Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

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Timesizing News, February 1-20, 2002
[Commentary] ©2002 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

02/20/2002  primitive Timesizing in the news -

1. [U.S. overtime (OT) laws, however compromised, prevail again - for the moment]
   Court refuses to hear state OT case, by Gina Holland, AP-NY-02-19-02 1028EST via AOLNews.
   WASHINGTON - States lost another round in the Supreme Court Tuesday in their move to get around federal labor laws that require them to pay their workers overtime [pay of at least 1½ times straight-time pay].
   Iowa, supported by 8 other states [IN, LA, NB, NV, OH, OK, TX, UT], asked the Court to rule that states have a constitutional right to set their own labor policies.
   [What a disaster that was back when they still had it!]
   Justices [of the US Supreme Court] declined to review the case, without comment.
   [For once our contemptible presidential-election-usurping high court does the right thing.]
   The issue has resurfaced repeatedly since 1985, when the Supreme Court said state and local governments must follow the same federal labor rules as private employers.
   [Radical - not.]
   Iowa, which had been sued by public safety employees, pointed to the state's financial troubles and said the federal rules are driving up state taxpayers' costs.
   [So tax the rich, who despite their ritual yelling and screaming, won't feel it - because they have far far FAAAR more spending power than they could spend in thousands of lifetimes, and as it is, they have suctioned to themselves the spending power out of the markets that once supported their own investments. What a disgrace Iowa is. And they have the top historian of worktime economics right there in Iowa City, Ben Hunnicutt!]
   Attorney General Thomas J. Miller, citing news reports, said the state has been "forced to send investigators home in the middle of major criminal investigations because it cannot afford overtime."
   [Well maybe the free criminals will teach the cowardly Iowa politicians and the whining Iowa wealthy a thing or two about priorities.]
   "District supervisors of the Iowa State Patrol are scrubbing toilets and vacuuming offices because the state cannot afford janitorial workers in district offices," he wrote in filings for the state.
   [Ah, poor babies. Then let them quit and drive up wage costs for the State Patrol too when patrolmen can't be hired for love nor money.]
   With the Court's refusal to intervene, the state could have to pay as much as $30m in back overtime.
   [Good, that should put a little life in the state's economy!]
   This case involves 22 executive and administration employees in the Dept. of Public Safety, but the state is facing challenges from hundreds more people who worked in other agencies. David H. Goldman, the attorney for the 22 workers, said the state has paid them no overtime since they filed suit in 1994. The state's claim that investigations have been interrupted is a gross misstatement, he told the court in paperwork. "The state's fiscal problems are due to tax cuts and overspending, not this claim," he wrote.
   The Fair Labor Standards Act generally requires employers to pay overtime - time and a half - when workers exceed 40 hours a week.  There are some exceptions, and governments may pay for overtime in compensatory time off rather than cash.
   Ohio Attorney General Betty D. Montgomery said in court filings that the law "has intruded on the very basic authority of the states and their political subdivisions to hire and manage their own work forces."...
   [No more than it's "intruded" on the very basic authority of business corporations, partnerships and proprietorships to hire and manage their own work forces - when they start doing so in a way that would destroy themselves and the whole state economy. Perhaps Iowa should either try bringing back slavery or - quit wasting money fighting the law of the land. How much have these states wasted with this frivolous suit?]
   The Iowa Supreme Court had sided with the employees last fall. The case [was] Iowa v. Antony, 01-790.
   [What a cheap disgrace. All these states wasting taxpayer money trying to roll back what little protection is in place against day-to-day poisoning of state and federal economies by upward creeping workweeks and a slide into poverty and slavery. Truly the educational system of this country has failed to teach any long-term economic history. And the wealthy are straining to repeat some of the worst episodes. You know, it wouldn't be so bad dancing around praising "liberty" while being ruled by a tiny super-rich elite if they had any brains, but they're sooo self-absorbed and stupid. Guess this is the mechanism by which "the first becomes last."]

2. [Well these 9 US states aren't the only dummies. Check out this late-arrived story from UK -]
   (2/14)   UK firms could not function with 48-hr week - survey, Reuters 12:37 02-13-02 via AOLNews.
   [Notice that these idiots are talking about the 48-hour level, proving that short-sighted people have NO IDEA when enough is enough or how to draw a line. Some people said the same kind of thing when we were back at the 70-hour workweek level. Look at the morons in charge of US medical training and the 120-hour workweek they want once a month (see 2/17/2002 #2). These people just don't get it. They'd whine the same way if we had a 167-hour workweek, nay, all 24x7= 168 hours! "Change the clock! Change the clock!"]
   Nearly half of Britain's bosses say their companies would not be able to function if both staff and board members worked a maximum 48-hour week in line with European Union [EU] law, a survey released on Thursday showed.... Richard Post, director of Reed Accountancy Personnel, said: "Quite clearly many businesses will not find it possible to stick to a 48-hour per week limit and effectively will be breaking the law in order to operate..\..
   [Bad management. Unfocused management. Slack, inefficient, unbounded management. Self-important management - "we're sooo busy." All this whining occurred all along the path of workweek reduction from 84 hours on down through every resistance point - 80, 77, 72, 66, 60, 56, 54, 50, 48, etc. And with all these hours, do you suppose British productivity is terrific? Well, it isn't. See "Britons work longer, produce less, than others," below on 2/05 #1.]
   "This survey shows that reducing long hours will be a much harder task than anyone could have imagined," said Gavin Hinks, news editor of Accountancy Age which published the survey with Reed Accountancy Personnel.
   The Trade Unions Congress (TUC) said earlier this month that nearly 4m employees or 16% of the UK workforce now work more than 48 hours per week, in contravention of the European Union working time directive [anyone got a copy? we'll put it on our legislation page and credit you!] which became UK law in 1998. But the TUC said that following a review in 2003, the EU is certain to end the UK's working hours directive "opt out," under which companies may legally seek employees' consent to work more than the 48-hour limit....
   Another survey published by Industrial Relations Services (IRS) on Thursday showed that 4 in 5 firms questioned about overtime practices had tried to cut back on paid overtime in the past year to cut costs. But employees worked unpaid overtime in 81% of the organizations surveyed with 1 in 4 firms saying the amount of unpaid overtime had increased over the last year, IRS said.

