Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

---

Timesizing News, June 1-5, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

6/05/2003  worktime consciousness & primitive timesizing in the news today = glimmers of strategic hope -

1. Many U.S. workers want time off work, but choice is key - Given choice, 4 out of 5 say they would take advantage of reduced-work schedules at some point, press release by Work in America Institute, PRNewswire 06/04/2003 14:23 EDT via AOLNews.
   Money may be tight these days, but time for family and other personal pursuits also appears to be a valuable commodity for a significant number of unionized workers. A new study of approximately 600 unionized workers by the Work in America Institute suggests that, given a choice, the vast majority - close to 80% - would likely take advantage of reduced-work schedules at some point in their careers. Moreover, about 25% of them would be likely to take advantage of certain reduced-scheduling options right now.
   [If only 25% would only just be "likely" to cut working hours immediately, it sounds like the 80% of these work-culture-drenched, job-insecure union members were answering in the direction they sensed the study sponsors were leaning.]
   ...The full study - including all charts referenced here - available online at the *Labor Project for Working Families.... Funding for the report, which was designed to explore reduced-time options that would benefit unionized workers, unions and managers alike, was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
   While the survey concentrated mainly on unionized employees, a comparison group of nonunionized employees showed an even more widespread interest in having opportunities to work fewer hours.
   "For many workers today, too often the only choice is between a full-time position or a low-quality part-time one, with low pay and minimal benefits or job security," said Dr. Will Friedman, director of the study. "Our data suggests that new scheduling options would help not only individual workers, but could also
   • help organizations attract and retain quality workers,
     [that much was proved by Ron Healey's 30/40 Plan]
   • reduce unscheduled absences,
     [compare study 1½ years ago, 10/24/2001 #2]
   • help unions attract new and younger members,
     [there was an All Unions Committee to Shorten the Workweek in Chicago in the 1970s and Walter Reuther was stumping for flexible adjustment of the workweek against unemployment at the UAW Convention in Atlantic City in 1964]
   • and generally raise morale."
     [There isn't a rustbelt company in the world with higher morale than timesizing Lincoln Electric of Cleveland, or a higher-morale steel company than Nucor.]
     
   [These pleadings for balance and employee consideration and even family time for family values are hardly ever effective. The only thing that seems to work is the question, "Do you want markets to come back or don't you?" - after job losses have so weakened the consumer base that even the rightwing can see that domestic demand is just not going to come back without reversing some of their ever-spreading control over people's lives and letting market forces discipline them flexibly into paying more and spreading the profits to people who are actually going to go out and spend them because they have the time and desire (and in many cases the actual need - though "conservatives" tend to assume everyone, like themselves, operates on choice), to do so.]
   The report explored the availability, desirability and feasibility of various alternatives for reducing work time, such as
   • unpaid time off with lost pay spread over the year,
   • variable part-year (as opposed to the usual part-week or part-day) schedules,
   • and incremental scheduling reductions.
   Rather than drastically reducing their [work] time, most unionized workers interested in reducing their schedules would do so by only 10-20%. Specifically, 23% would prefer to work either 90% or 80% of a full-time schedule.
   [That's a 36-hour or 32-hour (four 8-hr days) workweek.]
   (See Figure 1-A in report at *[this link].)
   "Choice is key here," said Jill Casner-Lotto, co-author of the study. "Workers didn't tell us they wanted to be given time instead of money. They said they wanted to be able to choose, in some instances, to have the option to work fewer hours.
   ["Death by a thousand qualifications."]
   A significant number do appear to be interested in these options, even if it might mean that they'd be making less money."
   [Some study in the late 90s claimed that 66% would be willing to give up money for more free time.]
   In addition to exploring the interest of unionized workers in reduced time options, the study looked at the views of union leaders and managers as well. As with many changes in the workplace, there are attendant cautions and concerns on the part of various stakeholders regarding reduced-work schedules. Some of these relate to administrative issues, and are of particular concern to managers. Moreover, fully half of union leaders worried that management might take advantage of changes in the status quo to roll back union gains (see *Figure 4-B), while employees expressed concern about their workload remaining the same even if their hours are reduced.
   Reasons most often cited for wanting to reduce hours relate to work/life balance - specifically, wanting to spend more time with family and friends. The majority of all 3 groups surveyed -
   1. unionized workers,
   2. union leaders
   3. and managers
   - believe reduced-hour options would help employees with their work/life issues as well as raise worker morale. (See *Figure 3-A.)
   Among those with the strongest interest in working fewer hours were younger workers (ages 18-34), close to half of whom, 45%, say they would select reduced-time options if available.
   [Same in Japan! - see yesterday, 6/04/2003 #2.]
   In contrast, only about a third - 32% - of those 55 and over say the same. Said one Boston manager, "We had a vacation buyback option - they could get more vacation by giving up pay. The Generation X workers all wanted that. Of the older folks, none opted for it." (See *Figure 1-A for additional data comparing age groups.) Women, as well as those in work cultures that can be characterized as dysfunctional [and which aren't these days?!], were also especially interested in seeing new reduced-time options in their workplaces.
   Indicating a possible generation gap, and perhaps signaling some significant trends for future union organizing, a full 70% of younger workers say it is likely that more scheduling options would help the union keep and attract members (see *Figure 3-B). In strong contrast, only 28% of leaders - who tend to fall into the older age categories - say it is "likely" that more options would help the union attract and keep members, while 45% say "not likely."
   [That's why God created death. Or as Max Planck put it, "A new scientific truth [or a new level of work/life balance?] 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."]
   The study also found that the quality of the work culture can be decisive as far as workers' interest in reduced-time options [is concerned], in that workers in uncomfortable, "dysfunctional" workplaces are considerably more likely to want to work fewer hours. (Dysfunctional here refers to places workers say have "mostly adversarial" labor-management relations and/or where they "mostly mistrust" management.) (See *Figures 1-B, 1-C and 2-B.)
   A New Jersey union leader in the study suggested a best-case scenario in which all parties would benefit from reduced-work options: "Each employee likes to have a little bit more control over his life. And when he's got a little extra control, he becomes more predictable, more reliable, and more productive."
   For organizations wishing to implement reduced-work options, the study offers case examples of current labor-management initiatives to provide reduced-time options, as well as guidelines for getting started:
   1. ...Initiate the program with strategies that provoke the least resistance among workers, union leaders and managers.
   2. ...Start with pilot projects.
   3. ...Communicate the benefits and address core concerns.
      [Ah, shouldn't this come first?! And shouldn't we avoid horrendous buzzworks like "core concerns"?!]
   4. ...Build carefully on initial success, paying careful attention to the concerns and preferences of all major stakeholders.
   For the study, phone surveys were conducted with 601 unionized employees in the 13 most densely unionized states: NY, HI, Mich., NJ, Alaska, NV, MN, CT, WI, IL, OH and CA. This sample represents 60% of unionized employees nationwide, and has a margin of error of ±4%. ...A phone survey of 214 non-unionized employees, from a national random sample, was also conducted, as were mail surveys that netted responses from 181 union leaders and 124 managers, including 59 who work with unionized employees....
   Netsy Firestein, Director of the Labor Project for Working Families, said, "It is important that workers have options for reduced-time schedules at good pay and benefits, if they so choose, but it is critical that they retain control over their work hours.
   [She must mean "regain" control, not "retain" control, cuz they haven't had control of their workhours since they allowed FDR to bribe and distract them out of the 30-hour workweek in 1933 in return for a mess of pottage that focused on mixed-blessing minimum wage, too-little too-late makework (CCC, WPA, NRA, NIRA, TVA...), and inadequate-income support programs (unemployment insurance, workmen's comp, social security).]
   These issues have not been explored to this degree before [except on Timesizing.com], and they deserve attention."...

