Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

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Timesizing News, May 20-26, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

5/24-26/2003  primitive timesizing & timesizing consciousness in the news, aka glimmers of strategic hope -

1. 5/24   G.M. plans to extend shutdown of plant by 3 weeks, AP via NYT, B4.
   Workers at the General Motors Corp.'s assembly plant in Baltimore are facing an unpaid 3-week break this summer and possible layoffs as the plant cuts back production because of weak sales. The Broening Highway plant, one of Baltimore's largest employers, with 1,300 workers, will cut production of Safari and Astro vans from more than 300 a day to [around] 200 a day when it reopens from an extended 5-week summer shutdown on Aug. 4, a GM spokesman, Dan Flores, said on Thursday. The plant normally shuts down for two weeks each summer.
   [So, 3/(52-2)= a 6% workyear reduction to avoid or reduce layoffs, possibly to avoid a 6% layoff (6% of 1300 = est. 78 saved jobs), = a primitive form of Timesizing, better done continuously by modulating working hours per week and prorating pay, if the company is, as here, experiencing weak sales.]

2. 5/24   Cooper Tire & Rubber Co., NYT, B4.
   ...Findlay, Ohio, said it would shut its four tire factories in the U.S. for all of next week because of a buildup of unsold products.
   [Here we have 1/52= a 2% workyear reduction to avoid layoffs.]

3. Out of money, Oregon schools end year early, by Sam Dillon, NYT, front page.
   HILLSBORO, Ore...- This affluent Portland suburbshut down its schools [yester]day for the summer, three weeks early, becoming the first of 84 Oregon school districts to close ahead of schedule this year for lack of money.
   [Here's another 3-week workyear reduction.]
   The early closing here left thousands of parents scrambling for emergency childcare, hundreds of teachers seeking temporary jobs and at least a few of the students believing they were shortchanged....
   Across the nation, schools have been struggling with budget cuts forced by the recession, and thousands of districts have laid off janitors, canceled school plays or shut down libraries.
   Bit only in Oregon, where there is no sales tax to compensate for declining state income tax revenues, has the recession caused such havoc that 84 of the state's 198 districts have been forced to lop off the end of the school year. Six other districts cut days from the year, but not from the end....
   [Sounds smarter. No sales tax is a good thing, but there should be an automatic compensation for falling income tax revenues in terms of an automatic imposition or steepening of the graduated feature of the state tax. That would maintain the state's services automatically and with the minimum of economic distortion, and prevent the state from contributing to the deepening of the recession in the state by laying off employees.]

4. 5/26   German steel workers vote to strike, by Geir Moulson, AP 05/25/03 15:50 EDT via AOLNews.
   BERLIN - Members fo Germany's biggest industrial union overwhelmingly approved strikes in the steel industry next month to push their demand for a shorter workweek in the country's economically depressed east, the union announced Sunday. IG Metall said 83% of some 7,000 steelworkers in the formerly communist east who voted between Thursday and Saturday backed strike action, well above the required 75% approval.... "The result demonstrates the determination with which workers want to fight for the step-by-step introduction of a 35-hour week," said Hasso Duevel, the top IG Metall official in Berlin and surrounding Brandenburg state..\.. The strikes are expected to start June 2.
   IG Metall, which has 2.7m members nationwide, wants to cut the workweek for 320,000 factory and steel workers in the east from 38 to 35 hours - the same as for their counterparts in the more prosperous west. Easterners work longer hours for the same base pay because companies in the region say they can't afford higher costs.
   The union says it's time to even the difference, 13 years after Germany was reunified. It contends that cutting hours would create up to 15,000 more jobs by spreading work among more employees in a region where unemployment is running at a level double that in the west.
   Employers counter that a shorter week won't work so long as labor is a third less productive in the east....
   [So automate - if you've got the markets for the extra stuff.]
   Employers have decried the strike move, saying it would raise labor costs and hurt growth and employment. But Duevel said the strike action was "not a national tragedy," dismissing concerns [about] walkouts at a time when the German economy is on the verge of recession.
   [Especially when the only way out of said recession is hours cutting and work&pay spreading.]
   The union's last national strike campaign came a year ago, when it staged 10 days of rolling strikes over wages that hit major auto manufacturers such as DaimlerChrysler and Porsche. It subsequently sealed a wage deal with employers, but working hours are governed by a separate agreement.

