Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

---

Timesizing News, March 21-31, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

3/30/2003  timesizing consciousness, & possible opportunity, in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

1. Peaks & valleys [column] -...Clock-watchers, by B.J. Roche, Boston Globe, City 6.
   And 70 years ago next Sunday, the US Senate passed a bill that would have helped out the unemployed by creating a 30-hour workweek. (Many of us have 30-hour per week jobs; the problem is we have three of them.) Organizers of Take Back Your Time Day, Oct. 24, (*timeday.org), want to make it a kind of Earth Day for events and discussions about the family/work/time squeeze. Barbara Brandt of Somerville is organizing Boston area events: for info, e-mail her at walterness@msn.com . If you plan now, maybe you'll have time to attend.

2. [and a possible timesizing opportunity -]
   Citing war in Iraq, airline will cut pay, NYT, A16.
   DETROIT...- On the eve of its planned emergence from bankruptcy, US Airways notified employees [yester]day that it would immediately impose a 5% cut in wages. It said the drop in bookings since the beginning of war with Iraq left it no alternative to recover lost revenue....
   [The opportunity here, since bookings are down anyway, is to cut working hours a corresponding 5%. That will change this pay-flexing strategy to a simple, sustainable now-oriented survival strategy from a loan whose payback may burden the company later -]
   The cuts will be in the form of deferred pay that must be restored after the first quarter in which the airline reports a profit, or no later than 18 months after the cuts start.
   [That 18-month cap, for example, is something that they cannot possibly guarantee.]

• [more on the overtime shakeup -]
  New overtime rules proposed, pointer summary (to A10), NYT, A2.
  [which differs curiously from the headline on the front page of the business section -]
  U.S. proposes wage rule change, pointer digest (to A10), NYT, C1.
  [But the texts of both pointers are the same -]
  The Bush administration proposed new wage and hour regulations that it said would allows 1.3m low-wage workers to qualify for overtime pay, but cut the number of higher-paid, white-collar workers who qualify.
  [and the target article is -]
  White House proposes new rules for overtime - Altering the tests to qualify for extra pay - A plan to increase coverage for low-wage earners while exempting more white-collar workers, by Steven Greenhouse, NYT, A10, flagged by Anders Hayden on SWT e-list.
  [Does it really matter when white-collar workers are getting laid off and coming back as consultants on billable time anyway? - if they can get jobs at all.... Let's see if there's anything new in this Times treatment -]
  ...The proposed regulations would alter [ie: expand] the criteria for determining which white-collar employees cannot receive overtime [ie: overtime premium pay] and would make it considerably harder for [any?] workers earning more than $65,000 a year to qualify for overtime.
  Under the existing regulations, which have not been updated since 1975, assistant managers of fast-food restaurants earning $18,000 a year often do not qualify for overtime because they are considered managers. Under the new rules, anyone earning less than $22,100 a year would automatically qualify for overtime, a significant change from the existing rules, under which only workers earning less than $8,060 a year automatically qualify for overtime.
  [What in the world is this penny-ante crap about 8060 and 22100?!? Isn't life complicated enough without nickel&diming everything?]
  ..\..Labor Dept. officials estimated...24.8% of the [estimated 1.3m] additional workers who would qualify for overtime under the new rules are Hispanic and 54.7% are women.
  ...Business groups generally praised the proposed regulations, while labor unions harshly criticized them, saying they would help employers by exempting large groups of white-collar workers [grunts or not!] from receiving time-and-a-half [pay] for overtime....
  [OK, ok, ok - we're beginning to get a scope on this. What this proposal does is
  • weaken the distinction between management and labor, between wage per hour per week and salary per job per year, and therefore between wage work (incentive for quality) and piecework (incentive for quantity) in the sense that an annual salary is compensation for a big "piece" of work as defined, if at all, in the job description - this is a great pity, because wagework vs. piecework is the natural two-party system of the economy of the future, competing with one another on the same tasks and bootstrapping quality and quantity ever upward
  • and strengthen the importance of annual pay level, whether wage work or piece work, and therefore the income gap, because there will be an effort to move everyone offered or earning pay anywhere between say $60K (and maybe as low as $55K or lower) and $64,999 up above the $65K divide in order to avoid time accountability. This too is a pity, because it will create another gap in the pay ladder, just as the minimum wage has created one below it for people climbing into the job market.
