Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

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Timesizing News, April 16-30, 2002
[Commentary] ©2002 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

4/30/2002  primitive Timesizing in the news - nothing in AOLNews today so we feature a previous story we discovered late -

• (4/26) Gov't to provide 19.7 bil. yen subsidies for [work]-sharing, Kyodo News 04/25/02 01:42 EDT via AOLNews.
  TOKYO...- The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry has decided to provide ¥19.7B in subsidies [roughly ($190m) over three years to companies introducing work-sharing, Ministry officials said Thursday. The subsidies are based on an agreement struck among...government, labor and management on March 29 to promote [work]-sharing in Japan as a way to deal with the country's deteriorating employment situation.
  [It isn't really necessary to subsidize the private sector in the transition from makework to sharework if it's done right, but it makes a lot more sense for the Japanese government to be throwing money at this approach than the totally wasted makework approach that they've been wasting trillions and trillions of yen on over the past decade. A fitting symbol of the wholework approach is the Kanzai Airport, a huge beyond-expensive artificial island off the east coast of Japan - that is slowly sinking...into the Japan Sea. We took off from there to fly back via Vancouver on Nov. 5 last. Fortunately it's still high enough above the waves to allow safe takeoffs - for a few more years.]
  A task force consisting of representatives from the Japanese Trade Union Confederation ('Rengo') and the Japan Federation of Employers Assocs. ['Nikkeiren'] as well as the government accepted the Ministry plan, the officials said. The decision will enable the government to start providing as early as June ¥300,000 per worker (roughly $3,000) to companies which have adopted work-sharing and hired people aged 45 to 60 who have lost jobs due to corporate restructuring, the officials said.
  The March 29 agreement defines [work]-sharing as reduction of work hours aimed at maintaining and creating employment.
  Among companies eager to ensure employment through [work]-sharing is Sanyo Electric Co., which plans to introduce the practice at plants in Gunma and Hyogo prefectures possibly in May. The company will try to cut the basic wage for factory workers by up to 20% by reducing their working hours [presumably by up to 20%], company officials said Thursday.
  [Again, wages should not be cut proportionately unless the company is in trouble. And it is always infinitely preferable to cut the unspendably high pay of top executives than the pay of ordinary employees who go right out and spend it, thus maintaining the vital circulation of the economy.]

• [here's an item that gives us some inkling of the problems we can expect in redesigning current overtime (OT) law to really stop overtime and convert it into training and jobs, instead of discouraging it with one hand (employers have to pay 50% more) and encouraging it with the other (employees often like the extra 50% pay) -]
  4/28 Job doc[tor]...- Concerned about getting OT rate, by Joan Cirillo, Boston Globe, G14.
  Q. If overtime (time worked over 40 hours a week) is paid to employees at a later date (quarterly), should it be paid at time and a half? I just found out my company is paying OT at a reate of straight time. This doesn't make sense to me. I work for a landscape architecture firm where employees are paid hourly. Our firm then bills these hours-worked to clients. The people who work at this firm are not consultants. We are employees of the firm and we get paid standard benefits such as vacation time and health insurance. Can you explain why OT is not paid at time and a half? If it should be, where can I find evidence to support this claim?
  A. ...I sought the advice of Victoria Cohen from Menard, Murphy & Walsh LLP. She says,
  "You are right that as a general rule, employers must pay their employees at time and a half for any hours worked over 40 hours per week. There are many exceptions to this rule, however, and it is possible that your landscaping job falls into one of those exceptions.
  "For example, according to Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 151 Section 1A(9), an employer that operates a seasonal business for fewer than 120 days per year can pay its employees at straight time for all hours worked. As landscaping is typically a seasonal business in this area [New England], your employer may qualify for this exception.
  [This approach is known as "annualization" of seasonality and also figures in the flexibility designed into the French 35-hour workweek, for example.]
  "It is troubling to hear that you are being paid quarterly for your work [but overtime work only, presumably to help them budget for off-season - ed.], rather than weekly or biweekly, as Mass. General Laws Chapter 149 Section 148 requires."
  [It's more troubling that this general topic, affecting a huge variety of employers in all 50 states and DC, is all a fractionated patchwork of state laws.]
  Any concerns regarding payment of wages can be directed to the [state] Attorney General's Fair Labor and Business Practices Division, 200 Portland St., Boston, MA 02114, 617-727-3456, or *www.ago.state.ma.us.
  [The Timesizing Program's design approach to overtime is to require that all overtime trigger its own resolution, on the principle of designing all problems to be self-solving like natural self-balancing systems. Timesizing accomplishes this in two phases, one directed at employers and the other directed at employees. The quick description of each is, a corporate overtime tax with an exemption for OT-targeted OJT or hiring in the first phase (Timesizing Phase Two) and an individual overwork tax with an exemption for OW-targeted OJT or hiring in the second phase (Timesizing Phase Three). Only when you have a watertight and effective OT design is it really effective to shorten the workweek, as France is finding out - and that's why Timesizing puts the workweek adjustment in a later phase (Phase Four). By the same token, only when you have fully motivated change can you accomplish it easily - and that's why Timesizing puts the full monitoring and counting of non-self-support in an earlier phase (Phase One) so people fully realize the extent of morale-damping parasitic dependence in their socio-economy (Phase One drops our current feel-good "unemployment" rate in favor of a comprehensive rate that adds in, for example, forced retirement, welfare, disability, homelessness, and prison. The figures in the new definition are set and adjusted by regular electronic public referendum and so is the current target rate. No more leaving this up to self-serving "experts" who are more interested in white-washing their own impotent economic advice than in just solving the problem.]