5. 3 pops of the Big Question -
   
   • [#1]
     5/24   Waging a war of words on the very idea of war, book review by Richard Falk, NYT, A17 & A22.
     ...The Unconquerable World: Power, nonviolence and the will of the people, by Jonathan Schell. 433 pages. Metropolitan Books. $27.50.
     [Compare "War no more - Jonathan Schell thinks traditional combat has become obsolete," book review by Jonathan Tepperman, 5/04/2003 NYT, Book Review 20.]
     ...Our war-mindedness is a consequence of a massive dose of cultural brainwashing.
     [Certainly Iraq war-mindedness was.]
     ...Mr. Schell's real gurus are the architects of resistance in Eastern Europe, especially Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former Czech president; the Polish journalist Adam Michnik; and the Hungarian novelist George Konrad, whose ideas and related movements brought totalitarian regimes to their knees by nonviolent cooperative action. [Schell] is also astute in describing the collapse of the Soviet Union and the miraculous, almost bloodless, transformation of South Africa's apartheid.
     [And let's not forget the students who turned around Serbia three years ago, and Martin Luther King's civil rights movement in the U.S. 50 years ago.]
     ...Where does this lead? Mr. Schell proposes a "revolution against violence - loosely coordinated, multiform, flexible, based on common principles and a common goal rather than on a common blueprint." Aside from an innovative league of democratic states, Mr. Schell's specific proposals follow familiar lines of global reform: disarmament, human rights, strengthening of international law and the United Nations, and giving priority to overcoming world poverty and reversing environmental decay.
     {All safely rhetorical and no mention of what it all eventually comes down to, unless you're avoiding the distastefully practical - jobs.]
     His essential idea, following Gandhi, is that it is imperative to link the renunciation of violence to an integral engagement with positive action to overcome the main grievances afflicting mankind.
     [Whoa, an upshift in polysyllabic buzzwords signalling a thicker insulation from the distastefully practical.]
     What is missing from Mr. Schell's prescriptions, and perhaps too difficult to expect, is how to get there from where we are, some sort of road map.
     [That would be the Timesizing program, because an adequate sharing technology drops the probability of war.]
     "The Unconquerable World" is devoid of a politics [or economics!] linked to the realities of power and opinion in America....
     [In short, the usual 9/10 diagnosis and 1/10 vague "cure." Well, even our "Timesizing, Not Downsizing," unedited and even unproofed though it be, does better than that - it's 1/10 diagnosis and 9/10 specific cure.]

