Timesizing News 10/11-20/2002

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Timesizing News, October 11-20, 2002
[Commentary] ©2002 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

10/20/2002 timesizing consciousness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

Unequal pay at United Airlines, letter to editor by James d. Fine of Manhattan, NYT, 3:10.
Re "United Air's family is anything but" (Oct. 6), which examined the disagreements among employee groups at United Airlines:
I'm slightly perplexed regarding pilots' compensation at United. The article said the most senior pilots make more than $300,000 a year for 80 hours of work a month....
[Hey, maybe UAL pilots are way ahead of us. That's 80/4= a 20-hour workweek! But this spoilsport goes on to cast aspersions on their futurism -]
To defend their high pay, pilots cite the long stretches of time they must spend away from home, as well as the demands of their jobs. No wonder United is heading toward bankruptcy....
Guards at nuclear plants feel swamped by overtime deluge in the wake of 9/11 - 12-hour shifts and 6-day weeks are said to be leading to errors - Rules requiring more guards to be on duty have resulted in greater workloads, by Matthew Wald, NYT, A25.
[huh?]
COVERT, Mich. [aptly named!]...- To increase security after 9/11, the Palisades nuclear plant here, like [nukes] around the country, sharply increased the number of guards on duty.
[Apparently this means merely "increased the guards on duty at any one time," not "increased the number of guards available for duty," because the next sentence says -]
To do so, it put the [existing] guards on 12-hour shifts instead of 8, often six days a week instead of five.
[We'll assume they at least got overtime pay. But here are some smart employees who don't want the pay - they want the safety of being better rested and less error-prone -]
The guards are still on that schedule, and they say it has made them tired, error-prone and cranky. But if they complain, they say, they are threatened with the loss of their jobs or sent for psychiatric evaluation....
[Oh that's one we haven't heard for awhile. You want work-life balance in America so you must be nuts. Hey, this is just what we want, right? - overtired nuclear plant workers. We'd probably be safer if they dropped the so-called security measures.]

10/19/2002 timesizing consciousness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -
nothing current on this slow newsday, so from the late arrivals, this doozy, thanks to Scott Thibodo of Calif. -

