Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

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Timesizing News, Sept.18-26, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

9/26/2003  primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope - stories from our AOLNews search jumped suddenly around the beginning of July and dropped around the beginning of September - AOLNews buried its search button a layer deeper, injected a useless in&out of freetime somewhere in that process and changed their search facility to strange&fancy&cluttered, sooo, we tried GoogleNewsSearch and were so overwhelmed with material (& time demands & popups & idiosyncratic printing challenges) that we couldn't begin to complete our whole search routine { work/job(-)sharing, 35-hour(s), work(ing)(-)week/hour(s), reduc(e)/cut(t)/short(er/en)(ed/ing) hours, (over)work(time) }, so we present today the plethora of stories from that search, truncated after "workweek" -

1. Ssangyong 5-day workweek galls creditor, by *Lee Ji-hun, Chosun Ilbo 9/25/2003 17:09 via GoogleNews.
   SOUTH KOREA - Chohung president Choi Dong-Su, whose bank is the main creditor for Ssangyong Motors, said Thursday that Ssangyong should not adopt a five-day workweek without pay cuts, because the automaker has been on the creditors' debt-rescheduling programs.
   The union and management of the firm agreed last week to adopt the shorter workweek [from previous 5½ days/44 hrs].
   [Good idea, considering the government passed it nationwide recently.]