1. France's shame - The result of France's first-round presidential contest was shocking - but it might do some good, The Economist, 11.
   ...The centre failed
   Mr Jospin destroyed himself.... Yet his record as prime minister had, for the most part, been honourable and competent.... Apart from the questionable imposition of a 35-hour week...he had managed France's economy fairly well, despite shrinking from the bolder sorts of reforms (of pensions, the labour market and health care, for instance) that the country badly needs....
   [As if the 35-hour week was not a "bolder sort of reform that the country badly needed"! Nearly 13% unemployment while plenty of people were working overtime? Sounds like the most central and strategic sort of reform to us, but evidently too bold for the "inside-the-box" thinkers at The Economist.]

2. After the cataclysm - Jean-Marie Le Pen should get no further, but his success has shaken up France; So it should, The Economist, 25.
   ...Most of those electors who bothered to vote (the abstention rate was a record 28.4%) chose to ignore a 5-year record in government of which Mr Jospin, with some justification, has been proud:
   • the lowering of the numbers of jobless by 900,000, from more than 12% of the workforce [in fact, 12.6% in June/97] to 9% [last Feb-May it bottomed at 8.7% before succumbing to the Japan&US-led downturn (see 8/01/2001 #1)];
   • universal health coverage for the poorest; and
   • the introduction, popular with the workers if not with their bosses, of a 35-hour week....
   [Hey, at least they're admitting here that the employees liked it - which a Reuters reporter was trying to deny a few days ago (see "Analysis - Shorter work hours leave French voters cold" on 4/12/2002 #4). And at any rate, employers certainly liked the extra business and the recession-proofing that it brought them, since it employed more people by spread the existing work instead of dragging government into more tax-supported makework - and spreading the work also helped centrifuge the income of the nation out of the unspendable concentrations of spending power among the top income brackets down to the people who actually spend it - and the more centrifugation, the more economic dynamism. No wonder France has been the most recession-resistant economy in Europe next to subsidy-soaked Ireland.]

• Sad and leaderless, French socialists reel - Shock and regret well up after a disastrous election and missed chances, by Suzanne Daley, NYT, A6.
  [Could the French have thrown away their world leadership in workweek reduction?]
  PARIS...- The apologies, thousands of them, have been piling up in the *chat section of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's website since he was knocked out of France's presidential race in the first round last Sunday.
  
  • "Words mean nothing, but I am so ashamed," said one woman, confessing that she abandoned Mr. Jospin for the Trotskyite Arlette Leguiller. "I voted for Arlette in sympathy and solidarity because she was a woman. MISTAKE!!! HORROR!!!"
  • Another woman says that there are six voters in her family, not one of whom voted for Mr. Jospin, believing he was a shoo-in. "The thing is, we were pretty happy with what you did; we would have voted for you if we had ever thought you would disappear after the first round."
  The messages are testimony that Mr. Jospin had more support than his tally showed last Sunday, when the rightwing...Jean-Marie Le Pen startled France, and Europe, by nudging him out of the race. They equally demonstrated that his campaign had failed to mobilize these backers to turn out at the polls or to stick staunchly by him.... For now, shattered by his loss, Mr. Jospin has announced that he will retire from politics..\..
  At time when Europe seems to be drifting to the right, the Socialists now find themselves leaderless and searching for a future strategy....
  [Leaderless?]
  In the short term, some experts believe that the left will have a very hard time getting itself organized in time to make a good showing in the legislative elections.... To head their drive towards the legislative elections, the Socialists have picked..\..Francois Holland, the Socialist secretary general....a man known for his ability to make deals..\..
  Others believe that voters will be motivated by what they see as the basic unfairness of what happened to Mr. Jospin, who polls showed would have been neck and neck with Mr. Chirac had he made it to the runoff. [In the longer term,] who will emerge to lead the Socialist Party remains an open question. Mr. Jospin was always credited with having a strong entourage, and there are a half-dozen potential candidates. They include
  1. Martine Aubry, who was the architect of Mr. Jospin's plan to reduce the workweek to 35 hours [to cut unemployment];
  2. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Mr. Jospin's campaign manager and a former finance minister;
  3. Laurent Fabius, the current finance minister;
  4. and Mr. Holland.
  But each is considered to have a weakness....
  1. Ms. Aubry made a lot of enemies when she enforced her 35-hour workweek plan.
  2. And Mr. Strauss-Kahn may be hurt by his close association with Mr. Jospin's defeat..\..
  3. Mr. Fabius is linked with a scandal over tainted blood supply..\..
  4. Mr. Holland has little experience in government....
  [Well considering that Aubry dropped 1997's unemployment rate of 12.6% one percentage point for each of the four hours she reduced the workweek, even though her shorter workweek design was primitive in the extreme compared e.g. to Timesizing, maybe the French should decide whether they really want a lot of unemployment after all. We in America seem to, though we keep it "off the books," e.g., the 2,000,000 Americans for whom we've made it easier to make a dishonest living than an honest one by stowing them out of sight in our prison-industrial complex. Then there's at least an equal number of homeless Americans, and then there's the disabled, real and imagined, and those forced into early retirement, and then of course there's our "low" unemployment rate itself....]