  [But why should business groups be so in love with these changes if it really includes more people than it excludes? Well, we can assume the Labor Dept. is dominated or pressured by the Bush administration, so their estimated figures are going to be whatever Bush and business want. In fact, the whole design of this proposal is going to be whatever shortsighted CEOs close to Bush want. And assuming there are 80-120m Americans in the workforce in a population of 280m, these estimated figures (13m and 0.64m) are negligibly small. The amount business is "saving" (never mind the damage to its own markets) from the higher paid exclusions has got to be phenomenally large, and/or there are going to be many more exclusions than the public estimates suggest, or, colleague Kate's view, they're out to break the unions - which would be strange and compulsive perfectionist, because the unions are down below 14% of the workforce and are already effectively broken - it is a global labor glut, after all, and unions recently have been too visionless to get back "on topic" and drive for shorter hours to restore their membership and their bargaining power.]
  Unon leaders applauded the expanded overtime coverage for low-wage workers, but predicted that the additional white-collar workers exempted from overtime would far exceed the 640,000 predicted by the Labor Dept. ...Said Nick Clark, senior asst general counsel with the United Food & Commercial Workers Union, "It's going to gut protections for many workers in the military, airlines, energy, financial securities and healthcare industries."
  Under current regulations, about 70m workers qualify for overtime because of automatic provisions or because their jobs are not considered exempt executive, administrative, or professional ones.
  • Traditionally, workers who are considered managers, high-level administrators or highly skilled professionals have been exempted from overtime coverage.
  • ...The Labor Dept's proposal..\..to determine whether an administrative employee is exempt from overtime...drops the longtime test of whether the workers customarily and regularly exercises discretion and independent judgement. Instead, the test would become whether the worker holds a "position of responsibility," defined as performing work of substantial importance or performing work requiring a high level of skill or training.
    [which practically all highly paid jobs do these days.]
  [These are both such nonsense. In an adequate economic design, the centrifugation of concentrated employment must go all the way up the salary, hours, responsibility, and prestige ladders, not suffer "death by a thousand qualifications." (Similarly, the Social Security flat tax {FICA} should go all the way the compensation continuum and not stop at $62,500. Enough of these controversial, arbitrary and market-distorting caps! The workweek cap itself should fluctuate very slowly and be non-arbitrarily determined by the comprehensive unemployment rate.) Just look at the disgraceful petty details in this presumptuously economywide regulation, both current and proposed -]
  Like the existing test, the proposed test for administrative workers would also weigh whether their primary duty is to perform office or nonmanual work directly related to the management or general business operations of their employer.
  • Under the new proposals, an executive employee would be exempt if 3 criteria were met:
    1. the worker's primary duty is the management of the enterprise or a department of subdivision
    2. the worker regularly directs the work of two or more other employees,
    3. and the [worker] has the authority to hire or fire or recomment hiring and firing other employees.
  • Under the old rules, executive employees were exempt if they met those 3 criteria and 2 others:
    1. if they met the test of using discretionary powers
    2. and if they did not devote more than 20% of their time - or 40% in retail and service establishments - to activities not closely related to exempt work.
  [What nonsense that some businessmen close to Bush are trying to make more highly paid people, rather than fewer, time-accountable! Aren't these the very people who are always paying lip service to "efficiency" and yet they want to exempt themselves and their ilk from time accountability? What hypocrites! They are the very ones who need the discipline most. And the fact that they've always got themselves exempted from it means they are out of touch - a primary example of where they are insulated and isolated from the consequences of their own decisions. An economy with such a flawed feedback system is a sitting duck in a competition with an economy with bottom-to-top time accountability. And here's the big Bush-whack -]
  If a nonmanual worker earns mroe than $65k a year, however, only one of the [five] criteria under the new rules must be met [presumably any one of the five. Thus,] union leaders said the revised criteria would make it far too easy for companies to exempt higher-paid employees. For professional employees, the proposed test is whether the worker's primary duty requires advanced knowledge in a field of science or learning customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction.
  [Note the shortsighted employer strategy here - kill employees with flattery - "oh you're Management now," or "oh you're Professional now," - "so you're beyond such mundane things are mercenariness - now you're interested only in the sacred Corporate Goals and Missions." Never mind that this may mean, as college tuitions rise, that some employees may never be able to pay off their astronomical student loans. And as automation and robotization proceed, what jobs these days don't "require advanced knowledge in a field of science or learning customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction"? - but just in case -]
  Under existing rules, that instruction generally meant college or graduate school, but the proposed rules say it could also include military duty, technical schools or work experience.