• Seche Environnement: 2001 sales up 30%, Business Wire BW0087, Feb 18 2002, 13:53 Eastern via AOLNews.
  CHANGE, France...-
  [There's a place in France called Change?! Checking... (And btw, "seche environnement" means "dry environment.")]
  - Consolidated sales for the year ending Dec. 31 2001 came to Eur 107.5m, up 30.2% with respect to 2000 (Eur 82.5m).... IIW-HW [Inert Industrial Waste-Household Waste] suffered a temporary slowdown at the end of December owing to a reduction in our customers' activity levels as a result of the implementation of the 35-hour working week. Volumes have regained their previous buoyant levels since January 7th 2002....
  [Small companies of less than 20 employees - and the government - in France had to implement a 35-hr workweek on Jan. 1. (Large companies had done it on Feb. 15, 2000.) Hey, if the implementation temporarily cut industrial and household waste, we may have found some kind of secret bonus to the workweek reduction strategy. We knew it was good for the environment. (See Anders Hayden's "Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet.")]
  ...Seche Environnement [translation: "dry environment"] has developed an expertise in the treatment, processing and storage of waste, and has improved its range of services with the acquisition of the Alcor Group. It now offers integrated services aimed at improving the environment.... The Group also offers waste transport services....

• [Phil "Mr. Timesizing" Hyde occupied the last third of this nearly 2-page article, but we'll give you a quick taste of the beginning before cutting to the chase -]
  Working overtime - Increasingly, Americans are spending more time on the job - Long hours nothing new in hospital industry, by Joe Coombs, Gainesville [Fla.] Sun 2/17/2002, p.8G.
  David Speicher, a registered nurse for the emergency department in Shands Hospital at the University of Florida, worked 900 hours of voluntary overtime last year. [lead photo caption]
  David Speicher has a grand total of four days off this month. He'll typically work anywhere from an 8- to 16-hour day, and he's been doing this for the past seven years as an emergency department nurse with Shands at the University of Florida.... "Hey, I need the money," said Speicher...of Gainesville FL..\.. He has bills to pay, and he just started a tree farm in High Springs....
  Speicher's story isn't uncommon in the hospital industry, and is becoming prevalent in other sectors of the U.S. labor force. The standard 40-hour work week has become as dated as the 3-martini lunch....
  [But if the workweek should be getting shorter, not longer, what level should it be?]
  In Philip Hyde's eyes, no time frame for a work week is perfect forever, due to the constant influx of technology. But Hyde subscribes to a theory that [Joe quotes us as saying "job sharing" but we'll replace that with what we actually said -] "work sharing," or reducing the amount of hours per worker by hiring more employees, would be [the] most beneficial to the nation's economy.
  Hyde believes he's the founder of the first online political party, timesizing.com...
  [Boy, if they can get it wrong, they will. It's the first dot-com political party. Lots of parties have been online for years.]
  ...which is based in Somerville, Mass. The party's views are displayed daily on its Web site, which contains snippets of information and newspaper headlines regarding workplace economics.
  [We like the "snippets" but it's worktime economics.]
  Timesizing.com's "hope du jour," for instance, highlights companies that use shortened work weeks to avoid layoffs, and the "doom du jour," of course, provides reports of job cuts. The political party was founded in 1996, following Hyde's failed run as a Republican candidate for U.S. Congress against former U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat.
  [No, it was founded in Dec. 1999 in preparation for a non-Republican Y2K run against U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat. It would have been a third progressive Republican run (96,98,00) but the GOP never helped us get the 2,000 signatures in 3 months for Rep. and you can't get 10,000 signatures in 3 months for Senate without help. Running independent allows 3 additional months and also allows defining your own party-name/message to be put right on the ballot. In a millennial year against the biggest family name across the last half-century of American politics, who could resist that opportunity?]
  "Our motto is 'timesizing, not downsizing,'" Hyde said. "My angle is, we're committing suicide economically by cutting all these jobs. With immigrants coming in and building up our population,
  [not to mention traditional housewifes still entering the labor force and building up the labor supply and untraditional technology still entering factories and offices and cutting down the labor demand...]
  you have more and more people competing for less and less work when it's time to rebound from a recession."
  [That's a good representation of our position. Thanks, Joe.]
  Hyde said France has been one of the most progressive countries in promoting "[work] sharing." That country's government has tried a number of approaches to combat unemployment - including one scenario that involved tax breaks for companies that cut 1% of workers' hours in order to increase their staff by 10%.
  [i.e., the Robien Law, 1996-97.]
  "We should learn to fluctuate the work week against unemployment," Hyde said. "[Work] sharing would eventually create a shortage of labor, which in turn would raise wages for workers as the market becomes more competitive...."
  [That last clause doesn't make sense. It should say, "as market forces respond to the new situation - a general shortage of labor instead of a general shortage of jobs." Or we could save both ends of the clause with this version, "as the market forces employers to compete for scarce employees, instead of forcing employees to compete for scarce employers." Now back to the rest of the article -]
  ...Longer hours are the result of several factors.
  • Speicher's field in particular is suffering a major shortage of available bodies....
    [which gives him more leverage which he should be using to raise his hourly pay instead of flaccidly turning himself into a round-the-clock robot that eases the shortage without correcting it.]
  • ...The breadth of layoffs that occurred in 2001 - estimated at more than 1.6m...- has also forced workers in other professions [besides nursing] to pick up the slack when jobs are lost....
    [So above, the argument is skill shortage caused by physicians' unwillingness to attract enough people into this assistant profession, and here the argument is skill shortage caused by management's macho cost-cutting posturing. Yet anywhere there is "shortage" on the employee side, employees have the edge in leverage. Clearly they're not using it, just rolling over and wimping out. The dumbing of America. The office one-upmanship in who's the biggest victim has moved to who's the biggest workoholic/mgmt patsy. In any layoff, if all the rest of the employees immediately handed in their resignations (or just went on strike), this short-sighted nonsense would soon stop.]
    