   • [popping the Big Question #2]
     5/24   Fear of a quagmire? - Why we should worry about deflation, op ed by Paul Krugman, NYT, A29.
     Suddenly the d-word is on everyone's lips. Last weekend [an] IMF report...made headlines by suggesting that Germany is likely to join Japan in the falling-price club. [But] the immediate danger [is] the risk that the world's major economies will find themselves trapped in an economic quagmire. Deflation [is] usually a lagging indicator. The crucial question is whether we'll stumble into the swamp in the first place - and the risks look uncomfortably high.
     [Guess that's how you get your op eds into the Times - keep all the bad news safely in the subjunctive. Never ever let on that we've been noticeably in the swamp for the last 2 years, unnoticedly in it for the last 32 years, and unmistakeably headed for it for the last 62 years, thanks to our penchant for turning the technological blessing of free time into unemployment by downsizing instead of timesizing. It's the tragedy of another commons, the job market. CEOs have just assumed that they can keep the same hours regardless of skyrocketing productivity, use fewer and fewer employees, keep dumping the extras on the job market - and that job market, just like the "infinite" oceans or the "infinite" rain forests, can take any amount of abuse. But sooner or later the job market's rehiring magic slows, and the consumer base and effective demand start to shrink, regardless of infusions of sheer population from housewife and immigrant cohorts.]
     The particular type of quagmire to worry about has a name: liquidity trap.
     [True, but we'd be more specific. We'd call it the marginal efficiency of concentrated money.]
     ...Deflation...can push an economy into a liquidity trap....
     [No, the hyper-concentration of the national income has already done that and that's why the deflation starts. Timesizing keeps the national income from getting that concentrated by getting an economy a lot closer to full employment, thus subjected the top income brackets to the discipline of the market's perception of a shortage, not a surplus, of job candidates.]
     or deepen the distress of an economy already caught in the trap....
     [This silly idea depends on Krugman's widely shared fantasy that -]
     Falling prices induce people to postpone their purchases in the expectation that prices will fall further, depressing demand today.
     [As if most people in a recession, oops, we mean of course "stumbling recovery," have money enough to provide themselves the option of timing of purchases of goods and services as if they were stocktraders. Besides, how much of a factor is such purchase-timing in consumer-computer markets where the prices are always decrementing and the consumers do tend to have the money to "time" purchases? Krugman, like many published economists, has just been too financially secure for too long to sense what it's like for most people in a "stumbling recovery."]
     ..\..In a liquidity trap, additional cash pumped into the economy [by the Fed] - added liquidity \only\ put in the hands of banks...- sits idle, because there's no point in lending money out if you don't receive any reward. And monetary policy loses its effectiveness.
     ...Deflation discourages borrowing and spending.
     [Watch your working, Paul! Deflation discourages lending, but encourages borrowing - which encouragement doesn't matter because the lenders are in the driver's seat. And deflation doesn't discourage spending. It encourages spending - but discourages selling cuz you're not gonna get that much for whatever it is. But at least Krugman is beginning to focus on the hyper-$concentration problem -]
     ...The taxcuts will flow mainly to the very, very affluent - the people least likely to spend their windfall.... Meanwhile, state and local governments, which are not allowed to run deficits...are slashing spending and raising taxes. And both the spending cuts and the tax increases will fall mainly on the...people who cannot make up the difference by drawing on existing savings.
     [Ergo, even less spending and more deflation.]
     The result is that the economic downdraft from state cutbacks (only slightly alleviated by the paltry aid contained in the new tax bill) will almost certainly be stronger than any boost from federal taxcuts. In short, those of us who worry about a Japanese-style quagmire find the global picture pretty scary.
     [Some don't worry at all. Two days ago, for instance -]
     Economic scene - Just because prices are falling, it doesn't mean there's deflation, by Virginia Postrel, 5/22/2003 NYT, C2.
     [But yes, Virginia, there is deflation, because you've forgotten the general decline in the value of American money compared with the euro. Back to Krugman -]
     ...Most analysts don't think we'll find ourselves caught in a liquidity trap.... But few analysts saw the Japanese quagmire coming either, and there is now a significant risk that we will find ourselves similarly trapped. ...Like the Fed, I hope that doesn't happen. But hope is not a plan.
     [Aha, a disguised version of the Big Question = so what's the plan? The only plan in print that's at a sufficient level below the surface structure of the economy is...Timesizing, Not Downsizing. Fiddling with interest rates & taxcuts, ie: monetary & fiscal policy, have no effect on the astronomical underlying skew of ownership = shares per person. Twiddling the ease of lending and borrowing is Exhibit A of the Chesterton Pan-Utopian Trap - it merely ties pretty bows around the existing inefficient, wasteful and dysfunctional allocation of resources and delivers it in limos and zeppelins. Timesizing tackles the most accessible imbalance = the concentration of limited market-demanded manhours - and the skills that go with them. Chant "lump of labor fallacy" as long as you can, the "lump" - of employment - is not only finite, but shrinking - unless (BGO!) you're a luddite. This BGO (blinding glimpse of the obvious) should make worktime-economics researcher Tom Walker of British Columbia very happy, if he hasn't thot of it already himself.]

   • [popping the Big Question #3]
     5/25   Long haul - A sickly economy with no cure in sight, by David Leonhardt, NYT, 4:1.
     [only as long as it takes for the Timesizing program and the underlying worktime economics get some notice.]