• France gets a purely symbolic setback for its nationwide 35-hour workweek and pathetic America is still fighting mandatory overtime -]
  SEIU nurses, caregivers say mandatory overtime and short staffing threatens quality of patient care and safety - Healthcare employees of the largest healthcare union in Michigan rally on the steps of the Capit[o]l at noon, Thursday in Lansing, in support of limiting mandatory overtime to emergency situations , PRNewswire 04/24/2002 14:40 EDT via AOLNews.
  LANSING, Mich...- Approximately 100 nurses, nurse aides and other healthcare workers, all members of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 79 will rally...in suppoprt of legislation to increase the quality of patient care in Michigan. After the rally the healthcare workers will lobby their individual state reps to increase awareness of the problems created by short stafing and gain support for a legislative solution....
  SEIU Local 79 represents 17,000 members in Michigan and is the largest healthcare union in the state.
  [The Timesizing treatment of overtime (OT) is to convert it into OT-targeted training and hiring, first via corporations and then via individual employees.]

1. Street protests loom after French vote - pollster, by Tom Heneghan, Reuters 04/23/02 11:04 ET via AOLNews.
   PARIS - Street protests against Le Pen's [win] have already started to snowball, with nightly demonstrations in Paris and other cities across France since Sunday. \So\ France could face serious street protests after its May 5 presidential runoff from militant leftists frustrated by the skewed contest [that placed] far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen [beside 'near'-right leader Jacques Chirac in the final May round,] said Sofres pollster Philippe Mechet.... "There was no real economic debate in the campaign, nothing on pensions, on tax, on social issues and especially on the 35-hour work week , he said, referring to the main reform of Jospin's...government....
   [Well, it was Jospin's decision, apparently, to finesse 35-hour week feedback in the campaign and sort of 'back into' the future.]

2. Chronology - German IG Metall strikes since 1950, Reuters 04/23/02 09:35 ET via AOLNews.
   ...Union IG Metall [has] formally declared that wage negotiation for 3.6m engineering sector workers have failed.
   [What do they expect if they allow labor to become a surplus commodity by focusing on reducing worktime per person in only one of eleven strikes since 1950, and only 7 years ago at that -]
   ...1995 - Strikes in Bavaria in February to IG Metall's 6% wage claim, the first strike action in the west German engineering sector since 1984.... The deal struck was for two years, giving a wage increase of 4%, with working week cut to 35 hours. \But\ employers said cutting the working week to 35 hours would increase wage costs by 2.8%....

1. [Some serious ammo for American medical students to fight ludicrous megahours -]
   Hospitals get ‘wake-up call’ from a study on lighting, by Judy Foreman, Boston Globe, C1.
   [The Journal of Pediatrics published a study in Feb/2002 in which Asst. Prof. Debra Brandon of the Duke University School of Nursing in Durham NC took -]
   62 babies born at least 10 weeks prematurely and weighing an average of 2 pounds [and] randomly assigned them to 3 groups with different lighting conditions. She found that those exposed to cycled light earlier [mimicking the natural rhythm of day & night] grew faster - at least 23 grams more per week - than those who got cycled light near the end of their hospitalization.... Dr. Charles Czeisler, chief of the division of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston \said\ the Duke study is exciting...because many hospitals still act as though "circadian rhythms don’t represent a biological need,” whether in the way they treat patients or the way they treat doctors in training, who are often required to work 30 consecutive hours every few days.

