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Timesizing News, March 1-10, 2002
[Commentary] ©2002 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

3/10/2002  primitive Timesizing in the weekend news - weekend's are usually bad for timesizing news, so this weekend we brought you a story that arrived late where Chirac calls 35-hr wk 'authoritarian' but would flex, not scrap, "Chirac, on campaign trail, pledges to slash taxes," now put back in its proper date slot on 2/28/2002.

3/09/2002  primitive Timesizing in the news - moves against overtime by employers and employees -

1. [employer]
   AT Plastics reports fourth quarter and year-end results, Business Wire BW2194 Mar 08 2002 via AOLNews.
   BRAMPTON, Ontario, Canada -...Revenue...declined 7% from last year, reflecting economic slowdown and pricing softness.... Unprecedented natural gas cost increases in the winter of 2000/2001 resulted in a spike in the cost of ethylene, with negative year-over-year impact on earnings of approximately $14m. Partially offsetting the high cost of ethylene were the benefits of an aggressive expense and cost reduction program, including reduced delivery and logistics costs, improved manufacturing efficiencies, reduced administration costs, reduced overtime and other raw material cost savings....

2. [employees]
   Minnesota Nurses Association [MNA] bargaining unit representing State of Minnesota nurses rejects contract, PRNewswire 03/08/2002 18:35 EST via AOLNews.
   ST. PAUL, Minn...- RNs [registered nurses] represented by the MNA, who work for the State of Minnesota, counted ballots today to accept or reject the State...'s offer. The contract was rejected by 77% of the votes. The RNs in this bargaining unit cannot strike [just like the South Korean rail employees below - who struck anyway] and will proceed to arbitration.
   'With a nursing shortage resulting in far more generous offers to nurses from other employers, excessive overtime at this employer, and a 10% loss in nurses here, the State's contract offer to RNs was rejected," said Linda Lange, MNA labor relations specialist. The RNs were perplexed that the State...offer to [them] did not even match what it offered to LPNs, who under the direction of RNs and have less education. The MNA contract covers RNs who work for the Dept. of Human Services, the Health Dept., Veterans Affairs and the Dept. of Corrections....
   [Hey, if enough of you get fed up and walk - to the many better offers in the private sector, the State will get the message. As our Icelandic nurse friends, Gudrun Marteinsdottir and Ingrid ??dottir, always said, "Minne sota (translation: less soda), more whiskey!"]

1. GM announces one-week layoffs [i.e., leaves], AP-NY-03-07-02 1255EST via AOLNews.
   DETROIT - Two General Motors Corp. assembly plants will shut down for one week starting Monday, affecting 5,700 workers, the automaker said Thursday. The plants, which will shut down to adjust production to sales, are
   • the Orion Township (Mich.) Assembly Plant, which has 3,200 employees and
   • the Oshawa 2 Assembly Plant in Ontario, Canada,with 2,500 workers.
   All of GM's other assembly plants have scheduled overtime for all or part of next week, the company said.
   ["Adjust production to sales" means reduce production to a drop in sales, because if it meant change models or styles, they wouldn't be completely shutting these plants down for a week. This means that GM has a costly bit of management ineptitude going on here - too many employees at these two plants and too few employees at "all of GM's other assembly plants" because of the costly overtime. At least they're doing worktime reduction instead of workforce reduction at the two overstaffed plants. And thet, phrenz, is timesizing, albeit of a somewhat primitive form.]

2. If jobs are gone, what good are [temporary unemployment] benefits?, by Peter Kilborn, NYT, A18.
   SOUTH BOSTON, Virginia, March 1 - For 13 years, Amy Altman worked at the JPS Apparel Fabrics plant here, and wound up earning $9.50 an hour. With production grinding toward a halt early last year, she began working one week on and one off, and on the off weeks she collected a $224 unemployment check....
   [Aha, this is average-workweek reduction with pay supplemented by unemployment insurance, similar to what Fred Best is talking about in his 1988 book, "Reducing Workweeks to Prevent Layoffs - The economic and social impacts of unemployment insurance-supported work sharing." Unfortunately -]
   When the plant closed on Aug. 1, letting 346 workers go, the checks continued. But in October, they stopped [because] her eligibility, limited to six months, had expired....
   [This situation points out the limitations of Fred's approach. Sustainable worksharing can't depend on temporary unemployment insurance benefits. A sustainable program must be designed and we submit Timesizing.]

