Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

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Timesizing News, November 10-20, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 117, Harvard Sq, Cambridge MA 02238 USA 617-623-8080

11/20/2001  today's breaking Timesizing news round the world -

1. LEAD: BOJ downgrades economic assessment for 6th month running, Kyodo via AP-NY-11-19-01 via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- The Bank of Japan (BOJ) on Monday downgraded its assessment of Japan's economy for the 6th straight month, saying personal consumption is gradually weakening due to the negative effects of sluggish industrial production on employment and income.... The BOJ also said corporate profits are deteriorating and the weakness in household income is becoming evident amid a decrease in work hours and the rise in unemployment....
   [Again, a decrease in work hours is presented as a negative when it is exactly what one would expect in the world's most technologized economy, expecially in the realm of personal technology like cell phones and "wash-lets" (toilets with a control panel the size of a 747's that will do anything you want to your posterior except tie a bow around it). Japan is a perfect prototyping ground for economywide Timesizing. It would lift Japan's butt out of the "wash-let" and make Japan a world leader in economic evolution. A flexible version of workweek reduction/worksharing in Japan would already put them ahead of France with its rigid 35-hour week, and the addition of overtime reinvestment in training and hiring would make a joke of their fears of competition from China (see today's "Tokyo fears China may put an end to 'Made in Japan'," by James Brooke, NYT, A3).]

2. South Korea: Airline furloughs, not layoffs, by Don Kirk, NYT, W1.
   Korean Air will make all its 17,000 workers take a one-month furlough without pay next year. Korean Air called the plan preferable to laying off any more workers; 1,000 were let go earlier this month. Korean Air's smaller rival, Asiana, said it too might have to resort to unpaid leaves and dismissals....

3. VW Brazil workers end week-long strike, Reuters 11:38 11-19-01 via AOLNews.
   SAO BERNARDO DO CAMPO, Brazil...- The 16,000 Brazilian workers at German automaker Volkswagen AG's 2nd-largest factory ended their week-long strike early on Moday as they considered a company proposal to suspend 3,000 staff cuts in return for reductions in wages [they probably mean weekly "pay," not hourly wages] and working hours....
   [Sounds like we're right back to Square One, before the union got stupid and turned down a primitive form of timesizing instead of downsizing.]
   The president of the ABC Metalworkers Union, Luiz Marinho...who went to Germany after talks broke down with local management, said he believed the proposal would be accepted by workers as a means of guaranteeing employment levels for the next five years..\.. "The proposal is complex and has many items," Marinho told workers during a meeting at dawn....
   [Sounds like he's finally seeing the light from his fairly enlightened employer and is trying to save face by talking about complexity etc. After all, VW is the outfit that saved 30,000 jobs and its hometown of Wolfsburg back in '94 by trimming hours from 35 to 28.8 and pay from 35 to 32½ hrs/wk levels - all this when moronic GM had just trashed its hometown of Flint, Mich. with 74,000 layoffs.]
   Of the 3,000 employees dismissed a week ago, 1,500 would return to work immediately and 1,500 would receive paid leave until Jan. 31. During that time, the company aims to put 700 people on a voluntary severance program.... According to the union, VW has promised to invest more than $200m in the production of a new Polo model for export to Europe.
   [It's a mistake for any company or economy to rely heavily on exports these days.]
   The Tupi, a compact model in the development stage that could replace the best-selling Gol, could also be assembled in the 42-year-old Ancieta factory.
   [If it works, don't fix it. Add the Tupi but don't yank the Gol.]
   The workers, in turn, would have to agree to a 15% cut in wages and working hours (a four-day working week) [four 8½-hour days] - items in the local management's original proposal lthat they rejected two weeks ago - as well as to a new productivity and evaluation program. Part of the lost wages would be offset with the company's profit-sharing plan....
   [Assuming with the sales slump there are any profits to share.... Anyway, here's something Marinho won that we're hearing about for the first time and that is certainly worth a strike to get rid of -]
   Marinho, known in the auto industry for his good negotiating skills, convinced VW management to abandon a plan to dismiss 6% of workers a year and replace them with new hires who would be 30% cheaper.
   [Whoah, that is nasty. VW Brazil must be almost as nasty as the Brazilian who heads Nissan/Japan and loves layoffs.]
   "This rotation of 6% annually was the big problem for the union," said Iram Jacome Rodrigues, a professor at the University of Sao Paulo who specializes in organized labor. "They worked out that the current workforce would be gone in a matter of years."
   [Guess so, duh.]
   In the...car capital of Brazil..\..the cluster of industrial cities of Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo and Sao Caetano \near Sao Paulo, known as\ the ABC...auto workers' wages are now around 30% higher than in other states.... VW is the auto industry leader [but just by a 1% advantage over Fiat] and largest private sector company in Brazil, operating five factories and employing 26,800. But it has been losing market share in past years [and] has had to deal with a sharp slowdown in car sales in Brazil in recent months as interest rates have risen and economic growth has lost momentum. The sudden staff cuts and subsequent strike threatened to further damage VW's image in Brazil....
   [The NYT version of this story, only 13 lines long, is -]
   Brazil: Strike at Volkswagen off, for now, by Jennifer Rich, NYT, W1.
   ...after the company offered to reverse 3,000 layoffs in exchange for a 15% reduction in the work week and voluntary buyouts for 700 employees....
   [No mention of the nub of the strike, VW/Brazil's agist proposal to gradually, systematically replace their workforce with new employees making 30% less wages.]

