Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

---

Timesizing News, Sept.1-9, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

9/9/2003  primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope -

1. The art of the family leave, pointer blurb (to B10), WSJ, B1.
   Tips on how dads can take one and [still] keep their career on track.
   The jungle - Focus on recruitment, pay and getting ahead, by Kris Maher, WSJ, B10.
   ...Men's attitudes about balancing a career and fatherhood have been slowly shifting for several decades.
   [Oh yeah? First we've heard of it, but this is the Wall St. Journal that's reporting this.]
   In surveys, a greater number of men report wanting to spend more time with their wives and children, particularly during key times such as the first few months of a child's life. Yet, especially in these times of uncertainty and overwork [and high unemployment and the threat of layoff], men also wrestle with the fear that if they take time off, they could be passed over for promotions or raises, be left off important projects, and generally be considered less serious about their careers....
   "You never like to be in a situation where you're giving your employer restrictions on what you're able or willing to do," says [Jonathan] Gray, \an\ architect and project manager...at Anshen+Allen, a San Francisco architecture firm, after a six-week leave. \He\ always expected to take off a week or two from work when his child was born. But when his wife got pregnant with twins late last year, he realized he wanted to take a longer break.... "If there weren't other compromising issues like pay and career, I would want to stay even longer [than 6 wks]," says Mr. Gray.... Mr. Gray's wife was hospitalized just before giving birth \and\ the couple's children remained in the hospital for a few weeks after being born prematurely.... Taking the extra time off is "something that I'm really glad I did for a lot of reasons," he says....

2. Bureaucracy faulted in heat wave deaths - French report cites understaffing, poor contact by agencies, by Joseph Coleman, Boston Globe, A6, flagged by colleague Kate.
   [This non-story drags on and on, fanned by sadie-masies on the French right, eager to exploit the misfortune to push back French progress - sorta like the Bushies are still exploiting 9/11.]
   PARIS - A scathing French government report yesterday blamed hospital understaffing during summer holidays, chronic bureaucratic snags, and a dearth of elderly care for the 11,400-plus death toll in this summer's brutal heat wave.... The number of patients in France's city hospitals was already "intolerable" by Aug. 10, and peaked two days later, with hospitalization rates five times what they were last year at that time, the report said..\..
   The government is considering eliminating a national holiday to raise revenues for elderly care..\.. The French report, ordered [and doubtless, crafted] by the Health Ministry...said that a "massive" exodus of doctors on August vacation left many elderly to fend for themselves.... The study also took hospitals and clinics to task for being able only to respond to demands rather than take initiative in a crisis..\.. "Hospitals found themselves in growing difficulties to provide personnel in a sufficient number," said the 47-page report.... In addition, it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit doctors for hospitals, the study said..\..
   [Then sweeten the job.]
   The study also said France's 35-hour workweek had cut into hospital staffing.
   [Yeah, sure.]
   Michel Combier, president of the National General Practitioners Union, said..."The problem wasn't that everyone was on vacation, but that the alert system was too weak to allow for hospitals to get everyone back working.... And the catastrophe [in the first place] was totally unpredictable and out of the ordinary."...
   ..\..No other European country even came close \to\ the high death toll \put\ provisional[ly] at 11,435 from the heat wave, which brought choking temperatures of up to 104 in the first two weeks of August in a country where air conditioning is rare. The heat baked many parts of Europe, killing livestock and fanning forest fires..\.. The Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics estimated 1,000-1,400 people died in the Netherlands from the heat....
   [But no other country has been subjected by defensive, out-of-synch, self-styled "conservative" politicians to the same self-flagellation over this unprecedented misfortune as France. Sound familiar to Americans? Then there's the aspect of distraction. What better way to fend off finger-pointing at the gov't than for the gov't to jump in with massive finger-pointing at the healthcare system - never mind that the healthcare system is the govt's responsibility. "The best defense is an offense." Recall the Bushies' need to distract the public from the corporate scandals involving Bush's friends just before 9/11? With "leaders" like these, who needs Osama? The source headline is -]
   France blames heat deaths on hospitals, AP 09/08/03 15:36 EDT via AOLNews.

1. 9/06   84% of 'full-time' prison doctors work less than 4 days a week, Kyodo 09/05/03 17:35 EDT via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- About 84% of medical doctors working full-time at prisons and detention centers across the nation work less than 4 days a week,
   [Shouldn't they be boasting about that?! - except for some outdated laws -]
   falling short of designated working hours as prescribed in the civil service law, according to a government survey. The Ministry of Justice study appears to underscore the so-called "name-lending" practice among medical professionals, in which doctors receive salaries from hospitals even though they perform no work.
   ["No work" is a lot different from "work less than 4 days a week."]
   According to the Justice Ministry's Correction Bureau, 88 of the 189 prisons and detention centers across Japan are required by law to have full-time medical doctors. As of March, 219 doctors were assigned to these institutions. The survey, however, shows only 35, or about 16% of the total, were actually working at prison and detention facilities five days a week.
   Of the remaining 184 doctors, 12 worked in the facilities four days a week; 151, three days; 16, two days; and 5 only one day. These doctors, paid [for full-time?] in accordance with the civil service remuneration law, are believed to have received around 10m yen in annual salary. Under the civil service law, full-time doctors at prisons and detention centers are required to work a minimum [a minimum??] of 40 hours a week.
   When the issue of work practice of prison doctors was brought up at the Diet earlier this year, the health ministry said on the days when doctors do not show up for work in prison they are supposed to be working at the universities that have assigned them to prison duty.
   Justice Minister Mayumi Moriyama told reporters on Friday that the phenomenon is partly due to a shortage of doctors and she wants to work out some mechanism that is more suited to the reality.

