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Timesizing News, August 1-8, 2002
[Commentary] ©2002 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

8/8/2002  timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

• Clocking out - Short work hours undercut Europe in economic drive - Culture that values leisure now finds it an obstacle; Jobs are going elsewhere - Taking 9½ weeks of vacation, by Christopher Rhoads, WSJ, front page.
  [Let's take this headline piece by piece -]
  ...Short work hours undercut Europe in economic drive [no, they underpin the European consumer base] -
  Culture that values leisure now finds it an obstacle [no, we're feeling envious];
  Jobs are going elsewhere [like our's aren't?!] -
  Taking 9½ weeks of vacation [eat your hearts out, Americans!]
  [This is a desperate attempt to explain to American conservatives why Europe is inferior to America despite having more free time for family and friends and community and spiritual life, and a generally higher standard of living in terms of more leisure, more travel, and many more families still well supported by only one wage earner. Canada is one step better than the USA because while it's health insurance system isn't perfect (neither is the USA's), ALL CANADIANS ARE COVERED. And Europe, excluding the UK, is generally two steps better - it also has universal health insurance AND it has longer vacations and shorter workweeks = more of the most basic kind of freedom, free time, than the self-advertised "Land of the Free." This article is also an attempt to stop the hemmorhaging of investment dollars out of the American economy, which has only sabre-rattling militarization and prison-building to anchor its consumer base, into the European Community which has work&wage-spreading shorter workhours to anchor its consumer base. The WSJ even picks the goofiest-looking German they can find as an illustration. Entschuldige, Uwe, but we thought you were a woman when we first glanced at your pic. But then again, you do have a bit of the same nerdy look as Bill Gates....]
  ESSLINGEN, Germany - Uwe Lang [has] planned this year..\..two 3-week vacations.... The...supervisor at Eberspaecher AG, which makes car heating systems, knocks off work each day at 3 pm in the course of a 35-hour workweek. He worked just 12 days total in May, which had four national holidays. Now he's planning to visit a cousin in Berlin, then head on to see some friends in Hamburg. He's pondering a diving trip in Egypt for later in the year, but hasn't firmed up his plans....
  Europeans are well known for a more balanced lifestyle than workaholic Americans. But these days, Europe has never worked so little.
  [But then, that's the whole point of technology - to assume the work and free us up - unless we're workaholics with a puritan work ethic like the Wall Street Journal staff who evidently can't see that what we're toiling for, the Europeans have already achieved.]
  While [i.e., although] the Continent worked as much as the rest of the developed world 20 years ago...
  ["the rest of the developed world" comprising only the English-speaking economies and Japan]
  it has steadily cut back on workweeks while lengthening vacations, a trend that has gathered steam in recent years. Without realizing it, Europe has embarked on an unusual experiment in an era of globalization: trying to become more competitive while working less.
  [This experiment is not unusual. It is what the whole world did for over 150 years from the start of the Industrial Revolution when we worked dawn to dusk six or seven days a week right up to 1940 when we froze the workweek at the 40-hour level. What's unusual is what the Japanese and English-speaking economies have done since then - introduced wave after wave of work-saving technology and responded to it by downsizing instead of "timesizing" or trimming hours. There are a number of assumptions that the age of high-tech worksaving automation requires us to question. One is that hard work in terms of long hours builds character. Another is that if we overwork we must be important. And a third is the one demonstrated here - that competitiveness requires long working hours.]
  So far the economic results are not promising.... Europe is on track to grow by about 1% in the first half of the year - well below the U.S.'s 3% rate - with nearly all the growth coming in exports.
  [Are we talking about next year and therefore talking forecasting, because if we are, let's just wait and see, shall we, considering the rapid deterioration that is going on in the U.S. right now in terms of rising inventories and falling prices = typical hallmarks of depression? In fact, shorter-hours France was the last Euro economy to succumb to the recession last year except for erstwhile subsidized Ireland, and France is not heavily export-dependent. And while we're at this point, this remark - isn't it interesting that only Americans are complaining about Europe's (by American measures) poorer performance?! To Europeans, it's not a problem. A problem for them is the horror show of guns, violence, prisons, and international unilateralism that they see developing in naive, poorly educated, blindered, triumphalistic, self-congratulatory America.]
  U.S. growth per capita, a common measure of standard of living, grew at twice the rate of Europe's largest economies in the 1990s.
  [GDP per capita may be a common measure but it is severely flawed as a measure of living standards. Its main flaw lies in including productivity regardless of marketability, so no matter how far we have to lower prices and wages and living standards to sell our output, as long as we can keep churning out the stuff we get brownie points in the GDP. In addition, all kinds of bad "productivity" inflates the GDP, such as America's world-record prison-industrial complex. The best measure of living standards would be our comprehensive dependency rate, including unemployment, welfare, disability, homelessness, prison, and personal support under protest. Other measures that have been suggested are John Cobb's and Herman Daly's Index of Sustainable Economic Well-being, and the *Genuine Progress Indicator (flagged by Tom Walker of B.C.), which subtracts non-productive activity from GDP.]
  Nevertheless, France this year extended its 3-year-old law reducing the workweek to 35 hours from 39. The far-reaching measure now includes companies with fewer than 20 employees. Parents in Sweden just got another 30 days of parental leave, at 80% of their salary. That brings the total to 480 working days per couple for each child - almost a 3-fold increase since the 1970s.
  [Oh how terrible! Europeans, who don't go on and on like American conservatives about the "sanctiity of the family" and "family values" just DO IT and give parents family time. And while the U.S. passes legislation and sets up commissions about workplace safety, Europe just gives its employees more rest to handle the waves of higher-productivity machinery, computers and robots safely.]
