Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

---

Timesizing News, April 1-10, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

4/10/2003  primitive timesizing in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

• House committee approves comp time bill, by Leigh Strope, AP 04/09/03 15:13 EDT via AOLNews.
  WASHINGTON - Employers who now are required by law to pay some workers overtime would be able to offer paid time off instead under [a bill] approved Wednesday by a House committee.... Time off would be calculated at a rate of 1.5 hours for each hour worked beyond 40 hours per week. Workers could accrue up to 160 hours of comp time annually, and companies would have to pay cash for unused time at the end of the year..\.. Said Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill., the bill's sponsor, "If workers have to work overtime [no one should have to work overtime!], they should be allowed to choose how they will be compensated - with more money or more time off"..\.. It is currently illegal for private companies to offer paid time off as an option to overtime pay to millions of workers covered by..\..the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act [FLSA]..\..
  [In our view, this particular bill, despite the fact that it comes from the Bush administration, is a small step in the right direction. Why? Let's keep in mind the ultimate goal here = to create an artificial, wage-raising labor shortage. Anyone working overtime for freely spendable income is frustrating that goal. No matter how much they may "need" the money in the short term, in the longer term they are monopolizing a vanishing resource, namely vanishing, market-demanded human employment, they are creating a labor surplus, and they are thereby driving their own wages downward. This is a point that seemingly only about 50% of the labor movement have understood for at least the last 70 years, because if they had "got" in it 1933 and raised huge nationwide demonstrations in support of the 30-hour workweek - as businessmen did against it - that bill would have been passed and by now would have been tinkered into what Reuther called "flexible adjustment of the workweek against unemployment" alias systematic automatic worksharing. From the viewpoint of this goal, it would currently be preferable if it was legal for companies to provide only paid time off as compensation for overtime because this would prevent wage-depressing monopolization of vanishing human employment instead of promoting it. With our current ambivalence-promoting overtime design, many employees want overtime and are thereby acting against their own longer term interests because year-over-year they are concentrating gradually diminishing market-demanded human employment on fewer and fewer humans while the automation and robots roll in. They are expanding what Marx called the vast "army of the unemployed," which he accused employers of fostering in order to depress wages. The problem with the design of overtime in the FLSA was always that it subverted its stated purpose of reducing unemployment by capping and lowering the workweek, because while disincentivating employers slightly by requiring them to pay 150% pay for overtime, the extra pay actually incentivated many employees to want overtime - thereby worsening labor surplus, pressuring down general wage levels and acting against their own longer-term interests. In the simplest ideal design, overtime is subject to a completely disincentivating overtime tax on both employers and employees, with a complete exemption from this tax in return for 100% reinvestment of their respective overtime advantage (over training&hiring) on the part of, first, the employer and then the employee. The reinvestment would have to go into overtime-targeted training and hiring and would therefore be an integral part of a problem-controlled solution, in full accord with the design principle of "make the problems solve themselves."]
  The bill, approved 27-22 by the House Education & Workforce Committee, is the latest Republican effort to revamp overtime pay requirements in the...FLSA. House leaders want a floor vote by early May.
  Business groups, emboldened by Republican control of Congress and the executive branch, have stepped up lobbying for revisions to the law, which requires pay at 150% of the hourly rate for some workers logging more than 40 hours a week.... Republicans say the bill provides flexibility to workers who are increasingly juggling demands of career and family. It would let workers accrue compensatory time off to attend parent-teacher conferences [huh? a bizarrely specific first example], school events [that's better], or whatever they choose.
  [We'd say simply, more compensatory time off for family, friends, community, school, politics and religion. And here, despite being businessmen and Republicans, they're right. Workweek ceilings have always had to accommodate farmers and other seasonal workers who have crunch times during planting and harvest, and slack times the rest of the year. The French Socialists in 1997-2002 designed this into their 35-hour workweek and called it "annualization." Basically that it what this bill, HR 1119, does to the squishy 40-hour workweek ceiling of the FLSA (squishy because it's still incentivating employees to contravene their own interests by working OT for more income). In either case, annualization is peripheral to the goal, which is to spread the vanishing human employment across the entire population that needs to self-support. And the ambivalence is still there. The message must go out to employers that any and all overtime is economically destructive and must therefore be temporary and strenuously avoided, and the message must go out to employees that overtime is not a source of extra money but upgrading your skills is. If we apply the 100% disincentive to business first (in say Phase Two) and get a lot of on-the-job training programs cookin' (because they'll want the exemption), then we can apply it to employees (in say Phase Three) and there will be a lot of on-the-job training programs available for employees who had self-destructively allowed themselves to become dependent on overtime for extra income instead of upgrading their skills.]
  But Democrats and labor unions opposing the bill say workers will lose money and work longer hours. They say employers will start assigning overtime to workers who agree to choose comp time. The bill also would allow employers to decide when the time off could be taken.
  [Again, until Democrats and labor unions understand that longer hours are NOT an appropriate source of extra money, they can hardly complain about working longer hours. And trying to get more say in decisions for employees is an uphill battle during a huge labor surplus. Until Democrats and unions get that surplus DOWN by (1) getting completely rid of overtime as anyone's standard operating procedure, (2) getting overtime reperceived as a very toxic temporary measure for emergencies only, sort of like belladonna poison in tiny amounts for acute muscle spasm, and (3) getting the standard workweek down down down and therefore the weekly overtime threshold set earlier and earlier in the day, they will be swimming against the current of market forces in trying to artificially provide negotiating power. The whole weakness of Democrats and unions has always been their distractibility - they get lost in the peripheral and transitional details of balancing the power gradient with employers - will we lose money? will we be able to schedule our own vacations, etc. etc. Those are questions that should only come up AFTER the goal is achieved = the workweek automatically varies inversely with the comprehensively defined unemployment rate to preserve a tight jobseeker-jobopening balance (instead of a gross surplus of jobseekers) and overtime automatically targets, triggers, gauges, paces, and funds its own resolution.]
  Opponents say the current overtime law acts as a protection [for] the 40-hour workweek because companies wanting more work from their employees now have to pay premium pay - and often think twice about it.
  [This disincentive has become almost totally washed out by the high per-employee cost of benefits. And the 40-hour workweek is hardly protected by incentivating increasingly flat-waged employees to exceed it for the sake of 150% pay.]
  "No single change to our labor laws would do more to undermine the standard of living of Americans than to weaken or eliminate the overtime requirement," said Rep. George Miller of California, the committee's top Democrat.
  [Again, our labor laws, i.e., the overtime provisions of the the FLSA, are very inefficient supports of American living standards as we've seen over the last two generations, especially since 1970, and the overtime requirement, while demotivating some employers, is still motivating many employees, to resort to overtime. But this is the single most important spot in any of our laws to redesign and get right. As the French found out over the last 5-6 years, there's no point in reducing your workweek if your overtime laws are leaky.]
  The legislation coincides with the Labor Dept's drastic overhaul of the regulations that determine what jobs must receive overtime pay.
  [The ultimate and best answer, NONE that is not 100% reinvested in OT-targeted training&hiring - and therefore, NO MANDATORY OVERTIME WHATSOEVER, and therefore, readier resort to temps (temporary employees) on the part of employers in crunch situations.]
  The plan would make millions of low-income workers eligible for the time-and-a-half hourly rate, but thousands of professionals would lose their extra income.
  [Better this outcome than the opposite. And professionals are the ones who should be weaning themselves from overtime anyway. The current shift of professionals from salaried employees to self-employed consultants on billable time would be an entirely positive development IF there was enough demand for their self-employed services, but there isn't because of the general damage to our consumer caused by the last 20-30 years of massive downsizing. The possibility remains that at some point in the transition from uncapped personal employment concentration to a macro-economically adjusted workweek, economies will have to set up a shadow time accounting system to bring salaried "professionals" into the employment-balancing program.]
  Nearly 22 million workers could be affected. Committee Democrats tried to block the Labor Dept's proposal, but failed.
  [Well, at least we know that there are two separate pieces of legislation in the works right now, the overtime range&skill bill (see story on 3/28/2003) and this comp time bill (which in hindsight, was the one discussed in our 4/4 #1 story below) -]
  The bill, H.R. 1119, can be found on our site or by typing "HR 1119" or "overtime" and clicking on "search" on *thomas.loc.gov.

