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Timesizing News, February 15-28, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

2/28/2003  pressures for timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

• [hey, maybe the cultural pendulum is starting to swing back -]
  The joy of sloooooooow - Three films offer a rare, refreshing change of pace from a frenzied world, by Ty Burr, Boston Globe, C1.
  [Maybe we getting tired of running away from ourselves.]
  Slowing down is a sin in a culture hooked on speed.
  [Ooo, sin sounds exciting, and note double entendre.]
  If a film doesn't hustle you to the next explosion, or hook you on a blizzard of images, or goose you with a 200-beats-per-minute soundtrack, don't you find yourself fidgeting in sensory withdrawal?...
  [No, azza matter of fact, we find ourselves not reachin for the remote or walkin outa the theater.]
  If so, you may want to stay out of movie theaters during the late-winter freeze....
  • David Gordon Green's "All the real girls"...tells of rural young love in the cadences of a dreamy alt-rock ballad.
  • Alexander Sokurov's "Russian ark"...carries a viewer on a one-take, 96-minute tour of that country's art and history.
  • Tomorrow the Museum of Fine Arts kicks off a film series devoted to the Prince of Pokiness, Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky.
  • Then there's Gus Van Sant's "Gerry"...: a nearly plotless reverie of disaster in the desert [which] slows time down to a point where seconds seem to acquire an oceanic vastness.
  There's a larger advantage to the pause that refreshes. Humans would go crazy if they didn't dial their brain waves down during sleep.... And the low-gear aesthetic of these movies may be more and more necessary to our sanity as pop culture's internal motor exponentially increases. The slow lane may take longer, but sometimes you see more.
  [Anda lotta people are diggin train travel these days.]

• (2/12)   Reliability Incorporated reports results for 2002, Business Wire 02/11/2002 05:16 Eastern via AOLNews.
  HOUSTON...- Reliability Inc. (Nasdaq:REAL) [yester]day announced that revenues for the year ended Dec. 31, 2002, were $4,041,000, resulting in a net loss of $5,089,000.... Larry Edwards, president and CEO, commented, "...The Company curbed spending by reducing salaries by 15% for executives and 10% for managers, forced plants to take extended shutdowns for holidays, cut hours, and reduced travel and discretionary expenses...."
  ...Reliability manufactures burn-in and test equipment for sale to manufacturers and volume users of integrated circuits.... The Company also designs and manufactures a line of power sources, including DC-to-DC power converters..\..
  [Must refer to different amperages/voltages of DC?]
  Reliability Inc. is based in Houston, with an operating facility in Singapore.... The Company's Singapore sugsidiary provides conditioning and testing services for integrated circuits..\..
  For more information, see the *Company's website....

