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Timesizing News, Oct.4-7, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

10/07/2003  primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope - all are 10/06 via GoogleNews except #3, which is direct from the 10/07 NYT hardcopy -

1. [The Brits are doing something interesting this week, similar to our Take Back Your Time Day on Oct. 24 and lead-in events. We have six versions of the story. Version 1 -]
   Workers invited to “opt back in” to 48-hour week, Human Resources-Centre (UK) 6 Oct 2003.
   UNITED KINGDOM - The TUC [Trades Union Congress] has issued a guide for employees on how to opt back in to a 48-hour week. “Time’s up for long hours” contains an explanation of working time rights and a model letter for employees to give to their bosses informing them they no longer want to work more than 48 hours a week.
   If employees want to opt back in they simply need to give the letter to their employer. It would be illegal for an employer to take action against or sack an employee because he or she made this choice.
   One in four people are forced to sign the opt-out and only one in three knows there is a 48-hour limit on the average working week, according to the TUC.
   The guide is part of the TUC’s “It’s About Time” campaign to end the UK’s opt-out of the EU Working Time Directive and the long hours culture.
   [Version 2]
   TUC invites workers to ditch 48-hour opt-out, by Quentin Reade, PersonnelToday.com (UK) 10.46 am 06 Oct 03.
   UNITED KINGDOM - The TUC has launched a campaign to help workers 'opt back in' to a 48-hour working week.
   The TUC claims that one-in-four people are forced to sign the opt-out, which allows them to work more than 48-hours a week.
   Time’s up for Long Hours, a ‘how to’ guide to opting back in to a 48-hour working week, is available at www.workSMART.org.uk and includes a model letter individuals can use to inform employers that they no longer want to work more than 48 hours a week.
   Writing a letter is all an employee needs to do to opt back in and it is illegal for an employer to take action against them or sack an employee because they have made this choice.
   But, the TUC says, employees do not know their rights - only one-in-three even knows there is a 48-hour limit on the average working week.
   TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: "The UK’s long-hours culture is a threat to the health and safety of employees and a threat to the health and growth of the UK economy. Employees are tired and stressed. Business is unproductive.
   "The European Commission should end the opt-out to the EU Working Time Directive when is reviewed later this year.
   "Unions always feared that employers would abuse the opt-out and this is exactly what has happened. In the meantime, the TUC will continue to ensure that employees are properly informed of their right to a reasonable working week."
   [Version 3]
   Unions urge rebellion over longer hours, by Claire Hill, The Western Mail via icWales (UK) Oct 6 2003.
   UNITED KINGDOM - Men and women forced to do longer hours after opting out of the 48-hour working week are encouraged to take a stand against their employers today.
   More than two-thirds of workers are ignorant about the length of the official working week and are being coerced into working longer without overtime [pay].
   Launching their "It's About Time" campaign, the TUC wants to end the loophole which enables employees to opt out of the 48-hour week and work an unlimited week.
   Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary said, "The UK's long-hours culture is a threat to the health and safety of employees and a threat to the health and growth of the UK economy.
   "Employees are tired and stressed. Business is unproductive.
   "The European Commission should end the opt out to the EU Working Time Directive when they review it later this year.
   "Unions feared that employers would abuse the opt-out and this is exactly what has happened."
   According to a TUC poll, one in three people did not even realise there was a limit on the average working week and one in four people who signed the opt out said they were given no choice but to fill in the form.
   Recent research showed that a third of men in rural Wales were working more than 49 hours a week.
   Even at the bottom of the table in Merthyr, Torfaen and Blaenau Gwent, between 14% and 18% of men are working 50-hour weeks.
   This work-horse culture can have a devastating effect on people's health.
   Dr John Wynn-Jones, director of the Institute of Rural Health, Newtown said at the time that cases of stress, suicides, accidents and heart disease are alarmingly high amid those living in the Welsh countryside.
   Within the EU directive workers can opt back into the 48-hour working week with no fear of repercussions.
   The TUC's campaign aims to inform people about this right and even offers a model letter that employees can present to their employers.
   The trade union said the letter is a simple way of opting back in and it is illegal for an employer to take action against or sack an employee because of their choice.
   However, CBI Wales director David Rosser believes the working week should be an arrangement between employers and employees only.
   [That would mean that, as employers continue to introduce technology and downsize in response to it, our economic production would continue to grow and our consumer base would continue to shrink. This is a formula for deepening depression and an unsustainable economy.]
   He said, "The employers and employees ought to be able to agree the details of a working contract and we want to fight to retain the opt out clause. If we lose it we remove the flexibility businesses need from time to time and the ability for workers to top up their wages with overtime.
   [That's one area of flexibility that businesses will have to sacrifice for the sake of maintaining, instead of shrinking, their own markets. And one "ability" workers will have to sacrifice in order to stop building themselves into sweatshops on a treadmill of working longer and longer for lower and lower hourly wages due to a larger and larger pool of desperate jobseekers willing to do their work for less.]
   "The UK has a reasonably flexible working arrangement by European standards.
   "The flexibility is a key part of UK productivity and it is something that has been continuously eroded and that should be stopped."
   [Workweek regulation is the minimum necessary regulation. If we continue to weaken it, we will continue to need larger and larger government inefficiently mounting more and more costly and artificial makework programs of job creation.]
   A spokesman for the Dept. of Trade and Industry, said, "Work life balance is about giving workers control over the organisation of their work not putting limits on the amount of work they do.
   [This character is ignorant of history, and has learned nothing from the mistakes of the past.]
   The Working Time Regulations allows workers to opt out of the 48-hour average week limit if they choose but does not allow employers to make people work longer.
   [But does allow employers to continue to increase their power relative to that of employees, and therefore to have myriads of little ways to make people work longer - while claiming otherwise in the news media they own.]
   "We know many parents, particularly of young children find it increasingly difficult to balance work and family life.
   "This why we have introduced new legal rights to help them balance childcare with work."
   [Version 4]
   Fight against long hours, Sky News UK 09:40 UK, Oct 06.
   UNITED KINGDOM - The TUC has stepped up its campaign against long working hours by offering help to employees forced to work excessive hours.
   It claims that one in four workers who sign an opt out from the European Working Time Directive, which aims to limit the working week to 48 hours, are given no choice.
