marches on, and shares the spending power among people who actually use it.]
   The report echoed recent assurances that the euro-zone economy remained in good health and that the ECB did not need to emulate the U.S. Federal Reserve which slashed rates by a full point last month to ward off a recession. ...The ECB...noted increases in hourly labour costs and unit labour costs in the third quarter of 2000, which in part could be attributed to some one-off payments and the shortening of the work week in France to 35 from 39 hours....
   [But then, how are you going to maintain or grow your domestic consumer base without wage increases?]
   Overall, wages remained moderate last year, the ECB said, but such factors as the wage indexation for higher-than-expected inflation in Spain and the reduction of weekly work hours could signal potential inflationary pressures....
   [But let's recall that inflation penalizes huge sluggish pools of unspent spending power and not centrifuged quickly spent wages. And let's also note that the real inflation control is not stupid consumption-bashing unemployment-fostering interest-rate increases, but the systemic reinvestment of overtime profits and earnings into training and hiring, a kind of systematic government-harnessing and market-channeling of deflationary incentive (alias charity or voluntarism) on an economywide basis.]

1. 2 "takes" on US recession-surfing with timesizing -

   • Global economy: US 4Q productivity rises at 2.4% annual rate, Bloomberg Feb/07/2001 16:27 ET via AOLNews.
     ...Business reduced worker hours for a second straight quarter as economic growth cooled....

   • US economy: Productivity surge keeps costs in check, Bloomberg Feb/07/2001 16:28 ET via AOLNews.
     ...Reduced hours. Businesses cut worker hours as production slowed in the final three months of the year. Hours worked fell at a 1.1% annual rate after falling at a 0.7% pace in the third quarter. "Firms have proven themselves extraordinarily nimble in cutting back on hours in the face of falling demand," said Vincent Boberski, chief economist at Dain Rauscher Investment Services in Chicago. "Managers have done a lot of the hard work of getting more from their employees."
     Compensation per hour worked rose at a 6.6% rate in the fourth quarter. That compares with a 6.2% pace in the third quarter and market the biggest rate of increase since the first quarter 1992 when compensation rose 8.8%. The increase in compensation, particularly at manufacturers, "likely reflects in part compositional changes, as lower-wage employees have been the first to face layoff," said Peter Kretzmer, an economist at Banc of America Securities in New York....

2. French temporary hiring fell by 2.4% in December, Unedic [unemployment benefit agency] says, Bloomberg Feb/07/2001 13:13 ET via AOLNews.
   ...Job creation is expected to slow this year, after having risen to its highest level "in the century" last year, the government said. That's because the effect of a law that cut the statutory working week to 35 hours from 39 at the beginning of 2000 is progressively fading, according to the government.
   [Time to flex it up and keep it adjustable a la Timesizing - very gradually though, maybe just an hour a year.]
   France's unemployment rate was unchanged at a 9½-year low of 9.2% in December. It has fallen from a post-war high fo 12.6% in June 1997.
   Temporary jobs account for about ¾ of hiring in the euro zone's 2nd-largest economy. One fifth of temporary jobs lead to full-time employment.
   Manufacturers and other industrial companies...account for ¼ of employment....

