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Timesizing News, Sept.10-17, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

9/17/2003  primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope - there seems to be a sudden drought in the worktime-related stories this week, after a flood all summer, so we reach into the barrel of past articles that we somehow missed -

• (9/15) Congress gives labor rare victories, by Leigh Strope, AP 09/14/03 08:04 EDT via AOLNews.
  WASHINGTON - Some Congressional Republicans, skittish about the political fallout from an economy hemorrhaging jobs, turned back administration proposals to rein in overtime pay, shift government work to the private sector and allow pension changes that cut benefits for older employees. The defections in the GOP-controlled Congress gave organized labor rare victories last week on packetbook issues.
  [Not a bad idea if they want any consumer base left.]
  
  • ...Six Republicans [bless'em!] split with the administration on the vote, including three - Sens. Arlen Specter of Pa., Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Col. [native American nation], andn Lisa Murkowski of Alaska - who are on the ballot in 2004.
  • The other three were Sens. Lincoln Chafee of R.I, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Ted Stevens of Alaska.
    [With a name like Olympia Snowe, she should trade districts with the Alaska senator!]
  Campbell said he voted with Democrats because he did not want to deny overtime pay to hardworking people who relied on it..."to actually make the payment on the house or to buy the insurance policy they need for the kids."
  [Nobody should rely on overtime pay, because that means the overtime is chronic instead of just for a temporary emergency, and while you're hogging a full-time job plus overtime, the guy next door is about to lose his house because there isn't enough work - in rigid blocks of 40 hours a week - for him.]
  ..\..The votes against the [changed] regulations on overtime pay, government outsourcing and retirement plans are not the final word because...in the House, a vote to block the [revised OT] rules narrowly failed \so\ the House and Senate must resolve differences...while facing a veto threat by Bush..\.. Still, the votes represent a growing uneasiness about the job market and the economy's potential impact on next year's election. Few lawmakers want to be seen now as trying to take money or jobs from Americans.
  [Too late.]
  Since pResident Bush took office, the economy has lost more than 3 million jobs [official, low-balled], and the unemployment rate - 6.1% in August [ official, low-balled] - has climbed more than 2%. Despite "signs" [our quotes] of a strengthened economy, layoffs continue and companies are not hiring.
  "It is not possible for you to talk about jobs too much," Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio, wrote GOP House members [in a memo].
  [She must have heard some of what her Ohio colleague, presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, has been saying.]
  "I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to communicate that job creation is our top priority," said Pryce, the GOP's 4th-ranking House member.
  [Lucky 4! Hey, the native Americans liked it because of the four directions. We like it because of the Fourth Person of the Trinity, the Spirit of Humor. The Third, the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, comes to us in our Weltschmerz and comforts us with tears. The Fourth, the Holy Humorist, comes to us in our tears, points from a detached location at the corner of the ceiling, and exclaims, "How tragic! How utterly tragic! How ridiculously tragic! How funny!" And changes our tears, first to chuckelsnorts, then laughs, then loud guffaws, then back to wails, then back to laughs, then alternating current.]
  ..."We have now some of the worst economic conditions that we have seen in years in this country," said Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. "Levels of unemployment continue to climb, so much so that many workers have simply given up looking for work. Why are we telling those who have work at this time that they should get less for what they do? Why are we telling these folks they have to take a pay cut?
  The administration said its proposal to update the decades-old rules would cut overtime pay for only 644,000 well-compensated workers, while making eligible or raising the pay of more than a million [1.3m] low-income workers.
  [That's because they raised the dollar amount at which all jobs had to be paid overtime - when they should have raised it right to the top. No economy can talk about "efficiency" when a huge part of their workforce is not time-accountable. No nation can talk about "freedom" when they disparage the most basic freedom, free time.]
  A study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal thinktank, says 8 million workers would lose their overtime eligibility.
  [And let's see. 1m more eligible workers at the bottom minus 8m newly ineligible workers at the top makes 7m newly ineligible workers and another blow to domestic consumer markets.]
  ...Also last week, 26 House Republicans joined with Democrats on a vote to block...speed[ing] up competition for government jobs. Bush wants to open 850,000 federal jobs to the private sector.
  [Is this makework or killwork?]
  ...Further, 65 House Republicans crossed over to approve an amendment that would prevent the Treasury Dept. from issuing final regulations on cash balance pension plans. Companies have converted their traditional [fixed-benefit] pension plans to cash balance plans, which often cut expected benefits for older workers nearing retirement. Treasury's proposal last year said cash balance plans would not be subject to age discrimination rules [regardless of theft from older workers].
  [And here's a related headline from last week -]
  (9/11) Retailers outraged by Senate overtime vote, by *National Retail Federation [NRF] via PRNewswire 09/10/2003 12:!4 EDT via AOLNews.
  ...The Senate voted 54-45 to approve an amendment by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, that bars DOL [Dept. of Labor] from implementing the update of Fair Labor Standards Act "white collar" rules. The amendment became part of the DOL funding bill.
  "This vote will leave employers trying to shoehorn 21st century jobs like computer programmer into Cold War job titles like keypunch operator"..\..NRF Pres. and CEO Tracy Mullin said....
  [He's right, but the solution is not to continue for the gov't to continue micromanaging an artificial distinction but just to apply what weak and ambivalent overtime disincentives we have TO ALL JOBS, from bottom to top, so we can spread the vanishing work and rev up our consumer base. See Timesizing Phase Two and Phase Three.]
  "The 50-year old overtime regulations that are currently on the books are vague, confusing and totally outdated. It is extremely difficult for an employer to determine whether a worker should receive overtime,
  [And employers should be occupied with allocating the workload into 40-hour packages and doing whatever cross-training or training&hiring that requires, but not obsessing about how to avoid paying extra for overworking some employees.]
  and the result has been an explosion of litigation from disputed decisions."...
  [Makework alert - see category #1.]