   It has published a new guide was telling people how they can opt back in to the regulations so that they cannot be told to work more than 48 hours a week.
   General Secretary Brendan Barber said: "The UK's long hours culture is a threat to the health and safety of employees and a threat to the health and growth of the UK economy.
   "Employees are tired and stressed and business is unproductive."
   The UK's decision to allow workers to opt out of the directive is being reviewed by the European Commission later this year.
   A recent TUC survey found that most people who worked more than 48 hours a week had not been asked to sign an opt out.
   [Version 5]
   Exclusive Tim Yeo interview, startups.co.uk.
   UNITED KINGDOM - As the Conservative Party meets for its annual conference in Blackpool, shadow secretary for the Department of Trade and Industry, Tim Yeo MP, means business.
   Talking exclusively to Startups.co.uk he explains why businesses need someone championing their cause in government - and why that person isn’t Patricia Hewitt.
   What did you think of Patricia Hewitt’s speech at the Labour conference?
   It was pretty thin stuff, I’m afraid. What she should be doing is addressing the needs of British business, which is facing a challenging period now. She should be saying she’s going to dismantle some of the barriers to growing companies and she should be championing the role of wealth creation within the whole economy.
   If you want better healthcare, better education, more secure pensions and a better environment, all those things, then you require the wealth business creates, and only business can create that wealth.
   I’m really disappointed that she is so reluctant to do that in any of her speeches. It was a good opportunity for her to do it, but she didn’t take it. She’s missed other opportunities to do it recently also, so I was extremely disappointed.
   She failed to address, despite heavy prompting, the issues of whether or not to continue Britain’s opt-out from a 48-hour maximum working week and right of employees in small businesses to trades’ union recognition. What do think about these issues?
   They’re two crucial issues. My view is that small firms particularly need as much flexibility in the way that they can work as possible and too much of the employment law, whether it’s European or British, has reduced that flexibility in the last six years.
   I’ve run a small business myself, I’ve been involved with other people who have run small businesses, I know that they are very good at looking after their own workers; they have to in a small business even more so than in a big business and startups, particularly, are usually characterised by tremendous enthusiasm, not just on the part of the boss or the entrepreneur, but the other people that work with that person and to constrain them by some artificial regulation is very harmful.
   The trouble started when the government gave up the opt-out that we’d won from the social chapter: a lot has followed from that. It would be a tragedy for small business and the enterprise which they’re able to show if that was inhibited by this kind of restriction, so I’m dismayed by that.
   Trades’ union representation is quite inappropriate for companies of that size. We are critical of the way the government has slightly tilted the balance back to union leaders. Obviously we perfectly happy to see workers of any organisation be members of unions, but forcing a small firm with only a handful of people to acknowledge trades unions if they don’t want to doesn’t serve any purpose at all. It can be burdensome, and we should be helping these firms create wealth not pile obligations on them.
   There seems to be a conflict between the idea of setting business free from regulation but still maintaining workers’ rights. How would strike the balance?
   I start from the point that the most basic right of any worker is the right to have a job and that small businesses particularly are the engines of job creation. So if you want to help workers you need to make it easier not harder for small businesses to create jobs.
   I think that we should be quite prepared for a lighter regulatory regime for smaller organisations. We would want to reverse the way in which the government has reduced the freshold at which union recognition can be compulsory and what to restore the position it was at in 1997.
   But there are other examples where we think it is better to simply exempt small firms altogether from certain obligations. Of course we want to see workers enjoy the best possible conditions, which goes without saying, but it’s a question of how you do that.
   I think that, as far as possible, the voluntary approach is best. The majority of employers know that their greatest asset is their workforce and they therefore look after them and do everything they can. Small firms are particularly flexible and will do everything they can. But you do that by encouraging good practise not by encouraging more and more onerous and intrusive laws.
   The reason why I am concerned by some of the measures the government has taken is that if you go on putting obligations and burdens on employers you actually don’t help the position of employees.
   The changes that I want to make are entirely to help employees and I think that those organisations that represent employees, like unions, ought to come together and analyse just what type of effect these measures will have. The law of unintended consequences applies very strongly in the employment field. People do things with very good intentions, but if the consequence is to destroy the job that isn’t making it better for the workforce at all.
   You have experienced starting and running a small business firsthand. Patricia Hewitt and many within the DTI haven’t, how important is that?
   I think it’s helpful to have direct experience. I wouldn’t say it’s essential but I do think it’s helpful because I have a natural sympathy for businesses and entrepreneurs.
   The excitement you get from watching a business grow from the brink of disaster is great. I think that makes me, first of all sympathetic to the needs of business, and secondly I understand the problems more easily than someone that’s never been involved at all. I’m not saying it’s impossible for them to understand it, but it’s harder for them to understand it.
   One of the thing I’ve enjoyed in the year of being doing this job is the opportunity I’ve got to talk to lots and lots of businesses from all different sectors and industries of all sizes and it’s really interesting - and I think I can talk some of the same language.
   The Lib Dems want to scrap the Department of Trade and Industry. What do think about that?
   I’ve worked in government and opposition and if you look around Whitehall, apart from the DTI, there’s no department to speak up for business and yet the policies of many department affect business; transport, education, pensions, home office, they all affect business.
   If you don’t have a DTI who is going to say to the transport department, ‘have you worked out what that is going to do to our competitive position?’, or ask the education minister what employers need out of the education system? So there needs to be someone inside the government whose main job it is to speak for business and you have to have a DTI to do that in my view.
   It doesn’t need to be as big as the present DTI; I want it slimmed down a bit. It should be changed, made better and made smaller, but to say you’re going to get rid of it altogether, well, I just wonder if the Liberals did that what would happen. I think you’d find all sorts of other policies then coming out of Whitehall which really harm business because there’s no one there to act as a kind of brake.
   Is there a need for a small business minister in the cabinet?
   I think that it’s the job of the DTI secretary to represent the interests of business at cabinet level. The cabinet is a small body and I think it’s already too large, so it’s difficult to justify having another person.
   One of the most cynical bits of spin the Labour government has been guilty of has been the way that they posed as the friend of business. If you look what they’ve done - increasing tax; increasing red tape; making life harder for growing companies - I can understand why small businesses feel they need someone identifiable as their champion. But a good secretary of DTI could play that role.