1. German metal union says strike call response good, Reuters 05/22/2003 09:03 ET via AOLNews.
   BERLIN...- German engineering union IG Metall said on Thursday steel workers in the poorer eastern part of the country were responding favourably to a strike ballot called following a dispute over shortening working hours. "The participation rate is very high," an IG Metall spokeswoman in Berlin said.
   The union has called a three-day ballot to decide on a strike to back its demand for a cut in weekly working hours to 35 from the current 38, to bring the region into line with [the unionized part of] westerm Germany, where workers already have a 35-hour week....
   IG Metall, which represents a total of some 310,000 workers in eastern Germany, says the gap between working hours in east and west, originally agreed [upon] to make up for the gap in productivity between the two sides, is increasingly unjustified given productivity advances [i.e., automation?] by eastern German plants. It is calling for the gradual harmonisation of working hours across Germany but has said the process would be spread over several years.
   [A one-hour reduction per year would take care of that, same as France planned from 1982-86 to get down from 40 hrs/wk to 35 - but the process got stymied after one year so France got stuck at 39 for nearly 20 years. The U.S. went down 2 hrs a year from 44 to 40 between 1938 and 1940.]
   The employers federation Gesamtmetall has rejected the demands, saying they would send "the wrong signal." "You have to realise that working hours in eastern Germany are already significantly shorter than in the most important competitor countries," Gesamtmetall Pres. Martin Kannegiesser told German radio.
   [Guess east Germany hasn't really made up its mind to unite with west Germany. Guess they're not really used to leading the world in quality of life, and they'd rather join the U.S. and Japan in their slide into the Third World.]
   An IG Metall spokeswoman said [the] eastern German steel industry had shrunk from some 100,000 workers before unification to some 9,000 today, but that production currently outpaced overall output from the old east German industry.
   [Ah, the wonders of technology. Not that the "leader" of "united" Germany has a clue -]
   ..\..The dispute comes as unions step up pressure on Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to water down his Agenda 2010 'reform' plan [our quotes], which seeks to encourage growth by loosening restrictions on hiring and firing staff and cutting social security benefits.
   [Well loosening restrictions on hiring is fine, but you can't encourage growth (= UPsizing) by firing staff (= DOWNsizing).]
   Around 7,000 IG Metall members at 17 steel companies including Arcelor unit Eko Stahl in east Germany are due to vote in the ballot, which runs until Saturday and which could trigger a strike from early June. A further 16,000 union members at 85 metal and engineering firms including two Volkswagen AG plants in the state of Saxony due to start a separate three-day ballot on Monday, union and industry spokesmen said....

2. Royal Mail loss halves, sees profit this year, by Victoria Cutler & Sudip Kargupta, Reuters 05/22/2003 09:39 ET via AOLNews.
   LONDON...- British postal service operator Royal Mail said on Thursday its losses nearly halved last year and aims to be back in profit this year.... The state-owned company is cutting tens of thousands of jobs and outsourcing non-core operations in a bid to return to profit amid stiff competition in its markets. Around 16,000 people have left the firm in the past financial year....
   [See 6/14/2002 #1.]
   Royal Mail is offering an extra £20 a week on top of average weekly pay of £363 and lump sums of up to £1,000 in return for postmen and women accepting a 5-day working week [instead of 6??] but longer single delivery round shifts.
   Royal Mail said it had seen a 90% drop in strike days since last year.
   [That's what massive layoffs and unemployment and recession do - they obliterate labor leverage - so why bother with strikes? - and they get your economy chugging along nicely - down to Third World levels.]