1. Family-leave advocates look to Canada for generous model, WSJ, B12.
   [Of course, in an age of phenomenal global overpopulation, it would be smarter to just cut the workweek for everyone instead of subsidizing reproduction by cutting the workyear just for parents. Let's stick to copying the Canucks' universal healthcare system.]

2. Southwest Airlines seeks mediation in talks with attendants, by Melanie Trottman, WSJ, A8.
   DALLAS -...Meanwhile, flight attendants began running ads over the weekend that read, "Working for free... Isn't that just plane nuts?" ...Southwest flight attendants are among the most productive in the airline industry. In the ads, the union says its members are required to clean planes and do other tasks without pay. Since February, groups of Southwest flight attendants have [been] calling attention to tasks they say they must perform without pay....
   [Number one in restoring employees' power balance with employers is definitely to stop 'giving it away.']

1. 9/14   editorial cartoon, by Wasserman, Boston Globe, D10.
   [2 suits, 4 frames -]
   
   1. [suit reading newspaper -] "A minimum wage employee needs to work over 100 hours...
   2. ...per week to afford the rent on an average apartment!"
   3. [suit wearing glasses, pointing -] "Just a couple more hours at the workplace...
   4. [& holding hands up in triumphant conclusion -] ...and they wouldn't need an apartment!"
   [and with 102-168 hours work per week and board, they wouldn't money, all of which proves again that the direction fixed-workweek, downsize-on-a-dime economics is going is a return to slavery in America. The opposite of slavery is shorter hours, and the most gradual, market-oriented approach to shorter working hours is the 5-phase Timesizing Full-Employment Program.]

2. 9/13   Ala. officials predict budget cut woes, by Phillip Rawls, AP 09/12/03 09:14 EDT via AOLNews.
   MONTGOMERY, Ala. - State officials whose pleas for a tax increase were soundly rejected by voters [hey at least they're deciding by the futuristic direct democracy of referendums] are offering grim predictions about the budget-cutting consequences, including an increase in crime and traffic deaths. At news conferences Thursday [9/11], officials said the cuts Gov. Bob Riley will formally propose Monday will hurt health care and education and lead to more crime and car accidents because state trooper patrols will be reduced as parole is stepped up for nonviolent inmates....
   [Oh c'mon! Just switch from slush-fundy taxes to specific fees for service.]
   Additional budget cuts to be proposed include switching state troopers to a four-day work week [and] curtailing their overtime....
   [Every state and corporation should be doing that anyway, and with every job category, not just police/guards.]

3. 9/13   Love in the aisles as supermarket dating hits Paris, Reuters 09/12/03 11:16 ET via AOLNews.
   PARIS - Supermarket dating, where singles can check each other out via the contents of their trolleys [American: supermkt carts], flirt while weighing vegetables and even walk down the aisles together [hoho], is coming to Paris.... Paris, home to around 900,000 singles, many of whom are increasingly working hours as long as in London and New York, has already been introduced to speed dating and online dating.
   [Sounds like a situation similar to America, where our grandparents gave us the weekend and our kids are giving it back. In France, the left-center gov't gave them the 35-hour workweek in 2000-2001, and now the kids are giving it back. So they may have more carefully chosen dates, but they'll have less time for dating. Brilliant. This is the result of bad design of the overtime and maximum workweek legislation. Timesizing has a good design in Phases Two, Three, and Four.]
   ..\..Lafayette Gourmet, the food hall at the Galeries Lafayettes department store in Paris, is about to unleash the [supermkt dating] concept on the worldwide capital of romance. Single shoppers will be identified Thursday evenings by special purple shopping baskets [purple for passion?] decorated with a cartoon of a kissing couple, and offered a glass of champagne and a free photograph in hooking up with a potential mate.... The "dating market" shopping evenings, an idea imported from the Netherlands, will be jointly run from Oct. 2 with Yahoo!, which already has an online dating service in France....

