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Timesizing News, December 16-31, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001-2002 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 117, Harvard Sq, Cambridge MA 02238 USA 617-623-8080

12/31/2001  primitive Timesizing round the world today -

• Canadian TV workers to return to work after strike, Reuters/Variety 21:54 12-30-01 via AOLNews.
  TORONTO - Canadian television technicians will return to work on Monday after a strike that disrupted programs for almost a month at the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corp. [CBC].... The dispute began in early December and centered on wages, overtime and working conditions..\.. The 1,600 technicians will get pay increases of 5.5%, spread over two years..\..
  [Still no details on terms and conditions, especially as related to overtime.]
  A statement issued late on Sunday by the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union said some 75% of workers had voted in favor of a deal agreed on Dec. 21....
  [See 12/22/2001 #2 below.]

1. Unemployed rediscovering value of work-life balance, by Virginia Galt, Dec 28 2001 Workplace Reporter, B1, via Anders Hayden via Shorter Work Time E-list (email swt-digest-request@swt.org with 'subscribe' as subject & message).
   TORONTO - Second of 2-part series -...With the national unemployment rate now at 7.5%, many Canadians are just grateful for steady work, [a] feeling [that] seems to have intensified since 9/11, which pushed the North American economy into a more pronounced slowdown, federal officials report.
   Indeed, thousands of employees have voluntarily reduced their hours under a federal [Canadian] work-sharing program that averts layoffs by spreading the available work around.
   [Bingo - timesizing, not downsizing.]
   This means a financial hit but, since 9/11, more than 13,000 Canadians in roughly 650 workplaces have decided the sacrifice is worth it, says Mike Walsh, chief of the work-share program administered by Human Resources Development Canada. The program, born of the 1980s recession, is a short-term measure designed to help employers contain costs and preserve jobs in tough times, Mr. Walsh says.
   ["Short term" and it started in the 80s? - don't think so. Hey, Japanese Labor Minister Chikara Sakaguchi should be visiting Canada instead of Germany to study work sharing programs (see story yesterday, 12/28/2001 below). Besides, Canada's a lot shorter flight time from Japan - less opportunity for "shoe bombers" etc.]
   Supplemental payments from the unemployment insurance fund partly compensate employees for lost wages.
   [Shades of Fred Best's book, "Reducing Workweeks to Prevent Layoffs - The economic and social impacts of unemployment insurance-supported work sharing" (Temple U: Philadelphia, 1988). This sounds like the program initiated in Massachusetts in the 1980s by the Dukakis administration. See "Tough times for hotel workers - {Gov. Jane} Swift pushing wage share program," on 10/23/2001 #2.]
   And, for some participants, the benefits go well beyond saving jobs.
   • In Montreal, the arrangement frees Air Canada flight attendant Carole Choquette to spend more time with her 11-year-old daughter.... And, although the agreement is temporary, it makes the work-family juggle that much easier in Ms. Choquette's household..\.. The youngster, like many children of airline employees, has been anxious about her mother's safety since terrorists hijacked and crashed aircraft into the World Trade Center. Ms. Choquette says. "It's good to be here with her right now." Currently on extended vacation, Ms. Choquette will be back in the air in January, by which time, she hopes, her daughter's worries will have eased.
     Her spouse is also a flight attendant, but he opted not to participate in the voluntary work-sharing agreement negotiated between Air Canada and the Canadian Union of Public Employees [CUPE]. "He wishes he did," she says with a laugh. "But one's enough.... Usually we fly on opposite days." Now they have time together as a family....
   • A spokeswoman for Air Canada says the airline has avoided almost 300 layoffs through work-sharing agreements negotiated with CUPE and the Air Canada Pilots Association.
   • Further jobs will be preserved under a separate agreement with the Canadian Auto Workers, which represents reservations agents, but the numbers have not yet been tallied..\..
   • At Toronto's Delta Chelsea Hotel, the 33 maintenance workers made a pact "to share the pain" rather than see any of their number out on the street without wages or benefits, says Leo Bautista, a member of the maintenance crew. The hospitality sector has been particularly hit hard by the economic downturn, Mr. Bautista says. "When we heard about the business going bad, we talked among ourselves. What's going to happen? What can we do?" Management was receptive to a work-sharing arrangement and now Mr. Bautista and his co-employees work four days a week instead of five, unplugging drains, changing light bulbs, doing preventive maintenance, "fixing things that get broken in the hotel." It means, for all of them, a bit of belt tightening, says Mr. Bautista, but the drug plan, dental plan and sick leave provisions are all preserved.
     And, as a shop steward with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, Mr. Bautista is also enormously proud of how the maintenance workers, who come from a mix of backgrounds, pulled together to help one another survive the slump. "We are Tamils, Filipinos, Canadians, people from the Caribbean, people from Africa, Europeans even - a mini-United Nations."
     William Pallett, Delta's senior vice-president of people and quality, says the program has been "a success all around." The hotel has also used sabbaticals and back-to-school programs in an effort to minimize layoffs.
     The maintenance crew was singled out and applauded by more than 300 other Delta Chelsea employees at the hotel's quarterly town hall meeting earlier this month, Mr. Pallett reports.
     "The [maintenance] team also received our team achievement award for the manner in which they got together with management and designed the program in a collaborative way. We have sent this idea out to our other hotels as part of our 'sharing best practices'...philosophy at Delta."
   ...There has been a steady shift over the past decade toward free agency and short-term employment..says Martin Parker, managing director of the branch that places "just-in-time executives" [at] Caldwell Partners of Toronto, an executive search firm..\.. As is usually the case during economic downturns, companies are reluctant to beef up permanent staff levels. But there is increased demand for temporary and contract employees - including a market for temps at the top, according to Caldwell Partners.... While demand for traditional headhunting services is depressed, Caldwell's interim executive business is way up, says Martin Parker.... These contract executives go in, do a job and move on - and now account for about 10% of management ranks in Canada, Mr. Parker says. Companies often need restructuring specialists or project managers, for example, on a short-term basis. And because of the recent "tech wreck" and changing labour market trends, there is no shortage of available talent....
   Outplacement counsellor Marge Watters, of Toronto-based Knebel Watters & Associates, says employee expectations have changed. No one expects a job for life. Still, she says, it comes as an awful shock to most people when they are pulled aside and told their skills are no longer needed....
   [But as the new culture spreads - of 'sharing the pain' by sharing the vanishing work = timesizing, not downsizing - that shock will gradually become a thing of the past.]

2. France's Fabius says economy ready for a recovery, Reuters 05:36 12-28-2001 via AOLNews.
   PARIS...- French Finance Minister Laurent Fabius said on Friday the country's economy was poised for a recovery after a tough winter....
   [Indeed they are. All they have to do is gradually relengthen their 35-hour workweek - or be prepared to see more of their 9% unemployed vacuumed back into the job market, simply by market forces.]
   "France is resisting better than others...
   [...primarily because of the 35-hour workweek's ability to spread the work and the active spending power - not even the French themselves realize how profound, central and powerful a solution this is...]
   ...but we're not outside the general movement and that explains this development," he said, adding that he did not expect France to fall into recession....
   [...unless the premature ceding of nation-specific monetary policy to the European Union via the new common currency (the euro) interferes with France's long-term timesizing solution via workweek reduction. No matter what gains we make by sharing the vanishing work, stupid enough monetary and population policies can vitiate those gains. That's why our Timesizing program starts by plugging the leaks in monetary policy by giving e.g. interest-rate setting to public referendum in Phase One, and by giving the population variables (imports, immigrants, births) to public referendum in Phase Five.]