  Vacations have nearly doubled over that same period in several European countries, including Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. About six weeks is now the annual norm across Europe. On top of all their days off, Germans typically are now out sick for 10 days each year, unheard of two decades ago.
  The divergence between the U.S. and European economies goes beyond the matter of working time. The U.S. enjoys [read "suffers from"] -
  • a deeper pool of investment capital
    [read "more tightly concentrated spending power, so astronomical and consolidated that not only is it unspendable, but it's also becoming uninvestable - there are no sustainable investments in the off-the-scale proportions of the investment capital because that capital has suctioned the markets away from its own real and potential investment targets]
  • mobile workers,
    [read "uprooted, familyless employees"]
  • a developed entrepreneurial culture
    [read a "narcissistic and insulated aggressive class"]
  • and faster adaptation of new technologies,
    [to worsen the imbalances further and hasten the deterioration to a third-world profile]
  • among other advantages.
  But, says Michael Burda, a professor of labor economics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, "you have to work to grow."
  [Europe also has its throwbacks. But the real problem is the anglosaxon economies, which have yet to take on their most cherished taboos and - not destroy them, but flex them up a bit to enter the future gracefully instead of with massive hidden un- and under-employment, involving makework, welfare, disability, homelessness, prisons and suicide.]
  Cutting Back
  Europe, though, continues to cut back.
  [Oh, those wrong-headed Europeans. They're already living in heaven compared to most Americans and they keep slicing themselves more of it! Could anything be more humiliating or embarrassing to pompous American economists, politicians, analysts and Wall St. journalists?]
  Today, the average German worker puts in about 1,400 hours a year, a 17% decrease from 1980, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Workers in Italy and France - who with Germany make up 70% of the economy of the 12 countries that share the euro currency - also are working far fewer hours than they did then.
  [This is the real measure of progress and economic superiority. The Europeans are doing more with less, while Americans are merely doing more with the same or more -]
  Americans, meanwhile, are working about the same average hours they did in 1980, about 1,800 a year. During Japan's decade-long economic slump, employees' historically high working hours also have dropped but are still roughly even with those of Americans.
  [That drop in Japan should tell Wall St. journalists something but they continue clueless.]
  In Europe, "we have fewer job opportunities distributed across people who work less," says Andrea Ichino, a professor of economics at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
  [Perfectly sensible, but it already contradicts the tightly held shibboleth of English-speaking economists that job opportunities don't become fewer, they only become more - implied by the their fatuously oft-chanted "Lump of Labor Fallacy" jibe.]
  Many Europeans view a healthy dose of leisure as part of what separates them from Americans.
  [It sure does, as surely as language separates humans from the animals.]
  But it wasn't always so. When Europe rebuilt after World War II, economic growth surged across the Continent, averaging close to 5% in the 1950s and 1960s, twice that of the U.S. at the time. Unemployment was half the U.S. level.
  [He doesn't mention the reason for all this, which is that a lot higher percentage of European employees were killed and disabled by the War, which took a much bigger proportion of the technology-surplused manhours out of the European job markets and raised labor power, wages and consumer spending and demand more than in the U.S. through the 50s and 60s. Basically the Europeans have smoothly switched from withdrawing manhours from the job market by war to withdrawing them by legislated piecemeal worktime reduction. ...(followup, 7/2003) which they are now in the process of undermining (Chirac in France is diluting the nationwide 35-hour workweek, and Schroeder in Germany is blocking the harmonization of the unionized sector's workweek at 35 hours for east Germans, still at 38) -]
  Germans and Italians averaged 2,100 working hours a year, compared with about 1,900 for Americans at the time, according to the OECD.
  [Europe didn't need the shorter worktime then - it had "benefited" so much more than the U.S. from the manhours withdrawal qua workforce destruction of the War.]
  Europe began to catch up to the U.S. and the performance of the globe's major economies appeared to be converging.
  But then came the oil shocks of the 1970s, when skyrocketing energy prices brought on inflation and recession.
  [And more important in the U.S., then came the postwar Baby Boom to replace the pre-War surplus of manhours in U.S. job markets.]
  The different responses of the U.S. and Europe go a long way in explaining their economic performances of the succeeding decades. While U.S. companies slashed workers [and worsened the labor surplus by introducing mothers into the job market in large numbers - ed.] and restructured [i.e., took advantage of labor's devalued-by-surplus position to summarily chop jobs and further worsen the labor surplus - ed.], Europe tried to cushion the blow by boosting government spending, expanding unemployment benefits and enacting stricter laws against firing.
  [Quite sensible as stopgap measures but nothing to compare to designing and implementing a mechanism to automatically and continuously adjust the workweek per person in inverse relation to the unemployment rate - if unemployment goes down, the workweek automatically inches up, and vice versa.]
  The measures helped to preserve calm in the face of the biggest economic shock since the war, but they made the Continent less adaptable to future changes.
  [Also less vulnerable to future damage - contrast USA's ongoing downsizings and weakening domestic markets. The maintenance of US domestic spending now depends almost entirely on record consumer credit, soon to run out. American auto companies are desperately offering zero percent financing, and American airlines practically have to pay travellers to submit to their bodysearches and fly.]
  In the three decades since, the U.S. created 50 million new jobs, five times the number generated in Europe, according to figures compiled by Lehman Brothers.
  [Most of them are low-wage "McJobs" with no prospects for advancement. As the woman in Clinton's focus group said when he was boasting about the 10 million jobs he'd created, "I already know about your 10m new jobs - I've got three of them myself!" Plus a lot of those new jobs are in America's huge prison-industrial complex - do we really want to boast about them?]
  While unemployment...steadily fell in the U.S. after the difficult 1970s,
  [it ain't fallin' any more, and over the last decade, it only fell for the same and only reason the US crime rate fell, namely, we locked up so many people that we've now hold the world's record population of incarcerated - Europe ain't interested in that kind of unemployment "solution" -]
  it remained stuck at about 10% or more in Europe.