3. Jospin says Chirac must not abuse France again, by Emmanuel Jarry, Reuters 18:30 03-07-02 via AOLNews.
   [Great line!]
   LILLE, France...- French PM Lionel Jospin cranked up his bid to win cliffhanger presidential elections this spring with a blistering attack against Pres. Jacques Chirac on Thursday at his first major campaign rally.... "The presidential election in 2002 must be an election of truth. The French must not be abused a second time," he told cheering crowds. Jospin attacked Chirac's "impossible triangle" of lower taxes, increased government spending particularly on the military, and reduction of public deficit.
   For his first campaign trip outside Paris...Jospin chose the northern town of Lille, where the mayor is his ally, Martine Aubry, who launched a controversial 35-hour working week that has been one of his government's key projects....
   [Controversial mostly in anglophone-media minds, since even Chirac has said he won't roll the 35-hr workweek back up to 39 if he wins.]
   Chirac is dogged by sleaze allegations, squabbling among his "conserative" allies [our quotes - ed.] and confusion caused by a promise last week [2/28] to slash income tax by one third if he is re-elected....
   [Ah the desperate bribery of the right - which they could do responsibly only if they first got Timesizing up and running.]

4. Lead: Koizumi pledges to take necessary fiscal, monetary steps, by Yukiko Ochi, Kyodo News via AP-NY-03-06-02 2227EST via AOLNews.
   TOKYO, March 7 - Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi pledged Thursday to take the necessary fiscal and monetary steps to revive Japan's sagging economy, but added there are no "quick fixes."
   [Well, the way he's going, there are no "slow fixes" either. He's got the same problem as Hoover and FDR - he doesn't realize the centrality and efficiency of the work sharing (alias timesizing) that his Labor Minister has been discussing with business and labor.]
   ....Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Chikara Sakaguchi said [his] Ministry is considering measures including work-sharing, fostering entrepreneurs and steps against unemployment to suit the needs of local areas which have different circumstances..\..
   [Apparently not even Sakaguchi realizes the potential and all-points priority of work sharing. He still thinks it's one item on a list when it's the paper and ink of the list itself. At least he's got it up at the top of the list.]
   Japan's jobless rate eased slightly to 5.3% in January, falling for the first time since February last year, from a revised record-high of 5.5% in December..\.. Commenting on Japan's high jobless rate of over 5%...Sakaguchi said the Ministry is actively dealing with employment measures..\..
   [We'd feel better if his Ministry were actively dealing with [ie: solving] unemployment and not just shuffling through alternative remedies. Problem in translation? Back to Koizumi -]
   "Since taking office, I have steadily moved forward" with structural economic reforms, Koizumi told the House of Councillors Budget Committee session, adding, "it takes a certain amount of time to heal a wound."
   [It would be nice if he let the rest of the world, including his own citizens, in on exactly what he thinks he has done, because he's lost a lot of popularity in Japan for not moving steadily forward on reforms as everyone expected, and it sure isn't clear to us what he's done. If he's been working behind the scenes, it's time to design a way to disclose what he's been accomplishing without causing a loss of face to anyone involved. It doesn't help inform his overseas fans that many Japanese speak very poor English. Take this next sentence for instance -]
   "There is no change in my policy that the economy will not recover without reform and to promote structural reforms," Koizumi said.
   [HUH??? Usually we can at least guess what it's supposed to mean, but this one is a stumper. It's gotta be a mistranslation or an elision. Otherwise, Koizumi is as bad as our own pathetic baBushKa in his command of language - which we doubt.]
   In reference to the current economic situation, Koizumi said, "A deflationary spiral occurs when (commodity prices) continue to drop, but we haven't gone as far as that."
   [Well you're pretty close. You've been verging on it for at least 4 years. Two years ago in "The Japan syndrome - That sinking feeling returns" (2/09/2000),
   Paul Krugman said, "Japan has the dubious distinction of being the first major nation since the 1930's to experience a 'liquidity trap,' in which even cutting the interest rate all the way to zero doesn't induce enough business investment to restore full employment. The result is an economy that has been depressed since the early 90's, and that in 1998 seemed to be on the verge of a catastrophic deflationary spiral."]