2. German workers threaten to extend strike, by Stephen Graham, AP 06/04/03 09:57 EDT via AOLNews.
   BERLIN - Industrial workers in once-communist, [now longer-hours,] east Germany threatened Wednesday to extend their strike for shorter hours after talks with employers yielded no agreement, while stoppages disrupted companies including auto giant DaimlerChrysler and steel firm ThyssenKrupp. Labor unions and employers are at odds over union demands for the working week in the depressed east to be reduced from 38 hours to 35, in line with their counterparts in the wealthier west.
   Hundreds of workers from a DaimlerChrysler truck plant and other factories at the Ludwigsfelde industrial park south of Berlin stopped work for about two hours to hear a top official with the IG Metall union urge them to extend the strike to further parts of the east in a ballot beginning Friday. "Make sure that the strike zone is widened to make clear to the employers that the fire can spread across east Germany," top union negotiator Hasso Duevel told a crowd of workers, many of them waving red union flags and wearing caps with the number 35 [as in hrs/wk]. The union expects to have the results of the ballot of members in Berlin and surrounding Brandenburg state next Tuesday.
   Workers in other parts of the depressed east already crippled production at Volkswagen car plants and steelworks, and the union said more than 12,000 were again on strike Wednesday, the third full day of their protest.
   Talks in Berlin Tuesay between union and industry representatives ended without agreement. The two sides are to meet again Friday.
   IG Metall, Germany's biggest industrial union, argues that it is time for eastern workers to have equal conditions, 13 years after Germany reunited following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Easterners work longer hours for the same base pay. But the union argues that manufacturers in the east are now competitive enough to afford having workers spend less time on the job for the same pay, and says a shorter week would spread available work among more people. With joblessness in the east at nearly 19% - more than double the rate in the east - employers say the longer hours help east Germany attract investment....
   [Eastern Germany doesn't need outside investment. It needs to activate the 19% of its consumer base deactivated by unemployment, and dynamize by centrifugation a fraction of its concentrated spending power amounting at least to 19%. Their problem is not productivity. It's sales. Here's the caption of an AP photo by Sven Kaestner on this strike -]
   DaimlerChrysler employee Frank Schneider blows a whistle during a warning strike in front of the DaimlerChrysler factory in the city of Ludwigsfelde, south of Berlin, Wednesday, June 4, 2003. The IG Metall (IGM) industrial union want[s] to cut the workweek for 320,000 factory and steel workers in the eastern parts of Germany from 38 hours to 35 - the same as for their colleagues in the more prosperous west.

1. Unions fight House overtime pay measure, by Leigh Strope, AP 06/03/03 17:55 EDT via AOLNews.
   [key quote -]
   ...Labor leaders say the current overtime law acts as a protection to the 40-hour work week because companies wanting more work from their employees must provide premium pay - and often think twice about it. They also think that if the bill becomes law, employers will assign overtime only to workers who agree to choose comp time....
   [Our view - this whole flutter-up is irrelevant to real progress. The bill is just "rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic" because it does nothing to reduce the workweek or disambiguate our overtime design, both of which the unions should be targeting, instead of fighting this piece of unnecessary micromanagement. Current overtime legislation both motivates and demotivates overtime, and we need it demotivated for everyone, employers and employees, particularly employees except those who love their jobs so much that they are willing to work overtime without getting any personal unaccountable spending power out of it (they must reinvest 100% of their overtime compensation as directly as possible in overtime-targeted skills, i.e., training and hiring, same as their employer in terms of employer's overtime advantage, to break open the overtime-indicated skill bottleneck. This is the root and source of the closed societies targeted by George Soros, and the key to gaining open societies is opening the millions of skill bottlenecks within present-day economies.]
   [The debate continues -]
   6/6   Comp time bill dismissal is setback to American workers - SHRM will continue to support flexible options in the workplace, press release from *Society for Human Resource Management, PRNewswire 06/05/2003 17:39 EDT via AOLNews.

