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Timesizing News, January 1-15, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

1/15/2003  timesizing consciousness in the news, aka flickerings of strategic hope -

• Community group sued for speaking out against temp firm, US Newswire 01/14 12:40 via AOLNews.
  SPRINGFIELD, Ma...- The Anti-Displacement Project (A-DP), an institutionally based membership organization that organizes low-income families in Western Massachusetts, announced the creation of a legal defense fund to help fend off a lawsuit by Labor Ready, the nation's largest provider of temporary day laborers. The company is seeking damages for materials that appear on A-DP's website.... Labor Ready, based in Tacoma, Wa...places more than 500,000 day laborers a year. Temporary and day labor work is the fastest growing employment sector in the US economy.
  [Day labor??? - first time we've heard this claim.]
  Current labor laws based on the traditional 40-hour workweek fail to address the needs specific to this growing workforce.
  [No detailed support given for this statement. Presumably the failure relates to the choppiness of different assignments from day to day, but all temporary job agencies share this challenge and presumably the temp agencies for office workers have it down cold. So the failure of transference from office workers to day laborers may have something to do with the relative education levels of the two groups and the presumably greater exploitability of the day laborers.]
  In the first campaign of its kind in the nation [a labor historian might be able to challenge this assertion], A-DP is organizing local day laborers to challenge exploi[ta]tive practices at temporary employment offices throughout Western Massachusetts. A-DP has talked to more than than 300 temporary workers in the area and documented cases where Labor Ready, the egregious violator of labor laws, illegally charged workers for transportation to job sites and check cashing services. A-DP has also uncovered evidence of systematic wage and hour violations by neglecting to pay workers for hours on the clock....
  [Hmm, sorta the opposite of Wal-Mart's problem. Wal-Mart got employees to clock out and keep working. Labor Ready keeps them on the clock but doesn't pay them. Like the Russian army.]
  On Dec. 18th, Labor Ready filed a lawsuit in US District Court in Boston charging that materials on A-DP's website infringed on their trademark....
  [Sounds like a fairly clear gag attempt. On the face of it, a trademark infringement suit would only be valid if A-DP were trying to compete with them and, on the contrary, they're criticizing them - a free-speech issue - not competing with them. A valid approach might be a slander case, not a trademark infringement. This irrelevant charge should not be hard to get thrown out.]
  A-DP is also looking to help initiate a class-action lawsuit against the company. Contributions can be made via the website at *slaverready.com or by contacting the A-DP at 413-739-7233....

• VW aims to make 180,000 Touran minivans in 2003, by Nick Tattersall, Reuters 01/13/03 11:27 ET via AOLNews.
  WOLFSBURG, Germany...- Germany's Volkswagen AG [VW] on Monday unveiled the car it hopes will help take its sales back over the 5 million mark this year, and said the new model would already beat its return-on-capital target in 2003. Speaking at the launch of the new Touran, a minivan based on the best-selling Golf, CEO Bernd Pischetsrieder told reporters that VW (VOWG.DE) aimed to produce 180,000 of the cars in 2003 and sell 130,000.
  Europe's biggest carmaker is depending on the Touran...to boost its sales at a time when its top-selling Golf and Passat models are beginning to look long in the tooth beside fresher-faced rivals. The car is also a litmus test for a new employment programme known as "5000 x 5000", under which the firm trains unemployed, unskilled workers and uses flexible working hours to meet capacity requirements. "If this model stands the test, the entire VW group will learn a lot and will see significant efficiency gains," Pischetsrieder said, adding that, if successfull, the employment model could be used to build other VW cars....
  [VW is the fourth of the case studies on our working models page, and this 5000 x 5000 program may have some timesizing elements. It involves a promise to create 5,000 jobs, with the new employees receiving 5,000 Marks a month (thanks to Rob Solmer (of Nokia?) for this info, tho' in the course of trying to refind this location, we came up with 2 places where we answered it ourselves = 7/05/2001 #2 and 8/25/2001 #2). The question hangs on the meaning of "flexible working hours." Is it merely moving around a fixed-length workweek, or creating jobs by shortening it? If the latter, it's timesizing. We'll keep our eye peeled and we ask readers to send us any information they come across, to timesizing@aol.com . Try to give the email a very relevant subject line because we're getting so much spam these days that it's faster for us just to transfer out the few meaningful emails by their subject lines and delete the rest, than to individually delete the horde of bad ones and keep the few good ones. Note that VW did a major timesizing in 1994 when, faced with the prospect of laying off 30,000 employees and and ruining its hometown of Wolfsburg, it demurred to dropping from 35 to 28.8 hours a week and from 35 hrs/wk pay to 32. If General Motors had done that instead of laying off 74,000 in the early 1990s, the city of Flint, Michigan, would today be more than a ghost town and Michael Moore would never have made his first and still-famous film, "Roger and Me," where he pursues GM CEO, Roger Smith, and tries to get him to explain WHY.]

1. 1/12  Some Hawaiian nurses ratify contract, AP 01/11/03 04:21 EST via AOLNews.