• [2 bits of intelligence here -]
  Is there life after Silicon Valley's fast lane? by John Markoff, NYT, C1, continued C4.
  [#1 in the photo caption on C4 -]
  "The ultimate question that is getting asked more and more," says Randy Komisar...a longtime Silicon Valley executive, author and consultant, "is, 'What really matters?'"
  [Unemployed Silicon Valley types are probably answering this by talking about family, friends, community, spiritual life, etc. Phil Hyde's answer after the suicides of his grandfather and father just before and after his 13th birthday gradually evolved from "find a convincing reason not to follow their example" to "identify and solve the biggest human problem of my lifetime." So for Phil, Komisar's "ultimate question" looks like a version of The Big Question.  One of Phil's articulations of it is, "How come the blessing of technology has turned into a curse?"   John Markoff's less ambitious menu of answers to Komisar's question has a close relevance to this articulation of Phil's Big Question. Back to page C1 -]
  Gordon Moore of Intel said in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip would double annually. He later refined that to a doubling every 18 months or so. [photo caption]
  PALO ALTO, Calif -...If there is a religion here in the nation's high-tech heartland, [that's it.   It's called] Moore's Law.... The doubling rate has held to about 18 months ever since, virtually dictating the pace of produce obsolescence and innovation, and indeed the pace of life, in Silicon Valley....
  [So let us get this straight. Moore's Law has provided predictable and guaranteed built-in obsolescence ever since 1965, meaning high tech has had a nice little private-sector makework campaign going now for nearly 40 years. No wonder they're now questioning what it all meant, and if it really mattered, and now feeling that it really meant nothing and didn't really matter, so they're asking, "Then what does really matter?"]
  Dr. Moore's is not a law in the physical sense, but rather a prediction derived from the economics of the semiconductor industry. For more than 3 decades it has accurately predicted the accelerating power and plummeting cost of computing. Because of the exponential nature of Moore's prediction, each change has arrived faster and more furiously than the one before.
  • In 1968, for example, the cost of a transistor was $1.
  • By 1995, a dollar bought about 3,000 transistors.
  • It now fetches 50 million.
  ..\..[This gave rise to] a pace of business that Intel's co-founder and chairman, Andrew Grove, referred to as "Internet time" in 1996 at the onset of the dot-com boom.... Take the clock speed of Intel's microprocessor chips, which rose gradually -
  • from about 100,000 instructions a second in 1971
  • to 25 million by 1989.
  • By 2000, an Intel microprocessor was firing off 1.5 billion instructions,
  • and now [early 2003] the rate is 3 billion - and climbing..\..
  Now some experts warn that Moore's Law may soon reach its theoretical limits, with dire consequences for the technology industry's economic engine....
  [Oh no-o-ooo, Dr. Moore!]
  It is a business burn rate that continues to claim casualties. Recently, for example, National Semiconductor, a pioneering chip maker, said that rather than continue fighting a multifront war against obsolescence, the company would sell its formerly promising information appliance business. "Hanging in there with the products that keep chasing Moore's Law is increasingly expensive," said Brian Halla, National's chairman and CEO. [And] asked by e-mail...whether he had new thoughts about...Internet time, Mr. Grove issued a terse reply: "I am too busy to contemplate this."...
  At the International Solid State Circuits Conference in February, [however,] Dr. Moore...predicted that [his] law would play out for another decade or so before designers reached fundamental physical limits that would prohibit the doubling of transistors in a given space. "No physical quantity can continue to change exponentially forever," he said. But, he added, "Your job is delaying forever."
  A growing number of Silicon Valley's technical experts...question whether Moore's Law can hold for another decade. Each year, the Semiconductor Industry Assoc...issues a detailed International Technology Roadmap. The map is color-coded to indicate where potential challenges might develop in the future.
  • Areas where a clear path can be seen are marked in green,
  • and those that require more engineering in yellow.
  • Obstacles for which there are yet work-arounds and which could stop progress entirely are marked in red - known in the chip industry as the "red brick wall."
  [Hey, sounds like the kind of thing we should be doing in worktime economics to break from downsizing over to timesizing!]
  Commenting on the latest roadmap...an IBM scientist [William Hinsburg] said the industry could hit a wall well before the decade was out [because] the light-resistant materials that are currently used in projecting circuit patterns onto chips may fail at dimensions below 50 nanometers (a human hair is roughly 100,000 nanometers in width).... Chris Mack [of] KLA-Tencor [said] the Moore's Law race to put more transistors on a single chip is losing relevance...because of limitations [32-bits, 4-gig memory] in the MS Windows desktop computer operating system.... [Still, it's had a great 40-year run!]
  If Moore's Law is reaching practical as well as physical limits, the implications could be far-reaching in Silicon Valley..\.. An influential cadre of heretics is arguing that seeing an end to the slavish demands of Moore's Law could be the best thing to happen to the culture of Silicon Valley and maybe even to the future of [the] technological innovation that is affected by that culture. "Forget Moore's Law, because it is unhealthy," Michael Malone, a longtime member of the Valley's tech community and an eBay founder wrote recently in a trade publication....
  [Hey, isn't that Luddite? Isn't that like calling technological advance and innovation SICK? Isn't that HERESY, a sacrilege of R.H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) or rather, of the Ever-Rising Capitalist Religion?]
  Forget Moore's Law, "because it has become our obsession," Mr. Malone wrote. "Because high tech has become fixated on it at the expense of everything else - especially business strategy. ... It is precisely this fixation," he added, "at the cost of other considerations like profit, product and market, that led to the dot-com bubble and bust."
  [Ah, would he go so far, under the "market" category, as to say "at the cost of downsizing instead of timesizing"? - thus turning technology into an anxiety-bringing, work-expanding, market-shrinking curse instead of a serenity-bringing, work-easing, market-maintaining blessing?]
  Fiittingly, perhaps, Mr. Malone's article appeared in the February issue of Red Herring, a venture capital magazine, which has since ceased publication, another victim of the technology bust.
  Sentiments like Mr. Malone's seem to find amplication in a new book by Po Bronson, an author who has chronicled life in Silicon Valley. His book "What Should I Do With My Life?" (Random House, 2002) explores "stories of people who found peace and fulfillment by giving up the frantic chase for their dream." Several of Mr. Bronson's case studies are about people who found the Valley's 24/7 relentlessness to be a "toxic environment." Tim Bracher, for example, worked at Cooley Godward, one of the region's most prestigious law firms, but hated the pressures. He left Silicon Valley for Atlanta and ultimately turned to teaching law for satisfaction.
  ...Doug Henton, founder and president of a Silicon Valley consulting firm, Collaborative Economics...argues that the Valley's designers and engineers took a wrong turn in adopting 24/7 lifestyles that emulated the machines they were creating. "Productivity should be about producing more with less rather than more with more," he said.
  He is far from alone in his conclusion. ...Randy Komisar...a longtime Silicon Valley executive whose credentials include [time at] Apple, the Go Corp., and WebTV...is the author of a 2001 book: "The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living" (HBS).... [He] now works as an independent consultant - but on his own terms [don't we all - the trick is getting paid for it!] He rides his motorcycle to client meetings [if any?] and he finds time most days [most days it's all too easy to find?] to take a long bicycle ride in the hills above Silicon Valley. "The ultimate question that is getting asked more and more," he said, "in a way that it wasn't being asked in 1999, is, 'What really matters?'"
  [Live to work? or just, work to live?]

