Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

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Timesizing News, July 22-28, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

7/26-28/2003  primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope -

1. 7/26   IBM cuts employee hours at Vermont plant, AP 07/25/03 17:48 EDT via AOLNews.
   ESSEX JUNCTION, Vt. - About 2,400 IBM employees in Vermont will start working shorter hours next month because of soft demand in the semiconductor industry.
   Employees on the chip manufacturing line at the Essex Junction plant now alternate 36-hour and 48-hour workweeks - an 84-hour schedule over two weeks.
   [Chronic biweekly overtime = a progress killer.]
   Starting next month, they'll work 36-hour weeks, or 72 hours every two weeks, IBM spokesman Jeff Couture said Friday [7/25]. The workers will still be paid for 40-hour weeks, Couture said.
   [Sounds like a deal! We've heard of the 30/40 Plan in Indiana. This is the 36/40 Plan in Vermont = 36 hours' work for 40 hours' pay.]
   "Some employees don't like it because they like the hours that are built into the schedule, especially the overtime, which will bring more pay," Couture said.
   [IBM is pretty stupid, inefficient and wasteful for building costly overtime into a standard schedule, and evidently some of their people are eagerly hogging overtime while other people are unemployed and underemployed - and willing to do these OT hogs' jobs for less $, thus pressuring down labor power and pay. They ought to be disciplined by their union, but their union leaders may be just as near-sighted and self-destructive.]
   "Some employment do like it, because they're getting paid for 40 hours and working 36 hours."
   IBM imposed the same cutbacks at the plant two years ago, citing lower demand for the chips made there. All workers resumed their original schedules by about 8 months later.
   Last year the company laid off 988 workers at the plant as part of a restructuring of its Micrelectronic Division, which designs and produces microchips.
   [So they only need layoffs in years they don't use shorter-hours schedules? = Timesizing, not downsizing.]

2. 7/28   Nucor's net plunged 86%, WSJ, front page.
   ...as increased costs and plant outages more than offset higher sales.
   [Ohoh, Nucor is one of main timesizers. Main story -]
   Nucor 2nd-period net fell 86% on energy costs, plant outages, by Robert Matthews, WSJ, B7.
   ...Nucor posted net income [of] $8.4m or 11 cents a share compared with $59.7m or 76 cents a share a year earlier. Sales rose to $1.52B from $1.2B a year earlier. But...for each ton of steel Nucor produced, the company spent $24 more in scrap costs than it did a year earlier. It paid $3 more in energy costs [too].... Nucor also said its profit was reduced $7.2m during the quarter because of "the failure to achieve projected improvements in operations at Nucor's sheet mill in Decatur, Alab., formerly Trico Steel"..\..said Dan Roling, steel analyst for Merrill Lynch....

3. [more evidence (beyond 7/24/2003 #5 below) that, contrary to popular belief, employment is a matter of fluid work time, not rigid 40-hour "jobs" -]
   7/26   Italy wage inflation up 0.1 pct m/m in June, Reuters 07/25/2003 03:10 ET via AOLNews.
   ROME...- Italian wages rose 1.7% year-on-year in June and were 0.1% from the previous month, official statistics agency Istat said of Friday [7/25]... The number of working hours lost to strikes and other industrial action in the first half of the year was 6.16m, a 73.7% decrease on Jan-Jun/2002.
   [Therefore we can easily reapportion the vanishing market-demanded human employment, in hour-units, to make self-support available to EVERYONE.]

4. 7/27   Higher costs found at 24-7 operations, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, G2.
   US companies with around-the-clock operations are losing $206B per year, according to a new study...by Circadian Technologies Inc., a Lexington MA consulting firm....compiled from its annual surveys and information provided by 10,500 employees from 60 companies [and] managers at more than 1,000 firms with 150,000 workers. The participating firms represented a variety of industrial sectors..\..
   Circadian noted that shiftwork is increasing among US employers as more and more companies adopt 7-day, 24-hour scheduling and operations. "Today, nearly one in five employees, or approximately 24m Americans, regularly work irregular schedules, night shifts or extended hours positions," said the study. "...24/7 employees staff around-the-clock customer service call centers, retail establishments, information technology monitoring and support centers, hospitals, emergency response services, and 24-hour news operations"..\..
   The study found that companies with 24-7 operations [do] have lower unit costs and shorter supply chains [huh?] than traditional firms. [But] they also have more job-related injuries, higher healthcare costs, greater employee turnover, and lower productivity, said the report.
   • ...Lower employee productivity is costing such companies $79.4B per year.... Employee productivity tends to decline during evening hours, dropping about 5% between midnight and the early morning hours, said the report. The annual cost of lower productivity at night: $3,309 per worker..\..
   • Higher absenteeism has led to the loss of $50.4B.... "Average absenteeism among companies with extended hours operations is more than twice the national average, at 4.9% vs. 2.1%," the report said. It noted that the average cost of bringing in temps to replace absent workers or paying OT to full-time employees who are filling in is approx. $2,101 per employee..\..
   • And employee turnover is costing companies $39.1B a year.... The average turnover at such firms is nearly three times higher, with annual turnover rate of 9% in 2002 compared with the national average of 3.4% for all companies..\..
   • ...Companies with extended [hours] operations spend $28.2B on healthcare.... Workers at 24-7 operations are more likely to suffer from obesity, gastrointestinal disorders, cancer, sleep disorder, and fatigue-related car accidents..\..
   • And [such firms spend] $8.5B on job-related injuries.... According to the study, it costs 24-7 operations an extra $1,181 to insure each shiftworker.