   [Version 6 for HR only]
   One in four HR professionals needs 48-hour opt out, HR Gateway (UK).
   UNITED KINGDOM - Brief details. While the TUC today renewed its call to end the UK's 'long hours culture', a new poll suggests that a quarter of people in HR work over the opt-out limit of 48 hours a week.
   [And if 25% of human resources professionals can't even follow an way-outdated FORTY-EIGHT hour discipline, how the heck are they supposed to help get some sense and discipline into any other employees' lives?]
   On the day that the Trades Union Congress (TUC) suggested that a quarter of workers have to sign a 48-hour opt out of the Working Time Regulations, a new poll suggests that HR professionals are no exception.
   According to the HR Gateway poll of 365 HR professional visitors to its news and information website, a quarter (25%) work over 48 hours a week with the majority (46%) working between 40-48 hours.
   While a further 24% told the poll that they worked between 25-39 hours a week and five% between 0-24 hours a week, the TUC’s Brendan Barber said that long hours were a threat to health in the UK:
   ‘Employees are tired and stressed. Business is unproductive. The European Commission should end the opt out to the EU Working Time Directive when they review it later this year.
   ‘Unions always feared that employers would abuse the opt-out and this is exactly what has happened. In the meantime the TUC will continue to ensure that employees are properly informed of their right to a reasonable working week,’ he said.
   However, a new survey from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) to be released this week suggests that many workers are happy working long hours, and that ending the opt out wouldn’t work:
   [Echoes of the myth of the "happy slave."]
   ‘You cannot take one rule and apply it across professions. A survey we are to release shows that half of people work long hours because they want to and that satisfaction levels among these workers is high.
   ‘There appears to be very little evidence of employer compulsion and so ending the opt-out does not seem a fair way to go. There is a difference between professionals and people working on the shop floor, however,’ the CIPD told HR Gateway today.
   Vanessa Stebbings of HR Gateway Consulting agrees with the CIPD. She believes that ending the opt-out would stifle business. Many UK workers are happy to work longer to do a good job, she says:
   ‘You cannot shift culture in the UK overnight. Many people want to put in the hours to help something grow. Many firms recognise this and compensate accordingly. It is purely employee driven.
   ‘You have to let people make the choice while protecting those who are vulnerable. A blanket end to the opt-out will not achieve this,’ she says.

2. [Meanwhile, back in the U.S. -]
   Profiting from fun, Time Magazine via Time.com, Oct 6, 2003.
   [Time Mag forces you to jump thru multiple hoops to access their stories, so we just copped the headline and the key sentence from Google News Search.]
   ... Nearly 3 million workers have lost jobs, and the rest of us are nervously glancing over our shoulder in the midst of 60-hour workweeks....

3. [Krugman steps in the doodoo -]
   Lumps of Labor, op ed by Paul Krugman, NYT, A31.
   [Most economists have the sense to quit gangbanging the "Lump of Labor Fallacy" [LOLF], not only because it's based more on ridicule and rhetoric than reason and reality, but also because it's a multiple misnomer, which should really be called the "Lump of Work Theory," since it accuses shorter-hours advocates, not of believing in a fixed amount of labor (people who represent a demand for work in order to support themselves and who increase and decrease with immigration/births and emigration/deaths) but of believing in a fixed amount of employment (time that you give to someone else in return for money). The rhetorical trick economists use to take swipes at shorter-worktime [SWT] advocates is called "ambiguous reference" - their whole sneer never specifies a timeframe, so they attack SWT advocates for believing in something that's ridiculous to believe-in in an indefinite (ie: infinite or very long) timeframe, even though it's ridiculous not to believe in it in an immediate or short timeframe. In fact, they themselves believe in it (it being fixed or even shrinking employment) in the short term, as Krugman himself betrays later in the op ed. The bottom line is that the sneer is irrelevant and time-wasting, though some mainstream economists still seem to enjoy it. Actually its full name would be something like the "Fixed Lump of Employment in an Indefinite Timeframe Fallacy," because it has no relevance to what its intended target, "gullible" shorter-worktime advocates, are talking about, namely the diminishing amount of employment in the immediate timeframe when downsizing is being implemented. The only major economics principals text that has touched the LOLF in the past decade is hoary ol' Samuelson himself. And as a dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian, he'd rather keep straining to have half the unemployed bury bottles of money for the other half to dig up (General Theory, chap.10, sec.VI, ref. just located on 10/14/2003), than simply flexibly divide up the vanishing market-demanded employment so the private sector could support its own through upturn or downturn without imposing on taxpayers.]
   Labor conomists call it the "lump of labor fallacy." It's the idea that there is a fixed amount of work to be done in the world, so any increase in the amount each worker can produce reduces the number of available jobs.
   [If this wasn't true in the short term, there would be no such thing as downsizing. And even if the amount of work to be done in the immediate term is rising, this whole sneer ignores the concentration of employment on relatively few people with overloaded (or no) job descriptions.]
   (A famous example: those dire warnings in the 1950's that automation would lead to mass unemployment.)
   [Wakey, wakey, Paul - it didn't start in the 50s because we were still breeding out the labor shortage of World War II, but the stagflation of the late 60s and early 70s signalled the arrival of the babyboomers in the job market, and the gradual acceleration of layoffs in response to the continued automation of the 70s, 80s and 90s has left us with more un(der)employment than most economists alias cheerleaders care to count, more welfare than politicians want to count (see the story following this one), a massive welfare-overflow into disability now at 5.7m, homelessness now estimated at 600 thousand, and incarceration now at 2.2m, and you "externalize the embarrassments" economists don't even want to think about the forced part-timers, early retirers, and client-less self-employed. Paul, you should stick to what you're good at, namely Bush-bashing.]
   As the derisive name suggests, it's an idea economists view with contempt, yet the fallacy makes a comeback whenever the economy is sluggish.
   [Could that just possibly be because it's based more on ridicule and rhetoric than reality?]
   Sure enough, the lump-of-labor fallacy has resurfaced in the United States - but with a twist. Traditionally, it is a fallacy of the economically naïve left -
   [Or of the imaginations of lazy-minded economists looking for an irrelevant straw man to pile on for an occasional locker-room bonding session.]