  "It's not just the physical toll that long hours can take on a person,"..\..said Lonnie Golden, an economics professor at Penn State University-Delaware County in Pa.
  [No, it's a heightened proneness to error and accident - but she's going to give the weak arguments - the ones from the employees', not employers', side.]
  "When people have no control over their schedule, that produces stress. When that accrues over time, it leads to diminished sleep and difficulty in balancing work and family...."
  [And you know what us autistic American executives trained in sociopathic sadistic/macho-drill-sergeant American business schools are going to say to that, "Aaah pooor babies. Are you getting a check? ARE YOU GETTING A CHECK?!! Then SHADDAP!" And as long as American employees are willing to take this crap, we American executives will be willing to serve it up on big thick platters that can also be used for smashing them down on wages, benefits and anything else we take into our insulated isolated self-absorbed little heads.]
  Other nations. Compared to other industrialized nations, U.S. workers are still way behind in average weekly hours, according to a 2001 survey taken by NY-based Roper ASW, a market research firm.
  [This is the survey we display on our Looong Workweeks page.]
  The leader [for the booby prize - ed.] is Taiwan, with an average work week of 53.4 hours, followed by Hong Kong with an average of 52.2 hours.
  [Ah, the sweatshops of the Orient - long hours and low pay. Life is cheap - human life, that is, not necessarily the cost of living.]
  In Japan, where there's an actual word - "karoshi" - [meaning] "death from overwork," workers average ["only"] 46.5 hours a week. The average work week in the U.S...is 42.4 hours, slightly ahead of Canada (42.2 hours), Italy (40.5 hours) and France (40.3)....
  [That's because the absolute cutoff under the 39-hour workweek in France, above which not even overtime was supposed to go, was 42 hrs/wk - and it's dying hard under the 35-hour week.]
  Some numbers from Golden's study for the Economic Policy Institute [clash with] the findings of NY-based Roper ASW. Golden's study found, through surveys, that average weekly hours in the U.S. have risen from 43.6 in 1977 to 47.1 in 1997..\..
  [Meaning that Roper's 42.4 hours for 2001 was based on surveying a lot of people idled by the already started recession and 9/11 and/or a lot of people underestimating their actual hours.]
  At any rate, we're getting more out of workers today, whether they're increasing or decreasing their hours.
  [Guess so, with wave after wave of output-multiplying technology, such as mechanization, automation and robotization. Without making humans work less while we're producing more with technology, we soon produce more than we can absorb, because we're a low-paid surplus commodity, and more and more of us are wasted to marginal employment, unemployment, welfare, disability, homelessness and prison. Why? Because the urgently demanded human work just isn't there any more after decades of technological leaps, whose whole purpose is to take over the work from humans.]
  A U.S. Labor Dept. report released earlier this month showed that productivity - of output of products per hours worked - grew at a rate of 3.5% during the final three months of 2001.
  [And constantly admitting they find productivity difficult to count, they're notorious for undercounting it.]
  That may be a credit to technological advancements that have helped to increase production,
  [yeees]
  but given the high amount of job cuts last year, that could also be a reflection of squeezing more work out of less people.
  [And undercounting hours, for which the surveys of productivity are also notorious. Then the article has a big discursus on emails and how much time they eat up. Then -]
  Four-day work week. ...Jeff Smith...is a dentist in Melrose [Fla?] and...he rarely gets trapped in the middle of a 10- or 12-hour day [even though] in dentistry, Smith said, it's easy to go over 40 hours a week if you work five days. So Smith and many others in the profession opt for four-day work weeks.
  "In my case, I have a pair of young children, so I wanted to spend more time with them," said Smith, a past president of the Alachua County Dentists Assoc. "Life is going so quickly, so I disciplined myself to have the extra day off" [which lets him] spend more time with his family, as well as participate in other pursuits, like karate and outdoor activities....
  But not everyone has that option. Many industries that boomed in the 1990s, particularly telecommunications, imposed mandatory overtime policies on workers just to keep up with customers' demands, said Golden of Penn State University....
  [We thought mandatory overtime is something that the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was supposed to have rendered illegal in 1938. However, Joe Coombs says -]
  The U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which regulates overtime, does not place a cap on overtime hours, and doesn't prohibit firing or other penalties for refusing overtime work.
  [No wonder Ben Hunnicutt says the FLSA is the Black 30-hour Workweek Bill "with all the work-sharing teeth pulled." See "Work Without End" (1988), p. 249.]
  The act's only requirement is that workers are paid an overtime premium of at least one-half of regular rate of pay for each hour worked over 40 during a work week..\..
  [But the more companies use overtime during booms, the more they ensure the boom will be temporary, because it concentrates employment and wages and spending power, and concentrated spending power is less active spending power. "The more concentration, the less circulation," by the much under-emphasized economic principle of the "marginal efficiency of capital."]
  "The recession forced a lot of those companies to cut back the hours," Golden said, "but up until a year ago, you had customer service reps and line technicians working for six or seven days a week at the telecommunications companies. Some manufacturers were working long hours too."...
  [The most dysfunctional contradiction is the people in high tech working long hours on more worksaving technology - and there's no automatic mechanism in present-day short-term capitalism to translate those worksavings smoothly into more free time instead of more unemployment and social problems.]
  "Most people are unaware that employers have a right to sanction, or even fire employees if they refuse overtime [OT]," Golden said. "A lot of the efforts now are trying to provide some sort of legal right to refuse OT"..\.. There are a number of current efforts on state levels to keep overtime hours under control, according to Golden's study.
  • In Connecticut, a proposed bill would prohibit mandatory overtime for hourly health care workers, and
  • in West Virginia, a proposed bill would prohibit all employers from forcing overtime on hourly wage workers, and also contains a provision for employees to decline overtime work..\..
  The federal government only recently considered making some changes, Golden said. The U.S. Senate has drafted a pair of bills concerning limits on overtime hours for the nursing industry, and they are awaiting the House's review....
  ["Put up in a place where it's easy to see,
  The cryptic admonishment 'T.T.T.'
  When you think how distressingly slowly you climb,
  It is well to remember that 'Things Take Time.'" (Piet Hein, "Grooks")]