4. 9/15   Feature - Ranks of jobless pose challenge to Brazil's Lula, by Angus MacSwan [God, there's a name for you!], Reuters 09/14/03 13:41 ET via AOLNews.
   SAO PAULO...- In his campaign for the presidency, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva pledged to create 10 million jobs for Brazilians in four years.... The veteran leftist [mng?] was elected with the support of many Brazilians who want to see social change in a country where flashy wealth and miserable poverty exist side by side.... "Creating jobs for everyone is a dream, an obsession, and the determination of my government,"
   [so drop the strained dream of job creation and ease into work sharing as demonstrated by VW/Brazil - see below]
   Lula, a former machinist who began his political career fighting for worker's rights [guess that's the mng of 'veteran leftist'], reassured Brazilians in a recent speech.... But the official figures paint a grim picture..\.. Brazil's ranks of unemployed have grown this year, presenting Lula with a challenge that, in part, will define his presidency.... So far, Lula has followed market-prescribed policies to nurse the economy back to health rather than throw money the country does not have at social problems....
   [Can we get more accurate and switch to "economic problems" here?! And with the kind of approach VW/Brazil is taking, you have an alternative to "throwing money at problems" -]
   Volkswagen tried to lay off 4,000 workers in August, but put plans on hold after the union stepped in. Overtime bans and reduced working weeks are in force in many factories.
   [There's your solution right there. A big part of the problem is continuing layoffs. If overtime bans and reduced working weeks can put layoff plans on hold, they can also quickly create jobs. Iin 1932, Republican Pres. Herbert Hoover called shorter workhours the quickest way to create more jobs and he saved 100,000s of jobs in the early Depression by cutting hours for postal employees (Hunnicutt "Work Without End," 149). The USA (1938-40, 19-15%) and France (1997-2001, 13-9%) both achieved a 1% cut in unemployment for each of 4 hours they cut from their nationwide workweeks. We've tried everything else. Let's quit fighting it and do the obvious = share the vanishing work!]
   ..\..Unemployment in July was 12.8%, slightly down from 13% the previous month, but still higher than 11.9% in July 2002. Some 2.6 million people were looking for jobs in six metropolitan areas, with 18.3m employed.
   [2.6/(2.6+18.3)= 12.4! Rounding must have really messed this up. And 2.6+18.3= 20.9m only accounts for a tiny fraction of Brazil's total population, which was 168.1m back in 1999, according to The Economist's Pocket World in Figures 2002 Edition.]
   ...The unemployment figures only hint at the scale of the issue. Armies of Brazilians work in the informal economy - in seasonal work on sugar plantations, scavenging for discarded cardboard or tins, or selling cheap items on the streets. "We have about 60m workers. Less than one-third have work papers"..\..said Christian Lohbauer of the Federation of Industries for the State of Sao Paulo (FIESP) lobbying group.... "Even in cities, millions and millions are not registered to work, so unemployment figures can't be compared to Germany or France."
   [Compare the over-rosy U.S. unemployment figures.]
   Many factories keep their workers off official books, to avoid paying the heavy taxes demanded of industry..\.. Critics say sky-high interest rates have stifled growth. GDP for Q2 fell 1.6%, knocking Brazil into recession.
   [With "millions and millions" not even registered to work, Brazil is a prime example of the phoniness of recession tracking. The truth is, Brazil is and has been in a deep deep depression for decades, and the US has been in depression for 30 years. High corporate taxes and high interest rates to squelch hyper-inflation certainly don't help the economy, so high corporate taxes should be replaced with temporary, steeply graduated income taxes to get that income quickly out of storage and into circulation until Timesizing can gain traction, and the rate-manipulation approach to hyperflation control should be replaced by inflationary/deflationary incentive balancing as outlined in Phase Two and Phase Three of the Timesizing Full Employment Program.]
   ...While waiting for its economic policies [what economic policies??] to bear fruit, the government in June launched an initiative called "First Job." The program gives companies and small businesses a cash incentive to hire young people while they carry on studying. It hopes to reach about one million youth....
   [Pathetic. Cut the ageism and just trim the workweek for everyone. Reinvest corporate overtime profits and individual overwork earnings in OJT (on the job training) and hiring, and maximize the vanishing work by sharing it and thereby centrifuging the national income, thus maximizing your domestic demand. It's not all that difficult or complicated. "It ain't rocket science" - which is probably why mainstream economists fight it so tenaciously - like lawyers, they depend on problems for their jobs.]

• [bonus]
  9/13   Outlook for living to healthy old age improving, by Patricia Reaney, Reuters 09/12/03 08:57 ET via AOLNews.
  MANCHESTER, England...- More people are living to a healthier old age with fewer disabilities and the trend is likely to continue...said Prof. Raymond Tallis of the University of Manchester. Life expectancy at birth has risen by 4.7 years for men and 3.5 years for women in the last two decades of the 20th century, he added, and the perception of the elderly as a burden to society is very different from the reality.
  [That's good, because due to the erosion of American pensions, more of them are having to find jobs.]
  ..."An aged body is one that can't withstand much in the way of illness so if you postpone chronic, disabling diseases you will live longer and die shorter. You will spend a longer time living and a shorter time dying," he said.
  [Whadda concept!]
  So rather than suffering from ill health in the finat 8 or more years of life, medical experts hope to compress illness to a very short time span.... People will still get old, and eventually die, but Tallis said the gap between the onset of disability and death will get shorter.
  [John Ritter sure had the 'shorter time dying' on Friday, but at age 54, he didn't really have the 'longer time living.']

1. Volvo, NYT, C3.
   ...Gothenburg, Sweden, the maker of heavy trucks, halted production for two weeks at a factory in Allentown, Pa., because of low demand.
   [Cutting worktime, not workforce!]

2. New physician training requirement are spurring medical educators to teach and assess competencies; Challenges outlined at national conference hosted by Tufts Health Care Institute, Business Wire 09/11/2003 09:00 Eastern via AOLNews.
   BOSTON -...Said Dr. Hershey Bell...VP for medical education and quality [what a laugh!] at the Harnot Medical Center, Erie PA..."The challenge for us training the next generation of doctors is to help them become excellent diagnosticians who know how to use all available resources to improve health outcomes. It means we have to teach more in the same or less time, and it means residents have to learn more in less time, since they are now limited to 80 hours per week."...
   [These people are so out of it. They know nothing about health or learning. They "strain out gnats and swallow camels." They are "white-washed tombs."]