  [Well, "military duty" will catch a lot of the middle and lower classes who couldn't afford college, but the real 'traction' here, "work experience," will not only catch everyone who stays on the job for awhile, but will therefore motivate a certain amount of job mobility on the employee side. Again, this is all economic suicide. It's another little weakening of the centrifugal forces on the national income to add to the hundreds, maybe thousands, of other little weakenings with which the wealthy have undermined the foundations of their own wealth over the post-World War II period, and particularly over the post-1970 period after the babyboomers started hitting the job market, replacing the war's perceived labor shortage (actually a labor-employment balance judging from the economic prosperity it created) with a restored labor surplus, and thus reducing labor's power at the bargaining table vis a vis management. The era of the top-heavy, 'black hole' economy had begun - again (as often before during prolonged, population-building peacetime eras) - and the financial markets began again to jump from ice floe to ice floe, or from bubble to bubble, there being insufficient, and ever decreasing velocity of monetary circulation (= the necessary anchor and foundation par excellence of concentrated wealth) to sustain the monstrous, ever-mounting, ever tightening, consolidating, compacting (and therefore relatively inactive) concentration of income and wealth.]
  [And now at last we get to one of the real reasons for all this business and Bush-administration meddling -]
  Randel K. Johnson, VP for Labor Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the proposed regulations - 13,000 words, down from the existing 31,000 [well there's a blessing anyway!] - should help slow the flood of class-action lawsuits in which many higher-paid workers assert that they were wrongly denied overtime.
  [And of course, higher-paid workers are the only ones that can afford litigation - aggrieved lower-paid workers certainly can't.]
  "We think they're on the right track simplifying some of these tests," Mr. Johnson said.
  [No, they'd be on the right track if they swept aside the whole centrifuge-weakening, economy-sinking idea of "exemption" from overtime premium pay, included ALL employment, and got on with the task of discontinuing the mixed-message of demotivating overtime for employers while motivating it for employees and designing a clear message of demotivating overtime for everyone - except those who are doing it totally voluntarily for love, not money - out of deflationary incentive, not inflationary - for qualitative, not quantitative reasons, as proven by their willingness to reinvest all overtime $advantage (employer) or pay (employee) in training and hiring in overtime-targeted skill areas. You want to know what a sustainable design for a core economy looks like? That's what it looks like. The problem triggers its own solution. Overtime triggers its own resolution = OT-targeted training and hiring. Let's cut the crap and modernize the economy out of the dark ages of boom and bust - and recoveries based on war.]
  ..\..Tammy McCutcheon, [the rather naive] administrator of the Wage & Hour Division at the Labor Dept...said the proposed regulations would not affect workers who qualify for overtime under union contracts.
  [(A) so few do these days now that union contracts cover less than 14% of the workforce. (B) What carries this is the "voluntary" part of a lot of it, but "voluntary" doesn't matter when one side in the bargaining has overwhelming power based on the massive-surplus-weakened powerlessness of the other side. (C) Even where and if true, with overwhelming power and self-destructively unextended self-interest, employers will change things to affect all workers, unionized or not - whatever it takes. But that will just make our economic deterioration faster and deeper. Third World here we come! And at some point, a branch of economists will start doing the figures on this and laying out how much better off the wealthy would be if they altered course and got everyone under time discipline (and work sharing), not exempt.]
  [The more conservative Journal version of this article today is the tiny 4.75-column-inch -]
  Changes are proposed in overtime threshold, WSJ, A4.
  WASHINGTON - The Labor Dept. released plans for the first significant update of federal overtime pay rules since 1975, helping millions of low-wage employees who work extra hours, but possibly making higher-wage workers ineligible for time-and-a-half pay.
  [Oh it'll be sooo wonderful! Wonder what the 1975 "update" did.]
  The announcement, welcomed by employer groups but questioned by labor unions, covers regulations on exemptions to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act by raising the overtime eligibility threshold for low-wage workers.
  Under current rules, an employee earning more than $155 a week can qualify as a "white collar" worker not entitled to overtime pay. The proposal would raise this to $425 a week. Officials say the move would guarantee overtime pay to 1.3m additional low-income workers.
  [So here's another way to characterize the change: it redefines "white collar" from activity-based to pay-level-based.]
  The Labor Dept. said about 640,000 people would no longer be eligible for overtime pay but would be guaranteed set salaries regardless of the number of hours worked.
  [But how often will they get to work fewer-than-40 hrs/wk? So seldom that this should be rephrased as "would be restricted to set salaries regardless of the number of hours worked."]
