Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

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Timesizing News, August 21-31, 2002
[Commentary] ©2002 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

8/31/2002  primitive timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

• [France is already showing symptoms of weakened work sharing -]
  France: Unemployment rises, Reuters via NYT, B2.
  French unemployment rose by 18,000 to 2.43m last month, its highest in almost two years....
  [Well, maybe the absolute number of unemployed persons is the highest in 2 yrs, but the French unemployment rate has been at 9%, even 9.1%, since France, last among the euro-based economies except for erstwhile subsidized Ireland, finally succumbed to the global recession.]
  ...As predicted by economists, the rate of unemployment held steady at 9%, according to Labor Ministry figures, leaving it among the highest of the 15 nations in the European Union. [But not as high as the biggest, Germany. A number of French employers have probably taken advantage of the swing to Chirac to further weaken France's primitive implementation of work sharing. They will pay dearly for it in weakened domestic markets.]
  ..\..Economists warned of worse to come as companies reorganize amid a weak economic recovery.... The latest figures come as French companies hold down costs to rebuild profits hit by last year's slowdown and seek to streamline to become more competitive....
  [French employers, generally no brighter than American employers, are allowing themselves to get drawn into the "race to the bottom." They react to slowdown in a way that worsens the slowdown - downsizing - instead of a way that strengthens recovery - timesizing - by centrifuging the work and income of the nation and strengthening domestic markets.]
  

1. Businesses can learn from failure, by Joyce Rosenberg, AP 08/29/02 07:05 EDT via AOLNews.
   Jeff and Diane Hunt started their silk-screening and embroidery business with a can-do attitude.... And that was fine, until CES Screenprinting and Embroidery started getting bigger, and there was no organized way for all the work to get done.... Things were so bad, Hunt said, that at one point, nearly a fifth of their receivables...were still unpaid after 30 days. No one had time to call customers to remind them the bills were due.
   CES, located in Indian Trail NC, is still in business today.... Along the way, the Hunts learned to delegate more, freeing them to do the tasks they really need to do. And Hunt said his workweek has shrunk to 40-50 hours a week from 80-100....
   [That's one thing for entrepreneurs and family businesses, but if the whole economy did that, work that is still unautomated would get so bunched up on so few people, domestic markets would collapse.]

2. French PM Raffarin seeks to dispel budget doubts, by Joelle Diderich, Reuters 08/29/02 07:03 ET via AOLNews.
   Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin on Thursday sought to quell doubts about his government's ability to juggle its pledges of taxcuts and spending rises against a background of disappointing growth.... Adding to the government's troubles, it faces the threat of union protests over its plans to cut employers' labour costs and ease restrictions on the 35-hour workweek, a flagship reform of the previous Socialist government [that was] ousted in June. Labour and Social Affairs Minister Francois Fillon is consulting unions and employers this week to ease the path of the [counter-]reform, due to be presented to parliament in October.
   [This story must be a regurgitation or have been filed late because this consultation has already taken place and the unions have declared their disatisfaction with it.]
   Raffarin is acutely aware that strikes in 1995 helped bring down France's conservative government two years later....

1. Mesaba Aviation to furlough some pilots, shut bases, Dow Jones via WSJ, A8.
   MINNEAPOLIS - ...The parent of a commuter airline that operates as a Northwest Airlink partner of Northwest Airlines..\..will furlough about 50 of its 950 pilots...between now and year end due to an expected drop in passengers [after 9/11] and lower aircraft usage.
   [That's 50 jobs saved by cutting worktime instead of workforce.]
   Mesaba...will...close its [flight-crew] bases in Wausau and Rhinelander WI..\.. ...Traffic fell 12.1% for the first 7 months of 2002..\.. The cost-cutting measures come on the heels of similar actions by many of Mesaba's larger competitors, including AMR Corp. [ie: American] and Continental Airlines....