2/16/2002  primitive Timesizing in the news - nothing found in today's news so we brought you a story that was identified late, "Anger over $112K court job - Workers, facing broad layoffs, question timing" - it has been moved back into its proper date order on 2/15/2002.

2/15/2002  primitive Timesizing in the news -

• [Boston trial court sets up ex-post-facto timesizing option to avoid deeper downsizing]
  Anger over $112K court job - Workers, facing broad layoffs, question timing, by Michelle Kurtz, Boston Globe, B5.
  Court employees [in Boston, Mass.] were fuming yesterday when they learned that the administrative office of the trial court had posted a $112,000-a-year executive position, just as court officials are poised to lay off as many as 250 workers and have asked all employees to work 8 days without pay.
  ...Chief Administrative Justice Barbara Dortch-Okara...within the last few weeks...has asked the trial court's 7,900 employees to work without pay for 8 days with the understanding they would later be reimbursed or given extra vacation time.
  [This is our first known case of ex post facto timesizing - in the case of the employees who take the extra vacation time instead of the $reimbursement, the trial court will have, in retrospect, used an 8-day timesizing to avoid further downsizing, meaning they've cut worktime to avoid cutting workforce more deeply.]
  But even with the vast majority of employees agreeing to do so, the courts still are $2.5m short. On Wednesday, Dortch-Okara said the system was [still] planning to lay off between 200 and 250 of the least senior employees by March....

• [1 TIMEsizing, 1000 new jobs]
  Michelin announces job creation, AP-NY-02-13-02 0942EST via AOLNews.
  PARIS - French tire manufacturer Micheline announced Wednesday that it plans to create at least 1,000 new jobs this year.... The new hires will include 200 managers, 300 technicians and supervisors and 500 workers, according to Serge Lafon, the company's HR director.
  [See today's entry (2/14/2002) on our UPsizing pages.]
  The new hires are on top of an additional 1,000 recruits Michelin is planning to hire as a result of the implementation of the new 35-hour workweek in France, Lafon said..\..
  [This is the first time we've seen actual quantified job creation (or 'job assembly') out of the 4-hr chunks cut out of everybody's old 39-hr workweek to get down to the new 35-hr workweek in France.]
  Michelin currently employs 3,100 people in France....

2/12/2002  primitive Timesizing in the news -

1. [shorter hours is a live political issue in France -]
   French leader begins re-election bid, by Christine Ollivier, AP-NY-02-11-02 1625EST.
   AVIGNON, France - President Jacques Chirac launched his re-election bid for the French presidency Monday, opening his campaign with sharp criticism of the Socialist government for squandering economic growth....
   [Spreading the vanishing work via shorter working hours so you have the most recession-proof consumer base in Europe is "squandering economic growth"? What planet does this guy live on?]
   His campaign themes, which were already announced by his party...
   [the UDF =Union for Democracy Française? no, another article says it's the Rally for the Republic party - "Jospin jumps into the race for President of France," by Donald McNeil, 2/21/2002 NYT, A7.]
   ...include cracking down on rising crime and lowering taxes. Other key issues include relaxing a Jospin law mandating a 35-hour workweek....