2. Analysis - France's Fifth Republic reels from Sunday vote, by Tom Heneghan, Reuters 04/22/02 07:55 ET via AOLNews.
   PARIS...- Like a bloodied boxer, France's Fifth Republic is reeling from the stunning blow voters landed in the first round of the presidential election on Sunday and wondering if and when the knockout punch is coming.... Far-right leader Le Pen knocked Socialist Prime Minister...Jospin out of the running.... Chirac, a conservative bidding for a second term [as President], polled less than 20% of the vote, the lowest of any frontrunner in the history of the Fifth Republic...a "republican monarchy" based on a powerful presidency, a submissive legislature and a centralised state \created by\ Gen. Charles de Gaulle in 1958...during the Algerian crisis that paralysed the Fourth Republic's parliamentary system....
   The first blow came in 1986 when Socialist Pres. Francois Mitterand had to appoint Chirac as his prime minister [thus 'cohabitation' of opposing PM & Prez] because a conservative majority won the National Assembly election. This mismatch arose because the mandates [ie: terms?] of the legislature and presidency were out of step, with five years for the National Assembly and seven for the Presidency. Mitterand had to accept two 2-year cohabitations during his 14-year rule.
   This power-sharing became the norm in 1997 when Chirac, after only two years in office, used his presidential powers dissolve the National Assembly and call a snap election that Jospin's "plural left" unexpectedly won. The president was sidelined in domestic policy for the next five years by a left-wing government that brought in reforms like the 35-hour work week which Chirac could not block....
   [This raises the question of why Jospin wanted to be the less-powerful President in the first place. We haven't heard of anyone he was grooming for the powerful role of Prime Minister.]

3. France's Jospin to leave politics, by Jamey Keaten, AP 04/22/02 09:33 EDT via AOLNews.
   PARIS...- When Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced his retirement from politics after a humiliating third-place finish in the first round of France's presidential elections, his supporters cited out in disbelief.... Jospin has been in office since 1997, making him one of the longest-serving prime ministers in decades.... He [had been] an economics professor for 11 years at a Paris university....
   [Which one??]
   Jospin and the leftist coalition that he led took control of the government five years ago, largely riding a campaign promise to cut intractable unemployment levels then hovering at about 13%.
   [And he kept his promise -]
   With a combination of better economic fortunes in France and a controversial, labor-friendly reduction of the work week from 39 hours to 35, the jobless rate came down....
   [The ouster of Jospin from the presidential race is no big disaster for France and the world, which needs visible political leadership along the lines of worktime economics and which he was providing as Prime Minister. But Jospin's retirement from politics is a disaster for France and the world - unless he can be cajoled back in. The trouble with professors in government - as we in America learned from Woodrow Wilson - is that they can be sooo perfectionistic and petulant. Wilson was so goddam rigid and perfectionist and non-power-sharing in his demands that he PO'ed the moderate Republicans enough to prevent America's joining of the League, which the U.S. itself had pushed on everyone else, and which everyone else needed the U.S. to join in order to prevent the kind of revenge-taking on Germany that produced Hitler and World War II. See Thomas A. Bailey's Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (Encounter/Quadrangle: Chicago, 1963). There is a lot Jospin could do if he stays as Prime Minister -
   • He could turn immigration policy over to electronic democracy and thereby solve, or unload the blame for, the high immigrant crime rate.
   • He could functionalize the 35-hour workweek by improving France's overtime design along the lines of Timesizing Phase 2 and Phase 3.
   • He could finish solving France's high unemployment by further reducing the workweek along the lines of Timesizing Phase 4.
   • And he could quit keeping quiet about his rudimentary worktime economics, make it the proud and loud cornerstone of his policy, and educate France and the world (and himself - beyond the rudimentary level!) about this long-neglected critical path to real progress.]

• Dispirited French town registers protest vote, by Catherine Bremer, Reuters 04/21/02 11:42 ET via AOLNews.
  DONZY, France...- For the past 4 elections, the result in this sleepy, bucolic town in the Loire Valley has uncannily mirrored the score for France as a whole.... Far removed from urban France and its crime-ridden suburbs, Donzy typifies the rustic chunk of the electorate that likes to grumble about high taxes, unemployment and immigration..\..
  Disenchantment is rife with incumbent [rightwing] President Jacques Chirac and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who have been locked in an awkward power-sharing deal for the past five years and are now the main presidential candidates.... "There is a total lack of motivation because the main candidates are promising things they didn't deliver," said Patrick Galonzka, who commutes the 125 miles north to Paris for work.
  [He's going to be sorry he ignored the 4% drop in unemployment due to Jospin's 4 hour cut in the workweek. At 1% per hour cut, if Jospin had gone down to a 30-hour week, he'd have got the unemployment rate down from 13% to 4% instead of just down to 9%. That's why we recommend keeping the workweek fluid and adjusting it slowly but repeatedly against unemployment.]
  He said he was voting for Trotskyist Arlette Lagiller, whose strong stance against corporate layoffs has helped her to poll around 10% in opinion polls ahead of the vote.
  [When you have a strong general safety net like a workweek that adjusts as far down as it takes to lower unemployment, you don't need to micromanage the morons who want to downsize. They find out soon enough that downsizing is the opposite of growth and calling it "rightsizing" or whatever doesn't change that.]
  Iin a bar near the town hall, one man said he would vote for far-rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the...National Front, who blames rising crime on mass immigration....
  [So strong is the English-language media's stamp of Political Correctness on virtually uncontrolled immigration that the only thing a far-sighted and ecologically sensitive candidate can do today is push to get the whole question of immigration turned over to regular secret and binding public referendums as quickly as possible, because few candidates can withstand the withering media name-calling if they utter a breath of concern in public about immigration.]
  ...If evidence of crime and mass immigration is hard to spot in this town of 1,700 mostly elderly folk, the decay of rural France is painfully evident as small businesses dry up and the young flee to Paris for work. The owner of the town's main restaurant said apologetically his last sitting on a Saturday night is at 8:30 pm because the new 35-hour maximum working week - a key Jospin reform - has meant he cannot afford to staff his kitchen beyond 9 pm....
  [Here's one employer who thinks that business comes from thin air, rather than from the wages he and other employers pay out. So rather than get creative about shifts, he merely cuts back and whines. He doesn't "get" the purpose of worksharing and it may be that Jospin never sufficiently educated the French public about it.]
  The region mostly lives off grain farming and its world-famous local wines like Sancerre and Pouilly Fume.
  [Hopefully the farms and wineries are a little smarter about spreading the work and wages around to more people and make more markets for everyone in this rural area.]
  The only sign of fresh industry in Donzy is a factory making plastic drinking straws and toothpicks, build on the site of a former business that dyed ostrich plumes for Paris casino girls....
  [How many "fresh industries" do you want in a village of 1700 elderly people?]
  "People here don't really know what goes on outside the town's borders, even less [about] international politics. They talk about crime and immigration, but they don't even know what it is," said schoolteacher Lydie Niveau.
  [Don't they have talkshow hosts in France?]
  "At the end of the day, people here are scared of change."
  [Not if they're voting for anyone and everyone but the incumbents.]