3. LEAD: Nov. jobless rate sets record for 3rd month at 5.5%, by Rieko Saito, Kyodo News 12/28 via AP via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- (EDS: ADDING COMMENTS BY LABOR MINISTER...)
   Japan's unemployment rate climbed to 5.5% in November, setting a record high for the third consecutive month, with job losses by middle-aged, full-time male workers showing a marked increase, the government said Friday. The seasonally adjusted jobless rate followed rates of 5.4% in October, 5.3% in September and 5.0% in both August and July.
   "Employment has deteriorated for the third month in a row. It is in a very severe situation," Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Chikara Sakaguchi said at a press conference. The government will seek swift and effective implementation-stimulus steps, for which it allocated fiscal spending under the first extra budget for the current fiscal year, and will push for proposed work-sharing systems, he said....

4. LDP to set up task force to study work-sharing, Kyodo News via AP-NY-12-28-01 0412EST via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has decided to set up a task force [or "panel"] to consider promoting work-sharing as a way to help the nation's deteriorating employment situation, party lawmakers said Friday. The task force will start its talks early next year so that it will be able to come out with concrete policy proposals by May, they said.
   Work-sharing is a system where a number of workers share a job [they mean "a project"] by shortening their working hours so as to maintain employment and create new job opportunities for those without jobs.
   The LDP panel will study how to promote work-sharing and secure employment for aged workers, while it is also expected to consider expansion of the application range of social insurance for part-time and dispatched temporary workers, they said.
   [Too much detail too soon. Age should not come into it at all, only ability and trainability. Part-time comes into it only as in terms of removing the legal rigidities that separate "part time" from "full time" and thereby rigidify the definition of "full time" at some arbitrary level, such as health insurance only being available to employees who work at least 40 hours a week. To implement work sharing, all benefits must become proratable. And as the strong bargaining-power-depressing function of labor surplus is removed by work sharing, restored bargaining power will negotiate benefits back up.]
   In a bid to cap the corporate burden of social insurance premium payments, the task force will discuss how a company should shoulder the payments in accordance with each worker's employment system, such as their work hours.
   [Ohoh, sounds like they're making this a lot more complicated than it is - as if each worker has a different employment system, but then why would each worker have different work hours.... At least they're starting to speak about this and hopefully work out the bugs in their language around it. There are concepts that need to be disentangled from each other and clarified, for example, like the fact that you can cut the workweek and maintain hourly wages but not maintain pay, or cut the workweek and maintain pay but raise hourly wages.]
   while the government, the Japan Federation of Employers' Assocs. (Nikkeiren) and the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo) have already established a council [or "forum"] to study the idea of work-sharing, the LDP [panel] has decided to support the three-way forum after the jobless rate for November hit a record 5.5%, the [party] lawmakers said. The panel plans to exchange views not only with Rengo and other labor unions but also with Nikkeiren and specialists on labor issues, they said.
   [They won't get much help on work sharing from "specialists" on labor issues, because work sharing has been probably the single most neglected, and slandered, labor area over the last 60-70 years, thanks to Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's failure to understand it and his consequent, internationally influential, propaganda campaign against it.]
   A senior LDP politician said, "Work sharing is likely to change conventional employment practices, and introduction of the system will be the first step for structural reform in the labor market."
   [Very true, but it will also reform all other markets in varying degrees. The focuses of the LDP party task force aka forum, and also the three-way forum aka council n their consideration of work sharing, should be on -
   1. First, flexibility. It was inflexibility that helped kill the Black 30-hour bill in 1933, and it is inflexibility that is making it rough for the 35-hour workweek in France today. There's no reason the system shouldn't have a "money-back guarantee" in the sense that the motion of the workweek can be bidirectional, not just down. And if by some miracle it does up too much, the remedy is obvious - automate more!
   2. Second, enforcement. It was lack of enforcement and perverse/reverse enforcment that undermined the 40-hour workweek starting during World War II. Enforcement doesn't have to be absolute. You only have to stop those with inflationary (monetary) motivation, not those with deflationary (qualitative) motivation. How to separate the gold diggers from the job lovers? Simple. Require reinvestment of overtime earnings. Those who love their jobs (deflationary) won't mind working overtime and reinvesting in training and hiring. Those who just do their jobs for the money will mind and won't work overtime, thus freeing up the work for ambitious inferiors and ultimately, the under- and un-employed. How to do that? In the private sector you can do it with a confiscatory tax on overtime earnings coupled with a complete exemption for overtime-targeted reinvestment in training and hiring. First you apply it to corporations, then to individuals.
   3. This brings up a third focus and behind it, a fourth. Training, training, training, continuous training - targeted by overtime or overwork.
   4. The hidden focus is - design the system to solve its own problems. Is the bunching up of work on a few people (overtime/overwork) a problem? Design it to the be the trigger and targeter and pacer and funder of overtime-obviating training.
   5. Fifth, no arbitrariness. The level of the workweek in a corporation or in a given political constituency, whatever the level, should be linked to e.g., corporate revenues or constituent unemployment, and not set by "experts" or any other process of guessing, dreaming or wishing. For example, economy-wide, if unemployment is too high or rises, the workweek SLOWLY goes down. Define "slowly"? Define it by asking the participants. Give them a multiple choice of reasonable answers. Do a referendum on this on a regular basis. This applies just as much on a corporate level as in a city, prefecture or national government. In 1983, Mitch Kapor as CEO of Lotus held a vote in the cafeteria in East Cambridge on whether to call the successor to 1-2-3 "Beacon" or "Symphony." Symphony won by a considerable margin. Don't just ask your citizens more. Ask your employees more.]

• Sakaguchi to visit Germany to observe work sharing, Kyodo News via AP-NY-12-27-01 2208EST.
  TOKYO...- Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Chikara Sakaguchi said Friday he will visit Germany in mid-January to observe how work sharing is implemented there. Sagaguchi said he plans to hold talks with officials in charge of employment and observe work places during his visit.
  In Japan, the government, employers and workers are discussing the possibility of introducing work-sharing systems. Work sharing involves available work being distributed as evenly as possible among all workers, or else reducing overall work time...to prevent layoffs..\..when production slackens....