2. 9/08 Paris may end a holiday to improve care of aged, by Elaine Sciolino, NYT, A13.
   [Finally the Times gets around to a big article on this, after its short article and the Journal's big article back on 8/28/2003 #3. Not much new here but a little patch on the shorter workweek -]
   ...Holidays in France are part of what is know as the "acquis sociaux" or social conquests [or less militarily, "social acquisitions"], benefits like generous social security and pension benefits and free education through college that are viewed as part of every citizen's birthright.
   In addition, French workers are working fewer hours since a law inaugurated a 35-hour workweek in January 2000 [for large companies, 2001 for small companies and gov't]. The law, intended to generate more jobs [and successful in lowering unemployment 1% for each of the 4 hours cut from the workweek], requires emloyers to give workers time off it they exceed the 35-hour limit and puts a cap on the amount of paid overtime workers can work.
   A number of unions argue that losing the holiday would primarily benefit employers and could be the beginning of a weakening of the 35-hour workweek....
   "The idea that every time something is wrong, we have to come up with a Marshall Plan, throw money around when you have no money left, is a weird idea," said Herve Morin, president of the center-right Union Democratique Francaise party bloc in the National Assembly....
   [Even weirder is the idea that you have to flagellate yourself by, e.g., forever giving up a holiday to expiate the guilt trip some freaks have laid on you for a lot of elderly dying in a heatwave.]

3. 9/06 U.S. employers unexpectedly slashed jobs in August, by Anna Willard, Reuters 09/05/03 16:37 ET via AOLNews.
   ...JOB-LOSS RECOVERY
   [Not sure what that means but people seem to be using it as an intensive form of 'jobless recovery.']
   ...On Thursday, Fed Governor Ben Bemanke, speaking in New York, dubbed the situation a "job-loss" recovery, noting that job losses have been much greater than the "job-less" recovery after the 1991 recession.
   [Actually, Bemanke probably got it from Carole Moseley Braun, who used it during the Dem prez debate last Wed. But it was even around before that. The Aug. 9 Economist attributes it to Merrill Lynch but we believe it originally came out of the progressive community on the Web. Colleague Kate claims the contrastive sememe is
   1992 recovery...jobless temporarily...jobs came back
   2003 recovery...job-loss permanent...jobs never coming back ]
   ..\..The average workweek was unchanged at 33.6 hours in August. Analysts were expecting [it] to rise to 33.7 hours. Lack of growth in the workweek is a less-than-encouraging sign. When companies are poised to begin hiring they often increase the hours of their current staff first.
   [You'd think that a civilization that had invented all this wonderful worksaving technology would regard a shrinkage in the workweek as an encouraging sign. But such is our screw-up with downsizing, instead of timesizing....]

1. Nippon Steel Corp., Dow Jones via WSJ, B6.
   ...kept its 3rd-largest plant idle after a gas-tank explosion and subsequent fire and...is looking into the impact on its operations. While production lines at its Nagoya plant in central Japan weren't damaged, steel-rolling and other manufacturing activities at the site have been shut down.... A Nippon Steel [NS] spokesman said the plant in Nagoya..\..with 2,600 workers...has sufficient inventories for the next 2-3 days [but] NS doesn't know when it will resume operations.
   [Ordinarily, an indefinite idling is a downsizing, but where we're talking about reserve inventories for only 2-3 days.... Plus this plant makes a big chunk of the firm's total output -]
   ..\..The Nagoya plant processed about 20% of the Tokyo steelmaker's overall output for the fiscal year ended in March....
   [So we're going to count this as timesizing, not downsizing, cutting worktime, not workforce. The uncertain duration may be due to the need to rule out employee sabotage.]

2. Mock attacks, NORAD to bolster nuke security - NRC, Reuters 09/04/03 17:13 ET via AOLNews.
   NEW YORK - Mock attacks against the nation's nuclear power plants and top-level lines of communication between the facilities and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) will be used to help protect the plants against any future threat, U.S. regulators said.... About 2 mock attacks per month are planned at various nuclear plants across the country in fiscal 2004, beginning Oct.1..\.. Nearly 2 years after 9/11/01, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has sent a letter to Homeland Security Secy Tom Ridge explaining what steps have been taken to better protect the nation's nuclear power plants from similar assaults....
   LIMITS WORK HOURS
   The nuclear watchdog [NRC] said it has put a limit on security force working hours to avoid fatigue....
   [But apparently has not found it convenient to disclose that limit.]

3. Pennsylvania Gov. Rendell administration reminds public of child labor law, PRNewswire 09/04/2003 15:59 EDT via AOLNews.
   HARRISBURG, Pa...- Pennsylvania Labor & Industry Secretary Stephen Schmerin [yester]day reminded Pennsylvanians that the state's child labor law [which] protects the health, safety and welfare of young people is more stringent during the school year than during summer months.
   The state's child labor law limits work hours and types of work allowed for children and teenagers under age 18. [It] covers 3 age groups: under 14..., 14-15..., and 16-17 year-olds.
   • Children under age 14 may not be employed or permitted to work in any occupation. Exceptions include children employed on a family farm or in domestic service, such as snow shoveling, lawn or house chores, caddies, newspaper carriers, and juvenile entertainment performers with special permits.
     [So this is a fairly absolute worklife floor.]
   • Teenagers are 14 and 15 may work a maximum of 4 hours on a school day [aargh!], 8 hours on any other day, and 18 hours per school week [phew! here's the real limit] (M-F) only at a time that does not interfere with school attendance. Work is limited to between 7 am and 7 pm. Exceptions include newspaper delivery, caddies and some farm work.
   • Teenagers age 16 and 17 may work a maximum of 8 hours on a school day [ridiculous!], 28 hours a week [also ridiculous] in the 5-day school week.
   • Individuals 18 years or older are not subject to the child labor law. A 17-year-old who has graduated or withdrawn from high school, as determined by the chief school administrator, is treated as an 18-year-old not subject to Pennsylvania's child labor law, but the Fair Labor Standards Act may apply....
   • Minors may not work more than 6 days a week, and must be allowed a 30-minute meal period on or before 5 consecutive hours of work....
   More information...800-932-0665 or *online, PA keyword "labor laws".
   Contact: John Currie 717-787-7530....