• [speaking of booming markets in shorter-workweek France (see our rebuttal to the notion that the 35-hour week policy "alienated much of French business," yesterday #2) -]
  France: Consumer spending rises, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
  French consumer spending rose at the fastest pace in 14 months in March, the latest sign the country's economy is recovering after contracting in the fourth quarter of last year. Spending on manufactured goods rose 1.2%, led by purchases of household goods.
  [Unlike here in long-hours U.S where most of our "consumer spending" is in real estate as the affluent scan for safe havens.]

1. [Another U.S. company avoids layoffs with shortened workweeks -]
   Valmont announces first quarter earnings, PRNewswire-FirstCall 04/18/2002 17:30 EDT via AOLNews.
   OMAHA, Neb...- Valmont Industries, Inc. (Nasdaq:VALM), a diversified manufacturer of poles, towers and structures and coating services for infrastructure, and [of] mechanized equipment for agriculture, reported Q1 net earnings of $6.8m...versus 1Q01 net earnings of $4.8m....
   With the acquisition of PiRod, Valmont is assembling a premier wireless communication structures and components business. The combination of Valmont and PiRod has created a strong business unit that is well positioned for the eventual recovery in wireless communication..\..
   [Sure, sure. But meanwhile, this is another badnews takeover.]
   Wireless communication sales were more than 50% below last year when PiRod's 1Q01 sales are added to Valmont's. Very weak market conditions persist in the telecommunications industry. During the first quarter, shortened workweeks, ongoing product line rationalization and cost reductions were specific actions taken to downsize the business and improve performance....