1. Nikkeiren proposes work sharing, wage cuts, Kyodo News via AP-NY-12-26-01 1203EST via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- The Japan Federation of Emloyers' Assocs. (Nikkeiren) plans to urge Japanese companies to propose work sharing as part of 2002 spring wage negotiations with labor unions in order to maintain employment levels,
   [and level of consumer markets]
   according to a final draft Nikkeiren guideline for the 2002 spring wage negotiations. According to a copy of a draft obtained by Kyodo News, Nikkeiren suggests that employees will face wage cuts, saying it is necessary to review or suspend mandatory regular pay raises if businesses adopt a work-sharing system.
   ["Mandatory regular pay raises" - sounds like mandatory inflation. There should never be mandatory regular pay raises anyway. And the lack of such a phenomenon does not equate to wage cuts.]
   It is the first time for the business body, which will merge with the Federation of Economic Organizations next May, to propose the introduction of work sharing in such a detailed manner.
   [Hope there are details we haven't seen so far, because nothing we've seen so far in this article constitutes proposing the introduction of work sharing in a detailed manner. The Timesizing program is closer to a detailed proposal. Nevertheless, if the Japanese get going with this, the world is in for some much faster, solider progress -]
   Work sharing is a system where a number of workers share a job and shorten their working hours so as to maintain employment and to create job opportunities for the unemployed.
   [Ah, we sense the crumbling of the moronic case against the slandered, misrepresented and misnamed "lump of labor fallacy."]
   Nikkeiren has been talking with the Japanese Trade Union Confederation, Japan's largest union body, since October over work sharing, but they are still divided over the issue.
   [The unions can relax about wage levels if once they obtain a flexible, market-oriented work sharing system such as Timesizing, because by suctioning the labor surplus into the job market, work sharing harnesses market forces to maintain and raise wage levels much more flexibly and efficiently and irresistably than any government-mandated wage manipulations. That is one of its major purposes - to centrifuge spending power out of the unspendably huge concentrations it has pooled into - to the detriment of the overall economy.]
   The Nikkeiren draft guideline makes it clear that wage hikes will not be on the spring negotiation agenda, saying, "We are not in a situation where we could discuss which to choose, a wage hike or employment."
   [No big deal. Japan is currently experiencing a general deflation, which is equivalent to a general wage hike for everyone anyway.]
   "We should negotiate how to maintain employment by checking overall labor costs," it notes, adding, "it is necessary to review or suspend regular wage hikes."
   [Let employers mumble in any way that comforts them. Work sharing centrifuges income, from overpaid employers where it has been concentrating as well as from overpaid employees, such as sports figures, where it has been concentrating - anywhere it has concentrated in unspendable excess.]
   "We need to positively consider maintaining employment by reducing overall labor costs," it says.
   The guideline also seeks deregulation of the labor market such as the liberalization of the temporary employment system, while it expresses opposition to dismissal-restriction legislation.
   [Restricting mass layoffs is good. Restricting individual firing for just cause is bad.]
   On labor-management relations, it calls for further cooperation in roder to protect employment.
   [Empty rhetoric.]
   Nikkeiren plans to adopt the guideline at its general meeting in January.

2. Koreans decide it's time to slow down frantic pace, by Sang-Hun Choe, AP 12/26/2001, Print Edition A16, via Anders Hayden via Shorter Work Time E-list (email swt-digest-request@swt.org with 'subscribe' as subject & message).
   SEOUL - ...South Koreans call it ppalli ppalli ("hurry hurry") - doing everything quickly, from leaving planes to eating, walking and driving.... "Ppalli ppalli was the main driving engine behind the nation's rapid industrialization," said Yoo Suk-choon, a sociologist at Seoul's Yonsei University. South Korea was reduced to ashes during the 1950-53 Korean War, but has built itself into the world's 11th-largest economy.
   However, government officials and social critics blame ppalli ppalli for many ills: traffic jams, corruption, slipshod construction and the reckless expansion by corporations on borrowed money, which proved a disaster during Asia's 1997-98 financial crisis. Today, after decades of rushing, there are calls for a more leisurely lifestyle.
   The government, supported by labour groups, is pushing legislation to introduce a five-day work week. Most Koreans still work a half-day on Saturdays. "Korean workers need to live more humanely," said Park Kwang-woo, a policy co-ordinator at the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, the country's largest labour group....
   [In his intro to this story, Anders Hayden notes that Korea is the OECD country with the longest average annual work hours (our only annual figures don't list South Korea - see 7/08/2001 #3 - but we have weekly figures that do on our looong workweeks page and a slightly different list on 6/6/2001 #1). Anders then asks, "Given current trends, perhaps it will not be long before the U.S. surpasses Korea for this dubious distinction?"]

• [strained arguments vs. worksharing by the time-blind -]
  International business commentary - Japan: Work-sharing will prolong the pain - A plan to save jobs will hurt productivity and consumer confidence, by Chester Dawson, Business Week Online Dec 24 2001 via Joe Polito.
  [But then, what's the point of productivity if you've no markets for it, and what's the good of consumer confidence if consumers are jobless and broke?   This is a rather fatuous article by a reporter who reflects the prevailing English-speaking economies' cluelessness about the cumulative effects (and real purposes) of work-saving technology.]
  Japanese executives will do just about anything to avoid firing someone.
  [Already we're into the sloppy language typical of critics. Dawson is not making the important distinction between firing and layoffs, that is, individual firing for cause vs. mass layoffs. In fact, Japanese executives, like responsible executives in America and the world over, will do anything to avoid mass layoffs, which the most responsible executives resort to only as a last resort, i.e., only when entering Chapter 7 liquidation. Dawson winds up arguing for layoffs, if you can believe. Apparently like many English-speaking CEOs, he thinks the job market is an infinite ocean that can absorb any amount of abuse (at a time when the ocean itself is clearly revealing its finitude) and nothing that mere man can do could harm such a thing as a nation's consumer base. (So it's always an Act of God when recession comes - "not our fault" say the CEOs who induced it by short-sighted downsizing instead of timesizing.)]
  They buy people out, they move workers from one unprofitable unit to another, they force them to take less pay.
  [All of which we've seen in the U.S. economy and elsewhere, nothing unique to Japan.]
  Now there is talk in Japanese boardrooms, union shops, and policy circles of introducing yet another stratagem: work-sharing, a concept that has been tried [with great success - ed.] in Europe. It's a tempting idea. Tempting and dangerous.
  [Dangerous only to Americans so ignorant of their own history that they don't realize that the USA itself had a 72-hour workweek (six 12-hour days) prior to the 1840s when people worked from dawn to dusk, 84 hours/week for those who didn't observe the Sabbath. Worksharing took over by fits and starts in the 100 years between 1840 and 1940 and cut the standard workweek roughly in half, to the 40-hour week. Dangerous? Then the original worksharing of the cut from the seven-day workweek to the six-day workweek was DANGEROUS!!! - as implemented in response to the Fourth of the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai in roughly 1500 BC. Dangerous? Then why don't we all go right back to that presumably "safe" 72- or 84-hour workweek of 1840??? Hell, why don't we all just jump to the 120-hour workweeks that the robopathic American medical establishment works their interns and trainees? For that matter, sleep is for the weak! Why don't we just really work "24/7" = all 168 hours per week. Never mind the statistics of high overtime accident rates even based on the 40-hour-a-week standard. Dawson is evidently one of the many many people who take for granted the 40-hour week and have no idea how hard it was to achieve it and how hard it's getting to stop it from sliding back up, often without pay (for "salaried positions") among those who still have full-time jobs.]
  The notion is deceptively simple:
  [Like someone is trying to pull a conspiracy on us. Yeah, the God of Moses had this nasty conspiracy to deceive the Israelites about the "safety" of working all seven days a week like the Philistines and the Amorites etc. Bad, God. Bad, bad. How couldst Thou force the Hebrews to lose their regional competitiveness like that!]
  Split the work day into more shifts and cut the number of working hours [per person - ed.]. In Japan, work days are often divided into two 10-hour shifts.
  [Interesting. Apparently a 20-hour workday for firms. How many days a week for employees? We assume only four since we believe the Japanese government lowered the workweek to 40 hours in the early 1990s, though we have seen no articles on this.]
  This might be replaced with three 6-hour shifts [per day] - a cut of four hours per worker. [And two hours/day for employers. Also interesting. This would cut the firm's workday to 18 hours - but then, they don't need the extra production anyway because they've been in a crisis of under-consumption now for a full decade.]
  The idea is already catching fire.
  • Ball-bearing manufacturer NSK,
  • carmaker Isuzu, and
  • toilet manufacturer Toto
    [Actually Toto makes not just toilets, but washlets that have a control panel bigger than a 747's and will do everything except tie a bow around your butt! The Japanese are way way WAY ahead of us or anybody else in personal comfort technology.]
    