1. Hyundai Motor workers, AP photo/Ahn Young-joon 7/24/2003 via AOLNews.
   Striking Hyundai Motor workers talk under a signboard at the Hyundai Motor factory in Ulsan, south of Seoul, Thursday, July 24, 2003. They went on a strike to demand higher wages and a five-day workweek. [photo caption]
   [more -]
   Hyundai Motor workers (2), AP photo/Ahn Young-joon 7/24/2003 via AOLNews.
   More than 10,000 striking Hyundai Motor workers march to hold a rally at the Hyundai Motor factory in Ulsan, south of Seoul...7/24/03. They went on a strike to demand higher wages and a five-day workweek. [photo caption]
   [more -]
   Assembly line of Hyundai Motor, AP photo/Ahn Young-joon 7/24/2003 via AOLNews.
   Assembly lines stand idle at the Hyundai Motor factory in Ulsan, south of Seoul, Thursday, July 24, 2003. Hyundai Motor workers went on a strike to demand higher wages and a five-day workweek. [photo caption]

2. Advertising - Verizon and a big union joust with help from slick hired guns, by Steven Greenhouse, NYT, C3.
   ...Labor leaders accuse Verizon of exaggerating workers' pay levels. [Robert] Master, the union spokesman, said that the base salary for Verizon's union members in New York is $52,000 [including overtime??]. He said that the company has downsized so much that workers average $7,500 in overtime each year.  "52 thousand a year is not an outrageous amount of money," Mr. Master said....
   [No, but in a permanent recession, it's pretty damn good. But the recession will never end unless the overtime ends. This is the first and most fundamental step, even prior to switching from downsizing to timesizing, and forms the first of the three central phases that constitutes the Timesizing Program proper. By allowing themselves to be seduced by overtime pay premiums, labor has sealed it doom and been an unwitting accomplice in its own demise ever since the flawed FLSA overtime design of 1938 - because that willingness to work overtime gives the green light for employers to overload employees, and overloadability gives the green light to downsizing. Yes, unions have stupidly been instrumental in their own doom.]

3. [Here's someone who handles overtime better than Verizon -]
   Edwards proposes program to increase nurses - 'Our nation is facing a crisis as more nurses leave the profession every day...and those who remain labor under crushing workloads', by Mike Glover, Boston Globe, A5, 'catch' credit to colleauge Kate.
   DES MOINES - Democratic presidential hopeful [Sen.] John Edwards is proposing a $3B, 5-year program to add 100,000 nurses to a profession hard-hit by overworked employees choosing to retire and fewer entering the heathcare field. ...The government would help pay tuition and fees for 50,000 new nursing students and would create grants aimed at luring veteran nurses back. The program also calls for eliminating mandatory overtime [OT], a chronic complaint of overworked nurses, and creation of highschool programs touting the benefits of the profession. Edwards did not say how he would finance the plan....
   [Three remarks:
   1. The only way to really eliminate OT is to design it to obviate itself - overtime should only be optional to employers and employees who are willing to reinvest 100% of overtime profits and earnings in training and hiring - in OT targeted skills. We will never have a sustainable economy until and unless this is done - because we will never have a sustainable consumer base without ironclad protection against the impoverishment of the consumer base by the concentration of our most precious vanishing resource, market-demanded human employment, and the corollary devaluation of our most vulnerable surplus commodity, human labor.
   2. Don't waste taxpayer money on the humble middle, nursing, caught between aides and doctors. If you want to solve the healthcare mess with yet another big piece of big-government micromanagement and makework, solve the skill bottleneck at arrogant top. Flood the market with doctors, and the surplus will automatically cascade down into nursing. The skill most in need of breaking its carefully constructed skill bottleneck wide open with streamlining of language and training and cutting out the whole crap of initiation and hazing that hangs like a stinking dead albatross around its neck is the profession of medical doctoring.
   3. But do it right and it doesn't require taxpayer money. Because you don't isolate individual sick professions like doctors and nurses. You do the economy at large, regardless of all the special interests and special squeals and whines. Of course, you can effectively do both just by starting your new ironclad overtime redesign and enforcement at the highest observed workweek levels in the economy, be they the 100-hour workweeks of medical trainees or the 80-hour workweeks of truckers, pilots, and B-school students. The world, despite all its rhetoric about time management, is really a pretty poor time manager in our day. And we will not effectively progress beyond our own day until we learn the fundamental skills of how to divide up workload into fair and even segments, for ourselves through time, and for all our citizens in the current instant across our entire citizenry.
   And, of course, Edwards, and our current government's basic mistake - NO gov't spending program should ever be proposed without an accompanying plan to finance it - which must be passed simultaneously with the spending program or prior to it. This is how PM Luigi Einaudi saved postwar Italy.]