2. Chirac defends EU pact breach as promoting jobs, by Robert Graham & Jo Johnson & George Parker, FT.com 9/25/2003 20:16 via GoogleNews.
   Pres. Jacques Chirac on Thursday defended France's 2004 budget breaching the EU's stability pact, saying it was a deliberate choice to promote growth and jobs.
   [Put this together with a story Graham wrote two days ago, "France looks towards longer week," supposedly showing that the French people are losing their appetite for the 35-hour workweek (econ-design comment: because it jumped too far (4hrs) too fast and it's not adjusting down further to create a wage-raising shortage) So France is poised to back off its world-leading, path-breaking (albeit primitive), market-oriented worksharing experiment and go back to makework in all its big-gov't, big-deficit, big-taxes manifestations. Here's how that article started -]
   France looks towards longer week, by Robert Graham, FT.com 9/23/2003 18:34 via GoogleNews.
   [This should be France looks backwards at longer week.]
   With unemployment rising and wages held down [how? why? more gov't interference?], 36% would like to see the shorter working week suppressed altogether with a return to the former 39 hours.
   [And if this is so great, why stop at 39?? Why not 40 - 44 -48 - 54 - 60 - 70 - 80 - hell, why not all 168 if this is so great?!]
   A further 18% would like to see the measure "temporarily suspended". The poll conducted for L'Expansion [of gov't?!] magazine by CSA, one of the country's main polling organizations [and controlled by near-sighted taxpayer-leaching employers], is the first significant indication of employees' growing dissatisfaction with the 35-hour week. If those wanting to see the measure either suppressed or frozen are taken together, then a majority of 54% are now hostile.
   [The spin begins in earnest, to convince the French populace that they don't like shorter hours and more free time. Pathetic!]
   The cut in the working week to 35 hours from 39 began to be introduced five years ago under Lionel Jospin, the Socialist [oh nooo, Mr. Bill!] premier. France is the sole EU member to have imposed ["forced thru/shoved down throats" etc.] such a ["stupid/horrendous/idiotic"] law....
   [Graham is seething with unspoken venom. He really seems seething with envy/ridicule.]
   The aim was to boost employment, but the precise effects on job creation remain hotly disputed since the law became operative when the economy was enjoying 4% annual [GDP] growth.
   [GDP growth in the age of automation is irrelevant to staff hours growth because it can all be accomplished by machine hours growth or now, even just by robot adjustment in "flexible manufacturing."]
   Tuesday's [9/23's] survey showed 67% felt the 35-hour week was ineffective at combating current rising unemployment.
   [Then simply adjust it down by even just halfanhour-a-year till unemployment responds. This isn't rocket science.]
   At the same time 61% echoed employers' criticisms that the 35-hour penalised French companies.
   [No, it just centrifuges the national income out of the top brackets and into the lower brackets where people actually spend it, thus creating a solid, demand-push boom on a potentially wartime scale without the war. But ironically, greedy gov't-coddled employers scream and whine all the way into this kind of solid boom because they initially have to loosen their grip on their hugely disproportionate share of the national income.]
   An almost equal percentage [ie: 60%?] felt the presence of the legislation was pushing companies to relocate outside of France.
   [OK, let them go and cut off their access to the shorter-hours-borne growth in the French consumer markets that they're no longer contributing to. Can't do tariffs under EU rules? Well, if you can go backward with deficits that you can't do under EU rules, you can certainly go forward with an optimization of national income allocation that you "can't do" under EU rules - if you're the second-biggest economy in the EU and the first-biggest is also breaking the rules (Germany is also deficit-bulging).]
   Another widely reflected criticism held by 68% of those polled was the degree of inequality between those who had switched to the 35-hour week and those still outside.
   [So did the northern United States go back to slavery because of criticism about the degree of inequality between them and the southern States that still had slavery? Nooo, the southern states eventually gave up slavery too. This is a ludicrous 'argument' based on dog-in-the-manger envy/hate, indicating there may have been some pretty leading questions in this "impartial" poll, but it stirred up some information on the French implementation of workweek reduction that we had not seen before -]
   In an initial phase, the shorter working week applied only to large companies.
   [But not to government! Isn't that ridiculous! And they did not introduce this by referendum as the Timesizing program recommends, to make sure the requisite public education and decision-involvement is done. You can't save people if they don't understand it's salvation and/or they don't want to be saved.]
   Those employing 20 people and less did not have to begin considering a cut in working time until 2002, with a progressive introduction through 2005. Small business such as restaurants, bakeries and garages have found especial difficulty in adapting and have simply delayed operating the 35-hour week since they can wait until 2005.
   Under pressure from employers the present centre-right government last year agreed to raise the legal overtime limit to 180 hours a year from 130, removing a big complaint.
   [But vitiating the cut from 39 to 35. The French overtime design is also of primitive design, like USA's, demotivating employers less and less as per-fulltime-employee benefits increment and motivating employees with extra pay. Under Timesizing's Second and Third Phases, voluntary overtime is demotivated for both employers and employees (who must reinvest 100% of overtime profits/pay in OT-targeted training&/orhiring) and mandatory overtime is history, requiring employers to crosstrain to accommodate that discipline and improve their time and workload allocation and management skills, which rapidly become the center and essence of management, as they have been all along in the best companies and economies.]
   But it has acceded to union demands in ensuring the minimum wage rises 11.4% by 2005 to harmonise the different rates of those coming onto the 35-hour week at different times.
   [We'd accept this only as a transition facilitator, because if workweek reduction is done right, you can completely repeal all wage controls. Market forces take care of it all as they respond to the perceived shortage of labor. Employers get disciplined - and the black hole of income in the top brackets gets centrifuged - by rising workforce turnover as employees respond to the greater number of job options. The economy in general becomes happier and more efficient as employers are pushed to respect employees more and improve their own management skills - including interpersonal skills.]
   While the extra leisure time is appreciated, the bulk of employees resent the way wages have been held down by employers to absorb higher costs.
   [This is only a transitional phenomenon in a fluctuating workweek program like Timesizing, where the workweek can and does continue adjusting downward to 34, 33, etc. But in a primitive system like France's which has simply jerked down from one rigid workweek to another (40-39-35), it's a permanent problem because there are never enough love-it-or-leave-it alternative job options for employees with which to discipline employers into sharing the profits from all the new work-saving technology they've been implementing.]
   Big employers have used the introduction of the 35-hour week to impose new work methods and have also offset costs by receiving cuts in their social security contributions.
   [One of the big advantages of timesizing is that it removes employee resistance to more efficient work methods and technologies - because those methods and technologies, if subverted by downsizing from their purpose of making life easier for everyone, are restored to that purpose by an aggregate-level safety net provided by well-designed overtime laws and a workweek that varies inversely with unemployment.]
   These fiscal concessions are increasingly costly and it is is not clear whether they would be prolonged after 2005.
   [The costs of S/S contribution cuts don't matter if they're linked to government cost savings on unemployment benefits when workweek reduction promotes additional hiring. And if that additional hiring hasn't happened yet, it's time to get everyone on board, and that means the government leads the way on the innovation, not lags behind with small companies. In short, France must get serious about full employment through worksharing or rejoin the rest of the world in the great makework&unemployment tailspin. We pick up that relapse trend now in our original, current article -]
   ...The sizeable 17B-euro ($20B) in social security breaks accorded companies adopting measures related to the introduction of the 35-hour week have been brought into the labour ministry budget. So have the various tax revenues contributing to a total of 15B euros towards this employment subsidy.
   [Again, it shouldn't be an employment subsidy. It should just be a rebate of now-unnecessary employer unemployment-insurance contributions.]
   Despite sharp rises in the defence and justice budgets, overall [gov't] spending [in 2004] will be pegged at 2003 levels, totalling 277B euros. Nevertheless, public spending will remain 53.9% of GDP, one of the highest levels in the EU.
   [Then quit subsidizing your wealthy with high unemployment and labor surplus due to a still outdated, overlong workweek.]
   The budget envisages a cut of 4,568 public sector jobs. This is well up on this year's modest 1,200 reduction but a big compromise on the original plan to slash 30,000 jobs.
   [Again, the French government can hardly expect the private sector to respond to workweek reduction with the desired hiring when it itself is responding perversely by firing. The whole French worksharing experiment is turning into an object lesson in how not to do it.]

3. [Here's a related story showing the center-right govt's scapegoating the 35-hour workweek directly for their own inadequacies -]
   France predicts 2004 deficit of 3.6 pct, Agence France-Presse via Expatica/Netherlands 9/25/2003 via GoogleNews.
   PARIS...- The French government...acknowledged that its public deficit would breach euro-zone rules for the third year in a row. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin nonetheless vowed to carry out further reductions in income tax and other charges and pledged to pare back the public deficit to under 3% of output [=GDP?] in 2005, a year earlier than previously indicated.
   [Sounds like Dubya disease manifesting in wild lying about increasing revenues by cutting taxes, or gaining economic prosperity by downsizing employment, e.g., gov't employment - and cutting taxes, probably for the rich.]
   ...Government officials maintained that France would not have breached the 3.0% ceiling if the previous Socialist government had not introduced a 35-hour workweek, saying that the reduction had cut national output by 1%....
   [So, if we're talking about loss of tax revenues on that 1% output cut, didn't that merely have the same effect as Raffarin's planned taxcuts? How come tax revenue cuts are OK when he cuts them, but not OK when the 35-hour workweek cuts them? And if he really thinks 1% more output - regardless of marketability - is the big cure-all, why not just ask all automated and robotized workplaces to increase output by 1-2%. That should more than take care of it. Raffarin is just one more idiot-CEO who thinks you can have growth by downsizing markets -]
   Raffarin on Thursday [9/25] insisted that his administration was determined to rein in spending....
   [And spending, chillun, equals markets.]

