Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

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Timesizing News, March 1-20, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

3/20/2003  primitive timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope - contrasting cases in the U.S. -

1. [1 of shorter worktime]
   U.S. hotels could cut services if war slows demand, by Peter Henderson, Reuters 03/20/03 00:33 ET via AOLNews.
   LOS ANGELES...- U.S. hotels and resorts could close restaurants early, limit hours of health clubs and cut other services if the outbreak of war discourages more Americans from traveling for business and leisure. "We've got a checklist of things that we are looking at doing at the hotel level," Marc Grossman, a spokesman for Hilton Hotels, said. Restaurants could be closed or shut early and staff hours cut quickly if demand dropped, he said....
   [ie: timesizing, not downsizing]

2. [1 of longer worktime]
   Working at a fever pitch - With unemployment rising, workers cut back on sick days; Absenteeism at 10-year lows, by Carlos Tejada, WSJ, D1.
   The latest casualty of the worst employment market in a decade is the sick day. It's not that Americans are healthier or have fewer soccer games to attend. But given the grim job market right now, looking lazy is a bad idea....
   [So, a lot more people sneezing around the office, and with more cubicles, fewer offices - more potential contagion - and now a new respiratory plague.... - and all because of the "grim" job market.]
   The unemployment rate is hovering just below 6%, a level not seen since 1994. Last year, big employers laid off more than 1m Americans. Just last month alone, 308,000 jobs disappeared, the biggest drop since the months following the 2001 terrorist attacks.
   The sluggish economy has done wonders for the nation's attendance record.
   {And for the nation's long working hours, since no one wants to be the first to leave the office at night.]
   This year, about 200,000 fewer employees per week are taking a day off for health, personal or medical reasons than did in 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employee absentee rates are at or near their lowest levels since 1991, according to a survey of HR managers by CCH Inc., a Riverwoods, Ill., research firm.
   Another sign that Americans are eager to keep their noses to the grindstone instead of getting some bed rest: Doctors are seeing a decline in patients requesting sick notes - and a jump in requests for painkillers that will help them stay at work. "People are afraid they're going to lose their jobs," says Banks Turner, a physician in Richmond, Va....
   [Here then is the explanation of the paradoxical juxtaposition of more overwork and less work available.]

3. [1 more of longer worktime]
   Compelling new novel tackles the price of ambition today - The Price, by NYT bestselling author Joan Johnston..., PRNewswire 03/19/2003 12:28 EST via AOLNews.
   LOS ANGELES...- In the aftermath of the scandals that brought down some of the world's biggest corporations in the last year, NYT bestselling author Joan Johnston has written a compelling new novel that tackles the pressing question: How high a price is a person willing to pay to achieve his or her ambitions?... This timely, impassioned story also explores the trade-offs people make between work and family as they pursue professional success, along with the timely personal issue of what is truly important in life.... Johnston knows well the world of The Price. After graduating with honors from the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, she spent 5 years as an attorney on the partner track at 2 high-powered firms - during which she was forced to confront her own priorities while coping with 60- to 80-[hour] workweeks as a mother of two....
   [ie: employee overload acceptable to employees because of job insecurity driven by scarce good jobs relative to surplus job candidates driven by employee overload... = the whole downward spiral that activated once we stopped our 150-year reduction of the workweek in 1940. The following shows the effect more clearly -]

• Winnebago posts strong profit, sees slower market, by Susan Kelly, Reuters 03/18/03 16:37 ET via AOLNews.
  Winnebago Industries Inc. [based in] Forest City, Iowa..\..said on Tuesday its quarterly earnings jumped 31%, but its stock sank almost 18% after it cautioned that the recreational vehicle maker was slowing under the threat of war. The company said it had temporarily scheduled 4-day workweeks at its factories due to the slowdown and higher inventory levels....
  [= a basic form of timesizing to avoid downsizing.]
  "Due to the U.S. facing the lowest consumer confidence levels in recent history and the geopolitical turmoil caused by the threat of war with Iraq, it appears that the RV [recreational vehicle] market has temporarily slowed," Winnebago Chairman and CEO Bruce Hertzke said in a statement. U.S. consumers, worried that they could lose their jobs in the weak economy, have snapped their wallets shut in recent months. "Spending on leisure activity is highly discretionary...," analyst Craig Kennison of Robert Baird & Co. wrote in a research report....