4. [another airline goes thru worktime consciousness raising -]
   America West faces discord with pilots - By strictly enforcing work rules, union members may upset carrier's turnaround, by Melanie Trottman, WSJ, B5.
   [Or is it, by NOT insisting on the strict enforcement of the work rules all along, top management has continuously weakened the carrier and its consumer base, and necessitated a turnaround?! - This headline is just more top-man unaccountability from the nation's top business newspaper. What a suicidal line for it to take - suicidal for the American economy, progressively beset by more and more irresponsible "leaders" - and for the nation.]
   ...Drawing outside the lines of contractual provisions is common in the airline industry, and sometimes agreeable to [both] management \and\ employees.... A company might ask a pilot to work on a day off, for example, in exchange for two days off.
   [Sortof like passengers who get a free flight if willing to be bumped? Or, could be merely that the Journal has picked an example that makes management look saintly.]
   But the employee groups can use the rules to their advantage when they want to play hardball with the company, and unions have staged work slowdowns in the past by "following the book."
   [Executives are damn fools for not always following the book or rewriting it to accommodate the flexibility they need without violating the basic requirement of spreading the workload and the seeding of its own and its customers' consumer markets. Not following the book leaves them open to the following -]
   ..\..Last week, gearing up for a showdown with the company, the leadership [of the Air Line Pilots Assoc. (ALPA)] in a hotline message [huh?] instructed its nearly 1,700 members to strictly abide by contract work rules, something that could prove disruptive by affecting on-time performance and canceled flights \for\ America West Airlines...the nation's No. 8 carrier, which has staged a turnaround since narrowly avoiding a bankruptcy filing following 9/11/01....
   ...The pilots expressed more agitation earlier this week, saying they were "outraged" over a performance-based [huh?] award program unveiled Tuesday that would reward cash to management based on the airline's stockholder returns relative to its competitors over set periods of time.
   [Sounds like political gerrymandering mapped into the economic sphere in aid of executive skimming programs. The double-standard reasserts its ugly head and along with it, class warfare, which nevertheless will be a charge flung by hypocritical management at labor. And the Chesterton trap is fallen into once again. But this is not going to be overcome until the next logical dimension of basic sharing is dealt with = worktime. And ALPA, like all unions, needs to get its priorities straight and quit frittering away its power on wage demands -]
   ..\..The group...already this March overwhelmingly rejected a tentative 3-year labor pact that offered an 11% pay raise at the date of signing and 3% more in January 2005....
   [- assuming they rejected it for more money. But they may have rejected it for its attempt to substitute instant money for longer term disempowerment - in which case they were correct -]
   Pilot leaders cited shortcomings in job security and retirement benefits that continue to be of concern....
   [Job security grounds are valid. Retirement grounds are just another form of distracting wage demands and therefore invalid. We must first and foremost get a flexible work sharing&spreading program that provides full employment and thereby rebalances labor and management power (by absorbing the wage-depressing "reserve army of the unemployed"). Until and unless this is done, all other "gains" by labor are based on sinking sand.]