2. Feature - Young Japanese workstyles free but troubling, by Kazunori Takada, Reuters 06/03/03 21:02 ET via AOLNews.
   [This is a very bizarro article, very confused, very tied up with worrying about positive developments. Key quotes -]
   TOKYO...- Shorter hours, minimal stress, and enough money to shop, play and even save. Sound good? Mika Onodera, 28, who works at a bakery in downtown Tokyo - her 5th job in as many years - thnks so. So do a growing number of young Japanese who are opting to become "freeters" [free Arbeiters] - workers who shun traditional life-time employment [as if they have any choice in Japan's depressed economy today], often work part-time and happily flit from job to job. "Living as a freeter, I get more freedom and I like that," said Onodera....
   [She seems to have taken the point that the most basic kind of freedom is free time. There is a drawback -]
   She shares an apartment with her sister to help save on costs and have more cash at her disposal. Others go even further, living at home with their parents to save on rent.
   [Again, for most, living at home is a counsel of necessity, not of choice. Here's another drawback -]
   "Although I cut back on my spending, I have enough money to go out with friends and live comfortably," said Onodera, who makes about ¥160,000 ($1,354) per month for her 40-hour work week and even manages to squeeze out some extra cash.
   [Drawback #2 = we're still stuck at the 40-hour workweek here. Ergo Japan's high unemployment and weak domestic markets in the context of their highly efficient technology. But this guy keeps pushin' the illusion of choice (which is becoming an illusion for a lot more of us in the overrated 21st century in a lot more areas) -]
   Too little greed, too few jobs
   Freeters, from the English word "free" and the German-origin word "arubaito" [Arbeiter = worker, as in Gastarbeiter = guest worker] meaning casual work [compare Jap. sarariman from Eng. salaryman, or Jap. arigado from Portuguese obrigado], slip into the lifestyle for different reasons, but for many it's a matter of choice. About half chose to hop between part-time jobs because they couldn't decide what they wanted to do or because they simply didn't want to work full-time, one government survey showed....

3. [a week-old Euro timesizing story finally penetrates the NY Times' rather rutted news radar -]
   West Europe is hard hit by strikes over pensions, by Mark Landler, NYT, A6.
   A wave of strikes from France to Austria left much of Western Europe snarled [yester]day, as protesting workers shut down subway systems, ports, trains, toll roads and airlines.... Workers in both countries [reject] government proposals to change the national pension systems, either by cutting retirement benefits or by making work longer to qualify for them..\..
   [Unless they grandfather-in such changes, they are "bait & switch."]
   
   • In France...a strike by air-traffic controllers grounded 80% of the flights into and outof the country.... The unions are rebelling against the government's proposal to require workers to pay into the state pension fund for 40 years, up from 37.5 years now, before they qualify for retirement benefits....
   • Labor leaders in Austria voiced similar complaints about the government's plan to reduce pensions by 11%.... The strikes were the biggest since World War II, leaving...Vienna without any public transportation or postal service,...even blockad[ing] the airport.... "We are all living longer; there are fewer children," said the education & science minister Elisabeth Gehrer on Austrian state radio. "You can't strike against demographic developments like that."
     [Sure you can, if you have any appreciation of the productivity-jumping role of technology. Where do they get a science minister with zero concept of technology's exponentially output-multiplying role and history?!]
   In eastern Germany, steelworkers picketed factories to demand the same 35-hour workweek that their counterparts in western Germany have....
   France has breached that rule \about keeping\ their budget deficits below 3% [and] was told [yester]day to get its deficit under the cap by 2004....
   [Oh yeah? What about the biggest euro economy -]
   German leader says deficit may exceed limit [for 3rd consecutive year], by Thomas Sims, 6/05/2003 WSJ, A15.
   [No economy is going to keep within any arbitrary limit until they quit straining for too-little too-late job creation cum transfer payments for the increasing numbers left behind, and switch to refereeing adjustable worksharing in the private sector. The private sector must recycle its own disposable employees and reactivate the markets they represent - they cannot keep relying on government to do all their dirtywork - especially when they're cutting gov't funding (ie: taxes).]
   [Here's the Reuters version of the overview -]
   Strikes hit France, Austria, Germany and Italy, by Catherine Bremer, Reuters 06/03/03 16:03 ET via AOLNews.
   [intro -]
   PARIS - Travelers were stranded and children were out of school across Europe Tuesday as strikes caused mayhem in France and Austria and lesser disruptions in Germany and Italy.
   [key clips -]
   ...In Austria, transport and postal workers staged the biggest walkout since World War Two, also over pensions, while steel plants and engineering firms in eastern Germany were hit for a second day by walkouts over working hours.... Thirteen years after reunification, striking workers in Germany's former communist east are fighting for the same working hours as their western colleagues, but the authorities say the economy cannot support such a change. German workers wearing red strike vests [is this uniform nationwide??] rallied at the factory gates of a Volkswagen plant in Mosel and at other engineering firms in the region. They want a reduction in workers' weekly working hours to 35 from 38 currently to bring them into line with western Germany..\..
   The French stoppages recall 1995 strikes that brought down the last rightwing government for trying to touch pensions. "Anger" [colère?] read one banner at a French demonstration. "Make the jet set pay" and "Retirement for everyone at 60" read others, as marchers beat drums. Unions said 1.6m joined the demonstrations across France. Police put the figure at 510k.... French teachers, furious at plans to decentralize education funding as well as at the prospect of working past age 65, staged their 10th walkout in as many months....

4. [And zeroing in on Germany -]
   E. Germany workers strike, demands could hurt region, by Kirstin Gehmlich, Reuters 06/03/03 14:33 ET via AOLNews.
   ...Thirteen years after reunification, metalworkers in eastern Germany work 38 hours per week, three more than in the country's west. The giant IG Metall union had originally accepted the gap, aimed at making up differences in productivity between the two sides; but the union has now called for a gradual reduction in hours to reflect the advances of eastern plants. "The employers need to stop blockading the reduction in working hours," said Klaus Zwickel, head of IG Metall, arguing that the East German engineering industry had made a leap forward in the past few years, with the sector growing by 4.4% last year. Carrying banners reading "Time is up," thousands of workers rallied at the factory gates of a Volkswagen AG car plant near Zwickau and other factories in eastern Germany.... Economists say the region would not be able to stomach implementing union demands.
   [So much for economics as a science, useful as a platform for progress. Now it's just a big standpat, or backward force.]
   Paying the same wages for reduced hours would drive up wage costs by almost 10%, economists say..\..
   [Never mind it would also drive up consumer demand, and never mind that the whole world DID IT for the 150 years prior to 1940 and got shorter hours and higher pay and prolonged prosperity.]
   Despite huge [money] transfers set to continue until 2019, eastern Germany has grown more slowly than the west since 1997, and unemployment has been higher than in western states.... In the state of Saxony, about 19% of people are without jobs, compared with a national average of 11%....
   [More -]
   East German strike over hours widens, by Tony Czuczka, AP 06/03/03 16:45 EDT via AOLNews.
   BERLIN - Strikers for a shorter work week in east German industry left another steel plant idle Tuesday, while talks aimed at ending the stoppages in the former communist region's top factories failed to produce an agreement. Some 12,750 workers in more than a dozen plants struck for a second full day to press demands for lowering their 38-hour week to 35 hours, the same as their counterparts in more prosperous west Germany, the IG Metall industrial union said.... Easterners work longer hours for the same base pay. But manufacturers in the east are now competitive enough to afford having workers spend less time on the job for the same pay,
   [Eh, Tony's a union sympathizer? At last, the Other Side of the story.]
   and a shorter week would spread available work among more people, the union argues.
   With joblessness in the east at nearly 19% - more than double the rate in the west - employer representatives say the longer hours help east Germany attract investment....
   [Yeah, like investors really pour it into 3rd-world countries.]

