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


10/31/2002  basic timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope - nothing compelling today so we dip into the barrel of late arrivals -

10/30/2002  basic timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -
  1. [some good news in the midst of bad news -]
    Exfo to offer employees alternatives to job cuts, Reuters 10/29/02 15:11 ET via AOLNews.
    [Any relation to Expo, as in "Expo 67"?  Naa, that was in Montreal.]
    QUEBEC CITY... - Exfo Electro-Optical Engineering Inc. <EXF.TO> <EXFO.O> told Reuters on Tuesday it will meet production employees on Wednesday to offer them the stark choice of reduced working hours or more job cuts.
    [Hey, what's so "stark" about keeping your job during a recession - and getting more free time?! This is the way of the future, timesizing, not downsizing. By preventing growth in the numbers of desperate jobseekers willing to do your job for less, it prevents market forces from jamming down your pay. And if it's applied more broadly in terms of a citywide or regional workweek reduction, the perceived labor shortage engages market forces in raising pay so you wind up with, e.g., 30 hrs work for 40 hrs pay or better, the kind of thing that happened from 1840 to 1940 as working hours were cut in half (from 80-84 hrs/wk to 40) and pay was multiplied many times.]
    The Quebec City maker of fiber-optic testing equipment, suffering from the downturn in the telecoms industry, said it would offer production workers two options to avoid layoffs: a four-day work week for about 26 weeks, or a four-week layoff over Christmas.
    [Hey, maybe Quebec will seize the world shorter-hours lead from la patrie, France.]
    "The months of December and January are usually more quiet, so we want to minimize the impact," Exfo spokesman Vance Oliver said.
    The firm has been forced to slash hundreds of jobs over the past two years and it was dropped from the key Toronto Stock Exchange S&P/TSX composite index <.GSPTSE> last month. Exfo now has 850 employees.
    [Guess they've slashed "down to the bone" and now they have to find an intelligent response to falling demand for a change - one that doesn't help it to fall so efficiently.]
    Oliver said the company hopes to find common ground with its employees on Wednesday. "We are trying to get a solution that would satisfy all parties involved," he said.
    The meeting is set for late Tuesday afternoon in Quebec City.
    Exfo lost about $309 million in fiscal 2002, its worst year since it was launched in 1985. The firm has said it expects a pro forma loss ranging between 3 cents and 5 cents a share for the first quarter of fiscal 2003, with sales between $16 million and $18.5 million.
    The company's shares were up 1 Canadian cent at C$3.40 on Tuesday afternoon on the Toronto Stock Exchange after being down as much as 13 Canadian cents in the morning. The stock has traded between C$24.76 and C$2.01 over the past 52 weeks. ($1=$1.56 Canadian)

  2. [and some bad news amid good news -]
    Members of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) shout anti-goverment slogans, by Kim Kyung-Hoon, Reuters photo caption 10/29/2002 via AOLNews.
    ...during a rally near the National Assembly hall in Seoul, October 29, 2002. More than 300 members of KCTU [Korean Confederation of Trade Unions?] staged a rally on Tuesday [10/29] to block the parliament's passage of laws on a five-day workweek and demanded improved working conditions.
    [At any one time, it seems that only 50% of labor are smart enough to realize that workweek reduction is the KEY "improved working condition" because the perceived shortage of labor it generates harnesses powerful market forces in raising labor's bargaining power.]