1. Analysis - Euro zone work-life trend hangs in the balance, by Alister Bull, Reuters 09/10/03 11:13 ET via AOLNews.
   FRANKFURT...- Looking for a better work-life balance? Don't expect the euro zone to keep delivering.
   [True, there are some backward trends, as usual in social evolution. But there are also some continuing forward pressures: see yesterday #1, and see "Clocking off - British workers are rebelling against long hours in the office," 7/19/2003 The Economist, 43, which colleague Kate just discovered as she plows through, trying to erode her pile of unread Economists, so we don't yet have it excerpted and commented yet.]
   France now challenges Germany as the leisure park of Europe, which was how former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl once branded his holiday-mad nation, but economic stagnation is forcing both governments to debate raising, not cutting hours worked.
   [That's like the Typhoid Mary's of international aid, the IMF and the World Bank, requiring countries that need more domestic consumer spending to go on a belt-tightening campaign - it's exactly the opposite of what is needed is will quickly result in changing stagnation into deeper deterioration.]
   ...The fact that Americans work longer hours with fewer holidays than in continental Europe is one of the big reasons why, on a per capita basis, they are a third more wealthy.
   [Americans a third more wealthy when Europe has only a tiny fraction of U.S. disability (5.7m), homeless (600k), and incarceration (2.2m)? - when Europe's income gap is still much less than the U.S. CEOs getting some 400-500 times what the average employee is paid, and therefore they have a lot stronger consumer base - which is 2/3 of the economy, that the U.S., and they're avoiding the threat of ultimate concentration, meaning, it doesn't matter how much money an economy has in absolute terms, if 99% of that money is concentrated in the hands of 1% of the population, the consumer base is going to be so small that the economy will be deep in the Third World. Of course, the wealthy will not have a lot of security in that situation, but they will have a lot of money, and that is reflected in the blindered thinking of those who are doing the criticizing in Europe today, for example -]
   ..\.."Our labor ethics are a disaster. We are a country of holidaymakers," said Reinhard Kuenstler, chairman of Jaguar and Landrover Germany, units of car giant Ford.
   [A presentday CEO talking about ethics? Criticizing holidays when that's the whole basis on which they sold new technology to people - the basis of making life better and easier for everyone? What a joke.]
   ...Over here, the fight for a better work-life balance has seen the number of hours worked fall steadily from the 1970s until it stabilised in the last decade. Times have changed. Ageing populations are now forcing both France and Germany, both still very rich nations on any measure you like, to overhaul their generous welfare-state safety nets.
   [The more they overhaul in terms of curtail, the less of a consumer base they'll have and the deeper their slump will get. They need to leave their safety nets alone and activate more of their effective domestic demand, by centrifuging income, by drawing more of their high unemployment into the labor market, by inducing more private sector jobs, by redesigning the 35-40 hour workweek to be a genuine maximum and not rather a minimum, and squeezing out the limited and even vanishing private-sector employment on more people.]
   Workers are being told that they must stay in their jobs for longer to qualify for a full state pension and the same goes for a working week, which firms say is a luxury that costs jobs.
   [Au contraire, a longer workweek costs jobs, and markets, as in Third World sweatshops, and slavery. The USA and the world cut the workweek from 80-84 hours in the early 1800s to 40 hrs/wk in the middle and late 1900s and by cutting it half, doubled the number of jobs. Of course, efficient worksaving technological was working in the other direction.]
   Germans on average worked 37½ hours a week last year but have been overtaken by the French, who have lowered the legal working week to 35 from 39 hours.
   "France is now champion of the amusement park [or rather, of leisure industries in general]," said David Tiergeist, a labour specialist [and management propagandist] at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Developement [OECD] in Paris.
   [How strained the attempt to blacken more free time, as if longer working hours are progress, rather than shorter. What, then, is the point of new technology, Mr. "Animal ghost" Tiergeist? Or perhaps you just can't cede control over their lives to ordinary people? So much for your lip service to "freedom."]
   But, taking account of Germany's longer holidays (six weeks a year plus 10 days' worth of public holidays), the total number of hours worked in 2002 was 1,444 versus 1,545 in France, according to the International Labour Office in Geneva.
   Compare that to the United States, which averaged 1,825 hours. Or South Korea, where the world's hardest workers racked up a [whopping] 2,447 hours each last year.
   [And which just a couple of weeks ago came down from a 44 to a 40-hour workweek. Presumably reporter Alister Bull would be ecstatic if we could just go back to 80 hours a week or what the hay, why not work all 168 hours a week?!]
   No surprise then that French and German politicians [aligned with nearsighted CEOs] have suggested giving up a public holiday in the national interest with German firms campaigning for a return to the 38 hour week.
   SQUEEZING LABOUR
   Is this just big business taking advantage of high and rising unemployment to squeeze concessions from labour [and damage their consumer markets further]
   [yes]
   and how much difference can a few hours make?
   [In both the U.S. 1938-40 and French 1997-2001 experience, each one-hour cut in the workweek resulted in a one-hour cut in the unemployment rate and a surge in effective demand, especially for leisure industries including bookshops, health clubs, and tourism. And there was more time for family, as in "family values."]
   Taking the example of France, where hours were actually reduced to 35 from 39 per week under law, the evidence is mixed.
   [Only to those who haven't noticed that the 12.6% unemployment of 1997 declined to 8.7% in 2001, before the U.S.-led recession began to take the French economy down, the last to succumb in the EU except for subsidized Eire, and French unemployment up.]
   Trade-offs accompanied the change to encourage flexibility, so firms wanting to make use of busy and slack times now have workers clock up more hours in peak periods, idling them when demand tapers off, so long as the annual average was respected.
   [In short, the aggregate-level annual worktime reduction freed up employers to become more efficient. What's "mixed" about that evidence? It is unmixedly positive.]
   It was also sweetened with cuts in social charges and this, the OECD reckons, could have created up to 200,000 new jobs in France in the years after the first part of the law went into effect in 2000 [although many companies cut hours in anticipation prior to 2000].
   [Naturally you save money on social charges for unemployment when you cut from 12.6% to 8.7% unemployment. Naturally you can lower unemployment taxes when you have 3.9/12.6= 31% less unemployed people to pay for.]
   But these are very hard to separate from cyclical effects of the stronger growth during 2000.
   [After troughing at 12.6% in 1H97, France's unemployment rate had already begun to come down in response to the Robien Law of 1996, which offered French firms taxcuts in return for hourscuts on a voluntary basis. Do cyclical effects of 2000 explain that?]