2. Newsmaker - France's Jospin, straight guy of the left, by Mark John, Reuters 04/18/02 06:13 ET via AOLNews.
   PARIS...- The time-honoured electioneering ritual of baby-kissing is not for French Prime Minister and presidential candidate Lionel Jospin. "I don't have the mother's permission," [he] insisted on a campaign stop...to the amazement of photographers hovering expectantly around a conveniently placed baby girl...
   With the French left in disarray after its rout in legislative elections in 1993, no obvious...candidates came forward to run against Chirac for president in 1995. Up stepped Jospin. And while he lost, he led on the first round and polled a better-than-expected 47.4% of the vote in the runoff.
   The high point in his career came 2 years later, as Chirac took the failed gamble of shoring up his wavering popularity by calling early parliamentary elections which ushered in Jospin as prime minister of a coalition [that included] Greens.... Jospin promptly set about a programme of "leftist" reforms [our quotes - ed.], notably the controversial 35-hour week policy, that alienated much of French business, and measures to boost youth employment.
   [This ignorant Reuters reporter, Mark John, keeps trying to spin workweek reduction as a "leftist" policy. In fact, the Republican Party in America championed workweek reduction legislation for the first 75 years of its history, beginning with the abolition of the unlimited workweek of slavery in 1863 under Lincoln and ending with saving 100,000s of jobs in the depths of the Depression by cutting the government workweek down to the 40-hour level in 1932 under Hoover. As recently as 1956, Nixon advocated the four-day 32-hour workweek at a campaign stop in Colorado Springs. And right there in France in the last few years, the right-of-center UDF Party pushed through the Robien Law in 1996, which gave 7-year taxbreaks to companies that would voluntarily cut their workweek 10% and hire 10% more staff, higher taxbreaks if they would do 15% and 15%. In fact, workweek reduction is the antidote to socialism, defined as government micromanagement, because by spreading the vanishing human employment and mopping up the wage-depressing labor surplus, workweek reduction -
   • deconcentrates spending power out of its unspendable consolidation among the affluent,
   • raises wages and benefits a little for the vast majority of employees instead of a lot for just top executives,
   • activates wasted consumers currently languishing in forced retirement, unemployment, welfare, disability, homelessness and prison, and
   • creates the kind of solid economic boom usually seen only during labor shortages caused by disasters like war or plague.
   [As for Mark John's crap about the 35-hour week "alienating much of French business,'" French businessmen sure like -
   • the extra markets they got from the shorter workweek (especially the restaurant, retail and leisure industries, see "French buying more books, CDs, due to 35-hour week" on 4/29/2001 and more recently, "Mickey's secret out as Disney opens French park" on 3/17-18/2002 #2) and
   • their greater recession-resistance than Germany {see "German gloom clouding euro-zone growth" on 3/07/2001 and more recently, "Optimism surges in euro zone service sector" and run-on article "French services sector recovers pre-Sept 11 levels" on 4/05/2002), and they also liked
   • their attractiveness to investors (see "Layoff outcry masks better French business climate" and particularly its subsection "France lures investors" on 4/07/2001 #1), and even French businessmen regardless of complaining seem to think their businesses are well worth investing in (see "France invests to keep economy steaming ahead" on 2/17/2001 #3) and
   • the greater labor flexibility that the stronger general social safety net of the shorter workweek provided (see "Layoff outcry masks better French business climate" on 4/07/2001 #1 which states "Executives that do business in France and investors that put their money in the country say the business climate here has improved dramatically in recent years. ...They say the state is taking a more laissez-faire approach to industry and companies are freer than ever before to run their activities as they see fit.").
   • Bottom line: if it's easier for people to support themselves, taxpayers don't have to.
   The fact is, Jospin has a lot of business-friendly policies, and even idee-fixe Mark John admits that -]
   Jospin has never felt...bound by Socialist orthodoxy - witness continued privatisations of state assets under his government..\..
   [Mark John tries to say -]
   Jospin has..\..never embrace[d] the "Third Way" politics of more centrist leaders like his British counterpart Tony Blair....
   [but in fact, the real " Third Way" is government-guided private-sector sharework via workweek reduction, instead of government makework via subsidies for jobs programs favored by the left and instead of government makework via subsidies for industries, especially military industries, favored by the right. Blair has nothing of this. Blair has no ideas. He has nothing but a bogus rose-colored unemployment rate that, like America's, excludes most of the non-self-support problem and ignores the deterioration of his economy and his society as the affluent concentrate more and more spending power in amounts they can't and don't spend, and increasingly, can't even invest because they've effectively suctioned the spending power away from all their potential investment targets. Hey, wait a minute. Lazy Reuters has basically just recycled this article from 2/21/2002 #2.   Cheap-*ss b*gg*rs!]

3. [timesizing a la worksharing gets Toshiba through a bad period -]
   Toshiba to run 4 semiconductor plants during Golden Week, Kyodo News 04:18/02 10:21 EDT via AOLNews.
   ...In addition, Toshiba has decided to thaw the freeze on one of the two production lines at the Yokkaichi plant, thus ending the work-sharing operations at the plant....
   [that is, there's been enough of a recovery to make work-sharing unnecessary for the moment.]

• (1/10)   New report examines policies that make work more family friendly - U.S. can learn from other industrial nations, *EPInet.org via Joe Polito via SWT elist.
  WASHINGTON, DC, Jan. 9, 2002 - Insights from the experiences of companies in other countries can point the way for new U.S. workplace policies that would make it easier for American workers to balance the demands of career and family, says a new report from the Economic Policy Institute [EPI]. That report, Shared Work, Valued Care: New Norms for Organizing Market Work and Unpaid Care Work [by EPI Research Dir. Eileen Appelbaum, Economics Prof. Thomas Bailey of Columbia Teachers College, Asst. Prof. Peter Berg at Mich. State School of Labor & Industrial Relations, and Soc. Prof. Arne Kalleberg of UNC/Chapel Hill] says that employers today expect to be entitled to "unencumbered workers" - that is, employees who function as if they had a partner or other caregiver at home full time.
  That expectation, however, ignores the mass entrance of women into the workforce over the past 3 decades. In 1967, about 1/3 of married women worked outside the home. In 1999, it was closer to 2/3. And among all women over the age of 20, the share in the labor market went from 41.2% in 1967 to 60.1% in 1999.
  [So already by 1999, despite the sturm&drang of men and their higher pay in the workplace, women already constituted a clear majority in the workplace?!]
  "Workplaces in the U.S. are in a kind of time warp, where the way work is scheduled and done is drastically out of step with the reality of workers' lives," says Eileen Appelbaum, a co-author of the report.
  [Jives with what we've been saying about the deterioration of American managers' and executives' skills in the top five areas of limit-setting, prioritization, delegation, scheduling and training, because they've been spoiled rotten by 32 years (1970-2002) of labor surplus built up over 1940-1970 by the freezing of the workweek in 1940 at a high pre-technology level (40 hours - after 100 years of reduction from over 80 hours) and labor's resulting loss of leverage at the bargaining table.]
  "Far more women are working now than ever before. Yet we as a society have done nothing to help families handle the mounting conflict between work and family responsibilities."
  [Nor are we likely to until we converge on our obsolete pre-technology workweek of 40 hours, which keeps us in a surplus-commodity position, saps our bargaining power and conduces to our running faster and longer for less and less.]
  Shared Work, Valued Care describes successful programs in Japan, Australia, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy that allow workers greater work-time flexibility and better child and elder care benefits....
  • A law firm in Sydney, Australia, with 1,500 employees worldwide, lets employees...cut back their hours to three days in the office and a half day working from home each week....
  • At an eldercare facility in the Netherlands, only five of the 100 employees work full-time. Part-time employees are paid the same hourly rate that full-time employees are paid, and their benefits are pro-rated. Workers can reduce their hours when their children are young and increase them later. Despite a national nursing shortage, this facility has had little trouble attracting younger nurses who must combine work and family responsibilities and older nurses who [want] a slower pace.
  • A Dutch multinational company with 90,000 employees worldwide introduced a job-sharing program in response to requests from employees for part-time hours. Between 30 and 40% of part-time employees are now participating, usually by pairs of workers alternating two and three day weeks.
    [Job sharing is in the right direction but affirms too strongly the inviolability of a rigid and arbitrary 40-hour definition of "full time." The next example is better -]
    