• (12/22/1985)   Is there life before death?, by David Warsh, Boston Globe, reprinted in Dave's "Economic Principals" (Free Press, 1993), 389ff, and soon to appear, if not already, on his *website.
  Can there be an adult in Boston who has not complained of not having enough time for the [Xmas] holidays?... As Walter Kerr once wrote, "Isn't it odd that a century which should, by all rights, be the most leisurely in all history is also known to be, and condemned for being, the fastest?"
  [i.e., the busiest]
  ...Not very much effort has been devoted to formally thinking through the problems of mixing consumption and time to maximize happiness, what Schlomo Maital calls "the King Kong of social science questions."
  [Hmm, better get that onto our Big Question page. ... Done.]
  ...What about happiness itself? Why doesn't money buy more of it? For those who habitually look to economists for guidance, the starting point is John Maynard Keynes...: He foresaw the possibility of a world of too much leisure,
  [in which book? and could this be "too much" only in the minds of child-people who are conditioned to having others tell them what to do? "Mummy, I haven't anything to do-oo (whine whine)."]
  in which "a general nervous breakdown" would be a threat.
  [meaning hypersensitization mounting to what our generation would see as hypochondia?? But undoubtedly much of what we in the developed, civilized world view as "problems" would be way way below the radar of most of our ancestors. This is a function of rising expectations. Solve the huge problem in front and perception adjusts so that the smaller problem behind, previously hidden, now looms just as large. Colleague Rob Firmin tells us that demographer(correct term?) Philip Hauser of UChic always emphasized "rising expectations."]
  The problem would be "to spread the bread thin on the butter - to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a 15-hour week may put the problem off for quite a while."
  [That's exactly what worksharing via timesizing does, in a flexibly adjusting non-arbitary way.]
  Well, it hasn't worked out that way - not yet, anyway. People still bang away, with shorter workweeks, longer vacations,
  [This article was published 3 years before Ben Hunnicutt's "Work Without End" which accepted some early evidence that American workweeks were actually getting longer and 6 years before Juliet Schor's "Overworked American" which came up with figures showing the American workyear had actually become an entire month longer in previous decades.]
  but they are just as hungry for more.
  [More work or more vacation??]
  Tibor Scitovsky, a Hungarian expatriate based at Stanford, has argued that consumers habitually choose short-term "pleasure" over long-term "comfort," insuring their general distress.
  [Meaning "the grasshopper and the ants" = the short-term leisure ensuring the grasshopper's long-term starvation, in contrast to the ants? Or meaning short-term work(aholism) ensuring long-term heart attack?]
  In The Joyless Economy, he described a society that produced too much and consumed too little.
  [Any history of the Great Depression describes such a society. For that matter, any history of our current post-dotcom-bubble-pop period describes such a society.]
  ...The central problem, according to The Harried Leisure Class \by\ Staffan Burenstam Linder...a well-born Swede...is to realize that spending money entails spending one's time too, and to act accordingly....
  [This view supports the Big Question articulation: those with all the money don't have the time to spend it, and those with all the time don't have the money to spend.]

1. [pressures mounting #1]
   Doing more with less, avoiding shoddy work and burned-out staff, by Carol Hymowitz, WSJ, B1.
   [This is only possible with less worktime from the same or more staff - who are better rested and clearer thinking.]
   Do more with less. That's the maxim in business today as executives and employees are pressed to work harder and faster as resources, from staffing levels to marketing and training budgets, are pared.
   [No, "doing more with less" was a phrase Buckminster Fuller coined to describe what advancing mechanization and technology allowed humans to do to make their lives easier. Bucky's main contributions, however, were written before the seroius acceleration of downsizing in the 80s and 90s, so he missed the necessity of assuring the blessing of technology by timesizing (trimming hours for all and keeping everyone employed) instead of invoking the curse of technology by downsizing (and gradually killing your own markets).]
   Multitasking is common, with many managers returning e-mails and checking cellphone messages while attempting to participate at company meetings. So are around-the-clock schedules, as those who want to get ahead have to make themselves available to global customers, bosses and subordinates.
   [Does it ever occur to the Type A crisis-managers at the Wall Street Journal that this is a description of hell. A real, 24/7, around-the-clock schedule means you're living in a state of invasion, with no down time, sorta like a perfect robot. Look where this kind of thinking got the space shuttle. Look where it got Enron. Look where it's getting Bush.]
   This constant effort to keep up, however, can result in sloppy or less-thoughtful owrk, as well as overworked and alienated employees.
   [No kidding.]
   The challenge is doing more with less while maintaining, even improving, work quality and staff motivation....
   [We repeat, this is only possible with less worktime from the same or more staff - who are better rested and clearer thinking. Otherwise it's just CYA management bluster. The people who came closest were the Japanese from 1950-1985 while they offered lifetime employment - to elicit more and more non-threatening innovation from all their employees - and a Deming-led focus on quality. The centerpiece of Deming's "14 Points for Management" was "Banish fear from the workplace." Doing more with less in terms of fewer and fewer employees, each in mounting fear for their jobs, is out of the question. Love is the most powerful and sustainable human incentive, not fear, or hate, or exhaustion, or peptalks about why it is sooo important to enrich corporate executives who have already got far far far far far far far far far more than they can spend. "You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar." The article follows with an anecdote about a VP of mktg who was put under a crunch, and what did she do? She traveled to 6-8 European cities for ideas. Of course, she missed their main idea - more free time.]

