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Timesizing News, July 16-21, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

7/19-21/2003  primitive timesizing & timesizing consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope -

1. 7/19   Hyundai Motor workers strike for more pay, AP 07/18/03 04:02 EDT via AOLNews.
   SEOUL, South Korea - Tens of thousands of unionized workers at the Hyundai Motor Co. walked off their jobs Friday [7/18] demanding a shorter workweek and wage hikes.
   [How many times do we have to tell you guys? Forget wages! Fight market forces and get wages hikes, and in a couple of years you'll have neither. Harness market forces and get a shorter workweek, and in a couple of years you'll have both. Market forces reward shortage and punish surplus. Shorter workweeks prevent surplus, generate shortage - of YOU. Now connect the dots!]
   The walkout by 38,000 workers forced South Korea's largest carmaker to shut down all three of its local plants. Hyundai Motor has about 50,000 employees [total]....
   The union has been demanding an 11% pay increase [FORGET IT! - ONE thing at a time! = the IMPORTANT thing] and the introduction of a 5-day workweek. Most South Koreans work a half day on Saturday.
   The Hyundai union threatened to continue their struggle next week, working only four hours a day.
   [Good move. Demo the concept.]
   The company normally runs two 8-hour shifts plus two hours of overtime for each shift.
   [Overtime = BAD, especially chronic overtime if company has to pay OT premium pay. Bad corporate management! Wasteful.   Here's the Reuters version -]
   7/19   Hyundai Motor union on strike, threatens more, Reuters 07/18/03 01:14 ET via AOLNews.
   [Not their smoothest headline.]
   SEOUL...- Unionised workers at Hyundai Motor Co downed tools on Friday and threatened more walkouts next week to push for an early settlement in talks with management over wages and working conditions. The union at South Korea's top auto maker said in a statement its 39,000 members, representing nearly 80% of the company's total employees, would stay off the job for at least two-thirds of their usual work hours every day next week.
   [Hey, guys, go with Reuters and you get an extra 1000 members!]
   They downed tools [LOVE that phrase!] on Friday in a one-day full strike as they [had] announced on Wednesday. The union had held a number of strikes lasting several hours since late June, seeking higher wages [bad!], involvement in mgmt decisions over investments [good - shouldn't be investing in anything but their own auto making! - but secondary], as well as a 40-hour workweek [top priority - should be first]....

2. 7/19   State not to appeal ruling in workers' compensation suit, Kyodo 07/18/03 01:39 EDT via AOLNews.
   [See our previous treatment on 7/09/2003 #2. Deceased employee still unnamed.]
   TOKYO...- The Labor Ministry said Friday it will not appeal a high court ruling that upheld a lower court's repeal of a Ministry decision not to provide workers' comp to the wife of a Toyota Motor Corp. employee who committed suicide in 1988 as a result of overwork.
   [Good. Move on and cut the Japanese workweek at all levels to restore spending and domestic demand, and gain a real recovery.]
   Health, Labor & Welfare Minister Chikara Sakaguchi said in announcing the decision, "The (Nagoya) High Court ruled that the death of the Toyota employee should be recognized as a work-related death caused by overwork [ie: karoshi] after admitting the adequacy of the Ministry's standards for such work-related death. We would like to accept the Court's decision."
   The Nagoya High Court ruled on July 8 upheld the lower court ruling which repealed a decision by a Labor Ministry office not to provide workers' comp to the [widow] of the Toyota employee, saying the suicide was caused by excessive work hours and workload which made the man suffer depression. According to the ruling, the man started suffering from depression around August 1988 when he was in charge of designing cars to be exported to other Asian countries and jumped to his death at the end of that month at age 35.
   His [widow] had applied to the Toyota Labor Standards Inspection Office for workers' comp in March 1989, but her request was rejected in October 1994. [Such speed!] Two additional requests were similarly rejected. The Labor Ministry...maintained that the [deceased] employee's overtime hours were not excessive compared with his colleagues, and the cause of his suicide was not work-related.
   [Kyodo reporters - read our refinements of your choice of words and finetune your English. This is mostly about tightening up the story by inserting a death sememe in your relational nouns and temporal adjectives: "wife" to "widow" and "former employee" to "deceased employee."]