5. French pension 'reform' passes in a landslide [our quotes], AO via WSJ, A12.
   PARIS - ...Public-sector workers currently have to work 37.5 years to qualify for full benefits. The measure will
   • require them to stay on the job 40 years, as in the private sector, by 2008.
   • By 2012, everyone will have to work 41 years to receive full retirement benefits;
   • by 2020, 42 years.
   [This is a 2-edged sword. First, by capping one unit of worktime and by aligning public and private sector, this legislation is a Good Thing. France has too much of disunifying tradition of special treatment for civil servants; for instance, by applying the jump down from a 39- to a 35-hour workweek last to government instead of first, so government could lead by example. But this (worklife) is the wrong unit of worktime to cap and the cap is being pushed back to lengthen worklife for one sector, not brought forward to shorten it. By capping the wrong unit and by lengthening worktime, this legislation is a Bad Thing. Theoretically, better than lengthening the public-sector's worklife requirements to align with the private sector would have been...shortening the private-sector's worklife requirements to align with the public sector. However, that still brings us into conflict with the big background problem; to wit, any capping of worktime per person per lifetime (alias mandatory retirement age, even via job age, as here) is a worklife cap that increases an unsustainable blank check on taxpayers due to the extreme variability of people's longevity, insurance tables notwithstanding. And any worklife capping also conflicts with the most fundamental medical goal of prolonging quality lifespan via medical breakthroughs, which serves a deep-seated human goal of conquering death - and therefore takes precedence over the rather recent, now runaway notion of putting the old horse out to (indefinite) pasture via Retirement With Taxpayer-Financed Pension.
   We can resolve the conflict by translating mandatory retirement into mandatory workweek caps and the complete elimination of mandatory workweek-uncapping overtime. In other words, we're taking the pressure off taxpayers and away from dying as soon as possible after retirement age, by the simple expedient of changing to longer and more sacrosanct weekly retirement via strongly enforced workweek limitation. As Danny "the flagon with the dragon..." Kaye would saye, we're mapping the capping from worklife to workweek. AND we can translate agist "retirement benefits" into general "disability benefits," which can then be secondarily translated into training and technology benefits. Because with modern work-aid technology such as that available to Stephen Hawking and others, the category of genuine "disability" to support oneself can, and with it the population of genuinely disabled, are being constantly reduced.]

1. Striking Hyundai workers, AP photo/Ahn Young-joon 7/23/2003 via AOLNews.
   Striking Hyundai Motor workers gather to hold a rally at the Hyundai Motor factory in Ulsan, south of Seoul, Wed., 7/23/2003. The workers went on strike to demand...higher wages and a 5-day workweek. The letters on the flags read, "Hyundai Motor Union." [photo caption]
   [further -]
   Rally, AP photo/Ahn Young-joon 7/23/2003 via AOLNews.
   Striking Hyundai Motor workers clap their hands during a rally at the Hyundai Motor factory in Ulsan, south of Seoul, Wed., July 23, 2003. The workers went on strike to demand higher wages and a five-day workweek. [photo caption]
   [further -]
   Mass rally, AP photo/Ahn Young-joon 7/23/2003 via AOLNews.
   More than 10,000 striking Hyundai Motor workers hold a mass rally at the Hyundai Motor factory in Ulsan, south of Seoul, Wed., July 23, 2003. The workers went on strike to demand higher wages and a five-day workweek. [photo caption]
   [further -]
   Workers with balloon sticks, AP photo/Ahn Young-joon 7/23/2003 via AOLNews.
   Striking Hyundai Motor workers beat balloon sticks [look like straight foot&ahalf-long sausage balloons - 1000s beating them must have sounded eerie] during a rally at the Hyundai Motor factory in Ulsan, south of Seoul, Wed., July 23, 2003. The workers went on strike to demand for [sic] higher wages and a five-day workweek. The letters on balloons read, "Victory." [photo caption]