2. [pressures mounting #2 - here's another scope on the deepening pathology of the American workplace - no, that's part of the problem - for many there's no defined workplace any more, just as there's no defined worktime -]
   Skipping a night out on the town - Increasingly, executives opt for relaxing[?] in their hotel rooms - A trend that has accelerated since 9/11/01, by Jane Levere, NYT, C6.
   Like many traveling executives, Peter Salmon, a senior sales manager for Sharp Electronics in L.A., has taken to holing up in his hotel room at night. If he's not entertaining clients at dinner, Mr. Salmon said he would "have room service, sit there, open and answer the day's e-mails and check our system for sales updates.... I've been doing this more and more," said Mr. Salmon, who favors Hilton hotels for their concierge floors, guest-room desks and high-speed Internet access. "There are some nights I spend 3-4 hours on a computer. I used to go out to eat more, but now I don't have as much time."
   [No limits. People with no limits are dangerous, to themselves and others. Growing isolation. What's the effect on interpersonal skills? Is Bush an example - someone who thinks he can opt out of everyone else's game and then expect them to play his? Someone who wants to meddle with everything everywhere? No limits = fantasies of omnipotence. Arrogance shading into megalomania.]
   Travel industry execs say Mr. Salmon is one of a growing number of business travelers who are skipping a night out on the town, once an inviolable perk, in favor of spending their evenings along in their hotel room to work or relax.
   [We get the "alone." We get the "work." Where's the "relax" come in?]
   Many of them are also converting the room into an office where they work during the day.
   [That ain't it. But there is fear -]
   Although this trend began before the World Trade Ctr attacks, they say, it has accelerated, spurred by the declining economy, cutbacks in travel budgets, increased pressure on time and productivity, and travelers' desire to use what free time they have to unwind and stay in touch with their families.
   [Oh? And just what free time do they have?]
   Of course, business travelers still head to night spots in large numbers and meet clients and colleagues outside their hotels....
   [Ya mean at nightclubs like the ones in Rhode Island and Chicago?]
   Gwen Davis, a New York writer, at the Hotel Bel-Air in L.A. [photo caption] "It's just so grisly out there right now, I literally have to build a cocoon around myself...."
   [When Americans have more worksaving technology than ever, which should put each and every one of them in a secure and stress-free heaven, relative to their parents and grandparents, they are instead exploring deeper and deeper levels of an Inferno.]

• What to do when freelance freedom means having no checks to cash, pointer blurb, NYT, 3:1.
  [And the indicated article -]
  'Free agents' find too much free time - Consultants, in a drought, depend on other jobs, by Eileen Gunn, 2/23/2003 NYT, 3:10.
  [The great Global Labor Glut, though overlooked and even denied, comes to consultants -]
  ...According to the Labor Dept., the number of self-employed people working full time or at least 35 hours a week [= full time in France] declined 5% in 2002 from 2000, while the level of self-employed people working part time rose 9%....
  [Forced "self-employment" and forced part-time are other possible outcomes of downsizing, besides standard temporary unemployment and welfare, and catastrophic homelessness, incarceration or suicide. Forced self-employment tends to be temporary too, because it drains your savings, but it compares to early retirement in that it can often be eked out for a long time. Forced part-time supports the view that we're reducing the workweek anyway, whether we want to or not, but we're doing it in a destructive way - forced "part-time" and spreading economic anxiety - rather than in the most constructive way, redefining "full time" as fewer working hours for all - as we did prior to 1940 - and spreading economic security.]
  "It's similar to being on unemployment," said Dr. JoAnn Brusa, a counselor and psychologist at Oak Consulting, an HR...company in Lisle, Ill. "You're dealing with loss in your business and anger and possibly depression."...
  The biggest challenge is financial. Free agents don't have unemployment checks or severance pay to fall back on when work stops for a few months.
  [And no assurance it's just going to stop "for a few months." It's often been said in the past - work-saving technology means we're going to save, i.e., reduce work, and we can take those savings as anxious un- and under-employment or as financially secure leisure time. The latter possibility exists only in the context of flexible adjustment of the workweek.]
  ..\..It's difficult to gauge how many people are independent contractors, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that about 6.5m Americans were self-employed when the economy peaked in 2000; the current total, it says, is about 6.2m.
  [So did 0.3m people grasp for modest retirement or low-paying part-time jobs at Burger King or what? Or does this just reflect the number of full-time self-employed, which "declined 5% in 2002 from 2000"?]
  With the economy now weak, many free agents are trying to find their way through a nebulous zone that isn't quite unemployment, but is still nowhere near the full-time business they once had.
  Projects have become smaller and less frequent than they were two years ago, said Robert Steir, the founder of MBA GlobalNet in New York, a network of management consultants who bid jointly on projects. At Dice.com, which lists freelance assignments for technology professionals, contract job listings fell 14% in 2002, after declining 28% in 2001, said Thomas Silver, a senior VP....
  [This story could well be the path of the whole economy in the next few years as economists continue to tell two conflicting stories about technology - it saves work but it creates jobs, sorta like more "self-employment" is being created but more self-employed are under-employed and having to work "part time." And the only way out of that feast of anxiety is work sharing.]