1. Schroeder's party to address ailing German economy, Reuters 12:55 11-18-01 via AOLNews.
   BERLIN...- German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his ruling Social Democratic Party [SPD] will face the woes of the economy head-on this week as they meet for their annual conferences in the southern city of Nuremberg. "We will certainly be talking about...the not-so-satisfactory state of the labour market...," Schroeder said as he arrived in Nuremberg ahead of the SPD conference which begins on Monday.... Schroeder ha[s] said his term in office should be judged by his ability to tackle unemployment..\..
   [Like Jospin in France.]
   Elections are due in September.... On Friday, [Schroeder] acknowledged the government would be unable to meet its goal of pushing the jobless total down to 3.5m in 2002.... Horst Siebert, a senior adviser to the German government [and] one of the five so-called "wise men," said Germany was experiencing a "mild" recession....
   CALLS FOR CUTS IN OVERTIME
   Meanwhile, Dieter Schulte, chairman of the DGB Federation of German Trade Unions, renewed calls for the introduction of a shorter working week as a measure to boost employment. In an interview with Welt am Sonntag, he said..."Many large companies are planning jobcuts or have already announced them. It is conceivable that the Chancellor could say that none of them should consider redundancies while thousands of hours of overtime are being clocked up..\..Siemens for example."...
   [It's good that one segment of labor is (A) focused on worktime as the key to their power and everyone's future and (B) is aware that there are two parts to the problem: (1) dealing with overtime and (2) changing, mostly downward, the workweek.]
   His views were shared by Ottmar Schreiner, head of the workers' wing of the ruling SDP. In an interview in the Leipziger Volkszeitung, to be published on Monday, he said the government should introduce a law to curb overtime....

2. Shorter work time: Kuwait, by *Ken Ellis, SWT Digest 19 Nov 2001 18:39.
   On 60 Minutes Sunday night [11/18], it was reported that the Kuwaitis are down to a 3 hour day, from 10am to 1pm. They know what's good for them.
   But, most of the real work in that country is done by guest laborers, who probably work a longer than 3 hours per day, but nothing was said about that.

3. Korean workers rally to demand shorter workweek, Reuters 03:16 11-18-01 via AOLNews.
   SEOUL...- More than 10,000 South Korean workers held a protest rally in a Seoul park on Sunday to demand that the government allow a shorter work week without cutting wages.
   Members of the country's largest umbrella union group, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), also accused management of abandoning negotiations over work hours.... The management group has opposed the union's demand for a shorter week, arguing it would add to labour costs at a time when the economy as a whole has yet to recover..\..
   [How the heck do these birdbrains think "the economy as a whole" is going to recover if not with stronger domestic markets borne by "added labour costs" doing business as increased consumer spending?!]
   "We want a five-day workweek with no change in wage schemes," said a union leader. "We also want better protefction for temporary workers."... "Managers the government sent in to state-run companies are our real enemies," said a protester. The rally was followed by a march through a district where the National Assembly is located....
   Union protests in Korea have risen this year as unionised workers, whose political influence has waned under Pres. Kim Dae-jung's "reform" drive [our quotes - ed.], seek to exploit his final months in office. South Koreans vote for a new president late next year ahead of the end of Kim's 5-year term in early 2003. Kim is barred by law from running for a second time.

4. US fears help stall a N.H. town's downhill slide, by Tara Arden-Smith, BG, B1 -
   DIXVILLE NOTCH, NH - That everyone who lives here works for someone named Tillotson comes as no great surprise to the people of this mountain-rimmed hamlet. Neil Tillotson, who died last month at age 102, more or less created this place 41 years ago when he invented the latex examination glove and decided to manufacture it.... [Those] made in Dixville Notch are the last still manufactured in the U.S.; cheaper labor costs have "forced" [our quotes - ed.] most production overseas.
   Tillotson Healthcare was holding on by a thread until recent weeks, when the threat of anthrax led some government agencies to take the extraordinary precaution of ordering gloves for all of their employees who handle mail or packages. Since then, Tillotson's orders have surged, and the company has been operating at full capacity for the first time in years. It even restored overtime [bad], tooled up an extra machine, and brought back shifts on Sundays.... Tillotson Healthcare is squarely in the middle of an economic irony: The more fear there is in the country, the less fear there is in the factory....
   The factory's 180 employees come from 50 miles in every direction - as far as Maine, Vermont, even Canada - for the kind of stability other manufacturing sites in the North Country have not known in many years. "This place had never laid people off - it was unheard of," said [Ron] Guerin...the factory manager, who has worked at Tillotson for 23 years. "A lot of places were laying people off all the time, then hiring them back again when they could. This was the secure place, where you didn't worry about next month."
   In 1999, after a difficult decade fending off new foreign competition, harsh reality finally hit Tillotson. The company's second New Hampshire factory, in Rochester, was shut down, and the first of three waves of layoffs started at the Dixville Notch plant....
   In the late 1980s, a massive new public health threat had helped fuel the company's growth. The AIDS epidemic created an avalanche of demand for protective latex examination gloves for doctors, nurses, dentists.... Tillotson underwent a huge expansion; when running at full capacity, the factory could produce 9m gloves a week. But the swiftly growing market caught the eye of other manufacturers, many of whom quickly realized they could produce the gloves overseas more cheaply.... Soon, Tillotson was losing longtime customers as new health care conglomerates signed long-term bulk contracts with the lowest-price makers. Since then, Tillotson's business has slowly eroded, and the "north of the notches" region has suffered once economic blow after another.... Unemployment in the Coos County is 10.1% - the highest in the state.... For people who live here, Tillotson Healthcare, which pays most of its production employees $10 to $12 an hour, is not just a mainstay. It's a last hope.
   When the factory lopped one day off its production cycle last April, cutting operations to just six days a week [without layoffs]...many in the plant..\..lost...pocket money...know[ing] that the factory can reduce capacity only so much before it can no longer support the cost of keeping itself operational.
   [After cutting from a seven to a six day week? Sounds a trifle alarmist.]
   ...[However,] the new glove orders that have come in in the last three weeks...mean the factory will go on for now.... Said..\..Louise Streeter, who has been there 37 years [and] runs the factory's testing lab, "...Being allowed to work weekends means money for the little things. People in the North Country don't make big bucks; it's more paycheck-to-paycheck.... So when we lost Sundays last spring, well, that's money you bring home."...
   "Being the sole survivor - the last US-made glove - is a great honor," Guerin said....
   [But if it takes a 7-day workweek in a county with 10.1% unemployment....]