(6/25) Memo to Germans: Be more like the French! by [Stephan Richter,] The Globalist June 24 2002 (*http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=2531) via Scott Thibodeau.
[This article has a new (to us) way of ignoring the power of work sharing. It spins France's shorter workweek as a merely "symbolic" distraction to employees so employers can sneak in "real" labor flexibility.]
Ever since World War II, Germany and France have been Europe's two main growth engines. During the 1990s, however, these economic powerhouses fell on hard times, with sluggish growth rates and rising unemployment. But if the European Union's eastward expansion is to proceed smoothly, these two economies will need to regain their footing - or risk domestic discontent that undermines European integration.
With Jean-Marie Le Pen's surprisingly strong showing in France's presidential elections, many observers feel that [domestic discontent] has already taken place in France.
[Le Pen didn't have a "surprisingly strong showing." The right just manifested its usual greater unity and focus than the left.]
A closer look, however, reveals that Germany is the [real] source of...worry. ...Germany has fallen behind France in several realms where it previously surpassed its western neighbor.
Key Questions
1. How big is the difference in economic performance between France and Germany?
2. How does the French political system manage to push through economic reforms that become stalled in Germany?
3. How does centralization help the French economy? And how does French disdain for authority also help?
4. What is the role of German co-determination in preventing economic reform, and why are German labor problems really much worse than those of the French?
Key Findings
1. Since 1991, the French economy has grown 20% faster than the German economy.
2. Since 1995, the French economy has reduced its unemployment rate from around 11% to 9%, while Germany's rate remained about 8%.
  [It's even more dramatic between 1997's 12.6% unemployment rate when Jospin came to power and 2001's 8.7% before the Japan&US-led downturn began to drag France down, last in Europe except for erstwhile subsidized Ireland, and France's June/2001 jobless rate went back up to 8.8%, its first rise since 1998. See 8/01/2001 #1. And Germany's rate went up to 9%.]
3. Since 1995, France's average annual inflation rate of 1.3% has been slightly lower than Germany's 1.4% rate.
4. The International Labor Organization says that French workers are the most productive in the world - while German workers aren't even among the top three countries.
5. The French leverage the power of symbolism to pave the way for economic reform, while German distrust of centralized decision-making cripples the country's ability to change.
6. Ultimately, the French approach emphasizes flexibility, which is the key to success in today's global economy. By contrast, Germans continue to emphasize the need for consensus and precision. That is an approach more appropriate to the manufacturing economy of yesterday, rather than today's information economy.
Rivalry Across the Rhine
The year 2000 marked the sixth year in a row that the French economy grew faster than the German economy.
The year 2000 marked the sixth year in a row that France has outperformed Germany in economic growth. Since 1991, the French economy has grown 20% faster. What accounts for the big difference between the two countries?
With essentially the same monetary and fiscal policies, the difference in performance cannot be due to traditional macroeconomic policy.
[This constitutes another piece of evidence for the view that monetary and fiscal policies are purely superficial = operating solely on the surface-structure of economies.]
Is it their respective societies and cultures - as well as some basic decisions about economic organization - that explain the real difference?
Interestingly, there isn't much of a debate about this topic in Germany. Germany starts with a serious handicap - eastern Germany.... But Germany's problems go far beyond its re-unification.... The real reasons for the difference in performance lie elsewhere - such as decision-making and elites in making national policy....
The German system exposed
Even without the east, the "German system" carried with it substantial problems - which have only now become fully apparent.
Only now has it become apparent that even without the east, the "German system" included substantial problems: an indecisive approach to public policy, a poorly thought-out approach to the relationship of management and labor - and an inability to achieve a high payoff from playing the politics of symbolism.
[This is all pretty fuzzy, except what Richter does with the "politics of symbolism" aspect.]
Remarkably, in each of these areas, the French are showing their eastern neighbors the way - if Germany would dare to follow. In surprising contrast to Germany, the French political system seems better suited to managing the difficulties of restructuring and the transition from the older-style welfare economies of the past. This was spectacularly demonstrated in the French debate over the 35-hour workweek.
[Richter seems to throw the spotlight on the debate for the 35-hour week here, but this is the last time he mentions the debate aspect.]
Symbolic and real victories
[Oookay, here we go - "symbolic" = unreal alias false.]
In Paris, the powers-that-be beautifully leveraged the politics of symbolism. After all, what seemed a victory for proponents of old-style labor markets [ie: workweek reduction] turned out to be an important reform [ie: distracting symbol] that allowed French labor markets to become more flexible.
[It's astonishing, but our "work hard to get ahead" programming is so ingrained that we absolutely cannot admit that something as simple as work sharing would actually be functional - it HAS to be merely symbolic.]
While unions ostensibly [but not REALLY] got what they wanted, employers go[t] something, too [but they got something REAL, not just "ostensible"]. In exchange for allowing the workweek to shrink, lots of costly non-wage benefits were eliminated. The net result: both sides gained.
[So there it is. Richter's bottom line is that the French 35-hour workweek was just a distracting ruse to allow employers to cut benefits. Well, American employers are cutting benefits like pensions even faster, and the American workweek is going up, not down. So if the shorter workweek in France is really just a ruse, it's an unnecessary one.]
Such compromises and leveraged use of symbols seem foreign to Germany - and that is unfortunate. Old institutions (such as labor unions) are forced by the global economy to confront an unprecedented loss of power.
[Only if you swallow the globalization party line and blindly open your economy to rapine by zeroing all your tariffs, which not even big "do as I say but not as I do" America is stupid enough to do.]
Without symbolic victories to carry them along, these old institutions will require real "victories" (read: higher and higher wages). In reality, these turn out to be Pyrrhic victories, because they not only thwart necessary economic reform, but exacerbate competitive pressures as well....
[Read, but reduce competitiveness as well. So shorter hours are merely "symbolic victories" and higher pay is "real victories." Talk about time blindness and resistance to the kind of functional sharing that has always enabled human progress! The irony is what Richter and run-of-the-mill economists spin as unreal "symbolism," if efficiently implemented to activate all potential consumers, including the unemployed, on-welfare, disabled, homeless, incarcerated and force-retired, will provide flexibly real victories including higher pay. How? Same way as withdrawing excess working hours from the job market does during wars or plagues - by creating a perceived labor shortage and harnessing market forces to raise labor's price (wages) and centrifuge the inefficiently and inactively concentrated spending power in the economy, getting it out to the people who actually have the time and need to spend it. But you'll almost never hear run-of-the-mill economists talk about this, despite their own "marginal efficiency of capital" principle and despite over 100 years (1840-1940) of workweek decreases and wage increases in the USA. It's still spun as leftist or socialist,
- despite its enshrinement in the Bible's Ten Commandments (the Fourth, Exodus 20:9-10),
- despite all the forward-looking capitalists (Lord Leverhulme, W.K. Kellogg, James Lincoln...) and Republican politicians (Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon...) who promoted it,
- and despite its clear difference from socialism - flexible adjustment of the workweek to vary inversely with the unemployment rate, comprehensively defined, is a single, generalized, employer-liberating, top-positioned, central-dimension-targeted, market-defining/playing-field-leveling, all-sufficient ground rule, while socialism is a burgeoning horde of detailed, employer-stifling, bottom-positioned, peripheral-dimension-targeted, market-distorting, "always need more" regulations.
Is it completely beyond Richter's imagination that the work sharing and spending-power spreading of workweek reduction may in fact be the functional part, and the benefit fiddling is just the side show? Richter is still petty-detail-oriented. The self-styled "Globalist" is missing the forest for the trees. It's the benefit-fiddling that was really the distraction for employers to salve their feelings about loss of control over 4 hor hours of people's lives, and the very idea! - being forced to centrifuge more of their unused spending power (never mind the huge groundswell it gave to their domestic markets - that was just a lucky Act of God). All this is proven by the fact of their lingering resentment and current determined dilution of the 35-hour workweek - by the back door of loosening overtime limits back up to the old 39-hour level. Wakey, wakey, "Globalist"!]

