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

5/15/2001  glimmers of Timesizing -

• F.A.A. plans to enforce work rules - Warning to airlines on pilots' schedules, by Matthew Wald, NYT, A12.
  WASHINGTON...- The Federal Aviation Administration [yester]day said it would tell the airlines to stop requiring pilots to fly without regard to delays that stretch their work days to more than 16 hours. The agency warned that beginning in six months it would "rigorously enforce" rules that have been on the books since 1985.
  But the agency would not answer questions about what it would do about a pilot [Donald T. Simonds] who was fired by his airline ["Pan Am" based in N.H.] last year for refusing to fly a delayed flight that would have put him well over 16 hours of duty time.
  [Don't wanna fly that airline!]
  The rules governing how many hours a pilot can work have been in chaos since late last year, when the pilots union at American Airlines asked whether it was legal for a plane to push back from the gate with a cockpit crew member who knew, because of foreseeable delays on the ground or en route, that he or she would be working more than 16 hours by the time the plane landed. The F.A.A. answered that this was against the rules. American then sent a letter to its pilots saying that the matter was under dispute and that until it was resolved, it had the F.A.A.'s permission to follow its past practice. The F.A.A. denied giving any such permission, but took no action against American.
  [Time chaos. This economy better get a grip on this. It's the most important issue of the new century and one that we botched last century.]
  The agency said [yester]day, in a statement, that "based on current information, the FAA is confident that, overall, the airline industry complies with the current FAA rules on pilot time limitations and rest requirements." But a spokeswoman, Alison Duquette, said that no one would speak on the record about how the agency knew this. Pilots maintain that they face strong pressure from their managers not to refuse to fly.
  [What's it going to take, a major plane crash to get the FAA and American Airline executives serious about passenger safety? Or maybe the question is, how many crashes, how many deaths before these clowns DO THEIR JOB and schedule pilots appropriately?!]
  ...Capt. Richard Rubin of the Allied Pilots Assoc...the American [Airlines?] union, said, "Sixteen hours by itself is way too much time for anybody to be performing a sensitive operation."...
  [We agree. Physicians practice the same stupidity, especially on interns. The FAA is foot-dragging so much it's beginning to smell of corruption.]