   HONOLULU - Striking nurses at Kuakini Medical Center ratified a new contract as walkouts continued at 2 other hospitals. The nurses Friday voted overwhelmingly for the 3-year pact that includes 20% in pay raises, said Sue Scheider, collective bargaining director of the Hawaii Nurses Assoc.... Scheider said of the union members..."They felt that it was worth it to hold out and to stay as strong as they did throughout the 6 weeks of the strike"..\..
   [And US nurses have an acute shortage on their side, which they created, as doctors did long since, by constricting access to their skills and shutting down most non-degree hospital nursing schools.]
   • Kuakini's 210 nurses went on strike Dec. 2,
   • the same day as nurses at St. Francis Medical Center.
   • Nurses at The Queen's Medical Center went out on strike the following day.
   A tentative agreement in the Kuakini talks was reached Tuesday. The pact also includes access to medical insurance after retirement and restrictions on mandatory overtime, Scheider said....
   A tentative agreement was reached at Queen's on Wednesday.... The Queen's pact includes 21% pay increase over 3 years, retiree benefits and some restrictions of mandatory overtime - all victories for the roughly 800 nurses....

2. 1/11  Germany: Large strike averted, by Mark Landler, NYT, A6.
   The government averted a strike by the country's largest labor union, agreeing to a wage increase this year and 2 smaller increases next year.
   [And no workweek increase.]
   The Verdi union, whose 2.8m members include garbage collectors, firefighters and kindergarten teachers, had threatened to strike later this month....

• [Here we go. Now the New York Times weighs in with its contribution to the ongoing smear campaign ("if you can't gag it, smear it!") against the shorter hours movement five months after the Wall Street Journal's mixed-success effort - see 8/8/2002 -]
  Shortened workweek shortens French tempers - Some French workers say a new 35-hour week is tiring them out, by Craig S. Smith, NYT, A3.
  [But once again, it's almost funny to hear overworked Americans trying to persuade themselves that the French have it worse than them. One wonders how hard they had to try to find "some French" who really don't like shorter working hours, or even if they did at all, or just French who like to complain - which is all too easy. Here's the photo caption -]
  Because of a 35-hour workweek enacted in France in 2000, some stores close early so that employees can leave promptly at the official closing time. A frustrated customer [in photo] was turned away from a Paris bakery at 7:45 p.m.
  [So, Americans, used to bakeries closing at 5 or 6 pm unless they're big boring chains, are supposed to shake their heads at a bakery closing halfway through the evening at 7:30 or so. Sooorry, no sympathy for the would-be customer. There are always going to be some people rushing up right at closing time as any small retailer can testify. The text starts off a little better -]
  PARIS - Ahhh, to be French!
  Marielle Saulnier, a 34-year-old radiotherapy nurse, took 10 days off to ski in the French Alps over Easter, and three weeks to vacation in Corsica during August. She took another week off in October to visit museums and parks with her children during their mid-autumn school break, and 18 more days, sprinkled throughout last year, just to relax.
  [An innocent enough beginning. So the French have a life, and we Americans don't, because we're either working 50-60-70 hours a week on salary or overtime wages like we did 100 years ago when we were still primitive enough to not even call it overtime, or we're working multiple part-time jobs (for peanuts) that add up to only 50-60-70 hrs/wk if we're lucky, or we're underemployed and struggling financially, or we're unemployed for a few more weeks until our benefits extension runs out, or on welfare (eg: 2/04/2000 #1) for a few more years until the 5-year max arrives, or we're on forced early retirement and wondering whether death or bankruptcy is going to win the race, or we've taken a shortcut and joined the 5.4m Americans on disability (9/01-02/2002 #2), or another shortcut and joined the 2.1m Americans in prison, or, hell, maybe we've just joined the uncounted Americans who have simply ended it all. We Americans in what we keep telling ourselves is The Richest Nation in the World (never mind the top 1% has it all) are Sooo Enviable, aren't we?!]
  She still has 35 free days saved up from past years and will take 8 of them this month before starting again the annual cycle of vacations - 58 days in all, not including weekends.
  [Damn them Frenchies. Gotta find something wrong with this, cuz "misery loves company."]
  But is she happy?
  [Bingo!]
  "Not entirely," she said with a sigh, "because I'm tired."
  [Huh?]
  Like many workers in what some European neighbors consider a mollycoddled land,
  [You'd prefer, maybe, a "rich"-country sweatshop like USA? "C'mon down!"]
  Ms. Saulnier complains [and them Frenchies do LOVE to complain!] that the country's 35-hour workweek, adopted in January 2000 [but prepared-for over the previous three years], is making her work too hard.
  [Aaah, pooor baaaby! Everyone we know here in The Best Country in the World (for those who can't guess, the answer is USA, haha) wants to quit sitting around for 8+ hours a day, just work harder when you're in the office and LEAVE EARLY so they can have a life and maybe even spend some time with their family once in awhile. But poor Marielle has to have something to complain about, and Craig S. Smith, bursting green with envy, has to have something to criticize on behalf of his corporate sweatmasters.]
  The law, conceived at a time when the national unemployment rate was nearing 13% [actually 12.6%] and French pessimism was at a peak [if that's possible], was supposed to usher in a utopian era of greater leisure [check] and more jobs [check - unemployment is now only 9%]. But many workers complain that it has not led to enough hiring [3.6% isn't enough? then cut more hours!] and has instead squeezed the same amount of work into fewer hours.