2. [Mesaba's response to downturn offers some good news. Now for some bad news that still reflects a hopeful timesizing consciousness -]
   Working in the post-recession workplace equals heavier workloads and longer workdays, CareerBuilder.com survey shows, PRNewswire 08/28/2002 08:45 EDT via AOLNews.
   ["Post-recession"??? What makes them so sure?! At any rate, that's the extent of the good news in this PR piece.]
   CHICAGO...- Workers in today's post-recession workplace are struggling to survive. Demands placed upon workers has resulted in increased workloads, longer workdays and rarely a break from the routine of work, according to CareerBuilder.com's "Life at Work" survey [which] included more than 1,400 respondents.
   After months and months of layoffs, many organizations are attempting to do the same amount of work as they managed to do last year; however, the volume of work is taxing the capacities of an already compressed staff. Not surprisingly, more than one-third of workers reported an increase in their workloads in the past 6 months.
   "Since Labor Day 2001, layoffs have touched the majority of workers in the workforce, either indirectly or directly," said Dawn Haden, a senior career advisor at CareerBuilder.com. "Because of the impending threat of a layoff, actual or implied, workers are getting the job done and making themselves appear indispensable. This has resulted in longer hours and heavier workloads." [Pretty stupid, eh? Longer hours and heavier workloads in an age when there has never been more worksaving technology, and all because our executive and employer class can't think more than one move ahead in chess and see that a downsizing response to technology strangles your customer base and dishes up recession, while a timesizing response (trimming the workweek, not the workforce) makes life better for everyone, including them.]
   Despite the workplace innovations of flextime and 4-day workweeks, the majority of workers spend 40 hours or more working 5 days a week on the job. Arriving to work early does not guarantee the possibility of leaving work early or on time.   39% of those who arrived at work early stayed late. Of those who stated that they arrived on time, 30% stayed late. With more than two-thirds of workers scheduled for a 5-day workweek, 46% reported that they work 40 hours or more as compared to 42% as measured in a CareerBuilder.com survey conducted in October 2001.
   In the post-recession workplace, the lunch hour is a misnomer: half of workers surveyed spent 45 minutes or less at lunch and 35% took 30 minutes or less for lunch.   67% stated that they did not leave the company premises for lunch. Instead, these workers ate in a designated lunch area, took a break in their work area or ate while working.
   45% of workers indicated that they were dissatisfied with their pay and more than 1/3 was dissatisfied with opportunities for career advancement. "Once the economy shows solid signs of improvement, the balance of these workers will be poised to seek another opportunity," commented Haden.
   [Don't hold your breath, cuz American CEOs are still practicing kneejerk downsizing instead of timesizing, and all that downsizing is still leaving pockets of economic depression in its wake.]
   The survey
   ...was conducted from July 11 to July 18, 2002.... CareerBuilder.com commissioned SurveySite to use an e-mail methodology whereby individuals who are members of SurveySite Web Panel were randomly selected and approached...to participate in the online survey. The results of this survey are accurate within +/- 2.5%.
   ...CareerBuilder
   ...is a leading online source for maximizing recruitment dollars and optimizing job searches with superior products, customer service and technology.... For more information..., call 888-670-TEAM or visit... *CareerBuilder.com
   Media contact
   ...Lynda Orban at (949) 439-8406 or... lynda@orbanassociates.com