   - for example, four years ago France's Socialist government tried to create more jobs by reducing the length of the workweek.
   [And they succeeded in reducing the 12.6% unemployment of 1997 to 8.6% by mid-2001, a one% reduction for each of the four hours cut from the French workweek, despite their kludgy design. And let's not forget that France's rightwing, the Union Democratique Francaise (UDF) party of Marcel Robien, had tried to create more jobs the same way starting in August 1996 - but on a voluntary, company-by-company basis. Worksharing is very common - but strangely a huge blindspot in B-schools and economics departments. Harvard Business School only has one case study about it - re Lincoln Electric - unless they've recently got themselves a case study about America's only profitable steel company, Nucor.]
   But in America today you're more likely to hear lump-of-labor arguments from the right, as an excuse for the Bush administration's policy failures.
   [Oh dear, here we see the real motives. Paul has got this mixed up with his forte = Bush-bashing.]
   The latest lump-of-labor revival came to my attention when I realized how eagerly certain commentators were picking up on a new study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In it, Erica Groshen and Simon Potter argue that the pattern of laying off workers during recessions and rehiring them during recoveries has changed: since 1990 employers have become much less likely to rehire former workers. It's an interesting study, and it might - repeat, might - shed some light on why businesses have added so few jobs during our so-called recovery.
   [So Paul baby is admitting that in the short term, the "fallacy" might - repeat, might - be true. What a putz!]
   But I was puzzled at first by the enthusiasm with which a relatively academic paper was seized upon by usually bullish, supposedly hardheaded business commentators. The puzzle vanished, however, when I read these remarks more carefully: they were mainly trying to make excuses for the administration's dismal job record.
   [But watch, he winds up with a lame appeal for Bush to follow FDR's mistake of big government makework instead of small-government work-sharing refereeing. Why "mistake"? Because in 1935 FDR admitted it was a mistake that he hadn't stayed "behind the 30 hour work week bill and pushed it through Congress" in 1933 when he had the chance, and in 1938 he implemented work-sharing in the FLSA with a 44-hour nationwide workweek on Oct. 24, 1938, 42 hours on 10/24/39 and 40 hours on 10/24/40, each time reaping a 2% reduction in the unemployment rate the following year. Then of course he was pressured to switch his unemployment solution to big-government makework via the Pentagon, which, dear Paul, bash them tho' you may, is exackitally what our teeny Bushbrains are trying to do.]
   You see, they say, it's not that an economic policy consisting largely of tax cuts for the rich has failed to deliver. No, it's a structural problem with the economy, which just happens to have arisen now, and nobody could have done better.
   [Somebody could certainly have done better, but with the "cornerstone" you're rejecting, timesizing instead of downsizing, and not another dust-off of the New Deal, which never succeeded in solving the 24.9% unemployment of the Great Depression by even half.]
   Oh, well. But partisan politics aside, the growing lumpishness of American thinking about jobs is dangerous, in two ways.
   First, it encourages fatalism - if politicians and the public believe that new jobs can't be created, they will stop pressuring our leaders to find more effective policies.
   [Big government job creation is "effective." What are you using for an economic history text???]
   And that would be a shame, since the Bush administration has resolutely refused to try the policies most likely to improve the employment picture.
   [True, but so did the Democrats after the war - who switched to bigger and bigger government makework and artificial job creation - corporate welfare, enterprise zones, block grants, industrial policy, blending into pork barrelling, patronage and ever-lengthening, ever more money-drowned campaigning, instead of simply setting up fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against un(der)employment, as per Walter Reuther's thoroughly ignored 1962 suggestion.]
   Since 2001, sensible economists have been pleading for federal aid to state and local governments so schoolteachers and police officers needn't be laid off because of a temporary fall in revenues. They've also urged the administration to stop dragging its heels on much-needed homeland security spending, not just because such spending is needed to make the country safer, but also because it would create jobs and put more income into the hands of Americans likely to spend it. (And if you're worried about spending's leading to increased deficits, why not cancel some of those long-run tax breaks for upper brackets?) Until we've done the obvious things, there's no reason to despair about job creation.
   [No reason except the host of reasons cited by Jeremy Rifkin in his 1995 "End of Work", focusing on CEOs' kneejerk response to inpouring worksaving technology in terms of downsizing, not timesizing = jobcuts, not hourscuts.]
   Second, lump-of-labor thinking - and the policy paralysis it encourages - feeds protectionism.
   [Shrinking-employment thinking - and the policy third-way it encourages - does feed an end to the simplistic panaceätic dogma of "free" trade ("we'll both take off all our clothes but you take yours all off first") - which is a mere distraction since only about 12-14% of the American economy is export-dependent, while 67-70% is consumer-base dependent, and wouldn'tcha know, downsizing the workforce seems to be followed by strange inexplicable downsizing in the consumer base - purely coincidental, of course!]
   If the public no longer believes that the economy can create new jobs,
   [as the track record indicates]
   it will demand that we protect old jobs from new competitors in China and elsewhere.
   [oh yeah, Paul, you mean all those "old" U.S. jobs like computer programming getting whooshed to Bombay with a "giant sucking sound," not to mention all those "old" Mexican maquiladora jobs getting whooshed to China?]
   Economists can explain until they are blue in the face why limiting exports from developing countries would be a bad idea -
   [yeah, it might actually solve something and then economists would start losing their problem-dependent jobs - better "blue in the face" than limited to "blue plate specials"]
   - why keeping our markets open to new producers is in America's interest both economically and diplomatically.
   [Ain't it interesting how "diplomatically" slips in there so fast to distract us from the "economically." As if even Clinton's diplomatic policy was building our economy when his claim to have created "10m new jobs" was nailed by a woman who stood up and said, "Yeah, I've got three of them myself."]
   But theoretical arguments for free trade will count for little if the real-world experience of jobs lost to Chinese competition can't be offset by a credible promise that new jobs will be created to replace them.
   [Damn straight.]
   History seems to be repeating itself: a similar rush to blame foreigners for U.S. problems happened during Bush I's jobless recovery (which looked like a hiring boom compared with recent experience).