10/18/2002 timesizing consciousness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

Boeing expects more job loss, by James Wallace & Paul Nyhan, Seattle Post-Intelligencer via John de Graaf.
Faced with a continuing slump in the airline industry and declining production rates in its factories, the Boeing Co...will have to further reduce its Puget Sound-area workforce next year. This will be beyond the previously announced 30,000 layoffs, Boeing said....
Boeing relied on attrition to shrink its workforce less than a year ago. Last December, the company trimmed 3,000 positions through attrition, retirements and elimination of contract labor. The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace said yesterday that Boeing also can absorb the next wave of layoffs through attrition. "It's time to stop the layoffs and prepare for recovery. It's going to be tough...if you let your best and brightest go out your door," said Bill Dugovich, a spokesman for the engineering union.
The company's two largest unions were unaware of specific plans for yet another round of layoffs, although engineering leaders were warned by a senior Boeing executive last week that the industry had not hit bottom.
As Boeing commercial executives consider handing out more pink slips, union officials urged them to look for other tools to trim payroll, such as scaling back overtime. Despite the downturn, some machinists still log 20% in overtime, according to Mark Blondin, president of the International Assoc. of Machinists District Lodge 751.
Since December, 7,500 members of the Seattle-based lodge have lost their jobs, roughly a quarter of its membership.
"Spread the work around," Blondin said yesterday. "There has been a lot of hurt throughout this downturn. A lot of this is unnecessary."
[In short, quit downsizing and start timesizing!]
P-I aerospace reporter James Wallace can be reached at 206-448-8040 or jameswallace@seattlepi.com

10/17/2002 primitive timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope - nothing impressive today but a solid item showed up late -