1. Analysis - French steal economic march on German neighbours, Reuters 13:16 02-06-01 via AOLNews.
   French workers may retain an image as vigorous defenders of traditional rights, but data released on Tuesday suggested the country is stealing a march on orderly Germany when it comes to economic modernisation.... Tuesday's numbers [showed] consumer confidence soared to a new record in January as the fastest job creation for more than a decade fostered optimism among traditionally gloomy shoppers. Germany, traditionally seen as the locomotive of European growth, handed in far glummer statistics, with January unemployment posting its first rise since March 2000 after a series of downcast business sentiment surveys.
   Pointing to a raft of data that has shown France's economy has grown faster than its larger neighbour since 1997, economists said often unnoticed French efforts to streamline its labour market were paying dividends. ...Economists believe these reforms will help France play a role in delivering growth in the euro zone without stoking the inflation that could prod the European Central Bank into interest rate hikes.
   French employment booms. Flexing its job creation muscle, France beat Germany hands down last year in the race to cut dole queues while inflation stayed firmly under control..\.. David Naude, economist at Deutsche Bank in Paris...said French employment growth increased by 3.5% in the year to 3Q00, compared with a 1.5% rise in Germany.
   France's impressive employment record has proved crucial in encouraging shoppers to splash out in stores and keep a "virtuous circle" of rising household demand triggering increases in industrial output and demand for more workers.
   [France is experiencing just a tiny taste of what long-term capitalism, with timesizing-enabled full employment, can do when unleashed. Think about it. We are wasting so many consumers in poverty and prison, when if we made it as easy as our technology levels allow, for people to support themselves at higher living standards, our domestic consumer base would be gargantuan compared to today's "from hunger" levels with all the income consolidated in the top brackets. As Arthur Dahlberg said in 1932, all we need is one planned adjustment to make our "balking backfiring profits economy...work in socially desirable ways, and even...satisfy high-grade engineering standards of efficiency, with even less involved governmental interference and industrial control than we already have."]
   "The main reason for this good consumer situation is that France is experienc[ing] the first big fall in unemployment for 20 years," said Michel Didier, director of the Rexecode research centre in Paris, in a recent Reuters TV interview....
   Scissors to red tape. Commentators said one of France's key weapons in the fight against joblessness are the scissors [French] governments have used throughout the 1990s to cut red tape. France still has a heavily regulated labour market in comparison to the "hire and fire" mentality of the United States and Britain [and for the last 12-13 years, Japan as well]...
   [exactly the same "hire and fire" mentality that has sunk Japan and is dragging us down into recession while France is flying. Why? Because we're scaring the hell out of our consumers with all our downsizing. American and British CEOs have a missing chip on their motherboards where the equation between workforce and consumer base should be. Plus they've become spoiled by the huge labor surplus they constantly deny, they've dropped training, they think management is all about acquiring market share instead of building it, and they've adopted a short-term grab-and-run attitude where no matter what happens to the firm, they get their golden parachute and run off to parasitize some other naive company where (miraculously) there's still some loyalty or good will to commoditize.]
   ...but [French] governments have gradually pruned the social charges employers face for hiring low paid workers. Crucially, governments have introduced laws to allow firms to hire increasing numbers of workers on short-term and temporary contracts, accounting for a major slice of new jobs created in recent years.
   [And employees are OK with it because they're beginning to feel that their security is coming from another dimension, the aggregate dimension of nationwide work-sharing that has been embodied in the one-hour workweek cut in 1982 and now the additional four-hour workweek cut in 2000, not to mention the subsidized company-level shift from downsizing to timesizing, and from samesizing to hiring-via-timesizing, that occurred under the right-of-centre UDF Party's Robien Law in 1996-97.]
   Commentators say France's [current] Socialist-led government has been careful not to trumpet its [rightist-sounding] progress in freeing up the labour market, preferring instead to woo voters with its laws to cut the working week to 35 hours from 39 to boost hiring.
   [Yet this is exactly what workweek reduction allows you to do - cut all the regulatory crap that you've put in place over the years to offset the fact that your workweek is far too long for your level of worksaving technology! As Dahlberg says, "one planned adjustment" can do the trick. If you balance the center, you don't have to run around on endless goosechases trying to balance everywhere else. One effective program in the middle can obsolete thousands of ineffective programs around the sides.]
   Naude said that Germany, known for its cradle-to-grave state support system and giant bureaucracy [Gott, sounds like India!], has made less progress in pruning back charges on employers, many of which date to the days of reunification with East Germany....
   [No, before. Long long before. Back in 1933, Hitler started curing the depression in Germany by massive militarization (i.e., government makework) instead of sharing the vanishing work, and as usual, that led to one government "fix" after another. And even before that, if memory serves, the government of Bismarck was pretty interventionist back in the 1870s or so.]

2. Swedish paper, pulp workers to get 5.5% pay raise over 3 years, Bloomberg Feb/06/2001 11:45 ET via AOLNews.
   Stockholm...- Swedish paper and pulp workers accepted a wage proposal that will give them 5.5% more income over 38 months and shorter working hours, said the union representing the workers, in a faxed statement.
   SIF, a union representing as many as 6,000 workers, accepted the offer that gives its members 2.2% more pay Feb. 1, 2001, an additional 1.7% increase in the following year, and 1.6% more a year after. The new offer, submitted by independent arbitrators, also implies an annual 9-hour reduction in working hours. Shorter working days are equivalent to another 1.5% wage increase, said the statement.
   [Apparently the Swedes are into chipping down the workyear, like the Japanese in our story back on 2/03/2001.]
   "This is an acceptable contract," said the SIF spokeswoman Mari-Ann Krantz. "I'm satisfied."...
   [Man, that's something you don't hear on this side of the Atlantic too often. "I'm satisfied." And yet a different set of Swedish employees - in the steel industry - said it too, in a previous story. See 1/24/2001 below.]