• (2/15)  Just what the worker needs - Longer days, no overtime - Administration push for 'flexibility' will make many bosses smile, by Policy Dir. Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute, Los Angeles Times FEB 14 2003 via Boston Shorter Worktime Group meeting 3/18/2003, source credit to attendees Barbara Brandt, Jon Bekken (chair), Jason & Matt.
  [This article is an interpretation of the AP article we excerpted on 2/02/2003 #1, which is admittedly a little fuzzy as to exactly what's going on.]
  The Bush administration is acting to make it easier for businesses to work employees longer hours without paying overtime compensation. A slick campaign will market these changes as employee-friendly efforts to increase "flexibility."...
  [Compare the campaign by the French right under Chirac to make the nationwide 35-hour workweek enacted during the previous administration "more flexible."]
  Instead of protecting more workers and improving enforcement, however, the Bush Administration is seeking to remove as many employees as possible from coverage.
  [except in their proposed raising of the pay level above which overtime-premium exemption can start.]
  By expanding the definitions of exempt "professional, administrative, and executive" employees, [Bush] would cut the cost to employers of longer work hours and seriously erode the 40-hour workweek.
  [And further concentrate the already unspendably concentrated spending power of the nation, and further strengthen the pressures against economic recovery and toward deeper economic recession.]
  Bills supported by...Bush would permit businesses to substitute comp time for overtime pay [universally??] and calculate overtime on a two-week, 80-hour basis. This would reduce incomes, make employee schedules less predictable, and increase work hours by making overtime work cheaper..\..
  But rather than weakening the rules, we should be strengthening what we already have. The overtime rules under the Fair Labor Standards Act [FLSA] established the 40-hour workweek in 1938.
  [Actually, the FLSA of 1938 established the 40-hour workweek in 1940, a 42-hr workweek in 1939, and a 44-hr workweek in 1938. Let's get this right, folks - it helps us we already have in American history a precedent for a planned and gradual reduction of the nationwide workweek. This precedent established the concept as constitutional, something that was not taken for granted at the time and something that some people today are challenging, and reduced the once-established 44-hr workweek FOUR hours in TWO years, compared with the French 1981 plan to reduce the 40-hr workweek FIVE hours in FIVE years. (It bogged down at the 39-hr level in 1982 but was jumped the rest of the way by Jospin 1997-2002, especially 2000-2002 by size of business {large went first} and sector {public went last with small biz}.) Here's a good articulation of the original design rationale -]
  By making every hour beyond 40 in a week 50% more expensive to the [employer], the law [encourages management to hire additional employees to work any additional hours the task needs,] discourages employers from assigning longer hours [to existing employees] and rewards employees for the sacrifice of their personal or family time [if longer hours are assigned]. The [FLSA] is the most important brake on longer work hours, other than unions.
  [But unions have shrunk themselves to less than 14% of the workforce by ignoring workweek reduction, and a weak and slipping brake the FLSA became as benefits mounted up separate from wages, making the extra 50% overtime premium, the "half" of the so-called "overtime time-and-a-half," a trivial expense to employers compared to the cost of the per-employee benefits they'd have to pay if they hired additional people. This trend may be reversing more recently as benefits weaken. But the time&ahalf design for enforcing a workweek ceiling has not worked well as an effective enforcement of the workweek ceiling and a consequent employment-spreader and unemployment reducer, because though it discourages some employers with its 50% extra-wage "taxes," it encourages many employees to want to work more than their share by pays those tax revenues to them. And as worksaving technology rolls in and the labor surplus mounts and the downward pressures on wages rise, more and more desperate employees want more and more than their share of vanishing human employment and the whole economy goes into a self-fueling downward spiral. A much smarter idea is to pay the overtime "tax" revenues to whoever is willing and able to hire, and if necessary, train, additional employees (as in fact the Timesizing program does in Phase Two and Phase Three). But since this pays existing employees only 'straight time' or less for more-tiring over-40 working hours, it necessitates (1) abolishing mandatory overtime and making overtime always, everywhere, completely optional, and (2) the higher the percentage of corporate overtime-over-hiring advantage and employee overtime pay required to go to training&hiring, the faster an economy will lose its parasitism and be able to safely dismantle big government - now mostly pork, patronage and job programs - and centrifuge the national income to activate spending power and yield a war-level boom without the war.]
  But...exemptions [from the overtime premium] based on faulty premises, such as the quaint notion that an employee becomes an "executive" if he supervises two other employees, need to be revisited. The law allows employees who make as little as $13,000 a year to be...denied overtime protection..\..as "highly paid executives." (Under California law, workers must make at least $26,000 a year and spend at least 50% of their time acting as a manager.) They can be required to work 50, 60, 70 hours a week with no pay beyond their set salaries.
  Businesses ranging from fast-food restaurants to insurance companies have exploited this unfair and ridiculous loophole in the law. Partly as a result of such loopholes, the average American...is working longer hours while wages fail to keep pace. The average workweek now exceeds 40 hours in most industries, and in 10 industries more than 20% of all workers consistently work overtime. Those who do work overtime average 51.8 hours a week.
  This trend toward longer work hours runs contrary to the rest of the industrialized world. Americans have less leisure time, less paid vacation, and less sick leave and now work longer hours than even the Japanese, who for many years were the world's most stressed workers.
  The problem is especially severe because the total hours worked by the average U.S. household - not just individual workers - have increased dramatically too. Women are working many more weeks per year and hours per week, on average, that they did 30 or even 10 years ago. Middle-class married couples with children and a head of household between the ages of 25 and 54 now work an average of 98 weeks a year, compared with 78 weeks in 1969. Overtime for either spouse - but especially the mother - can have serious effects on the family.
  We need to raise the salary level at which the regulations exclude workers from coverage,
  [which the Bush Administration's proposed changes actually do!]
  broaden the coverage, and protect as many workers as possible from being worked long hours without additional compensation.... When Bush announces he wants to give us the flexibility to work 60 hours a week with no more pay than we worked 40, we should tell him we're not interested.
  [If we're still alive and not yet ground up in Bush's war "solution" to economic downturn.]