5. Interview - Korea expects 2002 unemployment to fall, by Kim Myong-hwan with Martin Nesirky & Lee Jin-won, Reuters 01:58 03-07-02 via AOLNews.
   SEOUL...- South Korea's Labour Minister said on Thursday unemployment would fall...from 3.7% in 2001 if the economy grew more than 4% and as the country hosts the World Cup soccer finals.
   [Phew, doesn't Reuters have any editors any more?]
   Labour Minister Bang Yong-seok told Reuters in an interview he also hoped to implement the controversial 5-day workweek during the first half of this year. Most South Korean workers [currently] work a half day on Saturdays....
   [That's a 44-hour workweek, assuming they have 8-hour workdays - and a planned cut to a 40-hour workweek. Welcome to 1940, South Korea! And more bad editing -]
   His comments come as a strike by power workers enter[s!] the 11th day and other unions threaten to join in sympathy. They are protesting [long hours! and] government privatisation plans, which they say will lead to job losses.... Bang said...labour and management were near an agreement on the shorter workweek, though differences over wages remain. "We are working really hard to implement the 5-day workweek as soon as possible," Bang said, adding he hoped for National Assembly approval on the matter in the first half of the year....
   Korea's major union groups, including the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, have demanded the government shorten the week to five days without cutting salaries.
   [Probably eminently possible with the huge leaps in productivity enabled by technology.]
   "People should know the shorter work week will create more jobs in the service sector, which caters to holiday makers," Bang said. "In that way, one merit is that it can help resolve some unemployment issues."...
   [Hey pal, shortening the workweek and sharing the vanishing work creates more jobs in every sector, though France has certainly proved work-sharing's effectiveness in the service sector and in the leisure industries. See for example "French buying more books, CDs, due to 35-hour week, paper says," on 4/29/2001.]
   ...The ranks of unemployed climbed to 819,000 in January from 762,000 a month earlier due to seasonal factors. There were fewer jobs in winter in the construction and agricultural sectors.
   [All this unemployment despite economic growth is a sure sign of an overhigh workweek relative to the economy's level of productivity-hiking (as distinct from purely quality-improving) technology. Here are the stats on growth -]
   South Korea's economy was believed to have grown 2.8-3.0% in 2001. \Even so,\ the labour market varies, with unemployment far higher for those in their 20s as companies opt for experienced workers to avert educational and training costs....
   [So it would be a good idea for South Korea to implement automatic overtime-to-training conversion before they jump down the workweek.]
   The Minister also said his Ministry would work at improving job security for non-regular workers, a sector that has widened sharply since the 1997 Asian financial crisis.... Non-regular workers - those hired part-time or on a daily basis - accounted for 51.3% of the workforce in 2001, up from 45.9% in 1997, Ministry data showed..\.. "We will reinforce our supervision on discrimination against temporary workers," Bang said. "Companies' preference for non-regular workers in understandable as we need labour market flexibility. But too high a [pro]portion of them is not desirable for labour stability."...
   [Implement flexible adjustment of the workweek against unemployment, ie: timesizing, and you get all that for free, without the ineffectual government micromanagement here called "reinforcing our supervision on discrimination." Even the verbosity here betrays the lameness of these other approaches.]

6. [South Korean labor minister wants intro shorter workweek ASAP -]
   Interview - "Korea Inc" needs flexible unions to survive, by Martin Nesirky with Kim Myong-hwan & Lee Jin-won, Reuters 02:31 03-07-02 via AOLNews.
   SEOUL...- South Korea's labour minister, a veteran union activist during years of military rule, said on Thursday that workers needed to adapt more to ensure their companies and country survive breakneck global competition. In an interview with Reuters, Bang Yong-seok also said...he wanted to introduce a shorter working week as soon as possible and exected the unemployment rate to fall to 3.4% or lower this year from 3.7% last year if the economy grows more than 4%....