2. German union nominates new leadership, by David McHugh, AP 07/23/03 16:40 EDT via AOLNews.
   Officials of Germany's largest industrial union on Wednesday [7/23] chose its deputy head for the top job in a deal that ends a bitter leadership fight -
   [This is a victory for the shorter worktime movement.]
   but skirts hard questions over how to deal with shrinking membership and the country's economic stagnation.
   [Not really. If they focus on shortening the workweek and sharing and spreading the robotics-reduced human employment, they will reduce east Germany's 18% unemployment, get a lot more members and trigger a solid economic recovery for the entire nation based on a stronger east German consumer base.]
   Juergen Peters survived widespread criticism of his role in a[n only partially!] failed strike to shorten the workweek in eastern Germany, to win the nomination from the union's 41-member board of directors.... The union board settled on Peters, considered a hardline union traditionalist,
   [why is it bad to be a 'hardline' union negotiator while it's good to be a 'hardnosed' CEO? could this be the viewpoint of investors(/speculators)?]
   after he persuaded moderate Berthold Huber to serve as his running mate. Huber, an influential regional leader in southern Germany, had earlier withdrawn his support for Peters after many members blamed [Peters] for keeping them in the dark about how the strike would force secondary shutdowns [for lack of parts] at the factories of firms such as BMW and VW in the west.
   [Looks like there needs to be more coordination with unions in the west next time too, because if eastern workers are wimps, and western workers don't want German unity on the workweek, this economy - and nation - is goin' down.]
   The union abandoned the month-long strike on June 30 after politicians and even union officials said that its demand - shortening the workweek from 38 to 35 hours [as in the west] - was putting the [east's] depressed economy at further risk....
   [Fragged from within by union officials. Looks like some education and discipline are in order.]
   Peters rejected the labels of "hard-liner" [vs.] "moderate" and said he and Huber would work out a common path. "Our members are not interested in this phony discussion," Peters said. "They are interested in IG Metall being able to defend their interests in the workplace."
   [Which is impossible without harnessing market forces to reward the labor scarcity accessible (in peacetime) only by shortening the workweek.]
   ..\..On winning the nomination, Peters and Huber left open whether the union would continue with such traditional goals and methods - or would accommodate industry demands for flexibility to preserve jobs in an economy that has seen little growth in 3 years.
   [But if they start 'accommodating' short-sighted industrialists they will become quite useless for German recovery, because the industrialists and investors, with their uncoordinated unemployment and employment share per person, and their continual pressure and imposition on the German consumer base via the hyperconcentration of the national income, are the trigger and cause of German economic weakness.]
   ..\..The nomination still needs confirmation at a special union convention called for Aug. 29-31, but no other prominent candidates are standing....
   Some business leaders and economists say the one-size-fits-all contracts across entire industries, such as the manufacturing and electronics sectors covered by IG Metall, should be loosened to allow individual companies more freedom to reopen wages to protect jobs.
   [The only thing that will protect jobs is ending the one-size-fits-all-for-all-time-&-all-technological-levels definition of "job" as a rigid 40- or 38-hour a week entity. Unless the workweek comes down gradually but dramatically in the next years and decades as robotics continues to expand, the entire global economy is going into deeper and deeper depression, regardless of the biz-as-usual upticks investors seize upon to call "recoveries." Unions should forget wages. Go for shorter hours and let market forces take care of wages!]
   That issue was highlighted by the strike in the east, where the union pushed to shorten hours while workers at many companies had agreed to lengthen them in hopes of saving their jobs.
   [Their jobs aren't worth a damn if they're hogging so much of the automation-reduced employment that they've engineered 18% unemployment all around themselves. They have created just too many desperate people willing to do their jobs for less. And their whole approach further shrinks consumer confidence and the east's consumer base.]
   Unemployment in the east is running at 18%, twice what it is in the more prosperous west. ...Unemployment [throughout Germany] is chronically high at over 10%, and some companies have moved jobs to lower-wage countries next door in eastern Europe.
   [Take your pick. A race to the bottom or a controlled progress into the future of ever-higher technology and an ever-adjusting share of market-demanded employment per person - generally adjusting downward, much much further downward as determined by comprehensively defined unemployment. Here's the rather silly Reuters version -]
   German IG Metall picks leaders for struggle ahead, by Kerstin Gehmlich, Reuters 07/23/03 11:11 ET via AOLNews.
   BERLIN...- Germany's IG Metall engineering union on Wednesday chose a left-wing traditionalist and a reformer as a leadership duo in an attempt to end a paralysing power struggle and stem a slide in the union's influence. The union executive agreed almost unanimously on hardliner Juergen Peters to become IG Metall's new head, and for the more moderate Berthold Huber to become his deputy. A trade union congress is expected to confirm the proposal next month.... Peters [had been] widely crticised for driving a damaging strike for a shorter working week in eastern Germany that the union ended without winning any concessions from employers....
   [You can infer our reaction to this anti-shorter-worktime propaganda that "news" agency Reuters is lending itself to from our comments on previous stories.]

3. ["And in war-ravaged Cambodia, overwork is ranked with torture and starvation" -]
   War-torn Cambodia pins hopes on peaceful polls, by Ed Cropley, Reuters 07/23/03 02:59 ET via AOLNews.
   [We been resisting using these Cambodian stories for weeks, but they keep appearing, spinning "overwork" in the context of really Bad Stuff, so we finally caved, to make shorter-hours advocates aware of some potential reverse momentum for their cause in Southeast Asia.]
   PHNOM PENH...- Cambodians go to the polls on Sunday for general elections which, if peaceful, will mark another step forward for the southeast Asian nation in its long journey from Pol Pot's "killing fields" to functional democracy. The legacy of the 1970s Khmer Rouge genocide, in which an estimated 1.7 million were executed or died of starvation, torture or overwork, hangs heavy over Cambodia's 13 million people, despite billions of dollars of aid in the last 10 years....