• Cheers for a snow day 'weenie', letter to editor by Kathy O'Donnell of South Boston MA, Boston Globe, A18, flagged by colleague Kate.
  A snow day [i.e., a day off work because of deep snow] is a rare occurrence. So why should anyone feel bad about taking Tuesday off to dig out cars, shovel walks, help their older neighbors, and, more important, spend a few hours with family and friends?
  In Steve Bailey's Feb. 19 Business column, "Are you 'essential'?" he [claims] that the recent blizzard separated the workers from the weenies; the weenies stayed home while the workers reported for duty.
  Unfortunately a standard has been set in the American workplace that makes us believe that our jobs should be our number one priority in life. Every day we come to work. Many come in early, skip lunch, and stay late. In fact, many of work through the weekend. And for what? Is the world a better place because some people showed up for work Tuesday? Did the economy begin a path to recovery?
  [Quite the contrary, because there's sooo many robots and sooo many un- and under-employed.]
  Would most Globe readers have thought twice if Steve Bailey's column hadn't run for a day? I think not.
  For some people who trudged in to work, finishing a report, a presentation, or an article will be how they remember the Blizzard of 2003. As I shoveled my car out of 30 inches of snow, I watched as a man and his young son spent hours playing in the snow - laughing and enjoying each other's company. At a time when cellphones, Palm Pilots, and laptops invade our every space, memories like that one are few and far between.
  So if taking time to stop and enjoy life with his son makes that man a weenie, then I say cheers [for] the weenies of the world.
  ["Weenies of the world, unite - cast off your ridiculously excessive pre-hitech working hours!"]

1. Nursing home hit with one-day strike, by Alice Dembner, Boston Globe, B3, flagged by colleague Kate.
   Strikers picketed a Massachusetts nursing home for the first time in 3 years after the owner [Kindred Healthcare] of the Star of David nursing home in West Roxbury MA unilaterally cut workers' hours. ...Earlier this month, managment cut workers' hours from 40 to 37½, effectively cutting their pay by more than 6%. The reduction also eliminated the slight overlap during shift change when workers typically shared patient information. Management increased pay 20 cents an hour, far below the 45 cents an hour workers were seeking, according to union members.... Workers said Kindred had cut staff hours in 11 of its 34 homes in the states, but not in its 4 other unionized homes in the state.\..
   [There is a primitive form of timesizing, not downsizing in play here, because this business owner evidently valued its employees enough not to want to lose them to layoffs. Or maybe it's just that it had already cut to the bone -]
   Workers at Star of David Nursing, Rehabilitation & Alzheimer's Center voted to join Local 285 of the Service Employees International Union 14 months ago in large part because management had cut staffing, leaving fewer aides to care for more patients. On the home's Alzheimer's unit, for example, they said management cut 2 positions, leaving 4 licensed nurses and nurses' aides to care for 37 patients.... However, there are ways to implement timesizing and ways not to implement timesizing, and this is a good example of how not to implement timesizing. A solution isn't a solution if all those involved don't understand it as such. That's why the whole public-sector part of the Timesizing Program is gated and paced by public referendums. And this is a workplace where the employees would really understand timesizing, because -]
   ...Said RoseMarie Jean, a nurse's aide who has worked at the home for 15 years and was picketing yesterday, "We've been working here so long, we're like a family...."
   New nurses' aides get about $9 per hour, while those with many years' service earn $14 per hour. Kitchen workers earn as little as $7.21 per hour..\.. "We want respect," said RoseMarie Jean. "...They're trying to get us to leave so they can hire people for less money."
   [If management really values its surviving employees, its clumsy blunder of failing to include employees in the decision-making has sent exactly the opposite message to what they intended.]
   ...Turnover among nursing home staff statewide is a big problem.... The home scored low on the state's quality survey, ranking in the bottom 7%....