(10/16) France Seeks to Amend Short Workweek, AP 10/15/02 12:50 EDT via AOLNews.
PARIS (AP) - Conservative lawmakers...
[or are they actually radicals masquerading as conservatives, like rightwingers in America?]
...came a step closer Tuesday to changing France's shortened workweek by raising the limit on overtime hours and reducing benefit payments by employers. Deputies in the lower house of Parliament, the [577-seat] National Assembly, voted 373 to 160 to make the law governing the 35-hour workweek more flexible [must have been 44 abstentions].... The bill must also be passed by the Senate, which was to start examining the text in a week
The effort is aimed at toning down two laws voted in June 1998 and January 2000 that shortened the workweek from 39 to 35 hours in hopes that companies would cut unemployment by hiring more workers to keep up the pace..\..
[And while France was preparing for and implementing this 4-hour cut in the workweek in stages between 1997 and 2002, the 1997 unemployment rate of 12.6% went down to 8.7% in the spring of 2001 before the syncronized global recession began to drag France down, the last economy in Europe to sink, except for erstwhile subsidized Ireland. In short, the program succeeded despite its manifold flaws. (The government did not lead by applying the program to itself first, despite informative American experience between 1840 and 1940 while the US workweek was being cut in half. The change was merely to another rigid permanent level instead of continuously and gradually adjusting downward as long as unemployment was too high. There was no harnessing of the incidence of overtime to target, trigger, pace and fund training and hiring as, e.g., a corporate tax on overtime with an exemption for on-the-job training and hiring....)]
The short workweek had been the centerpiece of the previous leftist government, which was voted out of office in June.... The government of former Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin had championed the shorter workweek. The center-right government that triumphed in Parliamentary elections in June wants to modify the measure.
["Triumphed" is probably not the word, unless you think W. "triumphed" in America by having to have the meddlesome and partisan Supreme Court pre-empt the recount in Flori-duh. The French majority made too many assumptions about the secure incumbency of Jospin and made too many concurrent experiments with other flavors on the left, thus tossing the elections to the more unified right and getting foul-tasting policies shoved down their throats, sort of like the American majority, though more of the Americans did it by just not voting than by voting for hopefully more representative and progressive choices (Nader was the only example of such choices in the US while in France there were half a dozen).]
The new bill increases extra hours employees are allowed to work from 130 to 180 per year.
[Which effectively rolls the workweek back to 39 hours a week. Now watch French unemployment gradually climb back to 12.6% and higher. Watch income reconsolidate in the top brackets and return to suctioning the spending power away from the markets for its own investment targets. This is "conservative"?]
It also streamlines minimum wages - there are currently six categories - and lightens the fees companies pay to fund employee benefits....

10/16/2002 primitive timesizing & timesizing consciousness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