4. [Meanwhile, in ovework-rife Japan, the double "school karoshis" (7/15/2003) are gathering notoriety -]
   Focus: Principal's suicide triggers complications nationwide, Kyodo 07/23/03 22:02 EDT via AOLNews.
   HIROSHIMA...- The suicide in early July of Shokichi Yamaoka, deputy head of the education board in Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture, western Japan, who heard complaints from a primary school principal about 10 days before the principal killed himself in March, is triggering complications throughout the country.
   Blamed for their suicides are hard work and agony amid intensified state guidance on school management.
   [Aha, "overwork" has transmogrified into merely "hard work," - fuel indeed for our campaign to press substitute "work smart to get ahead" for "work hard to get ahead" and get the 1940-level workweek adjusting downwards to where it should be in the context of over six decades of work-saving technology - in order to let every citizen easily support him/herself - so taxpayers don't have to.]
   Yamaoka, 55, and Kazuhiro Keitoku, 56, principal of the city-run Takasu Primary School, both had no educational experience before assuming their duties and found the ["intensified state"] guidance hard to follow, education sources said.
   Keitoku was treated at a hospital for feeling uneasiness [sic] only one month after assuming the post in May last year, when his vice principal collapsed from fatigue. The vice principal's successor also collapsed and was hospitalized....
   In February 1999, the principal at the Sera Senior High School near the primary school committed suicide after being involved in disputes over whether the national anthem should be sung at the school's graduation ceremony..\.. In 1998, the then Education Ministry [told] the Hiroshima prefectural education board to rectify school management and educational content for the first time ever...and sing the national anthem at school commencement and graduation ceremonies....
   [They're dropping like flies. No elaboration in this story, however, on the "complications nationwide." But the story 'on the ground' in Onomichi goes on and on, and proves once again that weird news stories can come out of the east as well as the west. Our latest are the recent death of a five-foot-long 77-lb. catfish in Germany that ate a Dachshund ("A feared catfish is said to have had its last bite," Reuters via 7/26/2003 Boston Globe, A4) and a flotilla of rubber duckies from a Pacific container spill 11 yrs ago due to reach Britain within weeks powered by ocean currents alone ("All the world's a bathtub," Reuters via 7/26/2003 NYT, A2). At least the catfish & duck stories are things we can send to Dave Barry.]

5. [then there's this evidence that, contrary to popular belief, employment is a matter of fluid work time, not rigid 40-hour "jobs" -]
   Imperial announces second-quarter 2003 earnings, PRNewswire-FirstCall 7/23/2003 via AOLNews.
   TORONTO...- Imperial Oil Ltd. [yester]day announced second-quarter net earnings of $514m...compare with $310m...in 2002.... On June 3, 2003, the company hosted the official opening of its plaant and field facilities for the phases 11 to 13 of Cold Lake operations.... Construction of the project began in November 2000 and over 4 million work hours were carried out without a single lost-time incident for [either] employees [or] contractors....
   [And if it's about fluid worktime and not rigid "jobs" then we can easily divide it up differently to achieve full employment by allowing everyone to support themselves. We've kept the workweek high and run on downsizing and a surplus of employees as long as we can. Now economic weakness tells us it's time to push the workweek low and run on a "surplus" of employers for a change.]