   The Nagoya District Court ruled that the standards for recognizing work-related death should center on employees who are most vulnerable to stress as a benchmark for making a decision, but the Ministry office appealed to the High Court, saying the standards should center on "normal" employees.
   [Normal employees work 80-hour weeks?]
   The High Court ruling recognized that the suicide was caused by excessive work hours and workload which made the man suffer depression based on the acknowledgement of the Ministry office's standards.

3. 7/21   Laid-off factory workers find jobs are drying up for good - It's not just a slowdown - Structural changes strand many with basic skills, by Clare Ansberry, WSJ, front page.
   BUTLER, Pa. - ...Trinity Industries Inc. [which makes] parts for RR cars...started laying off workers in 2000 and a year ago, in a bid for efficiency, shut down the Butler factory.... The [Dallas-based] company, which has operations in Mexico, the Czech Republic and Romania, said the Butler work would be done at its plant in Texas [sure sure]..\.. Other plants around Butler also have closed, including one that fabricated steel and another that made vinyl siding. Hundreds of manufacturing workers have been left without jobs and their options for similar work have narrowed significantly in this city[?] of 15,000...north of Pittsburgh.....
   After..\..Brad Karenbauer...was laid off last summer, he couldn't keep up with the rent on his apartment. He moved with his girlfried, Lisa Schnur, and their infant daughter into a trailer owned by Ms. Schnur's aunt. Meanwhile, a landscaper gave Mr. Karenbauer odd jobs mowing lawns and putting down mulch, paying him under the table.
   [Is the Journal going to collect the bounty for snitching on Brad? We hope they reimburse him if the IRS descends upon him.]
   That [only] lasted until the snow fell.... Now he finds himself stranded in the labor pipeline along with a generation of assemblers, welders, and tool&die men who learned their trade on the job and know little of computer-driven machines and new-age manufacturing techniques.
   In June, manufacturing cut 56,000 jobs, the 35th consecutive monthly decline and the longest string of layoffs in that industry since [before] World War II.
   [Want a laugh? Here's the big SAVE PARTY LINE paragraph -]
   "We're saving corporate jobs [definition?? (=CEO jobs?)] by moving production jobs to lower-cost areas," says Daniel Meckstroth, chief economist with the Manufacturers Alliance, a public policy and business research group in Arlington VA.
   ["The blind leading the blind"?]
   The shift also means income for secretaries, maintenance workers, and counter people in lobby coffee shops and staff parking garages.
   [And what "secretaries, janitors, waitresses and parking attendants" would these be when we've only been talking about transferring jobs to machines and to other countries? Subtly, the Journal is letting us forget that so it only has to deal with lower-wage jobs in some even advanced-depression parts of this country, now that they've finally got around to actually trying to rationalize all this cannibalization of their own markets. And check this out. Subtly, these hands-on jobs have become a burden we really want to get rid of -]
   Further, off-loading much of the low-skill work saves money [for CEOs and investors, but they've got more money saved already than they an sustainably invest] and makes companies more competitive [yeah, in a race to the bottom - a competition to wipe out their best markets and huddle together down at the finish line in the Third World].
   That means they can focus on innovation [to which they will again respond with downsizing instead of timesizing?] and potentially create other jobs [they're sounding less and less sure of this, and rightly so, because these "other jobs" can and will also be automated as the "focus on innovation" moves on to them].
   [These guys talk Big Shift but they still don't have a clue about the timesizing imperative. They have partitioned brains. Later on in this very article we find the statement, "Moreover, even though inflation-adjusted output by manufacturers nationally is expected to grow 36% over the next decade, employment is expected to grow only 3%, or by 577,000 jobs, according to the Manufacturers Alliance." And they're including the computer jobs a la "focus on innovation" in that 3% figure. There's simply no choice. We must modernize the economy and start flexibly sharing the vanishing human employment via fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against unemployment, comprehensively defined, or we'll have no markets at all - but, gee, we'll have wonderful productive capacity and potential-but-unmarketable productivity. Here's one guilty culprit's confession and plea (to others, not himself) -]
   Stan Donnelly, whose Alexandria, Minn., company makes plastic parts for big equipment manufacturers, imports tools from China to save money.