10/29/2002  timesizing consciousness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope - some good news & some bad news -
  1. [the good news]
    Seattle man wants a day off for all, by Niki Hing, Scripps Howard News via Seattle Post-Intelligencer Oct 28 2002 via *seattlepi.nwsource.com.
    [Compare (9/30) story that we excerpted on 10/09/2002.]
    John de Graaf is on a mission: He's working hard to get Americans to work less. And if he gets his way, the entire country will have Oct. 24 off next year. De Graaf, an independent television producer for KCTS/9 in Seattle, has long been concerned that most Americans are overworked and suffer from lack of leisure time. His solution is to lead a national effort to establish *"Take Back Your Time Day" for Oct. 24.
    He hopes the day will give Americans some much needed rest and respite. He also hopes the day will spark a new conscientiousness about how too much work deteriorates quality of life. "We need a national conversation about our values," de Graaf said. "When we don't have enough time, it affects everything in our lives, from family and health to the environment."
    According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans work an average 237.5 days a year. That's more than any other developed nation, including Japan. It's also 20 more days each year than 25 years ago.
    According to the results of a survey released by the Families and Work Institute in 2001, people are feeling the crunch of those extra hours on the job. Nearly one-third of U.S. workers reported feeling overworked or overwhelmed. "This is about finding balance," de Graaf said. "The U.S. is No. 1 in productivity, but we're not No. 1 in other important things like health or happiness."
    De Graaf chose Oct. 24 to commemorate the nine weeks before the end of the year, which symbolizes the average 350 more hours Americans work than Europeans. Europeans receive an average six weeks of paid vacation - Americans average two weeks. Moreover, 26 percent of Americans got no vacation time at all last year.
    De Graaf came up with the idea for "Take Back Your Time Day" in conjunction with the Simplicity Forum earlier this year. He already has some support. More than 500 people across 30 states signed up for his mailing list and some 70 colleges and universities have requested information on how they can celebrate or hold teach-ins. Like-minded academics are lending a hand as well. Many are contributing to the official "Take Back Your Time" handbook de Graaf is editing.
    On the Net: To learn more, go to *www.timeday.org

  2. [the bad news]
    Miyakejima disaster relief worker's death stemmed from overwork, Kyodo News 10/28/02 05:34 EDT via AOLNews.
    TOKYO...- A labor standards supervision office in Tokyo said Monday it has acknowledged that the death of a 53-year-old man who took part in a disaster relief project on the volcanic island of Miyakejima was caused by overwork.
    The Chuo Labor Standards Inspection Office decided to grant the family of the man survivors' annuity compensation and funeral assistance, which was requested by his widow in September last year, in effect admitting that it was a case of ''karoshi.''
    The labor ministry said it is probably the first case for the labor standards inspection office to admit death related to overwork for a worker participating in disaster relief for volcanic eruption.
    According to the labor office, the man, a native of the evacuated island south of Tokyo, had participated in the project, which included road paving work, on the island since April last year.
    After suddenly falling ill on June 19 last year he was taken to a Tokyo hospital by helicopter but died of acute heart attack the same day.
    The labor office decided that the man was under excessive psychological strain as workers there were required to wear gas masks and gas detectors because of continued volcanic gas emissions there. The disaster relief project started in October 2000.
    Volcanic activity on Miyakejima, in the Izu island chain some 200 kilometers south of the capital, began at the end of June 2000. All 3,800 residents were evacuated in September that year as large-scale eruptions and pyroclastic flows continued.
10/28/2002  timesizing consciousness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope - 10/26/2002  primitive timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope - 10/25/2002  primitive timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope - 10/24/2002  primitive timesizing & pseudo-timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -
  1. [primitive timesizing -]
    Today in history - Oct. 24, AP 10/23/02 20:00 EDT via AOLNews.
    Today is Thursday, Oct. 24, the 297th day of 2002. There are 68 days left in the year....
    On this date:...
    In 1940, the 40-hour work week went into effect under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
    [They probably couldn't get it started any earlier because they only passed the Act's 44-hour workweek for 1938 far into that year and they had to leave a full year between going down to 42 hours a week in 1939 and going down to 40 hours in 1940. And they couldn't put off the whole system till the following year or they'd miss the ability to call it the "40-40-40 Plan" - 40 hours maximum workweek, 40 cents minimum wage, in 1940. The whole association with minimum wage was unfortunate. If they had implemented the maximum workweek anywhere near the level that would have had a Depression-solving effect (such as the 30-hour level contemplated by the Black Bill of 1933), they could (and should) have left wages completely up to market forces so as not to create an artificial gap at the bottom of the wage ladder for people trying to climb into the job market. The shorter workweek would have created a greater perceived shortage of labor in general and manhours in particular, and the free market would have taken care of raising wages same as it had so often before in history, for example, during World War I in the early 20th century and during the Great Plague in the 14th century.]

