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Timesizing News in Mar. 1-10, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

3/10/2001  glimmers of timesizing -

1. USS-POSCO steelworkers to begin layoffs, PRNewswire 03/09/2001 18:12 EST via AOLNews.
   USS-POSCO Industries (UPI) president Robert Smith announced today that approximately 40 production employees and members of United Steelworkers of America Union Local 1440 at the plant would be placed on layoff status beginning next week.... "Although UPI has successfully fought off layoffs for almost ten years, we have no other alternative at this time to ensure the long-term viability and competitiveness of the company," Smith said.
   [Have you looked at Nucor Steel's alternative, Robert? The following timesizing gesture could be greatly extended -]
   UPI is also implementing a voluntary reduced workweek for administrative employees and other cost-saving measures...\..
   Prices for cold rolled steel have declined to their lowest level in the company's history due to record levels of unfairly traded steel imported to the West Coast. At the same time, increasing energy prices have substantially increased production costs....
   Pittsburgh, Calif.-based USS-POSCO Industries, a joint venture between USX Corp. and Pohang Iron & Steel Co. of the Republic of Korea, is California's largest steel-finishing facility and eastern Contra Costa's largest employer with one thousand employees.
   [1000 employees? 40 layoffs? That's only a 4% staff cut. How big a deal would it have been to do a 4% hours&pay cut instead - for everyone, including you, Bob? You've already got the workweek reduction idea in play. Now try, try and get to Square Two. You're only limited by your lack of imagination. Many other companies have managed to get there, judging from the hints in the following story -]

2. 2nd LD: Feb. U.S. nonfarm payroll up 135,000, Kyodo News Service via AP-NY-03-09-01 0912EST via AOLNews.
   [We think "2nd LD" may stand for "2nd news release on US Labor Dept.'s preliminary report Friday" adding details.]
   The U.S. economy generated only 135,000 jobs in the nonfarm sector in February due to slack manufacturing activity, with the unemployment rate flat at 4.2%, the Labor Dept. said in a preliminary report Friday.... Katharine Abraham, commissioner at the Labor Dept.'s Bureau of Labor Statistics, said, "The key features of the February data, in my view, are the continued reduction in manufacturing employment and hours, offsetting job gains in services and some other industries."...
   [Strange that the only news agency that seems to be reporting what's happening to the US workweek is in Japan. Thank God the Associated Press, if it doesn't have the initiative on this, at least has the news sense to relay it.]
   The average workweek for private nonfarm jobs for February edged down 0.1 hour to 34.2 hours, with the manufacturing workweek down 0.3 hour to 40.6 hours, the Department said....
   [Again, this should be seen by intelligent beings as a positive sign, providing, as it does, more free time for employees thanks to worksaving technology, but in humanity's current brain-damaged state of using worksaving technology to downsize the workforce and the consumer base and to concentrate profits among fewer, much much richer consumers, a falling workweek is spun as a negative sign of economic ill health. This whole line of doubletalk really got its "big break" when FDR unleashed his academic pit bull, Rexford Tugwell ("The Industrial Discipline," 1933), to savage Arthur Dahlberg ("Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism," 1932) and the whole shorter-hours movement so that he, FDR, could be the Savior of the Nation without sharing any of the credit with AFL Pres. William Green and Sen. Hugo Black whose 30-hour workweek bill had just passed the U.S. Senate (April 6, 1933). See our Bibliography page.]