3. French govt '03 target unrealistic - business, Reuters 08/28/02 07:49 ET via AOLNews.
   PARIS...- France's employers association, Medef, said on Wednesday the government's forecast of 3% economic growth next year was "absolutely unrealistic" and pressed it to undertake controversial labour market "reforms."...
   [Our quotes around "reforms" since at least half the population would call them "changes for the worse," not the better - ed.]
   Adding to the government's troubles, \Medef's\ president, Ernest-Antoine Seilliere...said Medef wanted to see a relaxation of working hour restrictions - a "reform" opposed by the country's powerful unions.
   [The employers' association in France (Medef) is a lot less far-sighted than its counterpart in Japan (Nikkeiren) - see 3/29/2002 #1. Work sharing is another name for cutting the workweek to spread the shrinking amount of yet-unautomated human employment across more people who need to support themselves.]
   Seilliere urged the government to relax a law introduced by the previous...government which restricts the legal maximum number of overtime hours worked to 130 per year.
   [So the real maximum number of annual working hours in France is higher than you'd calculate just by multiplying 35 hours x 48 weeks (= 1680 hours). It's actually 1680+130= 1810 hours.]
   "We need a decree, for example, on overtime that increases the possibility for our country to work," he said, adding that Medef was concerned the government was hesitant about pushing ahead with such labour market "reforms."
   [Maybe that's because Medef, like English-speaking economists, analysts and most employers, is narrowly focused on working to produce output regardless of markets, and the difference with the Nikkeiren in Japan is that Japanese employers have seen 12 years without markets, and they've decided that maybe they need to optimize production in conjunction with optimizing their nation's consumption.]
   Despite government efforts to tread carefully on the labour reform issue, Seilliere said it must decree that employees can work longer hours - regardless of the outcome of talks with unions on the issue.
   [France, as the only nation with a statutory workweek as low as 35 hours, may be the most advanced economy in the world, but there are still a lot of people there who just don't get it. They don't understand that the promise of technology - less work and more pay - is not just a nice option. It's a categorical imperative - unless you want to stagnate wages and funnel and deactivate the spending power of the nation, clobber your consumer base, strangle domestic demand and generate unending recession - like Japan without worksharing the last 12 years. So even many people in France dance to the old anglosaxon Puritan Work Ethic = never mind working smart, just "work hard to get ahead."]
   "(Negotiations) won't lead to a result without conditions, because the unions...are not spontaneously going to go along with a reduction in the most restrictive aspects (of the legislation)," he said.
   [Seilliere is sooo clueless, perhaps he should just move to the USA where the unconditional surrender of the unions to employers is virtually absolute since they allowed themselves to be bribed out of the 30-hour workweek bill in the 1930s, and the payoff has been colossal corruption among employers and a consequently shaky stock market.]
   While pledging to ease working hours restrictions, the government is also eager to avoid protests by trade unions, whose strikes in 1995 helped lead two years later to the fall of France's last conservative government.
   Anxious to avoid such a fate, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has initiated a one-week round of consultations with unions on a package of proposed labour "reform" plans. But after meeting Labour and Social Affairs Minister Francois Fillon, the head of the CGT union, one of France's biggest, threatened on Tuesday to take to the streets if the government pushes ahead with plans.

1. Computer Sciences plans to cut 450 jobs, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...The 3rd-largest U.S. computer services company...whose customers include JP Morgan Chase...recently asked 60,000 workers to volunteer to take six months of leave with 20% of their pay.
   [Although Computer Sciences is announcing jobcuts today and did cut 2,000 jobs last year, it is also apparently trying to cut worktime as a substitute for even more workforce cuts = timesizing, not downsizing.]

2. French union threatens protest over labour "reform" [our quotes - ed.], Reuters 08/27/02 15:52 ET via AOLNews.
   PARIS...- One of France's biggest trade unions [600,000-members] threatened on Tuesday to take to the streets if the government goes ahead with plans to cut employers' labour costs and ease restrictions on working hours.... The proposals include a relaxation in the 35-hour workweek introduced by the Socialist-led government ousted in June.... Some unionists have criticised the government for announcing the tenor of its bill before even consulting [the] parties involved. The CGT, in particular, has vowed to oppose the attempt to extend the working week, where the government proposes to raise the legal maximum number of overtime hours..\..
   [The French do not yet have a good overtime design, such as a corporate tax on overtime with an exemption for setting up on-the-job training in overtime-targeted skills.]
   CGT union chief Bernard Thiibault made the threat after meeting Labour and Social Affairs Minister Francois Fillon, who began a week of consultation with union bosses with the aim of avoiding protests.... Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is acutely aware that strikes in 1995 helped to bring down France's last conservative government two years later....
   Other unions back the [increase in the overtime limit] as long as it is negotiated with each wage category.
   [Pretty stupid of them. They're basically saying, "Divide (and conquer) us," which pretty well undermines the whole concept of "union."]
   Unions are also in favour of harmonising the minimum wage, currently split into six tiers.
   [Now that would be unifying.]
   Labour groups also have concerns about other Raffarin measures, including the planned privatisation of state companies, pension reform and proposals to streamline France's large public sector by shedding posts. The are demanding broad wage increases for low earners,
   [if they'd keep cutting the workweek, market forces would take care of broad wage increases for them automatically.]
   which they say will help stimulate the hesitant economic recovery in France, the euro-zone's 2nd-largest economy.
   [Centrifuging the income of the nation would definitely stimulate the economy, and they're not going to get a recovery (nor is anywhere else in the world) until they do.]