  Enter the shorter working week. Unions argued that reduced hours would spur job growth by spreading the same amount of work among more people. Most economists dismissed the theory, but some argued it could force Europeans to become more efficient, squeezing more work into less time.
  [In France, with the preparation for and implementation of the 4-hour workweek reduction (from 39 to 35), despite its very flawed design, the unemployment rate dropped four percent from 12.6% in 1997 to 8.7% in 2001 - one percent for every hour cut.]
  Neither turned out to be true. Unemployment stayed high and productivity - the measure of the amount of output achieved by one worker in an hour - still lags behind the U.S. and fell further behind in the last few years, according to the OECD.
  [One of the techniques of the shorter-hours-deniers is never to give any data, and to quickly substitute some distraction, like the admittedly difficult-to-measure "productivity" (regardless of marketability) - sortof similar to the Bush administration's tactics. Rhoads is trying to derail-rhoad us onto productivity here, and in fact the latest figures from the European Central Bank show that the productivity gap between the US and the EU are narrowing, even allowing the US to include the lovely "productivity" from its huge prison-industrial complex.]
  While U.S. manufacturers stuck with the 40-hour week in place since the war...
  [pretty stupid in the context of worksaving technology, since unofficially it's been creeping back up to 1929, and even earlier levels out of the sheer job insecurity it has generated...]
  ...European countries went to 35 hours during the next two decades. Unions and governments asserted that the measures created or saved jobs. The French government claims its 35-hour law has led to more than 200,000 jobs since 1999. The new hires, though, come partly from subsidies the French government paid companies to hire new workers while the new law was phased in.
  [Well the "new hires" in America's supposedly superior frozen-workweek economy come from McJobs, which people take longer to find and which pay them less for doing more.]
  Caterpillar Inc., the U.S. maker of heavy machinery, added 70 new workers at its plant in Grenoble to cope with the change, bringing its total work force in France to 2,300. Like many others, the company chose an option in the law to let workers take more vacation days in lieu of reducing their weekly 39 hours to 35. [OK, so Rhoads now admits workweek and worktime reduction did succeed in created more jobs despite just having claimed that "neither turned out to be true." The reporter contradicts himself. He immediately tries the productivity distraction again -]
  But it quickly found that projects were delayed because too many people were out of the office on a given day.
  [Well, that's just bad management, or management untrained in the priority scheduling skills required by shorter hours. There's nothing about a shorter workweek that says all project-critical personnel can't be in the office at the same time.]
  "If our only competition and customers were in France it would not be an issue," says Laurant Rannaz, head of human resources for Caterpillar in France. "But they come from around the world."
  [Train your managers - this is where workweek reduction makes management more efficient. Management has been so accustomed to labor shortage that their skills have eroded appallingly. In France, this is changing.]
  For some smaller companies that can't afford to hire new workers to make up for the reduction in hours, the results have been disastrous. In the wine cellar of her 17th-century farmhouse in Aloxe-Corton, near Dijon, Veronique Perrin frets that she may have to sell the vineyard where her great-grandmother grew up. Her three workers no longer come in on Fridays as a result of the law change.
  [In the sustainable economies of the future, if you as an employer can't switch from jumping from one falling market to another and arrange your business to support your own customers' customers indefinitely, reinvesting directly and indirectly to sustain your own markets, then you definitely need to "sell the vineyard." You're just not thinking big enough or long-term enough.]
  What's more, the company that provides the labels for the 50,000 bottles of wine she makes each year can no longer keep up with her demand because it has lost worker hours.
  [Ever heard of technology? Ever heard of faster printers? Honest to God, the whining of these people!]
  "This is not the life I had in mind," she says.
  [Then your day is done. The ecological age is dawning, and that means a "closing circle." No more unsustainable usage of low- or no-cost common resources, including markets. The early Henry Ford approach of paying his workers enough to purchase their own output becomes the rule, not the exception. But since that will not happen on the basis of employer altruism, it will happen only on the basis of market forces responding to a scarcity of manhours in the labor market. That requires flexible adjustment of the workweek to eliminate wage-damping labor gluts and discipline employers. Like it or lump it.]
  For the bigger companies, globalization affords an escape hatch from the restrictions at home. [Not for long. As efficient technology pours into economies all over the globe and employers respond with downsizing instead of timesizing, they will be destroying their own and everyone else's markets. Only the economies that have moved on to work sharing via flexible adjustment of the workweek vs. un- and under-employment will have any domestic markets left, and they will be forced to increasingly protect them from the increasing desperation abroad.]
  Even though Europe boasts high-skilled, well-trained and educated workers, companies say the shorter work hours make the higher costs even harder to justify.
  [You want anchor, domestic markets in the future? Then you justify the costs. You have to put the spending power in the hands of the multitudes of employees who will provide your future markets, or you're just a hit&run artist like Chainsaw Dunlap and the boys at Enron, ImClone, Global Crossing, Arthur Andersen, etc etc. This is no longer just about lining your own few already stuffed pockets with more spending power than you could spend in hundreds of lifetimes. Future human evolution depends increasingly of ending the sacrifice of economic dynamism to pecking orders of "positional goods." It's just too inefficient. Too many people wasted sleepin in prisons and under bridges. Too many nudged into disability. Too much incentive for the traditional but now prohibitively dangerous "solution" - war.]
  French car maker PSA Peugeot Citroen, for example, more than doubled the size of its work force outside France to 68,800 in the last decade, while its domestic work force shrunk by 4,000.