3. Georg Fischer's Buehrer on shorter Swiss workweek: Comment, Bloomberg Mar/09/2001 via AOLNews.
   [We mentioned this guy briefly below in our 3/09 story. The present article gives him a lot more play and provides some more information about the Swiss 36-hour initiative, confirming that the upper house is also going to consider it.]
   LUGANO...- The following are comments by Radical Party member Gerold Buehrer, who is widely expected to succeed party leader Franz Steinegger, on shorter working hours, Switzerland's economic situation, the European Union and the jobless rate. Buehrer...is a board member of Georg Fischer AG, Europe's largest maker of castings for carmakers, was talking in an interview in Lugano.
   [The question arises, why this guy? We'd expect an analyst or an economist, but a board member at a big auto industry manufacturer does not compute. All we can figure is that Bloomberg News went out their way to solicit this anti-shorter hours interview to balance the shorter-hours interviews they carried on 3/01 below, one neutral (with Credit Lyonnais' Olivier Eluere), and one positive (with Merrill Lynch's Patrick Mange).]
   The Swiss lower house [of parliament on Mar. 8] rejected a proposal to cut the workweek to 36 hours, fearing Swiss companies would suffer as a result. The upper house will now decide on the measure before voters have their say.
   On shorter working hours: "We clearly reject cutting weekly working hours to 36 in Switzerland, as we think that countries that have cut their working hours have suffered competitive disadvantages and didn't create more jobs but lost some. In these countries, the jobless rate is much higher than in countries that have longer working hours."
   [This is the kind of blind doubletalk that we have seen in the "work hard" movement since the 1930s.
   • First, there is the ignoring of the incommensurate unemployment rates between the unemployment-minimizing rates of the anglophone (English-speaking) economies like the US and UK, and the continental European economies which generally follow the more inclusive EC definition of unemployment.
   • Second, there is the ignoring of the obvious comparison between two commensurate economies, France and Germany, Europe's 2nd-biggest and 1st-biggest economies respectively. As seen in reports below (3/07/2001 and 2/07/2001), France's growth recently is higher than Germany's and France's unemployment rate is lower. And France is the one with the shorter (35-hr) workweek, not Germany. So wo ist die competitive disadvantage, Herr Buehrer? - Where's the competitive disadvantage? And BTW, what planet are you living on?
   • Third, where does Herr Buehrer get the notion that France didn't create more jobs but lost some? If you define a job as 39 hours a week and you have 390 hours of market-demanded employment available IN THE IMMEDIATE TERM, you can get 10 39-hour jobs out of that. However, if you define a job as 35 hours a week, you get 390/35= 11 jobs out of the same amount of immediate-term employment. Do the numbers. It's calling "lightening the load by sharing the work." Do you see any lost jobs here, Herr Buehrer? What part of "sharing the work" don't you understand? Or is your motto, "Don't confuse me with facts, my mind's made up"? And BTW, what kind of "radical" party do you belong to anyway? Sounds like our radical "ecologists" who are actually in the pay of big polluters like the nuclear power industry.]
   On France's policy of a shorter workweek: "France's policy is completely wrong and won't pay off in the long run. In a world without borders, where other countries have the same or the similar productivity and longer working hours, as in the U.K., France will have problems in the long run."
   [Buehrer is apparently unacquainted with economic history. The industrializing world worked roughly 80 hours a week in 1800 and came down to 40-48 hours a week in the 1940s, all the while raising pay and increasing domestic demand. That means more markets, Herr Buehrer, much much more markets. Viel viel mehr Geschaeft, verstehen Sie? And 1800 -1940: that is a long run. And it is historical fact. The bizarre statement of faith that Swiss Radical Party member Gerold Buehrer seems to hold dear is that this is a "world without borders." That indeed is radical, because it is very similar to the visions of international communism. Everything at the international level is supposedly communal. No borders. No private property in the sense of national privacy or control including QUALITY control. No responsibility in the sense of national responsibility. No adjustability. No course correctibility. Everybody has to wait till the negative effects of a mistake get big enough to make it through the thick insulation around the brains of TPTB (the powers that be) in the World Trade Organization (WTO) before we even begin to get a course correction. Yet this is indeed the bizarre vision that the WTO has inherited from the GATT and is pushing for all it's worth. Free trade. Except when one particular group of infinitely acquisitive CEOs is crossed by another, and then maybe they buy themselves some nation-based "fair trade." Well, here's what Buehrer's vision will produce. We will all compete ourselves out of any quality of life whatsoever. We will reduce ourselves to the unlimited working hours and subsistence income of Dickensian England or Dixie cotton plantations, and consumer markets, those things that anchor 2/3 of the American economy, will shrink and shrink, just as they're doing in Japan today, which is kindly and self-sacrificially demonstrating, for the elucidation and enlightenment of all the rest of the world, exactly what it looks like when you introduce massive worksaving technology into your economy and retain one of the two longest workweeks in the developed world. France will have problems in the long run? France will be able to maintain a high quality of life when the rest of us are working 12-14 hour days for peanuts in competition with ongoing robotization. Hopefully by then the French will have the sense to flex up the 35-hour workweek and make it adjustable against unemployment, and also to exploit the incidence of overtime as a targeter and trigger of constant training and hiring.]
   On Switzerland's working hours: "Switzerland has one of the highest working hours [bad English, Herr Buehrer; it'll work if you change it to "workweeks"] in Europe and we are top in what concerns the employment situation.
   [Well we cannot assess your second statement until the American media get a little provincial and actually provide us with some reports on the Swiss economy. But you actually think your first statement is something to boast about? You're essentially saying that the Swiss are among the stupidest people in Europe, because despite their level of technology, they're still working long hours, "working hard, not smart." What in the world do you think technology is for, Herr Buehrer? In your world, it has no purpose whatsover, except possibly to convert a few millionaires into billionaires and deprive everyone of what little free time they had before. You clearly understand nothing about that most basic kind of freedom, free time. To adapt a phrase, "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose all his free time?"]
   "We have had a jobless rate of 2% and less. Belgium, France, Italy - three countries with workweeks of below 40 hours and a jobless rate of 9% and more. Switzerland and the U.K., which have higher annual working hours, have 2% and 3.5% joblessness. I think it's clear what the social policy is."
   [Well, let's ask a few uncomfortable questions here.
   • How does Switzerland define unemployment, like the UK and the US, or like France and the EC, which include more of the problem?
   • Any hidden unemployment? - welfare, disability, prisons, suicide.... Probably not, because the Swiss are too superior, right? But your "glowing" U.K. example - the whole of northern England is empty storefronts and endemic, no-longer-counted unemployment.
   • Are we including a high percentage of Swiss women here, or is Switzerland a society of high sexual differentiation and women are still mainly housewives, not included in the national economic figures (after all, they only got the vote in 1971)? And if the latter, what is the effect on Swiss children of having so little time with their fathers?
   • What about efficiency? Are the Swiss kidding themselves about their implementation of technology? Are we still talking hand-made watches and home-made chocolate - in short, Luddism?
   • What percentage of the Swiss economy are their exports compared with Belgium, France and Italy? It may be that Swiss exports are higher and therefore that Swiss workaholism is contributing to the unemployment in surrounding economies, as Japanese workaholism has been doing to Americans for decades.
   • Which brings us to - are the Swiss disproportionately dependent on luxury markets, on catering to the wealthy - because as money concentrates, there are more wealthy and they are much more wealthy. Handmade Patek Philippe watches and "chronometers," expensive Swiss kitchen gadgets for the wealthy Julia Child's of this world in their strategically important cuisine preparation, more and more "urgently needed"(?) attachments on the burgeoning variety of Swiss army knives....
   • And immigration - we've heard it is real tough to get Swiss citizenship and probably it's tough to get a work permit too. Switzerland has been functioning more and more like a controlled-access, gated community. France, and especially England, have not been that smart in their migration policies. The English, similar to Americans, tend to think they're going to save the whole world by moving the whole world's population into their wonderful or blessed or fortunate country. And not surprisingly, their country is gradually looking more and more like the third world.]
   On productivity" "I don't think that working hour reductions have an impact on the country's productivity. But if people work less, produce a similar output and costs are not reduced, wages rise and this aggrevates the competitiveness."
   [Ah, Herr Buehrer, if working hour reductions don't impact productivity, then why should increased working hours impact productivity, and if increased working hours don't impact productivity, whence their greater competitiveness, as you claim? In fact, Juliet Schor has documented increased productivity from slightly decreased working hours, probably due to increased prioritization of tasks and a more welcoming attitude to technological efficiency. Speaking of which, who says that if people work less, they're going to produce a similar output, as your second statement assumes? In a highly technological age, with everything around us - agriculture, manufacturing, AND services - automating and robotizing to beat the band, PRODUCTIVITY IS HARDLY THE PROBLEM. Counting it properly and admitting to the HUGE increase due to technologically magnified productivity is The Problem - and while constantly admitting this, conventional economists have absolutely no incentive to do anything about it because they are paid directly or indirectly by wealthy CEOs and wealthy CEOs are intent on perpetuating this silly game of saying that market forces raise wages along with productivity. So if by any miscarriage of fortune it ever came out just by how many multiples productivity has risen and wages have not, crash goes the "output theory of wages" by which their undercounting of output has been able to depress wages and concentrate every more spending power in their own few, unable-to-spend-it hands. And bottom line, what's the big deal about competitiveness if the "prize" is: we all become slaves? Why compete in a game where the prize or payoff is suicide? For you rich folks as well, because you're inducing a Japanese-style depression by repeatedly damaging your own consumer base, your own domestic demand, with all your long hours (for those still working) and more and more who aren't, but are safely out of the unemployment count as housewives or institutionalized, coupled with giving more and more money to the few wealthy in the population who have neither time nor need to spend it. A competition is only worth entering if it has a prize worth winning, and one thing that you Big Wheeler Dealers never talk about is, just what is the prize here? Exactly what prize are we talking about in this big globalized competition you keep refering to? It sounds like a pretty louzy prize that enriches only the few of you and only in the short term, because it's impoverishing everyone else, maybe not in carefully access-controlled little Switzerland, which may in fact be operating like a nation-sized gated community, but in all the populations that surround you in your mountain fortress. Your "more technology, longer hours" world is not the future, it is the past. The future is Timesizing.]