4. [more evidence that Germans don't realize what they're doing right -]
   "Lazy" Germans urged to work more to revive growth, by Emma Thommasson [sp?], Reuters 09/04/03 12:59 ET via AOLNews.
   BERLIN...- Germans have more holidays and work fewer hours than most of Europe [except France with its nationwide, not just west-half union-wide, 35-hr workweek] but politicians and industry leaders are calling for this lifestyle to change to drag the ailing economy out of recession.
   [They have 2 lethally flawed assumptions.
   1. Production creates its own matching consumption, so they can disregard markets. It doesn't and they can't, because the price you may have to go down-to to sell the stuff to compete against, e.g., China, may be less than your costs of consumption; ergo, you're bankrupt. On the contrary, consumption dba markets fairly quickly creates whatever production supply it demands.
   2. Manhours are a key variable for production in a highly automated and robotized economy. They aren't. Automaton and robot hours are.
   The pols and top execs are still reflexing with an obsolete, pre-technology mindset of 'work hard, not smart.' And what happened to their hallmark 'German efficiency'? But the stupid self-flagellation goes on and on -]
   "Germans are much too lazy" was the headline in the mass circulation Bild newspaper this week which greeted Germans returning to work from their long summer holidays.
   [Ha! Let the fool pols & CEOs drag their countrymen into the sweatshop race to the bottom - and themselves as their markets shrink!]
   In a turnaround from the days when they were lauded for their Teutonic efficiency and hard work in rebuilding the country after World War II, Germans are now being castigated [by their idle rich yet!] for not working hard enough [never mind 'smart enough'].
   "We need longer and more flexible working hours - 40 hours instead of the average of 37 hours is more reasonable than lower income.
   [As if masters of robots need longer manhours! And as if anyone can get higher income out of flooding the market, a market already weakened by high unemployment and low demand.]
   "It would improve the competitive position of firms and bring more innovation and investment," said Ludwig Georg Braun, president of the German Chamber of Industry & Commerce.
   [Gehe dann, Dummkoepfer! Join the race to the bottom, enjoined by your near-sighted 'leaders'! They will lead you as surely to perdition as 'Dolfi did, that lethal Fuehrer of your grandfathers! You don't need investment. There's a global glut of investment dollars. Stocks are multiples of historic P/E ratios. You need spending dollars, customers, consumers, markets. And as for innovation, you clearly don't know what to do with the innovation you've already got if, like Puritanical Americans, you allow it to master you, to disemploy an ever increasing few, and overwork the ever diminishing survivors. Turn technology's promise of freedom into slavery, like all the other fools across the world, you in Germany and France who were our hope.]
   According to International Labour Organization statistics, the average German worked 1,444 hours in 2002, compared to 1,815 hours for the average U.S. workers and 1,707 for the average Briton. Only the Norwegians and Dutch worked fewer hours.
   Germans also have more holidays than most other nations - 30 days leave is standard plus about 12 public holidays.
   The Cologne Institute of the German Economy [CIGE] estimates the average German takes off about another 12 days a year due to sickness [not 'taken off' but forced off], training [not 'taken off' - training is still on duty], maternity [not necessary a generation closer to the labor shortage and high wages of the War when one parent could still support the family] and other leave entitlements [the only 'leave' entitlement mentioned before was maternity leave], meaning most peple work the equivalent of a four-day week.
   [And why the hell not! - at the beginning of the Third Millennium, when 72 years ago the Technocrats visualized a workweek of four 4-hour days. Then 71 years ago Art Dahlberg imagined a 2-week transition to a 20-hour workweek. Then exactly 70 years ago the U.S. Senate passed a 30-hour workweek bill by a vote of 53 to 30. And five years later it was fixed at 44, to be reduced 2 hours the next year, and 2 more the next. The "40-40-40" plan - 40 hours maximum workweek, 40 cents minimum wage, in 1940 - was perhaps a little too catchy to remain fluid. And as war geared up and employers whined the harder to Roosevelt, the workweek froze .... And to our disgrace, as a supreme insult to the vaunted 'intelligence' of our species, we have chosen makework ever since, however wasteful or military, to offset and waste every work-saving innovation we've come up with since then, and every one we ever will come up with, until we wake from our guilt-manipulable toil-tied self-contempt and realize that for seven generations, our contrivances have cumulated to a new necessity - more free time, and less work but smarter, more strategic work. Like temps, we must get in, make an impact for a few hours, and get out - and leave it behind. No more 24/7 infinite gray, on-call, office-home blend. The 40 hours of market-demanded work is NO LONGER THERE now we have ushered ourselves into the Age of Robotics. But to solve the need to avoid parasitism and continue the illusion, the sustainable illusion, of self-support - and mutuality, we have now the new necessity of sharing the vanishing work, the vanishing market-demanded human work, now assumed more and more by machines, the most precious vanishing resource of any nation, and self-denied, self-stolen by ourselves when we regarded it as a curse, as unfreedom, and now we're having last minute doubts, now foolishly toying with changing our minds like unstable children, after we ourselves have cast the die and sealed our freedom from control, from toil and others' agendas, we have made our bed of freedom and worksharing and now we must lie in it. And the longer we fight our fate, the more we impoverish ourselves, all ourselves, including the rich, all becoming insecure.]
   Germans also tend to retire early - the actual average retirement age is 60 although the official pension age is 65.
   [None of this is accidental. It is a requirement of the Robotics Age. But a fatal plot is playing out. The largest economy, the USA, missed the shorter-hours fulcrum in the 30s and 40s and never recouped it since, as it descends to new layers of deterioration with massive prisons and major disability rolls. The second-largest economy, Japan, was the envy of the world in the 80s with its lifetime employment and large resulting domestic markets, but their stupid CEOs changed and copied US downsizing in 1989 and almost immediately they were ruined, and plunged into perpetual slump. Now the third-largest economy, Germany, is about to be wrecked by its fatuous "politicians and industrial leaders" who want to throw away its worksharing, worsen its labor surplus, destroy its wages and spending and domestic demand, and pitch it after Japan and the U.S. down the chute to the Third World. Pathetic! Soon each corporation will have but one employee, thousands of robots, unlimited productivity - and no markets. Just as Sismondi foretold in 1819 - "In truth then, there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England." (p. 563, fn, New Principles of Political Economy, trans. Richard Hyse).]
   