• Feature - German beer hit by growing taste for wine, new laws, by Dave Graham, Reuters 04/07/03 01:01 ET via AOLNews.
  BERLIN...- Beer, for centuries Germany's favourite drink, is in trouble as the country's most famous beverage faces a double hangover resulting from rising business costs and the surging popularity of a long overshadowed rival - wine. Wine topped beer as the drink Germans spent most money on for the first time ever in 2001 and the gap widened last year.... Adding to the woes of Germany's 1,280 breweries is a law which came into effect in January imposing a 25 cent deposit on throwaway cans. The measure hit sales by 10%, beer makers said. Wine containers are exempt.... The regulations were designed to increase recycling of containers. But consumer have balked at the hassle because they are required to return their empty containers to the store they bought them from.
  [Typical German overcontrolling micromanagement - they should be able to return them to anywhere that sells that brand. And why the exemption for wine containers?]
  A national clearing system will not be set up until later this year.
  "If we continue to have months like January and February, then the outlook for the future is very bleak"..\.. said Udo Franke, a director of Germany's biggest beer producer, Holsten Brauerei [which] has cut hours at some plants because of the drop in sales.
  [= timesizing, not downsizing, to maintain their consumer base.]
  "But hopefully once can-returns can be made anywhere in the autumn, conditions will improve."...
  "The economic slump, tax hikes and high unemployment have hit pubs and bars really hard," said Marc Scherr, spokesman for the German Hotels & Restaurants Association. "People are tightening their purse strings, and it's hard to see how the situation will improve until they have more money to spend."
  [All the more reason to trim hours instead of chopping jobs.]