  are considering the concept to preserve at least wome work for redundant employees.
  [Hey, this is interesting. This is the first we've heard that NSK, Isuzu and Toto are considering worksharing. We'd just heard about Toshiba, Fujitsu and NEC - see 1/05 #1 below. And of course, this fall, Lufthansa, Air Canada, Imperial Palace Hotel & Casino, and hundreds of other North American and European companies. In fact, Dawson, the only place we haven't heard about it that much is the Third World, which is probably why they're still "the Third World" of sweatshops, high unemployment, low pay and...no consumer markets. The only place we've heard about it in the Third World is Brazil, and that was mostly thanks to a European company, Volkswagen. (Is Brazil still 3d world? A: is it still hemmorhaging emigrants to America? The only country that has reversed the hemmorhaging lately is Ireland.]
  Meanwhile the Finance Minister is proposing subsidies to support such programs, while Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has ordered up a policy report....
  EASING WORRIES. Advocates insist work-sharing will trim costs and save jobs.
  • For starters, they say, companies would no longer have to pay overtime; workers now get time-and-a-half for the last two hours of their shifts.
    [Hm, assuming we're talking about daily shifts here, as we were above, then we must be talking about five 10-hour shifts a week, mean that the statutory workweek in Japan is indeed still 40 hours and two hours of overtime a day for each of five days means 10 overtime hours a week.]
  • And if companies hired part-timers for the proposed third shift, they'd pay less salary and benefits.
  • Finally, backers say work-sharing will boost domestic consumption. Says Kiyoshi Sasamori, chairman of Rengo, a union [of unions, like the AFL/CIO - ed.] that represents 7.6m workers, from factory hands to civil servants: "Work-sharing will ease worries about job security, encouraging consumers to buy."
    [This has been a huge problem in Japan over the last decade. People are so scared about the economy and their jobs that they're saving as much money as they can in case things get even worse.]
  There's some faulty logic at work here.
  [OK, let's see what he calls faulty logic and whose side it is really on.]
  
  • ...Work-sharing means shorter shifts and smaller paychecks, which would only exacerbate the spending phobia..\..amid record unemployment [and falling] average monthly income - last year...down 1.5% - because of paycuts, shrinking overtime, and skimpier bonuses....
    [Funny how these guys can put 1 and 1 together that high unemployment scares people out of spending, but they can't seem to put 2 and 2 together that high unemployment depresses pay because there's often someone else who's willing to do your job for less, and shrinks markets, because never mind the employed scared about losing their jobs, what about the unemployed who've already lost theirs?! So lower unemployment by worksharing and you've immediately got fewer people out there willing to do your job for less. Keep lowering unemployment and employers have to start paying more for good, hell, for ANY, employees. That rebuilds markets pronto. You get the 40/30 phenomenon as at Kellogg's by 1935 - employers paying 40 hours of pay for 30 hours of work. Kellogg's went from 30/30 in 1930 to 40/30 in 1935. And never mind that little five-year, one-town (Battle Creek, Mich.) stretch. What about the whole USA from 1840 to 1940? We went from 72-80 hours of pay for 72-84 hrs/wk of work in 1840 - let's round it off to 80 for 80 - to 80 hours of 1840 pay for 40 hours of work in 1940. No, even in 1940 depression conditions, 40 hours of work brought the lowest-paid employee more buying power than 80 hour's of 1840 pay, let's say conservatively then that by 1940 we had a nice little 100/40 plan going throughout the USA and much of the rest of the developed world, never mind a measly 40/30. So wake up, Dawson. Eliminating a wage-depressing labor surplus = high unemployment means unleashing market forces to flexibly raise wages and centrifuge pay out of the unspendable money oceans frozen in the upper income brackets. So work-sharing means bigger paychecks, as well as bigger markets.]
    
  • Creating busywork for idle hands and imposing limits on wages and hours also is sure to weigh on productivity.
    [Very sloppy, Dawson. The whole thrust of shared work is to avoid the strain and artificiality of makework, which is what your own short-sighted American economy chose, or rather had thrust down its throat by FDR's failure to support the Black-Connery Thirty Hour Bill in 1933.]
    • [Work sharing is the opposite of busywork creation. You're sharing the natural market-demanded work instead of continuing the goverment's artificial busywork creation of costly public works, whose effectiveness can be judged by the fact that Japan is still in the economic toilet, and whose symbol is the great sinking airport on the fake island of Kansai, the single most expensive public works project in world history until the Three Gorges Project on the Yangtse. (At least Kansai won't be quite the same ecological disaster, especially if the Japan Sea reclaims it.)
    • [Worksharing imposes limits on hours, not wages. Wages are free to rise, and rise they will, as we demonstrated in the previous bullet. (Dawson seems to have difficulty making distinctions.) With worksharing we can repeal our too-little too-late minimum wage laws as unnecessary and stifling - and ineffectual.]
  • Such maneuvering would increase labor costs over the long haul....
    [Wake up and smell the coffee, Dawson. "Such maneuvering" gave us the weekend. And though it increases labor costs, worksharing also decreases executive pay costs - which not surprisingly gets excluded from executives' constant "labor cost" complaints - and worksharing also increases profits by increasing markets - a point that only a few executives seem bright enough to take. It's ordinary people who spend a huge proportion of their pay, not top executives. "The more concentration, the less circulation" - and vice versa.]
  • DILEMMA. Finally, work sharing does not address Japan's core dilemma: too many people in the wrong line of work....
    [Yes, but a small enhancement, possible only with work sharing, does address this dilemma: overtime-targeted training, as outlined in the most advanced worksharing design we know of, the Timesizing program. In fact, in Timesizing's Phase Two, the incidence of overtime is harnessed to put training on a completely market basis. Overtime is designed not only to target, but also to trigger, pace, and finance cross-training, retraining and on-the-job training throughout the economy. And the shorter you make the workweek, the more overtime you have that is inexorably converting itself into market-oriented training and hiring.]
  [Then our boy Dawson tries to really slander the work-sharing approach -]
  Instead of underwriting the status quo...
  [What an ignoramus. Ask the French how much even their primitive version of work sharing in terms of a rigd 35-hour workweek has underwritten the status quo. Even in that basic form, work sharing has had a transformative effect on French industry and labor practices. But let's see what Dawson thinks is a solution -]
  