2. [a company that's cutting overtime]
   Eastman cancels plans for spin-off, AP-NY-02-11-02 1734EST via AOLNews.
   KINGSPORT, Tenn. - Eastman Chemical Co. is dropping plans to spin off its specialty chemicals and plastics business, the company said Monday.... Earlier this month, Eastman Chemical reported a $179m loss on $5.4B in sales for 2001, citing a weak economy and falling demand for its products. An internal memo from the company indicates it is currently looking for savings ranging from cutting overtime to reducing maintenance costs. With headquarters in Kingsport, *Eastman Chemical makes and markets chemicals, fibers and plastics worldwide with some 15,800 employees in more than 30 countries.

2/09/2002  primitive Timesizing in the news - please patronize our timesizing heroes, however basic a level they're starting from -

1. Sanyo work-sharing deal will cut wages by [up to] 20%, Kyodo via AP-NY-02-07-02 2246EST via AOLNews.
   OSAKA... - Sanyo Electric Co. has agreed with its labor union to cut basic salaries of employees taking part in a work-sharing program by up to 20%, a company official said Friday.... The program will slash working hours per worker by up to 38 hours a month through a cut of daily working hours or a reduction of monthly working days, the official said.
   [Assuming they're starting from a 40-hr wk, 40x52= 2080 hrs/yr, a 38-hr/mon cut is 38x12= 456 hrs/yr cut which is 456/2080= 22% hours cut and just up to a 20% paycut, so they're getting an 2% hourly wage raise on this.]
   ..\..Sanyo Electric plans to introduce the program in April, the official said. It will last from 6 months to up to 3 years.... [Now a murky sentence that we haven't quite parsed -]
   Subject to the program, of some 30,000 workers in the Sanyo group, are workers in the manufacturing sector whose section has carried out a 10% cut in jobs from a year earlier but has dim prospects for recovery of production in 6 months, the official said.
   [Clearly the official doesn't speak very good English, or Kyodo News doesn't translate too well, or AP doesn't have a very good grammar checker, or AOLNews doesn't do any proofreading.]
   There are some 10,000 workers in the manufacturing sector of the Sanyo group.
   [At any rate, here is one big Japanese company where work sharing is moving right along. And a 22% hours cut is equivalent to lower than a 35-hour workweek and so, better than France.]

2. Veeco reports 2001 fourth quarter and year-end results, Business Wire BW2042 Feb 08,2001 7:01 Eastern via AOLNews.
   WOODBURY, NY...- Veeco Instruments Inc. (NASDAQ: VECO) today announced...sales for the 4th quarter were $97.5m, a 14% decrease from the $113.9m reported for the 4th quarter of 2000....Edward Braun, Veeco's Chairman, President and CEO commented, "...Overall industry conditions in the data storage, semiconductor and telecommunications/wireless markets caused Veeco's bookings to be down 47% in 2001 to $319m.... Only Veeco's research business showed improved bookings in 2001. Therefore...we took significant cost reduction steps to align our operating structure with this lower business rate. Reduced headcount (approximately 20% total in 2001), shortened work weeks, selected plant shutdowns, and reduced management salaries will decrease our 2002 spending close to $320m for the year."...
   [Of course, they could have cut 20% of their workweek like Sanyo, but at least they did do some workweek shortening and thereby avoided deeper headcount cuts.]