4. [some shorter-hours potential astir in Puerto Rico?]
   Thumbs up or thumbs down? - Legislative scorecard: The performance of Puerto Rico's representatives and senators under the Calderon administration has been mixed, with few meaningful pieces of legislation presented, Caribbean Business [CB] section contribution by Jose Carmona, Puerto Rico Herald 9/25/2003 via GoogleNews.
   ...To assess the work of our legislators, CB contacted [among others] the Puerto Rico Chamber of Commerce (PRCC). ...Said PRCC Pres. Hector Mayol...the PRCC has participated in numerous hearing on proposed bills that would increase the cost of doing business in Puerto Rico.
   [This is one of the standard lines of objection to any reinvestment in domestic demand and raising of general living standards - and if pursued, will keep Puerto Rico 3rd-world forever.]
   "For example, Severo Colberg proposed reducing the workweek from 40 hours to 35....
   [Ignoramus Hector Mayol groups the single all-sufficient regulation presented by the shorter-hours solution with its opposite, a burgeoning maximum of stifling regulations -]
   "and others have sought to increase the number of permits required to do business," he said.
   If legislators are concerned about reducing unemployment, said Mayol [oh this should be good!], they should be looking at flextime [irrelevant to workspreading] or other work arrangements that give small businesses the flexibility they need to compete.
   [They already have flextime - what's stopping them? And if they can't compete in low-wage Puerto Rico, what hope is there for the continental U.S. - without tariffs?]
   "Big corporations might be able to absorb the higher cost of a 35-hour workweek by reorganizing the workforce, but mom-and-pop businesses, which usually have a small payroll, will have a harder time," he said.
   [True, just as in France, but there are ways to buffer workweek reduction for small businesses - after all, we have 150 years of experience with it in cutting the workweek from around 84 hours to 44 hours in 1938, and then two years of concentrated experience in cutting it nationally two hours a year from 44 to 40 in 1940.]
   The PRMA also will continue to fight legislation that would increase business costs in Puerto Rico.
   [Evidently the PRMA is just angry that they aren't getting as rich as fast as mainland U.S. CEOs.]
   ..\..PRMA Exec. VP William Riefkohl said...the organization is pleased that new Labor & HR Secy Frank Zorilla has categorically opposed Colberg's proposal to shorten the workweek.
   [Whatcha gonna do with "labor" secretaries who represent only short-sighted management?]
   "We are glad the Labor secretary...realized the inherent dangers of this proposal. You can't bring an experimental project from France, which has a superior socio-economic development than ours, to Puperto Rico, where we have a 12% unemployment rate [France's was 12.6% when they voted to start planning the 35-hour workweek in 1997], an 11% illiteracy rate [so when are Puerto Rican pols going to change that?!], and a 60% poverty rate [and they don't even want to share what little work they have? - pathetic!]," said Reifkohl. "You can't pretend it isn't going to have negative repercussions."
   [You certainly can! What could be more negative than Puerto Rico's current policies - like they've got anything to lose? France gained a 1% drop in the unemployment rate for every hour they cut the workweek, even though they did it in a crude way. What unemployment percentage is it going to take before Puerto Rican business owners wake up to the fact that they're losing a lot of neighborhood customers and markets here? Unfortunately we have no further information in this article on man, Severo Colberg, who made this intelligent, nay critical, worksharing proposal. We did, however, catch another article that bashes it -]
   A poor track record, Caribbean Business section contribution by Francisco Cimadevilla, Puerto Rico Herald 9/25/2003 via GoogleNews.
   ...Some of the most antibusiness initiatives have been proposed and are still pending, like the brain-dead notion of a 35-hour workweek with the same pay and benefits....
   [So prorate the pay and benefits down to 7/8 of the 40-hour level. When the high unemployment is absorbed, the greater leverage of employees will harness market forces to reraise pay and benefits, just as they were raised within five years after Kellogg Cereals went down to a 30-hour workweek in 1930. You can't get Puerto Rico out of its pathetic basketcase role without spreading the spending power beyond those who have much more than they can spend - at least at home in Puerto Rico. And as for the alleged ineffectuality of workweek reduction, ya gotta wonder, if worksharing dba workweek reduction is so ineffectual, how come these guys are attacking it so hysterically? What are they so afraid of? We DID it from 1776 to 1940, especially 1938-40, and it WORKED. France DID it 1997-2002 and it WORKED. So what's the big paranoia?! But this Puerto Rican case is the first explicit example we have seen of other nation's attempting to copy France's 35-hour workweek. How ironic, then, that the 'conservative' French government is now trying to dilute it. They want more power and control, no matter what it does to their consumer base and their domestic markets.]