   • Noting that German growth could be 0.5% higher than usual next year as several public holidays fall on weekends, Economy Minister Wolfgang Clement has said Germany is at the limit of what it can afford in holidays and working hours.
     [With 9% unemployment in the west and 18% unemployment in the east, Germany is not at the limit of what it can afford in holidays and working hours until it has less than 2% unemployment in both east and west. In fact, it cannot afford to fewer holidays and longer working hours, because it cannot afford higher unemployment and smaller markets.]
     
   • LONGER HOURS, LESS HOLIDAY?
     After an engineering strike this summer failed to win a cut in the working week in eastern Germany to the 35 hours standard in the west [except for steelworkers], Christian [Puritan!] Democrat leader Angela Merkel suggested western hours should be increased to match those in the east.
     [Sure, as long as your being suicidal, why shouldn't Germany-wide hours be increased to match the 75-hour workweeks in Thailand? You don't think you need a German consumer base? Fine. Go ahead and destroy it.]
     She also said scrapping a public holiday could add 0.2% to economic [ie: GDP] growth - a controversial proposal among conservatives as many holidays are Christian festivals.
     [What do you care about Christianity now you worship the mammon of GROSS Domestic Product (GDP) instead of effective domestic demand, productivity regardless of marketability, instead of a balance of the two.]
     
   • Hagen Lesch, a [CGGE] labour 'expert' [our quotes], said if the working week were extended by an hour, economic growth next year could be 3.1%, double the [Cologne] Institute's current expectations.
     [As in the USA, employees in Germany are being betrayed by their own 'labor experts'! The false indicator of the GDP is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. More and mroe urgently, we need a more reality-based, balance-based, sustainability-based indicator than the one-sided, supply-sided GDP, as if Say's Law was any more than Say's Fallacy = "if we produce it, it will sell."]
     
   • Hans-Werner Sinn, head of the influential IFO institute, says an increase in the average working week to 42 hours would restore German competitiveness lost in the last two decades.
     [Have all German leaders lost their minds? Why stop at 42? Ram it all the way back to 80! Push it up to 100! Hell, why not work all 168 hours a week. Germans don't need sleep. They're the master race, nicht wahr? Germans are often the ones (besides boyscout troops!) who roar down from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon with the least food and water, planning to hike all the way down and back in one day. And then you find them, an hour or two later, prostrate beside the trail. Try not to laugh.]
   Trade unions have slammed such calls, saying an increase in the working week of just an hour could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs [true - glad some 'labor experts' have some sense!] and that the debate ignores productivity.
   [If they mean output per manhour via technology, true again.]
   And Dieter Hundt, head of the BDA employers, the unions' counterpart in setting wages and working conditions, says blanket calls for longer working hours are misleading. "What matters is not so much a general increase in weekly or monthly working hours for all but rather [oh this is gonna be good] working hour corridors for firm-specific solutions [huh??] and more flexible organisation of working hours [eh?]," he said.
   [For a moment there, we had a glimmer of hope, but this guy's lost in his own little world of jargon and trivia.]
   Several companies have already agreed with trade unions [on?] more flexible working weeks to cope with demand fluctuations.
   [If they mean accordioning the workweek instead of firing and hiring the workforce, great!]
   CIGE's Lesch said resistance from the trade unions and their allies in the ruling Social Democrats means a general rise in working hours is unlikely any time soon.
   [Not to mention that 9% unemployment in the west and 18% in the east. More concentration of market-demanded employment is exactly the opposite of what they need right now if they want more markets.]
   "But in the long term we are going to have to discuss increasing working time," he said. "We have a growth problem and we will have to consider increasing time worked to improve our competitiveness."
   [Lord, what fools these mortals be! Short memories that forget the long term backward into the past over which we had to discuss decreasing working time, because we had a demand problem and we had to consider descreasing time worked to improve our sustainability. You can't be worrying about competitiveness if you're trapped in a recessionary downspin. Sustainability trumps competitiveness, and demand trumps productivity (GDP) growth.]

1. [UK gets militant, Germany marks time & US goes backward -]
   Interview - TUC boss plays down rift with Blair government, by Ashley Seager, Reuters 09/03/03 19:00 ET via AOLNews.
   LONDON...- As next week's annual Trades Union Congress [TUC] approaches, new TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber is doing his best to prevent an outright clash between unions and PM Tony Blair's government....
   [Why bother? Blair and his gov't deserve nothing but a vote of no confidence after supporting Bush's unprovoked, unnecessary and catastrophic invasion of Iraq.]
   While a growing group of newly elected left-wing union leaders want to confront [right-wing "Labourite"] Blair, weakened by the inquiry into the death of scientist David Kelly, at the Labour Party's annual conference later this month [as if anyone who doesn't want self-righteous first strikes is "left-wing"], Barber would prefer consultation to confrontation.
   [In short, he's a coward who can't stand up to misrepresentation, misrule and lies.]
   The 'left-wingers' [our quotes], dubbed the "awkward squad" by the [2-guy] media, are angry at Blair's plans to bring more private-sector involvement into the provision of key public services [this guy is 'leading' what party??] and are increasingly militant towards employers on issues like working hours and "fatcat" pay....
   [In short, they want a sustainable economy, one that works for everyone including restoration of market-sustained investments for the wealthy. What a crime!]