• [Seldom to we get to see, in this age of worksaving technology, such as CBT (computer-based training), clueless Americans lengthening their workweek before our very eyes, but here's an example in our supposed "educational" industry -]
  Spending less time being taught, teachers will teach more, by Abby Goodnough, NYT, A17.
  [As opaque a headline as was ever written. Let's try the photo caption -]
  Joel I. Klein, chancellor of New York City's public schools, said yesterday that the workweek for teachers this year would increase by 100 minutes.
  [That's one hour and 40 minutes more per week. Why does increasing your workweek lose you power? Because you're overloading the existing workforce and decreasing the chances of reducing the number of un- and under-employed people who are getting desperate and willing to do your job for less pay than you. Their existence increases your employer's bargaining power and decreases yours.]
  In his first attempt at improving instruction for NYC schoolchildren, Chancellor Joel Klein has added 2 days to the coming school year, time that had been set aside for teacher training.
  The last-minute change comes on top of a decision earlier this year to extend teacher workweeks by 100 minutes.
  [Nowhere in the article does it say what teacher workweeks are, so we can only assume that this is yet another American profession with no accountable workweek for employees, and a "shadow time accounting" system only for employers when they want to add more worktime. Soon we'll see American teachers protesting alongside American nurses, medical students and pilots. Teachers do, after all, already have to do marking of tests and essays "on their own time" at home.]
  Under a new contract agreement, teachers will spend half of the additional time [50 minutes a week] on training and half on instruction [the other 50 minutes a week]. To accommodate that change, most schools will be starting roughly 20 minutes earlier each day....
  [20 minutes times 5 days yields the 100 additional minutes per week, so additional teacher training for 10 minutes a day and additional teaching for the other 10 minutes? How meaningful. Apparently many schools are parceling the 100 extra minutes into two 50-minute sessions a week - which, however, make for a pretty early day twice a week and a rather erratic weekly schedule. What are the school buses going to do?]
  The shift creates logistical hurdles for teachers and parents alike, though most were informed of the schedule change in June, school officials said, so they have had time to prepare....
  [How about time for input into the decision??? Americans need to wake up to the fact that the most important aspect of work is maximum workweek and schedule, and they either get ahold of those decisions or they slide through a dictatorial 3rd-world stage to a depressed 3rd-world future. The teachers' union apparently did make some effort to draw a line -]
  The teachers' union insisted on a provision in the new contract stipulating that teachers cannot be forced to work past 3:30..\..
  [But how many teachers are involved enough in the union to not need the schedule change announcement in June?]
  Just yesterday, however, Mr. Klein informed school principals that 2 days that were previously set aside for training - Sept. 27 and Dec. 13 - would now be regular school days, meaning many students will be in the classroom 184 days a year, 4 more than the state requires....
  In the recent past, NYC schools have had up to 6 so-called professional development days per year, when students stayed home and teachers attended workshops meant to improve their skills. Parents often complained about the loss of instruction and the inconvenience [of having their kids stay home].... In one infamous case last year, the Queens High School District scheduled workshops in aromatherapy, yoga and birdwatching. This year, Mr. Klein, a former federal prosecutor who was Mayor Bloomberg's handpicked choice...is allowing only one training day, on Election Day. ...Mr. Klein said the decision made sense because half the additional worktime negotiated in the new contract was devoted to teacher training.... Principals also welcomed the change, saying that 50 minutes a week of professional development would be more useful than occasional daylong workshops.
  [We're hearing from everybody but the teachers themselves.]
  ..\..Mr. Klein also told superintendents and principals it was up to them to decide which students would receive the 50 extra minutes of instruction a week.... Several principals also said they were thrilled to have discretion over which students received extra instruction, because they wanted to help more students than Mr. Levy's plan [limited to only the weakest students) would have allowed....
  [This way the system can gradually evolve, as these things do, into extra instruction for the strongest and best students in the class.]
  Mr. Klein started his job on Aug. 19, and his most pressing responsibility is ensuring a smooth opening to the school year. This year, that involves figuring out the logistics of the newly lengthened school day - no easy task in a system with 1,100 schools, 80,000 teachers and 1.1 million students. One of the big questions that remains is exactly how the additional time will be parceled out over the course of the school year, and how it will affect the schedule of every student and teacher....
  