  • Tokyo [ie: the gov't] should be promoting mobility in the workforce..\..
    [Ambiguous. That could be said of job eliminations - if the eliminated could find new jobs - which they apparently can't if Japanese unemployment is breaking records. They're not known as lazy people, having invented the word "karoshi" for death by overwork. If they can't find jobs, the jobs just aren't there. But what about this -]
    Says Andrew Shipley, economist at WestLB Securities in Tokyo, "The problem isn't cyclical downturn, it's structural shift." Indeed, while bloated corporations are shedding redundant staff, some jobs in ascending sectors are going unfilled. Demand for computer technicians, health-care workers, and other service staffers will grow even as construction companies go bust and manufacturers move offshore.
    [Two points -
    1. [Computer jobs are also moving offshore - to Mombai (Bombay) and Russia, for instance. No safety there. And same as in the USA, the only reason for the shortage of healthcare workers is the intense sexual dissimulation of the weird healthcare industry. Doctors think they're God, and want all the pay for themselves. And everybody in the industry is supposed to work 120 hours a week so who wants it these days? Only the most traditional, who are a dying breed.
    2. [A major reason jobs in ascending sectors are going unfilled is that the labor surplus has lulled Japanese employers, like their counterparts in USA, into thinking they can just pluck any skillsets they want, however technical, right off the job market's heavy laden plum tree, or at least pass along the costs of training to employees and governments. Training has become the first budget line to get cut in a crunch, and now few employers know anything about it. Labor shortage changes all that, as demonstrated during World War II. Then, the briefest and most relevant training pops up, on the job, everywhere, as corporations practically shanghai employees off the streets to staff themselves. Worksharing, of course, does the same thing intelligently as war does stupid&wastefully - it creates a labor shortage so that market force flexibly raise wages and centrifuge income out of its unspendable concentrations. In short, it activates spending power, by deconcentrating it. And the most advanced worksharing design that we've seen is... Timesizing.]
    ..\..Mobility in the workforce [what we call "skill liquidity" - ed.] means funding retraining and making it easier to transfer pensions when people change jobs.
    In the longer term, greater competition for labor and growing tolerance for job eliminations will undermine Japan's cozy workplace traditions.
    [Is Dawson at all aware that job eliminations reduces employers' greater competition for labor? Like so many people who haven't thought things through, he's advocating a "solution" that is going to worsen the problem and nullify his one substantial suggestion so far, retraining. And as for government-funded retraining, that's usually too little too late, nothing like as pervasive as Timesizing's overtime-to-training conversion. And why should the government aka taxpayers pay the costs of the private sector's training anyway. That's no way to lower taxes - assuming you believe tax cuts offer some economically stimulative effect (which they do if the cuts aren't disproportionately for the top brackets).]
    The only way to cure what ails Japan is to stimulate - not stifle - workers' competitive juices.
    [As if workers's juices aren't already stimulated by their current furious competition for vanishing jobs. But to translate this into a helpful terms, we don't want to stop people who love their jobs and have deflationary qualitative incentive, but how can we distinguish them from the people who are just doing it for the money and only have inflationary quantitative incentive? Easy. Require reinvestment of overtime (or overwork = overtime from all sources) earnings. Those who love their job will keep working long hours and enjoying reinvesting in training and hiring, those who are just doing it for the money will quit at the statutory workweek limit and retrain into jobs where they can earn what they want during straight time or where they just like the job more and don't care so much about money. The whole worksharing/timesizing approach motivates people to gravitate toward jobs they like better, and gets the whole economy off its crude over-dependence on the money motive. This is Timesizing's built-in inflation control, much more intelligent than the Fed's erstwhile fostering of 6% unemployment in order to control inflation (ie: the notorious NAIRU = non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment).]

• Holidays - Survey says workers to get more time off, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, H2.
  ...The Bureau of National Affairs Inc. [BNA] , a private agency that monitors workplace policies and practices...notes that because Xmas and New Year's fall on Tuesdays, many employees will receive extra time off. In all, 63% of 448 employers surveyed had scheduled at least three paid days off for workers in late December and early January, up from 49% last year, according to the BNA's "Year-End Holiday Practices" report.
  Only a small group of employers - about 13% will curtail operations for a week or more during the holiday season. Most are factories or schools. Close to half plan to pay their workers during the shutdown. ...Only a third of the manufacturing firms questioned plan to compensate their workers. By contrast, 90% of universities and colleges will offer paid time off while campuses are closed.... Only 36% of nonunion firms will pay workers during the holiday shutdown, the survey showed \but\ 55% of all unionized companies will offer pay....
  Despite the fact that Xmas and New Year's are regarded as paid holidays by the federal government, four out of 10 employees will required that some employees work on those days. Health care, security, utility, municipal and maintenance workers are among [them]. ...The study noted, "Roughly four out of five employers that anticipate holiday shifts will give extra cash to some or all workers who come in on Dec. 25 or Jan. 1." Although time-and-a-half or double time is usually paid for holiday work, some employers plan to pay more. In all, 57% said they would offer extra pay.... Of those, some said they plan to pay two-and-a-half times the normal rate. A handful reported they expect to offer holiday workers triple the regular rate of pay.
  So-called "comp" time [compensating time off] will be offered to workers at approximately three out of 10 organizations, including 10% that plan to provide no other form of [compensation], according to the study. ...Researchers said, "About one out of 10 firms [8%] will offer both premium pay and comp time."
  ...The BNA...found that only a handful of firms were planning lavish..\..holiday bonuses....

1. Air Canada agrees to work sharing, reducing job cuts, Reuters 16:14 12-21-01 via AOLNews.
   TORONTO..- The Canadian Auto Workers Union said on Friday it had helped save nearly 800 jobs at Air Canada {AC.TO}, the country's largest airline, after it challenged layoffs at the airline and got it to agree to a work sharing program.... The work sharing program will cut schedules by one day a week for a period of up to 26 weeks, starting Jan. 6..\..
   [So a 4-day workweek is going to implemented at Air Canada. Wonder how it's doing at Lufthansa.]
   The union said Air Canada will now cut 427 jobs as opposed to an initial plan of slashing 1,281 positions, which was challenged by the union..\..
   [Hmm, 1281-427= 854 saved jobs. So why did they say nearly 800 instead of nearly 900?]
   Air Canada, the world's 10th largest airline, had announced plans to cut thousands of jobs in the aftermath of 9/11 that brought air travel to a halt.... "A compromise was reached that required the company to negotiate voluntary measures with the union," the union said in a statement. The union's members work in Air Canada's airport services and call centers....