2. German...exchange cuts trading day short, by David McHugh, AP 09/03/03 11:07 EDT via AOLNews.
   FRANKFURT...- Germany's main stock exchange in Frankfurt said Wednesday it will abandon a 3-year experiment with evening trading, shortening its trading day by 2½ hours to fall in line with other major European exchanges. Trading will open at 9 am local time as before but close at 5:30 pm beginning Nov.3, instead of 8:00 pm.
   [Hopefully this will mean shorter working hours for exchange employees.]
   Alexandra Franz, spokeswoman for exchange operator Deutsche Boerse, said the shortened hours were in answer to requests from market participants for a uniform end to the trading day in Europe. Under the change, Frankfurt would close at the same time as the London, Paris and Amsterdam exchanges. "If you have global or international market participants, it makes it far easier," she said. The decision will be reviewed in 6 months.
   When the exchange went to longer hours at the height of the stock market boom in 2000, the idea was to compete better [= the usual rationalization for the start of the 'race to the bottom'!] with online traders and give participants more time to react to developments on the New York Stock Exchange [NYSE]. The NYSE opens when it is 3:30 pm in Germany, where stocks sometimes react sharply to moves in New York. It also was meant to cater to small-time investors trading after working hours.
   [Ah yes, "to compete better" and to serve the public better, especially the little people. "We're only doing this for you!" But there is no objection to longer business hours if it's broken up into the same or shorter shifts for employees. Work hoarding, overwork and economic dislocation starts when it's too much trouble for management to bother with workload readjustment.]
   But German banks complained about the expense of keeping trading desks open into the evening, with the later hours providing only about 7% of trading volume.
   [Aha, there's the real reason for backing off.]
   The decision "makes sense for everyone in the market," said Commerzbank spokesman Dennis Phillips.
   The decision affects Deutsche Boerse's XETRA computer trading platform, which handles around 95% of trades executed in Germany from terminals at its 316 participants in 18 countries. The actual Frankfurt stock exchange trading floor will stay open to cater to indiividual investors who want to trade late [huh?], Franz said.

3. U.S. economy gains strength over summer, Fed says, by Tim Ahmann, Reuters 09/03/03 15:36 ET via AOLNews.
   WASHINGTON...- A strengthening in the US economy gathered steam in recent weeks as consumers kept shopping [but with mtg rates rising & home equity ceilings approaching, that won't last much longer] and the long-ailing mfg sector flexed a little [very little] muscle, the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday....
   While the report buttressed other recent data that suggest the economy is starting to move forward fairly briskly [something they've been saying for months], it also underscored a persistent problem - a lack of jobs.
   [Something that will be No Problem when we eventually implement automatic fluctuation of the workweek against unemployment, that is, systemic homeostatic work-sharing and -spreading.]
   "Labor markets remain slack across the nation," the beige book said, adding that [in the few jobs] where there were any gains in wages, they were modest. At the same time, an increasing tab for health care pushed up overall labor compensation costs.
   However, a senior Fed official said jobs creation would come if the economy strengthened as [self-serving] policy-makers expect,
   [market-demanded jobs creation when the whole mentality of business schools and CEOs is to cut staffing "costs" via new technology? - dream on]
   even though so far businesses had been able to meet rising demand by increasing their efficiency [e.g., through technology] rather than their hiring....
   [Our case rests.]
   ...San Francisco Fed Pres. Robert Parry...cautioned against hoping for "huge" gains in employment.
   MANUFACTURING ON THE MEND
   Even though Fed officials expect the economy to pick up steam [overpaid cheerleaders], they have said they are more worried about already low inflation moving lower [ie: deflation due to falling demand] than they are about prices rising....
   The report lent further to evidence [awkward] the beleaguered mfg sector is on the mend, with 10 of 12 districts saying factory activity was improving slightly to moderately.
   [They shout slight good news and whisper big bad news.]
   "Various districts report solid or strengthening demand for autos and auto parts, high tech equipment, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and building materials," it said, adding the need for factory workers appeared to be firming.
   [Firming despite all the excess capacity they had??]
   "A majority of districts indicate scattered reports or projections of longer work hours and selective hiring, and several report[s] that layoffs are becoming less frequent."...
   [With "good news" like this, who needs the obits? Layoffs merely less frequent? And the whole problem is the stifling selectivity of hiring. As for longer work hours, they have quite a distance to go from current averages below 35 till they get to 40, and how likely is it that overtime will trigger hiring when we've just been reminded that "an increasing tab for health care pushed up overall labor compensation costs."]