  [Then it's asking for its robust French markets to be restricted to only the percentage of French consumers it employs, and this is the type of development that will happen as some economies make the necessary shift faster than others. It's not as if this shift is optional. Labor-saving technology requires it. ]
  In Germany, Volkswagen AG expanded its foreign work force by two-thirds while keeping its domestic work force at 20-year-old levels. The company now makes its trademark Golf [model] in Slovakia, Brazil and South Africa, as well as in Germany, and all of its new Beetles in Mexico.
  [Then sooner or later Germany will be forced to ration even VW's markets in Germany to correspond only to the German consumers that VW employs.]
  Companies won't hire at home, even if demand is strong and existing workers are stretched.
  [Not true. As the 35-hour workweek preparations progressed in France and the worksharing was then implemented, French unemployment was drawn down by one percent for every hour cut from the workweek. That's a lot of hiring at home in France. And if any of the eurozone economies are foolish enough to relengthen their workweeks or workyears by loosening overtime regulations or shortening vacations, we will see a rapid deterioration in their domestic markets and a further drop into recession. And any that shorten their workweeks to activate the wasted demand locked up in their un- and under-employed population will recover, especially if they link overtime to training&hiring and "plug the leaks" represented by foreign CEOs who just want to produce output with the fewest possible employees and accumulate unspendable spending power in their own stuffed pockets. It's the old Ford-Reuther contradiction: Ford, "Let's see you unionize these robots!" Reuther, "Let's see you sell them cars."]
  Moog GmbH, the Boeblingen, Germany, subsidiary of the U.S. maker of hydroelectric valves used in airplane wings and other devices, at the moment needs 27 more high-skilled engineers. But Hubert Ammer, the head of human resources, has no plans to hire - at least not in Germany. The company is in the midst of moving various divisions to India and the Philippines, where employees are cheaper and work longer. "Hiring is the last thing you do" in Germany, says Mr. Ammer. "Only when there is no other way to get the work done."
  [Then selling is soon the last thing you will do in Germany, because you're just ricocheting around the world, looking for the last lode of cheap labor to loot. Don't want to reinvest in your own best markets? Then one way or another, you'll lose them, because you're destroying them.]
  He says this constrains the company's growth because it takes time to find skilled workers abroad, but he has no choice. [If he thinks a 5-hour reduction in his employees' workweek "constrains the company's growth," wait till he and all the other near-sighted and short-sighted executives like himself find all their markets shrinking.]
  An engineer who works only 35 hours isn't worth it for the company, he explains.
  [Funny how even in the field of engineering where so much of the work-saving technology is coming from, many still don't "get" the implications. Increased output without worksharing to maintain markets means reduced markets and excess inventory and soon, output artificially reduced below capacity. Why is this sooo hard to grasp? And these are supposedly professional people who work with their brains, not their brawn, and yet they don't understand "working smart, not hard"??!]
  He recently grew fed up with a worker who was taking 50 to 60 days of sick leave a year, in addition to all his vacation time. When the company moved to fire him, the employee got elected to the company's workers council, which represents employee interests to management. The position protects him from being fired. "If someone wants to do this, they can do it," he says. "And it's too expensive for us to do anything about it." The case is now in court.
  [When they want a parading horse, they grasp for a glaring abuse. See our story on the abuse of sick time in Sweden - which blends with Sweden's long-term disability support program. It's at the end of our story on American Social Security disability on 9/01-02/2002 #2. This German executive probably thinks that America is economic heaven, but hidden unemployment and dependency is huge and skyrocketing, as our excerpts from the Soc Sec disability story demonstrate. Then there's our record-breaking American prison population, and we don't even want to know about our homeless. And force-retired, and forced part-time.]
  Stories such as these help explain why Europe hasn't become as attractive a home for foreign investment as the U.S.   From 1991 to 1998, the amount of revenue of foreign manufacturers in the U.S. more than doubled to $883 billion, accounting for 42% of all revenue of foreign subsidiaries in the 30 industrialized countries that constitute the OECD's membership. The equivalent numbers shrank, both by volume and in percentage terms, in the three largest European countries in that time.
  [The terms "revenue of foreign manufacturers in the U.S." and "revenue of foreign subsidiaries" do not make it clear what variable the reporter is talking about here, but it does not sound equivalent or even relevant to foreign investment in the U.S.   And there have been several articles lately bemoaning the flow of investment dollars to Europe. One last year mentioning increased investment to France as the 35-hour workweek was implemented (see section title "France lures investors") was on 4/07/2001 #1.]
  'Parking Lot'
  The lack of job growth is particularly acute in Italy, which has the lowest percentage of working-age people holding a job of any country in Europe. With few job prospects, many young Italians just keep studying: The average age of graduation is 28. Universities have become a "parking lot" for young Italians unable to crack into the job market, says Ettore Recchi, a sociology professor at the University of Florence.
  [Ergo, "education," especially post-secondary education, as a makework campaign. See item 19 on our realms of makework page. Truth is, it's a big factor in "perfect" USA too, but you'll never get a hack from the WSJ to admit that.]
  Working less has become culturally ingrained since the 1970s, he says. Priorities and values have shifted. Family, having a boyfriend or girlfriend and leisure have all grown in importance among Italians aged 15 to 24 during the last 20 years, according to a recent survey by IARD, an Italian research firm.
  [God forbid that family should actually grow in importance, despite all the Republican lip service to "family values" in the U.S.! Little do Republicans realize that if they want any semblance of "family" left - or indeed any economy functioning above 3rd-World levels - and paradoxically, if they want to save the essence of the work ethic = everyone should be self-supporting - they MUST cut working hours in the context of massive incoming waves of worksaving technology. Otherwise society splits into workers and drones, like the WSJ apparently thinks Italy is already doing.]
  The importance of holding a job has declined steadily, the survey shows.
  Many Europeans don't have their first work experience until their late 20s. Similar surveys show that holding a job remains the top priority for Americans, who typically start work in regular, if part-time, jobs as teenagers.