   Plus, the longer-term impact of working less is not good for French growth potential because the number of hours worked in an economy, together with the level of productivity, are the ingredients that determine the long-term ability to expand. [This guy's head is still firmly in the 18th century. In the age of robotics, the number of manhours worked in an economy pales into insignificance beside the number and type of automata and robots deployed in fields, factories and offices, machines that are amplifying human productivity arithmetically and in some cases, exponentially. As Jeremy Rifkin pointed out in 1995 (The End of Work), hard work is dead in the developed world. For godsake, Alister Bull, wake up and smell the coffee! And as for productivity regardless of marketability, get real. Guess you got your paperthin thinking from the OECD -]
   "Is adding hours good in the medium term for the French economy? It is definitely good policy, because it increases the economy's ability to produce the goods," said Andrew Burns, head of the OECD's French desk.
   [That's like saying more unemployment is good in the medium term for the French economy - more employment concentrated on fewer people traded for the economy's ability to produce more goods - that now have weaker markets. Brilliant! When are mainstream economists going to think this through?!]
   "(This) will increase incomes and provide the necessary tax revenues to help finance the challenges of supporting an ageing population," he said.
   [Fatuous git! Longer hours per person produce more unemployment produces bigger labor surplus results in decreased wages and incomes as in s-w-e-a-t-s-h-o-p, not increased incomes. And not only will the decreased incomes mean lower tax revenues but the higher unemployment will eat up more tax revenues as well. Can't you guys connect the dots?! And as for supporting an ageing population, it doesn't matter how few manhours you have if you cut the manhours per person (ie: the workweek) so you can employ your whole potential workforce at good wages, and as mentioned, it doesn't matter how few manhours you have if each one of them is amplified massively by robotics. It's a new world out there, guys. Wakey wakey!]
   GERMAN MASOCHISM
   [Advocating longer working hours, Alister Bull must know all there is to know about masochism!]
   At the level of individual companies, the key is marginal labour costs
   [No, the primary key is MARKETS, as in customers, consumers, purchasers, buyers, sales, revenues.... Marginal labour costs are secondary.]
   and in export-oriented Germany,
   [At 15% of GDP max, Germany is still solidly oriented to domestic demand, home-based consumption. All this crap about everyone being "export-oriented" and therefore DRIVEN by competition with the low wages and louzy labor conditions of India and China is just scary manipulation by shortsighted CEOs (and their gulls like our Bull-y boy) - who are playing the float between making stuff in low-wage small-market places like China and selling it in high-wage big-market places like USA - before those big markets collapse for lack of high-wage jobs which said CEOs have blindly been outsourcing to the low-wage places.]
   where labour is the second highest in the world after Norway
   [and that means their conversion of national income into domestic consumer markets is the second most efficient in the world and if they mess with it by lengthening the workweek and concentrating employment and wages on fewer heads of consumer households, they will as rapidly TANK as Japan when it traded its traditional lifetime employment for US-style downsizing.]
   but unemployment could reach five million this year,
   [that just means they need to fluctuate that workweek slowly further down to employ those 5m people - the absorption of the unemployed into the active workforce will create a perceived labor shortage and harness market forces to raise hourly wages so that incomes remain steady or actually rise, and the addition of 5m confident consumers will do wonders for domestic demand]
   this [marginal labour costs] is a huge issue.
   [We exploded this myth above.]
   "It is the duty of every government that you have a world-competitive labour market," said Stefan Krause, finance chief and board member of BMW AG.
   [Give us a break! An executive for a LUXURY car company talking about competitive prices? This amounts to stating that it is the duty of every government, democratic or not, to drag their citizens into a race to the bottom against the likes of India and China and Mexico and eastern Europe. We disagree. Rather it is the duty of every government to build a strong enough domestic consumer base so that they can dismiss all these scare tactics about globalization and sweatshop competition with which insulated, isolated and shortsighted CEOs and their agents in the IMF and the World Bank are naively ruining one country after another by work&income&wealth concentration - and spending diminution - and while they're at it, dismiss all the wealthy's self-absorbed assumptions that "it's all about investment." Investment rests on profits rest on sales rest on purchasers rest on employees depend on jobs depends, in an automating world, on divvying up the vanishing manhours - and junking the obsolete crap about Lump of Labor Fallacy and 'technology creates more jobs than it destroys.' Timesizing is bidirectional, and if technology really does create more work (qualitative tech actually does but it's in the minority relative to quantity-amplifying tech), the workweek can slowly relengthen. We don't anticipate that happening in the foreseeable future with more technology and immigrants flooding in.]
   "We have an unemployment issue in Germany [well that's a change of tune!]
   and any good idea to help companies stay here and generate employment is definitely helpful.
   [that would be Timesizing - in short, embrace your 'horror' - shorter workweeks - and put everyone to work (and to confident consumption!)]
   The bottom line is that we have to be competitive," he [Krause] tolk Reuters in an interview. [Oops, he slipped back. Krause clearly doesn't realize he can't be competitive with Third World countries unless he's willing to accept astronomical Third World unemployment levels. And he doesn't realize he can't generate employment and lower unemployment when his top priority is being competitive with desperate millions in poverty. He's dealing with a flawed deck - too many partitions and gaps in his thinking and too many jokers filling those gaps.]
   Manufacturing accounts for a vital third of the German output. But critics of this argument [what, mfg for export?] claim the real challenge lies in improving the remaining two thirds of the economy, the services sector, where growth has lagged other rich nations.
   [Oh yeah, step right into the low-wage services world of McDonald's and Wal-Mart and prison guards, and the high-wage services world of high-tech jobs flying to Bombay!]
   This means [that] boosting employment in the export sector [would] not solve the wider problems of rules and regulations that prevent the service sector from flourishing as it does elsewhere.
   [Germany will only be able to remove constraints on layoffs without ruination when it implements an aggregate-level safety net in the form of automatic adjustment of the workweek against unemployment, i.e., sharing and spreading the vanishing human employment, i.e., Timesizing.]
   "Germans are fixated [on] wage costs and export-competitiveness [so are CEOs everywhere!] but the real problem is the service sector, which is not creating jobs [as everyone expected it to]," said John Morley, a labour expert and senior officer at the European Commission in Brussels.
   [At last, a guy who has a couple of gray cells to rub together!]
   "It's the old masochistic German way of thinking - always tightening the belt. What about getting more people into work, not selling more things to non-Germans," he said.
   [Amen amen amen! At least Alister Bull gave the last word to someone with some common sense.]