1. 12 prefectures have job share plan to help high school grads, Kyodo News via AP-NY-03-06-02 0326EST via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- Twelve prefectures have adopted or are planning to adopt "job sharing" plans to cut overtime and other benefits [overtime is suddenly a "benefit"?!] of existing prefectural employees in order to allow them to hire high school graduates, who have been hit particularly hard by the high unemployment rate, as well as other workers,...a Kyodo News survey released Wednesday [revealed].
   [The English of this reporter is not particularly good. S/he probably means "work sharing" in the fluid sense, not "job sharing" in the sense of splitting up a 40-hr/wk job.]
   The...Labor Ministry, the Japan Federation of Employers' Assocs. (Nikkeiren) and the Japan Trade Union Confederation (Rengo) [in short, government, business and labor] are examining the feasibility of the [work] sharing plans.
   [Yep, this was always referred to as "work sharing" at its inception back in January.]
   However, the...local governments [of these prefectures] have also apparently felt the need to begin taking such measures early [before the conclusion of the feasibility study] due to their sagging local economies, aggravated by the prolonged recession and increasing moves by firms to shift production facilities abroad.
   The [Kyodo News] survey found [that] such plans have already [been] introduced in Shiga and Hyogo prefectures, and that 10 others including Kyoto, Aomori, Akita, Shizuoka, Tottori and Ehime are planning to do so soon.... Among the nation's 47 prefectures, Aomori, which will adopt a [work sharing] plan in April, has the fourth-lowest rate of prospective high school graduates with job contracts against the total number of graduates, which prefectural officials say is the prime reason for the plan's introduction. Miyagi, Yamanashi, Osaka and 12 other prefectures and three major cities replied in the survey that they are considering introducing similar plans..\.. In addition to prefectural governments, two of the nation's 12 major cities, Sapporo and Sendai, are [actually] planning to begin taking such measures in April....
   While details differ from one local government to another, most are cutting down on overtime wages for existing staff in order to hire new graduates for simple work, such as document sorting and filing.
   • Akita Prefecture, for instance, has decided to cut about 10% of overtime hours worked by its current employees.
   • Tottori Prefecture has decided to trim the base salary of staff to take in more primary teachers to meet calls for an increase in teachers to cut down the number of pupils per classroom.
   Yamagata, Chiba, Wakayama and 13 other prefectures, and Yokohama and seven other major cities said they are not considering any work sharing plans.
   [There, the reporter got it right that time!]
   Aichi Prefecture said they have already trimmed the number of staff. Niigata said they believe an effective method to deal with joblessness is to increase private-sector hiring...
   [Yeah sure, duh, but where's the demand?!]
   ...and the government needs to slim down.
   [There's no way the government can slim down without deepening the depression when the private sector is already downsizing. In response to technological efficiencies, they should all be timesizing - that is, cutting the workweek and keeping everyone employed - instead of cutting jobs (and consumers).]

2. UK union sets five more train strike days, Reuters 12:02 03-06-02 via AOLNews.
   LONDON...- Commuters in northern England face 5 further days of train strikes, the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers' Union (RMT) announced on Wednesday.... The union said the action was being taken in support of their members' pay claim.... RMT general secretary Bob Crow said in a statement, "...The company is causing more disruption and damage to the travelling public by its blanket ban on overtime and rest-day working, and now it has wound our members up even more by cancelling leave," Crow said.
   [Here it sounds like the company doesn't want overtime and the union does.]
   The RMT said that they will also be holding ballots on additional, non-strike action, including working to rule, an overtime ban and days where workers refuse to collect fares....
   [Here, however, it sounds like the company does want overtime and the union is going to hurt them by banning it. Aside from ephemeral strike actions like this, overtime is definitely a Bad Thing, preventing the spreading and activating of spending power.]

• SEC staff upset over pay, promotions, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, F2.
  The Securities and Exchange Commission's [SEC's] professional staff, faced with new demands since Enron Corp.'s collapse, is frustrated over issues of pay, promotions, and uncompensated overtime, the head of [the GAO,] Congress's investigative agency said. The SEC should address these concerns even as it fights for a larger budget, David M. Walker, comptroller general of the General Accounting Office [GAO], said in an interview. The 2-to-1 vote by the agency's nonmanagement lawyers, accountants, and support workers to be represented by the National Treasury Employees Union "was a big signal" of an unhappy staff, said Walker.
  [Se even the market system's core regulatory agency is sloppy in the comprehensive worktime area - and even its faithful staff can get mighty annoyed by the cavalier assumption that their employer has a blank check on their lives. Isn't this David Walker the same guy who's suing Cheney and Bush to break their ridiculous "privacy" on the formulation of our national public energy policy? Ayyyyup, story on our goodnews pages on 2/23/2002 #2. He's lookin' better and better. And his cause apparently scored another victory today - "Judge orders more papers on (VP's energy) task force released," by Don Van Natta, NYT, A18.]