5. [here's a little retrograde motion in the U.S. too, longer hours and no hiring -]
   Montco denies request to hire more sheriff's deputies, by Margaret Gibbons, The Mercury 09/25/2003 via GoogleNews.
   NORRISTOWN [Pa.] - The Montgomery County commissioners sent Sheriff John Durante back to the drawing board this week, telling him he has to be more creative in scheduling his deputies.... He [had] submitted a proposed 2004 budget of $4.9m, which included $4.6m for salaries for a 127-person staff. His budget this year is $4.3m..\.. "We need more help," said Durante.
   However, the commissioners pointed out that, starting next year, the workweek for country deputies will be expanded from its current 33¾ hours to 37½ hours. This workweek increase will cost the country an estimated additional $294,000 next year. The increase in the workweek gives Durante an additional 367.5 hours of work a week, which is equivalent to 9-plus new employees, according to the commissioners.
   [We wonder -
   
   • how high unemployment is in Montgomery County, Pa.,
   • and how much they're spending on unemployment, welfare, disability, homelessness, jail, and suicide,
   • and how much effective consumer demand they're sacrificing,
   • and how much they're sacrificing in foregone contributions from forced retirement, self-employment and part-time,
   • and how much they're paying in prolonged "education" to keep people out of the job market as long as possible.]
   We might also ask the same thing of the French government and surveyees as they complain about the shorter workweek.]
   Durante said those hours do not help him because the courts still primariily operate on a 33¾-hour schedule and that is when his deputies are needed to be in the courtrooms and to transport prisoners.
   The commissioners were not buying it.
   [= Decision-making power in the hands of out-of-touch people.]
   "It just does not make any sense to me," said Marino. "How can you increase the workweek of almost 100 people and still need additional people?"
   "You are not getting those [additional] people from me," said Marino.
   At best, said Commissioner Ruth Damsker, she would only approve an additional two new deputies, urging Durante again to better use the additional hours that his deputies will be working.

6. [12 days in the Colorado week?]
   Prison staffing remains concern - Year after death, workers fearful, by Chris Frates, Denver Post 9/25/2003 via GoogleNews.
   [This is an example of sloppy speech.]
   LIMON, Colo. - Almost a year after a 23-year-old Limon prison worker was beaten to death with a kitchen ladle, corrections officers say that staffing levels have gotten worse rather than better. About 30 workers at the Limon Correctional Facility and the victim's father met Wednesday with representatives from the Colorado Assoc. of Public Employees. Prison workers told of 12-day workweeks [huh? they must mean "shifts"], ever-changing work schedules and the fear that there aren't enough officers for the prison, which, with 974 inmates, is filled to capacity. The association is exploring ways of addressing the concerns....

7. [And here's another example of sloppy talk -]
   Living wage measured annually, group says, by *Anne Ju, Ithaca Journal 9/25/2003 via GoogleNews.
   ITHACA, N.Y. - It's the annual gross salary, not the hourly rate, that really matters when determining whether someone earns a livable wage [ie: income] in the City of Ithaca, according to Living Wage Coalition [LWC] members.
   [Here are some people getting confused by their own verbal sloppiness. They've focused on the wrong thing, hourly wage per job, and now they're trying to generalize it to what really counts, income per person from all sources, relative to any time period.]
   In response to Mayor Alan Cohen's explanation to justify City employees' wages Monday night at a Common Council meeting, Tomkins County LWC organizer Carl Feuer said an employee must make at least $17,554 annually [doncha love the spurious precision?] in order to live as a single adult in Ithaca. The living wage debate [all a mere distraction from the only effective leverage-point, shorter hours, which harnesses market forces instead of bucking them] was opened again in an Aug.28 letter from the LWC. The letter claimed 13 City employees make less than the minimum living wage as recommended by a prior Alternatives Federal Credit Union [AFCU] study. The Mayor had argued that the generous health insurance package that City employees receive, which doesn't include a premium charge [to the employees], is reason to consider those 13 employees at or above the living wage of $8.68 per hour. At Monday's [9/22's] meeting, he amended that to say if [only] 25% [and why should it be only 25%?] of the health insurance premium - [100%? of] which employees don't pay - is added to the hourly salary of each employee, it works out to more than $8.68 per hour.
   [Which kinda takes the wind outa the sails of these crusaders-without-a-(worthy)cause - but here's where workweek length becomes more significant than hourly wage. The Mayor's calculations are apparently based, reasonably enough, on the obsolete, 1940-era, pre-technological but still-prevailing US standard "full time" workweek of 40 hours.]
   He also said some of the employees work only 35 hours per week [which presumably is their own funeral], while others in the City work 40.
   But Feuer said the AFCU study is supposed to address all "full-time" employees [our quotes], some of which work as little as 30 or as many as 40 hours per week in some municipalities, Feuer said.
   [Feuer is drifting into dreamland if he expects any employer to pay the same weekly amount regardless of worktime. The city's generosity in offering some fulltime benefits for as little as 30 hours a week does not mean 30 hours a week is "full time." But Feuer soldiers on -]
   "It's not appropriate to expect a 35-hour person to work five extra hours a week," Feuer said. "I think that's really stretching it."
   [Well, it's also stretching it to expect an employer to make up the difference between the 30 or 35 hr/wk employee's annual pay and 40 hrs/wk just because some study said the 40 hrs/wk coincided with an arbitrary Desirable Amount and the others didn't. That wouldn't be fair to those working for the extra money instead of just whining for it. It would give the whiners an undeserved wage hike, and those who worked least would get most. All this would make sense if we were talking about it on the basis of cutting the workweek for all city employees from 40 to 35 or 30, but it sure don't make no sense no more if we keep talking about artificially hiking hourly wages from 30 on up. Again we repeat, of the labor movement's two historic goals of shorter hours and higher pay, getting only the first would soon give them both, but getting only the second would soon give them neither, because they'd have created both an above-market wage at current levels of labor surplus - and increased current levels of labor surplus.]
   On the health insurance, he stood by the claim that while AFCU requires its employees to pay 25% of their health insurance premium, their employees actually receive more than $17,554 to cover the cost of the premium.
   [So why should any employer A match some other employer B - unless the job market is so tight that employer A is losing employees to employer B? - a situation that won't happen until and unless we get the whole nation's workweek reduced considerably below the pre-technological 40-hour level. Timesizing, not wage-sizing - yet. Income-sizing (per-person, not per-job unless divisible among two or more persons) comes after we've successfully established the groundwork with Timesizing.]
   The LWC plans to keep asking the City to examine the living wage issue and urged the HR Committe of Common Council to pass a resolution guaranteeing the $17,554 annual salary for all employees.
   [And what about employees working only 25 hours a week, or 20 or 10? What about when inflation goes up, or down? This initiative is out of order, and order is important. Worktime must be balanced first to prevent creation of unfairness, dependency and market distortions, and to provide a stable framework for more advanced balancings in the future, such as income, wealth, credit....]