1. NSW community workers win 12pc pay rise, Australian Broadcasting 16 Nov 2001 4:55pm AEDT via AOLNews.
   Workers in the community services industry have welcomed a new award, which cuts their working week to 38 hours and gives them an average 12% pay rise. The new award was handed down in the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission this afternoon. The average payrate will rise from about $11.00 an hour to $13.40. The director of the New South Wales [NSW state] Council of Social Services, Alan Kirkland, says it will bring the state's community workers' conditions into line with industry standards around the country.
   However, Mr. Kirkland says unless the State Government agrees to fund the increased costs, services will be cut. "The sorts of services we're talking about are neighbourhood centres, youth services, refuges, domestic violence services," Mr. Kirkland said. "Most of those services, the only source of income is government funding. If they do not get the government funding to pay these legally required award increases, they will have to reduce their hours."
   [That's it. This is one of those context-less little gems from Aussie Terralia that show up on AOL News from time to time without so much as a dateline. Was their workweek 40 hours before? If they don't get gov't funding, is it going to go below the new 38-hour week? Do the NSW workers have some kind of organization that fought and won this for them & ifso, may we know its name - duh? How do they calculate the 12% "pay rise"? - because the wage rise is actually more like (13.40-11.00)/11.00= 22%. This case could be an example of how things are supposed to happen as organizations introduce worksaving technology - wage rates rise and hours fall so workers have more time and at least as much spending power to continue to be able to consume their own output. However, it's like the Australians assume we're not really interested cuz they're just a bunch of isolated ex-cons or something, so they'll just send out a feeler now and then to see if anyone gives a damn. Well, we here a Timesizing.com do, cuz we figger, with Michael Moore, that the way the US workweek and prison population are going (both up), we're all going to be convicts up here soon, so maybe the Aussies can give us a few pointers from down under. We'll even clear the Aussie term-of-endearment for their exclusive use since we have no instinct for the German use of the term for East Germans vs. "Wessies," and we'll take care of Austrians with the term "Austries." Meanwhile, Aus.BC and you other kangakoala media, lay it on AOL News - we're lappin' it up uphere. And you Kiwis too. Keep drilling away at the insulating self-absorption of American media. Us Canuck infiltratrors get veh-ry nervous about it.]

2. VW may reverse 3,000 layoffs in Brazil, union says, bvy Mary Milliken, Reuters Nov 16 2001 via AOLNews.
   SAO PAULO, Brazil...- German automaker Volkswagen AG will reverse 3,000 layoffs in Brazil if workers accept certain [as yet unpublished] conditions in a deal which could lead to the end of a 5-day-old strike, the top Brazilian metalworkers union said on Friday. "...The layoffs may be reversed, but not as we would like," Celso Horta, the spokesman for the ABC Metalworkers Union told Reuters.
   [Hey, remember the horta from the first Star Trek series? It was this big round gray blob that moved through tunnels in rock, laid eggs, and had to protect them because it was the last of its kind. Spock did a mind-meld with it to find out why Kirk & Co. were having so much trouble with it. Seems to have a lot in common with Celso Horta, especially if you imagine VW playing the Enterprise crew. Star Trek's horta was even metal-based like the ABC Union. Always had a soft-spot for that Star Trek horta. Wonder what the Portuguese version of the word derives from?]
   An initial accord on the dismissals at VW's biggest Brazilian plant was made between ABC Union president Luiz Marinho and VW mgmt in Germany in meetings over the last two days. Marinho traveled to VW HQ in Wolfsburg after hitting an impasse with local [Brazilian VW] mgmt.... VW has lost production of up to 900 cars per day....
   [But who cares, if they're not selling?]
   Marinho told Brazilian news agency Estado, "We got what we wanted, but we're not quite there." Estado said the accord would be for 5 years.
   Union leaders are due to discuss the conditions over the weekend [among themselves]. Those conditions could include issues that have come up in previous negotiations, Horta said, such as a change in the wage structure and a four-day work week....
   [We believe that we're talking about four 8-hour days here, meaning a 32-hour workweek.]
   The [3,000] layoffs...came after the union refused last week to accept a 15% cut in working hours and wages proposed in response to the downturn in the car market....
   [Marino better be careful that he doesn't win points over the dead body of his employer, like the NYC newspaper unions between 1940 and 1980. New York used to have 6-8 vibrant dailies, but the unions got so demanding at a time when the growth of TV News meant that circulation wasn't exactly jumping, that today we're down to what, 2-3 NYC daily newspapers? And too, those were years of huge technological "improvements" in newspaper production taken stupidly, as usual, in layoffs instead of hours cuts. Why stupidly? Because they laid off their own best customers and marketers, that's why, and intensified the general wage-depressing effects of 1970-2000 that led many subscribers to conclude that their newspaper subscription was something they could either not afford or at least, live without.]
   Marinho, known in the industry for his calm but canny negotiating skills, argued that the onus of VW's troubles should not lie on workers, but rather on management to speed up the introduction of new models..\..
   [Which is gonna take technological "improvements," so here, Marinho may be slitting his own throat.]
   VW, the market leader in Brazil, said the jobcuts were also needed for the introduction of more modern assembly lines that require less staff.
   [Let's rrrrub it in once more - where now are those fatuous "lump of labor fallacy" critics and the morons who parrot "But technology creates more jobs than it destroys!" This is new. This is different. Technology has gone sooo far today that we MUST CHANGE from job cuts to hours cuts if we want any markets left. There's no option. This is a technological imperative. We cannot keep the workweek frozen solid at a pre-technological 1940 40-hr level, period. For VW in the meantime, there's also the little matter of competition -]
   VW had 42% of the market 20 years ago, but now only controls 27%. Italy's Fiat, meanwhile, has snuck up on VW to control 26% of Latin America's largest market....

• Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia releases November business outlook survey, PRNewswire 11/15/2001 12:00 EST via AOLNews.
  ...Activity in the region's manufacturing sector continued to decline, according to firms surveyed for this month's Business Outlook Survey. Firms reported declines in overall activity, new orders, shipments, employment, and average work hours....
  [Here we have a decline in average work hours reported as a Bad Thing, when all we have to notice is, IT'S HAPPENING ANYWAY - shorter worktime is happening anyway, and the only reason we see it as a Bad Thing is because we allow hours to bunch up on fewer people as the process goes on. In other words, the only reason we don't see it clearly a Good Thing is because we have not implemented a technique like Timesizing that turns the "average" workweek into the "actual" standard workweek of straight-time hours. (And then, don't forget to implement continuous training, targeted by overtime.)
  To repeat, for a run at a different perspective - Here we have a decline in average work hours reported as a Bad Thing when, in the dawning Ecological Age, it is clearly a Good Thing, because it means that people don't have to spend so much of their lives making a living, i.e., just getting to Square One - with all the desperate busywork that entails in conflicted societies that are automating human work on one hand but trying to keep humans busy for a whole pre-automation 40-hr workweek on the other. Such busywork becomes increasingly costly as we drift into an age of environmental limits on everything from ground water to ozone to trace minerals and fossil fuels, because we have to mount more and more advertising and consumption, regardless of approaching environmental drop-offs.]
  The demand for labor continues to be weak.
  [A simplistic statement. It really means, the demand for human labor on a rigid 40-hr/wk basis continues to be weak. Any truly intelligent species would simply shorten the workweek and share the nation's most precious vanishing resource, natural market-demanded employment in terms of a limited pool of manhours available in the immediate future for job candidates. (Go chase yourselves, "lump of labor fallacy" critics. Your point about the unmentioned indefinite future is irrelevant and fatuous in the extreme, since ANYthing in the indefinite term is indefinite. We're talking about a severely limited timeframe and a "lump" of employment that is not only fixed but shrinking within that timeframe.)]
  The current employment index, which remained negative for 13 consecutive months, improved slightly from -27.0 in October to -23.1. Almost 34% of the manufacturers reported declines in employment this month; only 11% reported increases. The current average workweek continued to decline, although the index increased from -23.2 to -12.1.
  [Of course, nowhere in the survey do they condescend either to define this last-mentioned index or provide actual current average workweek figures - "your Fed at work." Basically, we are the prisoners of some very rigid brains and we urgently need to modernize our economy by getting rid of our rigid and arbitrary national workweek standard and make it market-determined, in the sense that if comprehensive unemployment (includes welfare and prisons) is too high or rising, the workweek gradually shrinks, and vice versa. In short, we design the "current average workweek" to be the actual per-person standard workweek on a national basis. This is the essence of the Timesizing program. Of course, in the transition, we implement this program company by company, city by city, state by state, and region by region before we "graduate" to the national level. And all debatable or controversial targets in this scheme are determined by regular referendums, as often as it takes, of the participating political constituency. We're talking about such things as
  • the definition of comprehensive unemployment,
    (e.g., any person who has averaged less than 10? hours a week for over the past 6? weeks is "unemployed"
  • the target unemployment rate,
    (e.g, any unemployment rate above 2?% is too high and should trigger a correction in the workweek)
  • the tolerable rate of change in the workweek
    (e.g., the workweek should change at a rate no slower than one? hour per quarter?)
  Until we implement a program like this, we don't have an economic edifice - we have a ramshackle string of make-do economic shacks dominated by smelly outhouses - an insult to human intelligence. Timesizing makes the economy more flexible and market-oriented, instead of wedded to a rigid 1940-level workweek regardless of mounting market distortions (e.g., Bill Gates, Ross Perot and ... Osama bin Laden) and ecological costs (e.g., Russia generally, Tokyo/Kyoto air quality, Las Vegas fountains, Colorado River dessication ... we're just grazing the surface).]