Russia: Carmaker suspends production, by Sabrina Tavernise, NYT, W1.
Russia's biggest carmaker, Avtovaz, [will] temporarily stop car production after a sudden rise in the number of imported foreign cars created a glut in the market. Avtovaz will close its plants from Oct. 26 to Nov. 9, a break that Vladimir Savov, an analyst at the Brunswick UBS Warburg investment bank in Moscow, estimated would erase about $2.5m in profits from the company's books by year-end. The Russian government recently increased import duties on foreign cars older than 7 years, which are the main competitors for new Russian cars.
[Timesizing, not downsizing. Note also the probable but fuzzier additional case today in "Plant shutdowns at Osteotech reduced its earnings," Bloomberg via NYT, C4, which refers to "a shutdown of some processing" and states, "Processing at Osteotech's Eatontown NJ plant will resume by the end of the month."]
Work week: ...Calling in - Personal issues trump the workday for more employees, by Carlos Tejada, WSJ, B14.
The share of employees missing work for personal reasons has risen this year to 21%, compared with 11% for the year before, according to a survey conducted by CCH Inc., an HR information concern. The survey, which polled 333 HR executives on unscheduled absences, cited a shift in the priorities of workers over the past year.
Total absenteeism was unchanged at about 2%.
[This requires explanation but none is given. The question is, if "personal" absenteeism is up, what category is down?]
Companies with good morale had an average absentee rate of 1.9%, compared with 2.4% for those with fair or poor morale..
[This development reminds us of how the angry white men who run this cosmetic democracy "reformed" welfare and phased out traditional pensions, so more people simply went on disability. Here they retained the 1940 workweek long beyond its useful lifetime and so people are simply phoning in "sick" or claiming personal emergencies. Shorter workweeks usually reduce employee absenteeism. The source press release for this squib is -]
CCH finds employee absenteeism costs companies more than ever - Sick time used more for personal and family needs than illness, PRNewswire 10/16/2002 09:01 EDT via AOLNews.
[Carlos must have got an early release.]
Timesizing, not downsizing, op ed by Sean Gonsalves, 10/15/2002 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, B5.
[Nine months to the day after Carlos Tejada (see item above) put Phil Hyde on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, Sean has put Phil on the op ed page of the "Seattle P-I" and the Cape Cod Times. Thanks to Seattle's John de Graaf for telling Sean about Phil.]
Right before your very eyes,
[The magician prepares his demonstration....]
I will show you why the liberal-conservative/left-right political analysis (routinely regurgitated on TV pundit shows and during talk radio spleen-venting sessions) is a played-out, obscuring dogma.
[We need more common phrases in English for "dichotomy" and "ultimatum" and "twixt Scylla and Charybdis." Maybe "dilemma" or "Catch 22." What about "damned if you do and damned if you don't" or "between a rock and a hard place"?]
At the same time, you will also see an idea emerge that just might prove useful in these economic times.
By "these economic times," I'm speaking of the troubling circumstances at the heart of military conflict all over the planet - this process that we misleadingly refer to as "globalization" and its discontents.
[Amen.]
By "these economic times," I mean to highlight the increase in (relative) poverty being reported across America, the longer lines forming at food pantries, the upsurge in homelessness, the jump in unemployment, and the rising tide of uncertainty that has smashed holes in financial [life] boats amid waves of Enron "ethics" and downsizing (to say nothing of the 1 billion people in the so-called Third World who live on less than $2 a day).
If it were not for all the war-drumming going on, King George [W.] and his laissez-faire capitalist comrades would have a lot of explaining to do and we'd all be discussing possible remedies.
[Nice phrase, "capitalist comrades." It's getting to be a movement to attach old leftist/socialist/communist rhetoric to Dictator Dubya and his ilk - a movement we applaud.]
But I digress. Allow me to demonstrate why trying to size up society with a liberal-conservative/left-right analysis is like trying to "smash a triangle through a circle shape," in the words of the rap group Scienz of Life.
[Quotes from rap groups are always good, and establish the quoter firmly in a world of relevance.]
Enter Philip Hyde (see www.timesizing.com), who ran as an independent Republican against Joe Kennedy in 1996 and 1998 and then in 2000 against Sen. Edward Kennedy.
With an academic background in ancient history, linguistics and economic history, Hyde, a former technical writer, describes himself as an "economic designer and news commentator" living on his [rapidly shrinking] pension funds.
"You're never going to win against a Kennedy," he told me last week. "The main purpose was to get this issue of timesizing out there."
What's timesizing? "It's trimming the work week; not the work force;" re-defining full-time work by having work-hours "vary inversely with the unemployment rate, comprehensively defined," he explained.
Hyde is actually continuing a long-time GOP tradition that began in 1863 when Lincoln banned unlimited work weeks with the abolition of slavery. In 1868, a Republican-controlled Congress fought economic depression by cutting the federal government work week to 48 hours.
In 1903, Teddy Roosevelt cut the mining industry work week to 54 hours. In 1907, he cut the railroad industry work week to 96 hours, and the following year he implemented a federal 48-hour work week.
In 1912, TR's Progressive Party advocated a 40-hour work week. In 1922, President Harding, with the help of his Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, cut the work week of the last industry hold-out - Big Steel - from 84 to 48 hours.
In 1932, President Hoover averted mass layoffs by scaling back the federal government work week from 44 hours to a 40-hour work week, calling it the fastest and most efficient way to create jobs.