   [It's not foreigners who are chiefly to blame. It's our own Paul Krugmans and CEOs who respond to technology with downsizing instead of timesizing, enshrining a rigid and pre-technological 1940-level 40-hour workweek in perpetuity so that we never get the worksaving benefits of all this wonderful technology - we only get the kind of job insecurity and economic anxiety that leads no one to want to be the first to leave the office at night.]
   Remember the president's literally nauseating trip to Japan in the company of auto executives? But if the early 1990's flirtation with protectionism had the feeling of farce, today's employment stagnation - and the protectionist talk now emanating from both parties - has the makings of tragedy.
   [Ooh are you gonna turn up on the wrong side of this one! The tragedy will be only for your rigid 40-Hours-Forever thinking, Herr Doktor Krugman.]
   If we don't get some real job creation soon, the politics of jobs may become dangerously self-destructive.
   [As if (A) the job creation of the last 63 years since we froze the workweek has been "real" or naturally market-demanded, and (B) as if the artificial job creation of the last 63 years hasn't been dangerously self-destructive. Krugman doesn't realize how easily worktime economics explains the ongoing economic bubbles he's always complaining about.]

4. [This story includes a nice summary of the US welfare system (UK: "the dole") with worktime references.]
   Welfare changes could leave many in cold, by Kevin Duggan (KevinDuggan@coloradoan.com), The Coloradoan.
   LARIMER COUNTY, Colo. - The slow recovery of the national economy has yet to trickle down to many Larimer County families trying to make ends meet. Demand for publicly funded assistance programs continues to steadily rise, say officials with Larimer County Human Services. The increase comes after a sharp drop in the number of families and individuals receiving aid after welfare reform was introduced in 1996.
   Potential changes to one federal assistance program - Temporary Aid to Needy Families, or TANF - could put even greater financial pressure on low-income families by imposing more rules on what they must do to receive assistance, officials say.... TANF was created in 1996 to replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC. The goal of the program is to move families with children off public assistance and toward self-sufficiency...a major shift in national welfare policy..\..said Ginny Riley, director of Larimer County Human Services....
   Strings attached
   Welfare is a generic term for any number of publicly funded assistance programs. It began in the 1930s with the Social Security Act and the intention of helping widows have an income so they could stay home and raise their children, Riley said. Over time, welfare grew to encompass numerous sources of aid to help low-income, disabled and elderly residents meet their basic needs. The current system includes programs such as TANF, Medicaid and food stamps....
   In August 1996, the last year for AFDC, Larimer County had 1,266 families enrolled in the program. By the end of 1999, the number of families enrolled in TANF dipped to 579. The decline in caseload can be attributed to the robust economy at the time, Riley said, and the reluctance of some welfare recipients to deal with the many rules of TANF. But the downturn in the state and national economies contributed to the number of families on TANF increasing to 919 by the end of June.
   The program provides monthly payments to qualified low-income families, but the money comes with strings attached and strict limits on how long most families can receive benefits....
   A single mother with two children receives a payment of $356 a month under TANF..\.. Participating adults who are able to work must engage in approved work-related activities - such as employment, community service, training and education - for a prescribed number of hours per week to receive monthly payments....
   In most cases, heads of households are limited to five years of TANF benefits during the course of their lifetimes.
   Changing rules
   For more than a year, Congress has been working on bills that would reauthorize the TANF program. Versions of the legislation making their way through the House and Senate would increase the required number of work-related hours for TANF recipients but would not necessarily provide additional funding for child care.
   The end result, officials say, would force parents to spend more time away from their children and bear the cost of additional child-care expenses.
   [We see a society desperately trying to plug a leak some distance from its source - uncontrolled conception.]
   States and counties have some flexibility in how they apply the complex set of federal guidelines for work-related activities, said Joni Friedman, head of the Larimer County Workforce Center. In Larimer County,
   • a single parent with a child younger than 4 years old must work 22 hours a week;
   • single parents with children older than 4 must work about 32 hours.
   • Two-parent households must work 35 hours a week - 55 hours if they use subsidized child care.
   Under a TANF reauthorization bill recently passed by the Senate Finance Committee, the work requirement would increase at least two hours a week for most families. A House version of the bill would increase the requirement to 40 hours a week.
   "I couldn't afford to do that," said Elizabeth Triebe, the mother of two daughters, ages 20 months and 4 months. "It would make things much harder for me." Triebe, 21, has been on TANF since April. She works three hours a day, five days a week, as a telemarketer. She and her children are homeless and spend their nights at the shelter run by Catholic Charities Northern.
   To fulfill the work-related activity requirement of TANF, she is taking classes at the Larimer County Workforce Center designed to help her choose a career path. When she is at work or class, a Workforce Center program covers the cost of child care for her daughters at a local center....
   The Workforce Center administers the Larimer County Works program for TANF recipients. Specialists at the center assess the work skills of applicants and the services they need to get back on their feet.... The rise in TANF applicants has added to the workload at the center, which has not been able to increase its staffing because of state and county budget cuts.
   • In June 2001, the Workforce Center worked with 359 TANF participants.
   • By July 31 [2003], the number had risen to 667 participants
   - an 86% increase in two years.... Increased caseloads and costs have drained the funds for child care, forcing Human Services to tap into TANF payment money it was able to save when caseloads were lighter, in order to cover additional child-care costs. "As of July 1, we had used up all of our reserves," Riley said. Cash payments to families cannot be reduced, Riley said, so services have been cut to make ends meet.... The Department of Human Services laid off 26 workers last year, including 10 eligibility technicians, because of state budget cuts unrelated to TANF funding..\.. At the beginning of this year, for [another] example, the income eligibility cap for subsidized child care was lowered to 140% of the federal poverty level, or $10.11 an hour for a family of three. Scores of local families were eliminated from the program, affecting more than 400 children, Riley said....
   The House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would extend the current TANF program through March. The Senate is expected to pass a similar bill and not take up comprehensive TANF reauthorization again until next year....
   Unless federal legislators change their minds, the new program is expected to require more work hours from TANF recipients, offer less child-care support, and impose more restrictions on what qualifies as approved training. The emphasis will be on getting people working, not on helping them get the tools - such as education and training - they need to find jobs, Friedman said....