1. Lufthansa posts earnings drop, AP-NY-11-14-01 via AOLNews.
   FRANKFURT, Germany - German airline Lufthansa said Wednesday that its earnings fell 90% for the first nine months of the year, saying its business had been "gravely affected" by the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the sluggish world economy.... Lufthansa has already slashed capacity by dropping marginal routes and idling 43 planes. It is in talks with employees about cost-cutting measures, including a possible four-day work week, but says it will try to avoid laying people off..\..
   "It seems Lufthansa is surviving the crisis a bit better than the others," said Pia Schulze, an analyst with Merck Finck & Co. in Munich. Schulze said Germany's large domestic market provided more business than markets in smaller countries, and Lufthansa had avoided making deep fare cuts, thus helping its cash flow. Airlines have high fixed costs and can bleed cash [sie meinen wahrscheinlich "burn cash"] rapidly in a downturn.... The airline has added a $16 surcharge per round trip ticket to cover added security measures such as strengthened cockpit doors and additional background checks on employees.

2. Oilgear reports third quarter results, Business Wire Nov 14 2001 via AOLNews.
   MILWAUKEE...- The Oilgear Co. (NASDAQ/NMS:OLGR) [yester]day reported [that] excluding the previously announced restructuring charge of $717,000...for closing a facility, early retirement benefits and severance, Oilgear reported a loss of $1,117,000...per share for the third quarter of fiscal 2001, compared to earnings of $310,000...for the comparable prior period.... "Our lower sales are the result of continued weak demand for hydraulic products, particularly in the U.S. market and a softening European market," said David A. Zuege, president and CEO. "As a result of lower sales and earnings thus far in 2001, we have acted aggressively to reduce employment and operating costs.... We have reduced our U.S. workforce by nearly 20% since the beginning of the year through a combination of early retirements and layoffs and we have also reduced the hours or remaining employees," said Zuege....

3. Brazil union leader heads to Germany for VW talks, by Mary Milliken with Carmen Munan in Sao Paulo and Madeline Chambers in Frankfurt, Reuters 11-14-01 via AOLNews.
   SAO PAULO, Brazil...- The head of Brazil's top metalworkers union will travel to Germany on Wednesday to meet with Volkswagen AG to negotiate an end to the strike of 16,000 workers, now in its third day. ABC Metalworkers Union president Luiz Marinho will meet Thursday with the board member responsible for human resources, Peter Hartz, to press for the reinstatement of 3,000 workers layed off on Monday by VW, Brazil's largest automaker. "Sometimes you reach an impasse in negotiations that you can only get over if you go and talk to a superior level, which is what we plan to do," Marinho told Reuters before embarking for Frankfurt.... Marinho plans to return on Saturday before meeting early Monday with the 16,000 striking workers at the Anchieta factory..\..
   The layoffs at the Anchieta factory outside Sao Paulo, representing 11% of VW's 26,800 workers in Brazil, came after the union refused last week to accept a 15% cut in working hours and wages proposed as a soluton to the downturn in the car market. In 1998, the union accepted a similar wage and working hour reduction, but that accord ran out in July.... VW has managed to convince workers at its newer Taubate factory north of Sao Paulo to reduce wages and hours by 12% to avert laying off 1,000 of the 7,000 workers there....

1. Amtran reports third quarter results, Business Wire BW2116 Nov 13 2001 8:04 Eastern via AOLNews.
   INDIANAPOLIS...- Amtran Inc. (Nasdaq/NNM: AMTR), parent company of American Trans Air Inc. (ATA), [yester]day reported...total operating revenues for the third quarter of 2001 were $321.5m, a 7.4% decrease compared with the same quarter in 2000.... Said John Tague, Amtran's President and CEO, "...Fortunately during these hard times, Amtran has had the advantage of an inherent low-cost structure that supports the consumer's demand for value-priced fares. We also took immediate and decisive action in the wake of the terrorist attacks to mitigate the financial impact on our airline. Those steps included:
   • the furloughing of 1,100 employees from all areas of the Company,
   • voluntary leaves of absence and reduced work weeks for 300 employees,
   • an immediate pay cut by senior management,
   • a one-year across-the-board pay freeze for non-contract employees,
   • closing crew bases,
   • voluntary concessions from ALPA [Air Line Pilots' Assoc??],
   • benefits reduction for all employees,
   • the earlier retirement of older 727 aircraft,
   • a 20% reduction in planned capacity.
   We are confident that as a result of our immediate actions, combined with a strong and resilient group of employees, we will quickly return ATA to its pattern of stable growth."...
   [Sounds like an outfit that really has it together. Note no layoffs.]
   Contact:..
   Investor Relations: Kenneth Wolff, 317/240-7087
   or Kim Wick, 877/834-0606
   or Media: Angela Thomas, 317/240-7518.