• (2/21)  Business watercooler stories, by Justin Bachman, AP 02/20/2003 11:55 EST via AOLNews.
  Crisis management: Is the American CEO a firefighter in disguise?
  [Dick Cheney sure is.]
  Some apparently think so, according to a survey of 2,700 CEOs in 9 countries who were asked, "What single management issue do you consistently spend most time on?"
  Americans said they spend a fifth [20%] of their work time managing crises, compared to CEOs in France and Britain who said crisis management takes only 9% of their time.
  Beyond that, strategic planning ranked high in most countries, with that activity taking a quarter of CEOs' time. In Japan and South Africa, CEOs said planning depleted nearly a third of their schedules.
  [But suppose you direct your strategic planning toward creating crises that you can then manage - with no one daring to ask any questions? Clearly Americans gave themselves a mighty big crisis to manage when in 1933, they balked at easing into sharing the vanishing work and determined instead to strain to generate sufficient makework and "create" enough "jobs" to keep everyone eternally spinning their wheels for a whole 40-hour workweek or more, regardless of how much worksaving technology pours into the economy. Bottom line - just by quitting the generation of crises, American CEOs could work a 32-hour week (20% less) without skimping any of their real work.]
  In Germany, internal communication topped the list of dominant activity, and in Hungary "monitoring" took the most time.
  [Hmm, this is getting a little too revealing.]
  The survey was conducted by Proudfoot Consulting, a management consulting firm in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. It involved CEOs in Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, South Africa, Britain and the United States....

1. Pepsi Bottling settles case on overtime, by Sherri Day, NYT, C4.
   The Pepsi Bottling Group and the State of New Jersey [NJ] reached an agreement on Wednesday that will pay $17.36m to nearly 700 of the company's truck drivers and sales representatives who contended that they were denied overtime pay.... Pepsi Bottling employees first filed a complaint against the company with the NJ Dept. of Labor in 1994. In 1995, the department issued a citation against Pepsi Bottling, accusing the company of failing to compensate drivers who worked more than 40 hours a week and not giving workers adequate compensation when they were required to work on Saturdays..\..
   The agreement [Wed.] comes a year after Pepsi Bottling, the largest bottler and distributor of Pepsi products in the world, was ordered by a 3-judge panel of the state's Superior Court to pay back wages to its workers and penalties totaling $8m to the state. The company also agreed to pay $3m for the fees of the employees' lawyers....

2. [SLAVERY in Brazil!]
   Brazilian leader introduces program to end slave labor - Debt slavery still exists, particularly in the Amazon, by Larry Rohter, NYT, A8.
   BRASILIA - ...Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish chattel slavery, in 1888, and forced labor continued to be common in rural areas in modern times..\.. The Roman Catholic Church estimates that at any given moment at least 25,000 Brazilian workers are held in debt slavery [today], most of them in remote areas of the Amazon jungle.
   [So what in the world is the connection between slavery and timesizing? Just the glaringly obvious fact that slavery represents a completely uncapped working week. Slaves can be required at any hour of the day or night to perform any work. This fact is usually totally overshadowed by the fact that the work is unpaid. The Republican Party led in worktime legislation for the first 75 years of its history but it was the original Emancipation Proclamation that got rid of the slave workweek that had no effective cap below the full 7x24= 168 hours that define the 'week' itself.]
   Typically, recruiters go to poor rural areas and guarantee peasants good wages and benefits, but reneg on those pledges once the laborer has arrived at the jungle workplace and is guarded by gunmen..\..
   [Shades of zombie-ism in Haiti.]
   Attacking one of Brazil's most shameful but deeply rooted social problems, the country's new left-wing government has announced [Tuesday (3/11)] a sweeping initiative intended to eliminate slave labor. The plan calls for stepping up police raids on ranches, logging operations and mines that lure poor and often illiterate peasants into servitude, as well as heavier fines and criminal penalties for offenders.
   But the government said it would also seek passage of a constitutional amendment that would allow the seizure of businesses and properties found to employ slave labor and to turn those assets over to the former slaves to run....
   Between 1995 and 2002...more than 5,000 enslaved workers \were\ freed \by\ an enforcement squad..\..created \by the\ government \of former President] Fernando Cardoso.... But government inspectors complained that their efforts were hampered by weaknesses in Brazil's legal code. While they have the authority to force employers to pay back wages to enslaved workers, criminal charges have to be referred to the court system, where they are often ignored by apathetic prosecutors or shelved by judges sympathetic to business interests.
   In some cases, inspectors have raided the same ranch many times, freeing workers, only to return and find that others have been enslaved. The government intends to discourage that behavior by publishing a list of offenders, who will be denied access to any form of government loans, credits, subsidies or tax benefits, and by prohibiting those found guilty from appealing their convictions while out on bail.... The program also calls for a sharp increase in the number of inspectors. The Ministry of Labor says that this year it will hire and train more than 650 new inspectors, who will have good salaries and the untrammeled authority to enforce the law. In the past, "people have known that they can bribe a labor inspector or a police officer, or a mayor or alderman or member of Congress"..\.. President Luiz da Silva, a former labor leader, said.... "I want it to be known that those days are over."
   [Then it would seem he also needs to provide good salaries for police officers, mayors, aldermen, and members of Congress.]