2. On the go 24/7 - Tired of having too much to do? The backlash against moving so fast, by Linda Matchan, Boston Globe, H1, flagged by colleague Kate.
   ...24/7, that shorthand for being on the go 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Or call it, as former secy of labor Robert Reich has written, "a rising chorus of American voices resolving to slow down."...
   [It isn't primarily the speed. It's primarily the distance, the duration, the length of the workweek and the fact that for many with cellfones etc. it has penetrated their evenings, weekends and vacations. Employers are sooo spoiled by the massive invisible labor surplus in the background all around the world - due to the downsizing response to technology - that they have their own shortsighted way even as they have it both ways -
   1. if they cut employees' hours, they often expect them to do just as much in the shorter time, ergo speed,
   2. or if they cut jobs, they often expect the survivors to do the jobs of the dearly departed as well as their own, ergo speed.
   [The irony is that as far as speed and duration are concerned, humans can't compete with robots, which are the real 24/7 experts. You want "reality"? That is reality. And as Reuther said to Ford when challenged with "Let's see you unionize these robots!" - "Let's see you sell them cars." But with un-unionized, redundant and powerless employees unable to convert downsizing into timesizing, the hidden unemployment just builds up ... in welfare, disability, forced part-time and early retired, homeless, and incarcerated. And suicides. And the whole economic juggernaut careens off the track, cuz wages wimp out and the wealthy wind up concentrating sooo much unspendable spending power, they actually suction the markets away from their own investments. This is all so stupid and unnecessary. With all this miraculous technology, we should all be living in heaven by now. And the key to starting the transition is doing timesizing the right way where you cut employees' hours and hire more employees instead of overloading the survivors, and by hiring more employees, you gradually cut the labor surplus and harness market forces to flexibly raise wages and restore spending and consumer markets and industrial markets and financial markets. The present article has no solution. In fact, it worsens the problem with the usual BS -]
   No matter what you call it, the fact is that as the "realities" [our quotes] of a fast-changing economy dictate [the only 'dictators' are our downsizing-blindered plutocrats] that Americans stay competitive [what's the incentive to compete for lower quality of life in a race to the bottom?], work harder, move faster, and be busier.
   [What a crock of outdated puritanical buzzwords, guaranteed to shorten your life by heart attack or stroke. So after reinforcing by repetition that whole negative party line, we finally get to the vague and groping positive -]
   There are growing indications that many are looking for a more balanced way to live, and are seeking ways - big and small - to put the brakes on in the workplace and also at home. "I really believe that a lot of worker bees in this country are saying, 'What the hell am I doing?'" said Richard Laermer, author of "TrendSpotting" (Perigree), a book that analyzes trends in American society. "...When businesses failed in 2000 and 2001 [and 2002], a lot of people went home and said, "I need a break from all this."...
   [The rest of the article is more hand-wringing, interrupted by a few examples of people who've successfully escaped from the rat race, like the woman in the photograph (H3) who became a cabaret singer, unlike Timesizing, not a solution that would fit all of us.]