• Breathing space tight for French PM Raffarin, by Mark John, Reuters 08/25/02 04:55 ET via AOLNews.
  PARIS...- Back from sampling the fresh air of his alpine summer retreat, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin will find his breathing space uncomfortably tight upon his return to Paris this week.... France's 2nd-biggest trade union, the CGT, is out to block moves to allow firms get-out clauses from France's 35-hour working week, the flagship reform of the former Socialist-led government that was ousted in June national elections....
  [Hey, at least this article is calling the shorter workweek itself a "reform" instead of plans to weaken it. Looks like France's new government is out to unshare the nation's vanishing employment and increase its unemployment rate back up to 13%. Brilliant. France's rigid and arbitrary shorter workweek isn't the greatest design (Timesizing is), but it did cut France's unemployment one percent (from 12.6% to 8.7%) for each of the four hours it was shortened (from 39 to 35), and at least France is "tinkering in the right garage" instead of continuing to waste time on makework and minimum wage (let along war-mongering) like some nations we could name.]

• Work done out of office stirs suits - Employees protest lack of added pay for at-home tasks, by Cheryl Hall, Dallas Morning News via Arizona Republic, D2.
  Employer-provided laptops, PCs, cellphones, pagers and other modern gizmos can be flexible tools for the mobile workplace, but they're also making it hard for employees to leave work behind. A national survey taken this summer indicates that 93% of workers who qualify for overtime [OT] under federal law take work home.
  [Sounds very high - for this proportion, you'd have to have a lot of manufacturing employees taking work home and that's just not happening.]
  More than half receive no payment for this work. Two in 10 feel downright exploited.
  These are key reasons for an escalating number of employee class-action lawsuits, according to Employment Law Alliance, the network of labor and employment attorneys that commissioned the poll. "There may be no bigger issue in the American workplace," Stephen Hirschfeld, a San Francisco attorney who heads the Alliance, said in announcing the survey results.
  [He's right. There isn't. Because the more we load the work on fewer people, the more we starve our consumer base, and the less we pay the fewer people we load the work on, the more we starve our consumer base. This practice does both, and the more we starve our consumer base, the more we induce recession.]
  "Employers just can't say to non-exempt[-from-OT] employees that they are expected to be on call around the clock but pay them for only the eight hours they work in an office." Employers set themselves up for big-time OT bills by not keeping close tabs on off-premises work, said Phil Jones, partner-in-charge of the labor and employment practice at Locke Liddell & Sapp and a founding member of the Alliance.... He suggests that companies require written authorization before employees are allowed to work OT....
  There is another dangerous issue: Too many companies don't understand what jobs can be classified as exempt, Jones said. Simply taking someone off the clock doesn't mean the worker isn't due OT [pay].
  [Now that virtually every professional skill has either temps or professional contractors working "billable hours," the simplest way to handle this misunderstanding, and the way that will eventually prevail, is to make nothing exempt from OT. The whole salary concept has become just a blank check on employees' lives, and that ain't healthy.]
  "Employers think that if they make employees salaried and call them exempt, they are," he said. "But their job description must fall into one of the four exempt categories set up by the Dept. of Labor - executive, administrative, professional or outside sales."
  [The administrative and outside sales are the weakest of these four categories, and with billable-time consulting, the other two categories are also unnecessary.]
  A single disgruntled or fired employee can throw an entire company into timecard upheaval, Jones said. One official complaint often leads to a federal audit of the entire company's classification system for all work performed in the previous three years.
  [And we make fun of the French OT police?!]
  "Most of the situations I've gotten into involve less than 100 employees," he said. "But when you go back three years with incorrect classifications, you can get up to $500,000 to $1 million pretty quickly."...