• Swiss lower house rejects plan to cut workweek to 36 hours, Bloomberg Mar/08/2001 7:21 ET via AOLNews.
  LUGANO...- The Swiss lower house of parliament rejected a measure aimed at cutting the average workweek by six hours to 36, saying companies would suffer as a result.
  [So, much bigger domestic markets would make Swiss companies suffer? And what about Swiss families, what about Swiss children, when the breadwinner or both parents are working 36+6= 42 hours a week?! What's that, six 7-hour days? That's the level of the American workweek back around 1928 before the waves of worksaving technology kept pounding the economic beach the next 73 years.]
  The lower house, following an opinion by its commission as well as the government, voted 101 to 50 against the proposal. Proponents also sought to cut the maximum number of hours a person may work to 48.
  Other European countries including France, Italy and Belgium have introduced workweeks of 40 hours or less to reduce joblessness. Switzerland doesn't have such a problem, as its unemployment rate is only 2%, the lowest in Europe.
  [But have they had a referendum to determine if the people themselves think that's "low"? The Japanese think it's high. Only those involved have the right to determine how low is low enough, not the media, not the "experts," not the economists and not the analysts.]
  "We think that countries that have cut their working hours have suffered competitive disadvantages," Radical Party member Gerold Buehrer said.
  [Well, we've all cut them down from dawn-to-dusk working hours, Gerold, from 80-84 hours a week back before 1840. You really still believe in working hard, not smart. You think that's more competitive? If competitiveness varies directly with working hours, why don't you roll the Swiss workweek back up to 80 then, Gerold? Hey, why not roll it back up to 100? Or if you Swiss are so interested in "face time" competitiveness, why not work literally 24/7 = all 168 hours a week. Surely you super-transformer robopaths don't need sleep, or family life, do you? Call yourself a "radical"? Hey, we had people like you all over the American South prior to 1865 - we called them slave owners. ('Course dey didn't apply no 168-hour week to demsels.)]
  The proposal, initiated by the Swiss Trade Union Federation, or SGB, also demanded that workers earning as much as one-and-a-half times the average wage, or $4,615 a month, wouldn't suffer a pay cut to compensate for the loss of work.
  [That you could probably leave up to market forces responding to the greater scarcity of job candidates, as France did under the Robien Law of 1996-97.]
  Currently, workers in industry, office personnel as well as transport and technical employees work a maximum of 45 hours a week, while others work up to 50 hours. The Swiss are the world's most productive workforce behind Singaporeans.
  [Productivity has become notoriously difficult to measure, because economists tend not to measure the exponential amplifications of technology. This should mean that the Swiss have the most automated and robotized economy in Europe. Do they?? Or do they just have the most closely controlled statistics office and the most subtle ways of cooking their figures as a matter of national pride or self EU-proofing?]
  Switzerland has Europe's highest working week after the U.K., and the least number of holidays and vacation days.
  [In other words, the Swiss and the Brits don't have a life. They're born to work long hours on someone else's dream.]
  Swiss workers get an average of 28 days off a year, compared with 40 in neighboring Germany, 38 in Italy and 35 in France. [How do we figure the American equivalent? 2 weeks vacation + personal days + holidays?]
  Prosperity. Labor unions are calling for fewer working hours amid an economic upswing. The Swiss economy, which went through sluggish growth for most of the 1990s, last year expanded at the fastest pace in 10 years, or 3.4%, the government said today. "Swiss employees have a right to profit from the economic upswing, not only through higher wages but more free time," said Social Democrat Paul Rechsteiner, a member of the lower house and SGB president, in an interview.
  [Sounds like a formula for substantial progress. But here comes the usual stupidity -]
  Swiss companies have increasingly been "forced" [our quotes - ed.] to look abroad to find workers.
  [How about using the incidence of overtime to target, trigger, size and pace training and hiring of that last 2% of unemployed Swiss people, or is that beyond the spartan Swiss imagination?]
  At one point last year, the jobless rate dipped to 1.7%, with some firms saying sales were hurt by a lack of qualified personnel.
  [Spoiled and whining employers, who don't want to bother with what they all need more than anything else -the habit of training, the practice of continuous training in this constantly updating high-tech world, the strategy of overtime conversion - into training and hiring.]
  The initiative is the third of its kind after Swiss voters overwhelmingly turned down two proposals for a 40-hour workweek.
  ["Like a dare-gale skylark scanted in his dull cage,
  Man's mounting spirit in his mean house, bone house, dwells...." (Hopkins)
  "The prisoner loves his cage."
  (Or maybe this is more: "The pensioner loves to cage the employees who support him."
  Then it could also be, "I suffered. They should suffer too!" i.e., misery loves company, reinforced with fear of change and a rejection of progress dba a belief that they've already achieved the best of all possible worlds.]