• Rengo demands gov't compensation for work-sharing, Kyodo via AP-NY-02-07-02 0757EST.
  The Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo) said Thursday it will seek government compensation for cuts in wages should companies adopt a work-sharing system. Japan's largest labor organization adopted the policy at a meeting of its senior members on labor issues related to the work-sharing system, which the government and some employers are considering introducing as a way to maintain employment amid the current recession.
  [It's clear from the language here ("current recession" instead of "chronic recession") that Rengo still has no idea what Japan has gotten into. It still thinks this is cyclical, where magically the economy recovers. It is still not looking at the insignificant "recoveries" of the past decade and realizing - "forget them, this is one big indefinite slump" and more like a downward spiral with several resistance points. They will eventually realize that this is not cyclical or temporary but transitional - to a new kind of restructured economy based on what may be called "worktime economics." And the restructuring is in the deep structure, not just at the surface. The usual cosmetic economics will not work this time because the abuse of technology in terms of cutting employee-consumers instead of systemic worktime is cumulative and has gone too far for further bandaids (superficial work-arounds) or window dressing.]
  Rengo said it will accept introduction of the system, under which one or more workers share a job with reduced working hours, as a stopgap in the face of rapidly increasing joblessness in Japan. The agreement, however, is conditional on employers promising to maintain jobs and workers' hourly wages. Employers should also promise cuts in directors' remuneration and abolish the work-sharing system after companies' performances improve, it said.
  [Kids, they ain't gonna improve. The whole point of technology is to shoulder the human work, and if you turn that technological blessing into a curse by cutting jobs - and consumers! - instead of merely cutting working hours for everyone and keeping everyone employed and spending, then you've created a downward spiral and induced economic depression. Cutting hours slowly for EVERYONE at once is neutral in its effect on pay, because it maintains current conditions in the supply and demand for skills, which is the underlying determinant of pay. Cutting jobs quickly or slowly for a few, and a few more...has a diminishing effect on pay, because it creates more anxious job seekers who are willing to work for less - they have no alternative.]
  In the meantime, Rengo said, it will call on the government to pay compensation from its general account budget or a new subsidy system for those who see their wages fall due to shorter working hours. Such workers should be "supported by society as a whole," it said.
  [There's much justification for this practice as a transitional measure, especially if "society" (government) receives revenues from a combination of unemployment insurance premiums (see Temple University Press's 1988 book, "Reducing Workweeks to Prevent Layoffs - The economic and social impacts of unemployment-insurance-supported work sharing" by Fred Best) and a steeply graduated income tax as a temporary stopgap measure, because the whole reason for the fall in effective domestic demand and consumption is the astronomical concentration of spending power at unspendable levels in the top income brackets. "Society as a whole" may say, "Hey, why should WE pay? What are WE getting for it?" and the answer is, you're getting what you've been crying out for all the last ten years, namely CONSUMPTION. Clearly you can't go on relying on exports to sell you output because all the rest of the world has made the same stupid mistake in its response to technology as you, and has downsized its workforce - and markets - instead of just its worktime. So you've got to balance your own outputs and inputs, your own production and consumption. You can do it the way you have been doing it over the last decade - by cutting output and increasing dependency and parasitism among your citizens - or you can switch to a more utilitarian and efficient allocation of spending power which keeps more of it active in the lower income brackets and less of it deactivated in the higher income brackets. To do that the easy way - using market forces - you need to engineer a general shortage of skills ("labor") and to do that you need to ration the availability of labor to the job market by clearly limiting worktime per person per time unit, preferably workweek per person, and implementing a system that smoothly and automatically converts overtime into training and hiring. Then you need to implement a system that makes unemployment - defined to include the unemployed, welfare-dependent, disabled, homeless, incarcerated and force-retired - smoothly and automatically determine the workweek by inverse variation - if unemployment is too high or rising, the workweek automatically goes down - very gradually (the rate of change can be determined by referendum). If unemployment is falling, the workweek can automatically go back up - very gradually. If the workweek goes down too far for efficient management, your options are, alternate weeks or shift the pressure from the workweek to the "population variables," meaning imports, immigrants and births. Imports are proxy immigrants, immigrants have an immediate depressing effect on pay in an economy where robotization-without-workweek-reduction is already depressing pay, and births function as delayed immigrants. If neither workweek alternation nor population variable control are palatable - or when their usefulness has been exhausted - you shift the pressure to the next dimension - from personal worktime to directly to personal income, and apply essentially the same limitation, overage conversion, and fluctuation policies to that dimension. There is an endless series of dimensions to resort to, and in each case, the quality of human life improves by a quantum leap. More in our campaign piece, Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]
  Rengo plans to map our concrete proposals for government compensation, it added.

1. Nikkeiren welcomes unions' move to give up wage hike demand, Kyodo News via AP-NY-02-06-02 0328EST via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- Hiroshi Okuda, chairman of the Japan Federation of Employers Assocs. (Nikkeiren), said Wednesday he welcomes a series of decisions by labor unions not to seek a uniform hike in base-wage talks this spring.... Okuda said wage talks used to focus too much on pay hikes.
   [True, so true. Japanese labor, like labor worldwide, needs to realize that of its two historic goals, higher pay and shorter hours, higher pay alone leads to neither, while shorter hours alone lead to both.]
   But this year's talks will likely address a wider range of labor-management issues, such corporate systems [e.g., worksharing systems?] and union members' life styles, he said.
   Regarding proposed work-sharing programs, Okuda said he has presented four types of them to labor unions...
   [Here's hoping at least one of the four includes both overtime-to-training conversion and homeostatic workweek-vs.-unemployment adjustment.]
   ...and that he wants the unions to consider adopting them on an individual basis.
   [Okuda still doesn't get it, still wants futzing and floundering, even though -]
   He also said the recent plunge in Japanese stock prices indicates the market seems to be falling into a vicious cycle.
   [The phrase is "vicious circle," "vicious circle" - got that? "Cycle" implies it comes back up automatically and Japan in the 90s and 00s, as well as America in the 1930s, disproved that.]
   "As corporate earnings deteriorate, the stock market is getting on a bad trend," Okuda said.
   [That's right, because even though Japan doesn't have the same degree of concentrated employment and income as America, it's still too much for its own unique context because evidently the Japanese levels of concentration are still vacuuming the spending power out of the markets to sustain their own investments.]

2. [here's a company that cuts unplanned overtime and a tool that helps it -]
   United Technologies' Carrier Corporation goes live with i2 Factory Planner, Business Wire BW0231 Feb 06 2002 11:08 Eastern via AOLNews.
   DALLAS...- *i2 Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:ITWO), the leading provider of dynamic value chain solutions, today announced that Carlyle Corp., a business unit of United Technologies Corp. has gone live with i2's Factory Planner solution.... Carlyle decided to implement the i2 Factory Planner solution to meet the challenges posed by the production and related procurement for compressors that are difficult to plan and schedule due to the large numbers of SKUs, multiple processes, variability of set-ups and losses from downtimes.... "Factory Planner helps us schedule one of the most complex lines in our factory. Improvement in this area allows all downstream operations to be better synchronized, improving on-time deliveries to customers while reducing unplanned overtime and reducing inventory," said Richard Kobor, Carlyle plant manager. "The ability to identify critical bottlenecks and maximize production plans helps us ensure the best customer service possible."
   [Here's hoping they reduce all overtime, not just unplanned, and turn to using critical bottlenecks as targeters of training.]