2/2/2001  France says shorter work-week law saved, created 263,000 jobs, Bloomberg Feb/01/2001 9:37 ET via AOLNews.
[This gives the official figure for what in yesterday's story was only an estimate (251,915).]
PARIS...- France's shorter work-week legislation has created or saved 262,602 jobs since June 1998, Social Affairs Minister Elisabeth Guigou said at a briefing for journalists....
"Of course we benefited from faster growth...
[and don't forget that spreading around the spending power ACTIVATES a lot of growth because you're moving money from those who have little time or need to spend it, to those who have time and need to spend it]
...but also this reflects that government's making a priority of tackling unemployment," Guigou said. "Full employment is now completely realistic and attainable. It's more than just a theoretical point."...
[Amen to that, Mme Guigou!]
Cutting the work-week to 35 hours from 39 hours became a legal requirement starting one year ago [Feb. 1] for companies with 20 or more employees. From the start of this year, employers failing to comply have been liable to fines. From next year, the law will apply to companies with fewer than 20 employees, and to the French state, which employs 5.3m.
[This was kind of stupid. The French state should have LED THE WAY and provided a successful demonstration. "Do as I say and not as I do" or "Here's a great idea - you try it first" is always a hypocritical and disincentivizing approach.]
"We cannot allow them (small companies) to delude themselves that they can avoid the law," Guigou said at a breakfast hosted by the Assoc. of Financial Journalists. "We have to persuade them that they can prepare [for] the law."
[It would be a lot less of a "hard sell" if the government was doing it itself instead of just talking the talk.]
Guigou said that the law is flexible enough to accommodate certain industries, like catering, and the hotel trade, which have been reliant on employees working more than 35 hours per week..\..
[Hopefully just during the transition, and not after everybody else is doing it and "certain industries" are enjoying the extra economic dynamism while being "accommodated" by not having to play by the same rules and contribute to that extra dynamism.]
By Jan. 24, the government had registered 49,461 agreements between companies employing 20 or more staff and labor unions to increase staff numbers to compensate for the shorter week. These pacts, which entitle employers to cuts in payroll taxes, had saved or created jobs, Guigou said.... The registered labor agreements cover 4.88m people working in the non-state sector. Companies without agreements comply with the law through industry-wide or job-specific pacts, which carry no obligation to create jobs..\..
The Socialist-led government has made the shorter work-week law the center-piece of its efforts to reduce unemployment since being elected in May 1997.
[But in 1996-97 under the right-of-center UDF Party, France passed a law (Robien Law) that gave stepped seven-year payroll taxbreaks to individual companies who would cut their workweek 10 or 15% and hire 10 or 15% more staff or avoid a looming 10 or 15% downsizing, in order to help out with the nation's admittedly high unemployment rate (they count more in theirs than we do). In its first 6-months, 105 firms took advantage of the offer, and about a third of them kept pay at its same pre-workweek-cut level. (See our Working Models page.) So neither the political left nor right has a monopoly on this approach. It just takes a little intelligence and imagination, and the ability to see "BGOs" = blinding glimpses of the obvious.]
The jobless rate has declined to a 9½-year low of 9.2% in December from a post-war peack of 12.6% in June 1997....

2/01/2001  glimmers of intelligence - 2 general timesizing reports -

1. U.S. job growth seen weakening slightly in January, by Joanne Morrison, Reuters 12:07 01-31-01 via AOLNews.
   ...Despite the layoffs, most economists expect the January [Labor Dept.] report to show modest job growth..\.. Said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services..."I'm still expecting a small positive number for jobs.... My sense from all the other data, is that the labor market has definitely loosened up a bit." But he noted employers have opted to tighten the number of worker hours rather than seek layoffs. "So far we're seen some shorter hours rather than layoffs," he said....
   Mark Zandi, chief economist with Economy.com in West Chester, Pa., agrees that the jobs report is understating distress in the labor market. "People are being affected by fewer hours, by the loss of second jobs, and people are being affected by the inability to find the jobs they thought they could," he said....
   "The fact that the labor market is easing will probably take off some of the [upward] pressure in average hourly earnings," predicts Anthony Chan, chief economist at Banc One Investment Advisors in Columbus, Ohio....
   [But many employers cut hours instead of jobs, or if hours are cut economywide by legislation, as in 1938-39-40 (from 44 to 42 to 40 hrs a wk), the labor market tightens rather than easing and there is no loss of pay for employees. And since employees tend to prioritize more, there is little loss of output for employers either. And so there is little flationary consequence.]