1. S. Korea railway union leaders arrested, by Jae-suk Yoo, AP-NY-03-04-02 0451 via AOLNews.
   SEOUL...- Police arrested 11 state rail workers who allegedly organized an illegal strike last week, and the state-run power company said Monday that it planned to fire 47 workers accused of the same crime. Some 5,000 thermal power workers, joined by thousands of state rail workers, launched a joint strike Feb. 25. While the rail workers ended their strike 2 days later, the power workers' walkout entered its 2nd week Monday.
   Both groups demanded shorter working hours and protested a government privatization plan that they fear will lead to layoffs. The rail and gas workers won promises of shorter working hours and higher pay, but the government did not withdraw its privatization plan....
   [Shorter hours & higher pay. You can do without the second, because achieving the first gives you the second for free, via free market forces. But achieving the second without the first eventually zeroes the second.]
   The thermal power workers affiliated with the state utility, Korea Electric Power Corp., vowed to continue their strike. Over the weekend, some 6,000 state hydroelectric and nuclear power workers threatened to stage a sympathy strike.... South Korea gets 40% of its electricity from nuclear power plants.
   [Wonder where they stash their spent radioactive rods.]

2. Only 55% of private schools to adopt 5-day school week system, Kyodo News via AP-NY-03-04-02 0820EST via AOLNews.
   TOKYO -...The shortened 5-day school week...will begin in April at public schools nationwide. \However\ only 55% of private elementary, junior high and senior high schools will implement [it] according to a...survey by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology covering 10,400 private kindergartens, elementary...and...high schools...conducted in February.... Currently, Japan's public elementary and junior high schools are normally closed only on the 2nd and 4th Saturday of the month, in addition to Sundays and holidays.
   [So they're open on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of the month. Strangely complicated. So it averaged out to a 5½-day school week before. Bizarre that the most highly technologized nation on the planet has been conditioning their kids to a 5½-day workweek. No wonder they're in and out of recession. Their technology has made their workforce so redundant and underpaid that there's no way they have the centrifuged spending power to consume the level of output they need to keep everyone spinning their wheels for a 1930-era 44-hour workweek.]
   The Ministry on Monday sent letters to governors nationwide urging them to encourage such private schools in their prefectures to implement the system....
   [So "prefectures" are like U.S. states in that they have "governors."]
   An official at La Salle High School, an integrated 6-year junior-senior high school in Kagoshima City in Kagoshima Prefecture, said parents will not leave their children in the hands of private schools if the schools made Saturday a holiday.
   [That's where we discover that many Japanese have not yet discovered the weekend.]
   "...The 5-day school week system will cause a widening gap in academic standards between public and private schools," the official said.
   [Yeah, if productivity is proportional to hours and you don't care about creativity, which is deadened by hours. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Creativity is a matter of bringing together extreme opposites or non-computes (see Bill Gordon's Synectics). For that you need to get away from the grind and come back at it from a totally different angle. And a little creativity can match or outclass a lot of productivity.]
   An official of a cram school said, "Parents are anxious about the Education Ministry's new teaching guidelines which reduce the contents of academic course work, while private schools are compelled to give Saturday classes to ease such anxieties of parents and to raise their students' performance in university entrance exams."...
   [All this anxiety is derivative from the anxiety to get a good job, or even just a job, in today's conditions in the Japanese job market. And ironically, this is like a Chinese puzzle - the more you struggle the tighter you're caught. The more work time and school time they put in, the fewer jobs there will be relative to those who need them to earn a living.]

3. [US] workplace: Want a sabbatical? Just ask and negotiate, by Sherwood Ross, Reuters 12:09 03-04-02 via AOLNews.
   ...The New World Dictionary defines sabbatical leave as "a year or shorter period of absence for study, rest or travel, given at intervals, as to some college teachers and now people in other fields, at full or partial salary"..\..
   [A sabbatical may be viewed as mid worklife reduction, just as early retirement is backend and protracted 'education' is frontend worklife reduction. Worklife reduction and expansion is the least flexible form of timesizing. Most flexible uses workday or workweek.]
   