   [He needs more spending money sooo badly!]
   In the long run, bypassing U.S. toolmakers is a mistake, he believes. Those kinds of jobs helped create and sustain the middle class, and he's not sure displaced workers will learn new skills and become higher paid.
   [This guy too is less and less sure of this. The Lump of Labor Fallacy is becoming the Shrinking Lump of Employment Truism and we're seeing the birth of a hardier sneer at the Infinite Supply of Employment Fallacy.]
   "Look, we've got millions of people who have failed to get through high school. If their minds are not their salvation, what's wrong with letting their hands be their salvation?" asks Mr. Donnelly.
   [We're sure the Journal is dying to answer that question. "It's LUDDISM!" That's what's wrong with it. And neither Journal nor the Fed nor the B-schools nor the GOP nor the Dems nor the mainstream economists have even thought about a design for overtime-targeted on-the-job training of the kind of fluidity and efficiency we need.]
   "Over the last two centuries, America has developed a balanced society, with opportunities for a large cross section of people. We're gutting that."
   [You got it, pal. And that's "We" as in "CEOs, B-schools, and economists" - anyone who downsizes instead of timesizing. Downsizers are the real Luddites, because they pervert the purpose of technology from "making life easier for everyone" to making life harder for the majority so a minority can have a 101st million dollars they can't spend and they can't find any marketable productivity to even invest it in.   Now comes the dirge for hard work - but at least there's some inkling here that it's obsolete -]
   In Brad and [brother] Jim Karenbauer's childhood home, work was part of the natural rhythm of the day, filling the space between school and supper and most daylight hours during weekends.
   [Well, let's see. If school gets out at 3:30 pm and you don't have to stay in on detention till 4, you've got about two hours to work between school and supper at 6, assuming you can get from school to work and work to supper in 15 minutes each trip. That's 5x2hrs= a 10-hour workweek so far. Then daylight hours are 5-8= 15 hours in summer in these latitudes and 8-4= 8 hours in winter, average 11.5 hours - are we assuming no Sabbath observance? - that's 23 hours on 2-day weekends, plus 10 hours on weekdays, that's a grand total of a 33-hour workweek, which isn't too stressful or outdated yet, considering the most advanced economy in the world, France, is only down to a 35-hour workweek. But are we going to be able to hold the line at 2 hrs/day on weekdays once we get the boys out of school? Probably not. And if we're talkin' even just six 11½-hour days, we've got them on a 69-hour workweek, which is about where the mainstream of the American economy was back around 1840 (unless they worked all 7 days in the week). For that level of hours for everyone today, we'd really need some serious Luddism in the form of machinery-breaking, and a lot of inefficiency and featherbedding would help a lot too.]
   ...Their grandmother fried up home-made sausage in her iron skillet to welcome them back from the fields.
   [Sounds promisingly Luddite.]
   Afterward, they relaxed under an oak tree, with a bottle of pop [or later] a cold beer.
   [Ah, the good old days. Not much leisure but not much imagination about what to do with it either.]
   ...Brad Karenbauer took three years of welding in high school and after graduation in 1981 worker 16-hour days for a brother-in-law who had a boiler-repair business. "It was a blast," he says. "My brother-in-law didn't believe in an eight-hour day. You went to a job and stayed until it was done. I was bringing home more money than I could spend."
   [Especially if there was no free time to spend it in. 'The prisoners love their chains." This is all fine and dandy for Chinese restaurants and other family-owned sweatshops, and it was great for all of us in the early 19th century, but then those damn anti-Luddites started-in replacing human labor with machines, and computers, and robots, and just look where it's led us - gazing back so nostalgically/neuralgically and fondly on those good old 16-hour days, which would make an 80-hour week even with only five workdays. And all that blinken technology, even by 1932, led even the president of the US National Chamber of Commerce(!!!) to say, "It is better for all of us to be at work some of the time than for some of us to be at work all of the time while others are not at work at all." H. I. Harriman, quoted in NYT, 8/14/1932, front page, quoted in turn by Ben Hunnicutt on p. 148 of Work Without End.]