1. French museums free during strike, AP-NY-05-11-01 1310EDT via AOLNews.
   [Caption of AP photo by Michel Lipchitz -] Strikers demand that hundreds more jobs be created to accompany the introduction of France's mandatory reduced workweek.
   ...On Friday, thousands of museum-goers ventured past picket lines, empty cashier windows and into what striking workers dubbed "Open Door Day" at many of France's top cultural attractions. The Louvre, the *Musee d'Orsay and Rodin museums were among the Paris cultural meccas that waived admission fees as employees refused to staff ticket booths....
   [Though covering only 9% of the French workforce, according to Gary Zabel (Boston's head of a contingent academic workers' alliance), unions probably have disproportional strength in the public sector, as they do in the U.S. with their 14% of the U.S. workforce including both sectors dropping down to only 9% in the private sector alone. The museums are run by the government and therefore disproportionately unionized, but according to Zabel, the activism of French employees is surprisingly not at all limited to union members, and non-unionized employees can and do frequently walk out when dissatisfied. Zabel (Phil Hyde's co-presenter at the Boston Public Library last Tuesday) also dismisses the French 35-hour week as a sham because many employers did not restructure workloads and hire more employees in line with the whole work-sharing intent of the shorter week. Instead, he said, they simply expect employees to do as much in 35 hours as they used to do in 39 before the cut, some employers even going so far as to cut coffee breaks and lunch hours. So stupidly enough, it seems that some of the French public-sector employers (e.g., museums) are guilty of this government-obstructing strategy, and employees are applying pressure to cut the crap. Another danger signal is the fact that the government did not lead the way on the implementation of the 35-hour workweek - incredibly, they applied it to companies of over 20 employees last year while they themselves held back implementation throughout the government until next year with the smaller companies. Was this supposed to give the larger private-sector companies first pick of the unemployed perhaps?]
   Unions are seeking creation of hundreds of jobs to accompany the introduction of France's mandatory reduced workweek. Private companies have already had to cut employees' weekly hours from 39 to 35. State facilities have until January.
   Many museums have alternated between closing to the public and opening their doors free of charge, when unions agree to provide a skeletal staff. Friday was the third such nationwide work stoppage. At the Louvre, several visitors reveled in the $6 savings on admission and praised the strikers' tenacity....
   ...However...most museums give little or no advance notice about closures [and] dozens of France's most-visited sites [are] caught up in the strikes. The Picasso museum, the Chateau de Versailles and the Saint-Chapelle church, known for its 13th-century stained-glass windows, also have been intermittently shut down. The Pantheon was closed Friday. A simliar strike in 1999 shut museums on-an-off for three weeks.
   *The Louvre has been the unions' main target. Since March 23, it has been closed on eight working days and offered free admission on 12 other days due to the strikes. As a result, the museum has lost roughly $1.4m, said Louvre spokeswoman Patricia Mounier.
   [Then perchance it's time it lined up behind it's own government policy?]
   Though security guards remain on duty, the Louvre has been forced to close a fifth of the huge museum due to a shortage of other staff. Unions argue that once the shortened workweek takes effect, even more of the museum will be off-limits unless more jobs are created.
   [Oops, wait a minute. The shorter hours aren't even in effect yet at the museum and yet the unions are squawking already? What gives? Vague recollections of an answer to this one in a story below somewhere.]
   Only the Finance Ministry has the authority to budget for new jobs, and these things never happen quickly. The Culture Ministry said talks were under way. Unions, meanwhile, refuse to budge.
   [According to Zabel, the pressure it's taking to get a meaningful shorter workweek in France is enormous.]
   "We're going to keep up the pressure," said Guy-Noel Moser, spokesman for one of the largest culture workers' union[s] in France....