  "I want to work, but I also want to have fun," says Francesco Montanari, a 27-year-old economics student, sipping a cappuccino in a cafe on a steamy, crowded Bologna street. He wears a white sweater tied around his shoulders and black Gucci sunglasses pushed up in his hair. Mr. Montanari has dabbled at a few jobs, such as a disc jockey in a dance club, but he figures he'll continue to study until his father cuts his credit card. He still lives with his parents at home. "My father's generation came out of a war and they had to work, but we have a different situation now," he says.
  About 52% of Italians between the ages of 20 and 34 live at home with parents, an arrangement that provides not only warm meals and free laundry service but [also] the option not to work. That's a steady rise since the late 1980s. While some Italians tout the trend as a sign of the strength of family values, Mr. Recchi, the sociology professor, calls the growing dependence on family a "cultural dope."
  [Well, maybe Signor Recchi should look at the ridiculous undiscussed freezing of working hours at a 1940 level in an age of worksaving technology as something conceivable only by cultural dopes, clueless workaholics who can't adjust to new situations, regardless of how dysfunctional the result.]
  The differing work habits on the two continents stem in part from a choice on how to use the gains from prosperity.
  [Prosperity shmerity. It's the gains from worksaving technology that the Wall Street Journal and its ilk don't know how to use.]
  Europeans opted for more free time; Americans for more money and consumption, surveys show.
  [Yeah, money meaninglessly concentrated in the very top income brackets and a resulting level of consumption that cannot possibly keep up with the technology-multiplied output of people forced by the plutocracy's conspiracy of silence on workweek reduction to work 40 or more, much more, hours per week.]
  From the perspective of many Europeans, it's the hard-working Americans who have it wrong, at a heavy price to society. "Usually, when people get richer, they work less," says Juan Dolado, professor of economics at University Carlos III in Madrid. Spending so much time working, Mr. Dolado argues, means less time with family, less social cohesion and arguably more fertile ground for crime, a much bigger problem in America than in Europe.
  ["Wonderful" America has the biggest prison population in the developed world, at 2,100,000 inmates. Including those on parole and probation takes that figure up to 6,600,000, one in 32 U.S. adults (see 8/26/2002. America's disabled, +/- quotes, is up to 5,420,000 and climbing (see 9/01-02/2002 #2). And probably an equal number of homeless. You really have to wonder how these ignorant and insulated reporters of the WSJ have the gall to lecture other countries about anything.]
  Plus, while more Americans have jobs, many of these pay less than what jobless Europeans get on welfare. The large role of the black market in many service sectors such as home repair in Europe - an off-the-books market far bigger than in the U.S. - provides a comfortable income for some, though it doesn't show up in federal tax coffers or official statistics.
  Governments and unions are awakening to the need for change. Italy is cutting study time nearly in half. The new French government is expected to allow more overtime. And federal campaign season in Germany has prompted debate on loosening Germany's rigid labor market.
  [Grrreat! Then Europe too can have prison, disabled and homeless populations on a scale with Wonderful America!]
  Most governments have promoted part-time and other flexible work schemes, a trend that has grown in recent years. The reason for the new attention is clear enough: Disaffected, jobless young people were pivotal in the recent removal of the left-center French government.
  [Much more "pivotal" was the greater disunity of the left and the complacent assumption of the general populace, with whom the 35-hour workweek is very popular, that a win by incumbent Jospin was a foregone conclusion so they could afford to discipline him and his creep toward the right by voting for further-left candidates - much the same as Americans assumed a Democratic victory was in the bag so they could afford to discipline the Democrats for their creep to the reactionary with votes for the more-progressive Ralph Nader. And let's face it, if you can't afford to discipline a party when it's in power, when CAN you send them a much-needed kick in the slats - not when they're OUT of power! In 2004, even if the Dems put up Torricelli for President, everybody's going to vote for the sleaze just to get rid of Dubya and his destructors.]
  Rising unemployment may do the same in Germany's federal elections in September.
  [It didn't. Germans figured it's too close to discipline the center-left right now and it was, cuz they won by a whisker.]
  Concerned, the German government is considering scaling back jobless benefits to push the unemployed into the work force.
  "Reforms" [our quotes - ed.] are tough to implement and the trend is unlikely to be reversed anytime soon. Industry groups in Italy, for example, want to remove a law passed in the 1970s that makes it hard for large companies to fire. But recent government proposals to water down the restriction prompted the largest one-day strike in decades in April.
  [It's amazing how eager CEOs the world over are to downsize domestic consumer markets and slit their own revenue throats.]
  The resistance stems in part from Europeans growing accustomed to their newfound leisure. The French hours-reduction law gave Thierry Gaymard, a manager of nine Toys "R" Us stores north of Paris, 9½ weeks of vacation, more than twice as much as he got before the law was introduced. Instead of cutting his work week, he's taking longer vacations.
  Mr. Gaymard has used the extra time to lower his golf handicap and attend more school activities of his two young daughters. And he's begun building a new house, about a third bigger than his family's current home. For his American wife, accustomed to two- to three-week U.S. vacations, it was a "pretty big shock," he says. Now: "She loves it."
  [So if this is an attempted hatchet job, it comes off more as rueful praise. How will the American plutocrats keep the hoi polloi's noses to the grindstone now?! The comments of British Columbian shorter-hours advocate Tom Walker on this article can be found at *http://maxspeak.org/gm/archives/00000317.html.]

  8/07/2002  timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

  1. [there are smart unions -]
     London subway workers mull strike, AP 08/06/02 10:42 EDT via AOLNews.
     ...The Rail, Maritime and Transport Union, which represents train drivers and station staff..\..rejected...London Underground's offer of a 3% raise..\..Tuesday, and will vote on whether to strike, officials said....