  [Then strike. Or just "go-Japanese" and agree to whatever they ask and do whatever you can do, period. WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?! Force the hiring and quit sighing at home. Some French are like some people in America who complain to their passengers about other drivers but never honk their horns. (Fortunately? the French are not shy about actually honking their car horns.) Plenty of other French, mind you, must disagree, because the hundreds of thousands of people in that 3.6% who got re-employed, 3.9% between 1997 and summer/2001, must have got hired somewhere. As colleague Kate points out, our boy Craig Smith has essentially made a whole article out of two complainers. Here's the other -]
  "If you cut the hours without increasing the workforce, everybody has to work harder," said Jean-Paul Rouillac, a postal worker and union official, sipping a coffee beneath a poster of Che Guevara at a local union office across town.
  [Ah, Jean-Paul, where'd the 12.6-9= 3.6% unemployed disappear to if the workforce wasn't increased? Are you trying to say that France doctors its unemployment figures like the US does? We doubt it. Au contraire, we think for all its kludgy design, the 4-hour cut in the French workweek in process since 1997 brought the French unemployment rate down 1% for every hour cut. To his credit, even Craig Smith ruefully admits that much -]
  To some extent, the logic behind the 35-hour week has been vindicated. Unemployment has dropped to 9% since the law went into effect, and the government, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize new jobs [unnecessary if they'd cut the workweek gradually], claims some of that reduction is because of the shortened workweek.
  The greater flexibility has also helped streamline French industry and might be one factor [in] France's better economic performance compared with that of many of its neighbors in recent years [see, e.g., 5/23/2001 #1].
  But Laure Maillard, an economist with CDC IXIS, a financial firm, argues that the short-term employment and productivity gains will be overtaken by a longer-term drag on corporate profits and government revenues.
  [Oh yeah?
  • First off, cutting the workweek creates a sustainable long-term employment gain, Laure, unless you screw it up as the Democrats did in 1990s' America and inject historically unprecedented numbers of immigrants.
  • Secondly, though there may be a short-term drag on corporate profits because of a bigger workforce, the short- (from employee prioritization) and long- (from better-rested employees) term productivity gains, and the fuller-employment-borne hike in consumer spending, particularly in the leisure sector (5/16/2001) mean the corporate profits are solid and sustainable and not a flash-in-the-pan like the recent dot.com bubble.
  • Thirdly, the only reason there's a drag on government revenues is the screwy way France implemented shorter hours = by jumping down 4 hours at a clip instead on one hour a year as planned in 1982, and then by having the government go last instead of first!?! Pathetic! As it is, the government in France should is saving the money it spent supporting the 3.6% unemployed that have found jobs since 1997, and they can also cut 3.6% of their job subsidies and jobs programs - and "incidentally" reducing the related taxes by that 3.6%.
  [Workweek reduction - you can do it smart, or you can do it stupid. France did it stupid and still got 1% cut in unemployment for every hour they cut in the workweek. Want lower taxes? Cut more working hours and percentage points of unemployment.]
  "I think it could hurt French competitiveness," she said.
  [Or, it could keep France out of the global race to the bottom and leave France alone with a living standard worth a damn while the rest of us, nail-biting over working more and more for less and less in offices with the same schedules as sweatshops in Bangladesh. In short, it could some meaning in your interminable prattle about the French exception aka l'exception francaise. But Laure works for a financial firm which, like Wall Street, has a suicidally short-term view that boils down to "create a labor surplus, depress wages and funnel more profits to the top income brackets so they don't 'waste' money on consumer spending but 'save' it by investing it with us (and fattening our paychecks - damn anyone else's and damn the long term)."]
  It is already causing problems.
  [Here we go.]
  Lawyers, for example [another parasitic profession!], say that some of their some of their [sic - NYT editors, wake u-u-up] high-salaried associates are demanding enforcement of the 35-hour rule,
  [So?]
  and application of the law has been frozen for hotel and restaurant workers because those businesses cannot afford to keep bankers' hours or hire more people.
  [What about all the extra business they're getting now from people with more time and money? There are always going to be certain industries that are particularly good at whining and lobbying - Lordy, the US steel industry still had an 84-hour workweek in 1922 when Commerce Sec'y Hoover finally embarrassed them down to 48. Such crybaby-exploiters will eventually get in line, same as they did over the 100-150 years when our American standard workweek came down from 80-84 hours a week to 40 in 1940.]
  It is doubtful the 35-hour week will be repealed any time soon, however...
  [Gee that's too bad, because we here in America work miserable hours, annually the longest hours in the developed world, and "misery loves company." We'd love to persuade you French to screw yourselves with one of our stupider practices, just as we persuaded Japan at the end of a decade (the 1980s) when it was so successful we were actually writing management books about them to screw themselves by dropping their lifetime employment and imitating our idiotic mass downsizing. Ah, that was sooo satisfying. Japan almost immediately plunged into the economic toilet and has been there ever since. (Our only regret is that they are no longer available to yank us out now we've finally joined them.) "But soft" - why is it that we cannot pressure the French into sabotaging their 35-hour workweek any faster than Chirac and Raffarin are already doing so by pushing the overtime back to where it was before?]