8. [here's an example of training-for-workaholism in workaholic Britain -]
   Learning to enjoy student life, by Justin Parkinson, BBC News Online 2003/09/25 14:01:00 GMT via GoogleNews.
   ...Dr Peter Byrd, senior tutor at Warwick University, thinks that, with a little planning and by asking a few questions, almost everyone's university career can run smoothly. ...Dr Byrd recommends setting a timetable to cope with 35 hours' work a week, allowing time for socialising....
   [So far so good, but -]
   Some students work to boost their income, but Dr Byrd feels this should not be to the detriment of studies. He said: "We recommend a maximum of about 12 hours a week. Otherwise there's a danger of becoming full-time workers and only part-time students...."
   [What about the danger of getting used to 35+12= 47-hour workweeks and unable to self-direct during leisure, and turning into just another work hog helping keep Britain's official and unofficial unemployment and social taxes high?]

9. [here's an example of how much technology can multiply productivity - and disemploy humans/deactivate consumers given the wrong but prevalent kind of CEO -]
   BYU professor completes TenFold-Powe application in record time, PRNewswire-FirstCall 9/25/2003 via GoogleNews.
   SALT LAKE CITY - TenFold(R), provider of the Universal Application for building and implementing enterprise applications, [yester]day announced the successful completion, in record time, of a knowledge collaboration application developed by Brigham Young University [BYU] visiting assoc. science professor, Yuri Tijerino. Dr. Tijerino used a pre-beta version of the TenFold product, code-name Tsunami(TM), and completed an application in one day of [concentrated] effort, which he estimated would have taken him months with any other technology.
   "I'm now a believer in TenFold's claim to reduce design, develop and deploy...time of complex applications by at least ten times," said Tijerino. "...I've wanted to research and publish on technology-assisted knowledge collaboration, but felt existing development technology would take months of work. Not including the design phase, I build the complete application in two half-day sessions. That's one day. Versus six months. By my calculation, even assuming a 35-hour workweek, this is a one-hundred-to-one acceleration. So 'ten fold' is an understatement."...

• Scheduling in some dawdle time - Parents of booked-up children stop the micromanaging, by Bradford McKee, NYT, D1.
  ...A generation ago, the latchkey child was the most forlorn image in the parental universe. Now it is the overscheduled child, who, whether driven by parental ambition or the necessity for afternoon supervision, never stops moving. Jumping from Spanish to karate, tap dancing to tennis - with hours of homework waiting at home - the overscheduled child is as busy as a new law firm associate.
  [Or a US medical intern, or a trucker, or an airline pilot.... - all those who want to proclaim the silly, anti-Thoreau message, "I'm busier than you, ergo I'm more important than you, you relative SLACKER! - and therefore I should get more compensation than you because I'm sacrificing more - I'm a bigger martyr, nyaa-nyaa." It's all 7-year-old stuff and we can't even question it cuz it's linked to religion (martyrdom) and getting wired into our subconsciouses, if not our ids, over the last 400 Puritan-work-ethic years. But was it Lao Tzu who said, "Cursed be he who must always be doing."]
  But many parents have begun resisting the push to avail their children of every planned activity that a retail society can offer. These dissenters say they prefer to give their children plenty of time just to be children, to spend less time in car pools and more in sandboxes and spontaneous dodge-ball games.
  [And don't forget the hours in the upstairs living room with the electric trains - first Hornby (windup), then Marx, the Lionel - and then mix in the Tinkertoys (bridges for the trains), the Lincoln logs (little cabins), the Meccano set (the walking robot), and the Minibrix (little step pyramids with secret passage and tomb chamber). In parallel, it was butterfly collecting on Sundays in the two fields beside Grannie's bungalow 20 miles north of Toronto, then stamp collecting by carefully sorting through all Grandpa's papers and boxes in the bungalow basement and bringing the "haul" back home to 40 Harbord St. in Toronto, getting on the "sucker list" for monthly stamps by mail "on approval" from Littleton Stamp Co. in the States, and going downtown to the tiny stamp store on Richmond St. run by a dashing Australian - and his mother! - and then, surrounded by little boxes of the phenomenal diversity that only a country general store in the middle of the city can supply, sitting for hours on the floor and sorting that wealth of stamps into those boxes by country, big boxes for lotsastamps-countries like Canada and U.S., teensy boxes for hardlyanystamps-countries like Montenegro or Crete. Looking at the exotic pictures and scripts. Collecting the world. Controlling the world.]
  Many parents - if not their children - are simply ready to slow down.
  [And besides, the "nothing" that you're doing when you're supposedly "doing nothing" is often so much more valuable and significant than all these hackneyed agendas of other people. As Bucky Fuller said, "If someone else is doing it, it's not the most important thing in the world for YOU to do."]
  ..\..On Fridays after school, when the Fitzer and Magruder children play soccer at North Main Rotary Park in Greenville, S.C., the usual rules of the game apply, but not the usual annoyances. Their parents decided to pass up the local YMCA league, along with the rush-hour drives and the dinner delays it would entail, in favor of old-fashioned pickup games. The players - mostly 4 to 7 years old - meet half a block from their elementary school. There is no rush, no $50 fee and no pressure to join the game.
  "Whoever shows up shows up," said Heather Magruder, who used to coach her 8-year-old son, Dylan, and 7-year-old daughter, Corey, in the Y league. "If someone's mom calls them in to dinner, you just readjust the teams. We wanted our kids to have experiences closer to what we had," Ms. Magruder said. "You picked sides, put a goal down, and you played." Or you didn't. Today, however, "your kid has to grow up knowing how to do everything by age 8," she said, adding, "It's more important for us to be a sane family and not just spend our time running from here to there."...
  [Thoreau: "Let your affairs be as two or three, and not as a hundred or a thousand."
  Lao Tzu: "The sage does nothing, and yet, nothing remains undone."]