2. August Technology implements additional cost reduction steps to address continued industry downturn, Business Wire BW2687 Nov 13 2001 via AOLNews.
   MINNEAPOLIS...- *August Technology Corp. (Nasdaq:AUGT) today announced it has taken additional cost-cutting measures in response to the continued industry slowdown. The Company will further trim operating expenses using various measures including selective work-week reductions and an additional workforce reduction affecting 23 positions, or less than 13% of the Company's employees. "While the rate of decline has certainly slowed, we see no clear indication of near-term industry improvement," said Jeff O'Dell, August Technology's CEO....
   [So here's your typical small company that values its workforce and their skillset, and tries timesizing first before allowing itself to feel "forced" to resort to downsizing. Of course, the timesizing that it's trying is of the most primitive kind - selective instead of universal/comprehensive, rigid instead of small monthly or even weekly fluctuations, arbitrary instead of automatically governed by revenues or profits. And forget about overtime-targeted training and/or hiring.]
   Contact: Thomas Velin, 952/820-0080.
   E-mail: Tom.Velin@AugustTech.com
   or
   Megan Rasmusson, 952/259-1647
   E-mail: Megan.Rasmusson@August.Tech.com

3. Axcelis Technologies to cut its staff by another 4%, by Stephanie Stoughton, BG, D5.
   ...as it consolidates its US manufacturing facilities in response to the slowing economy and flagging demand for its semiconductor equipment. So far this year, the company has pared 450 positions, or about 20% of its workforce....leaving the company with about 1,800 workers....
   Since January, Axcelis has cut costs through workforce reductions, temporary plant shuttings, executive pay freezes, and voluntary furloughs. Over the summer, about 4% of its employees volunteered to take 90 days off without pay, while retaining benefits and collecting unemployment.

4. French politicians flex election campaign muscles, by Nikla Gibson, Reuters 13:03 11-13-01 via AOLNews.
   PARIS - ...Ahead of next year's brace of presidential and parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin declared his Socialists had "a real chance" of re-election based on their achievements since taking power in 1997, while President Jacques Chirac's RPR party denounced the government for putting a spin on its record....
   [Well what government doesn't?!]
   DUELLING BROCHURES
   A brochure launched on Monday for mass public circulation vaunted the record of Jospin's government -
   • tax cuts on private income,
   • the controversial 35-hour working week
     [or possibly not as controversial among the majority of French families as this wording would lead us to believe since it does provide more family time for family values - see overview article "French buying more books, CDs..." on 4/29/2001, especially that little sentence that goes "Over two thirds of respondents to the survey said they are [spending] most of the extra time for leisure activities with their families." So conservatives, make up your minds. You want family values or not? Ifso, what are you doing to give people more time for their families?]
   • reforms such as laws to acknowledge same-sex partnerships.
   Unemployment, which has declined substantially under Jospin...
   [We'll say! From 12.6% to 8.7%.]
   ...was to have been a major plank in the election campaign but this angle is less promising now the French economy has weakened and joblessness is beginning to rise once again.
   [But just up to 9.1-9.2%, and it's a global downturn, not a French downturn, and France is proving more resistant to it than anywhere else in Europe. Bottom line = get lower-unemployment back in the campaign as a major plank!]
   In its riposte to the Socialist brochure...
   [Gonna be tough when Jospin's offset his socialism with taxcuts.]
   Chirac's RPR launched its own pamphlet on Tuesday titled, "Jospin: Bankruptcy protection" - a reference to the recent spate of high-profile business failures that have caused thousands of job losses.
   [Everybody knows that's Sept.11, not Jospin. And Chirac has made the mistake of mentioning his opponent's name in his campaign literature, effectively giving him yet more publicity. And if Jospin smartens up and makes the workweek flexible instead of rigid - so that it fluctuates slowly and automatically against unemployment, he'll have the additional job losses licked. We'd all better get switching to flexibly sharing the robot-leftover employment, or we'll have nobody but the homeless and the incarcerated to market to. As Walter Reuther pointed out to Henry Ford in the 1930s, robots don't buy cars - or anything else for that matter.]
   The pamphlet contains snippets of the right's likely election manifesto, focusing hard on law and order, health and education...
   [i.e., all the conventional political B.S.]
   ...and takes to task the assertions of the Socialist brochure on the health of the economy and welfare state.
   [Chirac's straining for ammo. Check back on some of the glowing articles on France's vibrancy we picked up the first six months of this year, starting with -
   • 6/20 The French miracle: a shorter week, more jobs, and men doing the ironing - Official study finds that France's 35-hour week has boosted the economy and proved a hit with both employees and their bosses
   • 5/23 #1 France a bright spot in EU
   • 5/23 #2 French labor market healthiest
   • 5/16 France: better lifestyle
   • 5/04 France to escape worst of downturn
   • 4/29 French buying more books, CDs
   • 4/26 #3 French labor plans pose few perils for labor growth
   • 4/21 #2 temps give French firms flexibility
   • 4/07 Layoffs outcry masks better French business climate...France lures investors
   • 2/07 France steals economic march on German neighbors
   As for the charge of "welfare state," it is true that Jospin could go further at dismantling portions of the safety net that are no longer needed now the unemployment rate is down out of the double digits where Chirac left it in '97, but Jospin could dismantle the horde of ineffectual programs a lot faster if he put the moves on and modernized his primitive type of Timesizing - jumping down to just another rigid, arbitrary and soon-outdated workweek level - and introduced an automatically unemployment-determined workweek (UE up, wkwk down & vv.) plus overtime-targeted training&hiring.]
   "The official record (published by Jospin), based on skewed interpretations and figures which are not always true, lets the government and the Socialists be happy with themselves but is out of kilter with what the French think," RPR president Michele Alliot-Marie told a news conference.
   [Maybe it's out of kilter with what the top income brackets think, but then, they never thought there was a problem, except maybe they would like even more unspendable income than they already had. The elections will demo whether the majority of French voters are as easily drawn into voting against their own interests as Americans. God knows the French like complaining, regardless of their advantage over all other developed economies. But then, Americans like boasting how great and free and Number One in everything they are, regardless of how far behind they've slipped - in health insurance, vacation, workhours, prison population, homelessness, size of trucks rumbling through (or rather, blocking) downtown streets, gun control, public transportation, passenger rail, airport security ... don't get us started.]