5. [And zeroing in on France -]
   Strikes hobble transportation in France, by Elaine Ganley, AP 06/03/03 16:41 EDT via AOLNews.
   PARIS - Strikes hobbled subway service, cut train routes and grounded hundreds of commercial flights on Tuesday to and from France, one of several European countries hit by job actions.... Four unions remain opposed to the plan that calls for a progressive increase in the number of years employees must work to receive full retirement benefits. Public sector employees would have to work 40 years instead of the current 37.5. The plan goes to parliament this month..\..
   [but not for long -]
   In former communist east Germany, factory workers expanded a strike to press for a shorter working week to match that of west Germany. Thousands of workers in more than a dozen plants went on strike for a second full day Tuesday....

6. [example of misleading headline - by the accompanying chart! -]
   Pitching France to investors is shaping up as a tough job, by Charles Fleming, WSJ, A15A.
   [Here's the silly attempt to blacken France -]
   PARIS - Clara Guymard has a tough job ahead of her. As the new president of the French International Investment Agency, she wants U.S. and other investors to think of France as a great place for business - despite its reputation for frequent strikes, high taxes, a short workweek and, in the wake of the Iraq war, its perceived anti-Americanism....
   [Never mind that it's perceived as such only by the self-righteous blood-lusting first-strike lunatics in the White House and their gulls - among whom we must apparently number Charles Fleming and most of the WSJ editorial staff. Plus this intro statement is in direct contradiction to the recent weakness of the dollar against the euro and the accompanying chart, which shows that France only went down $52.6B-48.2/52.6 = 8% in foreign direct investment inflows from 2001 to 2002, while the U.S. went down 130.8-30.1/130.8= 77% and U.K. went down 62-25/62= 60%! We dunno if Chuckie Fleming and the Bushbutts in the editors' booth of the WSJ would really invest big bucks in the U.S. and U.K., but we'd rather invest in economies that only went down 8% (or went up 38.1-33.9/33.9= 12% like Germany) than 60 or 77% down like the U.K. and the U.S.]