  Union officials disagreed. [with what? too general, bad writing!] "There's no question that the salary levels needed to be updated, but we have a lot of concerns about the revisions," said Chris Owens, public-policy director at the AFL-CIO.
  [And the more-liberal-than-the-Times Boston Globe headline is -]
  US seeks overtime-pay rule update - Changes could aid low-wage workers, hurt some others, by Diane Lewis, BG, C1.

1. Slackers rejoice: Research touts the benefits of skipping out on work, by Sue Shellenbarger, WSJ, D1.
   ["Slackers"??? Once again the Puritan work ethic collides with the Technological Age imperative of spreading the vanishing work however thinly required to maintain our consumer markets. Otherwise, regardless of the leaping technological efficiencies on the production side, consumption weakens and weakens - nothing fast, mind you, that business or political leaders would notice and adopt timesizing, not downsizing, to correct. Nope, just slooowly so they don't notice and the economy keeps sliding down to Third-World levels.]
   With the nation on edge, taking a vacation today may be the last thing on your mind. You might want to reconsider.
   [Not if you're calling us "slackers" - make up your mind and cut the double message! We already know that if we take too much vacation in this workaholic 'Type A' climate, we risk being sidelined or even pinkslipped.]
   A growing body of research suggests the American trend toward skipping vacations is hazardous.
   [So, damned if you do and damned if you don't. Take vacations and lose your job; skip vacations and lose your health. Great.]
   In a 9-year study of 12,000 middle-age men at risk for coronary disease, researchers found those who failed to take vacations had a higher risk of death from any cause, but particularly from heart disease, than those who took regular vacations. The results were controlled for education, income and the possibility that some of the men's health was too poor to take vacations. [Huh?]
   A lack of vacations was a predictor of heart attacks and early death among 749 women studied over 20 years, says a landmark study published a decade ago in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
   [Now that takes guts. Touting a "landmark study" published TEN years ago! Hot news! ... Not that we didn't ignore it at the time and desperately need it now.]
   And employees of a manufacturing company reported fewer physical complaints for up to 5 weeks after a 2-week vacation, says a study published in 2000 in the journal Occupational Medicine.
   [Oh good, this one's only THREE years old. Guess she's not going to get any more specific so if we want to find out what page and volume, we have to email her - sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com .]
   A couple of years ago, Mark Maloney was deep into talks on a major deal involving his company. [But] he was having chest pains, a symptom his doctor attributed to stress. Breaking away...for a long-scheduled vacation, Mr. Maloney says, felt like "career suicide."
   [There it is - damned if you do and damned if you don't = Catch 22.]
   It also felt like a cure. His partners closed the deal while he led his son's Boy Scout troop on a hike in the New Mexican wilderness. By the time he returned 2 weeks later, "all the symptoms had disappeared. It was months before I noticed it again," says 53-year-old Mr. Maloney, who heads sales and marketing for eTrauma, a Deerfield Beach FL digital-imaging software company.
   [Somebody who lives in Florida needs to go somewhere else for vacation? Well, now we know where. "Further fields are greener."]
   Despite such benefits, employee utilization of vacation time is dropping across the board, says Carol Sladek of Hewitt Assocs., Lincolnshire IL [USA]. In some cases, she says, "companies are staffed so lean there's no way people can take the time."
   [Whoa, there's an unintended consequence of "leansizing" we hadn't thought of. Truly this country with its rambo management culture stressing lean and mean is trashing quality of life (sissy stuff!) and committing slow suicide.]
   In others, people are afraid, if you leave the office and take two weeks, who knows what will happen by the time you get back?"
   [In other words, who knows if you'll still have a job when you get back.]
   
   • Researchers say good vacations have a power that extends beyond the time you're away. Various studies surveyed by Dov Eden at Tel Aviv University reveal what I call an "afterglow," with vacationers reporting less burnout for 3-6 weeks afterward.
     [At last, some good news from Israel!]
   • Sarah Knox, a stress researcher at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, says that just as chronic stress tears down the body's ability to calm down from higher blood pressure and heart rate, vacations may give rise to the opposite dynamic, creating a metabolic rebuilding process.
   • Vacationers tend to form enduring new habits, such as exercise, says Brooks Gump of State University of New York, Oswego, co-author of the 12,000-man study.
   • Dr. Eden and co-researcher Mina Westman, also of Tel Aviv University, suggest vacations enable workers to reverse a loss of personal resources by restoring relationships with family and friends who provide support.