• 'You worked too much, Mom' - The daughters of exhausted, workaholic boomer mothers are showing signs of rebellion: 'I don't feel that need to prove myself', by Suzanne Hiller, National Post March 7 2001 via Joe Polito of 32 Hours, Toronto.
  Elizabeth Jansen's mother is a Halifax NS lawyer who always encouraged her daughter to put her career first. Now 27, Jansen, a physiotherapist, says she has no intention of working the long hours her mother did over the years. Recently married, she plans to eventually work three days a week. "I'm proud of my mother," she said. "But when I have kids I want to be around. I want to see them grow up. I don't want to be exhausted all the time."...
  After climbing for two decades, the percentage of 15- to 34-year-old women who work ceased rising during the 1990s. ...Some feel it...reflects the desire of some women to spend more time with their families. "They saw their mothers bust their butts trying out all these new things at once - power lunches, going back to school, kids. But although they were experiencing new freedom and individuality, they paid a price in overwork and lack of family time," says Lauren Dockett, who interviewed Gen-X women for a book she co-authored...called "Facing Thirty: Women Talk about Constructing a Real Life, and Other Scary Rites of Passage."... Gen-X women, born roughly between 1965 and 1980...are starting to make demands of the workplace - flex time, part time, job sharing and telecommuting - that many Boomer mothers would never have dared suggest.
  KPMG, an accounting firm that employs 4,700 people across [Canada], launched an initiative last year that includes options for working mothers - increased maternity leave, a reduced workweek, working from home, job sharing and telecommuting. Heather Kaine, 33, a senior manager at KPMG in Toronto, said no questions were asked when she dropped her workweek from five days to four....
  "At the early stages of their career, women are asking many more questions about the hours they will be expected to work, vacation, maternity leave - that type of thing," said Jocelyn Yacoub, a principal at Quest Executive Recruitment Professionals Inc. in Toronto....
  Researchers Liz Nickles and Laurie Ashcraft launched Update: Women in 1979 to get a handle on the tremendous cultural and personal changes sparked by women's march into the workforce. In three parallel surveys in the late '70s, '80s and '90s, Update:Women posed...questions to a statistically representative sample of 5,000 women aged 20 to 50.... "We saw a radical shift in the '90s women," [Ashcraft] said. "...They openly started placing photos of their children on their desk. And women who decide to stay home or cut their hours are feeling as guilty about it." But although many women dream of "de-escalating" with more time at home, most still need to work, for the paycheque or personal fulfullment. In response, Ashcraft said, many women are trying to move from the frantic "juggling" of work and home to a "grafting" of the two: doing some paid work from home, handling some family needs in the workplace, such as on-site child care.... Ashcraft predicts in this decade ['00s] there will be a huge growth in cottage industries, flex time and job sharing....
  Douglas Baer, a sociologist at the University of Western Ontario, points out that many young adults - of both sexes - don't want to emulate their workaholic parents. "I see it all the time in my classes," he says. "I don't thing it's gender-specific. Students say they just don't want to live like their parents."...
  Anna Porter, president of Key Porter Books, has publicly said she wonders who will succeed her, because it is unlikely her daughters will want to work her 18-hour days....
  "I don't want any thinking I'm not a feminist," said a 25-year-old freelance journalist. "I'm just not interested in working till 10 every night to break a glass ceiling."
  "I would hate for anyone to think my mother was not a good mother," said another young woman, whose mother was an oncologist. "I really admire her. She was always there for me, but she was always tired, too. I just want more of a life."...