2. French April consumer prices rise 0.6%, led by food and energy, Bloomberg May/11/2001 2:54 ET via AOLNews.
   PARIS - ...Inflation in Europe's third-largest economy climbed to 0.6% last month based on EU standards, national statistics office Insee said..\..
   [This is the first time we've seen France referred to as "Europe's third-largest economy." Has Ireland or Italy suddenly risen and beaten France? We doubt it. France is second-largest, not third.]
   French consumer prices rose at the fastest pace in seven months in April, as the cost of energy and food products surged.
   [This seven-month high is less significant than the following factoid from a later Bloomberg story the same day.]
   French, German inflation rates rise in April, Bloomberg May/11/2001 7:06 ET via AOLNews -]
   French inflation so far remains the lowest among the dozen nations using the euro. A reduction in the workweek from 39 to 35 hours persuaded unions to settle for moderate wage rises in recent months, helping to anchor prices more successfully than elsewhere in the area, analysts say. "France has been relatively immune from inflationary pressures," said Lorenzo Codogno, an economist at Bank of America Corp. in London....
   [That's amazing considering they have not implemented the more advanced form of workweek reduction that automatically balances inflationary incentive with deflationary incentive, money motive with job satisfaction. It does this by barring forced overtime (OT) completely and allowing only people motivated by pure job satisfaction to work longer than the workweek maximum for pay, which they must reinvest in OT-targeted training and hiring en route. Otherwise they must stop at the maximum and leave to others any additional hours required by employers. This harnesses the charitable and volunteer incentive in the population into elminating unemployment, raising general wage levels and centrifuging income out of the incredibly astronomical "black hole" of top-heavy, recession-inducing consolidation it's currently in and in-tensifying. And people with pure money motive are incentivated to gravitate into jobs in which they find either a higher wage or a more inherent (deflationary) incentive. As this spreads, the wage-price spiral of inflation loses steam.]
   Still, some "creeping [inflationary] tensions have emerged" even in France, Codogno said..\..
   The French government cut sales tax by a percentage point to 19.6% in April 2000, trimming the price level that month and boosting the April 2001 level in comparison.
   [Good G*d, we thought the Canadian Goods & Services Tax (GST) was bad at around 15%! And they count this in as inflation? Guess that's good from the viewpoint of blackening the concept of sales taxes, as regressive and market-damping a concept as ever there was.]
   In Italy, consumer prices also rose more than expected in April, a preliminary report showed two week ago. Together, the five countries [Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Germany and France] account for 85% of inflation in the dozen nations sharing the euro.
   Reports this week showed German industrial production posting the biggest drop in more than six years in March, while factory orders fell and unemployment rose. Business and consumer confidence declined across Europe the same month.
   [Too bad the Deutschers don't "get" the inherent contradiction between ever more and faster production - with ever fewer employees and consumers and markets - instead of ever more and faster production with ever more employees working ever fewer hours. Makes you wonder how the "good" countries with low inflation are going to avoid getting ruined by the inflation of the others after full currency union next year. We always said the euro was way premature.]
   ECB Switch
   The ECB [European Central Bank] was the last among the major central banks to reduce borrowing costs this year, reducing its rate by a quarter-point to 4.5%. It is now the same as the U.S. Federal Reserve's benchmark rate.
   [Another little puppydog economy caving in to pressure from the "cosmeticians" in Washington?]
   Until now, ECB policy makers cited inflation as the reason to delay a rate cut, repeating that price stability was their sole objective....
   [A self-defeating focus, considering that, in an economy where the unemployed are fully supported instead of pushed into starvation, unemployment is not on a seesaw with inflation - it is the major component of inflation. The reason is that you're diluting the value of the currency by exchanging it for nothing instead of for products or services. And in an economy where you push the unemployed into starvation works, you get just as "good" performance as an economy that sends large portions of its workforce to get killed or maimed in battle, or that experiences a fast-acting plague, or that locks up significant portions of its workforce in prison (the U.S. "solution" now that the Cold War is over - for a couple of years until the arms makers succeed in getting it started again with toys such as Star Wars). Whether you're carrying along more and more unemployed or killing them off - neither approach can compete with a timesizing economy which avoids wasting any consumers.]

3. Germany's Riester tastes success on pensions, at last, Bloomberg May/11/2001 12:06 ET via AOLNews.
   ...Riester had a good day at last after the Bundesrat, or upper house of parliament, approved the government's plan to promote investment in private pensions with tax breaks....
   Riester [had] got into trouble with industry and employer groups...last September after drafting a law to promote part-time work by allowing workers to switch from full-time to part-time employment after six months.... Riester became deputy chairman of the national IG Metall union in October 1993, a position he held until September 1998.... During his year at the IG Metall, Riester helped negotiate the 35-hour workweek for 3.5m metal and steel-workers, an accord that set benchmarks for other industries....

1. French jobs scheme passed against leftist votes, by Mark John, Reuters 07:20 05-10-01 via AOLNews.
   PARIS...- The French parliament passed a scheme to encourage the unemployed back to work late on Wednesday in a move seen boosting job creation and improving relations between the government and business before the 2002 national elections.... Initially blocked by left-wing Labour Minister Martine Aubry, it won government acceptance when she quit the cabinet in October..\..
   The scheme, which will lower social security contributions payable by both employees and firms but push the unemployed to attend job interviews, was approved by a cross-party committee despite resistance from the lest of the ruling coalition.... The so-called "aid plan for the return to work" (PARE) [Plan de l'Aide pour le Retour à l'Emploi??] was proposed last year by employers group Medef.... The PARE will mean that unemployment benefits will be more generous but their eligibility criteria will be tightened by making it harder for job seekers to turn down work....France is seen as doing slightly better at job creation than euro zone allies such as Germany, something..\..Prime Minister Lionel Jospin allies attribute to a policy mix of liberal economic orthodoxy and more overly leftist schemes, such as the 35-hour week....
   [There's nothing "leftist" about shorter workweeks when -
   • the UDF, a rightist group, sponsored them on a voluntary basis in France in 1996-97 (the Robien Law)
   • American companies use them to avoid layoffs in every recession
   • the whole world used them to appropriate the benefits of mechanization from the start of the Industrial Revolution to 1940, and that's what brought workweeks down from the 80-84 hour level to 40 hrs/wk
   [Capitalists from the early Republican Party (starting in the 1860s) to Lord Leverhulme (1919), W. K. Kellogg (1930) and Edward Filene (1932) have all recognized the categorical imperative of shortening workweeks to spread the vanishing employment and retain the consumer base. The blind stupidity of "playing the float" between cutting "my" company's workforce and experiencing a sales slump due to the ripple effect therefrom is a brain disease of just the last generation of death-wish capitalists who can't think two moves ahead in chess and seem oblivious to the closeness of crash&burn. Witness their pervasive stupid hype about dot-com "boom" until facts bopped them between the eyes.]