7. [and Today's Rant and counter-rant -]
   The dismal science? Hardly! editorial-page venting by Pres. & CEO Robert McTeer Jr. of the Dallas Fed, WSJ, A16.
   ...Economics training will help you understand fallacies and unintended consequences....
   [Or to perpetrate and promulgate them.]
   Most fallacies in economics probably are fallacies of [synergy]: What's true of the individual may not be true of the whole. You may be able to see better if you stand up - but not if everyone stands up.
   [This 'venting' is illustrated only with a line drawing of John Maynard Keynes, labeled just with his name and "Paradox of thrift."]
   ...Keynes' paradox of thrift provides a currently relevant example: Individually, most consumers need to save more. But, if all or many consumers need to save more, the economy will be in deep trouble.
   However...more relevant to contemporary economic debates...is called the the [sic] broken window fallacy. Whenever a government program is justified not on its merits but by the jobs it will create, remember the broken window: Some teenagers...toss a brick through a bakery window. A crowd gathers and laments, "What a shame." But...someone suggests a silver lining to the situation: Now the baker will have to spend money to have the window repaired. This will add to the income of the repairman, who will spend his additional income, which will add to another seller's income, and so on.... The chain of spending will multiply and generate higher income and employment. If the broken window is large enough, it might produce an economic boom! (Other catalysts to such booms might be a hurricane, a tornado or just about any government spending boondoggle.)
   [Sort of like Bastiat's 'negative railway' (tracks with gaps to provide jobs for porters and portageurs) and 'petition of the candlestick-makers' who want windows suppressed to avoid competition with the sun - See Robert Heilbroner's "Worldly Philosophers," 6th Ed., 180-81, or Keynes' old bottles that the Treasury stuffs with money and buries so private enterprise can have work digging them up (General Theory, chap.10, sec.VI). McTeer does not mention Keynes in this context.]
   Most voters fall for the broken window fallacy, but not economics majors. They will say, "...Wait a minute!" If the baker hadn't spent it on the window repair, he would have spent it on the new suit he was saving to buy....
   [Not if he was rich and had no need to save money to spend but, in fact, was already spending the entire tiny fraction of his wealth that he cared to. And if the 'broken window fallacy' is really so false, why is the White House following it so religiously, wastefully, unnecessarily and extravagantly with a first-strike war against country uninvolved in terrorism and lacking WMDs that could reach us (and possibly completely lacking WNDs), and with $74 billion of gov't spending poured into the Pentagon despite fact the 9/11 terrorists were only 19 in number and only used $5 boxcutters?]
   The broken window didn't create net new spending; it just diverted spending from somewhere else.
   [Again, not if the owner was affluent.]
   The broken window does not create new activity, just different activity.
   [Again, objection overruled if we're talking Bill Gates building one $30m house, compared to 3,000,000 Americans rushing out and just buying $10 worth of duct tape and plastic sheeting.]
   People see the activity that takes place. They don't see the activity that would have taken place.
   [No activity would have taken place when we're talking about the tightest concentration of spending power since World War II and the liveliest "activity" that most of the astronomically affluent wind up putting their millions in being stocks or bonds. McTeer's arguments are so unsuited to today's levels of income concentration that we're going to put 'fallacy' and any of its logical extensions in quotes from now on, as we do with the wealthy's banking 'reforms,' bankruptcy 'reforms,' and pension 'reforms.']
   The broken window 'fallacy' is 'perpetrated' in many forms. Whenever job creation or retention is the primary objective, I call it the job-counting 'fallacy.'
   [Now watch where he goes from here, kids ]
   Economics majors understand the non-intuitive reality that real progress comes from job destruction.
   [Wow. That's pushing Schumpeter's shaky "creative destruction" pretty far. And kids, ain't job destruction at bottom just another, worse kind of "broken window"?! If real progreess comes from job destruction, why doesn't real progress come from window destruction? Or any other kind of destruction for that matter? This whole argument is clearly that of a privileged and wealthy person who never gets pushed to think outside the box of the status-quo-propping nostrums peddled in the inbred economics departments and wealthier MBA programs of the nation. The only reason we've been able to scalpel through this kind of smug, widely widely accepted, and very snidely intimidating drivel is...a linguistics background. Let's hear it for the kid at the edge of the parade when the Emperor comes by in his "suit of new clothes." McTeer has nuthin'. He goes on, in this well-worn, blindered track -]
   It once took 90% of our population to grow our food. Now it takes 3%. Pardon me, Willie [he scorns], but are we worse off because of the job losses in agriculture?
   [We sure as hell would have been if the workweek hadn't been cut in half, from the 80 to the 40-hr week, between 1840 and 1940! And if there hadn't been the manufacturing sector for the 100,000s of displaced farm workers to run to for jobs. Then, of course, manufacturing got automated and the by-now millions of displaced factory workers had to run to the service sector for jobs. Now the service sector is getting computerized and...there's nowhere to run except 30-week unemployment benefits, 5-year welfare, indefinite disability (now 5.4m Americans) and homelessness and incarceration (2.1m Americans) and forced multiple part-time without health insurance and forced early retirement. But McTeer wouldn't know anything about this of course. He gets way over $100,000 a year plus plush benefits. He lives in Texas close to the current pResident and his dad, who didn't even know what a supermarket scanner was back in the early 90s. In McTeer, we're talkin' a super naive, sheltered, insulated and isolated creature of affluence - someone that the original Republican Party of Lincoln would have been rather embarrassed by.]
   The would-have-been farmers are now college profs and computer gurus or [here's his sop to the downside] singing the country blues on Sixth Street.
   [Right. Those displaced farm workers just marched right off the farm into college and high-tech jobs, and the flops among them became street musicians. Never mind our bulging prisons and disability rolls. Economics "the dismal science - hardly"? No question when you keep your eyes carefully averted from the spreading mess.]
   If you want jobs for jobs' sake, trade in bulldozers for shovels.
   [Now he launches into the great luddite strawman. But Mr. McLeer, how about jobs for markets' sake? Insufficient jobs, insufficient markets - or are you just going to assume that markets are infinite and unexhaustible, like our fishing stocks and groundwater? Dimly anticipating this problem, he sticks rigidly to jobs and claims that they are infinite and inexhaustible - the great starting point for the standard sneer at the multiply misnamed "Lump of Labor Fallacy" -]
   But there will always be more work to do than people to work.
   [Here's a guy who has never heard of the breadlines in the Great Depression, or thinks that the "lazy" men in them chose that lifestyle. Here's a guy who has never visited today's China (or jumped from Hilton to Hilton), where the farmworkers are even now leaving the farm in their millions, for the jobs in the city, and there aren't any. Ever the recourse of the sheltered rich to blame the victim.]
   [Slogan alert!]
   So instead of counting jobs, we should make every job count.
   [Phew. Baby, we ARE making every job count. It's called technology, with all its exponentiating productivity, and it's a tremendous blessing unless you respond to it, as we usually have the last 63 years, by chopping jobs (and consumers) instead of trimming working hours for all. Here's his sop to recessions -]
   We occasionally hit a soft spot when we have a mismatch of supply and demand in the labor market. But that is temporary.
   [And that is a leap of faith based on thousands of years of pre-technological history. McTeer still has his head fully buried in those sands. With ever more labor-saving technology and those savings taken in low-consumption unemployment etc. instead of high-consumption leisure, the soft spot is not temporary. It is permanent and deepening.]
   Don't become a[n active] Luddite and destroy the machinery....
   [Or a passive Luddite and destroy the purpose of the machinery - to make everyone's life easier by reducing working hours - rather than twisting that purpose from blessing to curse by making most people's lives harder with the kind of layoff anxiety that keeps people from leaving the office at 5, or 6, or even 7 or 8....]
   or..\..don't become...a protectionist and try to grow bananas in New York City.
   [A protectionist doesn't try to protect industries that aren't there, like banana growing in NYC - just the employed consumers and the markets they represent that are already there. McTeer is getting sloppier.]
   Labor productivity is growing rapidly and substituting in the short run for employment growth.
   ["In the short run"? Another leap of faith. Where does he see employment growth arising in the long run? Where does he see technology-boosted labor productivity NOT growing rapidly in the future? If he has any answer to that we'll call him an active Luddite.]
   But when businesspeople get their animal spirits back
   [Like in the 'New Economy' when they banked on huge online markets that weren't there? or when their financiers bought the line that they didn't need profits - until they changed their minds and punctured the Internet bubble?]
   and take advantage of historically low interest rates
   [you have to believe you've got potential markets before bothering to borrow - and there are potential markets only where there hasn't been downsizing, - where would that be, McTeer? - and the lower the historic low rates, the less it's worth the risk for your financiers]
   to invest in America's future,
   [well well, an appeal from patriotism? - what's the difference between this and the protectionism you disdain, McTeer?]
   we'll have employment growth in addition to productivity growth. That's a recipe for prosperity.
   [Another pure leap of faith. Where, McTeer? Only where we switch our response to productivity-exponentiating technology and takeovers from downsizing to timesizing. And you're still talking about productivity growth without regard to marketability growth, which will require not only employment growth but wage growth.]
   In the meantime, just think what Michael Dell and Bill Gates could have accomplished if they'd gotten degrees in economics.
   [Probably nothing, if by economics you mean the kind of flat-earth geocentric epicycle-filled ruts your mind has been travelling in throughout this editorial. You haven't been speaking scientifically. You've merely been rationalizing the status quo, however many distortions and data exclusions it takes. And exactly what more do you want Bill Gates to accomplish after he's concentrated - and deactivated - 50-100 billion units of spending power he couldn't spend in hundreds of lifetimes, and that he's giving away to the wealthiest charities/universities, providing little or no centrifugation and activation thereof. You mention Keynes' paradox of thrift. It doesn't take all or many consumers trying to save more to put the economy in deep trouble. It just takes a few consumers to achieve astronomical concentrations of spending power, the way top executives do in a global labor glut, such as has been building ever since 1940 when we stopped the 150-year decline in worktime per person by effectively freezing the workweek at the 40-hour level, particularly since 1940 when the babyboomers began to hit the job market and replace the kill-off of World War II and Korea, and the cordon-off of the GI Bill. Then came housewives entering the job market as families realized their pay wasn't going up the way it used to. And then came the Democrats' open-floodgates to unprecedented immigration, and repeated amesties for illegal aliens by both parties. This nation's and the world's economies are now in free fall, restrained only by inertia. But now that you and your pals are naively undoing all the "old-fashioned" depression-preventing legislation of the 30s - Glass-Steagall, bankruptcy, FLSA - admittedly not completely effective because all of it, and indeed the whole New Deal, was merely an attempt to stop a real new deal or redistribution of worktime in the form of an unemployment-reducing workweek reduction in the form of the Black-Connery Thirty Hour Work Week Bill that passed the Senate on April 6, 1933 - the chocks are pulled from under the wheels of the downward-headed economy, the inertia is overcome, and the downward spiral will now accelerate. Not even Keynes understood the Technological Imperative - we MUST timesize in response to technological leaps in productivity or our downsizing will assure us only of declining markets - what you so naively call "occasional and temporary soft spots." Apparently you haven't noticed how frequent and prolonged these soft spots have become in the one economy that is more technologized than ours, the world's #2 economy, Japan. Now #3 is following (Germany) and #1 (US) & #4 (UK) aren't far behind. In fact, #1 led #3 into the recent admitted downturn. (#5, France, was the last to succumb and is holding up surprisingly well, but only because of what little employment-spreading workweek-reduction they've done. They've got the whole economy on a now-diluting 35-hr workweek, while Germany only has the unionized sector in the west down that "far.") We essentially need to do what Keynes said but never designed (beyond burying bottles of money) - we need to automate investment in a sustainable way that centrifuges and activates spending power. That means the general target dimension has to be central and sustainable, and the valving has to be automatically appropriate - timing, gauging, pacing. For example, it would be nice to automatically bring human capital into skill bottlenecks and automatically valve the necessary monetary capital to support it. It would be nice to automatically activate the huge market potential and potential markets that we're currently wasting in unemployment, welfare, disability, homelessness, prisons, premature retirement, forced part-time. A new kind of economics, worktime economics, does all this, and our simplified model-design of the core structures required are described in the Timesizing Full-Employment Progam. We do indeed need a restructuring, but not at the cosmetic and superficial levels that you or any of your colleagues are monitoring. Parthian shot - "There will always be more work to do than people to work" sez you, probably based on the leap of faith that "Technology creates more work than it destroys." You're way behind the times in the march of technology. Not only is the erstwhile exempt services sector well into being automated, including the automation of programming itself, but the holdout areas in agriculture and manufacturing are now being automated. A story on today's front page illustrates the process in one of the holdout areas of agriculture -]
   Poultry in motion: Chicken catching goes high-tech - New invention is altering henhouse pecking orders; A bird in hand? Yuck, by Scott Kilman, WSJ, front page.
   One enduring frustration of the poultry industry [un]like pigs and cattle [is that] "you can't herd chickens."... Now after years of failure...manufacturers have finally produced machines capable of catching and caging chickens. ...The devices can capture 150 birds a minute. That's as many as a team of eight skilled men can corral....
   [In fact, McTeer, you're flattering yourself if you think most of your job can't and won't be automated. You certainly aren't bringing anything remarkable to it, if your inside-the-box editorial is any indication.]