• Southwest flight attendants protest deal, by Leigh Strope, AP 03/12/03 08:05 EST via AOLNews.
  [Alas, top management of the nation's happiest, more profitable airline has just gotten stupid and is in the process of destroying it. Their motto, "If it works, FIX IT!"]
  Southwest Airlines flight attendants say the prospect of no meal breaks at the nation's most profitable airline is no picnic. So, picnic baskets in hand and passing out boxed lunches to their co-workers, the flight attendants plan to protest Wednesday at airports in Baltimore, Chicago, and Oakland CA.
  The demonstrations are aimed at a management proposal to increase working hours without providing breaks or meals.... Southwest, the nation's only major airline posting profits in an industry struggling for survival, wants its flight attendants to add 2.5 hours to their 10.5-hour days, and to cut their time off....
  [2.5+10.5= 13 hour days??? Isn't that illegal? "Southwest - The Airlines with the Zombie Flight Attendants"!]
  Southwest flight attendants have tried repeatedly to...negotiate a 15-minute per day break..\.. Portia Reddick, a Baltimore-based flight attendant...said she often eats lunch on the plane standing over a trash can, if she gets to eat at all. Southwest's flight attendants and pilots clean the airplanes between flights, unlike other airlines that have cleaning crews..\..
  The airline's 7,500 flight attendants are represented by the Transport Workers Union, which has been negotiating a new contract for nine months. Ed Stewart, spokesman for Dallas-based Southwest, said talks are continuing. "We think negotiations are proceeding quite productively,'' he said. "Make no mistake, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we do have the best flight attendants in the industry.''
  [The morons in top management don't know that at all. All they know is -]
  While other airlines have laid off thousands of workers and slashed operations since the terrorist attacks, Southwest has not....
  [But they're apparently aching to, or at least to drive their flight attendants into quitting.] Major airlines lost $7.7 billion in 2001 and more than $10 billion in 2002. In that climate, Southwest now is being "forced" [our quotes - ed.] to examine ways to cut costs and improve operations. Southwest's earnings plummeted 53 percent last year.
  [But they're still in profit.]
  Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, major airlines have cut 100,000 jobs, slashed in-flight food service, hedged fuel costs, closed reservation centers, installed automatic check-in kiosks and changed flight schedules at hubs to use planes more efficiently.... American Airlines, the largest carrier, is lining up bankruptcy financing, according to some reports..\.. The second-largest U.S. airline, United, and US Airways are [already] in bankruptcy proceedings. Industry officials worry that war with Iraq would further rattle travelers and drive more carriers into bankruptcy..\..
  The flight attendants are the airline's only unresolved labor contract.
  [So management is going to take it ALL out on them.]
  About 85 percent of Southwest's employees are represented by a union....
  [And till now, they haven't needed one. Check out the headline of another recent article -]
  Southwest workers ask airline 'where's the love'?, by Jon Herskovitz, Reuters 02/14/03 14:59 ET via AOLNews.
  [The reference being to the fact that Southwest always had such good employee relations, it was dubbed the Love Airline - and it had its hub at Love Airfield in Dallas.]
  DALLAS...- Southwest Airlines flight attendants delivered a Valentine's Day volley at the carrier's main airport on Friday with a protest saying management has "lost its loving feeling" in asking them to work longer hours. About 40 flight attendants at the profitable low-fare carrier handed out candy and sang love songs from a past generation at Love Field in Dallas as they protested against what they said were management calls for a longer working day.
  "We are out here today because our company has suggested that our flight attendants should be working a longer duty day, with shorter rest periods and no breaks," said Thom McDaniel, president of the Transport Workers Union Local 556, which represents about 7,500 flight attendants at the airline. McDaniel said airline management has suggested raising the duty day to 13 hours from 10.5 hours. He said that unlike their counterparts at other airlines, Southwest flight attendants have extra work such as cleaning the plane on the ground between flights.
  Visitors to the airport were given chocolates and Valentine's day cards by flight attendants, who held signs reading "Southwest, keep that luv'n feeling" in their mild-mannered protest punning on the company's stock symbol, LUV. Flight attendants serenaded passengers in the terminals with versions of the songs "Love Will Keep Us Together" and "You've Lost That Loving Feeling". They may take their protest to other airports served by the carrier, union officials said.
  The airline, which prides itself on good relations between management and labor, has been in talks with the flight attendants' union for about nine months on a new contract. "The contract talks have been going well. It has been cordial," said airline spokesman Ed Stewart. "Both sides are trying to hammer out a win-win contract."
  Low-cost carrier Southwest bucked the trend in the money-losing U.S. airline industry when it reported last month its 30th consecutive year of profits. The airline said it could not guarantee a profit in the first quarter of 2003 as war with Iraq looms and demand for air travel continues to slump.
  For the full year 2002, Southwest earned $241.0 million or 30 cents a share on nearly flat revenue of $5.5 billion at a time when its bigger rivals cannot seem to post a profit for love nor money. U.S. carriers have collectively lost more that $7 billion in each of the last two years, and 2003 also looks bleak with a possible war in Iraq fanning fears of continued slow demand. Two big airlines, United Airlines parent UAL Corp. and US Airways Group have filed for bankruptcy, while several unions at major carriers have been asked to accept wage cuts in order to keep their airlines flying.
  Flight attendants said they have been a part of the reason why the airline has remained profitable because they do more tasks than colleagues at other airlines, while working on more flights in the average work day.
  "We love our company and we want to make sure that it remains profitable," union leader McDaniel said.