2. [Here's an unusual strategy to achieve shorter workweeks -]
   Heath brands UK's Hague "laughing stock", by Mark John, Reuters 07:20 05-10-01 via AOLNews.
   Former British Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath fired a valedictory blast at his party leader William Hague on Thursday.... Heath, elected prime minister in 1970, was swept from power in 1974 against a backdrop of striking coalminers who put British industry on a three-day working week. In 1975 he was ousted as party leader by Margaret Thatcher....
   [Shorter workweeks resulting from the shutdown of a key industry have been happening in many Californian companies recently due to the privatization and dumbing-down of the Calif. electric power industry. Wonder what kind of workweeks British cattle farmers have these days after slaughtering their "foot&mouth" threatened herds.]

3. Firm Aussie mulls employment..., by Mark John, Reuters 07:20 05-10-01 via AOLNews.
   SYDNEY...- The Australian dollar sat comfortably above 52 U.S. cents on Thursday and over a quarter cent above Wednesday's local close, holding most of its overnight gain despite a very puzzling employment report.... The labour force data proved a real muddle with [the] headline employment figure coming in as an astounding 40,100 rise when median expectations had been for a 5,000 drop.
   But as usual the devil was in the detail, with full time employment dropping by 40,400...and [an]"unprecedented"...part-time employment...rise by 80,000 in a single month..\.. The unemployment rate [rose] by a relatively sharp 0.3% to 6.8% [even as] the participation rate rose to 63.9% from 63.5%.... Chris Caton, chief economist at BT Funds Management...noted that it was "rare" for unemployment to rise 0.3%, "unusual" for full-time employment to fall by more than 40,000, and "unprecedented" for part-time employment to rise by 80,000 in a single month....
   [Looks like Australia may be experiencing new levels of turbulence from humans' losing battle with robots; that is, the contradictory strategies of evermore worksaving technologies clashing with frozen pre-technology workweek levels. Here's a situation "down under" that parallels what we've seen in the States in the last few decades - we might as well shorten the workweek because we're getting shorter workweeks willynilly in the vast expansion of part-time work, which however is happening in the worst possibly way because it's stripping people of health benefits and robust wages, which in turn strips the economy of consumers and domestic demand. "Third World here we coooooome!" - unless we have the guts to attack the sacred old Forty Hour Work Week and re-activate all our crippled consumers. Hell, we've made it so hard to make an honest living in this country that we've got two million de-activated consumers in prison, at a cost to us of $25-30,000 per inmate per year. What a bunch of geniuses we are! Talk about "efficiency"!]