     Also Tuesday, drivers with First North Western trains in northern England announced they would hold three 48-hour strikes Aug. 13-14, Aug. 27-28 and Sept. 10-11. The strikes had been called off last week, but the Aslef union said Tuesday that management had reneged on an agreement that included a 3.5% pay increase and reduced working hours.

  2. [and there are not-so-smart unions -]
     Union slams bureaucrat's call for shorter working days, Australian Broadcasting 08/6/2002 11:01 AEST via AOLNews.
     The union movement has described as hypocritical comments by a senior Canberra bureaucrat urging executives to work shorter days so they can spend more time with their families. The Secretary of the Dept. of Employment and Workplace Relations, Peter Boxall, has told a conference in Canberra that more of an effort should be made to accommodate family and social commitments.
     [One of Phil Hyde's campaign slogans in 1996 and 1998 vs. Joe Kennedy was "More family time for more family values."]
     A spokesman for the Community and Public Sector Union, Adrian O'Connell, says Mr Boxall's comments are unrealistic, as they come at a time when workers are being expected to work longer hours.
     [O'Connell has obviously never heard the phrase, "You attract more flies with honey than vinegar." Positive reinforcement is a much stronger force than negative reinforcement, yet this dummy is whacking somebody who is saying what he wants to hear. His stupidity goes further -]
     Mr O'Connell says Mr Boxall's Department wants more workers to sign individual contracts which do not include any provisions for minimum working hours.
     [The important line to draw for economywide centrifugation of income and wealth is maximum working hours, not minimum. Sweatshops don't need higher minimums, they need lower maximums - or they'll get worse. And O'Connell should be building on Boxall's words, not attacking them, to erode the Dept.'s individual contract push.]
     "There is often an expectation on employees who are on individual contracts that they will work extra hours and long hours, so that they can move through the organization and become CEO's," Mr O'Connell said.
     [But is there any reason why individual contractors shouldn't become organized and have backup union representation? That's essentially how the Writers' Union part of the UAW works in the USA. And the new unions for teaching assistants at various American colleges.]
  8/06/2002  timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope - nothing current so we dip into the barrel of late arrivals - please patronize the forward-looking timesizing companies we feature -
  • (7/30)  V-ONE Corporation reports financial resultsfor the second quarter and first six months of 2002, Business Wire 07/29/2002 08:04 Eastern via AOLNews.
    GERMANTOWN, Md...- V-ONE Corp. (Nasdaq: VONE) [yester]day reported revenue of $0.9m for Q2 and $1.73m for the first 6 months of fiscal 2002.... Said Margaret Grayson, President and CEO of V-ONE Corp., "V-ONE is continuing to reduce costs of operations and has implemented an across-the-board salary reduction program effective July16th.... Further steps were taken to reduce expenses in mid-July by implementing a reduced workweek designed to ensure that customers' requirements are met without jeopardizing the company's workforce....
    [Classic timesizing, not downsizing!]
    Providing enterprise-level network security protection since 1993, V-ONE Corp.'s flagship product is SmartGate®, a client/server Virtual Private Network technology. Fortune 1000 corporations, healthcare organizations and sensitive government agencies worldwide use SmartGate for their integrated authentication, encryption and access control. With its patented client deployment and management capabilities, SmartGate is a compelling solution for remote access intranets and secure extranets for electronic business between trading partners, for both conventional and wireless networks....
    Contact:
    Investor Relations: Merle Miller 301-515-5200 x5702.
    ..\..Product and network security information, white papers and the company's latest news releases may be accessed via *www.v-one.com....
  8/05/2002  timesizing awareness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -
  • [Timesizing applies not only to workweek limits but also worklife limits. We've had articles on the upper limit (retirement, mandatory and voluntary), Here's an article on the lower limit.]
    Government asked to act on teenagers' job safety - Some work risks too high, advocates say - Lax enforcement of child-labor regulations is cited as a concern, by Steven Greenhouse, NYT, A8.
    With nearly 4m teenagers at work across the natoin this summer, many health safety experts say it is time for the government to revise its 60-year-old list of jobs barred to young people because they are too dangerous.
    [No, it's time for the government to establish a regular 10-year referendum on the cutoff age and get completely OUT of the list business. Any time gov't gets sucked into this kind of level of detail, citizens as parents etc. are sloughing off their own oversight responsibilities, getting into blame-evasion and totally unrealistic expectations about what government is going to protect them from, and citizens as taxpayers are moving into an impossible no-win situation.]
    Federal rules already prohibit people under 18 from many hazardous jobs, including mining and logging, but some pediatricians and children's advocates want the Bush administration to declare other work off limits, including construction and window washing.
    ["WIndow washing"???]
    They point to an August 1998 accident in which a 15-year-old boy died when he fell 4 stor[eys] while working as a window washer's assistant outside Seattle.
    [A reasonable law would prohibit ALL child labor under 16 except in family businesses.]
    ...More than half of teenage deaths in agriculture occur in family businesses, often in tractor rollovers.... "In family businesses, parents often don't realize they're being careless about safety"..\..said Dr. Susan Pollack, director of the pediatric and adolescent injury protection program at the University of Kentucky..\..
    [Then that's their lookout, and their own family funeral. Injecting gov't into potentially family businesses and training of their own youth is overkill alias hyper-protectionism on the other side. Bad things happen, period. There are all kinds of design responses at the equipment level that are appropriate as solutions, and there are blanket-prohibition responses in terms of lists of jobs that are neither practical nor appropriate nor "solutions." If "parents often don't realize they're being careless about safety" because a particular activity happens to be on a big long gov't list of proscribed jobs, it's because it's unrealistic to expect parents to get ahold of a copy and read that list, especially if it's ever-changing, as these advocates seem to want.]