• (4/4) Lufthansa may slash working hours: report, by Steve Goldstein, Newsfinder 2:02am 04/03/03 via AOLNews.
  German airline Deutsche Lufthansa may cut working hours to 35 from 37.5 if the Iraq conflict and the SARS breakout worsen..., Chairman Juergen Weber told...Die Welt newpaper, AFX reported.
  [Much as we love the headline about 'slashing working hours' that's a pretty short article. Here's a longer version from Reuters that's evidently based on the same Lufthansa press release -]
  (4/03) German flagship Lufthansa sees weaker 2003 - paper, Reuters 04/02/03 14:20 ET via AOLNews.
  FRANKFURT...- German airline Deutsche Lufthansa AG {LHAG.DE} expects 2003 to be a weak year for the company because of the uncertainty over the war in Iraq, its CEO said in an interview released on Wednesday (4/02). "Because of the current problems, we had to ground 55 planes...," Lufthansa CEO Juergen Weber said in an interview in German daily Die Welt to be published on Thursday (4/03).
  Besides the war...Lufthansa and its rivals are struggling with falling demand for air travel because of the weak economy and more recently the impact of the deadly SARS virus in Asia. "We are not immune but we have done a number of things to avoid being hit by the disease all that quickly - Lufthansa has put its balance sheet in order, cut debt and lowered costs," Weber said. Lufthansa has grounded planes at its regional subsidiaries and partners as well as 38 planes at the main airline, according to the newspaper.
  Weber said that Lufthansa would be ready to cut weekly working hours for certain staff to 35 hours from 37.5 hours should the negative impact of the war in Iraq and the SARS virus continue to weigh on passenger numbers....
  [Please patronize our timesizing, not downsizing, companies - they're on the solution side instead of deepening the downturn like most other companies.]