   • ...The number of unpaid sabbaticals plunged between 1996 and 2001, from 27% to 14% [from what to what?], according to Kristin Bowl, spokesperson of the Society for Human Resource [HR] Management, of Alexandria, Va.
   • The number of paid sabbaticals - which very few employees ever get to begin with - dropped from 6% to 5% [from what to what?].
   "An employer can offer a sabbatical as a way for you to refresh your batteries and come back...recharged and be a [better] functioning employee," Bowl said.
   [That's something the Japanese private school officials and parents in the story above need to consider.]
   For most organizations, "it has become a somewhat outdated type of benefit.
   [It was outdated when it was first thought of.]
   "They prefer to give flexibility on a day-to-day basis," she added...
   [Bingo.]
   ...citing examples such as telecommuting, job sharing, flextime or a compressed work week.
   [Or work sharing, which is more flexible than 40-hr/wk-based job sharing - or a reduced workweek, which is less ambiguous than a compressed workweek that can be no hours reduction at all but just all 40 hours crammed onto, for example, four 10-hour days.]
   In the current economic slowdown though, some cash-strapped outfits may think there's no better time than the present to offer a sabbatical. Recalling an employee from extended leave when sales improve beats the high cost of firing employees today and recruiting new ones tomorrow. Firms with seasonal cycles such as greeting card makers, often urge employees to take an extended leave without pay during slow times, according to Helen Axel, an HR expert in Lebanon, NJ....
   "We use sabbaticals as a training opportunity," said Gail Dundas, spokesperson of Intel, in Santa Clara, Calif. "When managers go on sabbatical their assistants step into their jobs."
   [That could be a real disincentive for the managers to take a sabbatical, and if&when they were brought back into their jobs after sabbatical, a real downer for their assistants. For training purposes, a day-to-day or week-to-week approach, using the incidence of overtime as a training trigger and targeter, is far more fllexible, incentive-conserving and useful.]
   What's more, when a recharged - and more loyal - employee returns to work from a sabbatical the business will (theoretically at least) get a burst of fresh energy and insight from the person.
   [With a 5- or 6-hour workday, employers stand to get a burst of fresh energy and insight, i.e., some creativity, every day instead of just after every multiple-month or -year sabbatical. And as for loyalty, employers stand to elicit more employee loyalty by completely abandoning layoffs as a strategy. The alternative with the flexibility to allow that is workweek adjustment, not workyear or worklife adjustment.]
   SIDEBAR
   According to Industry Week magazine [Feb. 7, 2000 - this is a little old, isn't it?], companies with a sabbatical policy include Charles Schwab, Du Pont, L.L. Bean, Xerox Corp., McDonald's, Nike and 3Com.
   • At Xerox, hundreds of employees have received a full year of paid leave to participate in volunteer activities they deem important.
   • The magazine quoted Ron Sheban of Ralston Purina, now Nestle PetCare Co., as saying that employees are eligible for a 5-week sabbatical after 5 years of service. The days are put in a "sabbatical bank" that is separate from their regular vacation time. "Ralston Purina recognizes that today's workplace is fairly intense and that employees are less likely to stay with the company and take a career focus if they don't have an opportunity to recharge once in a while. You can trek through Nepal, take a karate class, or do community work," Sheban, CP for HR programs and services, told the magazine. But since Ralston was purchased last December by Nestle, the direction of some employee benefits programs, including sabbaticals, has yet to be resolved, Sheban said [in a more recent interview?]..\..
   [Back to the main article -]
   When a company offers an employee a sabbatical, said John Izzo, president of Izzo Consulting of Vancouver, BC, it is [saying], "We understand there are things other than work in your life that are important to you."...
   [Yeah, and how often does that happen in a labor-surplus world. More likely they're saying "We're easing you out." We don't know where Izzo got the following notion, but we sure hope it's true -]
   "Younger employees now rate time off as a more important workplace benefit than promotions," Izzo said....
   [Maybe it's a Canada thing....]