• Analysis - German gloom clouding euro-zone growth, by Alister Bull, Reuters 11:51 03-06-01 via AOLNews.
  FRANKFURT...- German jobless numbers have provided further evidence of a slowdown in the common currency's largest economic, raising pressure on the Euripean Central Bank for a further rarte cut. But German problems many be homegrown and the Frankfurt-based bank will want wider evidence of eurozone woes before slackening monetary reins held fast since October, analysts say. The unexpected rise in February unemployment followed news last week that German growth had stalled in the second half of 2000, confounding official optimism that the region was insulated from the chill of a cooling US economy.... German growth fell to 0.2% in 2000's final quarter, taking it into the same growth neighborhood as the United States but without rapid Federal Reserve rate cuts for protection..\..
  The extent of its slowdown was unexpected and makes for an unflattering comparison with nimbler members of the eurozone.
  French growth was 0.9% quarter-on-quarter, revealing a surprising divergence between the two economies which monetary union, in theory, should smooth out.
  A French formula that cut its working week to 35 hours to boost jobs and lifted consumer confidence helped support activity despite slackening world growth....
  [So to put it quite bluntly, the Frogs, who alone in all the world have the sense to drop passive Luddism and use technology the right way to free people up instead of enslaving them, are beating the Limeys (story yesterday), and the Krauts (story today), and of course, the Yanks, who, along with the Japs, are creating the slowdown in the first place with all their dashed downsizings. And identifying for a moment with the poor Canucks, we're not even significant enough to register on the seismograph. (If you notice a bit of bogus British brogue creeping in, it's because we're watching a classic British movie on late-nite telly.)]
  Economists said Germany's poorer performance reflected badly on labour market "reforms" [our quotes - ed.].
  [So we suppose that these are the so-called "reforms" that make it easier to terminate people, increase the labor glut, and weaken the power of labor by market forces, without cutting the workweek to decrease the labor glut, strengthen the power of labor by market forces, and maintain domestic demand.]
  The country may also have been hobbled by a construction sector crippled in a 1990's unification boom which turned quickly to bust and was still curbing growth.
  [Well, we could all list a few sector problems from the '90s, couldn't we.]
  "We cannot yet infer a eurozone slowdown from German weakness," said Goldman Sachs chief euro economist Thomas Mayer. "These were all home-made problems linked to slackening domestic demand, of which the lack of employment reform is the most likely explanation," he said, pointing to recent recent re-regulation in the German labor market agreed in Berlin....
  [These conventional economists just don't get it. They refuse to face the colossal contradiction between burgeoning technological efficiency and rigid pre-technological human workweeks. They think you can give the tiny minority represented by CEOs more and more arbitrary power and wealth, and the vast majority of employees less and less, and for some strange reason that will grow your domestic demand - when quite the opposite is the case. "The more concentration, the less circulation."]