• Qantas joins forces to fight fatigue, Business Wire 03/11/2003 17:34 Eastern via AOLNews.
  SYDNEY...- Qantas, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), the Australian & International Pilots Assn and the Centre for Sleep Research at the University of South Australia have joined forces to conduct a major study on pilot fatigue with a view to enhancing safety for the traveling public. A 3-year study will set a world first by developing a new risk management-based system for flight crew rostering. This is the first time that an airline, safety regulator, pilots' association and academics have collaborated to find a scientific way of manaing the risks associated with fatigue....
  CASA's Director of Aviation Safety Mick Toller said the study would provide real and lasting improvements in safety. "This project gives the regulator the first useful access to scientific data to predict when pilots are likely to have lower performance levels due to fatigue. We all know when we are tired, but fatigue is more complex, particularly for pilots doing long flights and operating through numerous time zones most of their working week"..\..
  The Fatigue Risk Management System (FRMS) study will be conducted in 3 phases.
  1. In the first phase, which is well underway, volunteer flight crew have kept sleep-wake diaries and worn special activity monitors to obtain data on sleep patterns....
     
  2. In the second phase, pilots will be observed in flight simulators to link real performance measures with predicted fatigue.
  3. The research data will then be used to develop methods to determine how different flight tasks are affected by fatigue, and thus be used to determine pilot rosters, shifts and duty time in the cockpit....
  [Fine and dandy, if this conduces to fatigue reduction through shorter worktime and not just to fatigue management through gimmicks and self-congratulatory rhetoric.]

• (3/04)  South Korea president to enjoy time off at weekend, by Nam In-soo, Reuters 03/03/03 02:55 ET via AOLNews.
  SEOUL...- South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, acting on a campaign pledge to cut the workweek to five days, has vowed not to work on weekends as he bids to push through a policy opposed by unions and big firms.
  [So who the heck is on his side? Just a majority of the voters? When have they ever mattered?]
  South Koreans toil longer than most other workers, clocking 50% more hours a year than Swedish workers, for example. Like many of the country's 21 million workers, Roh normally works a half day on Saturday. Banks and some companies have already adopted a 5-day workweek, but a comprehensive bill aimed at a shorter week has yet to be passed.
  "President Roh will not have official schedules on Saturdays and Sundays unless he has urgent issues to deal with," a presidential Blue House spokesman said on Monday. "He wants to avoid ceremonial events over the weekends." During a presidential campaign in December, Roh pledged to introduce a 5-day working week and to improve benefits for workers, including foreign labourers.
  Asia's two largest economies have already moved to a 40-hour week, with Japan changing in 1988 and China in 1997. [Currently in South Korea,] the National Assembly is [still] debating a government-proposed bill aimed at cutting the workweek to 40 hours from 44, essentially scrapping the practice of working a half day on Saturday.
  But economists said the bill faced hurdles in the opposition-controlled parliament as both employers and workers wanted the policy to be revised.
  [Hey, join the race to sweatshop!]
  Although a reduced working week might appear beneficial for workers, labour groups said they opposed the plan because the government also wanted to chop the number of public holidays, hitting members' income and leisure time.
  [Hmm, could be an overly mixed blessing, as some paint France's 35-hour week.]
  On the other hand, employers said the new scheme could only work if workers dropped some of their existing benefits.
  [If you bang employees, you bang consumers - how much do you really want consumer demand?]
  Analysts said the labour groups could take issue with the shorter working week, unleashing a wave of labour unrest during the traditional labour rallies in early May. Industrial chaos, a South Korean trademark in the 1980s when workers fought for better working conditions and rights under military regimes, dealt a blow to Hyundai Motor and other big companies last year, causing heavy financial losses.

1. [workweek cuts used to reduce workforce cuts -]
   (3/3)   Quipp announces 4th quarter and full year results for 2002, expensing of stock options and shareholders rights plan, PRNewswire-FirstCall 03/03/2003 via AOLNews.
   MIAMI...- Quipp Inc. (Nasdaq: QUIP) announced...an increase of $75,000 compared to a net loss of $10,000...for the same period in 2001. [However,] for the full year 2002, Quipp's net loss was $106,000.... Quipp Inc...designs, manufactures and installs material handling equipment to facilitate the automated bundling and movement of newspapers from the printing press to the delivery truck....
   [How ironic that Quipp's automation is finally impacting Quipp's own employees, due to ambient downsizing instead of timesizing.]
   Michael Kady, Pres. and CEO of Quipp, stated: "...In response to lower revenues, it was necessary to reduce our salaried and hourly workforce, implement a 2-week plant shutdown during July, and temporarily reduce operations to a 4-day workweek...."