1. [how's our little attack on a finite workweek going?]
   Reducing overtime pay, by Steven Greenhouse, NYT, A12.
   A House subcommittee approved a bill that would make it easier for employers to offer tens of millions of workers comp time instead of paid overtime. In a party-line vote, the subcommittee of the Education & Workforce Committee voted 8 to 6 for the bill, which would ease provisions that bar companies from offering comp time instead of overtime to employees who work more than 40 hours a week.
   [Actually this kind of flexibility is necessary in seasonal industries such as agriculture, but it's so expensive to monitor and enforce that it should not be generally available. Management in general needs more time discipline, not less. We don't want to turn America into a "Latin sweatshop" too quickly -]

2. Latin sweatshops pressed by U.S. campus power - Dominican Republic plant signs labor pact - Top brands work...to improve conditions for the employees, by David Gonzalez, NYT, A3.
   VILLA AL TAGRACIA...Workers \at the\ BJ&B hat factory...which employs about 1,600 people [and] has made caps for major companies like Nike and Reebok and for athletic powerhouse schools like Penn State and the University of North Carolina...said they had tried to form a union about 6 years ago because managers were forcing them to work overtime, sometimes dismissing them without reason when they tried to leave early to attend night school.... Said Jenny Perez, who used to work at the factory, "[Supervisors] would humiliate you verbally, but you took it because there was no other place to work."...
   [Employee powerlessness, brought to you by the miracle of job shortage/labor surplus/frozen 1940-level workweeks.]
   The stateside [student] groups began to lobby the brands that had contracts with the factory. United Students Against Sweatshops, a group that at one point sent thousands of letters to the factory, also sent a student volunteer for most of last year to help the union organize.
   [Anybody see the name of the union in this article???]
   University officials, brand executives and officials from a consortium of campuses, unions and students visited with the union and factory managers.
   [This sounds like a very big deal. We haven't heard of a student success like this since the video on the student organizations in Serbia that organized to vote out Milosevic and his party in 2000(?).]
   ..\..The union at BJ&B was the first formed in a free zone in 5 years..\..
   [Yet this is the first time it's surfaced in the Times or the Journal?]
   The zones were set up in recent decades with tax breaks and other incentives to create jobs by attracting international manufacturers.
   [Again the desperation to create jobs in a world with downwardly inflexible workweeks - the hellish strain of makework instead of the heaven of automatic worksharing.]
   ...Said Scott Nova, the exec. dir. of the Worker Rights Consortium, "Gradually, the factory came to recognize..\..through ongoing pressure from Nike and Reebok that it was not in their interest to allow this to continue...and we eventually persuaded them to produce a public letter signed by managers pledging neutrality, no intimidation and that the workers had the right to make their own choice."...
   The campus groups said that the large American brands had to be pushed several times to be more aggressive in responding to concerns over the treatment of workers..\..
   [No kidding.]
   Still, the process was not easy - the factory had to be pressured several times into rehiring union members who were dismissed on the flimsiest of pretexts. At one point, the American brands brought in outsiders who spoke about the rights of workers to choose a union or not. Yet it was [all] accomplished without the kinds of violent clashes or shutdowns that have marked organizing efforts elsewhere....
   Alberto Yang, the factory administrator, said..."With global companies, you have to accept global standards, not just local ones."...
   [Whatever makes it easier for you to accept, Yang - it ain't all Yin.]

3. Aid to airlines from Europe is unlikely - Europe is unlikely to aid its airlines in travel slump - Cutbacks and layoffs as war and illness deter passengers, by Christine Whitehouse, NYT, W1, W7.
   ...Lufthansa...has grounded 31 aircraft and cut $200m from its capital spending plans. \However, it\ has less freedom [than Dutch KLM] to shed staff because of German labor laws, but it is talking to its unions about reducing flight attendants' work hours and pay....
   [Timesizing, not downsizing. See also Lufthansa mention below on 4/01 #4.]

1. Whirlpool Corp. to lay off 315 workers, WSJ, B2.
   ...temporarily...at a dishwasher plant in Findlay, Ohio, because it has high inventory levels. The maker of home appliances...expects the layoffs at the plant - the largest dishwasher-manufacturing plant in the world - to be short term, lasting 5 or 6 weeks.
   [Hooboy, here we are right on the fence between downsizing and timesizing. This is apparently the old usage of the word "layoff," which was always temporary. We're going to give them the benefit of the doubt and regard these "layoffs" as leaves of absence. Our criterion is, a leave has to be short and specific, and this one is over a month in length and slightly fuzzy in expected duration, which leads us to believe that it could stretch to 7 or 8 weeks. But the rest of the article suggests this is also an "old-economy" company with considerable employee-to-employer loyalty, suggesting considerable employer-to-employee loyalty, so we'll count it as a primitive kind of timesizing to avoid real, permanent layoffs.]
   About 100 workers volunteered for the layoff, a company spokeswoman said. Another 81 are temporary workers, she said. At the end of last year, the plant had 2,050 workers.
   [Making this a 315/2050= crude 15% timesizing, which should have been done more sustainably via a weekly adjustable 15% workweek cut for all employees, with heightened overtime-targeted cross-training. Whirlpool makes high-quality, long-lasting washing machines so rush right out and buy one.]