   While hundreds of factories close in any given year, something historic and fundamentally different is occurring now. For manufacturing [and indeed, for the whole economy now that robotics is invading the last refuge of human employment, the service sector - ed.], this isn't a cyclical downturn. Most of these basic and low-skill factory jobs aren't liable to come back when the economy recovers or when excess capacity around the world dissolves.
   Railroad cars, unlike buggy whips, are still needed, as are toys, appliances and shoes. But the task of making these goods in increasingly being assumed by more efficient machines and processes.
   [At last a glimmer of awareness on the front page of the Wall Street Journal!]
   Or they've been transferred to workers who earn less and live in another country.
   [Secondary, and driven by the more difficult growth and competition in this country thanks to the much-too-frequent downsizing, not timesizing, response to technology.]
   While these changes have been going on to a limited extent for years, the economic slowdown has greatly accelerated this historic shift.
   [No, vice versa. The (1) downsizing response to technology and the (2) outsourcing response to the weakening domestic markets that downsizing has caused - which have both been going on for years - have finally reached critical momentum and created the economic slowdown. CEOs are cannibalizing their own consumers. This article is still trying to regard economic slowdowns as totally mysterious Acts of God, of which CEOs are innocent victims, instead of near-sighted engineers and perpetrators.]
   By some estimates, roughly 1.3 million manufacturing jobs have moved abroad since the beginning of 1992, the bulk in the past three years to Mexico and East Asia....
   [Notice how fast the Journal diverts our attention from "the task of making these goods is increasingly being assumed by more efficient machines." It's as if the prevailing mindset just cannot face the implications here.]
   ...After Danny Mottern was laid off last summer he worked for a landscaper. That winter he shoveled snow and ran errands for an elderly judge. Mr. Mottern doesn't want to leave Butler because his family and girlfriend are here. He and Brad, his cousin...often discuss their growing fear that they are becoming obsolete. Both feel they are behind on computer technology, which is increasingly important in factories.... Prospects for workers with their skills are dim. Pennsylvania has lost [10% of its] manufacturing jobs, or 90,300 jobs, in the past 3 years. Industrial cities such as Butler have been disproportionately hit by job loss. Earlier this year, unemployment in the country jumped to 7.3%, the highest level since 1994.
   Moreover, even though inflation-adjusted output by manufacturers nationally is expected to grow 36% over the next decade, employment is expected to grow only 3%, or by 577,000 jobs, according to the Manufacturers Alliance.
   [Which kinda makes you wonder, just who "is expected" to buy the leftover 36-3= 33% of the inflation-adjusted output? And don't say, "export it!' because other economies are in just as much contradiction and denial about the timesizing imperative as we are.]
   The bulk of the [3%] new jobs will be given to those with computer, mathematics and management skills, while production workers are expected to decline as a share of all manufacturing occupations.
   [There's no 'expecting' or 'forecasting' required. This has been going on for decades over the last 200 years and it's already gutted agriculture and most manufacturing. Now it's getting started on the service sector.]
   The Butler Eagle carries some "help wanted" ads, but the skills and pay don't fit their levels.
   [Hey, if they want to continue in Butler working 16-hour days and living near family and friends or maybe still living with family....]
   ...Brad Karenbauer has three kids.... He passed over a job paying $6.50 an hour. Another paid $8 an hour but involved industrial chemicals, which he thought would be dangerous.
   [Isn't this the guy who said he "doesn't mind getting dirty" at the bottom of column two?]
   ...So far he hasn't found a job..\..for the township, making $13 an hour.... The $7,000 in his 401k is gone.... With his unemployment running out and in need of health insurance benefits, he finally took a job in April at [a] foundry that paid $8.85 an hour. He drove 45 minutes to get to the foundry and worked a midnight shift. ...He said shortly after taking the job, "It's repetition and I hate repetition."
   [Picky picky. On the other hand, repetitive functions can be easily automated and, sayonara this job too. This guy just needs a lot more choices, of the kind that the Timesizing program provides, especially in Phase 2 and Phase 3.]