1. Future US doctors favor lifestyle over money - study, by Ben Klayman, Reuters 09/02/03 16:33 ET via AOLNews.
   The stereotype of the rich doctor might be due for some surgery. An increasing number of medical students are picking their specialty based on the lifestyle it permits, including more time to spend with family, rather than such traditional factors as pay and prestige, according to a study [ie: survey] published on Tuesday in the journal of the American Medical Assoc. [AMA].
   "We're being told essentially that it's not the number of hours or the intensity of the work, it's the ability at the end of the day to close out the work day and go home and be away from professional responsibilities," Gregory Rutecki, one of the study's authors, said. "The trend may also represent the increasing number of women in the profession," who seek a closer balance between family and professional duties, Rutecki said.
   The finding points to potential shortages of doctors in specialties such as family practice, surgery and obstetrics as medical students shun fields where they are required to be on-call during many off hours, the report said. "We're going to have person-power shortages in the next 10 years in critical areas. [We've had these for decades thanks to AMA wage-hyping strategies!] Where are the primary care doctors going to come from?" said Rutecki, a physician and professor at Northwestern University.
   [Poor helpless richboy! So they'll keep raising the price of these specialties until public outrage bursts in and busts open the carefully AMA-crafted bottlenecks on these skills, including inflation of training and hours. Much of this artificial shortage can be relieved by linearizing medical training from EMTs aides to nurses to doctors, introducing more steps along the way such as the Russian feldsher in between nurse and doctor, and making each step in the training less expensive and less polluted by medical-guild wage control in the guise of fatigue-inflicting initiation rites.]
   The report said previous studies also have detected the trend, with students more inclined to select specialties with fewer work hours per week and fewer nights on-call.
   [Finally the sadists in the AMA just aren't finding enough fresh masochists to keep membership up. "Physicians, heal yourselves!" "First yank the plank out of your own eye and then you'll see clearly enough to get the speck out of someone else's."]
   Researchers collected 6 years of data from industry matching programs that direct graduating medical students to hospital residencies in their chosen specialties, with professions offering more defined hours gaining favor.
   [These specialists think they're professional when they have undefined hours??]
   
   • From 1996 to 2002, the percentage of students surveyed who chose anesthesiology [with more defined hours] grew to 6.4% from 1.1%, dermatology was picked by 2.3% up from 0.2%, and radiology was chosen by 6.1% in 2002 versus 3.3% in 1996.
     
   • On the other hand, 9.5% chose family practice in 2002 compared to 16.1% in 1996, and 7.6% chose general surgery versus 10.4% six years earlier.
   Through the length of the study [mng??], 55% of students' choices related to lifestyle factors, compared to 9% basing their decisions on potential income.
   The increasing number of women doctors and general practitioners' loss of decision-making [power] to insurance companies will likely exacerbate [bias! replace with "intensify"] the trend, Rutecki said.
   [They need to replace this co-author with someone less invested in the past.]

2. Senate Democrats take the offensive, on education and labor, by Sheryl Stolberg, NYT, A14.
   WASHINGTON...- The Senate returned to work [yester]day after a monthlong summer vacation, and Democrats immediately went on the offensive, vowing to increase financing for education and block a White House proposal that could strip millions of workers of their right to overtime pay. As the Senate began debate on a $137.6B spending measure for labor, education and health programs, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said he believed he had the 60 votes needed to pass an amendment that would block the overtime proposal....
   The overtime issue is certain to become part of the election debate, and could pose a political problem for Republican, like [Arlen] Specter, who are up for re-election.... "Workers who go the extra mile for their employers depend on overtime pay to make ends meet," Sen. Edwards said. "Hard-working people shouldn't be forced to put in extra hours without extra pay."
   Mr. Harkin's amendment would block the administration from putting in place a rule to update the Fair Labor Standards Act [FLSA], the 1938 law that created the 40-hour workweek. The Act guarantees workers overtime pay, at time&ahalf, after 40 hours unless they are classified as executive, professional or administrative.
   The White House proposal would reclassify certain workers - by some estimates, as many as 8m - to make them exempt.
   [A better design for the top of the workweek and for overtime is the corporate tax on overtime and the individual tax on overwork, both with a complete tax exemption for reinvestment of overline profits or earnings in overtime/overwork-targeted training&hiring, in the Timesizing Program's Phase Two and Phase Three.]
   Business leaders say the updating is long overdue. But Mr. Harkin called the move "bad policy," saying: "It's antiworker. It's antifamily."
   [The Journal version is -]
   Democrats, labor launch push to halt overtime overhaul, AP via WSJ, D7.
   WASHINGTON - Democrats and their labor allies renewed their drive to block proposed Bush administration rules that opponents say would cost 8m workers their overtime pay.... The rules could take effect by early next year, unless a law is enacted to kill them. The proposal changes definitions of who qualifies for overtime, with the Labor Dept. estimating the extra pay would be eliminated for at least 644,000 white-collar workers who now receive it..\..
   Sen. Tom Harkin...said he would propose an amendment to a spending bill to derail the proposed regulations and predicted he would prevail. A similar bid by House Democrats lost in July by a 213-210 vote after the White House threated a veto.... Sen. Harkin said he believed he had 3-6 Republican votes, which could be decisive in the Senate, where the Republican Party has control by a narrow margin...\..
   In addition, the AFL-CIO said it was beginning to run TV ads nationally and in pivotal states aimed at pressuring senators to support Sen. Harkin's provision. Labor groups have opposed the administration proposal, while numerous business groups have lobbied for it.... Sen. Harkin said pResident Bush and his supporters would suffer political consequences should they persist is trying to redefine which workers would qualify for time&ahalf pay after a workweek has exceeded 40 hours....
   [The straight AP story adds a couple of touches -]
   Democrats renew fight over overtime rules, by Alan Fram, AP 09/02/03 17:29 EDT via AOLNews.
   WASHINGTON - ..."He [Bush] may satisfy some of his business friends, but he's going to lose middle America," Harkin said.
   [Gee, wonder why the Journal omitted that?!]
   ...The AFL-CIO said its ad would run this week nationally on CNN and in Maine, Ohio and Missouri. Maine is home to moderate GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. Sens. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and Christopher Bond (R-Mo.) are up for re-election next year. The 30-second spot depicts an aerospace worker, who complains that loss of overtime would hurt his retirement plans while helping big businesses.\..
   ...The Senate reconvened Tuesday after its 4-week summer recess, but few lawmakers were around. Harkin conceded that one difficulty he faced was making sure enough Dem senators are in town for the vote, which may not come until next week. Four of them are running for president and often are on the road campaigning....
   The administration, which proposed the regulations in March, says they represent a needed update to rules first laid out in the 1938 FLSA. Republicans say the proposal would clarify confusing regulations and reduce an increasing number of lawsuits by workers seeking overtime pay.
   The administration rules also would raise - from the current $8,060 to $22,100 - the annual pay below which workers must be paid overtime. The Labor Dept. says up to 1.3m additional low-income employees would gain overtime under that proposal, and Harkin's amendment would let that change take place....