• (2/18)   More Japanese women suffering mental problems from overwork, Kyodo 02/17/03 05:56 EST via AOLNews.
  TOKYO... - The number of Japanese women who die or suffer from mental problems due to overwork is rising as a result of worse working conditions under the recession, government and private group statistics show. A Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry survey shows that a record 10 women died from overwork in fiscal 2001, and diagnoses of mental problems such as stress and depression caused by overwork totaled 22, almost double the figure for fiscal 2000.
  More women in Japan are putting in longer hours and working late-night shifts, many in an apparent attempt to keep their jobs amid the prolonged economic slump and associated layoffs. In one example, a civic group offering advice on overwork said it has dealt with 221 consultations from women between 1988 and the end of 2002.
  Staff at a Tokyo-based labor union for women also cited an increasing number of consultations and inquiries from women about job conditions, physical and mental health and taking leaves of absence. Many women who want to stay in full-time jobs rather than switching to part-time are forced to work overtime even when they feel unwell, they said. Some pregnant women are afraid of becoming the first ones to be let go under restructuring drives and refrain from taking maternity leave, they added.
  The government is also concerned about growing numbers of deaths related to work. Last month, the ministry submitted to an advisory panel for the labor minister a 5-year plan aimed at reducing overwork and the number of deaths, including suicides, resulting from it.
  But one family is suing the state over the death of a female relative it says died of overwork, and claims the government was negligent in providing security for her. Yuko Murakami was a nurse at a state-run medical center in Suita, Osaka Prefecture, when she collapsed at home from a stroke in February 2001, according to her family. She died the following month at age 25. They recently asked the state to recognize her death as ''karoshi,'' a Japanese term for death from overwork.
  Murakami was putting in 80 hours of overtime per month, taking care of seriously ill patients, training nurses and preparing for medical research announcements, they said. Before she died, Murakami had sent emails to her friends saying she was exhausted from working long hours without getting much sleep.
  The National Personnel Authority is considering whether to recognize the case as karoshi, but a labor ministry official refused to comment due to the ongoing lawsuit.

• (2/15)   Press digest - Washington Post business - Feb. 14, Reuters 02/14/03 00:28 ET via AOLNews.
  ...Southwest Airlines flight attendants plan to picket Friday [2/14] at the carrier's main airport in Dallas to protest a management proposal to increase working hours, the head of the flight attendants union said.
  [Whoa, if charmed Southwest starts p*ssing off its staff, it's doomed. Its "Love Field" in Dallas has been the hallmark of its excellent employee relations, reciprocated company loyalty and astronomical productivity.]

• Average monthly pay down 2.4% in 2002, Kyodo News 02/16/03 via AOLNews.
  TOKYO...- Avenue monthly pay in all Japanese industries in 2002 fell 2.4% from the previous year to 343,480 yen, the government said in a revised report Monday. The percentage drop [was] the largest since comparable data were first taken in 1991...the Ministry of Health, Labor & Welfare said. Adjusted for changes in consumer prices, the real wage declined 1.3%, a revision from the preliminary 1.2% drop, said the report, which covers companies employing 5 or more people. Both figures marked the 2nd straight yearly falls.
  The Ministry also said average work hours for 2002 came to 1,825 hours per person at companies with 5 employees or more, down 11 hours from the previous year [2001].... At companies with 30 employees or more, average yearly work hours for the reporting year dropped 11 hours to 1,837 hours for the 2nd consecutive yearly decline.... The government has set a target of reducing yearly work hours to 1,800 hours by fiscal 2005 at companies with at least 30 employees.
  [The only set of annual figures we have come from a Boston Globe article on 7/08/2001 #3, which gives Japan's average annual hours worked as 1889, which is considerably above either the small-company figure (1825+11=1836) or the large-company figure (1837+11=1848). So what if the July/2001 story is from 2000. If there was the same rise in the large-company figure from 2001 back to 2000 as the year after, we'd have 1848+11= 1859 in 2000, still far below 1889. So we have no idea whence the discrepancy between these two sets of figures. And we have no assurance from these stories that the reduction is not due merely to the relegation of more and more people to part-time, no benefits.]