   [Reverse Robin Hood - tax the poor and subsidize the rich.]
   Studies show that employment is the key to breaking the intergenerational cycle of welfare dependence, Riley said. Children who come from families that work are more likely to develop a strong work ethic and less likely to be dependent on government assistance. But the proposed changes to TANF are not realistic or family friendly, Friedman said. "You can't get on this program unless you have kids," she said. "But where's the emphasis on helping those kids?"
   [And where's the emphasis on not having kids in the first place?]

5. [Here's a related story on welfare in America, with worktime references.]
   School’s out - New welfare rules could put education out of reach, by Neil deMause, inthesetimes.com.
   You’d think Maureen Lane would be happier than this. In April, after years of lobbying by her Welfare Rights Initiative and a coalition of advocates for the poor, the New York City Council passed Local Law 23, the Coalition for Access to Training and Education [CATE] law. Seven years after President Clinton authorized strict limits on education for welfare recipients, the CATE law would at last allow city residents to enroll in college classes without jeopardizing their welfare benefits. The euphoria lasted all of one month.
   On May 8, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg filed suit against the council, saying it was his prerogative to decide how to run the city’s welfare programs, and no two-bit gang of elected officials was going to tell him how to do it. Two months later, Bloomberg’s Human Resources Administration upped the ante, announcing that it would refuse to comply with the law, prompting a legal showdown that could drag on for years.
   And now, as the latest wave of welfare legislation slogs through Congress, the entire CATE law could be wiped out by new federal requirements that would force cities and states to pull welfare recipients out of classes and find them jobs - any jobs, no matter if they’d be enough to pay the rent, let alone lift families out of poverty. So instead of spreading the word on the opportunities provided by Local Law 23, CATE is back to lobbying local officials to do what they thought had been achieved back in April.
   “In the City University of New York system alone, we’ve lost 23,000 students” to the changes in welfare law, Lane says. “That we even have to add one more family to that statistic this year, that’s the shame of it.”
   As hopes for a more progressive, less punitive welfare reform have fallen away before the reality of a Republican-controlled Congress, education was thought to be the one possible exception. Unlike such wild-eyed schemes as guaranteed childcare or lifting the five-year time limit on benefits, education and training programs appeal even to many Republicans: Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) long has championed her state’s Parents as Scholars program, which lets students count classroom time toward welfare’s work requirements.
   Certainly, there’s plenty of evidence that education is by far the most effective and lasting route out of poverty. Studies have shown that a GED or high school diploma can boost earnings by more than 30%; with a vocational or bachelor’s degree, income nearly doubles. Maine’s Parents as Scholars program is a case in point: Its graduates’ earnings jumped from $7.50 to $11.71 an hour after getting a college degree.
   Traditionally, earning an education while receiving welfare was a common route out of poverty. All that changed in 1996, when the new Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program imposed a one-year cap on schooling, requiring at least 20 hours of work a week on top of coursework. Immediately, says Lane, enrollment of welfare recipients at CUNY plummeted.
   “Students would say, ‘I can’t take this workfare assignment, it’s right in the middle of my class schedule, and I’m about to graduate,’” she recalls. “You’re told you’re going to lose your food stamps and your Medicaid and everything else unless you forget school - the students left in droves.”
   For the architects of welfare reform, it wasn’t a moment too soon. In an August 5 Washington Post op-ed, Heritage Foundation welfare guru Robert Rector and his colleague Brian Riedl blasted schooling as a waste of time: “Welfare recipients assigned to immediate work see their earnings increase more than twice as fast over the following five years as those first placed in education-based programs, according to calculations we made using data from the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. If the goal of welfare reform is to raise earnings while reducing dependency, then quickly moving welfare recipients into real jobs is the answer. Prolonged classroom training tends to be the dead end.”
   Not so, says Mark Greenberg of the D.C.-based Center for Law and Social Policy. The study in question, he explains, found that narrow job-search programs fared slightly better at boosting short-term income than those stressing adult basic education - but never studied the effects of GED or vocational training, let alone a college degree.
   “It makes sense that if somebody is at a 5th-grade reading level and can get to a 6th- or 7th-grade reading level, it doesn’t much affect employment prospects,” Greenberg says. In fact, the program most effective at increasing earnings was a Portland, Oregon, program that included both job-search and vocational training. (The MDRC study also found that none of the programs significantly boosted total income. Participants’ paychecks were neatly matched by loss of food stamps and welfare benefits, leaving them just as poor as when they started.)
   For welfare activists and recipients themselves, the value of education is self-evident.
   “I was going to school for my GED, and I was only allowed to go two days a week,” says Nichole Thomas, a mother of two who recently joined Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, one of the groups in New York’s CATE. “Welfare is supposed to be a stepping stone to help you get on your feet. If they make you drop out of college, how are you going to get on your feet? We would rather have a job. But if you’re going to end up working at McDonald’s, it’s not enough.”
   Theresa Bill, then a women’s studies lecturer at the University of Hawaii, says that when the new work rules came down, “people were leaving school in droves. Talking to students about their classroom performance, it was clear that with their work hours they just didn’t have time to do their homework.”
   To stem the tide of dropouts, the university teamed with the state department of human services to create Bridge to Hope, which allows students receiving welfare to count class time toward their work requirements, and provides part-time campus jobs to cover the rest. It’s been a popular program, with the 150 students it serves annually and with state legislators.
   If trying to get an education while on welfare is a mess now, it could be thrown into complete disarray when Congress finally passes legislation reauthorizing TANF, which could happen anytime in the next few months.
   While welfare terminology gets more arcane with each new “reform,” two of the key battlegrounds in the current reauthorization debate are over work hours and participation rate. Under existing law, recipients must work (or participate in “work activities”) 30 hours a week, although some states have passed even stiffer standards. House Republicans, following the lead of the Bush administration, have called for a 40-hour-a-week workload, with a minimum of 24 hours in “core activities” precluding training or community service - a schedule that would effectively block single moms from taking classes without risking their benefits.
   The participation rate is a more esoteric figure, indicating the minimum number of welfare recipients who must meet program rules for a state to continue receiving federal funds. Under the 1996 law, the rate stands at 50% - but “caseload reduction credits” for cutting the rolls have given some states effective participation rates as low as zero. (Only five states, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, have half their caseloads officially participating in TANF.)