• Workaholic Britain too tired for sex, by Mikey Rosato, Reuters 12:03 03-05-01 via AOLNews.
  LONDON...- Britons who devote long hours to the workplace have no appetite for sex or family once they go home, according to a survey released on Monday...conducted \by\ the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development [CIPD].... The CIPD, which polled 486 Britons who work more than 48 hours a week, along with 139 of their partners, represents personnel managers in the United Kingdom.... "Over half of all the partners (54%) [say] their sex life is suffering because the 'long hours' worker is tired and 43% [say] they are fed up with having to shoulder most of the domestic burden..\.. [Even of the 'long hours' workers themselves in the survey,] nearly a third...admit that work-related tiredness is causing their sex life to suffer and 14% report a loss of, or reduced, libido....
  Nor were [sex] and family life the only things to suffer. The report said that in the last 12 months "more than a third say they have made mistakes, ranging from fatigue-related mismanagement of people and projects to property damage and personal injury."
  Surveys show Britons work longer hours than their fellow Europeans, even after the British government introduced the European Union Working Time Directive in July 1998, five years after it was initially adopted. The directive limits Britons to a 48-hour week [e.g., six 8-hour days], but the government added a raft of exceptions to the rules.
  France by comparison is implementing a cut in the legal work week from 39 hours to 35...to promote more employment.
  [And French unemployment is down nearly thirty percent to a 10-year low of 9.0% from a 1997 high of 12.6%, and the boost in domestic spending which that drop in unemployment generated has inoculated France against the U.S. downturn and enabled it to beat the performance of the only bigger economy in Europe, Germany.)]

• Swiss parliamentary session in Lugano, March 5-23: Program, Bloomberg Mar/02/2001 10:17 ET via AOLNews.
  BERN...- The following is a list of issues that the Swiss Parliament is scheduled to discuss in the three-week parliamentary session starting in Lugano on Monday [3/05].
  Cut in Working Hours. The lower house will discuss a proposal to cut the average working week to 36 hours. Currently, workers in industry, office personnel, as well as transport and technical workers work for a maximum of 45 hours per week, while others may work up to 50 hours.
  [This omits two vital pieces of information: (1) what is the current average working week, and (2) historically, we have seen various ways of enforcing a maximum workweek but how do they plan to enforce an average working week? That sounds more difficult.]
  Workers earning as much as one-and-a-half times the average wage, or about 7,600 Swiss francs ($4,626) per month, wouldn't have to take a pay cut to compensate for the loss of work, according to the proposal. The initiative, sponsored by the Swiss Trade Union Federation (SGB), also demands a maximum working week of 48 working hours, in line with European Union regulations.
  [This proposal contains an interesting design refinement which, to our knowledge, the French reduction from 39 to 35 hours a week did not include - the idea that employers would be allowed to presumably prorate wages above a certain level, but not below a certain level. The difficulty here, of course, is the sharp and arbitrary boundary which will reverse the relative size of wages just above and just below it. The difficulty would be solved by setting the boundary by referendum and then logarithmically smoothing it so all relative sizes of wages are preserved. At any rate, the article has so far given us the good news. Now the bad news -]
  The commission charged with preparing the issue for parliamentary debate recommended,...as did the government, \that\ the house...reject the proposal. Once both [houses] of parliament discuss...the proposal, it will be put to voters.
  Time [of discussion]: March 7/8, from 8 a.m....
  [Hey, at least this overdue development - in view of our waves of labor-saving technology and the dangerous, unlimited nature of our concentration and consolidation of income and wealth - is spreading beyond France and even picking up potentially valuable design fillips.]