• [another union begins to get back "on issue" = work time]
  SEIU Local 79 caregivers file charges of harassment and illegal intimidation against three nursing homes involved in 24-hour strikes, PRNewswire 02/05/2002 08:48 EST via AOLNews.
  DETROIT...- The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 79 filed unfair labor practice ULP) charges with the National Labor Relations Board against all 3 nursing homes involved in strikes 2 weeks ago.... Workers, including certified nurse aides who do 90% of the hands-on care in the homes, dietary workers, maintenance workers and housekeepers, are working without a contract and are being asked to accept huge cutbacks, including elimination of pensions, reduction of sick and personal time off and paid holidays, reduction of insurance benefits, no scheduled weekends off, and no overtime pay for 10, 12 and even 16-hour shifts, which occur freqently..\..
  Over 400 nursing home workers held 1-day strikes on January 23, at
  • Oak Pointe Villa and
  • Fairlane Nursing Center in Detroit, and
  • Lasher Hills Care Center in Southfield....
  Workers say the nursing homes are not suffering financially and don't claim poverty at the negotiating table. They believe if..\..owner Jim Branscum...gets what he wants, many [employees] will be forced to look for other jobs with better wages and benefits, which will only exacerbate employee turnover and thereby, continuity of care..\..
  [Evidently they don't call him Branscum for nothing.]
  Despite attempts to hold a peaceful strike, workers were harassed with video cameras thrust in their faces, obscenities and lewd suggestions shouted at female caregivers, and other bully behaviors....
  SEIU Local 79 represents approximately 13,000 healthcare workers at hospitals and nursing homes throughout Michigan. \It\ has been in contract negotiations since last spring with...Branscum.... The nursing homes were already facing ULP charges...before the 1-day strike for refusing to hand over information required for bargaining, illegallyaltering working conditions and harassing union members....
  [Only when all employees realize the primacy of the worktime issue in gaining power at the bargaining table (by reducing worktime, they can create a shortage of it and make employers value it - and them - much more) will these kinds of situations, which occur daily all over the nation and the world (less so in France and Japan which are ahead of most economies in worktime limitation), begin to "magically" improve as market forces do their thing on the basis of supply and demand. "Discipline of workers" is not the issue in the global economy. It's the discipline of management that is holding up the main line of human progress. And employees need to get back on their power issue, worktime abuse, to discipline management to focus on time management and scheduling that is appropriate for rising technology levels, instead of abusing technology by transforming it into recession via downsizing rather than timesizing. The historic goals of labor were always higher pay and shorter hours. But shorter hours gives you both - by making labor a scarce commodity - while higher pay gives you neither, since you just lose jobs to cheaper labor. With an automatic system of adjusting hours to eliminate unemployment, you don't even need unions. Or the vast government investments in jobs programs including patronage. Timesizing is truly the first landing on the staircase to heaven.]

1. Britons work longer,  produce less,  than others, Reuters 04:08 02-04-02 via AOLNews.
   [Ditto Americans, Japanese and in fact any economy that still thinks productivity demands long hours.]
   British employees work more than three hours longer per week than workers in Europe, a new report by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) showed on Monday. Britons on average worked 43.6 hours a week, compared to the 40.3-hour average in Europe, the report said. But government figiures show they are less productive than workers abroad despite the longer hours.... One in six working Britons puts in longer than 48 hours, a limit set by a European working time directive that became British law in 1998, the report said..\..
   "Britain's long hours culture is a national disgrace," said TUC General Secretary John Monks in a statement.
   [Amen to that, ditto USA's-Canada's-Japan's-Australia's - but at least Aussies get 4-week vacations.]
   "It leads to stress, ill health and family strains."...
   Britain is the only EU state that allows employees to opt out of the bloc's [48/week] working hour limit if they want to. But this clause would be reviewed by the European Commission by 2003, the TUC report said, and was likely to be removed.
   Many European countries already have much tougher restrictions on working hours. Employees in Austria, Belgium and Sweden all have 39- or 40-hour limits, and France has a 35-hour week. But recent figures show that French workers are 24% more productive than Britons on an hourly basis and Germans 11%..\..
   [So let's see. The French work (43.6-35)/43.6= 19.7% fewer hours per week than the Brits but they're 24% more productive? And American media are so flaccid about reporting this that all the redneck talkshows hosts and listeners think France is a loser and Britain is a big success? This is what misinformation can do. Well, as Brits neglect their families, the prison-industrial complex in Britain will benefit in a few years, just as it has in the workoholic U.S. throughout the 1990s.]
   Managers and professionals topped the British long hours league, the TUC report said. About half said that they were working longer hours to deal with excessive workloads.
   [Sure, sure. The "I'm overworked so I must be important" syndrome. Or maybe it's fear of layoffs - nobody wants to be the first to leave the office at night.]
   By contrast, 70% of skilled and manual workers said they put in extra hours to earn overtime pay, the report said....
   Men were much more likely to work long hours, with 3.2m, or one in four, exceeding the 48-hour limit. But 750,000 woman employees, or 6%, were also on duty for longer than the European Union limit....