3. Rendell administration reminds public of child labor law, PRNewswire 05/22/2003 11:00 EDT via AOLNews.
   ...that the [Pennsylvania] state Child Labor Law applies during the summer months as well as during the school year. The law limits work hours and types of work allowed for children and teenagers under age 18..\.. On behalf of Pa. Gov. Edward Rendell, Labor & Industry Secy Stephen Schmerin...said, "The law provides common-sense safety and health protection for Pennsylvania's young workers."...
   During summer vacation, teenagers ages 14 and 15 may work no more than 8 hours a day or 44 hours a week [oh great - and you thought South Korea was backward] and only between 7 am and 10 pm. Exceptions include newspaper delivery, caddies and some farm work....
   [Exceptions to workweek max or 7-10 sched, or both?]
   Teenagers ages 16 and 17 may work a maximum of 8 hours a day or 44 hours a week [presumably including 4 hours on a sixth day] during summer vacation with no night work limits....
   [Guess that means "no night-work allowed" rather than "no limits on illegal work between 10 pm and 7 am."]
   Minors may not work more than six days a week and must be allowed a 30-minute meal period on or before five consecutive hours of work.... More information is available by calling toll-free 1-800-932-0665, or on the Internet at *www.state.pa.us, PA keyword: "labor laws."
   There is also a federal child labor law. Currently, the more stringent of the two laws in favor of the young worker takes precedence.
   Contact: John Currie of the Penn. Dept. of Labor & Industry ...717-787-7530....

4. Rengo turns to organizing part-time workers, Kyodo 05/22/03 08:11 EDT via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- The Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo) began putting an emphasis on part-time workers given their increase amid corporate efforts to cut personnel expenses, according to a Rengo guideline made available by Thursday. With its first guideline on part-timers, who are mostly not unionized, the leading umbrella body of labor unions in Japan aims to improve their work conditions that are generally much worse than those of full-time workers.
   [Hmm, sounds like Japan might be starting a bottom-oriented strategy of beefing up part-time, like the Netherlands. As we saw on 5/21/2003 #1 below, that bottom-focused strategy didn't work as well as France's top-oriented strategy of setting and enforcing a workweek ceiling = a more even share of market-demanded employment per person. The solution for part-time and wages is not sharp-shooting with detailed, market-distorting government regulations, but just easing the economywide maximum workweek, very slowly, down to lower and lower levels - preferably with overtime-to-training conversion -until all the unemployed, underemployed, welfare, disabled, incarcerated, force-retired, forced-parttime...are drawn into the job market (and thereby turned into confident, active consumers).]
   The guideline stresses the merits of part timers joining labor unions - mostly set up company-by-company in Japan - not only for the workers themselves and regular workers, but also for employers.
   In Japan, there were some 12.11 million part-timers working less than 35 hours a week in 2002, comprising 23.2% of the country's total workforce, according to data at the Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts & Telecommunications Ministry....

1. German industrial union OKs strike vote, AP 05/21/03 14:38 EDT via AOLNews.
   FRANKFURT...- Germany's IG Metall industrial union Wednesday [5/21] asked workers in eastern Germany to vote on whether to strike for a shorter workweek. IG Metall's executive council approved strike ballots only for narrow sectors of industry in the economically depressed region, though the union could widen strike plans later.
   The union wants workers in the east to have the same 35-hour week as the west.... Union head Klaus Zwickel said the shorter week "is a question of social justice." ..\..Easterners work 38 hours for the same base pay as western industrial workers because companies in the formerly communist region say they can't afford more.
   [Then they should welcome the chance to pay 3/38th's less! Not to mention the chance to re-employ and activate their unemployed consumers.]
   ...The east has about 320,000 steel and manufacturing workers, union and nonunion. East and west reunited in 1990 at the end of the Cold War, but the east still lags, with unemployment double [18.7% in Apr.] what it is in the west [8.5%]..\..
   About 25,000 workers, the bulk in Saxony state, were asked to vote after talks with employers collapsed.... Some 9,000 steelworkers throughout the region will vote Thursday through Saturday, while 16,000 factory workers in Saxony will vote from Monday through Wednesday, with 75% approval required for a strike..\.. Strikes in Germany typically target individual regions, concentrating on companies within those regions where unions feel they can maximize pressure on employers..\..
   Employers decried the strike move, saying it would raise labor costs and hurt growth and employment.
   [But if they avoided the strike by just agreeing to cut the workweek, it would spur growth, and by unblocking resistance to more efficient technology, actually cut labor costs.]
   "Recovery in the east should not be endangered by IG Metall," employer association president Martin Kannegiesser said in a statement....
   [Evidently a geezer who has not thought too deeply about the implications of exponentially output-increasing technology. In Malthus' day, population was increasing exponentially and food wasn't. In our own day, automation is increasing exponentially, and jobs aren't. And even though, in industrialized nations, births aren't either, that exponential increase of automation not only guarantees that the much-denied finitude fo the lump of employment (misnamed 'lump of labor) is becoming, or has become, a reality, but makes its actual shrinkage a probability. There may be bubbles, but there will never again be sustainable prosperity in this automating world until we begin to implement an economic design that matches it, and that means flexible adjustment of the workweek, preferably gradual, preferably market-oriented without government makework, and that means something very much like Timesizing.]