2. Canada's CBC reaches deal with striking workers, Reuters 18:20 12-21-01 via AOLNews.
   TORONTO - The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. said Friday it reached a tentative agreement with some 1,600 technicians to end a strike that has played havoc with the public broadcaster's regular programming.... Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union spokesman Mike Sullivan also confirmed the deal but said he could not yet provide details on terms and conditions. The dispute centered on wages, overtime, and working conditions....
   [So overtime is again a bone of contention.]

3. Russian parliament backs new labour laws, Reuters 04:56 12-21-01 via AOLNews.
   MOSCOW...- Russia's parliament pressed on with President Vladimir Putin's economic reform programme on Friday, giving final approval to a labour law replacing Soviet era legislation, when the state was boss. The new code adapts to post-Soviet economic reality in allowing private firms to hire and fire workers. It also seeks to boost job security, locking in workers' rights and penalizing employers over delays in paying wages.
   ...Vyacheslav Volodin of the centrist Fatherland-All Russia group told RTR state television, "Look what issues have been settled here - the length of the working day, overtime pay, defending the interests of young people, women." The new code formally provides for a 40-hour working week, enshrines the right to paid leave after six months' employment instead of 11 months, and sets 28 days as the minimum holiday entitlement....
   [So with four weeks minimum vacation, Russia is now ahead of the USA, especially if Russia enforces the 40-hour maximum.]

1. Hitachi, Toshiba introduce work-sharing programs, Kyodo via AP-NY-12-19-01 1251EST via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- Hitachi Ltd. and Toshiba Corp. have introduced work-sharing programs among workers at their troubled semiconductor production plants to prevent layoffs, company sources said Wednesday.... Electrical machinery makers, hit hard by a slump in their information technology business, are under increasing pressure to cut costs to remain competitive..\.. The two firms went ahead with the work-sharing scheme without waiting for results of talks now being held among the government, the Japan Federation of Employers' Assocs. and labor unions on the issue....
   [Hey, just like Kellogg's in Dec., 1930, or Lincoln Electric in the 1950s, or Nucor Steel in the 1980s. Some companies are smart enough to "just do it" so they stop contributing to their national and our global economic death spiral.]
   Sanyo Electric Co. also plans to introduce a work-sharing scheme next spring..\..
   [Whoah, three big Japanese companies jumping into work-sharing. This may move Japan ahead of France in demonstrating the future of "work smart, not hard" - while the English-speaking economies get left in the dust of "work hard to get ahead" regardless of worksaving technology, downward pressures on pay and the unspendable concentration of spending power.]
   Work-sharing involves available work being distributed as evenly as possible among all workers, or else reducing overall work time, when production slackens to prevent layoffs....
   [In direct contravention to the ranting by Paul Samuelson and other idiot savants against the "lump of labor fallacy." Maybe you boys better just siddown and shaddap. You've cost the world economies enough jobs and balanced production-consumption over the last 100 years since you started this rant.]
   
   • Toshiba has introduced work-sharing programs at its semiconductor memory production plants in Mie Prefecture, company sources said.
   • Hitachi has introduced work-sharing programs at its semiconductor plants in Ibaraki, Gunma and Yamanashi, company sources said.... One example of work sharing by Hitachi is to add an additional worker to a team job that used to be performed by four workers in three shifts. As a result, working hours per worker have been cut by 20%, while wages per worker have also been [cut]. The company leaves their hourly wage unchanged.
     [Not clear. Does this mean they now work five workers for four shifts? And are wages per worker cut proportionally to working hours? At least they 're on the right track, while other parts of the Japanese economy are not - the news release "Japanese [Thursday (12/20)] morning newspaper headlines," Kyodo via AP-NY-12-19-01 1745EST via AOLNews, states, "Postal offices failed to pay 280 million yen in overtime for 11,000 night staff for past 5 years."]
   [But there is a downside also in the Hitachi implementation -]
   ...The ongoing work-sharing program is likely to last [only] until next March, the sources said \because\ Hitachi is pushing ahead with restructuring plans under which it will cut 3,100 jobs in the semiconductor division by March 31, 2002.

2. Paris uproar over plan to scrap Saturday school, Reuters 09:27 12-20-01 via AOLNews.
   PARIS - Paris parents, teachers and priests were up in arms Thursday over a proposal to end one of those little oddities that make life in France just a bit different from elsewhere - Saturday morning school sessions. Under pressure from families demanding a full weekend free, Paris City Hall and its board of education unveiled a plan to switch the Saturday classes to Wednesday - which, in another Gallic twist, has long been a free day for primary schools.... The unusual rhythm of the French school week dates back to 1905, when the state barred all religious education from public schools but agreed to leave Wednesdays free for catechism.
   [So let's see. Here's the problem in a nutshell, with emphasis on the "nut." Sun. school is on Wed. and Wed. school is on Sat. And they can't move the Sat. errands to Sun. without busying up the weekend even more.]
   But parents have become increasingly critical of school on Saturday, saying it ruins "le weekend" - an idea once so foreign, French had to borrow an English word to describe it. This argument is heard especially in neighborhoods where people are rich enough to afford a weekend house in the country. [However,] with the work week officially shortened to 35 hours, even many parents who are not so well off now have more free time and don't see why their children shouldn't have it too..\..
   [Amen to that! The French workweek reduction has apparently narrowed a cultural difference between the rich and the rest of the population.]
   But the chorus of protests from so many different quarters made an intractable problem out of what other European countries would consider to be normal practice. [For example,] a large teachers union...considers 5 school days in a row too demanding. The staunchest opposition came from the Roman Catholic Church, fighting to save its traditional Wednesday morning catechism classes despite dwindling attendance and social trends that have changed daily life in France. ...Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger told Europe 1 radio...only 15% of pupils in state schools attended Wednesday catechism, said Saturdays should be free because two-thirds of all Paris families included single or divorced parents and children needed time to visit both parents.
   [Good point, but isn't the good Cardinal arguing on the wrong side here, or is he way ahead of his time and actually arguing for just four days of school for the kids?]
   He ruled out scheduling religious classes Wed. afternoon, which the new plan would leave free, because modern families had so many other things to do then. "There's judo, there are rhythmic dance classes, dental appointments," he explained, "all the things people can't do on Sat. because they go away for the weekend."
   [Oh those French - ya gotta love'em!]