1. Work/life benefits survive economic hard times; Working Mother Magazine finds no drop in programs, announces 100 best companies for working mothers, Business Wire 09/23/2003 07:07 Eastern.
   [Setting aside for the moment the madness of couples' having children if one of them doesn't want to childcare them him\herself, or of corporations' subsidizing population growth in a grotesquely overburdened biosphere (see Timesizing's Phase Five), the catch here is that there are fewer jobs with these lovely work/life benefits. CEOs sometimes loot your pension fund by changing it from fixed-benefit to cash-balance, but we don't often hear of their cancelling your childcare etc. benefit. They don't have to - they just outsource your whole division to China, thus wounding their own American consumer base a tiny bit more deeply. Later, of course, they turn around, all innocence, and ask, "What happened to all our customers?"]
   Payroll may be down but work/life benefits are up at many of America's top companies, according to Working Mother Magazine, which today released its 18th annual list of the "100 Best Companies for Working Mothers."
   [They go on and on about these wonderful companies, but bottom line - who cares how many benefits a given job category has if it doesn't exist any more?}
   ...The magazine finds tht companies have increased benefits - ranging from childcare programs to massages to take-home dinners straight from the company cafeteria - in order to cut stress and keep employees healthy.
   [For that matter, who cares how many take-home dinners they "give" you when you've given them a 24/7 blank check on your home life?]
   What this means..\..says Working Mother Editor-in-Chief Jill Kirschenbaum...is that "workplace cultures at the best places to work have changed and now reflect the permanent impact of working mothers. And companies also are responding to pressure from both men and women in Generations X and Y, who want a balanced life. Work/life benefits are here to stay."
   [Even though the 40++-hr/wk jobs that carry them aren't.]
   This represents "a seismic shift at companies around the country," says Kirschenbaum, "turning work/life into an essential part of business strategy.
   [If true (doubtful), trivialized by loss of these "good" jobs and replacement with low-pay McJobs in America or low-everything jobs in, e.g., Bangladesh.]
   Even as little as four years ago, only 30% of companies on the 100 Best list had a wide array of childcare and flexibility option. Now most companies do - and they're getting stronger, with additions like afterschool, holiday, and emergency care for kids and elders, as well as fitness programs....
   - 100% of 100 Best offer flextime vs. 55% [of] companies nationwide....
   [Well, the shellgame of flextime, where they just let you move your 40+ hrs/wk around from 8-5 to 10-7 etc. is not really signficant for the future. We're looking for actual shorter hours, and there are two categories in here -]
   - 94% of 100 Best offer compressed workweeks vs. 31% nationwide
   - 93% of 100 Best offer job-sharing vs. 22% nationwide....
   [Compressed workweeks mean you still have to get your 40+ workload done, but you can go home early if you do. Job-sharing usually means two people can divvy up a 40+ hr/wk job. There are many companies with this option on the books but no actual takers - they advertize it to pollsters like this magazine but not to employees. And these significant categories are only two out of eleven categories. Their top 10 companies are Abbott Labs, Booz Allen Hamilton, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Fannie Mae, General Mills, IBM, Prudential, S.C. Johnson, and Wachovia. Many of these companies are familiar from our takeovers page, indicating job loss due to post-merger overlap. For example, Abbott bought BASF's drug business in Dec/2000 for $6-6.9B, Perclose in July/99 for $680m, tried for Alza in June or Sept/99 for $7.3B but the deal was squelched by the FTC in Dec/99, bought Glaxo anesthesia products in Oct?/99, bought Vysis in Dec?/01, bankrupt Jomed NV in May/2003 and God knows what in between, since we dropped exhaustive takeover tracking from the NY Times in 2001. So whazzamadda with takeovers if there's no subsequent downsizing? Well, we probably didn't catch all of them, but there were 2,000 Abbott layoffs in Oct/2002. Ironically, the downsizing was just a few months after our glowing little squib on Abbott's jobsharing on 6/25/2002 #2 (and a 420-job upsizing in May/02 - 90 more Aug/03). This is the only time we remember referring back to this date in ref to #2 instead of #1 re Wal-Mart's unpaid overtime. But then again, Abbott was noted, among others, bulking up executives' pensions while clobbering those of ordinary employees' (4/03/2003). So not many of these companies will really bear close scrutiny, even though some have been recognized by other magazines as well. Abbott's glowing little squib in June/02, for example, came from Health Magazine's quest for the 10 best companies for women. But glancing down the list, the very name of Bristol-Myers Squibb indicates a takeover (and possibly too Booz Allen Hamilton), Fannie Mae has been in the media doghouse lately, IBM has been laying off - nyaa, you don't want to know. But here's another positive angle - you can redefine "full time" downwards, or, you can beef up part-time benefits -]
   Working Mother names Pernille Spiers-Lopez, president of IKEA North America (Plymouth Meeting, PA), as this years FAMILY CHAMPION for helping the furniture retailer's employees design a life that works. Spiers-Lopez's personal mantra helps drive her company: "Take care of your personal issues, and the work will follow." Speirs-Lopez has made a good company better by applying her personal philosophy to her corporate mission. On her watch, IKEA has instituted flextime, full benefits for part-time workers and a diversity plan, among other policies....
   [This is the approach the Netherlands have taken, and also, at least in health insurance, our own Starbucks chain, which offers health insurance for a workweek as low as 20 hours. The net effect of gov't-adminstered health insurance, like Canada's province-based schemes, is the same as a beefing up of part-time benefits.]