  2. [pseudo-timesizing -]
    NEC introduces flexible work system for 7,000 staff, Kyodo News 10/23/02 02:50 EDT via AOLNews.
    [Flexibility is nice, but it's not the kind of adjustibility required for economic recovery and used in the automatic "adjustment of the workweek against comprehensive unemployment" that is one of the twin cores of Timesizing (the other twin is automatic overtime-to-training&hiring conversion).]
    TOKYO...- NEC Corp. has adopted a flexible work system under which 7,000 future managers, or 30% of the total workforce, can decide their hours and job priorities on their own starting this month, company officials said Wednesday. The new system is designed to encourage achievers, they said.
    It is the largest discretionary working-hour system in Japan in terms of worker numbers, according to Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry officials.
    Major Japanese electronics makers have been changing their work systems to improve employee efficiency amid fierce international competition.
    [For example, genuine recovery-building work sharing at Sanyo Electric - see story on 8/22/2002 #2.]
    Contrary to the NEC move, Fujitsu Ltd. and Sharp Corp. have returned to a set working system from a flextime program.
    But NEC officials said the company pays workers based on their performance. The flexible work system is being introduced to make the work style match the policy, they said. NEC first introduced a flexible work system in 1993 for about 300 staff in the research and development division. It has expanded the system to about 30% of its total workforce of 24,000 following the labor ministry's move in February to widen the types of jobs for which the flexible working system can be introduced, the NEC officials said.
    Under the system, NEC pays salaries for regular work hours plus one hour of overtime [OT]. No additional payments are set basically, even if employees work longer under the system, they said.
    [No cap, not even one with required overtime earnings reinvestment (in OT-targeted training and hiring) as in Timesizing - so no real contribution to work-sharing, income-centrifugation and ... economic recovery.]
    Employees can, however, apply for temporary exclusion from the system in case their workload increases sharply.
    [Oh thanks a million, NEC.]
10/23/2002  timesizing consciousness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope - some good news and some bad news -
  1. [the good news]
    Nurse-patient ratio linked to death rate, AP via NYT, A19.
    [Be patient. The good news is at the end. Meanwhile, the Boston Globe has this story on the front page -]
    Study links workloads of nurses to patient risk, by Anne Barnard, BG, front page.
    [Back to the NYT -]
    ...In the study, reported in Wednesday's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Assoc., researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that each additional patient in a nurse's workload ["additional" to what number?] meant an increase of about 7% in the likelihood that the patient would die within 30 days of admission.
    [OK, the Times' version is lame. Let's switch to the Globe -]
    The more surgical patients assigned to a hospital nurse, the greater those patients' chances of dying.... UPenn researcher Linda Aiken and her colleagues found that every time an extra surgical patient is added to a nurse's workload, the patients' chances of dying within 30 days rose by 7%. Their odds of suffering inrreversible complication also increased, the study found.
    Increase a nurse's workload from four to six patients - six is common at many hospitals - and the patients have a 14% greater chance of dying.... Several recent studies have found that adding nurses reduces patient complications, but Aiken's, which looked at more than 230,000 patients, found the clearest link yet to mortality rates. It also is the first to link increased workloads to nurses' dissatisfaction and "burnout." ...Said Aiken, a registered nurse, "...Hospitals have too few nurses."...
    10-20% of nursing jobs are unfilled across the country, increasing nurses' clout to improve working conditions.

  2. [the bad news]
    The France Growth Fund Inc. internalizes management, Business Wire 10/22/2002 09:02 Eastern via AOLNews.
    ...Its board of directors named Pierre Daviron, a director of the Fund since its inception, as Pres. and Chief Investment Officer [CIO] of the Fund.... Mr. Daviron, who was the initial Chairman of the Fund and served as Pres. and CIO of Oppenheimer Capital International from 1993 to 1998, said, "Six months ago, I would have been more reluctant to propose managing this fund, because valuations were stretched, the Government was bankrupt of ideas,
    [a shorter workweek, more consumer markets and better work-life balance are "bankrupt of ideas"???]
    and market expectations were unrealistic. The situation, I believe, has changed: a new political team is bringing fresh ideas to France,
    [cutting taxes and longer hours are "fresh" ideas???]
    and good companies' [stocks] can now be bought at reasonable prices.
    [Yeah, depressed prices, and going lower!]
    Without fanfare, the adverse effect of the 35 hour work week has been mitigated.
    ["Adverse" only in the imagination of some of the wealthy. This is the problem with plutocracy. They are sooo insulated and isolated, short-sighted and near-sighted. They never realize that they consolidate so much spending power they strangle the markets away from their own investment vessels.]
    France is changing direction,
    [Yeah, backwards.]
    and this is a moment of opportunity for investors and, if it should continue, for the Fund."...
    [Re-raise the French workweek and unemployment rate and there's no way it shall continue.]

10/22/2002  timesizing consciousness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -
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