1. [another US firm restricts layoffs with shortened workweeks -
   Mattson Technology, Inc. [Nasdaq: MISN] announces first quarter financial results, Business Wire BW0826 MAY 08,2001 0:04 EASTERN via AOLNews.
   ...A leading supplier of advanced process equipment used to manufacture semiconductors...recorded a net loss for the first quarter of 2001 of $3.5m or $0.10 per share.... Brad Mattson, CEO...stated, "The first quarter results show the impact of the global slowdown in semiconductor capital spending. The industry has transitioned from a record growth of over 80% in 2000 to a declining market in 2001. Although these downturns are common in our industry...it's clear that we must take proactive steps during this time to ensure long-term financial health for the Company. We have implemented a cost reduction program that will target a 20% overall expense reduction for fiscal year 2001. To do this, we are consolidating facilities, simplifying our product lines, reducing executive pay, implementing shortened work weeks and reducing headcount."...
   [Think you could talk in code like this? You too could be a CEO! Anyway, this particular executive "unit" is doing two Good Things. Cutting executive pay slows the concentration of wealth that is rocketing us into the topheavy Black Hole economy. Shortened workweeks does too, by slowing the drift toward ever grosser labor glut. Researchers on shortened workweeks in the USA can phone Mattson's Ludger Viefhues at 510-657-5900.]

2. RBS's Anderson on rise in German April unemployment: comment, Bloomberg May/08/2001 via AOLNews.
   ...The number of Germans out of work rose a seasonally adjusted 6,000 in April, the [German] Federal Labor Office said [yester]day, three times' analysts expectations..\..
   [Don't tell us we're going to go through an entire article on German unemployment without finding out the German unemployment rate?! Yep. Well, time-travelling ahead to "Global economy watch: GDP, inflation, deficit, jobs, yields" (Bloomberg 05/21/2001 13:40 via AOLNews), we discover the figure of 7.7%, which is kind of strange considering that just last summer it was all of 9.5%, according to "German unemployment drops" on 9/07/2000. The previous summer according to "German unemployment" on 7/7/1999, it was 10.1%.]
   Following are comments by Nigel Anderson, an economist [at] RBS Financial Markets in London, on German unemployment in April.
   "Unemployment [was] worse than the market median of an increase of 2,000. It follows increases in each month during the first quarter averaging 9,000 which broke a 17-month falling trend in unemployment.
   [Time for the Germans to start copying France and cutting their workweek if they want to stay on top. Apparently they're doing it anyway willynilly and scorning it as "part time" so, unlike the Dutch, they don't give part-timers full-time benefits -]
   "Other indicators...confirm the deteriorating trend in the labor market. The number of workers on reduced hours was up 11% year-on-year in April, up from 3% in March and compared to an 18% fall at the end of 2000.
   [Time to quit moaning and cut the workweek - don't fight it, join it = "the zen of work-saving technology."]
   "Companies typically react to a downturn by reducing working hours first, and laying off workers later if the slowdown persists or becomes too deep.
   [The only appropriate time for a company to move from hours reductions to mass layoffs is immediately prior to liquidation. Otherwise it's just reinforcing the slowdown.]
   "Even in Germany, many sectors were reporting labor shortages last year which will make them reluctant to lay off staff until the scope of the deceleration becomes clearer.
   [There's no such thing as a labor shortage in today's automated world - there are only spot skill shortages. And there's no meaningful complaint about skill shortages - there's only a huge shortage of TRAINING.]
   "The significant deterioration in manufacturing conditions as highlighted by yesterday's 4.4% monthly decline in orders means that the pinch will be fell [in Germany] first and hardest [in Europe]. The ECB [European Central Bank] faces an uncomfortable period over the next couple of months of worsening news on both the economy [i.e., unemployment] and on inflation, with the latter to hold sway at least until next month."
   [Here we go again with stagflation = the simultaneous rise of both unemployment and inflation, which conventional economists still regard as opposites on a seesaw, despite the highly educational stagflation of the 1970s. As Toronto-based cities-focused economist Jane Jacobs points out, stagflation isn't at all unusual in the world - it is absolutely standard...in the Third World. So what are we saying here, that Germany is sinking into the Third World? Yep, that's exactly what we're saying - and taking a slightly different route than the U.S. because Germans support their unemployed and poor at much higher levels than Americans, who have begun to rely much more on enforced working poverty and mass incarceration. That's the "Land of the Free" for you.]