   “Under current law, a state is always free to let somebody participate in postsecondary education, but if it’s for more than 12 months, it can’t count toward the participation rate,” Greenberg says. “Once you’ve got a high participation rate, you really have to structure your program around what does or doesn’t count.”
   Both the House and Senate bills would raise this bar to 70%, with much less wiggle room than under the old law: The House would credit only caseload reduction since 2001, while the Senate bill would provide a limited “employment credit” for moving people off welfare into jobs. For states that have been using the old law’s leeway to ease restrictions on education - 23 states, according to CLASP, currently allow more access to education than is permitted under TANF - such a jump in the rate would be a catastrophe. (New York’s CATE law, in fact, would likely be nullified entirely, as it requires the state to exceed the minimum participation rate by at least 10% - an easy target now, but nearly impossible under a strict 70% rate.)
   Taken together, the increased work hours and tightened participation rates are expected to hit states with billions of dollars in new program costs, at a time when state governments swimming in red ink are already looking to slash benefits. It’s a scenario that could severely blunt the impact of Sen. Snowe’s Parents as Scholars amendment - attached to the Senate bill, but not the House - which would let states allow college classes to count toward work hours. Even if the Snowe amendment survives, there’s the danger that cash-strapped states will simply decline to implement a program that would force them to keep paying benefits to students until they get a degree.
   “With the unemployment rate what it is, there is no way to put everybody to work, so the states are going to have to create massive workfare programs,” says Berkeley education activist Diana Spatz, noting that the California legislative analyst’s office estimated $2.9 billion in new costs if the House bill passes. “I don’t know how our state’s going to be able to manage.”
   Until the Congressional debates are settled, Spatz and other activists can only continue their local efforts, hoping that they aren’t obliterated by the latest dictates from Capitol Hill. For New York’s CATE, it means everything from staging meetings with local education officials, to ambushing city welfare chief Verna Eggleston - who downplayed her single-mother’s reliance on welfare for nearly two decades - outside her office to demand a meeting on the still-dormant Local Law 23.
   Nichole Thomas, one of those who confronted Eggleston, says there’s no excuse for the current stalemate: “If there are people out there who don’t mind working, that’s fine. But there’re a lot of us who do need a diploma. You got yours. Why can’t we get it?”
   Neil deMause is a regular contributor to In These Times, and the editor of heremagazine.com. His article “Bad to Worse: Welfare Reform Is Up for Reauthorization, But It’s Only Going to Get Meaner” (ITT, Sept. 2, 2002) was selected by Project Censored as one of its Top 25 Censored Media Stories of 2002-03.

6. [here's the time crunch for people not yet on welfare -]
   The working life - Juggling work and home life leaves little 'me time', by Sharon Lindstedt (slinstedt@buffnews.com), BuffaloNews.com ( NY) 10/6/2003.
   Even if you make a point to never, ever bring work home from the office, and do your best to build a fire wall between your professional and personal worlds, there's still a good chance your job is interfering with your family life.
   • If you're a woman, you are more likely than ever to be working full time, taking you away from traditional home duties.
   • If you're a working mom or dad, you've probably watched your "me" time go from slim to none, and have had to forego more school functions than you'd like to admit.
   • And if you're a man whose spouse or significant other has a full-time job, there's a good chance you are pitching in around the house more than you were five years ago.
   These are among the findings of the just-released "National Study of the Changing Workforce' from the New York City-based Families and Work Institute.
   "We're seeing more sensitivity and flexibility on the part of employers, but when you get right down to it, it falls to the workers and their families more often than not to figure out how to balance work life and home life," said Terry Bond, the institute's vice president for research.
   The study found the key factor driving work/life changes is the expanding role of women in the workforce. Not only is the overall number of female workers continuing to rise, a growing%age of them are calling the shots.
   Thirty-eight% of working women now hold professional or managerial positions, compared with 28% of male workers. Women in today's workforce are also better educated than their male counterparts, with 62% having completed college, compared with 56% of working men.
   As you might guess from the growing number of working women, the number of dual-earner households is also on the rise. Over the past 25 years, the number of two-paycheck families has climbed from 66% in 1977 to 78% today.
   Together, these couples are working longer and longers hours. Combined work hours for dual-earner couples with children rose 10 hours per week, from 81 hours a week in 1977 to 91 hours now.
   That extra time on the job translates to less personal time for parents. Today's dads spend 1.3 hours each workday on themselves, down from 2.1 hours 25 years ago, while moms have just 0.9 hours a day to call their own, down from 1.6 hours in 1977.
   Despite that time crunch, parents are eking out more time to spend with their children, according to the study. The combined time spouses spend with their kids, caring for them and doing things with them, has increased from 5.2 hours each workday to 6.2 hours.
   "It's fairly surprising to see that increase, but I think it shows that parents are doing everything they can on the home front despite the outside time pressures," Bond said.
   Another change in the lives of American workers, according to the study, is the expanded roles of the father in the home. Since 1977, fathers have increased the time they spend on workdays doing household chores by about 42 minutes, while mothers have reduced their time by the same amount, although they still do more than fathers.
   In home activities such as cooking and child care, women are still much more likely to shoulder greater overall responsibility, although fathers appear to be taking more responsibility than they used to.
   When it comes to what employers can do to help their staffers juggle an increasing work load while balancing their personal lives, the study found that "flex time" got high marks from over-scheduled employees.
   "When workers have that option they exhibit more job satisfaction, greater loyalty and more positive outcomes. And the good news for employers is that its a low-cost way to accommodate their workers," Bond said.

7. [and while the affluent love to hear how hard the less-affluent are working, here's what many of them are doing -]
   Analysis: K.C. judges collecting six-figure salaries for part-time hours, AP via LJWorld.com (Lawrence KS) Oct 7, 2003.
   KANSAS CITY [K.C.], Mo. - It's nice work if you can get it: a part-time job that pays a six-figure salary, and you can set your own time off and working conditions.
   That's the unofficial job description enjoyed by the nine full-time judges on the Kansas City Municipal Court, according to an analysis by The Kansas City Star.
   "It's a good gig," Presiding Judge John Williams said, "but you want it to be a good gig and attract talented lawyers to the bench."