• Ryanair denies pilots' flying hours exceed limits, by Carmel Crimmins, Reuters 08/22/02 11:35 ET via AOLNews.
  DUBLIN...- Irish no-frills airline Ryanair Holdings Plc on Thursday denied [that] its pilots work beyond approved limits on flying hours as their union said it was concerned safety standards were being compromised. "Ryanair operates to an approved flight time limitation system, whereby no Ryanair pilot may fly more than 900 hours in any year," an airline spokeswoman told Reuters. "Over the last year to March 31, no Ryanair pilot either reached or exceeded this [international] 900-hour limit, and the average flight hours for each Ryanair pilot was 809 hours."...
  
  • A spokeswoman for the Irish Aviation Authority said that while there rumours of Ryanair pilots working over the 900-hour limit, those rumours have not been substantiated. ...The spokeswoman told Reuters, "We have received only one formal complaint from a Ryanair pilot about working hours and that investigation is ongoing. So far, that claim has not been substantiated"..\..
  • The British Airline Pilots Assoc. (BALPA), which represents pilots in the UK, where more than half Ryanair's fleet is based, said it had received "several" complaints from Ryanair concerned about flying hours..\..
  • The London-based Times newspaper said two Ryanair pilots had contacted it to allege dozens of the airline's pilots had either broken the international 900-hour limit or were scheduled to do so very soon under rosters drawn up by the company....
  Discount carriers such as Ryanair have seen passenger numbers surge over the past year as demand for premium travel plummeted in the wake of 9/11 and full-service rivals cut flights to save costs....
  [In general, English-speaking executives, economists and analysts have been spoiled for three decades by a surplus of labor hours on offer in the job market and consequently they've become careless about the whole issue of scheduling. Here's a group of British Isles pilots who are fighting management sloppiness in this area, which is the only way it's going to change. Note that the 900-hour annual limit is flying time and therefore probably excludes all the airport prep and debriefing time that pilots put in.]

1. Gov't to develop work-sharing guidelines, Kyodo 8/21/02 10:20 EDT via AOLNews.
   [Hmm, we thought they'd already done this back on 3/24/2002 according to Asahi. Guess those guidelines were just preliminary - a "draft agreement to emphasize work sharing for full-time employees."]
   TOKYO...- The Labor Ministry plans to develop guidelines for regular-payroll employees working fewer hours to facilitate work-sharing arrangements in Japan, officials said Wednesday. The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare plans to request a special budget from the Finance Ministry to fund a string of surveys for fiscal 2003 to probe the feelings of Japanese on the proposed short-period regular work system, they said.
   [Japan, the sleeping giant, stirs again and may yet leap ahead of France in prototyping Long-term Centered Capitalism and escaping the quicksand of Short-term Split/Sided Capitalism that the USA, the UK and virtually every other economy is mired in.]
   Employees hired under the system would receive the same hourly pay and fringe benefits as full-time workers on the regular payroll.
   [All well and good. Then a peculiar twist -]
   The system is designed to increase the number of workers by recruiting mothers into the workforce and putting them on regular payrolls amid Japan's low birth rate and resultant rapidly aging population. The Ministry plans to conduct large surveys targeting people from various walks of life from youth below working age to people raising children to those taking care of elderly.
   [Granted a shorter workweek would make it easier for mothers to participate in the workforce and earn spending money to help raise Japan's under-consumption - this is great for single mothers (and single fathers) but doesn't Japan have enough general unemployed people without targeting mothers specifically? After all, why pay some stranger to raise your children if you can do it yourself?]
   The Ministry also plans to set up an advisory council whose members would be charged with devising guidelines for people who apply for the system, they said. The suggestions would be designed to meet specific needs of each industrial sector and business field based on feedback from unionns and industry associations.
   The Ministry wants to present the guidelines to various unions and industry associations, they said. It plans to pick four or five model companies from each area to check whether the guidelines would be workable, the officials said.
   [Good idea. That's what we've done on these news pages and on our case-studies page. Japan has been moving ahead with work sharing pretty steadily. A search of our timesizing news pages just between 11/2001 and 3/2002 reveals these highlights -
   • 11/29/2001 #1 - 3 sectors agree to talk about work sharing
   • 12/28/2001 - Labor Minister plans visit to Germany to observe work sharing (1/15/2002 #2 - he visits)
   • 1/16/2002 #2 - 3 sectors agree Japan should adopt work sharing
   • 3/24/2002 - work-sharing guidelines set in terms of a draft agreement to emphasize work sharing for full-time employees
   • 3/27/2002 #1 - gov't agrees to provide financial aid for work sharing
   [If Japan keeps creeping ahead on this, they're going to have full-blown, nationwide Flexible Adjustment of the Workweek vs. Unemployment, alias Timesizing, before France or Germany achieves that goal, and then they're going to beat the pants off the U.S. and U.K. in terms of consumer-base optimization, GDP per capita, and ecological sustainability!]