   His cousin, Mr. Mottern, lucked out and landed a job...working on a RR track crew [for] $12 an hour, a $1.30/hr paycut from his old job at Trinity....
   [And economy's consumer demand contracts just that little bit more - repeated millions of times all over the country.]
   Most of the available jobs have been at malls [(service sector alert!). His] older brother, Jim, now works at Wal-Mart....
   [or slaves at Wal-Mart if they're still making employees to clock out and keep working - see 6/25/2002 #1. But these wages are 'from slavery' anyway -]
   At Wal-Mart he makes $6.25 an hour, half of what he earned at Trinity....

1. Airline Swiss [sic] reaches jobs deal with cabin staff, Reuters 07/17/03 10:32 ET via AOLNews.
   ZURICH...- Ailing Swiss International Airlines...to return to profit..\..has reached a deal with cabin-personnel unions to cut 935 jobs, it said on Thursday [7/17], a day after it clinched a similar accord with pilots.... Swiss plans to cut 3,000 jobs in all...and has been wrangling with unions over just how to do this. A Swiss spokesman said the nearly 4,000 cabin staff would be asked to cut working hours to help save jobs,
   [Timesizing, to reduce downsizing.]
   and the number that agreed would determine the final number of layoffs....
   [An unusually dramatic situation where saving jobs is directly dependent on the number of employees willing to share the vanishing work.]

2. Fear of attack keeps Iraqi women at home, by Jamie Tarabay, AP 07/17/03 04:40 EDT via AOLNews.
   BAGHDAD, Iraq - ...Men of all ages jam Baghdad's streets and bazaars - buying generators, refrigerators, reading newspapers, waiting in line for gasoline. Few women can be seen. And the women who do venture out to work have been given shorter hours and are taken to and from work by drivers whom they know. They avoid taxis....

3. Analysis - German[y]'s IG Metall must reform whoever is leader, by Emma Thomasson, Reuters 07/17/03 08:56 ET via AOLNews.
   BERLIN...- Rather than [soothing] its wounds, Germany's IG Metall engineering trade union has been pouring salt on them by descending into a bitter power struggle following last month's [partial] defeat in eastern Germany.
   [IG Metall insists on seeing the glass as ¾ empty, instead of ¼ full. They did, after all, win the 35-hour workweek in the eastern German steel industry, even if not in the larger auto industry.]
   ...In many countries, employers would be crowing over its troubles and keen to exploit its internal divisions. But in Germany, where a post-war tradition of strong unions is credited with ensuring labour peace and high productivity, nobody wants to abandon the system of industry-wide wage bargaining although everybody accepts it must be modernised. "I can only hope that these problems are solved quickly so we can have strong unions that are able to negotiate," said Dieter Hundt, head of the BDA employers' association.
   [You Dummkopf! You should have thought of that before denying your east German employees a trivial 3-hour trim in their workweek to align them with west Germany. Now you've condemned them to indefinite second-class citizenship and driven a spike between the converging economies and societies of the two Germanies. At the risk of being ourselves damned, we say to German employers and politicians, you near-sighted FOOLS! Listen to dopey Schroeder -]
   "Nobody in Germany can have an interest in the unions weakening themselves," Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said last week. "I would hope that this conflict will be decided in a way which makes it easier for this important union to compromise."
   [What a hypocrite! They have already compromised by waiting THIRTEEN (13) years for the harmonization of the east and west German workweeks and wages. and they were prepared to endure a prolonged transition of one hour's reduction per three-year period that would not have delivered harmony until 2011. It's the blind and disunity-sowing politicians and employers that need their fat noses rubbed in the lessons of compromise and unity, not IG Metall!]
   ...IG Metall will hold an extraordinary congress at the end of August to choose a new leader after Juergen Peters, a left-winger who had been in line for the job, was blamed for last month's failed strike for shorter hours in east Germany..\..
   With 2.6m members, IG Metall still proclaims itself the world's largest industrial union. But its membership has shrunk by 10% since 1995 and the IG BDE chemicals union has usurped its role as the trendsetter for pay deals across Europe of late....