2. Not tonight, honey: The plight of the dual-income, no-sex couple, by Sue Shellenbarger, WSJ, D1.
   Remember..."YUPpies," for young urban professionals? Or "DINKs" [for] dual-income, no-kids couples? Here's a new one: "DINS" for dual-income, no-sex couples.
   The label drew a laugh when former Labor Secy Robert Reich, a professor at Brandeis University in Waltham MA, cited it as one of the hazards of overload in a speech at a recent work-life conference. ...Says Susan Seitel, a Minnetonka MN publisher who attended, "It's really tough. People don't have time" for sex....
   [What's the song, "No time for a summer rain.... No time left for yoo -ou."]
   Dual-earner lifestyles aren't the root cause, says Janet Hyde, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Fatigue is a better predictor of low sex desire in women than work roles, Dr. Hyde [not Jeckyll!] and others found in a study of more than 500 women and their households.... Here are some useful suggestions from the experts on keeping the love alive:
   • Argue about it....
   • "Just do it."...
   • Make time. You've read it here before: If something matters to you, take time to focus on it. Make dates with each other.... Sheldon Isenberg, a Naperville IL psychotherapist and consultant, says that when clients complain they lack time for sex, "I tell them, 'You know, if you were having an affair, you'd find a lot of ways to do it."...
   [We are not alone - see "Workaholic Britain too tired for sex" (3/06/2001, and here's part of the reason, "All work and no pay? - New U.S. poll shows more Americans taking their work home" ( 6/27/2002).]

3. Corps headquarters - Second thoughts and very long hours, by Bernard Weinraub, NYT, B5.
   [How much intelligence are they getting out of this intelligence officer? -]
   Col. Steven Boltz, intelligence officer for V Corps, spends very little time in his tent. Instead, he is at his Tactical Operations Center from morning to night. [photo caption]
   V CORPS HEADQUARTERS, in northern Kuwait...- It has been the toughest week in Col. Steven Boltz's career.
   • On the one hand, Co. Boltz, ...a veteran of 27 years in the Army, has been working long and hard, poring over computerized maps, data and documents and whispering guidance to his commanders....
   • On the other hand, Col. Boltz, like so many others here and at the Pentagon, looks back on the early days of the war with some distress. "I did not anticipate that Saddam would send the paramilitaries all the way from Baghdad to southern Iraq," he said.... "What we didn't anticipate was his ability to move so quickly."
     [Ever heard of worst case planning? 'Course, if what passes for American leadership today did any worst case planning, they would never had started this near-sighted unilateral invasion of a nation at peace, which is going to cost American lives and wealth and prestige for decades to come.]
   Col. Boltz...has been spending very little time in his tent these days. From 6 am until past midnight, he can be found in V Corps Tactical Operations Center, an enclave within the enclave that is this desert base....
   [Let's see, 6 am to say, 12:30 am is 18½ hours a day, and if we can assume even just six days a week, we're talking about a 111-hour workweek, but we're probably talking about a seven-day, 129½-hour workweek. Maybe those of us who think this war is one of the five stupidest things this nation has ever done should be grateful that some of our key troops are crippling themselves in this way.]
   The operations center is surrounded by barbed wire and guarded round-the-clock by soldiers....
   [Presumably on shifts. At least two = 12-hour days = only 84-hour workweeks even if seven days a week.]
   Col. Boltz...is a brooding, almost dark figure as he prowls the operations center. He rarely leaves, except to sleep or fly by helicopter for periodic meetings with senior officers. He doesn't even bother to go to the mess hall. ...He rarely smiles; in fact his mouth seems set in a permanent frown....
   [A posterboy for overwork.]
   Before the war started, Col. Boltz had said that he believed that Iraqis would welcome American troops. He believed that the war would...not get bogged down in southern cities like Nasiriya and Basra. And [he] believed that Iraqi forces would surrender in large numbers in the American sweep from the south. Things haven't proceeded exactly as he had envisaged.... He said..."I know it will work out. It will just take longer than we thought."