2. Sanyo Electric to implement work-sharing scheme - paper, Reuters 8/21/02 14:46 ET via AOLNews.
   [On the company level, Sanyo has really been leading the way on work sharing -
   • 1/17/2002 #3 - Sanyo asks employees to accept work sharing to avoid layoffs
   • 2/09/2002 #1 - Sanyo gets down to design specifics on corporate worksharing]
   Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. plans to streamline its biggest production base in Japan and implement a work-sharing system aimed at drastic cost-cutting while avoiding jobcuts, a Japanese business daily said. Sanyo, Japan's 3rd-largest consumer electronics maker, expects over 1,000 staff to be affected by the scheme to start in October, as part of its plan to partially shift production to cost-friendly China [oh-oh] from its factory in Gunma Prefecture, north of Tokyo, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun's online Thursday edition said....
   Sanyo is one of the first major Japanese firms to adopt such a system, which took effect in April, under which each employee works fewer hours and gets paid less.
   [But if the company's doing well, they can get paid the same for fewer hours, and when the system is applied economywide, market forces make sure they get paid the same or more because, with all the technology they're using, the productivity is there to support the same or higher pay.]
   The scheme includes the transfer of 600 to 700 factory workers to other departments and will mean a cut of up to 20% in base salary for those who will work shorter hours, the paper said.
   [Better a 20% paycut for all and they keep their jobs and make a minimal change in their spending patterns, than a complete job loss for 20% of the current employees who then shut down their spending as much as they can, thereby damaging the consumption patterns of the economy and necessitating further percentage-cuts by the company down the line in a self-fueling downward spiral to economic collapse. The English-speaking economies (with the possible exception of Australia) will be demonstrating this disaster for the world in the next few decades, and maybe sooner, thanks to their productivity-regardless-of-marketability-fixated and efficiency-regardless-of-damage-to-consumer-base-obsessed economists and analysts.]
   Sanyo expects to shift 70% of its output of home-use air conditioners to China starting next March and keep production of high-end and eco-friendly models at home, the paper said. This production shift will generate excess labor of around 2,000 workers at its Gunma factory, the Nihon Keisai said.
   [Here's the problematic part. First, we're apparently going to have eco-hostile models for palming off on the Chinese and other Third-World nations, though the idea of producing for the Third World in the Third World is a good one. Second, what guarantees do we have that production from China won't be marketed for windfall profits in Japan resulting in further workforce and consumer base damage there? Every advanced economy in the world is going to have to design blocking systems for this kind of dumping unless it wishes to join the Third World itself, which seems to be the hidden agenda of the fervent and dogmatic free-traders in the English-speaking world.]