2. IG Metall eyes big pay rise, tough fight likely, by Katie Allen, Reuters 09/10/03 11:33 ET via AOLNews.
   [Going for higher pay before you've got market forces on your side by reducing workweeks and absorbing the unemployed is a constant labor error of impatience, selfishness (uncaring about the unemployed), and short-sightedness.]
   BERLIN...- Germany's IG Metall trade union has signalled strong pay demands in the next wage round but analysts say the union, weakened by membership loss and infighting, won't repeat last year's 6.5% claim.
   [Oh no? Does this sound like they've learned anything -]
   Despite a failed strike [it did not fail for steelworkers] and damaging leadership battle this year, the engineering and metalworkers' union which represents some 2.6m workers said on Wednesday it saw no erason for modest demands when the sector-wide deal expires in December. Referring to an abortive east German strike and a campaign by the opposition conservatives to loosen the system of industry-wide pay bargaining that is the bedrock of union power [whereas its bedrock should be reduced-workweek-borne low unemployment - note however that the UAW in the US is finally adopting the industrywide bargaining system; see "Big 3 and union said to be near one deal for all," 9/12/2003 NYT, C1], new IG Metall chief Juergen Peters told Handelsblatt newspaper: "I don't think my colleagues see those factors as a reason to hold back." [However,] Peter[s] has been tarnished because he led the June strike in eastern Germany for shorter working hours which the union was forced to abandon after protests from businesses and the government that it was threatening the region's weak economy....
   [This union needs to educate itself about the shorter worktime imperative, and then mount a massive campaign to educate the public about the shorter worktime imperative. Meanwhile, their big ideas about immodest and not-held-back pay demands are likely to meet with the same treatment from the gov't and public as their recent 'abortive strike'.]
   ..."The union is amazingly out of touch with reality," said Thomas Mayer, Chief European Economist at Deutsche Bank Global Markets in London. "If they get the same result as last year [a 4% raise in June/2002 and a further 3.1% in June/2003] then more jobs will be lost"..\.. Many small businesses hit hard by the economic slowdown said the last deal was too expensive and blamed it for layoffs and weak growth....
   [The tragedy is that Mayer and German business is also amazingly out of touch with reality. The more they starve their employees in the name of competitiveness with the Third World, the more they shrink their consumer base to Third World levels, meaning no domestic consumer base and 100% export dependency - at a time when every other time-blind economy in the world is approaching 100% export dependency.]

