["Let me be a workoholic or I'll slug you with my baguette!"]
French bakers protest reduced hours, by Jean-Marie Godard, AP-NY-11-26-01 1814EST via
AOLNews.
PARIS - Thousands of bakers, some wielding giant baguettes, marched in Paris on Monday to protest France's plan to shorten the work week. Police said 2,900 bakers from across the country marched on the Employment Ministry's offices to protest the 35-hour work week, which is to take effect for small- and mid-sized businesses next year.
TV reports showed bakers marching in their traditional aprons and floppy white hats. Many held placards that read "Allow us Time to Serve Our Clients Well."
"Serving our clients early in the morning and late in the evening is part of our job," said a leaflet from the National Confederation of French Bakers and Confectioners, which organized the march. "We demand enough time to make proper bread, enough time to serve our clients properly, enough time to work freely."
[Have they ever heard of shifts? Have they ever heard of splitting the day, if it's so important to catch early-morning and late-evening trade?]
Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's Socialist government introduced a law to shorten the work week to 35 hours from 39 in an effort to reduce unemployment.
[And then did not jump in with government demonstrating the process and leading the way.]
The law is a centerpiece of Jospin's program, but many employers say the government is meddling in the economy.
[Jospin needs to dramatize how much other expensive government meddling in the economy this one central change will allow. He'll be able to cut unemployment taxes, repeal minimum wage laws, dismantle jobs programs, unnecessary public works, industrial policy, programs like our block grants and enterprise zones, and much of the other big government that has grown, since our misguided lead with the New Deal, into a huge makework campaign designed to offset private-sector "efficiency" since the 1930s that manifested in terms of total jobcuts for a few instead of small hourscuts for everyone.]
Companies with more than 20 employees were forced to implement the shorter work week starting in February last year [2000]; smaller firms have until Jan. 1 [2002].
[And Jospin let the government off the hook until the smaller firms' deadline. This implementation is in many ways how NOT to apply Timesizing. It is rigid, arbitrary, unconnected to and uncontrolled by changing levels of unemployment, unidirectional... etc. etc. and yet it is STILL working to make France the most recession-resistant economy in Europe and possibly the world. Check out our story below on 11/24 #1. These bakers have more people with more money and time to buy their wares because of the implementations of this highly flawed worksharing program so far. DEVELOP AND SHOW THEM THE FIGURES! You want the business? You play the game.]
Franceline Delalande, who runs a bakery in the eastern Burgundy region, said large companies can handle the 35-hour work week because their employees can work rotating shifts. "If I have to apply the law, I will either have to close my shop for two days a week, or employ more people, which is financially impossible," said Delalande. Three people work at her bakery. Speaking to The Assoc'd Press at the march, Delalande said if the government does not scrap the plan, "it will lead to the death of small shops. There will only be big supermarkets with frozen products left."
[Hmm, we were wondering about this simplistic division at the 20-employee level. France's implementation is quite flexible in terms of annualizing the workweek reduction or even "weekifying" it in the sense you don't have to cut to five 7-hr days as long as your overall workweek doesn't come to over 35 hours. But this woman's situation raises the possibility of making a more graduated implementation based on finances instead of on number of employees. The intent of the bill, of course, is to get Franceline to employ more people - or leave the trade to someone else two days a week. But is she really that close to the edge that she'll be ruined by an 11% cut in the workweek (from current 39 hrs/wk to coming 35)? Maybe the best course for Jospin would be to delay application of the law to small businesses for another year while some "economic impact" assessments are made on very small businesses like Franceline's, and meanwhile, APPLY THE LAW TO THE GODDAM GOVERNMENT!!! That will produce even more recession-proofing for share-work France while Germany and the other makework economies continue downward, and even more business for small companies like Franceline's to mute their squawking. It would also give Jospin time to redesign the stifling top of the workweek, which right now says flatly to everyone, STOP WORK HERE (at 35 or whatever) when it should say, CHOOSE ONE -
- stop work here and leave the extra work/business for others
- keep working and reinvest overtime profits in your own training and hiring
- keep working and have someone else use your overtime profits to approximate the training and hiring you should be doing with them
That's the essence of Timesizing's Phase Two. It might even be possible to apply Amory Lovins' *Rocky Mountain Institute idea of marketable pollution credits to smaller businesses, in the sense that if a small firm really thinks they need to work more people more than 35 hours a week and thereby has to concentrate natural market-demanded hours on fewer people and "pollute" the economy with more unemployed who have thereby been deprived of their share, let them buy disemployed pollution credits or some such from other firms that can afford to work even fewer hours per week than 35 and use the unused "pollution credits" of those other firms. The point is, there's nothing wrong with the basic work sharing idea, but like every new idea from the steam locomotive to the aeroplane, there are a lot of little ways to make it work better, and France is doing the rest of the world an immense service by prototyping the concept for our time. We need a LOT more press coverage and discussion of France's experiences along the way. She is definitely leading the world on this right now. When our grandparents took it for granted that we'd all need to work only 20 or 30 hours a week by now, the dawn of the Third Millennium with worksaving technology all around us, we are certainly an unintelligent and masochistic bunch when groups like these bakers of France are squawking about coming down a measly 4-5 hours a week to 35. Pathetic! Many colleges and insurance companies have been on 35-hour workweeks already for decades! How do they suppose humans are going to make any substantial progress in the substantial terms of less work and more pay? Cutting the workweek has its difficulties, but they are The Right Difficulties, similar to the difficulties in developing the steamship or the light bulb. These things represent the way ahead and give human beings more freedom and variability; in short, more survivability. And let us recall an often overlooked fact - the most basic freedom is free time, because without it, the two (or whatever) active freedoms cannot be exercised (freedom of speech and religion).]
• [Was this a timesizing or just a paysizing?]
Crash deals new blow to revival of Swiss airline, by Elizabeth Olson, NYT, W1, W7.
...Swissair workers struck for half a day at Geneva's airport last week over pay cuts - pilots' pay fell 25% and cabin crew pay fell 9.4%, retroactive to Nov. 1, under the rescue plan - and they are demanding more severance benefits from the government....
[Whoa, if you want trouble, just make a paycut retroactive! Some of these employers have the brains of Neanderthalers, duuuh. A timesizing can be an hourscut alone or an hourscut with a prorated paycut. Guess if they're making the paycut retroactive, there's no way this is a timesizing unless they're keeping track of comp time - unlikely.]
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