  ...the reason has more to do with sociology than with economics.
  [No it doesn't. Economics is the key to societal norms and living standards today, not politics, not geography/history, and not sociology (though economics will soon be replaced by ecology). And worktime per person has been the hidden key to economics over the last two centuries of the Industrial Revolution and wil remain so over at least the lifetimes of all currently living.]
  The French already work less than people in most other developed countries - on average, nearly 300 fewer hours a year than Americans, according to one study - and they like it that way.
  [No kidding. Guess that's the real "French cultural exception," and a good one it is!]
  "I'd rather have a better quality of life than touch a little more money," said Jean-Marie Gastou...a Federal Express deliveryman.
  France, the richest country in Europe during the 18th century, [Yeah, remember how happy they were then cuz Louis XVI had all those riches? - So happy with hundreds in the Bastille that they staged the French Revolution and have a national anthem that still expresses their relief at stopping from being whatever they were "during the 18th century"!]
  was slow to industrialize, and so it preserved a provincial pace while many of its neighbors, notably Germany and Britain, beavered "ahead." [our quotes - ed.]
  In the 19th century, Marxist influences [oh no-o-o, not MARXIST INFLUENCES - that's taboo for English-speaking economists to even SAY OUT LOUD!] helped define work as a mean to achieve leisure rather than an end, as it was to many Americans.
  [Ya mean the French work to live - and have a life, and a family - while many Americans just live to work - and don't have a life, or a family, or if they have a family, never get to spend any time with it? Yeah, that's real dangerous Marxism all right, especially since the whole idea of leisure was only copied from the capitalist upper classes and since the whole idea that real progress requires less toil, not more, was espoused by capitalists from Lord Leverhulme of Lever Brothers (author of "The Six-Hour Day," 1918) to W.K. Kellogg of Kellogg's Cereals (see Ben Hunnicutt's "Kellogg's Six-Hour Day," 1996) to Edward Filene of Filene's Basement etc. ("Successful Living in This Machine Age, 1931") to James Lincoln of Lincoln Electric to the guys who run Nucor Steel and Hooker Furniture and all the rest of the examples on our case studies page and our timesizing news pages. Yeah sure, Marx has a real hammerlock on these ideas, especially since they were first published by Sismondi in 1819 the year after Marx was born. One-year-old Marx had sooo much to contribute to Sismondi's "New Principles of Economics" (search on Sismondi on our bibliography page.]
  Some French were even taught that ambition could make them ill, said Theodore Zeldin, a British sociologist and keen observer of French society.
  [Yeah the Brits were always at pains to show how much better they were than the "frogs," never mind that some of the most ambitious Brits in history were King John who had to be slapped down off his omnipotent fantasies by the Magna Carta, or Charles II who had to be beheaded to convince him that maybe the Divine Right of Kings was a little megalomaniac, or George III who was more ambitious for the monarchy than anyone in centuries until he lost the American colonies and went nuts. Zeldin might have pointed out that the French got the idea that ambition could make them ill by looking at the Brits - not to mention their own ambitious king, Louis XVI, who suffered Charles I's fate. And speaking of America, what's the U.S. divorce rate - and disability rate - and incarceration rate - today? - largely because Americans don't really "get" the implications of automation and robotization so the U.S. workweek and workyear have been creeping up, not down, since 1945. Ambition. Work hard (never mind smart). Work long hours. Real healthy. Ri-i-ght!   Oops, looks like Craigy is going to stretch for the Marx connection again -]
  Karl Marx.s French son-in-law, Paul Lafargue [any relation to Dickens' Mme LaFarge?], wrote a political tract entitled "The Right to Idleness," which argued for a 3-hour workday.
  [Let's get something straight. More leisure time is essentially more freedom from someone else's agenda and control, something quite different from idleness. And if you're self-employed, more leisure is essentially more freedom from the beck and call of the market for whatever product or service you're selling. The attempt to tie leisure to idleness is just another smear tactic, like the attempt to tie it to Marxism. It's something that some in the suicidally short-sighted American power structure have been trying to do at least since FDR swung into battle against the SHOCKING 30-hour workweek bill (S.5267, 72d Congress, 2d Session) that passed the U.S. Senate 53-30 on April 6, 1933, and was unable to reverse when he realized his mistake two years later. Because idleness, well, "the devil finds work for idle hands to do," doesn't he? Naa, leisure industries find work for idle hands to do. Stair stepping, weight lifting - just look at the health clubs, which have had a small boom in France while the 35-hour workweek has been gaining traction (no pun). Earth Watch even has rich people paying to help them do projects. And hell, a lot of people could use a little idleness. "Cursed is he who must always be doing," says Lao Tzu. "Let your affairs be as two or three and not as a hundred or a thousand, says Thoreau. One of the basic purposes of zen is to "empty the mind," and those of you who followed Carlos Castaneda and don Juan Matus will remember "stopping the inner dialog."]