2. [Does this headline indicate a disguised demand for more free time? -]
   Demand grows for properties requiring little management, WSJ, B10.
   Property investors are increasingly eager to get their hands on real estate they can pretty much ignore.
   [This presupposes that property investors, if no one else, have a lot of claims on their time and a lot of ideas of what to do with their free time. So can we at last bury the anxious objection to shorter working hours that goes something like, "But what are we going to do with all our free time?!" - not to mention the old Puritan admonition, "The Devil finds work for idle hands to do!"? The "Devil" is not the beneficiary here. Surely it is God who created the leisure industries, and it is God who benefits when people have enough free time to attend to their spiritual lives, not to mention their civic duties, and entrepreneurial ideas, and errands, and, oh yes, for any CEOs who happen to be concerned about consumer spending and its dependent markets, enough free time for shopping.]
   Demand is strong for single-tenant net-lease properties, which are office buildings, warehouses or retail properties occupied by one tenant that is responsible for expenses, including taxes, insurance and maintenance, and almost everything else. Investors find net-lease properties desirable because they don't require hands-on, day-to-day management. What's more, the tenant usually holds a long-term lease - sometimes 30 years - which gives investors the impression that income can be counted on for years....
   [Ah, the good ol' renter class of David Ricardo!]

3. [Here's a complaint from a Times reader about telemarketer encroachment on free time -]
   Last call: The fade-out of a modern pest, letter to ed by Rick Phelps of Burlington VT, NYT, A26.
   ...I was recently called (multiple times) by a telemarketer who simply could not understand why I did not want to hear about the great deal she had. Although her calls were not taking anything from my wallet, they were taking away something equally valuable to me, my time....
   [Nice of him to completely equate free time with money. But there is a weird difference, noted by The Economist in August (8/09/2003, p.62) -]
   ...People's rivalry over income does not extend to [rivalry over] leisure....
   [This may be because rivalry over free time is negated by the overriding rivalry for "important" - and importance has become identified with busyness. No matter what your skill or prestige level, there is a kind of integrating, common ground in this matter of busyness = importance. "I'm busier than you, ergo I'm more important than you." You may be a college professor and I may be just a trucker, but I'm busier than you so you're less important to the economy than I am, nyaa nyaa. This one's gonna be tough to root out. It's going to take a clear and simple demonstration that this particular level playing field is actually wildly skewing a more important one = self-support. Truckers' (or airline pilots', or physicians', or lawyers', or anybody's) megahours of work - while the guy next door is about to lose his house cuz he's been laid off and despite 1000s of CVs he can't seem to land another job in this tight job market constantly rendered tighter by automation and robotics - is not an integrating, level playing field - it's mean and selfish and greedy and uncaring and all things bad.]

• PECO restores power to nearly 98% of customers affected by Isabel - Full restoration anticipated by Monday evening, PRNewswire-FirstCall 09/22/2003 00:41 via AOLNews.
  PHILADELPHIA -...As crews continue the third consecutive day working 16-hour shifts, all resources are now focused on the small pockets of customers in heavily damaged areas....
  [These engineers think they're efficient and error-free when they've been working double shifts for three days? Have they never heard of cross-training? Or maybe they're so caught up in the melodrama and heroics of the "crisis" and the desperate need for...them, that they're not even prepping for the next one now.]
  ...PECO Energy is an electric and natural gas utility serving southeastern Pennsylvania, [a] subsidiar[y] of Exelon....

• World film and television directors announce Dublin declaration - Seven directors' organizations affiliate to protect the creative and economic rights of film and television directors worldwide, Business Wire 09/19/2003 19:26 Eastern via AOLNews.
  DUBLIN, Ireland...- In an international meeting of English-speaking directors' organisations, a unified joint declaration asserting the...rights of...directors was set forth today in Dublin along with plans for a new affiliate organisation to advance and protect the[ir] rights....
  PART ONE - CREATIVE RIGHTS
  ROLE OF THE DIRECTOR ....
  ONE DIRECTOR TO A FILM ....
  POST-PRODUCTION -...Cutting behind the director's back is unacceptable....
  PART TWO - CONTRACTURAL AND ECONOMIC RIGHTS
  CONTRACT....
  FEES....
  WORKING CONDITIONS - Directors shall not be required to work hours that are injurious to their or others' health or safety.
  [Nice goal but unenforceable without a specific cap.]
  CONTACT: Directors Guild of America, Morgan Rumpf, 310-289-5333....