   Peters is portrayed as a hardliner,...less likely to play ball over plans to cut welfare benefits, urging a wealth tax instead.
   [They call him a "hard" liner when he wants the burden to fall on the rich instead of the poor? We don't think so. The wealthy think it's all about them. They think it's all about investment, not consumption. Yet they have to invest in production that's sustainably supported by consumer demand. Consumer demand is weak all over the world, while investment demand is so strong, it has driven stocks repeatedly into bubbles far higher than their sustainable price/earnings ratios. Yet TPTB (the powers that be), the plutocrats, all over the world don't get it. It never occurs to their little pea brains that a phenomenon such as the over-concentration of income is possible. It never dawns on them that too much of a nation's (or an entire world's) income can be converted into investing power by defaulting to the top brackets, instead of kept in circulation as spending power in the middle and lower income brackets. And our prostituted economists, university economics departments, and business schools perpetuate the blindness.]
   ...Even Peters has seen the writing on the wall for one-size-fits-all pay deals, helping craft a deal with carmaker Volkswagen last year to create 5,000 new jobs in return for workers accepting wages below the VW norm.
   [If that was accompanied by workweeks below the VW norm, it's timesizing. Otherwise it's paysizing or income sizing, which is the program we'll need to implement in 100 years or so when our self-respect and expectations rise beyond what the groundwork timesizing program can provide. At any rate, this statement again makes it sound like Peters is getting caricatured in the media, and is not at all the big bad "hardliner" they keep repeating he is. Phil Hyde is well aware of this media laziness, having been painted as a Kennedy plant his first time out in the Congressional races - as if Joe Kennedy would bother setting up an cash-free opponent. When Jack Kennedy did it in 1946 or 1948, it was his first time out and he was setting up a couple of opponents with the same name as his strongest opponent, to confuse the voters and split the opposition vote.]
   ...Peters is still fighting, telling the Frankfurter Rundschau daily on Thursday: "In terms of political content, there are far fewer differences than the simplistic label of moderiser or traditionalist would suggest."
   [Guess they've been calling him 'traditionalist' because 'modernizer' would suggest he's OK with proceeding right down to Third World levels under the cloak of globalized "competitiveness" with Eastern Europe and Asia. Here's one of those prostituted economic 'scientists' we mentioned above -]
   Hagen Lesch, of the Cologne-based Institute of the German Economy, said IG Metall has learned its lesson from weak public support for its campaign to cut the working week in east Germany from 38 hours to the 35 hours standard in the west.
   [The only lesson that needs learning here is for the hoity-toity institutes and universities of Germany and the rest of the world to smarten up about where their favorite cure-all of downsizing instead of timesizing is taking the world. But their kinda like the astonomers of Copernicus' time, solidly committed to the idea that the universe revolves around the Earth, not the Sun, or the economy revolves around the investor, not the customer/consumer/market.]
   "After this experience in east Germany, IG Metall must take more note of public sentiment....
   [No, IG Metall must put more into molding public sentiment, the way the self-destructive-via-consumer-base-destruction employers, investors and politicians are doing.]
   "...Surveys show workers are not so interested in a shorter working week but in other things like savings accounts for hours to be used for training," he said.
   [We'd be more inclined to believe this if it was coming from workers or unions, and not from an agent of near-sighted investors. The fact of the matter is, if employees had a shorter working week they wouldn't NEED savings accounts for hours to be used for training. If it's true that "workers are not so interested in a shorter working week," then IG Metall has its task cut out for it in educating its own members before it can even begin to educate the public.]
   ...The union won a pay rise of about 3.5% over 18 months last year after a 10-day nationwide strike....
   [Of course, it may be that the union itself is confused about its priorities. Countering market forces to push for pay raises is ultimately self-defeating. Harnessing market forces by engineering a scarcity of labor via workweek reduction ultimately gives you higher pay, benefits and everything else. In brief, if you just achieve one of the two traditional labor goals of higher pay and shorter hours, if it's higher pay you target and achieve, it'll be a brief victory soon lost in downsizing, but if it's shorter hours, you'll soon get higher pay and everything else as well, because markets value scarcity. It's all supply and demand, and not only capital but also human capital are just two more commodities in the market. The universe does not revolve around them or give them any special exempt status.]