   Some research shows [vacations] as short as a day can relieve symptoms of stress. [But] to get the biggest [benefit] for your [vacation, it] should meet at least one of three criteria:
   1. It should have a big enough mental and phsyical effect on you to create an afterglow.
   2. It should inspire you to form healthful new habits.
   3. Or it should...shore up ties with family or friends.
   [In short, it should be longer than one day. But not necessarily far away -]
   The real distance you must travel is mental.
   But at the risk of stating the obvious: No...telecommuting while on vacation. [It] can foster a stress-magnifying condition [Brooks] Gump calls "vigilance for threat" - the state of being tensed, like a coiled spring, and scanning the horizon for perils, such as bad feedback or getting fired. In a study, Dr. Gump found that when he [are we sure Brooks is male?] subjected students to stress after creating a period of "vigilance for threat," their blood pressure spiked higher than...if they'd been calm. Dr. Knox says, "Often, the threat of stress is as bad as [or apparently worse than] the stress itself."...
   [Well, grump, we've been curmudgeonly in our comments, but, grump harumph, nice article, Sue.]

2. [and speaking of work stress -]
   A growing threat to troops in Iraq: Sleep deprivation, by Anne Marie Squeo & Nicholas Kulish, WSJ, B1.
   [Never mind mere life deprivation.]
   Soldiers catch catnaps in the sand while their vehicles are refueled. Pilots pop little orange "go pills" to give them an extra lift during day&night flying missions. The war [we started!] with Iraq is only a week old and the fiercest fighting lies ahead, but many U.S. and allied [yeah sure] forces already are exhausted....
   [No wonder there's a helicopter accident or a friendly-fire or fratricide incident every day.]

3. [and back on the home front, noted even in the generally trogloditic Journal -]
   Overtime pay would be required, news blurb, WSJ, front page.
   ...for as many as 1.3m more low-income workers in an administration proposal due out today. But 640,000 white-collar employees could lose it.
   [Finally someone has come up with some figures on this. But since they're administration figures in the narrowly bottomline-focused Journal, they favor short-term business views, regardless of slightly longer-term damage to the consumer base. The number of white-collar employees who could lose overtime premium pay could just as easily turn out to be twice as many as the number of blue-collar workers who gain it, i.e., 2.6m white-collar losers. Or more. Estimates are estimates, and with the current disconnect between good pay and strong markets, these guys are going to go to considerable trouble to weaken yet another little vector of the weakening centrifugal forces on the national income - to their own (and our) cost in the near future as the "recovery" fails to materialize and the recession hardens.]

• [Here's a puff piece from the office of US Rep. Judy Biggert (R, Il.)]
  (3/07) Biggert Introduces 'Family Time' Flexibility Bill - Legislation Will Help Working Women Balance the Demands of Family and Work, PRNewswire 03/06/2003 14:04 EST via AOLNews.
  WASHINGTON...- U.S. Representative Judy Biggert (R-IL) today introduced legislation that would allow hourly workers, through a voluntary agreement with their employer, to choose paid time off as compensation for working overtime hours.
  [What's the choice? How come there's no mention of the alternative? Is the choice getting paid time&ahalf? Ifso, why is mere comp time being sold so hard?]
  "Today's working women face the challenge of balancing the needs of family with the demands of work schedules," said Biggert, Vice Chair of the Education and Workforce Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, which has jurisdiction over wage and hour matters.  "For far too many women, inflexible work schedules prevent them from addressing family emergencies, attending teacher conferences, and dealing with the many family needs that arise unexpectedly throughout the course of a typical month or year.  Family time will provide a powerful new tool to help working women balance the needs of their careers and families."
  Most public sector workers already are allowed to use flexible work schedules.
  [Instead of what other option exactly?]
  "Unfortunately, current law prevents private sector employers from offering private sector employees the same option that public sector employees have enjoyed for 15 years," said Biggert.
  Under Biggert's bill, if the employer and the employee agree - or in union shops, the union and the employer agree - to allow the employee to start accruing overtime hours as compensatory or family time, the employee has the option of banking up to 160 hours that he or she can use at a later time as paid time off.  The bill allows an employee to cancel the agreement at any time,
  [And then what happens to your "banked" time - you lose it?]
  and it provides protection against employer coercion of employees to accrue or use comp time.
  [So the law protects you from being "forced" to have any compensation for overtime whatever?]
  "Providing men and women with increased control over their work schedules may sound relatively simple," said Biggert.  "But private sector employers and their workers are constrained by the Fair Labor Standards Act.  Most workers simply want additional flexibility in the workplace and more choices than are currently available."