3. [speaking of which -]
   Exports boost German trade surplus in July, by Clifford Noonan, Reuters 09/10/03 08:52 ET via AOLNews.
   BERLIN...- Germany's trade surplus with the rest of the world widened in July to 14.1B euros from 10.4B euros in June, as the weaker euro boosted exports from Europe's biggest economy.... German exports had been hit by the strength of the euro against the dollar, which makes German goods more expensive abroad, but the weakening of the euro against the greenback [U$] in recent months has helped exporters. Commerzbank said that a strike in the engineering sector in June over working hours in firms in the former East Germany may have skewed the month on month comparison somewhat while August would probably be worse because of summer holidays.
   [Here's a novel argument against strikes - "they skew our stats!"]
   ..\..The head of Germany's BGA trade association, Anton Boemer, said in a statement: "Exports is one of the few sectors of the German economy that is still generating growth."...
   [So the export "deus ex machina" is still working - at least for now.]

4. Feature - Militant Korean unions rattle foreign investors, by Judy Lee, Reuters 09/10/03 21:36 ET via AOLNews.
   [So what - S. Korea's got enough home-grown investors. Investors are so insulated and isolated, they think it's all about them, but though they control the media, investment rests on marketable productivity which rests on markets which rest on consumers which rest on employment.]
   ...This month, 30,000 truck drivers called off a two-week strike after the government agreed to hold more talks on improving working conditions.... Hyundai Motor Co recently caved in to union demands for an 8.6% wage rise and other benefits to end 47 days of strikes....
   [including a companywide 40-hour workweek, down from 44, several months ahead of the nationwide 40-hour workweek enacted last week.]
   South Korean unions say they push for more benefits because the social safety net is not as comprehensive as in other industrialised countries. They also point out that labour costs account for only 10% of total production costs and many big companies are still capable of paying high salaries.
   [Yep, at least to top executives!]
   ...Analysts say the new centre-left government has...given too much ground to labour, \and\ Pres. Roh Moo-hyun...a former labour lawyer \who\ took office in February on the back of strong support from blue-collar workers and a reform-minded younger generation...has at times intervened in disputes to ensure union demands are met.
   [But in S. Korea, with China right next door, any ground given to labor beyond slavery is "too much" -]
   In stark contrast, [in] neighboring China...average monthly wages for a manufacturing worker...are only $98, compared with $1,319 in South Korea in 2001, according to data from the Bank of Korea, the central bank.
   [If S.Korea (only 47m population in '99!!) wasn't protecting itself from that madness, it would no longer have jobless rates just around 3% (officially up to 3.2% in May, per "Young, bright and jobless," 6/21/2003 The Economist, 35-36). On the contrary, it too would still be dirt-poor Third-World behind the Philippines (77m) and India (998m) instead of the 3rd largest economy in Asia behind small-population Japan (127m in 99) and huge-population China (1,250m in 99). What's S.Korea doing right? It's centrifuging its national income with high wages for ordinary employees and thereby maintaining a large domestic consumer base relative to that national income. So it's getting a lot more domestic demand-based GDP ($407B in '99) out of its limited national income and very limited population than any other non-city economy in Asia except Japan ($4347B GDP in '99) and Taiwan ($289B in '99, pop 22m). So more meaningful index - GDP per capita: S. Korea 407B/47m= $8,660 and Japan 4347B/127m= $34,228 and Taiwan 289B/22m= $13,136.]
   ..."The government must rethink whether its labour policy is economically rational"..\..said Kim Jae-yun, an economist at Samsung Economic Research Institute....
   [Or maybe Kim and economists in general need to adjust their concept of "rational" before they enroll everyone in their race to the bottom for the sake of "global competitiveness" and get a world-full of under-developed countries with income and wealth astronomically concentrated in the top brackets (with no market-sustained investment targets except?? a pyramid-scheme stock market) and wall-to-wall poverty everywhere else.]
   Meanwhile, foreign companies at times feel they are being pushed into a corner.
   [You don't like it? Then leave. Go set up in $98/month China and see how long before your 100%-export dependent strategy continues before either you ruin your export markets by outsourcing from them, or they wake up in time and regulate your dumping with tariffs.]
   ...Nestle SA locked out staff at its Seoul HQ on Aug. 25 after two months of labour action. It said a string of wage increases had pushed coffee production costs in South Korea above those in Germany.
   [Both S. Korean and German unions need to lay off the market-unsupported wage increases and refocus on market-harnessing unemployment reduction via workweek reduction.]
   Elsewhere, U.S. fibreglass maker Owens Corning narrowly averted closing its factory in the south of the country after a 20-day lockout triggered by labour unrest. Unions accepted a last-minute compromise on working hours and bonuses....
   [Again, forget money until you get the unemployment under control via shorter hours. In fact, forget all the other arrogant demands until you don't have a bunch of desperate unemployed people waiting outside the door eager to do your job for less.]
   "The union demanded they should participate in managerial decisions such as outsourcing and technology development as well as job guarantees," Park Jong-wha [sp?], an Owens Corning manager, told Reuters. "If the company had to accept such demands, it'd better pull out of Korea and go somewhere else."...
   [Again, first you relevel the job market with shorter hours. Only then do you work on the population variables; namely, imports; immigrants (inflow of jobseekers) and their equivalent, outsourcing (outflow of job openings); and births.]

5. The Senate blocked a Bush plan, pointer blurb (to A2), WSJ, front page.
   ...that would make it easier for employers to avoid paying overtime to white-collar workers.
   [Interesting that the conservative Wall Street Journal is no longer trying to conceal this angle. Here's the main article headline -]
   Senate votes down overtime plan - Bush rules would ease way to avoid extra wages for white-collar staffers, WSJ, A2.
   [and the Times headline -]
   Senate Democrats block new rules on overtime, NYT, front page.
   [or the Reuters version -]
   U.S. Senate votes to block proposed overtime changes, by Thomas Ferraro with Andrew Clark, Reuters 09/10/03 15:51 ET via AOLNews.
   [Don't get this story of the Senate's defying Bush on overtime confused with Bernie Sanders' victory in the House yesterday over the Bush Treasury's attempt to ease older employees out of defined-benefit pensions - see 9/10/2003 #2 or the story about the Senate caving to the Bush administration's screw-tightening on welfare moms, below.]
   WASHINGTON - A divided US Senate defied a White House veto threat Wednesday and voted to block proposed changes in federal work rules that foes say could deny millions of Americans overtime pay. The Republican-led chamber, on a 54-45 vote, approved a Democratic amendment that would derail a proposed expansion of overtime exemptions for white-collar workers under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act....
   [And if they're "exempted," they do not get premium overtime pay.]
   Six Republicans, including Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens of Alaska, joined 47 Democrats and one independent [Jeffards] in approving the amendment. One 'Dem' [our quotes], Zell Miller of Georgia [naturally from the backward South], joined 44 Republicans in opposing it....
   There is plenty of confusion and debate over how many and what type of workers would be affected by the proposed changes. The [Bush] Labor Dept. estimates no more than 644,000 employees would lose overtime protection. But critics put the figure at between 6 and 10 million.
   [And as we've said before, this administration has such an impressive track record of poisoning anything it touches, that this is not the time to go messing around with controversial stuff.]

6. Bill on changes in welfare advances to full Senate, by Robert Pear, NYT, A16.
   ...Major provisions of the 1996 [welfare 'reform'] law expire on Sept. 30, but Congress could extend them for a few months, as it has done several times in the past year.... Under current law, [welfare] recipients are generally required to work 30 hours a week. Mr. Bush wanted to increase that to 40 hours. The House bill would require 38 hours. Under the Senate bill, most recipients would have to work 34 hours.
   [Anyone vote for 32 and 36 to cover every possibility, counting by 2s, from 30 to 40?]
   The Senate bill also provides up to $1.5B for programs to help low-income people "form and sustain healthy marriages."...
   [Hooboy. And here's the Reuters version -]
   U.S. Senate panel OKs welfare reform bill, by Joanne Kenen, Reuters 09/10/03 18:43 ET via AOLNews.
   WASHINGTON - A Senate panel Wednesday narrowly approved a bill to make welfare recipients work more hours per week, building on the 1996 law that emphasized getting people off welfare and into the workforce. The bill, passed the Senate Finance Committee on an 11-9 party line vote, would increase from 30 to 34 the number of hours welfare participants would have to work or be engaged in approved work-related activities such as attending vocational school. Single parents of children under age 6 would work fewer than 34 hours but still more than they have to now....
   Like the House version of the bill, it would also gradually phase in a requirement that 70% of welfare recipients work, up from 50%.
   [Never mind the lack of jobs for them, and their lack of transportation and training.]
   The House bill would boost the workweek to 40 hours, although states would have some flexibility in defining what constitutes work-related activity for 16 of those hours....
   [If we continue to make it harder for people to earn an honest living, they will continue finding the alternative. And if we continue to make it difficult for people to support themselves despite the overwhelming waves of worksaving technology that we are introducing every year and now, every month, we taxpayers will continue to have to support them, not only the 2.2 million of them in prisons and jails, but the 5.7 million of them who have found their way into the functional extension of the now-capped (at 5 yrs) welfare program, disability.]
   Some [Democrats] oppose introducing more rigorous work requirements at a time of higher unemployment....