3. Union rejects German insurers' two pct pay offer, Reuters 13:39 05-08-01 via AOLNews.
   BERLIN...- German service sector union Verdi rejected on Tuesday an offer of a two percent plus pay offer [sic] from insurance firms, a Verdi spokesman said. Verdi is seeking a 5.5% pay rise for some 220,000 workers in the insurance industry plus a shorter work week and other improvements to employment packages....
   Verdi is also negotiating a 5.5% pay rise for some 470,000 bank employees. At negotiations on May 3 it rejected a proposed 2.2% pay increase, spread over 14 months....
   The service sector wage talks are one of the few wage rounds in Germany this year and they come at a time when the European Central Bank [ECB] is urging unions and employers to treat a spike in inflation as a temporary phenomenon. The ECB has made clear that it will not cut interest rates until it is certain that inflation is heading down, or unless the outlook for European economic growth this year deteriorates.
   [The ECB has demoed that Europe is more irrationally paranoid about inflation than the U.S., but then Germany suffered from of the great hyper-inflations of the last century, in the early 1920s (or rather, a German, Hugo Stinnes, "thoughtfully" engineered it and inflicted it upon his countrymen - see "The Penniless Billionaires"). We have been in an undiagnosed global depression for an entire generation now, and all prices are depressed and deflated, simply because we're wasting so many potential consumers by deepening a global labor glut and impoverishing so many people. We really have not understood the workweek-shortening imperative that waves of work-eliminating technology lays upon an intelligent species. Guess that don't say much for our intelligence. The most complete workweek-shortening plan that integrates democratic and market values and provides for interest rates, inflation, workoholics, and population variables, is Timesizing. Let's get into the 21st century already.]

4. Securitas first-quarter net rises 20% on acquisitions, Bloomberg May/08/2001 14:54 ET via AOLNews.
   STOCKLHOLM - ...The Swedish company..\..Securitas AB said first-quarter profit rose 20%, lifted by acquisitions such as Burns International Services Corp. that gave the world's largest security-services company a fifth of the U.S. market.
   [#1 - Adding an acquisition's profits to your own is a phony and misleading profit rise. And #2, note the appropriate language "gave" them market share. Many of today's CEOs are having such a hard time building market share that they give up and just try to buy somebody else's by acquiring their company. Market fundamentals aren't going anywhere but down until more CEOs start spreading the vanishing market-demanded employment by trimming their workweeks, like Mattson above. But clearly Securitas doesn't "get" it because -]
   In France, the company implemented a second price increase. Securitas raised prices 10% last year to compensate for France's 35-hour workweek. It lost some low-margin public-sector contracts by doing so....
   [If Securitas keeps raising its French prices instead of trimming its own hours and its own executive pay, it will soon be losing high-margin private-sector contracts in France. And if France keeps trimming its workweek and spreading the vanishing work, it will soon have the only solid domestic markets in the world - except maybe for little Netherlands, which is doing the same thing via the backdoor of boosting part-time with full-time benefits. So Securitas may really be screwing itself with its French price hikes - pardon our French. Wakey, wakey, CEO Thomas Berglund. We would have thought more Scandinavian countries would have been further along in economic evolution, pioneering shorter workweeks. What's the holdup? Or is just it a function of the Great American Blackout on international news? Ah, Turner and Murdoch are ever so much subtler than Pravda and Izvestia, but effective nonetheless.]