1. U.S. Post has Q3 profit, fiscal 2003 could hit $1B, Reuters 06/02/03 17:58 ET via AOLNews.
   WASHINGTON - The U.S. Postal Service [USPS] recorded a $224m profit...on revenue of $16.5B..\..in Q3 of its fiscal year...ended May 16..\..and said it is on track to post a profit for 2003 as cost-cutting will offset stagnant mail volume. [They] did not provide year-ago comparisons for Q3..\..
   Postal authorities said they are reducing work hours at a faster pace, and could see net income for the year ended Sept. 5 as high as $1B, up from an earlier forecast of $600m. Mail volume for the year will hold steady at 203B pieces, below prior estimates of 205B....
   [Shades of the winter of 1932 when Hoover cut USPO hours to 40 and thereby saved 100,000s of jobs in the depths of the Depression.]
   Following a rise in the cost of mailing a 1st-class letter [from 34] to 37 cents on June 30, 2002..., said Dick Strasser, CFO with the post office..\., "The rate increase is still favorably impacting growth and revenue even if volume is not."... Mail volume in Q3 was flat at 47.1B pieces from the same quarter a year ago as a rise in standard mail [AP: largely advertising] offset a 2.4% slide in 1st class, which has fallen for 7 straight quarters.
   The post office, which is facing threats from Internet and commercial parcel alternatives, is being studied by an independent commission charged with modernizing the 228-year-old agency.
   [Snips from the AP version -]
   Postal Service revenue down, by Randolph Schmid, AP, Reuters 06/02/03 17:17 EDT via AOLNews.
   WASHINGTON - Postal Service revenue was nearly a half-billion dollars less than expected over the past 3 months as mail volume remained stagnant, officials said Monday [6/02]. The post office has been struggline to cope with falling mail volume over the past 2 years due to the weak economy and 9/11/01, including the anthrax-by-mail threat in 2001....
   Postmaster General John Potter told the pResident's Commission on the Postal Service last week that for the first time in histroy the agency has experienced 2 years of declines in 1st-class mail, its biggest money maker. He said that is likely to get worse as more people turn to the Internet to receive and pay bills.
   In Q3 1st-class mail volume suffered a 2.4% decline, down 566m pieces from the same period last year. Standard mail, largely advertising, increased by 3.2%.... "The Postal Service continues to hold the line on expenses through rigorously matching work hours to workload"..\..postal CFO Richard Strasser told the agency's governing board.... The PO does no receive tax funds for operations, although Congress did vote a special appropriation to help cover the costs of recovering from the [anthrax] attacks.
   Also on Monday, the governing board approved a 3-yr experimental agreement offering discounts to the financial firm Capital One if [the latter's] 1st-class mail volume exceeds 1.225B pieces annually. The PO is not allowed to offer volume discounts, common among other businesses [then what's "Periodical Rate" etc?], but the independent Postal Rate Commission approved this proposal as a test case.
   [Here we see the stupidity of government tying an organization's hands and expecting it to compete with untied organizations. Compare American and British passenger (and freight!) trains, expected to compete - unsubsidized - with planes and buses while airports and roads, but not tracks, are heavily government-subsidized.]