• The nap gap, pointer summary (toB1), WSJ, front page.
  The taboo against 40 winks on the job exempts top brass and ignores scientific data on productivity....
  [and the indicated article -]
  As bosses power nap, cubicle dwellers doze under clever disguise, by Jared Sandberg, WSJ, B1.
  Steve Polevi was surrounded by sleepyheads. Until 3 years ago, the...finance manager was working for an electronics giant in Silicon Valley where countless Japanese expatriates customarily extended their workday into restaurants, bars and the wee hours of the morning.
  [Long hours, but at a cost -]
  "Napping was epidemic in the office," says Mr. Polevi....
  [However, more often -]
  ...In a country with the largest economy, built on a nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic, falling asleep on the job here is taboo - if not a fireable offense. Nevermind the drumbeat of science suggesting that napping would help production..\.. Those who had an office could close the door and number-crunch sheep.... Executives [could] get away with it, but \the\ cubicloids, on the other hand, had to get creative.... The cubicle set have to go to absurd lengths to catch a wink..\..
  • "Meetings became euphemisms for nap time"..\..says Mr. Polevi.... At one of his presentations, easily 2/3 of the audience was variously listing to one side or nap jerking, he recalls....
  • ...One napnik confesses to closing his eyes right at his desk, holding...a bottle of eye drops.
  • ...A computer consultant in Rocky Hill CT announces that he's going to the bank on his lunch hour, then dozes in his car. Even though he's on a break, he refuses to admit to napping.
  • At his former packaging company, Dick Nicholson retreated to the bathroom stall. Meanwhile, the president of the company "had napping down to a science."... The chief would turn his [chair's] high back...to the door and use his disconnected phone handset as a pillow.
  It's obvious to Mr. Nicholson, himself an executive, that the more [digits] in your salary, the more z's in your workday. "It was a privilege of rank," he says.
  No kidding.... Naps just get a bum rap. ...We all grew up with nap time. Every father knows how naps can soften the patricidal edge of his toddler. Studies show adults also feel it makes them less cranky.... A 2002 study by Sweden's Karolinska Institute found that being a boss [gave you] "a 52% greater risk of falling asleep than the people [you] supervise"..\..says its author Torbjorn Akerstedt..\..partly due to a harder job and partly because [you have] an office....
  Research shows napping improves visual skills, learning and alertness. In her study released last month, Sara Mednick discovered that 60-90 minutes of REM sleep allowed the same improvement in visual learning as 6 hours of shut-eye. "Nappers could actually make their workday more effective," says Ms. Mednick, who recently started work at the Salk Institute....
  But you apparently have to be a napper on the level of legend[s like] Da Vinci, Churchill, Einstein and Edison to feel secure in doing it..\.. Opponents...argue it's bad form. But maybe it's just another example of our fetish with the appearance of productivity and professionalism. In our fake-it-till-you-make-it culture, superficiality is a substitute for real productivity.... ["Face time."]
  One NASA survey showed that
  • 71% of corporate aviation pilots,
  • 80% of regional pilots
  • and 66% of hospital workers
  said they sacked out on the job.
  [Scary. How about simply ... shorter hours?!]
  In another NASA study, Mark Rosekind, former director of NASA's Fatigue Countermeasure Program [huh?! - they PAY a fulltime salary to tell people to nap?!], found that airline pilots who fell asleep on average for 26 minutes experienced a 34% improvement in performance and 54% improvement in alertness. "You can only imagine how much better it would be in the office," he says. "What other productivity tool do you have that will buy you a 34% improvement?"
  Still, a National Sleep Foundation survey found that only 16% of adults say their companies allow naps. Probably most of them - airlines and railroads - do so because the liability of a...crash outweighs the assumed productivity loss of a [nap].
  Going to bed early doesn't eliminate the need for an afternoon siesta. There's a natural window of napportunity between 3 pm and 5 pm. "Even if you get a great night's sleep," Mr. Rosekind says, "the pressure for sleep builds up and there's an afternoon dip in alertness."
  Bill Anthony, who founded the Napping Co. to promote dozing at work, says companies don't have to set up special sleeping rooms, they can just institutionalize nap breaks the way they have the coffee break.
  [Apollo Computer back in 1983 had lots of huge sofas around in big common areas on its programming floor. Later Phil Hyde sought dark below-stairs areas on the other side of the building at IRI, or moved his desk out from the wall to provide a hidden 'sleep coffin' in his against-a-wall cubicle, which would be cushioned with an unfolding foam easychair.]
  Not doing so will force nappers to come up with excuses like those of Mr. Anthony, such as: "I'm meditating on the mission statement and envisioning a new paradigm," or "They told me at the bloodbank this might happen."

1. German union head bows out with attack on deputy [Peters], Reuters 07/21/03 09:32 ET via AOLNews.
   ["Bows out" implies more grace than we see here.]
   The head of Germany's powerful IG Metall union added [or tried to add] fuel to a damaging leadership row on Monday [7/21], stepping [or stumbling] down with a stinging attack on the deputy he blames for the union's worst strike defeat in decades.... Klaus Zwickel, who had been due to leave in October, said 'hardline leftwinger' Juergen Peters [our quotes], the union official in charge of wage issues, bore the main responsibility [or scape-goatability] for an abortive strike campaign for shorter working hours in eastern Germany....
   [Wouldn't it be nice to see a top man today who took the responsibility himself for a change?! (Actually, based on his appearance on Charlie Rose' show, the chief editor of the NYT did so and resigned after the Jason Blair fiasco, even though he had little direct part in the ostrich-burying-head-in-sand syndrome.) And never mind the 80% strike approval by membership. The good news here is that unaccountable, finger-pointing Zwickel is apparently stepping down early, and based on his recent behavior, we say Good Riddance!]
   Zwickel...has led IG Metall for the past decade....
   [Apparently a decade of otherwise unchallenged 2nd-class citizenship for east German union members (38-hr workweek for same pay as 35-hr week in west Germany).]