1. 3/04  HP's fierce face-off - Despite a brutal boardroom battle, Carly Fiorina is closing in on her Compaq [prey], by Chris Taylor, Time Magazine, 46.
   ...The merger debate [is] rush[ing] toward a March 19 shareholder vote.... Last week Walter Hewlett, [cofounder] Bill Hewlett's son and the HP board member leading the fight against the Compaq merger, released a report on what the company should really be doing....spend a few billion growing HP's most profitable division, the one that makes printers and digital cameras.... Fiorina...slams Hewlett's alternative as a waste of opportunity....
   Of course, that sidesteps the question of whether HP and Compaq can successfully merge without leaving the floor slick with blood [via layoffs]. Most large-scale tech-firm mergers have been hideous disasters. Compaq's last acquisition, the Digital Equipment Corp. [DEC], was a textbook example of how not to do it. Good products died, top talent fled and resentment lingered for years after management cut 15,000 jobs. Now HP plans, upon the merger, to lay off 15,000; it also hopes for cost savings of $2.5B....
   Is this the HP way? Certainly Bill [Hewlett] and Dave [Packard] would have balked at laying off 15,000. In 1970 they chose cutting work hours 10% over firing 10% of the company....
   [We heard for years that HP was a good company to work for. Little did we suspect that a timesizing, not downsizing mentality was behind it. This 10% hourscut instead of 10% jobcut was just like the Robien Law in France in 1996-97.]

2. 3/3  Family members of striking workers..., caption of AP photo by Ahn Young-joon March 2 2002 via AOLNews.
   ...shout a slogan during a rally held in front of the headquarters of the state-run Korean Electric Power Corp. in Seoul, Saturday, March 2, 2001. About 5,000 workers at 5 power plants walked off their jobs Monday, demanding shorter work hours and protesting a government plan to privatize their companies. The headbands [worn by the strikers] read "Stop the government's privatization plan."

• Caribbean nations limp out of tourist slump, by Frances Kerry, Reuters 02-28-02 via AOLNews.
  MIAMI, March 1 - Nearly six months after 9/11, one effect is still rippling through the Caribbean: a drop in tourism that the region has struggled to reverse during its peak winter season.... In the Bahamas, which last year received 4.1m visitors, 85% of them from the U.S., government officials said they were happy with the season so far. "We're very pleased with the way it's rebounding," said Vernice Walkine, the country's deputy director-general of tourism.... Hotel occupancy figures for January were lower than the year-ago month but in February were expected to match last year's result, Walkine said, adding that the islands' hotels had kept layoffs to a minimum, although they had run reduced-workweeks during the crisis....