    Many children's advocates and safety experts say government action is needed because each year 300,000 workers under age 18 suffer injuries and about 70 die, about one on-the-job death every 5 days. The injury rate for teenagers - 4.9 injuries per 100 workers per year - is almost twice that for adults, even though many hazardous jobs are barred to teenagers.... Even when jobs are barred to teenagers, injuries can still happen. Calling for stepped-up enforcement, safety advocates point to one study reporting that 40% of teenagers who died on the job were doing tasks prohibited to them by law.... A 1988 study of 562 teenage workers in North Carolina found that 31 reported using forklifts, tractors or riding mowers and 36% reported using ladders or scaffolds. A 1996 Massachusetts study found that 19% used food slicers and 13% box crushers, even though federal law prohibited people under 18 from operating those machines. In its new report, the occupational safety institute [shouldn't they have capitalized this??] recommends...letting 16-...and 17-year-olds use meat slicers [because] injuries from [them] are usually minor, [but] angered children's advocates [disagreed].\..
    [Such government list making violates one of the supreme rules of rule-making that we mention on our general 'goodnews' page today (8/05/2002) - KEEP IT SIMPLE. The idea these advocates seem to have of expecting everyone to read a constantly updating and lengthening government list of prohibited jobs for youngsters involves government in an expensive and ludicrous goosechase and sets up wildly unrealistic expectations of parents. "Accidents will happen," and you can run your family close to the edge or you can broaden the margin of safety. Close to the edge you'll find more "accidents will happen," but even when you broaden the margin of safety, occasionally some fluke will snag you or your family, and that's just 'show biz.' More sensible might be doing studies to discover at what age the injury rate for young people falls within an acceptable multiple of the injury rate for older workers (define "acceptable multiple" by occasionally repeating, multiple-choice referendum) and then set the general lower limit on everyone's working life at that age.]
    ...Blame for the injuries and fatalities is shared by teenagers, parents, employers and the government, public health experts say. Young workers are less mature, have less judgment and work experience than adults, and are less likely to challenge their bosses about dangerous tasks. "Teens sometimes do things in an effort to please their employers [even though] those things are dangerous," said Carol Runyan, director of the University of North Carolina Injury Prevention Research Center. "They don't want to ask questions because they don't want [it] to appear that they don't know how to do things."
    Studies show 4/5 of teenage injuries occurred when no supervisor was present and 1/2 when there was not proper training. ...After serious accidents, parents are often shocked to learn that their children were doing hazardous work.
    [And many teens may not be telling their parents what they're doing in the first place - another factor to mix in with the decision about what age at which to draw the general limit - and no general limit is going to prevent all accidents. "Accidents will happen." The important thing is to facilitate a population's decision on the lower limit with a regular but infrequent referendum - enforce that general line, and expend the bulk of your law enforcement efforts on behalf of youngsters in more serious areas like kidnapping and sexual abuse. Here's an example of child labor in Afghanistan -]
    Feature - Afghan carpet makers find industry at crossroads, by David Fox, Reuters 08/02/02 via AOLNews.
    ...The looms are made of steel - the only bow to modernity in the process - but everything else is done the same wasy as it was centuries ago. Far from the stereotypical image of a Dickensian sweatshop..\..Ghulam Yahia['s] factory with 15 looms in the western suburbs of Kabul...is a cheerful place with the boys teasing each other and constantly playing pranks. Some of the boys are as young as nine, but they all go to school and work after hours in the factory....
    [Ah, the "happy slave" in different guise.]
  8/03/2002  dim timesizing awareness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -
  1. [doing a good thing but viewing it as a bad thing -]
     Companies determined to contain labor costs, by Louis Uchitelle, NYT, B1.
     Determined to hold down costs in a weak economy, the nation's employers slashed hours, cut overtime and limited hiring to a bare minimum....
     [At least they slowed down on downsizing, so they were doing a good thing = timesizing, not downsizing.]
     Employers cut the average workweek by an unusually large 3/10 of an hour, to a flat 34 hours. Not since the Labor Dept. began to track the average workweek in 1964 has it been as short, except in two unusual months: January of 1996 when a blizzard struck the East Coast, and October of last year, in the aftermath of 9/11. The glum labor report...helped send the stock market down again..\..
     [How stupid can we get? We regard a shorter workweek as bad news? That's ridiculous! As long as we keep people employed IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW SHORT THE WORKWEEK GETS because we'll still have our foundational consumer demand intact. The whole point of the wave after wave of efficient worksaving technology that we have been pouring into our economy is to provide more money for less work. If we cut the workweek and spread the progress to everyone, we'll all be in heaven. If we cut the workforce and pile up the work and money on the few, while disemploying and impoverishing the many, we'll all be in hell. Pick one (and if we don't pick consciously and deliberately, the default selection is hell).]
     The latest data raised fresh questions about the faltering recovery....
     The unemployment rate remained steady at 5.9%, the same as June...
     [and even if it didn't, the political pressure to keep it below 6% is enormous enough to do whatever it takes to keep it the same]
     as 86,000 people who might have been listed as unemployed and job hunting dropped out of the labor force....
     [and stopped being counted. What a pathetic excuse for an economic index!]
     The number of temporary workers, which had been growing in earlier months and usually rises as the economy is beginning to move, shrank in July....
     Total employment, based on a survey of companies, rose a bare 6,000 - an almost imperceptible gain.
     [Not only imperceptible but well within margins of statistical error. Not only within error margins but totally swamped by the 86,000 people who quit lookin' and in any sensible index would still be counted because they're now unsustainable or reducing others' spending power.]
     Consumers...continued to sustain the "recovery" [our quotes - ed.], as they have for months. Their spending rose in June by the largest amount in two years.... But here too, the signals were mixed....