2. Mudslinging unleashed in French election row, by Mark John, Reuters 12:05 02-04-02 via AOLNews.
   PARIS...- Insults flew in France's election race on Monday as Pres. Jacques Chirac's RPR party accused the Socialist government of mudslinging over a former RPR official wanted in a kickback probe.... Supporters of Socialist PM Lionel Jospin, who barring an upset will lead the left's challenge against Chirac, said [the accusation] showed the right's "paranoia."...
   Jospin is under pressure from rising joblessness and a wave of public sector protests over pay and the implementation of a controversial 35-hour working week, but pollsters say Chirac has struggled to capitalise on the Prime Minister's woes.

3. [firm cuts labor costs with workweek reduction initiatives instead of layoffs]
   PSi Technologies reports fourth quarter and full year 2001 results, PRNewswire-FirstCall 02/04/2002 19:45 EST via AOLNews search.
   SANTA CLARA, Calif. and MANILA, Philippines...- PSi Technologies Inc., a leading independent provider of assembly and test services to the power semiconductor market, [yester]day announced...net income for the quarter amounted to a loss of $1.6m compared with a loss of $2.2m in the previous quarter and [a profit of] $1.6m in the same quarter last year.
   ...Chairman and CEO Arthur Young Jr. said... "We are pleased with the sequential increase in our revenues after several quarters of declining growth...."   Senior VP and CFO Thelma Oribello reported... "The improvement in our gross margin from -3.3% in the third quarter, to break-even in the fourth, resulted from the increase in unit volumes, and the reduction in direct labor costs resulting from our -
   • workweek reduction initiatives
   • early retirement program
   • headcount attrition
   • and our compulsory leave without pay scheme which effectively reduced our paychecks across the board....
   [Here we find workweek-adjustment timesizing and two more primitive forms (early retirement, temporary leave without pay) of timesizing to avoid layoffs.]

2/2/2002  primitive Timesizing in the news -

1. United Airlines to restore more than 120 flights to its worldwide schedule, PRNewswire-FirstCall 02/01/2002 18:10 EST via AOLNews.
   CHICAGO...- United Airlines (NYSE: UAL) announced today that it will add 127 flights to its April schedule in certain markets and will recall some flight attendants and furlough fewer pilots, thanks in part to slightly stronger customer demand.... With the exception of..\..new nonstop service from Tokyo to Taipei (effective April 18)...these flights represented part of United's 23% schedule reduction, which was in response to lower customer demand following 9/11. United Airlines offers about 1,650 flights a day [around] the globe....
   [So, United is using temporary furloughs, at least for flight attendants and pilots, to avoid indefinite or permanent layoffs = timesizing, not downsizing.]

2. [Airbus & other firms give comp time for overtime instead of $$]
   No prizes for runners-up - With pay budgets in trouble, companies need new ways to motivate key staff, The Economist, 57.
   ...The most obvious way to live with such pressure is to pare employment costs. Some firms have already frozen or even cut pay. Thus Airbus, whose employees were due for a 4% raise in January, has persuaded staff to accept a freeze, and replaced payments for overtime with extra time off....
   [Radical! Comp time instead of overtime pay. Nevertheless, it's a very basic and primitive kind of Timesizing, amounting to an abolition of overtime on an annualized basis, and as such, it's a step ahead of where they were and something that should be standard and augmented by overtime-targeted training and hiring. It is a nice irony that The Economist magazine out of London is publishing this, because they've often sneered at the idea of sharing a limited (or shrinking!) amount of employment in the past, using the multiple misnomer "lump of labor fallacy," yet they're almost certainly unaware that this story reflects the same "false" point of view.]

• Associated Press photo, by Francois Mori, AP-01-31-2002 via AOLNews.
  A demonstrator throws a barrier at riot police after thousands of hospital workers marched in Paris Thursday, Jan. 31, 2002, to press for new negotiations on France's shortened 35-hour week.
  [As we've learned from previous stories, hospital workers want government officials to cut their own hypocrisy and use the shorter workweek for what they said it was intended, namely creating more jobs and hiring more of the 9% unemployed, instead of just overloading and rushing the existing 91% workforce. This is the result of failing to implement a smooth-running overtime-to-training&hiring program before cutting the workweek. Here's more from a late-posted story -]
  France police disperse protesters, by Pamela Sampson, AP-NY-01-31-02 2233EST via AOLNews.
  PARIS - Security forces use tear gas Thursday to disperse egg-throwing hospital workers protesting for more jobs.... About 5,700 hospital workers took part in the march, one of several held around the country [Marseille, Bordeaux,...] to press for new negotiations on France's shortened 35-hour workweek. The demonstrators wanted 80,000 new jobs created in the framework of the shorter workweek.
  However, an accord between the government and unions allows for only 45,000 new jobs over three years.
  [Huh? Their mutual goal is to create more jobs and they've put a CAP on it? What idiocy is this?! Here's the goal -]
  The Socialist government's decision to reduce the 39-hour workweek to 35 hours is aimed at creating jobs by sharing the work load among more people....