• (3/29)   Hooker profit up, says workers on reduced schedule, Reuters 03/28/03 10:36 ET via AOLNews.
  [oooh, baaad headline - CSA! (chaotic syntax alert)]
  Furniture maker Hooker Furniture Inc. {HOFT.O} on Thursday reported a larger net profit for the fiscal first quarter and said its workers were operating on reduced schedules. Martinsville VA-based Hooker reported a net profit of $5m, or 88 cents per share [on what revenue?], compared with a year-earlier profit of [only] $3.2m, or 57 cents per share.
  The company said its workers worked 35-hour weeks in the quarter ended Feb. 28 and would continue to do so in the near future, with a down week in April as a way to control [ie: restrain] inventory levels and deal with weak economic conditions.
  [There it is. Another American company achieving profitability in a recession through timesizing, not downsizing, and adjusting its workweek to its revenue flow and productivity needs, instead of its workforce = timesizing, not downsizing! Better add this puppy to our working models page.]
  Hooker also said it expected sales of its new bedroom furniture products to help its overall business.
  Hooker shares closed up 7.7% at $24.88 on Nasdaq.
  [Please patronize our featured timesizers - to wit, shop Hooker furniture and buy Hooker shares. If shorter hours was gonna happen by itself, it would already have happened by now, but we're stuck at 40 plus plus, and unless we change that, it will not change.]

1. Giving 'family friendly' workplaces new meaning - Ms. Foundation for Women launches new, expanded program: Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work_SM , PRNewswire 03/31/2003 via AOLNews.
   New York...- From 1993 until 2002, 71 million American adults participated in the Ms. Foundation for Women's Take Our Daughters to Work® Day and demonstrated their commitment to "girl power." According to a national study conducted by the Families and Work Institute,...81% of girls and almost 60% of boys said they will reduce their work hours when they have children. [However,] through Take Our Daughters to Work Day, the Ms. Foundation learned how difficult it will be for children to realize these expectations. [And] men's stories echoed those the Ms. Foundation had heard from working women for decades - working adults [of both sexes] want to be more involved in their families' lives, but fear caregiving responsibilities limit their job possibilities and chances for advancement at work.
   \So\ after a decade of success [with Take Our Daughters to Work Day], the Ms. Foundation is evolving the program and [officially] launching Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work_SM on Thursday, April 24.... Men [already] participating in the program thanked the Foundation for creating a day when they could be "public fathers" in the workplace.... "Girls and boys see how difficult it is for adults to meet the challenges of work and family, and want their lives to be different"..\..said Marie Wilson, President of the Ms. Foundation for Women.... "This program will help make their vision of the future [a] reality."...
   [Then they better put some thought into how they are going to have the power and leverage in negotiations with management to get more family time, because the overall trend over the last two generations has been in the opposite direction. The downsizing response to technological innovation has created a huge hidden labor surplus and damaged markets in every industry except extreme-luxury, security, the military, and prisons. The only non-war technique of redressing the extreme power gradient between employees and employers is reversing the labor shortage into an engineered perception of labor shortage - by strictly limiting worktime per person per time period - in other words, by cutting the workweek. (Legislating longer vacations and earlier retirement is simply not flexible and adjustable enough.) The most gradual and market-oriented strategy for cutting the workweek that we know of - with the "moneyback guarantee" of bidirectional flexibility for special situations - is Timesizing.]

2. Media giant Clear Channel sued for policy of working employees off-the-clock without pay, US Newswire 03/31 14:45 via AOLNews.
   [shades of Wal-Mart (6/25/2002 #1). And Clear Channel is the gang that's stifling sane broadcasts about the war to 61% of American radio listeners (3/25/2003 #3, 5th bolded subhead). Clearly these people are straight out of the 19th-century.]
   ...Clear Channel Communications and Clear Channel Broadcasting Inc. are being sued by former employees who claim that the media and communications giant violated Federal law by refusing to pay its hourly production workers overtime compensation. The collective action lawsuit [different from class action??] [was] filed in the US District Court in Nashville, Tenn.... Clear Channel controls the programming for over 1200 radio stations and 19 TV stations throughout the U.S. [It] reported earnings of approximately $8.4 billion in 2002..\..
   "Even though we routinely worked 60 hours or more per week, we were not allowed to earn overtime pay," said..\..lead plaintiff, Thomas Bland.... "The company simply refused to accept time sheets reflecting more than 40 hours per week."
   [And why didn't they just quit?   Probably no job alternatives given the recession and the uniiversal labor glut.]
   ...The employees claim that Clear Channel's policy was designed to cause confusion as to whether the employees were [included in or] exempt from the overtime provisions of the FLSA [Federal Labor Standards Act]. "The FLSA requires that workers be paid one and one-half times their regular rate of pay for all hours over 40 in a workweek, unless a specific exemption applies"..\..according to Nashville attorney Charles Yezbak, who represents the employees.... "Clearly, these employees are 'non-exempt' [i.e., included]."...