2. [high tech actually brings more urgency for timesizing, not downsizing all over the world -]
   Worker vengeance makes its way online, by Thanassis Cambanis, Boston Globe, front page.
   [BOSTON -] Furious that he'd been fired from the travel agency where he'd worked, James O'Brien waited months before allegedly springing his carefully plotted revenge. Just before Christmas 2000, according to federal prosecutors, O'Brien hacked into his former employer's computer system and canceled 60 customers' airline tickets. The move cost the agency $96,000 and left dozens of would-be holiday vacationers stranded at airports....
   [It's in the interest of all of us to update our mutual interest with a flexible market-based worksharing system. Instead, with downsizing we weaken our mutual interest and widen the income gap. Dumb-a dumb dumb.]
   O'Brien's alleged crime, according to federal law enforcement officials who brought charges against him last month, is the new face of hacking: Irate workers who in the old, low-tech days might have simmered or spread slander about their ex-bosses now instead are wreaking havoc on their former workplaces by infiltrating their computer systems.... O'Brien...faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted..\..
   "Ten years ago, almost all computer crime tended to be kids, seeing what they could do," said Asst. US Attorney Allison Burroughs, who heads the Computer Hacking & Intellectual Property [CHIP] unit in the US attorney's office in Boston. "Now, it's disgruntled employees."...
   [or ex-employees.]
   Four full-time prosecutors work in the so-called CHIPs unit.... The Boston office of the FBI has 13 agents assigned to high-tech crime - one of the bureau's only growth areas other than terrorism. And the US Secret Service here has another six-agent team that investigates cybercrime..\..
   Burrough's unit is currently working on 10 other cases in the federal district of Massachusetts involving fired employees who allegedly struck back at their former bosses by hacking into company computers. About ¾ of all federal hacking cases in Massachusetts, she said, involve disaffected employees, compared with a decade ago when that proportion of hacking cases stemmed from juveniles vandalizing computer systems.
   The phenomenon not only marks a seachange in the criminal use of computer systems, but poses a costly threat to corporations, which can lose millions of dollars to hacker attacks by former insiders who know their systems' vulnerabilities.... The potential for mischief is great.... "Technical knowledge and a bad economy have given a certain class of people the means and the motive to commit crimes they would not have been able to commit," Burroughs said. "There are people getting laid off who have a tremendous amount of knowledge about a company's security and systems."...
   [Hours cuts, not layoffs.]