That gave momentum to legislation calling for a 30-hour work week, known as the Black bill. The bill was introduced by the conservative Alabama Democratic Sen. Hugo Black in December 1932 [and passed in the Senate on April 6 the next year by a vote of 53 to 30].
FDR called it "socialism" and tied it up in House committee, where it emerged five years later as the Fair Labor Standards Act, minus all of the 30-hour work week provisions.
Despite Nixon's 1956 forgotten promise to bring every American a 32-hour work week, since World War II, we've been stuck with the same work week ever since, even though there's been a tremendous increase in labor productivity.
So Hyde calls for "timesizing," not downsizing. "If we can't set things up so that our incredible technology provides shorter work weeks for us, what the heck good is it? Are we going to go through the 21st century with more and more efficient technology and less and less time for our families and communities?
"We don't need government job creation. We just need to spread the private-sector work - and skills - to include everyone. It doesn't matter how much money a country has, if 99% of it is owned by 1% of the population, you have one miserable dirt-poor Third-World situation with a tiny fraction of the economic dynamism it could have.
"Executives, CEOs - let's give this a chance. Let's stop starving our own potentially gigantic customer base of time and money. Let's reinvest in our employees. Concentrating the profits in your own pay and perks does not count as reinvestment."
Is this liberal, conservative, left or right? Hyde quotes shorter workweek researcher Anders Hayden: "It's not left or right but out in front."
More on this idea in next week's column.
Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and a syndicated columnist. His column runs on Tuesdays. Call him at 508-775-1200, ext. 719, or e-mail him at sgonsalves@capecodonline.com.
[This column also appeared today under the headline "Re-introducing Philip Hyde" in the Cape Cod Times on the East Coast. "This guy's a good writer," said Colleague Kate. Phil Hyde concurs. Here are two email responses to the Seattle P-I version that Sean received just a couple of hours after it hit the newstands out there -]
- Dear Sean,
  Thanks so much for an excellent editorial on work hours and sharing work.
  It is the best thing in the Seattle PI today.
  Such a good commonsense idea, to share work, and it should start with the CEOs. They should receive no salary while their company is trying to stay afloat... for it is usually their fault for ripping it off in the past!
  I am retired and I know that the first thing to do is to quit when I am tired!
  I seldom work an 8-hr day, 3 or 4 is enuff!
  Keep up the good work. But not too much work!
- sgonsalves@capecodonline.com
  I read your column in the Seattle PI. I have been working with the homeless for some time, and am aware of the so-called recession we are in, otherwise spelled 'depression' but no one seems to want to say the word,
  and you have provided what is desperately needed, a cut-to-the-core-of-the-problem idea and attitude that bypasses all the political party and left/right posturing nonsenses.
  We are in an economic crisis, where due to the gap in social services, many unemployed adults that do not have custody of minor children, aren't pregnant, or are over sixty-five have an income of zero, beating the income low-water mark of some Third World countries by 2 bucks. To top that off, I have seen the conditions some WorkFirst mothers have to endure, and we are not above running sweatshops in this country, supplied with their employee/victims by the state.
  No I am not a WorkFirst mother.
  Please keep up the good work, you and your ideas are desperately needed in this awful mess, and as a matter of fact such ideas may have prevented this mess in the first place....
  P.S. Hope to see much more of your work in the future.
Shorter hours coalition meeting in Boston, exclusive to Timesizing.com.
A loose coalition of groups met in downtown Boston over Chinese food last night from 6 to 8 to hammer out ideas for a tighter coalition. Eight people with a rotating ninth.
1. Jason from the Campaign for Contingent Workers recommended the network concept in preference to the coalition concept as a more organically expandable organization. He's going to have a sort of Boston Tea Party against a conventional association of temp agencies next week.
2. Barbara Brandt of the Shorter Worktime Group announced she was going to organize Take Back Your Time Day in the Boston area, come hell or high water, and we could jump on or off or go whistle Dixie. The consensus of our meeting seemed to be to jump on and flog our own particular hobbyhorses en route.
3. Several Wobblies were there - the meeting was ably chaired by Jon Bekken - except when several red herring got loose that seemed politically incorrect to catch and cage. Unfortunately the nursing reps who said they would come if they could, couldn't.
4. Phil Hyde of Timesizing.com smiled benignly over the whole proceeding, with only one impassioned plea - to avoid stamping the undertaking with the exclusive IWW or even union label because it was a vital issue for investors (who are currently suctioning the spending power and markets away from their own investment targets) and CEOs (who are currently downsizing their customers' customers and deepening the recession).
5. Terry Crystal of the Greens chipped in frequently.
6. Wobbly Pablito was the one with the biggest burr against the word "coalition" under his saddle.
7. Steve (Hillman?) quietly represented a union.
8. Matt (Kameker? IWW?) sat in the blind spot directly across from Phil.
9. One lady (Laurie Taymore-Berry) left early, looking dark, but was replaced by a self-elected representative of the homeless and "freelance union organizer." If the latter person had trundled in earlier, we would have had a minyan.
Barbrandt, Phillide & Ms. Crystal left together for the looong journey back to Cambridge and Somerville on the subway. They ejected one at a time at three stations in a row. Terry got off at Harvard Sq, Phil excused himself at Porter Sq, and Barbara disappeared at Davis Sq., thus covering Cambridge, Somerville and the borderlands between.