3. [Now focusing on the ads -]
   AFL-CIO runs TV ads opposing Bush attempt to slash overtime pay - Ads on CNN and on local stations in Maine, Ohio and Missouri urge support for Harkin amendment to block cut in overtime pay, PRNewswire 09/02/2003 15:54 EDT via AOLNews.
   WASHINGTON...- A new TV ad by AFL-CIO will urge working families to call their senators to support the amendment, offered by Sen. Tom Harkin, that would block pResident Bush's plan to take away overtime rights from as many as 8m workers.... The ads direct viewers to call their senators and to visit a *website in order to get more involved..\..
   The 30-second ads feature an aerospace worker, Alan Rice, who says, "This means a direct 10% paycut from what I'm accustomed to bringing home." He goes on to point out that Bush's proposed overtime changes will drastically change his family's plans for college and retirement.... The rules would broaden the exceptions to the overtime law, thus making it easier for employers to avoid paying overtime pay. In addition, virtually all workers earning more than $65,000 would be denied overtime protection.
   "The last thing that America's workers need is a major pay cut," said AFL-CIO Pres. John Sweeney. "...Bush wants to allow corporations to force workers to work more hours for less money, which means less time with family and community. The Senate should vote for this amendment to keep overtime pay for millions of workers."
   [Here's an ominous insert -]
   Since the 40-hour workweek became law in 1930 [actually Oct.24, 1940], many American workers have come to depend on overtime pay. In fact, overtime pay was 25% of the income of workers who worked overtime in 2000.
   [And that is the whole weakness of the FLSA overtime design - this ambivalence between capping the workweek by penalizing employers with time&ahalf, and yet motivating employees to want overtime by paying them the time&ahalf. Overtime is a pure evil when compensated with unaccountably spendable earnings in the context because it's a barefaced incentive to take more than your share of a vanishing resource, market-demanded human employment in the context of incessant automation and robotization. Our overtime design, encapsulated in Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the Timesizing program, does not make this mistake.]
   Americans work more hours than workers in any other industrialized nation, and the current overtime laws help rein in excessive work hours.
   [Apparently not too effectively. However -]
   More than twice as many unprotected workers work over 40 hours a week, compared to workers with overtime protection, according to the GAO.
   The AFL-CIO pointed out that if the overtime rule change is implemented, many employers will have a strong incentive to force their employees to work longer hours rather than hiring new employees, a practice which will hurt rather than help the nation's anemic job market.
   [Employers saddled with a load of per-employee benefits including the runaway costs of health insurance still have a strong incentive to force their employees to work longer hours rather than hiring new employees. Time&ahalf is trivial for employers today compared to the cost of per-employee benefits.]
   The Harkin Amendment would not bar the Dept. of Labor from raising to $22,100 the threshold below which low-wage workers are guaranteed overtime. The AFL-CIO has called for this threshold for guaranteed overtime to be fully adjusted for inflation and raised even higher, to at least $27,000....
   In addition to the TV spots, the 13m member AFL-CIO has organized an aggressive grassroots campaign. It includes a national union-member outreach to members of Congress involving more than 300,000 people, an e-activism campaign, and member-to-member contact throughout the country....
   Source AFL-CIO
   Website *AFLCIO.org

4. Not everyone's working for love of the job, letter to ed by Jason McGruder of NYC, WSJ, A17.
   Your...editorial "America works" [8/29/2003 #4] tells only half the story. While most Americans do indeed "like" or even "love" their jobs,
   [questionable]
   this is not mutually exclusive with valuing additional vacation time. As recent Fox News and Monster.com stories demonstrate, many workers do not take vacation time because they are afraid of being laid off. This may be in lieu of or in addition to love of their work. Second, a new UN study shows that while America is the most productive country per worker, this is partly because our employees also work longer hours. Norway, France and Belgium surpass the U.S. in productivity per hour by 19%, 9%, and 6%, respectively. Thus if we were as productive on an hourly basis as the mean of these three EU nations, Americans could average 5.9 more vacation days a year and still be the most productive in the world.

5. Union IG Metall wins pay talks right at IBM Germany, Reuters 09/02/03 08:01 ET via AOLNews.
   FRANKFURT...- Germany's powerful IG Metall trade union said on Tuesday it had won a legal battle with U.S. computer giant IBM Corp. to negotiate on behalf of IBM's 26,000 employees in Germany. A Frankfurt tribunal ruled that IBM...must deal with the hardlinel engineering union as well as the huge services union, Verdi, in negotiating pay. The company had said it would only talk to Verdi.
   "IBM must finally accept reality," IG Metall leader Juergen Peters said in a statement.... Peters, a hardliner, was chosen as leader of Germany's 2nd-largest union at the weekend amid bitter internal wrangling over who was to blame for a failed campaign for a shorter working week in eastern Germany - IG Metall's first unsuccessful strike in decades....
   [The media storyline hardens - "don't confuse them with facts, their mind's made up." For example, the strike succeeded in winning the shorter workweek for east German steelworkers.]