     [The main mixer here is consumer credit, which is the real sustainer of the "recovery." This article, and many economists and analysts, try to say that slightly rising income is sustaining the spending, but the hugely rising income of the top brackets (apart from stock losses) is skewing all the income figures.]

  2. [inchoate irritation at overtime per job]
     Oakwood Healthcare System maximizes workforce efficiencies with Per-Se's One-Staff process automation solution, Business Wire 08/02/2002 13:47 Eastern via AOLNews.
     Like many healthcare systems seeking innovative ways to enhance patient care and workforce productivity, Oakwood Healthcare System in Dearborn, Mich., has turned to information technology from Per-Se Technologies. In the face of a growing national nursing shortage, Oakwood selected Per-Se's One-Staff® enterprise-wide staff and productivity management software solution to manage staffing challenges across its healthcare enterprise.... "The inability to allocate appropriate staffing to address care needs and stay on top of fluctuations in workload census caused costly staffing errors, unnecessary overtime and work duplication"..\..said Nini Coury, RN, clinical staffing and resource manager at Oakwood Healthcare System.... "We implemented One-Staff to help us address these issues."...
     [But then, to a good manager, all overtime is unnecessary, and the Timesizing program's Phase Two feature whereby the incidence of overtime automatically triggers training &/or hiring guarantees that any overtime rapidly becomes unnecessary.if it isn't at the gitgo.]

  3. [formless annoyance at overtime per person, across jobs = overwork]
     Feminist author to grace new Japan banknotes, Reuters 08/02/02 03:10 ET via AOLNews.
     TOKYO...- A 19th century feminist author will become the [second] woman to grace the front of modern Japanese banknotes when the money gets a facelift aimed at fooling counterfeiters.... The 5,000 yen bill will be adorned by a solemn portrait of kimono-clad Ichiyo Higuchi, a 19th century woman author who wrote of the unhappy and restricted lives of young women.... Higuchi, born in 1872 to a minor bureaucrat, was forced to end her education in grammar school, but later achieved fame for her moving fiction. Overwork and poverty contributed to her death at the age of 24 from tuberculosis.
     [The Timesizing program counteracts overwork and (in terms of cumulative overtime per person - from all sources/jobs) and karoshi (death from overwork) in Phase Three.]
     The only other woman to grace Japanese banknotes in modern times is Murasaki Shikibu, the 11th century court lady who authored the classic "Tale of Genji" narrative and peeks out shyly on the back of 2,000 yen banknotes introduced in 2000..\..
     Finance Minister Masajuro Shiokawa told a news conference on Friday [that] he had selected Higuchi and..\..Hideyo Noguchi, the microbiologist who isolated the cause of syphilis [1,000 yen bill]....as symbols of the changes needed to push forward Japan's stagnant economy. "Until now, the portraits of people on the bills leaned too much toward politicians. But the Japanese economy will become more wide-ranging [i.e., diversity-including] - equal participation by men and women. And we want to acknowledge pioneers," he said....
     [ Timesizing integrates maximum diversity and unleashes maximum variabiliity by applying balancing controls only in the very comprehensive time dimension (worktime) and thereby decontroling a horde of more specific and targeted and stifling controls at less comprehensive dimensional levels, such as jobs programs, rent control and affordable housing programs, food-stamp programs, The more general and comprehensive the point of balancing and equilibration, the more diversity and variability in the system. But the mere inclusion of diversity cannot guarantee variability and resulting survivability to a system. For that we need a balanced allocation of resources, based on a balance between the centripetal and centrifugal forces on wealth. Mere currency redesign or diversity celebration makes little contribution to counteracting the overwhelming centripetal forces on wealth. For that you need to start with much stronger work-sharing systems, such as those being applied at the local and prefectural levels in Japan, and such as the Timesizing program.]

  8/02/2002  primitive Timesizing in the news, aka a glimmer of strategic hope -
  • Korea's Hyundai Motor July sales rise, Kia suffers (Wraps sales figures, adds analyst comments), by Samuel Len, Reuters 08/01/02 02:56 ET via AOLNews.
    SEOUL...- Hyundai Motor Co., South Korea's largest automaker, said on Thursday July sales rose more than 20% from a year earlier aided by strong demand for SUVs and new models, but affliliate Kia Motors suffered from strike action.
    Analysts said the implementation of a shorter workweek for South Koreans had created more demand for SUVs and the end of the World Cup finals brought more South Koreans into showrooms.
    [At last, some intelligent analysts!]
    ...Said Don Shim, an auto analyst at KGI Securities, "There is a continued demand for SUVs, especially with the 5-day work week taking full force."...
    [South Korea had been on a 5½- and 6-day workweek.]
    Financial industry workers in South Korea won a 5-day workweek in May. Various government ministries are also experimenting with the shortened week....
    [Guess the shortened workweek hasn't really taken full force if various gov't ministries are still just experimenting with it.]
  8/01/2002  primitive Timesizing in the news, aka a glimmer of strategic hope - nothing current so we dip into the barrel of late arrivals -
  • (7/25) Building union launches campaign for shorter working week, Australian Broadcasting 07/24/2002 14:54 AEST via AOLNews.
    The union representing building workers has started campaigning for a shorter working week, saying yesterday's Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) decision has forced it to take the issue into its own hands. The AIRC ruled that workers can refuse to work excessive overtime but stopped short of setting a national standard on what constitutes unreasonable hours.
    Construction, Forestry, Mining & Energy Union (CFMEU) national secretary John Sutton says the union has now finalised its claim for the new round of bargaining in the building industry which begins in September. "We will be campaigning for a 36-hour week on building sites up and down the country," he said. "We'll be campaigning for a decent wage increase for our people together with an increase in issues such as superannuation [ie: retirement?] and redundancy [ie: layoffs] et cetera."

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