1. The mind-set of a slowdown - Thriving or hurting, US manufacturers brace for the worst - Uncertainty about the economy often has a ripple effect, by Louis Uchitelle, NYT, C1.
   [Photo caption -] The Kohler Co., a maker of bathtubs...and other fixtures, has noticed few signs of a slowdown. Still, its chairman, Herbert V. Kohler Jr...says overtime [has] been scaled back. [Text -] "Overtime disappears naturally; our foremen and supervisors know to pull it back," he said..\.. [Don't let die-hard socialists convince you there aren't any intelligent, far-sighted top executives. Here are a few more.]
   ...Despite...wide differences among manufacturers, their strategies for the weeks ahead are eerily uniform. Bracing for the worst, most of America's industrial leaders are hunkering down by eliminating overtime....
   [It's good that they have this first in the list - but overtime should be never be allowed to become the standard operating procedure that many executives allow it to become. It should always be a freak occurrence, and it should immediately trigger training of some kind, especially cross-training.]
   ...putting a freeze on hiring, scaling back on new investment and shrinking the number of jobs at their companies.
   [This last should only be done by attrition, never by mass involuntary layoffs, which destroy morale and productivity. But next comes a connection between scaling back and inducing recession that we seldom see in the media -]
   Yet in doing so to strengthen their operations for the longer term, they may be helping to make it more likely that in the short run a full-blown recession could indeed arrive.
   [The connection between multitudes of individual firms scaling back and the arrival of recession is accurate. What is bizarre is the reversal of long and short term. Most executives scale back because they have to in the immediate short term and if they help induce a recession in the longer term, tough noogies. The strange reversal here apparently came about because the reporter had in mind companies like Kohler whose scaleback of hiring and investment was premature (though a scaleback of overtime and its replacement by training and hiring is never premature, since overtime is always a Red Alert about a bottleneck in skills) since they're not hurting yet. More on paradox -]
   "When uncertainty spreads, as it is spreading now, you focus on defending your profitability," said Ralph F. Hake, executive VP and CFO at Fluor. "And that, unfortunately, is self-defeating."
   [Let's review the non-selfdefeating mechanism then. By bunching up work (and skills) on fewer and fewer people by practicing overtime and mass layoffs, a company is bunching up wages/income/profits on fewer people and diminishing spending activity and demand, since fewer people with more money means people with less time and less need to go out and spend it. This is how thousands of stupid CEOs create their own recession. But if, in defending their profitability, they avoid overtime and mass layoffs by constant training and workweek adjustment for everyone, including themselves, they have a neutral effect on recession. If they practice hiring when skill bottlenecks signalled by overtime cannot be resolved by cross-training, they counteract recession. And if they pre-emptively reduce their workweeks and hire more people to make up the difference as in France, they generate their own solid boom. Why? Because they are reducing the surplus of labor which has been flattening general wage levels and unleashing market forces to raise wages and centrifuge income and wealth away from their own overstuffed, underspent pockets and into the pockets of people who immediately go out and make purchases with it. Demand rises, production rises, and profit rises, even though they have, in the short term, seen a centrifugation of profit out of their own and investors' pockets and into wages.]
   ...Executives of a dozen companies described their experience as more like a tire with a slow leak than a balloon suddenly popped.
   [Yeah, it's the "frog in the water" syndrome. If he doesn't jump into boiling water and realize the danger, but rather sits in water that gradually warms up until it comes to a boil, he never jumps out and saves himself.]
   The slowdown is even seen by some companies as an opportunity to cut costs that should have been eliminated during the boom years....
   [That's all very well, but if you can't distinguish between your own employees and "costs" - if you don't value your employees, your actual "company," your immediate skillset and beyond that, your morale and mutual loyalty, if you just look at your employees as "costs" to be cut to the bone like Chainsaw Dunlap, you shouldn't be in management, because you are a recession-generator.]

2. French Reuters/CDAF PMI picks up to 52.9 in Feb., by Laura Geoffrey, Reuters 02:52 03-01-01 via AOLNews.
   PARIS...- The pace of French manufacturing industry growth accelerated for the first time in nine months in February, albeit only marginally, the CDAF/Reuters Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) showed on Wednesday. The index hit 52.9 from a downwardly revised reading of 52.6 in January, marking the first rise in the expansion rate in the manufacturing sector since May 2000, but the pick-up in activity remained tamer than in most of last year. The number - which indicates an expansion when it passes 50 and a contraction when below 50 - appeared to offer a more optimistic view in the face of U.S. slowdown than the one given by France's statistics office [INSEE] survey of business sentiment for January....
   Output remains strong.... Employment also grew for the 23rd consecutive month in February, partly due to the need to maintain output levels by increasing staff levels to offset a shorter legal work week. INSEE reported on Wednesday that France's jobless rate fell to a 10-year low of 9.0% in January.
   Inflation falling. Input prices paid by manufacturing firms rose in February at their slowest rate since June 1999, recording 54.4, down from 62.2 in January. Firms said they benefited from more benign trends in commodity prices, and from the impact of the overall rise of the euro against the dollar since October 2000.
   Firms continued, however, to report overall input price inflation, partly as a result of price rises at suppliers following the introduction of the 35-working week. The survey showed firms were keen to reduce stocks of purchased goods, which fell at their most rapid rate since November 1998.
   [So although the inflation news is good, it's not because of the shorter workweek. Simple workweek reduction will raise wages by mopping up surplus labor, not maintain or decrease them (except when the reduction cuts featherbedding). Generally, wage raises are good, despite their being labelled as "(bad) inflation" by conventional short-sighted economic theorists. However, if CEOs and governments want to moderate the "inflationary" effect of workweek reduction, they must first set up a system of automatic overtime-to-training conversion - which France failed to do. In France, the failure was moderated by the training tax on payrolls which they practice anyway as standard operating procedure. This is a tax (of 1½%?) on payrolls with a complete exemption if companies spend the amount on training. It's kind of scattershot and nothing like as strategic and market-focused as overtime conversion, but it's a lot better than nothing - which is more or less what the English-speaking economies have - including US.   In our Timesizing program, we put overtime conversion first in Phase Two (after defining overtime by referendum in Phase One) and we put actual workweek reduction second in Phase Four (after roping in moonlighters in Phase Three).]