2. [Compare -]
   (2/12)   Furniture maker Haworth cutting 255 jobs, AP 02/11/03 22:34 EST via AOLNews.
   ...at three Michigan plants. Employees learned the news in a letter. Haworth blamed the decision on an industrywide sales downturn that left some company employees working 3-day weeks.... Haworth is the world's third-largest office furniture maker after Steelcase Inc. [see 3/05 below] and Herman Miller Inc..\.. "Our hourly people are putting in short hours, and it's too hard to get by on that," Haworth spokeswoman Susan Wray said.
   [Only when you maintain a frozen 1940 workweek-borne labor glut to keep ordinary pay (and markets!) down and you're paying top executives 400 times ordinary pay.]

3. ["The exception proves the rule." There are a few companies who actually get more markets from longer hours, but not their own -]
   Greggs on a roll despite insurance blow, by Mark Potter, Reuters 03/07/03 04:57 ET via AOLNews.
   LONDON...- Britain's biggest high street baker, Greggs Plc, said on Friday a surge in demand for sausage rolls drove a forecast-beating rise in 2002 profits. [Greggs] was confident about this year, despite higher insurance costs.... Managing Director Mike Darrington...was relaxed about the slowdown in spending on Britain's high streets, saying Greggs was getting a boost from longer working hours as employees switched to takeaway food from the traditional breakfast and lunch breaks....
   [Great, every other business on London's main streets is hurtin' cuz downsizing-inspired job insecurity is turning everyone into workaholics, but for the moment, these sausage people are makin' out. Wait till the businesses they're serving start closing, cuz Britain, like the USA, doesn't quite "get" the implications of work-saving technology = speedup in unemployment, "slowdown in spending on Britain's high streets" and everywhere else - unless CEOs start reacting to technology by trimming hours instead of chopping jobs.]

1. Strike threat adds to pressure on S. Korea's Roh, by Yoo Choonsik, Reuters 03/06/03 01:33 ET via AOLNews.
   SEOUL...- South Korea's main militant labor group threatened on Thursday to call a major strike, adding to pressure on new Pres. Roh Moo-hyun, who is already grappling with North Korea tensions and signs of a slowing economy. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), the second-largest union grouping, said workers at a wide range of factories across the country would down tools unless labour strife at a power equipment maker is resolved soon.... The KCTU, which says it has 595,000 members at some 900 companies, ended a one-day strike about 4 months ago after parliamentarians delayed legislation for a shorter working week, which workers feared could eat into benefits such as holidays....
   ["Shorter working hours - that damn rightwing conspiracy!" (Again, ya just can't count on labor to have any common sense or self-interest on this key power-determining issue - "(labor) history is no guarantee of future performance" and come to think of it, labor history has been pretty spotty anyway.)]

2. UV absorber suppliers look to Asia for long-term growth in personal care markets, PRNewswire-FirstCall 03/06/2003 11:01 EST via AOLNews.
   While the U.S. and Western European markets for UV [ultra violet] absorbers in personal care applications still account for upward of 80% of the worldwide total...developing markets in the Asia-Pacific region, including China and South Korea, are expected to exhibit the strongest growth.... Several factors are contributing.... The need for UV protection is greatest in Australia, which has the highest incidence of skin cancer in the world.... In addition, a strong increase in demand for sunscreens is predicted for Asian countries with rising per capita incomes and an increase in leisure time due to shorter working hours....

3. SHRM Pushes More Flexibility for Employees, Employers; New Bill Gives Workers Option of 'Comp Time', U.S. Newswire 03/06 15:28 via AOLNews.
   [Here's a story that indicates some progress toward easing the path to timesizing, which obviously is going to have to involve OT-exempt salaried employees as well as OT-non-exempt wage workers, and therefore is going to require some kind of shadow time-accounting system for salaried employees.]
   ALEXANDRIA, Va...- The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) today strongly supported legislation giving hourly, private sector employees the flexibility to use overtime for personal or family needs. Currently, only hourly (non-exempt), public sector employees can choose between overtime and compensatory time (comp time) for working more than 40 hours in a workweek, according to rules under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
   SHRM believes that the Family Time Flexibility Act, introduced by Representative Judy Biggert (R-Ill.), would help employees better balance work and family. The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates nearly 71.4 million private sector, non-exempt workers are entitled to overtime at time-and-a-half after completing a 40-hour workweek, and many of those workers have the potential of benefiting from this bill.  For organizations, providing non-exempt employees with the option of comp time can be an effective recruitment and retention tool - helping to reduce expensive turnover costs.
   "What we're really talking about here is flexibility - flexibility for employees so that they can spend more time with their families or on personal interests. Public sector employees have had this option since 1978, and their needs are no different than private sector employees. There shouldn't be a double standard," said President and Chief Executive Officer Susan R. Meisinger, SPHR.
   Non-exempt employees who voluntarily choose paid compensatory time off could accrue up to 160 hours of comp time per year and would be compensated in cash for any unused hours at the end of the year. The employer and employee must sign a voluntary agreement before the employee chooses comp time as their preference, otherwise the employee will continue to receive overtime payments. The legislation clearly prohibits employers from forcing employees to take comp time instead of overtime.
   "This legislation makes small changes to an outdated law, but the impact will be tremendous. A 2000 SHRM survey found 41 percent of HR professionals in favor of amending FLSA to allow comp time in order to increase flexibility for employees' personal leave needs. I believe passage of this bill will translate into more satisfied employees and more productive, successful organizations," Meisinger added.
   The FLSA of 1938 is the federal labor law establishing standards for minimum wage, overtime pay and child labor. The law also established an exemption from the Act's overtime provisions for employees in certain professional, executive and administrative jobs. In 1978, Congress passed the Federal Employees Flexible Compressed Work Schedules Act as a trial program to federal employees. Congress made the law permanent in 1985. Lawmakers have debated legislation granting comp time benefits to private sector employees under the FLSA since 1994.
   The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is the world's largest association devoted to human resource management. Representing more than 170,000 individual members, the Society's mission is both to serve human resource management professionals and to advance the profession.   Founded in 1948, SHRM currently has more than 500 affiliated chapters within the United States and members in more than 120 countries. Visit SHRM Online at *http://www.shrm.org.
   Contact: Frank Scanlan [at] 703-535-6043 or fscanlan@shrm.org
   or, Jen Jorgensen [at] 703-535-6356 or jjorgensen@shrm.org