1. Hyundai Motor union to hold one-day strike on Fri, Reuters 07/16/03 01:52 ET via AOLNews.
   SEOUL...- [39,000] Unionised workers at Hyundai Motor Co., South Korea's largest auto maker, said on Wednesday [7/16] they would down tools for one day on Friday to push for an early settlement in negotiations over working conditions.... A Hyundai spokesman said the union wanted a shorter workweek and improved conditions for temporary workers. The auto maker's union has held strikes for three hours or longer on several occasions since late June, seeking higher wages, participation in management decisions involving investments, as well as a 40-hour workweek [instead of current 44-hr wk].... Labour relations at Hyundai Motor are monitored by investors as automobiles are one of South Korea's top exports and have buttressed the count[r]y's economy, Asia's fourth-largest....
   [after Japan, China and India.]

2. New study examines competitiveness of corporate America in global marketplace - Survey of Fortune 1000-type executives uncovers both concern and optimism among senior U.S. managers, Part one in a three-part series, Business Wire 07/16/2003 09:39 EASTERN via AOLNews.
   With corporate America in the midst of a fundamental...change driven by the downturn in the U.S. economy, corporate scandals and the stark events caused by international terrorism [and an irresponsible White House!], U.S. executives appear to be taking a more pragmatic, sober, and in some cases, contradictory view of the ability of U.S. companies to compete abroad. This is one of the conclusions [ah, a contradictory conclusion doesn't qualify] from a new survey commissioned by *Celerant Consulting, the global operational strategy and implementation specialist, and conducted by *Lieberman Research Worldwide.... The survey was conducted...during the months of March and April 2003, with a sample size of 201 senior executives randomly selected from S&P's Corporate Directory..\..
   [and doubtless self-selected by those willing to reply.]
   With the pressures of competing on a global scale escalating, respondents indicated that while personal job satisfaction has not improved, it has remained reasonably stable over the past 5 years, with executives in the southern part of the U.S. reporting the greatest satisfaction (43%). Respondents in the East either experienced the same amount of personal job satisfaction (36%) or were less satisfied (34%).
   Holding back any increase in job satisfaction may be the fact that, overall, American businesspeople are spending more time at work than they did five years ago. Work hours have increased by nearly a third during this period. Increased time at work is especially prevalent in the transportation, construction, and agriculture industries with 85% of respondents confirming that they are working longer hours than 5 years ago. Additionally, executives in the eastern parts of the U.S. (67%) are spending more time in the office than [executives] in the Midwest (55%), South (54%), and West (42%)....
   [So top executives are committing suicide by karoshi (death by overwork) as well as imposing karoshi on others. Brilliant.]

3. Survey explores the impact of hospital computer systems on resident work hours, Business Wire 07/16/2003 09:00 EASTERN via AOLNews.
   BOSTON...- The Medical Reports Institute (MRI) is pleased to offer the first in a series of studies, surveys, and/or research conducted and/or sponsored by leading healthcare IT vendors. MRI does not validate or endorse the results of these efforts; however, it does offer a commentary. Th[is] first publication in th[e] series...has been submitted and sponsored [ie: financed?] by MercuryMD, a healthcare-focused software company that provides hospitals with mobile technology solutions. A brief background and summary of this paper follow:
   Long work hours are widely considered a necessary part of graduate medical initiation [oops,] education in the United States. Residents are reported to regularly work 70 hours per week for 3 or more years, with some specialty residents reported to work more than 100 hours per week.
   The enduring paradox is this: while quality patient care appears to require [ha!] such demanding [read 'debilitating'] training, such...training appears to endanger patients [amen!]. A recent Institute of Medicine study reported that sleep-deprived, overworked residents are responsible for medical errors causing 5,000-15,000 deaths a year.
   Coincident with increasing public scrutiny and pressure from medical, legislative, and regulatory communities, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) recently approved a policy limiting residents to an 80-hour workweek, effective July 2003. Residency programs violating this policy risk probation and loss of accreditation. Additionally, the pending federal legislation mandating similar limits threatens offending institutions with fines and a loss of Medicare/Medicaid funding.