10/15/2002 primitive timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

Companies cut costs where it hurts: employee pay, by Kemba Dunham & Kris Maher, WSJ, B1.
...Agilent Technologies Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif., high-tech company, cut pay across-the-board in May 2001, and after restoring salaries for many workers in November of last year, again temporarily reduced pay for some in December. Starting Feb. 1, 2002, the rest of Agilent's white-collar work force had to take a 5% temporary pay cut while U.S. hourly workers were required to take off one day a month without pay.
[This is a case of matching paycuts and hourscuts a la timesizing not downsizing. But it illustrates a difficulty. The "salary" concept, that supposed "blank check on your life," seems to be being used to avoid explicit hourscuts by some companies because this article mentions wage workers with a paycut and matching worktime cut, but not salaried workers. Hopefully salaried employees are taking the time off anyway - after all, there IS generally less demand for their services in a depression.]
That round of rollbacks ended in August. "Everyone is back on full salary," says Amy Flores, an Agilent spokeswoman.
[Agilent is lucky.]
As far as Ms. Flores knows, staff turnover didn't increase when salaries were reduced. "My guess is that nobody had anyplace else to go," she suggests. "People figured, 'At least I have a job.'" Agilent has no plans for additional salary cuts, she adds.
Caterpillar plans to furlough up to 3,270 employees, AP via NYT, C5.
...A leading maker of heavy-duty diesel engines announced plans yesterday to furlough...workers in December at 5 plants because of slow demand. The furloughs should last one to two weeks a Caterpillar spokesman, Kelly Wojda, said, and would include managers, manufacturing employees and salaried workers.
[We'll give them the benefit of the doubt since some managers are included, and regard these as a real, predefined furloughs instead of undefined layoffs. We will assume, however, that these furloughs are without pay since none is mentioned.]
...They will be from Illinois plants in Mossville, Mapleton and Pontiac; and in Thomasville and Jefferson, Ga., she said. Caterpillar is based in Peoria, Ill.
[Followup. Tomorrow's Journal article does not use the term furloughs, "Soft demand for truck engines to result in temporary layoffs," Dow Jones via WSJ, D4.]

timesizing consciousness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

10/13 Working 9 to 5, give or take, by Macaulay Campbell, NYT, 3-9.
Blame the boss's style, or perhaps the e-mail server that keeps crashing. Whatever the reason, American businesses are unproductive 38% of the time, losing the equivalent of 86 workdays this year, a new study says. The report, by Proudfoot Consulting, a management consulting company in Palm Beach, Fla., found American businesses second in productivity to those in Germany, which are unproductive [only] 37% of the time, losing the equivalent of 83 workdays. At the bottom of the list of seven countries were Britain and South Africa.
Low productivity, the survey found, stemmed in part from poor planning and control be management and from weak morale. In America, morale problems became particularly troublesome, chewing up nearly 7 more days than they did the year before.
[So American productivity declined from 2001 to 2002, counting fiscal years from Oct to Sept. And if 86 workdays are 38%, then we're basing this on a workyear of 226 days in the U.S. Check out our chart(s) of annual work and vacation, available on or from near the bottom of our vacation page (note additionally that all Australians start with 4 weeks' vacation each year). There are 8 charts accompanying the present article. Here are the first two -]
Average work productivity level, by country, in 2002
- Germany 63% productive...
- United States 62%...
- Austria 62%...
- Australia 60%...
- global average 59%...
- France 57%...
- Britain 51%...
- South Africa 46%...
[Note that one nation with fewer workdays per year is ahead of the U.S., another is the same and another just below, and while one is just below the global average (France), two others far below that are also high in their number of workdays per year. The message seems to be that shorter worktime either benefits productivity or does not reduce it. The explanation for France's less stellar productivity may be that during the last half of fiscal 2002, France's 35-hour workweek has been under greater pressure from the right than previously, and increasing attempts to dilute this popular reform has probably dampened employee morale throughout the economy.]
Reasons for 86 lost workdays in the U.S.
- 31.0 days - poor planning and control
- 21.5 days - inadequate management
- 13.8 days - poor working morale
- 7.7 days - information technology problems
- 7.7 days - inefficient communication
- 4.3 days - workers with wrong qualifications
[The other 6 charts for some reaon provide -
1. sales of painkillers
2. new mortgage applications
3. transportation costs
4. personal bankruptcy filings
5. online sales
6. hotel occupancy rates
[long workhours in the U.S. are playing a role in the demise of the small organic farmer -]
10/14 Small organic farmers pull up stakes - Agriculture's rebels reject the new rules, op ed by Samuel Fromartz, NYT, A21.
A curious thing happened on the way to a national organic standard: the small farmer, once at the heart of the organic movement, got left behind. Talk to those who have farmed organically for years and you will find a surprising number who have decided not to call their produce organic any longer. The costs - [mainly] administrative...- of using the government-defined label are too great.... At local farmers' markets around the country, you'll find many farmers who say their vegetables are "grown without chemicals" or that their meat is "free of antibiotics," but many won't use the "O" word.
...Even as the rules were refined, small organic farmers had trouble with the fine print. One farmer told me that an organic certifying agent inspecting his farm wanted to know the dates on which he had moved his crates of zucchini into the cooler the previous year and when he had sold them. "After farming for 12 hours a day, I am not going to spend two hours doing paperwork," he says. Considering that small farmers typically grow dozens of crops on small plots, the paperwork burden could potentially exceed that of a large organic farm growing one crop on hundreds of acres....
[Workweek regulation applies to seasonal workers like farmers via "annualization" (averaging out across the whole year). But exhaustion can still be a factor during the long-hour days of the work season.]