• Bread, roses and the 30-hour week, by Brad Lorton of *Work Time Reduction Committee of Indiana, 3/05/2003 *Nuvo.net via SWT e-list (join by emailing swt-digest-request@swt.org with 'subscribe' as msg).
  ...Since 1980, the average American work year [= working hours per year per full-time employee] has grown about 100 hours. Americans work more hours than any other people in the developed world.
  [Yep, we finally beat Japan in this "race to the bottom."]
  ...A quick walk through Target or Wal-Mart leaves me with the impression that we have way too many people engaged in making a lot of cheap crap, useful only to the corporate bottom line....
  [No, it's vital in an economy with a frozen 1940-era workweek to keep people spinning their wheels for 40-plus hours a week.]
  Among other things, this creates an idolatry of material wealth.
  [that is, the Gospel of Consumption, and more recently, now that the national and global concentration of spending power has forced consumption to fall behind, the Gospel of Productivity, regardless of marketability and consumption - driving ever more invasive advertising (telemarketing, junkmail, spam...).]
  ...A consumer society needs high levels of production....
  [This is the cart before the horse. Actually, high levels of production need a consumption-obsessed society, and the production is needed in the first place because in 1933 we were pointed toward makework (ever too little too late except in wartime) instead of sharework alias timesizing alias sharing and spreading the vanishing work. In short, as we said above, an economy with a frozen 1940-era workweek needs high levels of production to keep people spinning their wheels for 40-plus hours a week.]
  The last thing we need is more work. In fact, we'd be better off with a lot less. Technology is replacing human labor at a rapid rate.
  [See Jeremy Rifkin, "The End of Work" (1995).]
  "Near-workerless factories" and "near-workerless offices" are real possibilities in this century.
  [This was foreseen by Sismondi in 1819: "Indeed, [if] wealth is everything [and] men are absolutely nothing...in truth then, there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England." Richard Hyse, trans. New Principles of Political Economy, p. 563, fn. The critical problem with these workerless visions, of course, is that they participate in the prevailing CEO disconnect between employees and customers (alias consumers) - no employees, no pay packets, no active spending power (it all funnels to the top brackets who couldn't spend that much in hundreds of lifetimes), no markets - ergo, recession and depression.]
  Anything close to full employment based on the 40-hour week may be the "impossible dream" of the year 2030 - if not the year 2003. The coming decades will demand "spread the work" strategies to avoid intolerable levels of structural unemployment....
  [- "intolerable" because No Markets.]
  A legislated 30-hour workweek, with additional measures to protect and enhance the livelihoods of workers and poor folks, is a growing necessity.
  [But let's not get trapped, like France at the 35-hr level, into simply another rigid arbitrary workweek level. We really need what Walter Reuther (1962 UAW convention in Atlantic City) called "fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against unemployment," or what we call timesizing. And if you don't have a good overtime-to-training&hiring conversion mechanism before you start scrunching the workweek, you're going to need a lot more, kludgy, "additional measures to protect and enhance the livelihoods of workers and poor folks."]
  America needs to think in terms of...the roses as much as the bread.
  [Keynes foresaw the challenge being "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." Quoted in David Warsh's Economic Principals (1993), p. 389, probably from Staffan Linder's "The Harried Leisure Class."]
  A time affluent [as distinct from merely (money) affluent] society won't spend as much time working and shopping as participating in community, culture, churches, schools, libraries and yes, democracy. More time would be spent connecting people with each other, rather than to machines and gadgets.
  It's a matter of choosing the blessing [of technology] over the curse. That's why I've been organizing the Work Time Reduction Committee of Indiana.
  [Ah, Indiana, home of the 30/40 Plan of shorter-worktime consultant Ron Healey. Hope Brad and Ron get in touch, if they're not already.]
  This group will encourage people to contact their congressional representatives on behalf of work time reduction legislation. It will also participate in the national observance of "Take Back Your Time Day" this coming Oct. 24 - the remaining 9 weeks to the end of the year being symbolic of the difference between our [working hours per year] and the shorter work years in Western Europe. Those interested should visit our *website or e-mail us at shorterworkweek@netscape.net.
  In choosing the blessing over the curse, I recall William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor [AFL] in the 1920s [and 30s], who said, "Free time will come. The only choice is unemployment or leisure." May we choose wisely.
  [Thanks, Brad. More power to ya!]