3. US Airways ALPA pilots applaud congressional delegation for efforts to help promote talks with US Airways management, PRNewswire 12/20/2001 12:48 EST via AOLNews.
   PITTSBURGH - ...US Airways Master Executive Council (MEC)...developed two proposals in the past three months.
   1. The first was authorized by the MEC on Sept. 17, and was designed to prevent furloughs and help the airline through the aftermath of 9/11.
      [Great, we're not just trying to prevent permanent layoffs here - we're even trying to prevent temporary furloughs!]
      After US Airways management indicated that saving all pilot jobs was possible, ALPA [the US Air unit of the Air Line Pilots Assoc.] offered pay cap reductions, a pilot-funded early retirement program and training relief.... The objective...was to provide US Airways with immediate cash to deal with the drop in passenger deamnd, prevent employee furloughs, and maintain the ability for a quick recovery when demand returned.
      [So there's the reason for preventing even furloughs - to be ready for a quick recovery.]
      The offers had the potential for saving the Company hundreds of millions of dollars....
   2. The latest proposal, delivered to management on Nov. 13, 2001, authorizes the Company to utilize additional small jets under its code [which] would be used to regain customers and enhance US Airways' competitiveness in small jet commuter markets and feed to its hubs. In exchange, the proposal provides job protections for US Airways pilots. These include furlough protections and the opportunity for furloughed US Airways mainline pilots to fly the small jets that are acquired by US Airways Express small jet operators...\..
   [Basically, US Air top executives have been pretty unresponsive to the pilots assoc. proposals. Dinosaur thinking? Petrified with fear? Who knows why people are stupid and uncommunicative.]
   Management rejected ALPA's efforts and offers for assistance after 9/11 and...refused to meet with ALPA to work out solutions.... Management...rejected the [Nov.] proposal on Nov. 21 and ALPA's open offer to enter into discussions to work out solutions. Management [mailed] 250 unscheduled furlough notices to affected pilots just before Thanksgiving, almost seven months in advance of furlough dates.
   [What are "furlough dates"? Anyway, there are further discussions on Jan. 3.]

4. America West announces customer service enhancements at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, PRNewswire 12/20/2001 15:52 EST via AOLNews.
   [Things seem to be going a little more smoothly at America West, although this may only be an illusion generated by the fact that this press release comes from top execs, not pilots -]
   ...Last month, America West initiated several other services to expedite the check-in process including recalling more than 70 furloughed workers, adding additional x-ray and magnetometer machines and installing six self-service kiosks....

5. [Mixed bag in Hawaii -]
   Hawaiian and Aloha Airlines pilots comment on merger, PRNewswire 12/20/2001 11:52 EST via AOLNews.
   HONOLULU - ...Captain Conrad Waggener, chairman of the Aloha Airlines unit of ALPA, stat[ed], "...Pilots from all three airlines [including the Aloha subsidiary, Aloha Island Air] have been furloughed as a result of the stagnated economy and the lack of travelers since 9/11. Our mutual objective is to mitigate future furloughs as well as bring all our pilots currently on furlough back as soon as possible."...
   Founded in 1931, ALPA is the world's oldest and largest pilots union, representing 67,000 crewmembers at 46 airlines in the US and Canada. Visit the ALPA website at: *alpa.org .

• Chirac calls for less French red tape, lower taxes, Reuters 09:16 12-19-01 via AOLNews.
  PARIS...- French President Jacques Chirac on Wednesday called for the country's notorious red tape to be cut and taxes reduced to help the economy grow. [Chirac's] RPR party is on the right in France's political spectrum....
  [The red tape part we agree with. The tax cut part depends if you're cutting them for the poor (more growth) or the rich (less growth), since the whole business cycle is a tide in the affair$ of men, which taken at the flood reveals a strong centrifugation of income and wealth, but taken at the ebb reveals tight concentration. And the first way to centrifuge income is to cut the workweek and centrifuge earnings -]
  Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who has..\..unveiled an economic stimulus package...to counter the impact of 9/11 [and] also implemented a controversial 35-hour working week, is likely to face off against Chirac in presidential elections next spring....
  [And that workweek reduction has been the major factor in slump-proofing France or at least making it the most downturn-resistant nation in the world and the slowest to go down. It would help if the workweek were more flexible, fluctuating automatically against unemployment (if UE goes up, wkwk goes down and v.v.) and it would help even more if they tied training to overtime. And there's nothing like plenty of shorter-hour jobs to demotivate the proliferation of red tape, which is only necessary when you've got to find some way to fill all those unnecessarily long hours of the 40-hour week in the age of worksaving technology.]

• Washington State Nurses Assoc. [WSNA] supports nurses on strike at Oregon Health & Science University [OHSU], PRNewswire 12/18/2001 19:!4 EST via AOLNews.
  SEATTLE...- WSNA strongly supports the registered nurses at OHSU in Portland OR as they have boted overwhelmingly to strike.... Washington State, along with the rest of the nation and the world, is facing a nursing shortage crisis. The average age of nurses today is 45. Fewer than 9% of the nation's 2.6m registered nurses are under the age of 30....
  [Here is a paradox within a global labor surplus. Employers generally are sooo spoiled by their overwhelming power at the bargaining table (if there is one) that even in certain professions where there are shortages, they still don't get it. Especially employers in the health professions where they were so used to the sexual dissimulation of tough hard-driving overpaid workoholic male doctors and gentle compliant underpaid quiet hard-working but rather more balanced female nurses. Nurses are old-fashioned females to these atavistic brains, and females are supposed to just shut up and take it and take it and take it. Political correctness or even sensitivity was very late in coming to the nurse-doctor relationship because all the old-fashioned girls who survived into the 70s and early 80s went into...nursing and teaching, even though they were rapidly becoming a minority among the young female population. To their credit, most young women simply will not put up with that sh*t any more. Even back in the early 80s when Phil Hyde was the token male on the staff of Boston University School of Nursing, one of the most memorable things any graduate student ever said to him was, "Phil, nursing sucks." And it was no pun and no come-on. She said it angrily as if the doormat era was over - for her. And here's the nub of the doormatting -]
  "...Mandatory overtime, nursing input, and wages and benefits have all been priorities for our local bargaining units...," said Louise Kaplan, PhD, ARNP, Pres. of WSNA....
  [It is essential that labor wrest macromanagement control over worktime from management, while leaving micromanagement control to management. In other words, labor must see that overtime is enforced and then must see that the level where overtime starts each week (i.e., the length of the workweek) is low enough to provide well-paying jobs for the entire working-age population in its city, state, region and nation, "well-paying" by market forces alone without the distracting futility of "minimum wage laws." This is the essence and function of the 5-phase Timesizing.com program. Mandatory overtime should have been made obsolete by the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. It should have been made an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. But clearly it didn't, and labor has lost ground ever since because of that omission.]

1. Hong Kong: Airline offers unpaid leave, AP via NYT, W1.
   Hoping to weather the global airline slump, Cathay Pacific Airways announced cost-cutting measures that include a request that employees take unpaid leave for two weeks to a year. Although Cathay has had unsteady relations with workers, including pilots who are threatening industrial action ahead of the Christmas and New Year holidays, Hong Kong's top airline [is] trying to make it through the industry's downturn without any layoffs. Cathay [expects] to have 300-500 more flight attendants than it needs next year and 200-250 too many pilots, but executives hope to bring things in balance if enough workers take the unpaid leave.