1. Japan's unemployment rate falls, by Yuri Kageyama, AP-NY-02-28-02 2046EST via AOLNews.
   ...to 5.3% in January from a record high of 5.5%, the government reported Friday, a bit of unexpected good news that was largely a reflection of how bad conditions were in December. The improvement in the jobless rate was the first in 11 months. The rate had been edging up steadily - repeatedly marking record highs - as jobs dwindled amid Japan's third recession in a decade. The government has been keeping such records since 1953. Masato Chino, director of the government's labor statistics office, warned against taking too much hoipe from the latest figures, saying they were attribut[able] to the sheer severity of the Dec. results. "The trend has not changed," Chino said. "The rate remains high."...
   [Hooboy does Japan ever need work sharing - if only it would get it right and implement an overtime-to-training&hiring conversion system first, and then timesizing instead of downsizing.]
   According to the latest revised figures from the government, Japan's unemployment rate was 5.4% in November and 5.3% in October.... The number of unemployed people totaled 3.44 million, up 270,000 from the same month a year ago..\.. With no immediate recovery in sight, companies are likely to be "forced" [our quotes - ed.] to cut more jobs.
   [The only thing that's "forcing" any of these downsizings is lack of imagination among CEOs or - ignorance of our Timesizing program.]
   The U.S. unemployment rate stood at 5.6% for January.
   [But Japan doesn't "Enron" its unemployed off the books into prison and homelessness like the U.S., so the comparable U.S. rate is much higher, more comparable to the more honest Euro rate -]
   Unemployment in the 12 euro-zone countries for December was higher at 8.5%....
   Japan's...slowdown has dragged on for more than a decade. It is destroying jobs in the old strongholds of the economy such as manufacturing and construction....
   [No it isn't. The job destruction is causing the slowdown, not vice versa. And the job destruction is purely and simply due to Japanese CEOs' failure to trim working hours and keep everyone employed as Japan's extremely high levels of work-saving technology take over formerly labor-intensive industries. Instead, they have been short-sighted and trimmed jobs, not working hours. They have laid off a few this year, then a few more next year, and a few more - till the result was that they damaged their consumer base and made everyone so insecure that no one wanted to spend any more money than they had to. Thus Japan is doing the world a favor by demonstrating with a minimum of rose-colored spin-doctoring the bleak future that's ahead for us all unless we get smart and replace downsizing with timesizing. Actually, the USA is further along in this demonstration, but American quality-of-life expectations are already so much lower than Japan's, viz. the number of people we're prepared to toss out of the workforce and into the streets and prisons, that we still think we're God's gift. Our Murdoch and Turner "2-guy" media also help greatly in this illusion.]
   Recently, even major electronics companies that used to champion the nation's system of lifetime employment have announced massive early retirement packages. Smaller companies are resorting to layoffs.
   [Japan is in the process of a protracted lesson, learning the hard way that the nation's system of lifetime employment was not optional or incidental to the nation's economic power and success - with all its problems, it was the basis and foundation of Japan's power and success, from which they would depart only at their extreme cost. And that cost they are incurring now. Their only hope is to move on to a modernized and flexible form of their old lifetime employment system, and their focus of work sharing is the correct general direction. But the elements of work sharing must be applied in the correct order, or confusion and problems result. Japan has so far given no evidence that it is aware either of all the elements or the correct order in which they must be implemented. But all it takes is a look at the five phases of Timesizing, as displayed in the right-hand column of the box menu in the middle of our homepage.]
   Yasuo Nishiguchi, president of Kyocera Corp., a major electronics company whose profits have been plunging, said his company was determined not to rely on early retirement programs [let alone layoffs?]. "Business here is about people," he said. "Cutting jobs isn't the best way...."
   [Early retirement is worklife reduction, so primitive form a form of timesizing that it harms the economy rather than helps it because retired workers on fixed pensions are not big spenders and do not give the consumer base much vitality. The problem with early retirements is, they're indefinite, like layoffs, and anything that's indefinite is a source of unpredictability, uncertainty and anxiety, and any kind of anxiety is bad for domestic consumer markets, except possibly in narrow areas like weapons. Protracted "education" is also a worklife reduction, and has much the same M.O. as early retirement. Long vacations, as in Europe, is workyear reduction, the second-most primitive form of timesizing. They help somewhat. The U.S. automakers often practice the third-most primitive form, workmonth reduction. Here's an example -]

2. GM orders one-week closing of plant, AP-NY-02-28-02 1453EST via AOLNews.
   DETROIT - General Motors Corp. has ordered a one-week shutdown at its Wilmington, Del., assembly plant, citing sluggish sales of the Saturn L-Series mid-sized sedans made there. The shutdown, which will run from next Monday through Friday, will affect 1,100 workers, GM said Thursday.
   [But GM's kludgy workmonth-based form of timesizing is no evidence that the company has the slightest clue about future corporations' standard timesizing operating procedure, or even about the intimate relation of its workforce to its consumer base - because they routinely waste the vital information locked in the incidence of their overtime, instead of routinely transforming it into training and jobs -]
   GM's other North American assembly plants will be up and running, all of which will be on overtime all or part of next week....

3. CDT announces second quarter FY2002 results, PRNewswire-FirstCall 02/28/2002 16:05 EST via AOLNews.
   PITTSBURGH...- Cable Design Technologies (NYSE: CDT), a leading worldwide provider of high-speed network connectivity products, [yester]day reported a net loss for its second quarter ended January 31, 2002 of $0.2m...before restructuring and other charges of $5.1m.... The estimated impact \of\ cost reduction initiatives developed in response to the worse-than-anticipated business conditions in December...is approximately $11m on an annualized basis, although certain of these initiatives, such as reduced workdays and salary cuts, are temporary pending improvement in business conditions.
   [Workday and workweek fluctuation is the most flexible basis for timesizing, but whereas CDT should be doing all its adaptation to changing market conditions on this basis, they are still also relapsing into layoffs -]
   Similarly, the layoff of direct and indirect factory workers helps to bring the labor cost structure in line with current sales volume....