2. [here's an fortunately unusual reason for hours cuts -]
   Illinois casinos may cut hours to skirt tax hike, Reuters 06/02/03 14:51 ET via AOLNews.
   CHICAGO...- The most profitable riverboat casinos in Illinois may cut their hours of operation to skirt a new...tax approved by the Legislature over the weekend, a gaming association official said on Monday [6/02].... Tom Swoik, exec. dir. of the Illinois Casino Gaming Assoc., which represents the 9 existing casinos in the state, said the legislation hikes the tax on adjusted gross receipts over $250m to 70% from the current 50%, while the 50% taxrate will apply to receipts over $100m instead of the previous level of over $200m.... "I think we'll see a rollback in the hours," Swoik said, adding that some casinos may go to only 2 shifts to avoid reaching a profit level that would subject them to a higher tax rate.
   [Cutting entire shifts of course implies maximally destructive downsizing whereas adjusting worktime per person implies minimally destructive timesizing.]
   He added that such a move could decrease the state's revenue predictions for the tax hike to less that $100m instead of $201m.... Once signed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich, the new rates will take affect July 1.... Blagojevich had included the casinio tax hike as part of a package of revenue measures in his propsed fiscal 2004 budget aimed at easing a projected $5B 2-yr deficit.... Bills that would expand gambling in the state by allowing more gambling positions at riverboats, allowing slot machines at horse racetracks, legalizing video poker and allowing Chicago to own and operate a casino failed to move.
   ..\..One casino operator, Argosy Gaming Co., said Monday [6/02] it was looking at reductions in marketing expenditures, introducing admission fees, as well as reducing hours to offset the tax hike.... In addition to Argosy, which operates riverboats in Alton and Joliet, and..\..Penn National Gaming Corp...other Illinois casino operators are Boyd Gaming Corp., Harrah's Entertainment Inc. and Mandalay Resort Group....
   [and clips from Argosy's press release -]
   Argosy Gaming Co. announces impact of Illinois legislative gaming tax increase, PRNewswire 06/02/2003 08:02 EDT via AOLNews.
   ALTON, Ill. -... Argosy is currently evaluating plans to minimize the effect of the increased tax burden through cost savings measures. Potential actions could include reducing the amount spent on marketing, implementing admission fees at the properties and reducing hours of operation to benefit from a corresponding decline in operational costs....
   [As Milton Friedman says, tax it and it shrinks; subsidize it and it grows.]
   [Followup -]
   Australia's Aristocrat posts loss, sees better H2 [2nd half-year], by Ang Bee Lin, Reuters 08/12/03 00:53 ET via AOLNews.
   MELBOURNE...- Embattled Australian slot-machine maker Aristocrat Leisure Ltd sank to an expected half-year loss on Tuesday after a South American contract failed and sales slowed in North America and at home.... Revenue fell about 18% in Australia as customers such as casino and pub operators bought fewer machines after tourists were discouraged by the outbreaks of the Iraq war and the deadly SARS virus.
   [Yeah, Cheney-Bush is actually a deadly virus that has broken out.]
   Earnings hit by smoking bans and shortened hours in some gaming venues also forced clients to cut spending....

3. Independent Women's Forum [IWF] urges House passage of [Rep. Judy] Biggert['s] 'Family Time' bill; Accuses unions, radical feminists of blocking choice for working mothers, PRNewswire 06/02/2003 10:01 EDT via AOLNews.
   WASHINGTON -...Said Deborah Perry, IWF Senior Fellow, "Two thirds of American women with children under the age of three are currently in the workforce. But if they are hourly workers - as opposed to salaried workers - they are not allowed to accrue comp or flex time. For these women, going to a child's school play during work hours, or leaving work to tend to a sick child is out of the question, unless mom can live with a smaller paycheck. That's the reality women working on the clock face today thanks to..\..the Federal Labor Standards Act...a 65-year-old law: ignore your children's needs or take home less pay to help feed your family.... Unfortunately, the unions are fighting this bill. ...So is the National Organization for Women."
   [Clearly we're only getting one side of this story in this press release.]
   ..\..Under "Family Time" if the employer and the employee agree - or in union shops, [if] 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 time-and-a-half off. The bill allows an employee to cancel the agreement at any time, and it provides protection against employer coercion of employees to accrue or use comp time....
   [As we recall, the fear is that with high turnover in the workplace, the comp time or family time will just be banked indefinitely until the employee is laid off. And why can't all these things be done by mutual agreement anyway? It seems like more government micromanagement that should be handled by adjusting the overall power gradient between employees and employers in the national and global labor glut, and reducing the national workweek at the federal level - THAT'S what has scandalously not been updated for over 60 years! - and leaving it to market forces - macroeconomically optimized in this way - to handle the details of giving working mothers more power and consideration in the workplace. Why would cutting the national workweek not cut national wages? Because in the economic deep structure, prices are determined by market forces responding to supply and demand - the price of labor is the wage - and wages are determined by market forces responding to supply and demand of labor, not by productivity and not by the hours of labor which are only surface-structure determinants and incapable of holding against deep-structure trends. (This in fuller answer to Cambridge-MA Dr. Ed Kowaloff''s question 6/05.) Labor's chief problem over the years since 1940 when the workweek was frozen has always been winning the surface-structure battles of (A) increased productivity for more pay and less headcount, and (B) longer hours for more pay and less headcount, while losing the deep-structure battle of controlling labor supply (and preventing surplus) relative to demand - and thus gaining higher pay-per-hour and overall, more pay for shorter hours, instead of merely more pay for longer hours for fewer and fewer full-time employees.
   [Bottom-line on Biggert Bill - it merely rearranges hours per person and does not cut them. Therefore it is irrelevant to the hidden labor surplus and has no effect on balancing the employer-employee power gradient or centrifuging and activating the huge and dedynamizing concentration of spending power in this nation, the world's biggest economy.
   [Another illustration of this mistake from the world's second-biggest economy, a day late -]
   (6/02) Japan April overtime pay up for ninth month, Reuters 06/01/03 21:31 ET via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- The average overtime pay of Japanese wage earners, a barometer of income conditions, rose 3.0% in April from a year earlier to 19,100 yen ($159) data showed on Monday. It was up for the 9th straight month.
   [A barometer, but interpreted the wrong way by the prevailing "wisdom" of time-blind economists. The fact that work is still concentrating instead of spreading - along with wages - means that Japan has still not learned its lessons about the deep-structure suicide of long hours in a highly efficient and productive high-tech economy, so it's still growing its "under" employment problem, still deactivating spending power by concentrating it in the top income brackets where they're already spending all the money they want, and probably still actually cutting overall wages, despite this bump in OT pay. Yep -]
   The Ministry of Health, Labour & Welfare said total cash earnings, which include overtime and special bonuses, fell 0.6% to 285,537 yen....
   In terms of hours worked, overtime [OT] rose in April for a 10th straight month, and was up 4.0% from a year earlier....