2. Britain: Airbus Industrie cuts jobs, by Kerry Shaw, NYT, W1.
   The European aviation giant [will] eliminate 500 jobs in Britain, and announced cost-cutting measures that would save the equivalent of 9,400 jobs in France, Germany and Spain. The CEO...Noel Forgeard, insisted that these measures did not include layoffs, but instead reduced the number of work hours per year.
   "When we get rid of overtime, or move to part-time unemployment we reduce the number of men employed," Mr. Forgeard told Bloomberg News....
   [Talk about incoherent! He means by reducing the number of manhours, they're reducing the number of FTE's or full-time job equivalents, where "full time" as given by the Deity Himself on Mt. Sinai in 1940, is, of course, always and only 40 hours a week. More coherence on this story from AP -]
   Airbus cuts 500 U.K. jobs, AP-NY-12-17-01 1402EST via AOLNews.
   TOULOUSE, France - European aircraft maker Airbus SAS...will reduce the total number of employee work hours by 20% to cope with declining demand, the company's top executive said Monday.
   [For example, a 32-hour workweek of four 8-hour days??]
   Chairman Noel Forgeard...told reporters the reduction in work hours will be structured to avoid a need for additional outright job cuts. Instead, Airbus will rely on attrition and temporary layoffs, he said. Forgeard spoke on the sidelines of a gathering to mark the first delivery of [Airbus'] A330-200 airliner to Air France....
   A spokesman for British subsidiary Airbus UK in London said separately that up to 2,000 jobs could potentially be eliminated - 18% of its work fore - unless employees agree to stop working overtime and accept other cost-cutting measures. "On the manufacturing front, we have to get our costs down.... About 2,000 jobs would be at risk if we just carried on the way we are today," spokesman Howard Berry said. The British unit produces the wings and undercarriage for Airbus airliners.
   Airbus, based in Toulouse, has some 47,000 employees, mostly in its four founding countries: Britain, France, Germany and Spain. Like Chicago-based Boeing Co., its leading competitor, Airbus has been hit by fallout from 9/11.... Airbus recently lowered the number of commercial aircraft it expects to deliver in 2002 to 300 from 375 before 9/11....

3. Hospital reaches agreement with nurses over staffing, Australian Broadcasting 17 Dec 2001 9:00am AEDT via AOLNews.
   New England [Australia] Health says it has managed to reach an agreement with nurses to keep open the emergency department of Inverell Hospital. The nurses had earlier threatened to close it down.... The health service's CEO, Stuart Schneider, says the nurses agreed to continue to staff the emergency department on condition that the service employed local doctors over the Christmas period.... In August, four doctors practicing in the town withdrew emergency services from the hospital for four days a fortnight [= 2-wk period], saying they were overworked and exhausted....

4. Southern California Gas Co. workers sue for 5 years of overtime pay; Suit seeks to represent an estimated 500 workers, Business Wire BW0179 DEC 17 2001 9:31 EASTERN via AOLNews.
   LOS ANGELES...- A group of Southern California Gas Co. employees filed a proposed class action lawsuit claiming that the natural gas company...ha[s] systematically required field crew workers to work 6-day weeks, but ha[s] refused to pay overtime. The suit [was] filed Dec. 13 in Calif. Superior Court [here].
   According to the suit, prior to 1996 many So Cal Gas employees who voluntarily agreed to work on Saturdays following a full, 5-day week were allowed to take a day off in the following week. Beginning in 1996, So Cal Gas changed the policy, making Saturday a required workday, but refused to pay overtime compensation....
   [and may we also infer that they refused to allow comp time?]

5. 'Juggling' is timely work about family - All of the workers struggle to 'balance' their lives by making sacrifices.... All seem to bear the burden of a constant state of total exhaustion, by Suzanne Ryan, BG, E8.
   Re: "Juggling Work and Family" with Hedrick Smith
   On: WGBH-TV (Channel 2)
   Time: Tonight at 9
   ...Tonight's PBS documentary...is a fascinating but sad commentary about the busy, busy American lifestyle.... Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith interviews a variety of working people across the country, including a hotel doorman, a lab technician, and several attorneys - some of whom live in the Boston area.
   
   • ...One man regularly works an 18-hour shift.
   • Another sees her spouse only one hour each day because the couple work opposite shifts to care for their children.
   • All seem to bear the burden of a constant state of total exhaustion.... Single mother Charlotte Gattenby, a manager at Hewlett-Packard in San Jose, Calif., can hardly keep her eyes open after a tough day at the office [in front of] her latchkey children, who cook dinner for themselves three nights a week....
   • The film includes a segment on Boston lawyers which suggests that the culture of large law firms absolutely doesn't allow for responsible motherhood, even though 50% of law school graduates today are women. Claire Smith, a former attorney at Goodwin Procter, says she felt she was set up to fail after she had a child and wanted to reduce her workload to four days a week. ...She was given an assignment that was impossible to finish in the time allotted. When she finally resigned from her $100,000-a-year job, her manager told her she'd been sending signals she wanted to quit [just] by working part time.
   ..\..How did the world spin so out of control?...
   [The wrong fork in the road in 1933.]
   The documentary does offer some hope. It features companies like Hewlett-Packard and Baxter International, which offer employees options such as
   • job-sharing.
   • working from home, and
   • part-time assignments.
   Obviously these policies aren't enough to alleviate the stress of the modern workplace. Still, in this 24/7 economy, it's nice work if you can get it.

1. Delta pilots to vote on work plan, AP-NY-12-16-01 1021EST via AOLNews.
   ATLANTA - Delta is asking some pilots to take a month off with reduced pay to trim costs.
   [...and presumably minimize layoffs.]
   Leaders of Delta pilots' union are scheduled to vote Wednesday on the proposal, which would pay the pilots for 55 flight hours per month [73%] instead of their usual 75. In return, the pilots would be guaranteed the month off.
   [And presumably guaranteed their regular job back at the end of the month. Sounds like a good deal, especially if they can take it across the Xmas hols when there's always too much to do, or across Jan-Feb when there's always too little and a nice getaway in Bora Bora (not to be confused with Tora Bora) would just hit the spot.]
   The plan would cut costs and ease overstaffing at the airline, spokesman Tom Donahue said Friday.
   [Overstaffing or more likely post-9/11 'underflying' on the part of the traveling public.]
   It would be offered on a monthly basis and only to pilots in overstaffed categories, he said. Delta pared its schedule by 16% after 9/11 and has furloughed 400 pilots because of weak demand. The company estimates it will lay off about 1,700 pilots.
   On the Net:
   Delta Air Lines, *delta.com
   Delta Air Lines Pilots Assoc. site, *dalpa.com

2. The nation needs a vacation to reassess and rejuvenate, by Lisa Belkin, NYT, C6.
   [Amen to that, Lisa! America with its miserable 2-week vacations compared to Europe and Australia with their 4-6 week vacations?! And we think we're God's gift, a beacon of the future? Ha. We're more like people repealing the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 in deed, if not in law.]
   ...Rob DeRocker, an executive VP for Development Counselors International in Manhattan, will be taking a "real" vacation this year, not just because he feels he owes it to himself but also because he is realizing that it is owed to him. "Sept. 11 put things like work in a different perspective," he said. "Chances are both the world and my job will be here tomorrow, but if for some reason they aren't here tomorrow, the last thing I want is to leave with a legacy of having forsaken valuable time at home for unnecessary time at work."...
   [Rock on, DeRocker! But when we're pumping worksaving technology into the economy and cutting staff instead of trimming hours and keeping everyone employed with more free time, then we're building up such a pool of desperate jobseekers that no one wants to be the first to leave the office at night. And that means a lot of people putting in unnecessary time at work.]