1. Jospin trumpets million fall in French dole queues [unemployment lines], by Joelle Diderich, Reuters 09:12 02-28-01 via AOLNews.
   ...since he came to power [in June 1997] as data showed January's jobless rate in the euro zone's second largest economy hit a 10-year low. "It is a great joy and a great satisfaction to see that...we are crossing the threshold of a one million drop in unemployment since 1997"..\..Prime Minister Lionel Jospin on Wednesday...told reporters.... Noting that French economic growth outpaced the rate of the other big euro zone players, Jospin said youth job subsidies and the introduction of a shorter 35-hour work week had helped boost job creation to record levels in recent months....

2. French January jobless rate drops to 9% from 9.2%, Bloomberg Feb/28/2001 5:55 ET via AOLNews.
   [That's better than expected when we recall a story a few days ago, "French unemployment seen falling to 9.1% in January: Survey," Bloomberg Feb/23/2001 9:06 ET via AOLNews.]
   PARIS - ...Record Jobs. France added a record 517,400 jobs last year, as rising investment and exports boosted economic activity....
   35 Hours. Reducing the statutory workweek to 35 hours [from 39] has created or saved 251,915 jobs as of November last year, the Labor Ministry estimates. The law applies to companies with more than 20 employees, while those with fewer workers need to comply by 2002.
   A subsidized jobs program provided 298,140 people under 30 years of age with work as of the end of January, the Labor Ministry said.
   [This kind of imposition on taxpayers will become unnecessary as France gets used to workweek adjustment, especially downward, and the resulting work sharing and spreading. France is leading the world on this. (Thank God somebody has the sense to do it - and the guts to go against the prevailing stupidity!) It is the most significant experiment for human progress going on at the dawn of the Third Millennium.]
   Today's report shows the number of job seekers under 25 years of age fell almost 18% since January 2000, though it rose 0.9% last month from December.
   The number of unemployed aged 25-49 - most of the workforce - declined 2.5% in January 2000. Those aged 50 and over and those who have been unemployed for more than a year both fell 3.1% in the month.
   The number of people registered at ANPE, the national employment agency, amounted to 327,600. That's 4% more than in December. Both the unemployment rate and the number of jobless are seasonally adjusted. ..\..Though exports to countries such as the U.S. are likely to cool, spending may underpin French economic growth, economists say.
   [That's what a repackaging of the nation's work into smaller job-parcels does - it gets more money out of the black hole of the top income brackets and into the hands of people who immediately go out and spend it - and create effective demand and rising markets and more marketable productivity and more investment... - a "virtuous circle" upward instead of the kind of vicious circle downward that Japan and South Korea and Turkey have - and we're getting into.]
   "We're opening new stores and creating close to 600 new positions this year," said Herve Courvoisier, chief executive of Mr. Bricolage, a French chain of home-improvement stores. The group employs about 5,000 people, he said....

3. Comment #1 (positive) -]
   CL's Eluere on French producer prices, unemployment: Comment, Bloomberg Feb/28/2001 3:50 ET via AOLNews.
   ...Two government reports released [yesterday morning by the French national statistics office, Insee] showed that the jobless rate declined more than expected to 9% in January, from 9.2% a ,month earlier [the lowest since March 1991], while producer prices fell unexpectedly by 0.5% in January..\.. The following comments...were made by Olivier Eluere, an economist at Credit Lyonnais SA in Paris....
   On Growth and Unemployment. "Growth in France is solid and recent better-than-expected figures have illustrated that, but it's by no means exceptional. Calling it inflationary would go one step too far.
   "Last month's unemployment rate benefited from the introduction of the 35-hour workweek in the beginning of the year. But that effect will go in coming months, so job creation is likely to slow." Eluere expects the jobless rate to fall to 8.8% by the end of this year....

4. [Comment #2 (even more positive) -]
   Merrill Lynch's Mange on French unemployment, prices: Comment, Bloomberg Feb/28/2001 4:05 ET via AOLNews.
   The following comments...were made by Patrick Mange, an economist at Merrill Lynch in Paris....
   On unemployment: "This is very positive and highlights the virtuous circle that exists in the French economy at the moment: employment growth is boosting consumer confidence, translating into higher consumer spending. This in turn causes companies to increase production, thereby requiring more [employees] and so it goes on.
   "It's a happy situation to be in. Whatever happens at the moment to the economy, unemployment will probably keep falling. The shorter 35-hour workweek is undoubtedly playing a role here."