1. [35-hr workweek France is still growing while Germany & Italy are contracting -]
   French GDP rose 0.3% in first three months, Dow Jones via WSJ, A11.
   France won euro-zone bragging rights in the first quarter by posting the fastest growth among the region's major economies. But it may be that France seems in good shape because its neighbors Germany and Italy look so bad....
   [Whatever. France is the only one with an economywide 35-hour workweek. Only the unionized sector in western Germany has the 35-hour week and in eastern Germany, even the unionized sector is still working 38 hours a week - see 5/06/2003. And the German economy, #1 in the euro zone, is bigger than the French, which is #2, and Italy is the next biggest, #3, after France. The Netherlands are #5 after Spain.]
   The French economy expanded at a 0.3% quarterly rate during the first 3 months, the government said, matching expectations. At an annualized rate of about 1.2%, France is more in a league with the U.S., which grew at a 1.6% rate, than with its neighbors, Germany and Italy, where GDP contracted in the first quarter. Euro-zone GDP was flat in January through March.
   [France's secret?]
   French consumer demand remained strong, rising 0.6%.
   [With the world's only nationwide 35-hour workweek, French consumers have more time for errands and shopping and a more visible and futuristic integrating mechanism to buoy job security and consumer confidence, than any other consumers in the world. And the result -]
   Business investment rose for the first time in two years.
   [But -]
   ..\..Starting this quarter, the factors weighing on the rest of the euro zone - the strong euro, rising joblessness and falling confidence - are likely to bring France's modest growth rate back down to the average for the common-currency region....
   [No big deal. Just lower the workweek again, preferably just an hour a year this time, LED by government this time, instead of government "leading" from behind as with this last jump from 39 hrs/wk to 35 hrs/wk, where they clipped 1% off the unemployment rate for every hour they trimmed the workweek. Otherwise, with France's "conservatives" trying to dilute the 35-hour week, France may indeed get more joblessness and less consumer confidence. Here's the Times version -]
   France: Tepid economic growth, by Ariane Bernard, NYT, W1.
   The French economy avoided a recession in the first three months of the year, as its growth slowed to a rate of 1% year over year from 1.5% in the fourth quarter of 2002. The economy grew just 0.3% in the first quarter from the fourth. Increased consumer spending and investment fueled the moderate growth, the national statistics office Insee reported. The data come just days after three of France's partners in the euro, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, said that their economies unexpectedly contracted in the quarter [see 5/16/2003 #3]
   [The fact that France is doing better than the Netherlands may say something about their different approaches to timesizing. France is doing it for everyone except very small businesses and doing it by setting a cap on the top. The Netherlands is trying to do it just for part-timers by making employers give them full-time benefits. So they're trying to do it from the bottom up, as it were. This last quarter's data may pass a significant judgement between their differing approaches. These problems are not really problems at the bottom, eg: some people having (passive) too little. They are problems at the top, eg: some people taking (active) too much.]

2. [ talks so far fail to cut east German workweek from 38 to 35 hours like west's - strike will change that? -]
   East Germany faces engineering strike as talks fail, Reuters 05/20/03 07:15 ET via AOLNews.
   BERLIN...- Germany faced a strike by engineering workers in its economically depressed east on Tuesday as talks on shortening the working week there failed. Engineering union IG Metall, which represents 310,000 eastern workers in carmaking and other [industries], said it would proposed a strike ballot. A strike could start in early June.
   IG Metall is demanding a cut in weekly working hours to 35 from the current 38, to bring the region into line with western Germany were engineering workers already have a 35-hour week.... IG Metall has said the working week needs to be shortened to close a "fairness gap" in working conditions between the east and the west..\..
   [Not to mention the fact that employment will slide from west to east Germany, the two Germany's will gain parity in higher unemployment and weaker consume demand, instead of gaining parity higher free time and pay and consumer base and dependent markets, and the nationwide consumer base will shrink. Whereas if the east cuts the workweek to match the west's, the two Germany's will gain parity on the higher level of the west instead of the lower level of the east.]
   A strike could hit car makers and car components suppliers, including Volkswagen AG and Opel, the German unit of GM....
   [We assume VW will not fight this, since they've been insightful about the values of timesizing in the past. See our case studies page. As usual, though, many employers have not thought this through -]
   Employers have argued that working hours should only be cut when businesses in eastern Germany become as productive as western businesses....
   [That's like Israel saying 'we'll only do the right thing when the Palestinians stop trying to make us do the right thing.' Then of course, when there's no longer any pressure to do the right thing, guess what happens....]
   Eastern Germany's seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate in April was 18.7%, compared with 8.5% in the west..\..
   [Clearly both Germany's have too long a workweek for their level of technologically enhanced productivity, but while western Germany's is just too long, eastern Germany's is WAY too long.]