  [As in, the flexibility to shaft themselves?]
  Biggert's bill would amend the depression-era Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), enacted in 1938, when very few women worked outside of the home. Today, approximately 70 percent of mothers with children under the age of 18 work outside of the home, according to recent studies. "Jobs have changed, lifestyles have changed, but the law hasn't changed," Biggert said.  "The FLSA must be modernized to reflect the needs of working mothers and the rest of today's workforce."
  [Nothing like a few sympathetic-sounding but irrelevant-to-the-case statistics.]
  ...Bush has endorsed the concept of compensatory time, as did President Clinton before him.  Today, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao expressed the Administration's support for the bill.  "Employees in the public sector have enjoyed the benefits of 'family time' for 15 years," she said.  "The legislation introduced today will help all working people better balance the obligations of their jobs and families."
  [If Bush and Chao like it, it's got to provide a big boost for the economy - over the cliff.]
  SOURCE  Office of U.S. Representative Judy Biggert

• [the shape of the future for all company-survivors -]
  (3/21) Lufthansa says Iraq war extends airline crisis (Combines stories, adds detail from press conference, analyst), by Jeff Mason with Rolf Benders, Reuters 03/20/03 07:50 ET via AOLNews.
  MUNICH>..- Deutsche Lufthansa AG {LHAG.DE} on Thursday [3/20] repeated its forecast of lower 2003 earnings and said the war in Iraq would extend the crisis plaguing airlines since 9/11/01. ...The airline's CEO Juergen Weber said at a news conference...that the recent pay deal with 55,000 cabin and ground crew allowed the airline to react flexibly with shorter working weeks and part-time hours without having to return to the negotiating table..\..
  [And probably because of this TIMEsizing flexibility, similar to profitable US steel-industry survivor Nucor and profitable rustbelt survivor Lincoln Electric, -]
  Lufthansa shares rose despite the gloomy outlook, with traders saying the airline was a rare example of financial strength in the industry. The stock stood 3% higher at 8.91 euros at 1249 GMT, compared to a 0.3% rise by the German DAX [general stock index].... CFO Karl-Ludwig Kley said there was no company-specific reason why the airline's credit rating could not be raised given its financial strength....
  [what a contrast with suicidally DOWNsizing US and Canadian airlines -]
  (3/21) World's largest airlines react to war with cuts, by Kathy Fieweger, Reuters 03/20/03 20:55 ET via AOLNews.
  Several of the world's biggest airlines announced cuts in jobs and flight schedules on Thursday, beginning what is expected to be a wave of reductions because of a slump in travel made worse by the Iraq war. Bankrupt United Airlines, the world's No. 2 carrier, told employees to expect unpaid leaves and capacity cuts.
  [Unpaid leaves are not as bad as layoffs, but they are less flexible and more traumatic than Lufthansa's "shorter working weeks and part-time hours."]
  Air Canada said the war underscored a need to cut 3,600 of [its total of] 40,000 workers this year.
  AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, the world's largest airline, said it would cut international flights by 6% in April as an initial step because of the war, trimming some flights to Europe and Latin America....
  [So is American doing this by trimming hours instead of chopping jobs? We haven't seen an announcement. Judging from the stockprice response, they aren't doing anything that intelligent -]
  Shares of AMR Corp. and UAL Corp. closed weaker on Thursday, and the American Stock Exchange's airline index fell by 0.3%....
  A US Air spokesman said bookings were down 20% last week and off 40% on Wednesday [3/19]. But U.S. airlines with the heaviest exposure to the transatlantic market, such as US Air and No. 3 carrier Delta Air Lines have not yet announced changes to their flight schedules....
  Across the pond...in Europe...Deutsche Lufthansa, Germany's largest airline, said it would look to flexible [ie: fluctuating] work hours to trim costs....
  [Wake up and smell the coffee, North America!]

• GOP battles labor on overtime - As law faces review, groups bicker over eligibility criteria for overtime pay, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, G1.
  [Another slant on the Next Big Slice off the American consumer base and American domestic markets - by near-sighted American CEOs.]
  Employees stand to win or lose millions of dollars in overtime as the US government prepares to redraw regulations that have not been changed in 30 years. The revisions could cause higher paid employees to receive less compensation for working extra hours.
  Union and liberal activists fear the rules will be revised to exclude salaried white-collar workers who are struggling with the working conditions of the 21st century. Employers, smarting over multimillion-dollar settlements, say the existing law imposes time-clock standards on a digital workplace.