primitive timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

[here's an indication of the pervasiveness of unreported timesizing from an old article since there was nothing current on AOLNews for today -]
(8/16) Stalled US factory growth stirs new economic gloom, by Ross Finley, 08/15/2002 Reuters 16:44 ET via AOLNews.
NEW YORK...- US factory growth appears to have stalled, stirring speculation the Federal Reserve may cut interest rates in coming months to ward off a second recession if the weakness spreads.
[So this is how the spindoctors are going to handle the massive dysfunctionality of our current economic design. They're taking a narrow definition of "recession" and they're going to keep heralding little in's and out's - seeing the trees = a string of "recessions," instead of the forest = a massive and deepening depression from which there is no escape except a non-nuclear World War III (which we can't guarantee will stay non-nuclear/biological/chemical) or Reuther's fluctuating adjustment of the workweek, alias sharing the vanishing work, alias timesizing.]
"I've beeen an optimist for a long time. But I'm beginning to get a little concerned because the manufacturing sector does seem to be contracting," said Sharon Stark, economist and head of fixed income strategy at Legg Mason in Baltimore.
[Keep smilin', honey. Shake them pompoms. "Don't worry, be happy." Gal, if you don't see contraction in the mfg sector by now, you need to take off the rose-colored glasses.]
...Recent ISM [Institute of Supply Mgmt] and Philadelphia Fed data also shows manufacturers are shedding more workers after eliminating 1.8 million jobs since mid-2000 and are trimming the workweek....
[Typically, the average workweek nationwide has been slipping. e.g., from 34.7 to 34.5 hours recently.]

10/11/2002 timesizing consciousness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope - here's a little bit of the plentiful actual timesizing that's going on - trimming hours, not jobs - that got reported for a totally different reason -

Judges Give Pay to Court Employees, AP 10/10/02 13:22 EDT via AOLNews.
DENVER - Twenty Denver judges are donating part of their salary to bailiffs, clerks and other court employees who have been ordered to take three days off without pay to help ease a state budget crisis.... Court workers across the state are being forced to take the time off without pay to help balance the budget.... All state departments must cut their budget by 4% to help offset the state's estimated $608 million shortfall in this year's $13.8 billion budget....
[Cutting worktime instead of workforce = timesizing.]
The court system's mid-range salary is about $32,000 a year, with an entry level clerk earning $23,500. District judges earn $104,000 a year..\.. The order affects all employees except the judges, who are constitutionally protected from pay cuts..\..
[But this story has some unusual icing on the cake -]
Each judge is giving $600 toward a fund for the furloughed workers to show support for what they say are underpaid employees who keep an overloaded system running. Each worker will get $100 before the holidays. "We want to show that it's not just the little guys who should suffer when things go bad. The judges have every intention of sharing in the dilemma,'' Judge Robert Hyatt said....
Linda Gibbs, Hyatt's judicial assistant, will lose $160 for each of the three days she will be on furlough. She has canceled a trip to a hot air balloon event. "This is something from their hearts,'' she said of the judges. "It gives us the idea that they understand what we do around here.''
[Don't get too effusive, Linda. You're losing 160x3= $480, and you're only getting $100 back from these guys who are making three times what you are.]
..\..The Denver judges are not alone in their generosity. Judges in Colorado Springs have voted to donate about $400 each for their workers....
On the Net: State Courts: *www.courts.state.co.us
O'Neill - Longer work week points to new U.S. hiring, Reuters 10/10/02 13:47 ET via AOLNews.
WASHINGTON...- U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said on Thursday the increase in the length of the average work week, shown in the September employment report, is often a precursor to new hiring.
[Timesizing's Phase Two and Phase Three would guarantee that lengthening in the average workweek was a precursor to new hiring by lowering the level where overtime starts each week (ie: cutting the workweek) in response to unemployment, comprehensively defined, and making any overtime trigger training and hiring.]
"It's a significant movement ... and what it tells you is businesses are asking the people who are already working to work longer hours," he said at a press briefing. "And that is generally a precursor to new hiring."
[Duh, we get it by now, Paul.]
The Labor Dept. said last Friday that the average U.S. workweek grew from 34.3 hours in September from 34.1 hours in August....