  "It fits in with a French idea of what life is about - the enjoyment of one's senses and the company of others, sitting in the cafe watching people go by," said Mr. Zeldin,
  ["Droles de gens de ces gens la" say the onlookers in Act II of Gounod's Faust. But hold on, isn't Zeldin in danger of switching sides a bit here and promoting what he's trying to squelch, in the best Puritan tradition? - a "Puritan" being "a person with the nagging suspicion that somebody, somewhere, is having a good time." So he corrects his error -]
  who nevertheless cautions against facile characterizations that ignore the country's many entrepreneurial [ie: workaholic?] personalities....
  [Well this goes on for another 2 columns and we have a half-hour TV show to prepare for, so maybe we'll take a break and just upload what we've got so far. OK, we're ba-a-ck. Let's try keyboarding a paragraph without exploding -]
  A sense of immobility in the traditionally class-conscious society also saps many people here of the get-ahead ambition that drives their counterparts in the United States.
  [Boom!   Yeah, "work hard to get ahead" and when you do that in the context of automation and downsizing, you wind up working harder and harder for less and less, just by simple market forces punishing a surplus.]
  The country's exam-heavy education system sets career paths early and there is little flexibility for changes later on.
  [But here's a good part -]
  "We've never believed in the American Dream," said the nurse, Ms. Saulnier, relaxing in a lounge of the sprawling 19th-century hospital where she works.
  [And a good thing too, now that the American Dream has become hitting the lottery or suing the deep pocket.]
  She says it's obvious that there aren't enough jobs or resources to allow everyone to move up, "and the French understand that."
  [Well, anglophone economists do not understand that - they're still peddling the pap of "employment is unlimited" because "human wants are infinite" - never mind that the vast majority of people don't have the infinite purchasing power to indulge that fantasy - the Imelda Marcos illusion that they can acquire (eg: shoes) - and create employment - without limit. And more likely than not, they're still spreading the fairydust of "technology creates more jobs than it destroys," despite the copious explicit examples in the news the last two centuries (and especially the last two years) of post-upgrade downsizing. That fairydust involves rephrasing over and over again Henry Ford's line in the Ford-Reuther paradox and never getting to Reuther's line: Ford, "Let's see you unionize these robots." Reuther, "Let's see you sell them cars." And well, no matter how much billable worktime or resources there are, there aren't enough when we fall into the Chesterton trap.]
  Instead, the French prefer to keep work in perspective, giving them what many people see as a healthier balance in their lives.
  Ms. Saulnier says she's content with her 860-sq-ft, rent-subsidized Paris apartment, for which she and her common-law husband pay about $600 a month.
  [Sneaking in just a pinch of the taint of parasitism, are we? - as if that is a necessary concomitant of work-life balance.... The subsidies would be unnecessary if the French followed through on workweek reduction and let the workweek edge downward until unemployment was less than 1% = wartime levels of full employment, because then ordinary wages would be high enough for people to afford 100% of their rent.]
  She considers her $20,000 annual salary adequate and even better than that of many of her peers.
  [That's the nasty side-effect of labor surplus dba high unemployment. France cut an hour of unemployment for every hour they cut the workweek, but that still just brought unemployment down from rounded 13% to 9% and holding.]
  "My life doesn't turn around money," she said. "I'm more interested in having more time to do what I want."
  [And any population that isn't, eg: the US, Britain, Japan..., is a sitting duck for the creeping return of slavery via sweatshops, however disguised and high-tech.]
  Part of the reason for the relaxed attitude is that the government gives citizens...
  • free healthcare and education,
    [terrible! demotivating and debauching the population!]
  • inexpensive and reliable child care when they working
    [shocking softening of the citizenry]
  • and hefty unemployment payments when they are not.
    [now these are a problem if they pay better than jobs]
  • There are subsidies for all sorts of things, including housing
    [unnecessary if there's full enough employment and low enough unemployment to raise wages above grinding subsistence - usually achievable only through war, plague or worksharing (but why should we start doing something intelligent this far into history??)]
  • and schoolbooks.
    [shocking! free textbooks! must have a strong publishers' lobby.]
  • Parents get a monthly stipend of about $60 per child simply for being parents.
    [Not a long-term strategy to subsidize reproduction in an age of over-population.]
  Some other European countries rival France in its leisure ethic, its taxes and the generous social benefits, but none have yet enshrined such an abbreviated working time into law.
  [They're just a bit slow, preferring to take their work savings from overbearing technologies in terms of anxious and market-damping unemployment rather than financially secure, confidant-consumer leisure. What silly gits! (We're listening to old Goon Shows on Harvard radio.)]
  Valerie Arnaud, a marketing executive at a financial services firm, says that most people in positions of responsibility realize it is not possible to adhere to a 35-hour week. Still, thanks to the law, she gets 22 extra days of vacation each year - the maximum allowable.
  The added vacation days permit many people to start their weekends on Thursday or end them on Tuesday. Working mothers now often take off Wednesdays when many French children are not in school.
  Ms. Saulnier, who now goes home a little more than an hour [after she arrives - just joking] earlier every day, receives 20 more vacation days a year than she did before.
  But falling profits and budget cuts have prevented hiring at many companies and institutions, such as her hospital.