4. Strikes hit France, Germany amid air chaos threat, by Catharine Bremer, Reuters 06/02/03 17:50 ET via AOLNews.
   PARIS...- A wave of strikes in west Europe began on Monday in Germany and France, embarrassing the Group of Eight [G8] summit host [Chirac], with an Italian labour dispute [also] threatening to deepen expected air traffic chaos.
   
   • French public sector workers launched a nationwide strike, the latest of a series of stoppages over pension 'reforms' [our quotes], that will cripple rail and air transport across France on Tuesday.... After a "Black Tuesday" in France on May 13, when strikes paralysed transport and shut schools, the country is braced for nationwide public sector walkouts and a 24-hour strike by air traffice controllers that will ground 80% of flights in and out of French airports.... The French strikes, [timed] to coincide with a parliamentary review of the unpopular reforms, promise misery for travellers.... "The aim is not [primarily] to blockade France but to get the biggest turnout we can," Bernard Thibault, head of the powerful CGT union, told Europe 1 radio.
     Unrest mounts.
     French unions are up in arms over plans to make public sector workers pay into the state pension system for 40 years, in line with the private sector, up from 37.5 years at present, in a bid to stave off the looming "age-crunch". Despite pleas by Chirac that the reform is urgent, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's centre-right government has struggled to convince workers already angry at a watering-down of the 35-hour workweek [established] by the previous government. A wave of protests this year over pensions and jobcuts is recalling strikes in 1995 that led to the downfall of the last rightwing government to try to touch pensions. ...The walkout by SNCF intercity train network staff was expected to leave just one train in three running. In Paris, bus and metro services will be down by 50-65%. Postal workers, ambulance and truck drivers, dock workers, the merchant navy, tollroad staff, tax inspectors, telecom and electricity workers are also expected to strike in a protest that will...affect some 50 towns and cities..\..
   • In Germany, thousands of workers at eastern steel plants and engineering firms dug in their heels for a shorter working week to bring them[selves] into line with the west of the country, with strikes due to run until at least Thursday. German unions, though banned from politically motivated strikes [irrelevant - this is economically motivated], have rallied thousands in past weeks to march against a pro-business [in the very short term only!] 'reform' package [proposed] by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
     [There are a couple of photos on AOLNews today on this strike. Here are the captions -]
     • Picketers block a road to the VW plant near Zwickau, eastern Germany, Monday, June 2, 2003. German unions want to cut the workweek for 320,000 factory and steel workers in the east from 38 hours to 35, the same as their counterparts in the more prosperous west. Poster at rear reads: "This plant is on strike" [caption of photo by Eckehard Schulz, AP 6/02/2003 via AOLNews]
     • Steel worker Juergen Schmidt sits behind a poster reading "We are on strike" at the gates of Eko Steel, the largest east German steel factory in Eisenhuettenstadt near the Polish border on Monday, June 2, 2003. Unions want to cut the workweek for 320,000 factory and steel workers in the east from 38 hours to 35. [caption of photo by Sven Kaestner, AP 6/02/2003 via AOLNews]
   • ...From 1800 GMT [on], workers in Austria were also readying for strikes to protest [against] plans to overhaul their generous but costly pension scheme.... Austrian rail and postal workers will strike for 24 hours from around midnight - causing disruption that OeGB labour union federation head Fritz Verzetnitsch said was nothing compared to the potential effects of the pension 'reforms'..\..
   • In Italy, a strike over jobcuts by the cabin staff of Italian airline Alitalia...forced the flag carrier to cancel 200 flights scheduled for Tuesday.

5. [But there's also pension trouble in Germany that reveals the prevailing policy of workspreading via worklife reduction that Schroeder is now trying to weaken -]
   Germany aims to trim state pensions from 2005, Reuters, 06/02/03 06:44 ET via AOLNews.
   BERLIN -...When Germany's first chancellor Otto von Bismarck invented the state pension in 1889 only retirees over 70 could benefit, a distant prospect in an age when life expectancy for males at birth was [only] 37 years. The retirement age was cut to 65 in 1916. Now the average German male who reaches 65 can expect to live another 15 years and the state "pay as you go" pension system - where today's workers pay for retirees' pensions out of payroll taxes - is busting at the seams. Germany's actual average retirement age is 60 - a legacy of policies in the 1990s to encourage early retirement and make room for younger unemployed workers..\..
   [Now they want to reverse that policy instead of transferring it from an inflexible worklife basis to a workweek basis. This will worsen unemployment, decrease effective demand, and deepen the recession. In short, despite intentions revealed in the following, this is not a way toward sustainability -]
   "The Minister has this morning [6/02] asked the Ministry's experts to work out within several weeks a concept for the implementation of a sustainability factor and how it could be incorporated into the pension funds," a spokesman for Health & Social Security Minister Ulla Schmidt told a news conference....