   [At last, the physicians may have to heal themselves.]
   The goal of th[e] survey [by MercuryMD?] was to reveal specific instances of residents' interactions with hospital computer systems that could be optimized through IT [information technology] - helping to reduce work hours. This survey examined hospital-based IT because of the hospital's dual significance as [the] focal point in residency training and as the hub in our healthcare economy.
   Results.   A total of 2,096 respondents from 263 medical centers in 47 states and D.C. submitted a [completed] survey. According to the ACGME, of 100,709 total U.S. graduate medical trainees in the most recent academic year - ending June 30, 2003 - 86,228 of these trainees are non-fellowship level. Based on these figures, the response rate for this survey is between 2.1% (all trainees) and 2.4% (non-fellowship trainees) of the total eligible respondent group nationwide.
   Respondents reported working an average of 81.7 hours per week. By dividing total hours worked per week by six working days (this method excludes the variability of call schedules), the data show residents work an average of 13.6 hours per day. Additionally, respondents reported spending 2.2 hours (16.2%) of the day in "direct patient contact" and 5.2 hours (38.2%) of the day managing data ("data mgmt")....
   For the full text of the survey results...and the MRI commentary, visit *MedRecInst.com/resources/resident.
   Contact: Medical Records Institute, Ellen Boland, 617-964-3925....
   [Maybe the wheels of genuine reform are grinding into motion in this ancient and, in America, backward profession. But we're still talking about 80-hour workweeks here, which is the level the mainstream in the American economy was putting up with back in the 1840s.]

1. Furniture makers to seek duties on China imports, by Frank Tang, Reuters 07/15/03 15:28 ET via AOLNews.
   NEW YORK...- A group of furniture makers said on Tuesday it will form a committee seeking protection from the U.S. government against competition from cheaper Chinese wood bedroom furniture imports by imposing anti-dumping duties on them. A special committee, formed by 15 U.S.-based furniture companies which include Bassett Furniture Industries Inc., Hooker Furniture Corp. and Stanley Furniture Co., said it will file a petition this fall with the U.S. Dept. of Commerce and the International Trade Commission.
   ...Paul Toms, CEO of Hooker Furniture...said Hooker's bedroom furniture, which represents a relatively small part of total production, was hit the hardest by competition from cheaper Chinese imports in recent years. The Martinsville VA company said in June it would continue with reduced working hours for most of its employees and shut down some facilities due to soft demand.
   According to the Dept. of Labor, the U.S. wood furniture industry has lost about 27% of its jobs with about 95,000 total workers reduced in May, down from more than 130,000 in the same period in 2000.
   [Not terribly comforting.]
   [Followup tomorrow -]
   China whittles its way into furniture market, pointer summary (to D1), 7/17 WSJ, front page.
   Americans are snapping up wooden beds and tables made in Chinese factories. Competitive pricing and quality are leaving U.S. furniture firms in the (saw)dust.
   [No mention in near-sighted WSJ of dumping or damage to US workforce=consumer base and accelerated descent of US economy into Third World, with attendant mega-problems for US investors. The indicated article -]
   China's latest export: Your living room - Country's cheap furniture gains in quality, popularity; Full dining sets for $2,500, by Morse & McLaughlin, 7/17 WSJ, D1.

2. Heat wave kills 12 in southern Algeria, Reuters 07/15/03 07:15 ET via AOLNews.
   ALGIERS...- A heatwave...with temperatures soaring to 135°F has killed at least 12 people in the past 6 weeks, local health authorities said on Tuesday....
   [Global warming lives!]
   Frequent power cuts have made matters worse with workers and residents unable to use air conditioning.
   ..\..Most victims were elderly or people with breathing ailments living in the Adrar area, about 800n miles S/W or Algiers in the Sahara desert.... Legislators from the region are to table a draft law in parliament to change the working hours in the south, from 8 am - 4 pm currently to 7 am - 12n.
   [Hey, that's shorter hours, from an 8-hour to a 5-hour workday.]