5. Singapore wages body set to back cuts to save jobs, by Jacqueline Wong, Reuters 03:43 11-13-01 via AOLNews.
   Singapore's National Wages Council, which advises the government on pay levels, is expected to propose salary cuts to save jobs and lower business costs to help the ailing economy ride out its worst recession since 1964....
   [So are they going to do a corresponding cut in working hours?]
   A poll by Remuneration Data Specialists (RDS) late in October showed 28% of 174 Singapore companies surveyed saying they planned to freeze wages in 2002 in anticipation of worsening economic conditions. This was in line with the government's call that companies should lay off only after other measures had been considered, such as shorter work weeks and salary freezes and cuts..\..
   [Well that's hopeful. Shorter workweeks is first in the list - before pay cuts - but then they promptly forget it -]
   Economists said the Council...could recommend cuts of at least 6% in line with the guidelines issued during the 1997-98 Asian crisis.... Wage cuts rare - The anticipated wage cut recommendations will only be the second time in the Council's 29-year history - and the second time in three years - that it has had to ask for such measures..\.. "If we are to restore labout competitiveness to levels of 1994, it would mean that there is a need to reduce total wage costs by around 6%," said Tan Kang Yong, economist with UOB Kay Hian, noting 1994 was the benchmark for wage cuts [of 5-8%] recommended in 1998..\..
   [Wage controls are stiflingly specific and unnecessary when you have general overall worktime controls to level the field over which the market plays. And aside from the fact that they dampen your own vital domestic markets and do nothing to reverse "the more concentration, the less circulation" of personal income and spending power, here's why -]
   But some analysts say that in order to give firms the flexibility to offer competitive salaries in areas where there is a skills shortage, it is possible the council may prefer to call [only] for wage restraint....
   [So let's get this straight - the only options they're looking at are a Hobson's choice/Catch 22 between a stifling policy (wage cuts for all) and an ineffectual policy (oh dearie, dearie and a tut-tut-tut, please do restrain your wages!) - when they should be looking more deeply at something they seem only to mention in passing as one item on a list - hours cuts. Why aren't hours cuts as stifling as wage cuts? Because
   • hours cuts leave wages flexible to signal and redress skill shortages
   • if coupled with overtime-to-training conversion dba overtime-advantage-reinvestment, hours cuts can put training and hiring on the kind of directly efficient market basis they should be on when product cycles have shortened so much
   • economies are in trouble because, despite the well-known but much-ignored doctrine of the marginal efficiency of (concentrated) capital, they're all currently operating on the opposite principle, as if wealth gets more useful as it concentrates and there's point of diminishing returns when the bottom line of the whole thing "changes sign" from positive to negative;  hours cuts on the other hand, by relieving the general surplus of manhours in the job market (or if you don't agree there's a general surplus, then "by creating a general shortage of manhours in the job market"), have the effect of engaging market forces to flexibly and gradually centrifuge all the lazy unspendable income that is tightly concentrated in the top brackets - so hours cuts reverse the general trend of "the more concentration, the less circulation" and the greater velocity of money and vitality of business constitutes a "rising tide that lifts all ships"
   • when you take away workhours from somebody (without taking away their job), you automatically give them back something of value (free time aka leisure) - however, when you take away wages, you give them nothing in return
   • unlike wage cuts, hours cuts, by operating on a dimension that is much more inherently balanced than money per person (whether income or wealth) because you only get a maximum of 168 hrs/wk regardless of how rich you are, have a much shorter distance to cut to level the playing field
   • what about the vital indispensable people whom we absolutely need and MUST HAVE working long unlimited hours because they're so important?! - what we really need is more fluid skill transfer from these self-important workoholic prima donnas, not more awe and reverence to reinforce the ongoing megalomaniacal sacrifice of their ever actually "getting a life" - and with overtime-to-training conversion at work as hours are adjusted gradually downward, you do get these Sacrosanctly Scarce Skills pried loose from these grandstanding hystrionic and often hysterical solipsists and spread around to more balanced and numerous individuals for whom the Profession/Crafte/Whatevère is just not such a B.F.D. (strictly for our ESL friends, that means Big F*ck*ng Deal - EFL readers {English as a first language}, you didn't see that!) - and as for these "indispensable" solipsists (often a legend in their own mind), American CEOs and physicians and lawyers, yes this does mean many of you. Check out our story a few days ago (11/09 #3) on the hours American physicians work cuz they're sooo desperate to prove their Supreme Importance and "natural" loftiness - on the ladder of income brackets. Path-ological and path-etic. It's nothing but skill hoarding for the sake of wage puffing, and it has soured many an idealistic youth who really wanted to help people.]
     
   Recession-hit Singapore's export-driven economy is headed for a 3% contraction this year after 9.9% growth in 2000, reflecting harder times for businesses and workers....
   [Aside from the question, why are we so compulsively dependent on growth when everything else in Nature can flexibly roll with growth or contraction without "having a cow", any economy that is export-driven is a vulnerable kind of economic parasite, parasitic because it leeches on other economies' internal dynamism and vulnerable because it has no real control over the external markets it has foolishly allowed itself become dependent on. On the subject of pay cuts, there's a mention of this strategy in the NYT today, "Switzerland: Bank's profit falls," by Elizabeth Olson, NYT, W1, where it states, "According to the...executive board president, Luqman Arnold \of\ UBS, Switzerland's largest bank,...the bank favors reducing compensation rather than adopting the practice of large-scale layoffs that some rival banks...have followed."]