  [Then cut the workweek another hour, to 34 a week. Transform another 1% of the unemployed into confidant consumers and centrifuge and reactivate another small modicum of the unspendable spending power of the French elite, despite their squealing. That will cut unemployment from 9% to 8% so you can cut unemployment taxes/premiums one ninth and save 11% of taxes required for government makework, including corporate subsidies etc., etc.]
  The result is a rising murmur of complaints that the shortened work year has made life more stressful for many people.
  [Pooor babies. Chirac is in the process of sneakily taking them back to 39 hours a week. The EU only holds the line at 48-hours a week so they can go back to that. If that doesn't sound appealing, they can just siddown and fermez la gueule! or for those in Strasbourg or near the German Grenz, halt's Maul! or for those near the entree to the Chunnel, shut yer gob!]
  Ms. Saulnier says she has to work harder to finish her job before quitting time - theoretically 2:36 pm under the new rules -
  [One word - delegate.]
  and complains that if she runs late, her work eats into her personal time.
  [So if she runs late on the old 39-hour workweek, it's starts eating into her personal time shrunk by 4 hours. Truly the French looove to complain. "Our hearts bleed."]
  "From outside, it looks great, but because we're short of staff it isn't great," she said, adding that during the afternoon, her ward should have seven nurses but there are rarely more than four.
  [One word - strike. American nurses have the same problem but it's all based on the 40-hour workweek, and they too have to strike - with 5 fewer hours of personal time. The only point of the shorter week was to force more hiring, and clearly the French are enforcing the beginning and end of the hours without enforcing the additional hiring - a lesson for future implementations.]
  Workers complain that the tighter schedule has made people stingier with their time. Some stores, for example, now close half an hour early so that workers can leave promptly at the official closing time.
  [In other words, they've gotten time-accountable and efficient, so what's the beef? They'd prefer maybe to have the old blank check on employees' lives, as they have in the U.S. We doubt it.]
  "Back in the old days, things were friendlier and we didn't watch the clock so much," said Serge de Matos...a crewcut night orderly, stuffing union flyers into envelopes at the hospital's union office.
  ["Further fields are greener." Chirac is listenin', pal. He'll restore your hours and more, if he can.]
  Mr. de Matos, says he spends the extra free time sleeping because he's busier at work now.
  [Good, instead of a 39-hr zombie the hospital now has 35 hours a week from a well-rested employee. It would be great if any employees, especially physicians, in American hospitals were well-rested.]
  "I'm more tired than I was before," he says.
  ["Another shitty day in paradise!"]

• U.S. jobs picture will take time to improve, by Joanne Morrison, Reuters 01/08/03 12:17 ET via AOLNews.
  WASHINGTON...- U.S. businesses, [nervous] about the economic recovery and risks of a war with Iraq, have yet to begin serious hiring and will likely delay doing so until later this year, analysts say....
  [Every month a report like this comes out, and usually the solution is hidden in a lower paragraph.]
  Average hourly earnings are expected to advance byl the same 0.3% logged in November while the average workweek is expected to remain at 34.2 hours..\..
  [If that's were the average is in this weak economy, that gives us some idea of where the standard workweek should be, to spread the work and get the spending power out to the multitudes who actually spend it. But current analysts don't think outside the box, and have no idea what "structural" change should mean for the economy -]
  "Businesses continue to live hand-to-mouth," said Ken Mayland, economist with ClearView Economics in Pepper Pike, Ohio. "I do think the economy is on the mend, but I think we are going to see persistence of a so-called jobless recovery."...
  [The whole concept of "jobless recovery" rests on the illusion that the fundamental markets in an economy are the capital or financial markets. In fact, the recurrent phenomena of financial bubbles on one hand, and of wartime prosperity on the other hand, prove that the fundamental markets are the job markets and the financial markets are derivative from and dependent upon them, not vice versa. War corrects imbalances in the job markets in the most drastic way - it kills off all the excess manhours, the tremendous peacetime labor glut that builds up as technology makes jobs redundant and wages flat in the absence of a workweek that automatically adjusts to current technological (and under-employment) levels. No solid and sustainable recovery is ever "jobless." Only hollow unsustainable bubbles due to the frustration, boredom and wishful thinking of investor/speculators are jobless.]

• German public sector set for strike if talks fail, by Kerstin Gehmlich, Reuters 01/07/03 09:32 via AOLNews.
  BERLIN...- German public sector workers will take industrial action for an indefinite period unless their government employers make a new offer at pay talks this week, their VERDI trade union warned on Tuesday.... The employers' latest offer, made towards the end of arbitration talks, suggested a pay rise of 2.8% in two stages over 20 months and demanded other concessions.... Die Welt daily [newspaper] reported on Tuesday employers were willing to accept a wage rise of 3% over a time period of up to two years, versus the 18 months suggested by the arbitration compromise, in return for a longer working week....