3. French govt urged to trim 2003 growth forecast, Reuters 8/21/02 07:53 ET via AOLNews.
   PARIS...- The French government would be over-optimistic to base next year's budget on its most recent forecast for economic growth of 3%, the chairman of parliament's finance committe said on Wednesday. In an interview with Le Monde, Pierre Mehaignerie urged the government to base the budget on a forecast for growth in [the] range of 2.6-3.0% [big diff, not] and suggested that the tax cuts pledged by Pres. Jacques Chirac might have to wait....
   [Having exchanged the visionary Jospin for the hack Chirac, France is saddled with the same hackneyed economic sugarpills as the U.S., without the added saber-rattling.]
   Mehaignerie also urged the government to push ahead with reform of the country's large civil service. His call for reform came after the president and VP of France's main business federation, MEDEF, urged the government on Tuesday to reform the national pension system, make the 35-hour working week more flexible and lower social charges.
   [Vous français conduisez le monde en la semaine de travail plus courte. Ne laissez pas Chirac et les autres clochards l'affaiblir! Vous avez encore 9% de chaumage d'employer. Il faut la réduire plus pour le faire. So loin vous avez remployer 1% de chaumage pour chacune des quatre heures que vous avez coupez de la semaine de travail, de 13% a 9%. Courage, et continuez! (Et svp, excusez notre 'fractured French.')]

4. Workers participate in a protest, AP 8/21/2002 via AOLNews.
   Workers participate in a protest in Santiago, Chile, Wed., Aug. 21, 2002, prior to a march by more than 3,000 workers demanding better working conditions and protesting a plan to allow employers to hire workers at reduced salaries and for shorter working hours. [isolated-photo caption]
   [We don't know offhand what the unemployment rate is in Chile today, but if it's high, Chilean employees had better embrace shorter hours, drastically cut the unemployment, and market forces responding to labor "shortage" (actually balance) will take care of disciplining management and raising pay and benefits. This is the way of the future, the way of Timesizing - the only way to real progress unless you count the war approach to reducing excess labor.]

• GE unit misclassified managers to avoid overtime, suit claims, by Rachel Silverman, WSJ, B2.
  ...According to the suit, GE's aircraft-engine unit routinely classified certain employees as salaried, or "exempt [from overtime]" workers, while treating them as hourly wage earners. The suit contends that GE deducted pay or vacation time from these employees for work absences, including partial-day absences, a practice inconsistent with the employees' exempt status.... Such practices violate the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and state wage and hour laws, according to the suit.... The suit also alleges that employees are expected to work overtime hours but aren't compensated for that labor, because of their classification as exempt workers. In some cases, the suit claims, employees have been randomly selected to receive so-called planned overtime compensation, but are paid straight time, instead of 1½ times their wage rate.
  "You can't have it both ways," said Steve Berman, managing partner of the Seattle lawfirm Hagens Berman LLP, who filed the suit on behalf of the plaintiffs. "...Here, they...take pay away if you don't work the amount of time they want you to work, but they never add [free] time if you work overtime"..\..
  [It's the old "heads we win, tails you lose" game of employers spoiled rotten by the unbalanced leverage given them by the global job shortage and labor surplus, created by the introduction of work-saving techology with no automatic mechanism to adjust the workweek downward as output moves upward. Note the attempt at intimidation despite demoralizing side-effects that this GE unit pulled on 8/16/2002 #3 by threatening a large unspecific layoff. But eventually this gets into the high production, low consumption, deflation of the Great Depression that we're again flirting with. As Reuther retorted to Ford's "Let's see you unionize these robots!" - "Let's see you sell them cars."]
  "The suit is without merit and GE Aircraft Engines will vigorously oppose it," said Rick Kennedy, a spokesman for GE Aircraft Engines, of Evendale, Ohio.
  [What a lot of time and money they waste on bluster instead of playing the game and getting on with the job.]
  ..\..There aren't indications of the alleged practices occurring elsewhere in GE....
  [A little management training and/or discipline called for in this unit, perhaps? One bad apple is spoiling the whole basket.]
  ...GE fell 64 cents to $32.25....