• Steelcase to Close for a Week, AP 03/04/03 20:50 EST via AOLNews.
  GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - Office furniture maker Steelcase Inc. has warned employees of more possible layoffs, and next month will idle all 15,000 of its North American workers for a week without pay.... The one-week shutdown will begin April 7, when many area schools are closed for spring break.
  The last time the company closed was over the Christmas and New Year holiday in 2001. At that time, workers could take vacation days to cover the shutdown. No vacation requests will be accepted for the April closure, Steelcase spokeswoman Jeanine Hill said.
  In January, Steelcase told workers that it was moving to a four-day work week for hourly employees and asking for volunteers to be laid off for up to five weeks.
  [So far so good - we're avoiding mandatory layoffs by cutting worktime, not workforce, in the primitive plant-shutdown technique and the more advanced workweek-adjustment technique. However -]
  The company also said Tuesday it will reduce its white-collar work force by an undetermined number of jobs by the end of March. About 250 hourly workers in Grand Rapids, Mich., where Steelcase is based, were notified Tuesday they may be laid off within the next 60 days.
  [Ooo, that's gotta hurt your morale, not to mention your productivity.]
  If Steelcase acts on the layoff notices, the cuts would push the ailing company just below 6,000 workers - a drop of about 45 percent from the 10,800 employed there in December 2000....
  More than 10,000 western Michigan office furniture jobs have been eliminated in the past two years. The region is home to the nation's three largest producers, including No. 1 Steelcase.
  On the Net: *Steelcase Inc.

1. Steelmakers seek price rises of up to 10%, to recoup costs, by Robert Matthews, WSJ, B4.
   ...The latest price increase, initiated by Nucor Corp., and followed by AK Steel Holding Corp., Steel Dynamics Inc. and others, boosts sheet-steel prices by $30 a ton, effective in April, to about $330 a ton....
   [Nucor is one of two major American working models of timesizing, and here it is calling the shots in the American steel industry. Timesizing Nucor is the most profitable US steel company and for awhile (& maybe still), the only profitable one.]

2. GM and Ford plan to cut output as war jitters weigh on car sales, by Sholnn Freeman, WSJ, front page.
   ...By keeping factories running..., automakers have helped keep the manufacturing sector from a more painful slowdown despite sluggishness in other parts of the economy. But now, GM...and Ford...plan to tap the brakes on production in the second quarter of this year amid concern that consumer demand has softened to the piont that even big rebates won't clear bulging inventories.... Until recently, GM has been running many of its factories on overtime, mainly to build up stocks of high-profit trucks. But now, GM dealers are sitting on big inventories....
   [The Big 3 automakers typically do ad-hoc week-at-a-time plant shutdowns when excess inventory builds up. Watch for announcements of such in Q2 starting in April. This strategy is a primitive form of timesizing to avoid downsizing.]

• Bring back the sabbath - Why even the most secular need a ritualized day of rest - Interrupting our ceaseless striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit and social sanction, by Judith Shulevitz, NYT Mag, 50.
  [Here's an article to warm the cockles of the heart of Rabbi Arthur Waskau of Philadelphia, who started a website advocating shorter hours for easier shabbas observance and more time for our spiritual side in general. Unfortunately, whenever we've tried his website address recently (freeourtime.org), it gets hijacked by a porn site. Wha' hoppen'? Anyway the article would also warm the heart of Christian clergy like Ruy Costa (a Presbyterian working for the Episcopalians in Boston area), who has long been alarmed at the creeping resurgence of longer workweeks and the reduction in time for worship.
  Anyway this is a 3-page article in the Times Magazine with an evocative illustration by Brian Cronin, showing a man with a windowsash labeled "closed" pulled down over his face (evidently toward his employer). How pathetic are we, when - if we're still employed - surrounded by worksaving technology, we've lost the 2-day weekend that our grandfathers fought so hard to gain for us, and we're back to arguing for a 1-day weekend like our great great grandfathers. As our parents said, "Our parents fought hard to give us the weekend and our children are throwing it all away." Actually it was our parents who threw it all away by going for a laundrylist of labor demands instead of the one and only kingpin demand that guaranteed them enough of a labor scarcity and bargaining power to get all the rest = shorter working hours. We'd done it for 150-175 years. We stopped doing it in 1940. And after a generation to replace the war dead, it's been downhill all the way ever since. Shulevitz's arguments are the obvious ones summed up by "Ya NEED a break," even if at first you "experience the paiinful inklings of sanity."]