  • A cardiac hospital in the Netherlands with 2,500 workers maintains full-time workweeks of 32 or 36 hours. Shifts are 8 hours a day, so workers achieve a 36-hour week by working 5 days one week and 4 days the next, or by alternating between 6 and 3 days. They may also work a permanent 32-hour week for prorated pay.
  • Under Swedish law, workers at a steel company that the authors visited can opt to work a six-hour day instead of an 8-hour day, until their children are 8 years old or in the first grade. The company prorates the workers' pay, with the balance covered by social insurance for eligible workers....
    [This is fine as one variation in the early private-sector stage of timesizing, but the objection here is that shorter hours should generally not be related to having children let alone to the micromanagement of the children's age or grade in school. Shorter hours or worksharing should be determined simply by a comprehensive unemployment rate that includes forced retirement, welfare, disability, homelessness, and prisons. This of course gets us into the later public-sector stage of the timesizing program. As long as that comprehensive unemployment rate is too high or rising, the workweek is adjusted gradually downward, for everyone, and any companies or individuals who want to work over that line can do so only if they reinvest their overtime (OT) profits/ earnings in OT-targeted training and hiring - or pay a tax so the public sector can attempt to carry out the training and hiring that the private sector should be doing.]
  • A[n] automaker...in Germany...work[s] to better match output to demand by maintaining changing schedules. The German plant has a 28.8-hour workweek for nine weeks [sounds like VW], with the tenth week off. Workers are paid for 28.8 hours for all ten weeks, and can be required to work up to 40 hours a week, but hours over 28.8 are credited to an employee's "working-time account."...
    [Whatever that is.]
    
  • A Japanese publishing firm promotes career track jobs for women employees with a range of incentives, including reduced work hours....
    
  The authors call for
  • [U.S.] legislation that would allow for a shorter workweek for all workers and limits on mandatory overtime, as well as legislation allowing workers to request...reduction in hours for...prorated reductions in pay and benefits....
  • equal opportunity and non-discrimination provisions to improve the options for part-time workers....
  • a stronger social safety net, including universal access to healthcare..\..
  Contact: Nancy Coleman or Tom Kiley, (202) 775-8810

1. [dim realization dawns on Americans that maybe longer and harder is going backwards, not forwards -]
   Business watercooler stories, by Matt Moore, AP 04/16/02 12:37 EDT via AOLNews.
   ...Executive overtime:
   More employees are working longer and harder, including managers, a new survey finds. In fact, says Robert Half International Inc., a staffing service that specializes in accounting , financing and information, more managers than ever believe there just isn't enough time in the work day to get everything done.
   [Thus declaring that without the top management skill of setting limits, unlimited hours are making the next three most important management skills unnecessary. So naturally, American managers are losing these skills too: prioritization, delegation (of tasks), and scheduling.]
   A recent survey of 150 managers and executives found that more than a third said their time on the job has gone up from five years ago. The average time spent working during the week is now 54 hours, according to the people polled.
   [Let's see now.... Our Own Time by Roediger and Foner.... page x.... average weekly hours, 1900-1972.... let's see.... 54...54.... oh yes, 54.9 in 1916. That means that American managers are suuuch geniuses that they are now working at the level of 1917, despite tables and shelves full of 'worksaving' technology. The dumbing of America proceeds apace.
   • The lowest in the chart was 38.1 hours in 1940, just before World War II ended the Great Depression in America.
   • The average weekly hours peaked at 40.7 in 1964, slipped to 40.6 in 1972,
   • then according to "Distribution of Work and Income" by Wassily Leontief, p. 102 in Mechanization of Work (Scientific American, 1982), up to 41.3 in manufacturing in 1977, which would presumably be mostly men.
   • Then as more women entered the job market and the figures by gender were split out, by 1987, men's workweek was up to 43.8 (women's was 37.0) according to Juliet Schor's Overworked American (1991), p. 30.
   • Fifteen years later it's up to 54, 10 hours increase in 15 years.
   That means the workweek
   • lengthened by about 6.5 minutes a year between 1940 and 1964 (though most of the lengthening came immediately due to the War).
   • Stayed the same 1964-72.
   • Lengthened by 8.5 minutes a year 1972-77.
   • Lengthened by 15 minutes a year 1977-1987.
   • And lengthened by 41 minutes a year 1987-2002.
   This is progress?]
   Because of that, warned Max Messmer, chairman and CEO at Robert Half, more executives need to step back and reassess their own needs and the demands of their jobs, lest they start suffering from burnout....
   [No kidding!]