3. [a glimpse of how & why Mexico is still third-world -]
   Maids in Mexico targets of racism, abuse, by Lisa Adams, AP 03/31/03 12:22 EST via AOLNews.
   MEXICO CITY - ...Mexico remains in the dark ages when it comes to the treatment of domestic workers - despite repeated efforts by activists to reform antiquated labor laws and Pres. Vicente Fox's recent promises to improve conditions for female workers.... The full-time, live-in maids - many of them in their lower teens despite Mexico's minimum employment age of 16 - generally abandon poor, rural, Indian communities to work in city homes. ..\..Many Mexicans don't know how to live without their maid. Take a look inside nearly any middle- or upper-class household - and even occasionally a lower-class one - and you will find a domestic worker....
   "They are working practically in slavery," said Julia Carapia, coordinator of the women's studies program at Mexico's National Autonomous University. "They have to be on top of everything, from early in the morning until nighttime, and they are totally dependent on the familiies they work for. Sexual harassment and abuse is very common."
   Live-in maids working for upper-class families earn at least the federal minimum wage - about $140 a month - while also receiving room and board. The average salary for employees in other professions in Mexico City is two or three times the minimum wage.
   [Hence the impotence of the minimum-wage without maximum-workweek approach in improving conditions for all employees, not just those who don't need it. In short, of the two traditional union goals, higher pay and shorter hours, focusing on higher pay winds up getting you neither, but focusing on shorter hours winds up getting you both, because it gets the free-market on your side - market forces see a shortage of labor and respond by raising pay levels. Thanks to FDR's huge error and subsequent anti-SWT (shorter worktime) campaign in 1933 and subsequent years, labor picked the wrong horse and is now "in the toilet." Labor picked minimum wage (and maximum makework! - but somehow always too little too late) instead of simply staying on task and DRIVE-DRIVE-DRIVE-DRIVING for shorter hours. And unless somebody starts doing that soon, there are going to be no first-world economies left. The whole 'globalized' world is going to be 'third world' - like Mexico, and we're all going to be wearing "rape me" signs like these Mexican domestic workers. Bush&Cheney's disgusting military adventures are not going to succeed in creating the levels of labor shortage that gave World War II its 'wonderful' depression-solving role.]
   ...The current [federal] law says that live-in maids should have a decent place to live, good food...and adequate time to rest. "For some employers, a decent place to live could mean a space under the staircase or in the washroom, good food could be beans, tortillas and coffee, and sufficient rest might from four to six hours (a day) for a 45-hour workweek," [Raquel] Guadarrama said \after spending\ more than three decades [as] a domestic worker.
   [Bad math. 24 hours a day minus 6 hours for rest is 18 working hours a day. Even with only a five-day workweek, that's still a 18x5= 90-hour workweek. What can she be thinking?]
   ...Women who have their own families to take care of but are forced by economic circumstances to provide a second income to their household often take maid jobs that aren't live-in, earning about double what a live-in maid makes. Although they do receive free room and board, the live-in workers are generally poorer, less educated and less apt to fight for higher wages. The domestic worker field is now divided nearly evenly between the two groups. ...Federal law addresses only the live-in maids [but] only in vague terms. That means salary, benefits, hours and personal treatment are determined arbitrarily by...employers. The women, who desperately need the work, have little choice but to take what [little] is offered to them.
   ...The Atabal Collective, a Mexico City-based group...was established in 1987 to raise awareness about the maids' poor working conditions and to help them fight for their rights. The group...holds yearly marches to recognize maids.... Yet years of efforts to get maids legally recognized as part of the workforce, with guaranteed hours [the phrase we need to see is enforced-maximum or capped hours], wages and benefits, have gone nowhere. Activists say they are up against a slew of prejudices still embedded in Mexican society....
   [Well there were a slew of prejudices against all poor people in England in 1347, so in 1348 they had the Black Death, created a labor shortage in the stupid but effective way, and raised respect and pay for employees like you wouldn't believe and couldn't stop with wage controls (they tried!). Regulating the workweek and cutting it until everyone who needs to support themselves decently, can, is the smart way to create a tonic labor shortage. And if that means holding the cutting it so far that we have to start alternating workweeks, or even just working one week a month, or one week a year, SO BE IT.]

4. European airlines face 'worst crisis', AP 03/31/03 17:34 EST via AOLNews.
   [So it's not only U.S. airlines, unfortunately.]
   BRUSSELS, Belgium - European airlines appealed Monday for governments to help carriers survive the loss of business from the Iraq war, which the industry blamed for compounding the "worst crisis in history." The Association of European Airlines said its 30 member airlines reported a 12.3% drop in international passengers from March 17 to March 23, the week when the US-led invasion of Iraq began. It said the war was compounding losses from the prevailing economic downturn and the impact of 9/11/01....
   [So Cheney, Bush, ARE YOU SATISFIED?!]
   ...Meanwhile Monday, Lufthansa said it is in talks to reduce hours for 13,500 flight attendants as the German airline seeks to cut costs.... Lufthansa could use German law, which permits cuts in worker hours when there is 10% less work for at least 30% of workers. The government then pays compensation to the workers.
   Alternatively, a crisis clause in the airline's collective contract allows cutting the workweek from 37.5 hours to 36 hours without compensation.
   [In short, a real effort to trim hours instead of chopping jobs and markets.]