2. French jobless rate unchanged at 9.2% in December, Bloomberg Jan/31/2001 4:51 ET via AOLNews.
   ...after declining for four months, a sign companies are scaling back on hiring as economic growth slows. [Still,] the number of registered job seekers fell by 19,000 to 2.4m, based on ILO standards.
   While French unemployment has declined from a postwar peak of 12.6% in June 1997, when Socialist Lionel Jospin was elected prime minister, it remains more than twice the US level...
   [except for the fact that the US does not use the ILO standards to (under)count its supposedly low unemployment - ed.]
   ...and above the euro-zone average of 8.8%. Jospin pledged to return the economy to full employment by 2010 and is counting on further reductions in the jobless rate to win presidential elections to be held in 2002....
   A government initiative reducing the statutory workweek to 35 hours has created or saved an estimated 251,915 jobs so far. Companies with more than 20 employees have this year in which to finish implementing the law, while midsize and smaller companies must comply by next year.
   Help or Hurt? ...Some analysts said..\..the shorter workweek law hobbles the ability of companies, especially smaller ones, to adapt to fluctuations in demand...
   ["Some analysts" came up with this same worry when people wanted to abolish slavery, or go from the 12-hour day to the 10-hour day, but if everyone's playing by the same rules, and reducing the workweek builds your markets by building your workforce, and your employees are better rested, you've got more adaptibility, not less. Reducing the workweek also prevents those same companies from burning out their employees. And burnout does not make employees particularly adaptible.]
   ...and may actually destroy jobs.
   [There are always a bunch of people who fight common sense and try to call black white and v.v. Here they're trying to say that sharing the vanishing work makes it vanish faster. Fine. Then we cut the workweek even further and share it faster. Who or what says that a "job" has to be 40 hours a week or more? Just our own pre-technological Puritan work ethic, that's all. And remember the definition of Puritanism - "the nagging suspicion that somebody, somewhere, is having a good time."]
   ...They add..\..the law also discourages companies from outside of France from investing in the country....
   ["Oooh nooo, Mr. Bill!" With full employment, the purpose of outside investment is what, exactly? And full employment is exactly what sharing the vanishing work by trimming the workweek accomplishes. If the French government used a flexible workweek approach instead of a jerky downward jump from 39 to 35 hours a week, yet another frozen, rigid and unyielding "permanent" workweek, it would not have had to do the following -]
   A government-subsidized jobs program for those under 30 years of age created another 281,000 jobs as of last October, according to the Labor Ministry. [Yester]ay's report shows the number of job seekers under 25 years [old] fell a seasonally adjusted 0.8%.
   While the labor market is unlikely to repeat the "spectacular performance" of last year, French Finance Minister Laurent Fabius said [Tues]day, jobs will continue to be created in 2001 and "this will have an important psychological effect."
   [Presumably he's referring to all the smaller companies implementing the shorter workweek and hiring more people. What he could also mention is that the additional workforce will mean additional domestic markets for France.]
   ...France added 394,000 jobs in the first three quarters of last year, more than in all of 1999, as rising investment and exports boosted economic activity.
   [Of course, the shorter workweek had nothing at all to do with it, according to this "trapped in the box" Bloomberg newswriter.]
   Preliminary figures for the fourth quarter will be released Feb. 16.
   The number of unemployed aged between 25 and 49 years of age, who comprise most of the French workforce, declined 0.7% in December....
   [This is the first fairly comprehensive coverage of the French employment picture that we've seen, and it's clearly hostile to the outrageous concept of sharing the available employment, despite the experience of raging capitalists like Lincoln Electric and Nucor Steel. It's also clearly ignorant of the fact that we completely abolished the unlimited workweek of slavery and cut the workweek for everybody else in half between 1776 and 1940 - and things only got better, much better. But FDR blocked the process in 1933 by blocking the 30-hour workweek bill and backing minimum wage and maximum makework instead, and now a lot of these "analysts" talk about efficiency but have no idea how makework has permeated and distorted our economies, and how huge our markets would be if we really did achieve full employment by simply sharing the available market-demanded employment on an adjustably-reducing workweek basis. But we've tried to make it easy for them with our handbook, Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]