2. As part-timers, women earn more, Bloomberg via BG, D2.
   Women who work part-time earn an average of $1.15 for every dollar their male counterparts make, according to a report on 2000 data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS].
   25% of working women work part time, compared with 10% of working men, and
   part-time men's wages are lower because 56% of them are 16-24 years old, an age group that typically has low earnings, compared with [only] 32% of female part-timers [in that age cohort], according to the report.
   There are 29.8m part-time workers in the U.S.; most cite noneconomic reasons, such as child care and family obligations, for not working full time, BLS said.
   [The Netherlands is leading the world in the part-time approach to timesizing. They have legislation that attempts to remove the 'part-time penalty' in benefits, and consequently Dutch part-timers get considerably more benefits than American part-timers.]

• [NYT comes up with one of its rare mentions of the great sleeper issue of the age -]
  U.S.-style conservative runs as outsider in France, by Marlise Simons, NYT, A4.
  PARIS...- In the presidential race in France, Alain Madelin is closest to being the American candidate. He opposes high taxes and government meddling and favors free markets, free trade and free enterprise....
  [Very lovely, but without one central ground rule to keep employment and skills and spending power from concentrating into ever more unspendable black holes in the top brackets, "free markets, free trade and free enterprise" develops such an unspendably tight concentration of spending power that it actually suctions the markets away from its own necessarily huge investment targets. In short, it undermines itself. This is the simple implication of the neoclassical theory of the marginal utility of capital, though it's a corollary that virtually all mainstream economists overlook.]
  When Mr. Madelin cites the 35-hour workweek as absurd government intervention, he is attacking the one reform of the past five years that may carry the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, to the Elysée Palace.
  [This is a guy who still thinks that balance is automatic, that economies automatically stabilize at full capacity. This was disproven once and for all by the Great Depression. They can "stabilize" at any level of less-than-full capacity. This is a guy who simple-mindedly thinks all regulation is socialist. Evidently he's too under-equipped in the gray matter dept. to understand there might be a difference between a burgeoning maximum of stifling details in gov't regulation, and a stable minimum of liberating general rules, theoretically just one. The quest for the single all-sufficient control, so well-designed and centrally positioned that it supercedes virtually all other government regulation and bureaucracy (most of which is devoted to overt or covert job creation), is the Holy Grail of economic designers. Our best candidate is Timesizing, a gradual and market-oriented program to utilize and optimize all consumers, instead of deactivating 2,000,000 of them in prison as we do in the "free markets [except when we give tax breaks to Raytheon & Fidelity etc], free trade [except where we don't want it, like steel] and free enterprise [especially for big firms like agrobiz, mining that get gov't subsidies and dairies that have price controls]" US of A. How there can still be reporters who talk about America in terms of free anything is beyond us. We just have a lot of free advice and loose yapping about our "free markets" etc. In fact, our failure to implement a program that automatically cuts the workweek as technology advances, so we get its worksavings in terms of free time instead of unemployment, welfare, disability, homelessness and prisons, has resulted in a burgeoning horde of government regulations to try and control the damage without plugging the yawning leak in the side of the boat as we make it harder and harder and harder for people to earn an honest living - when our miraculous technology should be allowing us to make it easier and easier and easier. But that'll never happen while we respond to it by downsizing instead of timesizing - by cutting jobs and markets instead of cutting hours and maintaining jobs and markets. Simpletons like Alain Madelin just don't see the cause-and-effect between uncontrolled worktime per person and downsizing, and between downsizing and chronic economic downturn such as we're currently experiencing. And as for calling an idiot like Madelin "conservative," ha! Longer workweeks mean less time for family. Less family time means less family values. What's "conservative" about that?! In "US welfare-to-work mothers still poor despite jobs," by Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters 04/15/02 16:45 ET via AOLNews, we read "A Republican plan unveiled last week embraces pResident Bush's goals of having more of those on welfare work, and raising the number of hours they work from 20-30 to 40 hours each week. 'This really means more mothers will be away from home even more than they are now,' said study author Sharon Kagan of Teachers College of Columbia University." Yeah sure. That's sooo "conservative."]