3. [investors in Romania still clueless re necessity of workweek cap for their own survival -]
   Foreign investors urge changes in Romania labour code, by Antonia Oprita, Reuters 05/20/03 09:17 ET via AOLNews.
   BUCHAREST...- Foreign investors in Romania called for changes in newly-adopted labour legislation on Tuesday, saying it increases red tape and lowers workforce flexibility, putting much-needed investment at risk. Two months after a Labour Code came into force designed to offer more protection to workers living on salaries of about $130 per month, employers complain the law is just another bureaucratic burden.
   [What don't some investors "get" about the very intimate connection between lots of well-paid employed people ... and booming consumer (and derivative) markets?!]
   "The new labour code considerably reduces the flexibility of the workforce in Romania," Ruxandra Stan, Exec. Director of the Foreign Investors Council in Romania told Reuters.
   ["Reduces the flexibility" or "reduces the exploitability." Damn, they may be losing one of their few remaining opportunities to loot a Northern Hemisphere, predominantly Caucasian, Third-World country.]
   EU aspirant Romania, where unemployment is forecast to climb to around 9% this year, badly needs foreign investment to create jobs for those who will be laid off during restructuring of its crumbling industries.
   [No, it doesn't. Foreign "investors" who want the nation to stay third-world aren't investors, they're speculators. Real investors want the nation to move up to first-world levels with a much bigger consumer base and the robust job, industrial and financial markets that derive from it. All Romania needs is to optimize what employment they do have, and that means sharing the limited market-demanded employment and reactivating all their unemployed potential-consumers.]
   Stan said some provisions, such as forcing employers to pay for a wage guarantee fund or setting strict working hour limits, may deter potential foreign investors from Romania.
   [We repeat, that kind of foreign "investors" you need like an infestation of parasites.]
   ...The new Labour Code stipulates that employers must pay social security taxes even for contractors or part-time workers.... "Costs for employers were lower when they could hire workers as contractors without paying social security," Labour Minister Marian Sarbu told a conference on the new labour code in Bucharest. "But the fact is that such contractors had almost no social protection," he added....
   [Beefing up benefits for part-time employees is the Dutch approach, and as we saw in item #1 today (above), this is probably not as effective as simply redefining "full time" downward. But the previous paragraph we excerpted indicates that the Romanians are also implementing the more effective approach, or at least laying the groundwork for it by "setting strict working hour limits."]

4. [protestors in Hong Kong press gov't to keep promise that would establish workweek cap -]
   Unemployment protest, AP photo caption 5/20/2003 via AOLNews.
   Protesters hold banners as they demonstrate near Hong Kong's [HK's] government offices Tuesday, May 20, 2003, shortly after the latest unemployment figures were released. The economic fallout from SARS pushed HK's unemployment rate to 7.8% in the three months ending April 30, matching a record set last year, the government said Tuesday. The banners read: 'Chief Executive Tung (Chee-hwa), please keep your promise not to implement lay off, [but instead] establish working hour limits, increase employment opportunities.'

5. [US firm in France remains clueless complainer re 35-hr workweek despite added markets -]
   Cuisine Solutions announces third quarter fiscal year 2003 results, PRNewswire-FirstCall 05/20/2003 via AOLNews.
   ...Cuisine Solutions France [CSF] increase in sales was primarily driven by higher sales to the retail and foodservice channel.
   [But CSF keeps slamming the shorter workweek in France for "limited availability and higher cost of labor" (i.e., higher wages) despite the benefits to its own business from the conversion of (12.6%-8.7%=) 3.9% of the nation's unemployed from marginalized to mainstream consumers and the resulting time and money and demand for their products, incredibly, suicidally, "biting the hand that feeds"! -]
   Foodservice operators are forced to deal with the 35-hour workweek constraint and discovered that the Cuisine Solutions product line offers a solution to the limited availability and higher cost of labor created as [a] result of the mandated workhour rules....
   [Is this the kind of blockheadedness we have to penetrate in order to achieve the worktime economics' paradigm shift and implement the next generation of economic design? Or, do we just have to set up more working models and wait for people with the old mentality to die off? What's that quote we saw recently to the effect that science never progressed by changing minds of the believers in the old theory, but merely by their deaths? Ah, here it is in the "comics for Phil's local cable TV show" pile -] Reflection for the day, selected by B. & T. Fitzpatrick, 5/17/2003 Boston Globe, D22.
   A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents...but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Max Planck.
   [This is certainly a pessimistic divergence from "The progress of science is not accelerated by advancing a fuzzy theory." Humans are the most versatile species so we don't like to be that pessimistic, but it's certainly true in some, maybe many, cases.]