  [Strange how the government of a nation with persistently high unemployment is so eager to concentrate the inadequate amount of human employment in the nation even further, and spread further the consumer weakness and unconfidence. Read our lips and spread the vanishing work! The German trade-union people seem to understand this -]
  Lutz Kokemuller, a top VERDI official in Bremen, said the reported proposal sent out the wrong signal. "The wage round on Wednesday in Potsdam can easily be brought to a conclusion. But the basis is the arbitration proposal from the weekend, which does not mention an extension in the weekly working time," Kokemuller said. Arbitrators on Sunday proposed a 2.4% rise for 2003 and a further 0.6% rise for the first six months of 2004....

• (11/19/2002) GM Daewoo eyes new models to rebuild market share, by Samuel Len, Reuters 11/18/02 03:22 ET via AOLNews.
  SEOUL...- GM Daewoo Auto & Technology Co, South Korea's third largest automaker, said on Monday it may launchy a large passenger car and sport utility vehicle (SUV) [oh nooo] in its home market as it struggles to regain lost market share.... Demand for SUVs has surged along with increased leisure time after the country started adopting a shortened, five-day workweek, benefiting SUV specialist Ssangyong Motor Corp....
  [So the boost for leisure industries from South Korea's 4-8 hour cut to the 40-hour workweek that we foresaw on 11/02/2002 #1 was confirmed just 17 days later, but we're only just now getting around to posting it. And it's just too bad the confirmation came in terms of gas-guzzling SUVs. We prefer the French confirmation, 4/29/2001 and 5/16/2001, esp. section "Leisure sector sees boom."]

• (11/18/2002) Gov't to back up work-sharing more actively: Sakaguchi, Kyodo News 11/17/02 01:56 EST via AOLNews.
  TOKYO...- Labor Minister Chikara Sakaguchi said on Sunday the government hopes to act as a facilitator between labor and management to help companies introduce the work-sharing system. ...Sakaguchi said the government...will soon propose measures to facilitate introduction of the system.
  Corporate executives and labor unions have basically agreed to promote [work]-sharing as a means to deal with the country's deteriorating employment situation. But labor unions are concerned about an expected cut in wages as a result of [work]-sharing.
  Sakaguchi said, "I would like to have the core of measures focused on social security issues which may arise when companies hire new employees," hinting at the possibility the government may provide new subsidies aimed at improving social security to companies introducing a work-sharing system.
  [He's not listening. Where's his answer to union concern about an expected wage cut?]
  Speaking on a Japan Broadcasting Corp. program, Sakaguchi, Minister of Health, Labor & Welfare, said the government needs to strengthen job-creating measures to deal with an expected increase in jobless people as a result of an aggressive disposal of bad loans by banks. He said the number of unemployed will likely increase by more than 300,000 if banks clear up 15 trillion yen in bad loans. "If the number of the unemployed increases with the disposal of bad loans, it must be recognized as due to the government's policy decision."
  Regarding establishment of incentives included in the government anti-deflation package to support people finding new jobs, Sakaguchi said, "We'd like to implement the step from around Dec. 1."

• AFL-CIO and PACE union announces boycott against Graphic Packaging Corp., Coors Beer to be targeted, PRNewswire 01/02/2003 12:00 EST via AOLNews.
  KALAMAZOO, Mich...- Decrying the "brutal demands to force workers to work as many as 7 days a week and 16 hours per day" at the Graphic Packaging Corp. (GPC) plant [here] and the "anti-worker, union-busting" practices of the Coors family, [Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical & Energy-Workers International Union (PACE) was joined today by the AFL-CIO in announcing a nationwide boycott against GPC and consumer products for whom GPC provides packaging. Included among manufacturers whose products are contained in GPC packaging are Coors Brewing Co., General Mills, Quaker Products and Kraft Foods. GPC, headquartered in Golden CO, is the largest folding carton manufacturer in the U.S., with one mill and 17 plants throughout the country. The corporation is publicly traded and owned and controlled by the Coors family through family trusts.
  On July 27, 2002, after a dispute primarily over mandatory overtime, holiday work requirements and pensions, GPC imposed a lockout on 429 members of PACE. At the time of the lockout, GPC was demanding that workers could be required to work, if needed, all scheduled days off, all Saturdays, Sundays and holidays - even Christmas - as well as a lower pension for younger workers. GPC later relented on its demand for Christmas work after Jeffrey Coors, GPC CEO, was challenged about this demand on religious grounds.
  At a news conference held [yester]day in Kalamazoo, AFL-CIO and PACE officials and workers announced plans for the boycott.... Also participating in the news conference were representatives of the U.S. Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) which will be active in the boycott nationwide. ...Mark Gaffney, AFL-CIO Michigan State President, stressed..\..that the GPC boycott is an official boycott [by] the AFL-CIO and will be honored by its 13 million members....
  Speaking on behalf of PACE, VP Bill Gibbons said..."The GPC workers in Kalamazoo are being punished by Coors solely because they have engaged in their legal right of collective bargaining and rejected the company's unreasonable demands to [impose] sweatshop conditions, \that is,\ to work up to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, all days off and every holiday except Christmas.... This conduct...could set an...anti-family precedent."
  ...James Thomas, a member of PACE who spoke at the news conference on behalf of the locked-out workers, many of whom were in attendance...remarked: "After working at this facility for more than 20 years, I find it impossible to understand why Coors would inflict this kind of pain and suffering on me, my family and co-workers for simply saying 'no' to their unreasonable demand to work more hours, thus eliminating valuable time we have to spend with our family and churches."...