• France needs urgent social security reform - auditor, Reuters 09/18/03 12:41 ET via AOLNews.
  PARIS...- France urgently needs to reform its social security system to cope with the growing financial strain of a ballooning retired population, a state advisory body said on Thursday [9/18].
  [Now France is softening up the public to 'reform' (ie: gut) its social-security pension system before babyboomers retire. Boy, they're all getting into the act. Yesterday it was to OECD.]
  ...The funding crunch was due to
  • the cost of meeting increased demand for medicines,
  • a pay hike for doctors last year,
  • and applying France's 35-hour working week in hospitals,
  the court said. Weak revenues were not the main problem....
  [Ah, if you raise your service expectations with more/better medicines and less staff fatigue, weak revenues ARE the main problem. As for a pay hike for doctors, if they're already paid as much as in the U.S. (unlikely), the doctors are the problem.]

• OECD urges labour reforms to fund pension costs, by Paul Carrel, Reuters 09/17/03 08:37 ET via AOLNews.
  PARIS - In a report entitled "Employment Outlook - Towards More and Better Jobs," the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Develoment (OECD)..\..said on Wednesday..\..governments in...its 30 member..\..industrialised countries must do more to expand their workforces or risk economic [ie: GDP] growth being choked by the cost of ageing populations. ...Governments in these countries...needed to draw more people into work to help fund the growing demands of ageing populations on national pension schemes, the think-tank said.
  [Nice of the OECD to assume those demands are a given, while in America they are under attack. We'd have a lot more respect for the OECD's intelligence if they were concerned about taxing output after getting countries to expand their automation-to-workforce ratio, or if they were calling for higher graduated income taxes on the people with astronomically concentrated income. As usual, however, they seem most concerned about dreaming of job creation, however artificial, and then taxing the newly employed, however many debts they may have incurred while they were jobless. Guess they're not concerned about weak consumer markets because they're so sure the elderly will receive continuing support - never mind what happened recently in the big French heatwave.]
  Governments should improve job opportunities for women, older workers, the disabled and low-skilled workers.
  [Are they also handing out the prerequisite magic wands for this dictate? It sounds like a perfect call for worksharing via Timesizing, but we're not hearing any such words out of them. They just dwell on their own dream-demands and the lovely tax-on-the-rich-saving results -]
  "Without more and better jobs for such groups who are under-represented in the workforce,
  [suddenly they're concerned that workforce has to be "representative" (of what?!) like the U.S. House of Representatives? - bad metaphor!]
  the prospects for economic growth [for whom?] in many countries will be undermined as the population ages," the OECD said in a statement accompanying the report. Increasing the presence of under-represented groups in the workforce could generate more tax revenue and ease benefit claims, it said....
  [When France lowered their workweek by 4 hours in 2000-2001, and dropped their unemployment rate by 4% during those two years and the previous two years (12.6% in 1997 to 8.7% in 2001 before the US-led recession finally began to drag them down) as many companies anticipated the law, they saw a reduction in the costs of unemployment benefits.]
  OLDER WORKERS A PRIORITY
  To cope with the projected rise in the proportion of elderly people in OECD countries, governments should target labour market reforms[??] not just at finding jobs for the unemployed, but also for many of those people who now choose not to work.
  [Don't you love the way these insulated, isolated richboys always assume it's merely some kind of capricious choice for people?]
  "On current trends, the ratio of the over-65-year-olds to the total workforce will rise from 27% in 2000 to 47% in 2030, straining current pension schemes and threatening living standards," the OECD said.
  In addition to policies to support economic growth and demand for labour [presumably in general without ageism], governments could keep more older workers in the job market by removing incentives to early retirement.
  [They conveniently forget that many of those incentives exist because the jobs have ceased to. As technology has taken over more and more human employment, worklife reduction in terms of prolonged "education" and ever earlier retirement has been a big background source of relief.]
  "Similarly, disability benefit schemes should be reformed in order to prevent long-term dependency and encourage work," the OECD said.
  [So little about sweetening the job market, as Timesizing would do, and so much about souring the social safety net.]
  The thinktank also singled out women - mothers and lone mothers in particular - as groups that governments should target to join, or return to, the workforce. Subsidising childcare and promoting flexibility in working hours could help, it said....
  [This is so pathetically obsolete - it's ageist, sexist, weighed down with advocating micromanagement.... How about just ADJUSTING THE WORKWEEK GRADUALLY DOWNWARD FOR EVERYONE to achieve the same withdrawal of labor hours from the labor-flooded job markets as growth-goosing World Wars I and II accomplished by killing millions? Why are we straining so hard to avoid the obvious?! Share the vanishing market-demanded manhours and quit beating around the bush! Let's start getting some general benefit from worksaving technologies instead of having to offset every worksaving with tut-tutting and job creation to save our arbitrary and rigid definition of "full-time" benefits-providing "job." How much is ubiquitous downsizing going to have to cost us before we cut the pre-technological 1940-level workweek to offset it instead of wringing our hands?]