• 16,000 VW Brazil workers strike to protest layoffs, by Carmen Munari, Reuters12:18 11-12-01 via AOLNews.
  SAO BERNARDO DO CAMPO, Brazil - All 16,000 workers at German automaker Volkswagen AG's biggest factory in Brazil went on strike Monday after weekend talks to reverse 3,000 job cuts ended without an accord.... The collective dismissal of 11% of VW's 26,800-strong work force in Brazil takes effect on Monday after workers received job termination letters last week. VW management said it was the only solution after the ABC Union refused to accept a 15% cut in...working hours \and\ wages...last Tuesday....
  [which reduces weekly pay but maintains hourly wages.]
  High interest rates and a slowing economy have undermined demand for cars. According to Brazil's auto industry association, car sales dipped 15% in October from a year earlier, while production fell 13%.... (VW is Brazil's largest automaker with 27% of the market, but Italy's Fiat is right on its heels at 26%)..\..
  One of management's arguments is that wages are [already] high in the Sao Paulo car industry compared to other states, like Minas Gerais, where Fiat has its main factory, or Parana, the site of VW's newest factory....
  [An irrelevant distraction if they're indeed not proposing a decrease in hourly wages.]
  "The workers are not responsible for the fall in the market of Volkswagen, which wants to cut wages. If the company loses market share, it is because it does not launch new products," ABC president Luiz Marinho told the meeting..\..
  [The point is not a loss in VW's market share, but a decline in the overall Brazilian (and global) market for cars. That's not the company's fault any more than it's the workers' fault, and it can't just be fixed by launching new products. However -]
  With a unanimous show of hands, the workers voted Monday morning to strike for an indefinite period at a meeting in the Anchieta factory complex in Sao Bernardo do Campo, the Brazilian car capital 13 miles from Sao Paulo. They also gave the ABC Metalworkers Union the green light to negotiate directly with VW headquarters in Germany after failing to break the stalemate with the Brazilian unit's president, Herbert Demel.... Union leaders called the dismissals an act of "aggression, truculence, cowardice, and terrorism."
  [Sounds like they're a little out of touch. If workers won't accept timesizing that keeps them all employed and ultimately raises wages and benefits, they'll get downsizing or war or both.]
  During the strike, market leader VW will lose production of 850 to 900 cars per day, mostly Brazil's best-selling compact model, the Gol, according to local VW management.... The ABC Union, long considered the vanguard of organized labor in Brazil, played a key role in more than a decade of anti-military protests which restored full-fledged democracy to Brazil in 1985. In past years, it participated in a series of agreements to avoid layoffs at Anchieta, a sprawling 42-year-old factory in a constant process of modernization.
  In the newer VW plant in Taubate north of Sao Paulo, union leaders agreed last week to reduce wages and hours by 12% after the Anchieta job cuts were disclosed, thereby averting 1,000 layoffs among the 7,000 car workers there.
  In Anchieta, the union and management negotiated for 12 hours over the weekend, but Marinho said VW refused to reverse the 3,000 layoffs. Veteran labor leader Jair Meneghelli, who attended the meeting to support the workers, said he was surprised that relations had soured so much. "I did not expect to see this in 2001," Menegheli said. "I thought in 2001 that I would see respect from management."
  [But then he probably did not expect to see a global recession in 2001 either. He probably expected to see the Internet bubble keep swelling. If he wants to respect from management, he's got to smarten up and fight for shorter hours to keep labor a scarce commodity in the job market as robotization pours in and makes humans redundant. Scarce commodities don't need a lot of rhetoric to gain respect. Natural market forces take care of it. So ABC, cut the misplaced anger and get back on issue - restoring your power by cutting the company, local, state, regional and national workweek. Otherwise, you're just roadkill. And you'll find VW an unusually receptive corporation to the strategy of cutting hours while maintaining wages - in other words, to the future of sharing the vanishing (human) work instead of progressively cutting headcount and markets. Timesizing, not downsizing. It's up to you to get worktime per person reduced even faster so market forces give you more respect at the bargaining table and consequently higher wages and benefits, so that the consumer base can keep up with technology-amplified production and we don't keep falling into these downturns. The brief NYT version of this story today was -]
  Brazil: Walkout at Volkswagen, by Jennifer Rich, NYT, W1.

• S. Korea labour unions in protest, demand shorter hours, Reuters 03:54 11-11-01 via AOLNews.
  SEOUL...- Some 20,000 workers and students from across South Korea marched to the capital Seoul on Sunday, demanding shorter working hours and job security, witnesses said.... The demonstrators lined up in downtown Seoul, where the country's Parliament is located, witnesses said..\.. They said the demonstrators, who were distributing leaflets and chanting slogans, were involved in scuffles with the police. One protestor was injured and sent to hospital.
  The protest involved a number of South Korea's industrial unions, including metal workers and teachers, as well as foreigners from 16 countries protesting against the World Trade Organization (WTO). The protestors against the WTO believe the trade body worsens poverty and helps developed countries by forcing undeveloped nations to open the door to foreign products....