  [Translation - employee power degraded so much over the past generation, after c.1970 by when the postwar baby boom had replaced the leverage-bestowing labor scarcity of the war, that management skills gradually degraded too - "power corrupts" - and now employers don't want the burden of any time discipline whatever.]
  They argue that it was originally designed to help low-wage workers with no clout in the boardroom - not highly compensated professionals.
  [As if "professionals" these days are still highly compensated and as if they any longer have any "clout in the boardroom." As for the idea that the "digital workplace" erases time-clock standards and accountability, this is one of the really backward myths of high tech - that the work (usually a crisis cooked up by incompetent managers, as Dilbert frequently points out) is so important, you actually have to be available 24/7 via your cellphone and notebook computer. On the contrary, this is a period when more free time, more "head space," is more important than ever, because smaller mistakes can wreak much larger technology-amplified damage.]
  The struggle is being waged on the following front: a proposed change in the federal regulations imposed under the Fair Labor Standards Act [FLSA] of 1938, the law that mandates the 40-hour workweek and overtime pay. The Dept. of Labor, the federal agency charged with rewriting the rules, expects to release proposed changes for public comment in 30-60 days.
  Under the law, companies must pay employees time-and-a-half for working more than 40 hours. Employees who are classified as executives, administrators or professionals are generally exempt, but figuring out whether a worker fits into one of those 3 classifications is confusing because the job descriptions in the law haven't been updated in 54 years.
  [To make the minimal necessary adjustment in the FLSA without getting a really effective overtime design, like Phase Two and Phase Three of the Timesizing program, it's high time to drop the distinction between exempt and non-exempt from overtime completely, and brings ALL jobs under the simple discipline of the 40-hour week. Cut the posturing and megalomania and superior airs of various professions and just subject all management of all jobs to the discipline and accountability of this level playing field. Timesizing If you can't, in this day and age, normally get your job done in a 40-hour week, maybe you should restructure the job - delegate, hire assistants, whatever. Under Timesizing, you can work all the hours you want but over 40 (or whatever it comes down to so that everyone can have a piece of vanishing employment in the age of robotization and support themselves) but you have to prove that you're not "getting weird" by reinvesting all your overtime pay in training and hiring. And companies must reinvest all their dollar-advantage from overtime rather than hiring in training and hiring. This business in the FLSA of punishing the company but rewarding the employee for overtime is a serious and debilitating flaw, especially as long as benefits per person remain high so that the "punishment" for the company is negligible.]
  "Right now, the current regulations tell employers whether a keypunch operator, a gang leader, or a straw boss [is] exempt or not," said Tammy McCutcheon, administrator for the Dept. of Labor's wage and hour division. "We don't even know what some of those jobs are, or whether they exist today."
  [You can always tell a bad law when it starts getting this detailed, details slipped in by whining special interests. Let's cut the crap and bring all jobs, occupations, professions, crafts, whatever under the same big tent, even if it means starting at a higher level which we can afterward bring down for EVERYONE, even pompous and "critically important" brain surgeons and CEOs.]
  Unions and management agree that something must be done, but they disagree on the method.
  [And as long as management sees no connection between its employees and its consumer base, this will continue.]
  Unions argue that overtime should be available to all classes of workers, regardless of income.
  [Even the language here is revealing. The FLSA overtime was supposed to demotivate overtime, not motivate, and here overtime is seen as a benefit that should be available to all workers. This is pathetic and entirely out of step with the constant erosion of human employment by technology. Overtime must be reperceived as an unmitigated evil - except for those who for whatever reason LOVE their jobs so much that they are willing and eager to work overtime for NO personal unaccountable monetary compensation but instead, use that money to share their dream job with others, by taking on trainees and/or hiring assistants. Here again, employees are their own worst enemy on this, without the imagination and vision to see beyond the workplace what they are doing to others and to their own pay by scrambling for overtime while technological advances disemploy more and more of them.]
  They want the salary test used to determine eligibility for overtime increased to more accurately reflect today's wage rates....
  [There should be NO salary test and NO job-description test, and any overtime design that can't jibe with that needs complete reconceptualization along Timesizing lines. The main design principle here is, design overtime to be self-resolving, like a natural biosystem. The whole discussion of salary test level is a distracting irrelevance. Let's get on with the real meat here -]
  The Bush administration...acknowledges...that fewer professionals could qualify [for overtime premium pay] if the changes the government seeks also move more job classifications that might have qualified for overtime [premium pay] in the past into the exempt category. Business leaders, who are seeking to reduce payrolls during the current downturn, are hoping for such a reprieve. "Professionals and other people who are exempt [now] presumably have more bargaining power with their employers, and are less likely to need FLSA's protections," said Michael Eastman...director of labor law policy for the 3.1m-member US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC.