  [Hey, maybe US labor is starting to get strategic. Let's hope they finally realize that in terms of their traditional demands for higher pay and shorter hours, if they focus on the first they get neither, but if they focus on the second they get both. Shorter hours, as the Great Engineer, Herbert Hoover said, is the fastest way to create more jobs, and when there's less of a shortage of jobs and more of a shortage of labor, wages will go up automatically by market forces, as they do in wars and plagues for the same reason = withdrawal of surplus manhours from the job market.]
  ...Gibbons reported...Coors products will initially get the emphasis...because the union believes the Coors family wants [union] members to work until "they drop" and Coors would like to return to the days before unions existed to protect workers from this kind of abusive treatment.
  General Mills cereal products which will be targeted include: Wheaties, (Honey/Apple Nut) Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Trix, Cocoa Puffs/Crisp, Total (Raisin Bran), Golden Grahams, and Wheat/RiceCorn Chex.
  ...Quaker products to be targeted by the boycott are all flavors of Rice-a-Roni and Pasta-Roni.
  The Oscar Meyer brands of Kraft Products will be specifically targeted....
  The plan includes the use of radio and TV ads [and] a website - *Coors-abuse.org ....

• Flexible hours seen as key perk for UK workers, Reuters 01/01/03 23:47 ET via AOLNews.
  LONDON - British workers would rather have flexible hours than extra pay, a company car or gym membership, a survey conducted by a recruitment consultancy and the government revealed on Thursday. Of the 4,000 respondents to the online poll almost half - 46% - chose flexible hours as the perk they most wanted in a new job. A third of new jobseekers said they would rather have the chance to work flexible hours than to receive £1,000 in extra pay.
  [We suspect the use of "flexible hours" here includes "shorter hours" in the sense that, if I've finished my work I can go home early. We suspect this because of later references to paternity and maternity leave and "better work-life balance."]
  The survey carried out by recruitment website reed.co.uk and the Dept. of Trade & Industry (DTI) comes on the eve of a government publicity campaign to raise awareness about new employment rights, which start on 6 April 2003.
  The new rules, which the government is keen to describe as "family friendly," will mean that workers with children under six or with disabled children under 18 will be eligible to ask their employers for flexible working hours. The government estimates about 3.7 million parents will be eligible to apply for the new working arrangements.
  Under the new rules workers will also benefit from changes to paternity and maternity leave.
  "This poll shows that getting a better work-life balance is becoming much more important for all employees - men as much as women - and the competitive advantages business gains from offering flexible working are now well established," said Trade and Industry Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, in a statement.
  "The new employment rights will be a major step forward in helping businesses hold onto good staff and help millions of working parents balance work and childcare," the minister said.

• (12/26) French bank workers get stress hot line, by Brian Rohan, AP 12/25/02 02:37 EST via AOLNews.
  PARIS - It would give anybody stress: merger mania, heavy workloads, and worries about job security. Now France's second-largest bankers' union is planning to give stressed-out members just what they need - someone to speak to on a 24-hour psychological hot line...scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2003 [to] provide a free, phone-based counseling service to union members - from tellers to senior management - and their families....
  [What they really need is a REAL shorter workweek, implemented correctly, instead of the simplistic leap from 39 to 35 hrs/wk with government leading from behind and defining "large company" as anything over 20 employees!]
  A two-year-old French program to reduce the working week to 35 hours - which had been touted as a saving grace for employees - has often meant that companies have held off hiring to save money. So the employees who remain face extra pressure to work efficiently. "After the 35-hour work week was passed, not enough new employees were hired, and the workload wasn't significantly reduced"..\..said Regis dos Santos, VP of the SNB CFE-CGC bankers union..\..
  [An hour's reduction each year for businesses of all sizes, as originally planned in 1982 but only implemented one time, is much less of a hardship because it gives markets a chance to expand due to a bit of extra time for shopping and a bit more numerous (because recently re-employed by employers who "get it"), confident consumers and calm the qualms of alarmist employers who don't "get it."]
  "The stress is there.... And when 75% of employees think that even speaking about stress can affect their careers adversely, there's a problem."...
  [Yeah but the real problem is still much too much unemployment, and we'd bet that France still has too many silly regulatory obstacles in the way of hiring too, such as too many per-employee taxes/mandatory benefits which motivate employee overloading and overtime, and such as, ironically, too many regulatory obstacles in the way of individual firing for just cause if an employee just ain't performing.]
  Dos Santos' union has hired Psya, a French company that links distraught employees with a team of 20 "tele-psychologists," to put the anti-stress plan in action....
  [Hooboy. Anything but address the real problem. Job insecurity because France, like everyone else in the wake of the Hitler-FDR-Keynes' tangent of work creation instead of work sharing, has fallen waaay behind in work creation and has a huge 'army of the unemployed' disciplining the workforce (and the consumer base) into the ground instead of disciplining employers, especially hyper-hoarding CEOs, into centrifuging their black hole of astronomical income into wages for new hires and thereby supporting the markets that they wish to keep sustainably supporting them.]