7. [bonus]
   Second anniversary of  9-11 shows few flight reductions, OAG says, PRNewswire 09/10/2003 13:54 EDT.
   CHICAGO - ...According to figures published today by OAG, the world's leading source of independent flight information...carriers have reduced U.S. domestic flights by 7% (just over 2000 flights) on Sept. 11, 2003. This is less severe than last year when carriers reduced schedules for the day by 12%.... Worldwide flight schedules for the day are up 2% on Sept.11, as compared to last year, although still down 6% compared to 2001. U.S. domestic flights on 9/11/2003 are up 3% over last year.... Only transpacific flights show a further decrease, of 3%, over last year's anniversary....

1. REPORT - UPDATE 1 - Doctors' on-call time is proper work, EU court says, by Douglas Bakshian & David Milliken, Reuters 09/09/03 09:02 ET via AOLNews.
   LUXEMBOURG/BRUSSELS [huh?] -...Norbert Jaeger, a casualty doctor at a hospital in Kiel, northern Germany, sued his employer for only counting the time he was actually treating patients as full working time..\.. The European Union's [EU's] highest court ruled on Tuesday the time doctors spend on call at hospital should all count as standard working time - even if they can sleep during some of it.... The decision could cost Germany billions of euros and hit healthcare across Europe, officials at the European Commission [EC] in Brussels said.
   "The German government estimates the cost as up to 2B euros ($2.23B), and [the decision] means a requirement of 20,000 extra doctors and nurses," EC health spokeswoman Antonia Mochan said.
   [Well, you idiots should make up your minds - do you want lower unemployment or don't you?! Do you want stronger domestic consumer markets or don't you?!]
   A German doctors' organisation had forecast a lower cost of 1B euros and 15,000 extra medical staff, she added.
   [Whatever. It's more jobs, isn't it?]
   Jaeger said after the ruling that it would lead to shorter hours for doctors and better healthcare for patients.
   [Great, that's exackitally what we want, nicht wahr?]
   "I don't think you want surgery done by doctors who are overtired, who have been working for more than 20 hours [straight]," he said. "We have the ironic situation that I can operate, but afterwards I am not allowed to drive my car."
   [Touché!]
   The EU court ruled the German law conflicted with an EU directive that defines working time as "any period during which the worker is...at the employer's disposal."
   [Or less idiomatically and more definition-robust, "working time is any period during which the worker has turned over control of his time to the employer." This is the famed EU "working time directive."]
   German employment law [by contrast] distinguishes between "readiness for work," which is paid at full rate and subject to the tightest rules on working hours, and "on call service" which is not.
   [But don't you have to be instantly "ready for work" if you're "on call"? The distinction is imaginary.]
   The Court of Justice in Luxembourg said Jaeger's night shifts should count as "readiness for work" because he had to spend them at the hospital. "A doctor (on call at hospital)...is subject to appreciably greater constraints than a doctor on stand-by [at home] since he has to remain apart from his family and social environment and has less freedom to manage [or 'control'!] his time," the Court said in a statement. It did not make a difference that the hospital provided a bed for Jaeger to sleep in when he was not needed.
   [The quintessence of "work" is control. Who has it, the person or the employer?]
   ...The case was referred to the EU Court of Justice [in Luxembourg] by the labour court in the [north] German state of Schleswig-Holstein.
   [Thus rocketing Herr Norbert Jäger into the history books.]
   ..\..The EC [i]s reviewing the impact of the working time directive,
   [Why? Too short-term expensive to do it right?]
   and [will] produce a report by the end of the year....

2. SHRM fights myths surrounding proposed changes to FLSA regulations, PRNewswire 09/09/2003 18:54 EDT via AOLNews.
   ALEXANDRIA, Va...- The Society for HR Management (SHRM) [yester]day said negative myths surrounding the Dept. of Labor's efforts to 'update' [our quotes] the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulations are jeopardizing lower-salaried workers' opportunities to receive overtime pay.
   [Well, now we know who the HR department is really advocating for, and it seems to be the Bush Dept. of Labor. Not for nothing did Scott Adams call Dilbert's HR rep, "Catbert, the evil HR director." When a paw of the administration has to put out a PRNewswire press release to characterize the opposition's views as five myths, it does not seem to be a good administration under which to be passing labor reforms or updates - because it has zero credibility. The job of this Congress is to curtail the damage of the small group of extremists who have seized the U.S. Executive Branch, and until they do that, instead of sitting compliant for a new outrage every week and now almost every day, such as 93,000 jobs lost in August and then $87B for the unnecessary Iraq war (never mind how are we going to pay for social security 25 years from now with fewer workers, how are we going to pay for this criminal war next month with fewer workers?!), they will get no cooperation on anything else, because their good intentions, competence, and even sanity will be suspect.]