1. Labor group calls for sharp cut in annual working hours, Kyodo 09/01/03 23:55 EDT via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- A major umbrella labor organization on Tuesday proposed shortening annual working hours per worker to 1,500 hours through work-sharing in the long and medium term.
   [Sounds like Japan's umbrella labor oganizations are a little smarter than South Korea's (see Sat., 8/30-9/01/2003 #1 below).]
   The Japan Council of Metalworkers' Unions (IMF-JC) said its member workers worked an average of 1,971 hours in the year ended March 31, 2002, more than 100 hours longer than the average of 1,843 hours for Japanese workers during the same period found in a survey conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labor & Welfare.... The IMF-JC is part of the International Metalworkers' Federation and it encompasses labor unions in seven industries, including the auto, electric machinery, shipbuilding, and nonferrous metal industries..\..
   The IMF-JC made the proposal at a regular meeting in Tokyo as it is struggling to secure employment amid the tough labor market in Japan. It wants to see the annual working hours fall to the 1,800 hours level at an early day to achieve the medium- and long-term target, IMF-JC officials said....
   [Excellent - another group in Japan realizes the work-sharing imperative, besides the isolated companies, cities and prefectures that are experimenting with it - see roundup in commentary on 5/30/2003 #3. Japan still has a chance of seizing the leadership from France on this critical path of progress. They probably got the idea from Hyundai's, Kia's, and then the whole of South Korea's recent cut from 44 to 40 hours a week to "do more with less" in terms of hiring more potential consumers with the same amount of market-demanded employment and without straining for more taxpayer-bashing public works and artificial job creation. Timesizing = upsizing the private-sector workforce and consumer base without upsizing government and taxes. Note yesterday's testimony to the lumpy misallocation of work generally in Japan -]
   (9/01) Japan overtime pay up for 12th month in July, Reuters 08/31/03 21:31 ET via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- The average overtime pay of Japanese wage earners, a barometer of income conditions, rose 4.6% in July from a year earlier to 18,025 yen ($154.40), government data showed on Monday. It was up for the 12th straight month....
   In terms of hours worked, overtime rose in July for the 13th straight month, growing by 4.3% from a year earlier....
   [When overtime grows at the same time that unemployment is high or rising, you are not growing your consumer base and your domestic demand, and you are not helping your economy pull out of 13 years of sundowning in and out of recession. Japan is the perfect country to pioneer nationwide worksharing. That would return it to its economic glories of the 1980s faster than anything, and once again, everyone would be writing envious management books about the Japanese, instead of pitying them. And, Japan would lead the world out of its current atavistic, anachronistic and autistic response to the dramatic but uncomprehended leaps in worksaving technology (automation, robotics, ...) in terms of downsizing employee-consumers in a constantly market-damaging way, instead of practicing consumption-neutral or positive timesizing = trimming hours and keeping everyone employed (and keeping just as much of the national income flowing to crowds of consumers instead of cliques of investors - who then can't find any market-sustained investments on scales huge enough to match their 'black holes' of idle, astronomically concentrated money).]

2. [probable timesizing]
   The Postal Service, pointer blurb (to A3), WSJ, front page.
   ...is reducing the hours of operation at some post offices to cut costs amid a slump in first-class deliveries.
   [indicated article -]
   US Postal Service [U.S.P.S.] pares operations as volume slows, by Rick Brooks, WSJ, A3.
   ...About half the post offices in Maine have scaled back operations in the past several months, opening later or closing earlier or at lunchtime.
   [Lunchtime? Great! Just when people need them most!]
   Similar moves are underway in Vermont and upstate New York, and Postal Service managers across the country are weighing the possibility of additional cutbacks, according to an agency spokesman.
   The Postal Service hasn't set a target for the number of hours that will be trimmed nationwide.
   [Good. Keep it flexible and only do as much as necessary to avoid layoffs &/or closings.]
   It says it is making cuts at times of day when few customers are buying stamps or sending packages ["lunchtime"??], and that customers are being told in advance about the changes [yeah sure]. "We are trying to squeeze out what we don't have to spend while maintaining the service that people want," the USPS spokesman said.
   The moves are the latest in a belt-tightening campaign under Postmaster General John Potter aimed at reducing costs without eroding service quality.
   [Not really possible in a human-contact operation like the USPS, except in automated mail sorting etc. What are they going to do, pass more time costs onto customers like ATMs, self-cashier supermarkets, self-pump gas, and automated receptionists?]
   The world's largest mail-delivery operation [in the land of the world's richest but cheapest plutocrats] continues to quietly downsize its gigantic workforce, with almost 47,000 full-time jobs, or 6%, eliminated through attrition since Mr. Potter took the top job in mid-2001.
   [If they're limited to attrition, the cuts in hours of operation do mean an avoidance of jobcuts, alias timesizing not downsizing.]
   The Postal Service is getting more efficient, moving 14% more mail and delivering to 11m more addresses with the same number of workers it had 9 years ago.
   [You were saying?...about technology creating more jobs than it destroys??]
   Meanwhile, delivery of the average first-class item took 1.91 days in a 12-week period ended May 16, compared with 1.96 days a year earlier. The agency also has boosted the number of locations outside its network that sell stamps or basic services to about 25,000.
   In addition to reducing the hours of operation at some post offices, often by an hour or two a day, the USPS has recently closed or will soon close 566 post offices [POs] across the country where service already was suspended.... The USPS still can't close POs simply for operating at a deficit. While 75% of the nation's 27,698 POs are in the red, even the specter of closings raises a ruckus in Congress....

3. Brazil said it freed 800 slave workers, news blurb, WSJ, front page.
   ...on a coffee plantation in Bahia, the largest single emancipation since 1995. Lula [prez?] vows to expand the effort.
   [That introduces a workweek cap on the unlimited slave workweek of 800 people, and positions it wherever Brazil currently defines the weekly start of 'overtime.']