• France to escape worst of global slowdown - OECD, Reuters 05:16 05-03-01 via AOLNews.
  PARIS...- Strong domestic demand buoyed by falling joblessness and tax cuts means France will be spared the worst of the global slowdown and perform above potential this year and next, the OECD said on Thursday.
  [OECD stands for Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. "Perform above potential"? It's rather a question of all the world's economies currently performing far below their potential when such astronomical income is concentrated unspendably in the top income brackets.]
  Government structural measures such as the introduction of the 35-hour working week were helping keep unemployment at its lowest level in a decade but could pressure the state budget, it concluded in the French chapter of its world economic outlook.
  [When the government regulates the minimum at the economy's core necessary to level the playing field enough to include everyone, the markets drop their distortions and take over the micromanagement - government can deregulate all the details and dismantle most of the bureaucracy. That means the state budget is eased, not pressured. We'd like to see them make the connection between the shorter workweek and stronger domestic demand, because low unemployment means hotter competition for employees and and higher and broader regular-employee wages centrifuged out of unspendably concentrated top-executive pay and therefore...stronger domestic demand. At any rate, they get around to mentioning demand in the next sentence -]
  "Although international economic forces are becoming less supportive, the French economy should continue to grow slightly above potential in 2001-2002 thanks to continuing strong domestic demand," it predicted.... The unpredictability of consumer demand for information technology products - currently strong in France - [is] a risk factor....
  [The only other things we could wish for is a tie-in to training and a flexible workweek adjusting against under-employment.]

• Cambodian garment workers stage May Day protest, Reuters 01:36 05-01-01 via AOLNews.
  PHNOM PENH - ...About 2,000..\..garment industry workers marched through the Cambodian capital on Tuesday, Labour Day, demanding a shorter work week and higher wages.... Opposition leader Sam Rainsy addressed the crowd, saying he would push for the government to support the demonstrators' demands for a 44-hour work week and $70 per month minimum wage....
  [Radical! A 44-hour workweek is what the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) legislated for America in 1938, a mere 63 ears ago. It also legislated a 42-hr week for 1939, and a 40-hr week for 1940, so it could achieve the "40-40-40 Plan" (40 hours maximum workweek, 40 cents/hour minimum wage, in 1940). But there it did both stop and stay, as if it was given by Moses on Sinai or Jesus on Golgotha. Lend-lease started, WW2 started, and the hard lessons of the Depression, learned so little and so late, were forgotten. Now we drift along with an increasingly Third-World-like economy, the rich getting richer and increasing by the much publicized hundreds, the poor getting poorer and increasing by the much ignored hundreds of thousands, the economy a mere shadow of what it could be if we weren't wasting all these consumers, consigning them to overwork or under-employment, welfare, disability, homelessness, prison, or suicide. Our usual solution to get the huge excess of manhours out of the job market as work-saving technology pours in? War or plague always centrifuges income by market force and makes the economy grow, solidly, sort of like repeatedly burning the land like Aborigines. The intelligent way doing it? Timesizing, like Lincoln Electric, Nucor, or France.]
  Cambodia's more than 100,000 garment industry workers earn a minimum of $40 per month and work 48 hours per week, plus overtime. The workers - representing about 1% of the population - have complained that managers of the mostly foreign-owned factories have paid them late and forced them to work unpaid overtime.... [One] demonstrator told Reuters..."At my factory, we have 1,600 workers, but we have only one toilet..\.." The managers have denied the allegations.... The demand for Cambodian textiles has surged in recent years.... The value of garment exports in 2000 increased 48% year-on-year to $965m..\..
  [A fraction of what it would be if the employees who manufacture them had the time and money to buy their own output.]
  "I cannot survive on $40 a month because I have to pay for rent, utilities, food and other things.... If they don't meet our demands, we will demonstrate again in the future," Chhim Vandeth, a...demonstrator, told Reuters.... Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh warned last week that if workers continued to demonstrate and strike, factory owners would pull out of Cambodia and end up costing workers their [jobs].
  [Right now we are competing ourselves into lower and lower living standards and levels of hell. With our level of technology, we should all be living in heaven. We can achieve that only by sharing instead of moving ever closer to Third World levels of income concentration and wealth gap. Our computer technology is far ahead of our socio-economic technology. It's a matter of putting a fraction of the design smarts we put into our computer software into our economic servo-technology . It's a matter of designing ourselves a new, automatic, market-oriented, macro-economic, skills-work-&-income sharing technology. The Model T version? Timesizing instead of downsizing.]