  [An unwarranted presumption, considering the massive layoffs in such "professional" areas as high tech, airlines, and hospitals.]
  For both sides, the stakes are high. An estimated 80m US employees - about 20% of the workforce - were covered by the overtime rule in 1999, according to the AFL-CIO, a 65-member union federation.
  [God, employers have 80% of the workforce and they want more? The major reason the economy is weak is because employees are already getting too little of the national income to sustain effective demand. How much less do employers want them to get = how much faster do employers want to gut their consumer base than they already are?!]
  The General Accounting Office reports that close to 45% of exempt employees worked more than 40 hours per week in 1998. By contrast, only 19% of employees eligible for overtime payments worked extra hours.
  [So there at last we have a quantitative gauge on the efficiency of the squishy time-and-a-half approach to workweek capping and overtime control. The FLSA approach, inefficient as it is, still cut observed unlimited overtime by (45-19)/45= 26/45= 58%, more than half. We estimate that the Timesizing approach would cut it by over 95%.]
  ...Said Kelly Ross, a legislative representative for the AFL-CIO, "[The] overtime [pay premium] was designed to discourage employers from requiring excessive hours. Take it away and you take away the disincentive [to work employees without limit], resulting in more work hours, less flexibility for employees, and less time with their families."
  [not to mention fewer market-demanded jobs in today's mechanized agricultural world, the robotized manufacturing world, and our increasingly automated services. Fewer jobs means more downward pressure on pay, more unspendable concentration of spending power in the top brackets, and less chance of economic recovery.]
  Unions also argue that employers have been getting around the law by misclassifying lower paid workers as managers.... McCutcheon said some employers [are doing that] because of confusion over the rules..\.. But unions maintain that the overtime regulations are not confusing....
  Other [employers] are skirting the regulations, resulting in a rash of lawsuits and multimillion dollar settlements. In 2002, the Labor Dept. awarded $143m in back pay to US workers who either were cheated out of overtime or misclassified as exempt under the FLCA, up 29% over $111m companies paid to settle such cases the year before, federal statistics show....
  Some legal specialists blame the dot-com era for the current confusion over the law. "The overtime issue is a work culture question, and the dot-com era gave rise to it," said Joshua Davis, a management lawyer and director at Goulston & Storrs in Boston. "Young companies were trying to create workplaces that felt equitable. So, the CEO was not on a pedestal and the people who earned the big dollars were in workspaces similar to those who made less.
  [Oh really? We suspect that the egalitarianism imagined here was a distinct minority in high tech. At Lotus in 1983-84 the executives definitely had corner offices and not just one of the growing number of cubicles, and in fact, all through the late 80s and early 90s that process of cubiclization was going on, demoting the "professionals" in high tech to clerks and leaving the corner-office executives ever more remotely on high.]
  "In an environment like that, the FLSA gets pushed aside.
  [No, it gets pushed aside because of the increasing isolation and insulation of CEOs, who just don't want to be bothered with it or in fact any discipline or regulation - regardless of the dot-com bubble burst two years ago and the first wave of corporate scandals last year. This management lawyer begins to appear "on a different planet."]
  "Everybody is treated as if they are exempt from overtime [premium pay eligibility]."
  {Well, let's not forget that chattel slaves were and are also exempt from overtime, or any other, kind of pay, and with a class of CEOs who seem to see no connection between their employees and their customers' customers, it is back toward poverty and serfdom and indeed, chattel slavery that we are again sliding. The Third World beckons. Unless we again submit to the discipline of time limits beyond those scattering out of the fevered brains of our crisis-manufacturing and -managing CEOs.]

• Textron to cut 1,200 workers at Cessna, citing falling sales, by William Bulkeley, WSJ, A2.
  ...in the latest sign of weakness in the business-jet market.... Cessna, which employs about 11,000 of Textron's 49,000 workers also plans an extended summer furlough for 6,000 workers at the Wichita, Kan., plant that makes business jets. Textron initially planned a one-week furlough but extended it to seven weeks, starting June 20, a company spokeswoman said.
  [Trimming the workyear instead of chopping more jobs.]
  Textron CEO Lewis Campbell said in a news release that a worsening "economic and geopolitical situation" had hurt business-jet demand "much more severely than expected."...