2. Peters likely to win top German union job, by David McHugh, AP 07/21/03 14:54 EDT via AOLNews.
   A 'traditionalist hard-liner' [our quotes - this same name-calling is considered a choice of news sources?!] appeared headed for the top job at Germany's biggest industrial union Monday amid worries about a stagnating economy. The union's No.2 leader, Juergen Peters, persuaded a more moderate candidate, regional leader Berthold Huber, to serve as his running mate in a bid to take over the top job from retiring Klaus Zwickel.
   [And finally, the statement in plain language -]
   Zwickel, who has sharply criticized Peters for a failed strike over work hours in eastern Germany, resigned Monday to protest the deal rather than serve his last weeks in office.
   [Ah, term slated to end in October, David? That would be "his last MONTHS in office." Ya know, it's almost that Peters has enough internal support to force the resignation of this 'weak sister,' but the 2-guy media are determined to whiten Zwickel and blacken Peters. Ja ja, "schwarze Peter" wie in der Geschichte! - "Black Peter" like the guy at Xmas who brings bad kids coal.]
   Peters' deal must be ratified by a union convention tentatively slated to begin Aug. 30....
   [So now the early convention has transformed from a "let's resolve the internal strife" bridge to ratification of whatever in October, to an early ratification of Peters' earlier-than-expected accession, because Zwickel was behaving so badly, or pouting so pointedly.]
   In the absence of other candidates, the arrangement appears to resolve a leadership struggle at the top of IG Metall, one of the most powerful industrial unions in the world and Germany's most militant - but not the questions about union strategy and influence raised by the failed strike.
   [On the other hand, if old Zwickel didn't have the stomach for the tough strike it turned into, and started caving in and making weak noises to the media, maybe the questions about union strategy are resolved - everybody's now going to unite on seeing strikes through. But good ideas for prep -
   • time the next strike for when the auto makers have a flutter of orders so it really hurts them if they don't compromise and settle fast
   • do some TV commercials explaining the union's desire for harmonizing the workweek with west Germany and ending east Germans' 2nd-class citizenship - that shouldn't be too tough to put across
   • be prepared to deal quickly and cleanly with anyone who starts cracking under the strain and whining to the media = assuming over 75% of the membership has approved the strike, as they did this time, fire any fifth columnists and throw them out of the union pronto - and let it be clearly known in advance that this will happen to anyone who disunifies the union when under the tremendous stress of 'battle'
   • and for God's sake, focus on labor's top power priority = cutting the flabby outdated workweek in a highly technologized and robotized economy that leaves 18-20% of the population unemployed - forget the distractions about wages and other stuff - they don't matter compared to the concentration of vanishing human employment and the complete disemployment of increasing numbers of east Germans. It is not enough for unions to just become another centripetal force on employment and income in modern economies - and therefore complicit in gutting of each nation's consumer base and a contributing factor in its excess capacity.]
   ...Union membership has fallen, from 29% in 1992 in western Germany to 25% in 2001, and from 40% to 18% in the east as many former East German firms have gone bankrupt....
   [That's because if unions don't focus on the obsoletely long, low-tech-suitable workweek, they are absolutely no use to anyone. Further -]
   German IG Metall hardliner poised for leadership, by James Mackenzie, Reuters 07/21/03 11:22 ET via AOLNews.
   BERLIN - ...Klaus Zwickel[']s resignation left [Juergen] Peters poised to take over as head of the union, with the moderate Berthold Huber as deputy.... The crisis, which had long been brewing, was triggered last month when IG Metall conceded defeat in a strike for a shorter working week in the east, the first time in 50 years the union had ended a strike without any concessions from employers....
   Peters...had been due to take over at a union conference in October.... "Our proposal, our talks have shown our common desire to take some of the tension out of the organisation and bring it back into calmer waters," he said. Huber, a 'reformer' [our quotes] who had stood against Peters in a race to become the union's official candidate for the leadership earlier in the year, had withdrawn his availability to be his deputy, but has apparently been persuaded to reconsider..\..
   "I want to stress that by taking this step [early resignation] I am explicitly not taking sole responsibility for the defeat in the east German engineering industry strike," Zwickel, who had been due to step down in October after a decade in the job, told a news conference....
   [Oh, you mean he is taking some responsibility? That's big of him!]
   "The main responsibility...is held by the deputy chairman [Peters] and the regional leaders in Berlin, Brandenburg and Saxony," he said.
   [In other words, the guys "on the ground" in the areas that were suffering the 38-hr workweek for the west's 35-hrs' pay. This is the first we've heard of this! This pompous scumbag probably undercut the strike himself cuz of CEO & big-pol pressure in the west.]
   "They at no point showed the slightest readiness to take personal consequences."...
   ["Personal consequences"? Ah, izza po' widdo Klausy not gonna get invited to Schroeder's personal retreat in the Schwarzwald any more? Looks to us like Zwickel just wanted to coast thru to the end of his term in October, rubbing shoulders with the bigwigs and feeling important, just as he apparently coasted through the last decade, without really doing anything to centrifuge work and spending power and grow German consumer markets and domestic demand. We say again, Good Riddance!]

3. Results to trail forecasts amid continued poor demand, Dow Jones via WSJ, D5.
   La-Z-Boy Inc...expects fiscal Q1 earnings to come in below analysts' forecasts, due to continued sluggish demand and taking more plant shutdown time than usual to pare inventories....
   [We're guessing that this is a crude form of timesizing, to avoid downsizing. Hey, other furniture makers are doin' it, like Hooker Furniture of Virginny - see 7/16/2003 #1, below.]
   The Monroe MI furniture maker...now anticipates Q1 net income between 10 and 12 cents a share, including a charge on the closure of three casegoods plants....
   [Temporary (timesizing) or permanent (downsizing)? We aren't told.]