   The judges aren't officially part-time workers, but they average less than 30 hours a week in the courthouse, the Star reported based on a computer analysis of 13 months of parking records.
   Two judges averaged as little as 24 hours a week. The longest average work week was 32 hours.
   The judges, whose salaries are set by the Kansas City Council, are paid nearly $119,000 a year - higher than any other Missouri judge except members of the Missouri Supreme Court.
   The Star said its analysis was based on parking records, which showed when judges entered and left the courthouse garage, as well as other court documents including caseloads, docket schedules and the days judges were off.
   Judges can take off as much as 45 days each year. During a one-year period ending Aug. 31, the nine full-time judges took off a total of 386 work days.
   Records also showed that four Kansas City judges often left the courthouse by 3 p.m.; a few routinely arrive late for their 9 a.m. dockets; and all the full-time judges take Friday afternoons off. Part-time housing court Judge A. Wayne Cagle often works past 4 p.m. Fridays.
   The judges defended their time in court and their work ethic, maintaining that they work hard enough to handle thousands of cases a week without an apparent backlog.
   Judge Michael McAdam, who recently was named president of the prestigious American Judges Assn., called the analysis of parking records unfair. McAdam said "it doesn't take into account a lot of the things we do outside the building," such as professional development and community activities.
   The Star used the Missouri Open Records law to obtain electronic data on the judges' security-card swipes in and out of the Municipal Court parking garage. The newspaper reviewed 13 months of data between Aug. 1, 2002, and Sept. 1, 2003.

8. [Here's an interesting article from the employers' viewpoint on the effects that the economic downturn and the rising labor surplus are having on the power gradient between employers and employees.]
   Tough tactics for a tough market - Signalogic CEO tells interested engineers up front what he expects of them, by Victor Godinez (vgodinez@dallasnews.com), Dallas Morning News via dallasnews.com.
   Jeff Brower of Signalogic is clear about the type of engineers his company is seeking - and he's telling would-be applicants on the Web. [foto]
   This spring, Jeff Brower decided he'd had enough. As president and CEO of Dallas-based Signalogic, which designs and makes digital signal processor hardware and software, Mr. Brower was accustomed to receiving scores of applications for engineering jobs at his company.
   But he was surprised at the work ethic and pay demands of many of the applicants, he said. "I was just stunned that people were not getting this concept that in tough times, you have to meet the deadline," Mr. Brower said. "And people were still asking for year 2000 salaries." So he posted an open letter on Signalogic's Web site, detailing the technical expertise that applicants must have to be considered and describing the commitment he expects of his employees.
   The job market for computer and electrical engineers has been tough for a while now, with salaries down and unemployment rates up. Experts say Mr. Brower's letter reflects the adjustments that employers are making as the demand for their products remains uncertain.
   "You must have no problem with long work hours if you get behind," Mr. Brower wrote in the letter ( www.signalogic.com/index.pl?page=jobs ). "If you get stuck, if you get behind schedule, then you eat here, you sleep here, you do whatever it takes to fix the problem and get back on schedule.
   "If you think you're going to walk out at 5:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon and leave me or another engineer to work over the weekend on your problem that is causing you to slip the schedule, you can just keep walking. The rule is: If someone else has to do your work, you no longer work."
   [Never mind managing the workload better. This kind of blank check on people's lives is cured only by high turnover, and high turnover requires lots of options for employees in terms of other good jobs and/or on-the-job training - a situation that prevailed only during the World Wars - and during the reduction of the national workweek from unregulated to 44 in 1938 and thence to 42 and 40 hours in 1939-40.]
   Mr. Brower adds in the letter that Signalogic - which is hiring - offers the chance to work with cutting-edge technology and motivated professionals. He also notes that the company, which fluctuates between 11 and 14 workers, pays its engineers between $55,000 and $72,000 a year.
   [What good is technology if it doesn't give you more free time? What good is money when you've got no life?]
   Some visitors to the site have been stunned by the company's take-it-or-leave-it hiring strategy. A writer for industry trade journal Embedded Systems Programming wrote a column criticizing the letter.
   But Mr. Brower offers no apologies. "People who come here have to have already read the notice and be prepared to talk about it," he said. Mr. Brower and others say the business environment is too tenuous for employers to relax their hiring standards for engineers.
   [And guess who's made the business environment "tenuous" - CEOs like Brower, who downsize even when in profit. Essentially, they screw themselves by downsizing their customers' customers and then blame the resulting downturn on an Act of God while they downsize employment conditions.]
   George McClure, chairman of the career and workforce policy committee for trade group IEEE-USA, said that many companies that employ electrical and computer engineers have tightened their job requirements in the last couple of years.
   "Their job descriptions are getting more specific, but I'm not sure whether that's because they need the specificity or because they want to cut down the number of applicants," he said.
   Mark Finger, vice president of human resources at Austin-based National Instruments Corp., said his company is hiring selectively. But he gets so many résumés and job requests that he's stopped telling people he meets what he does for a living.
   "As you might guess, our turnover is way down," he said.
   Contrary to conventional wisdom, National Instruments recruits almost exclusively on college campuses to find raw, talented engineers who haven't picked up any bad work habits.
   "This year, we'll probably hire on a worldwide basis 150 to 175 engineers," he said, with about 100 to 110 of those hires in the United States. "That may not be the 200 we hired two years ago, but it's still quite a few folks."
   Business conditions have reduced hiring industrywide. They've also put pressure on salaries at more companies than Signalogic.
   The unemployment rate for computer and hardware engineers was 5.7% in the second quarter, and electrical and electronics engineers came in at 6.4%, according to the IEEE-USA. For all workers in the second quarter, the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent.
   Meanwhile, the National Association of Colleges and Employers said that this year's computer engineering graduates saw average starting salaries increase to $51,343, just 0.4% over last year's offers. Electrical engineering graduates saw average salary offers fall 1.2% to $49,794.
   "Business is always cyclical, and I'm sure at some point things will improve overall, and employers such as myself won't have to make such a strict case as this," Signalogic's Mr. Brower said.
   "But for the time being at least, it does seem that we have to be really clear and explain things that you wouldn't think have to be explained."

9. [Another example of the "long hours = productivity" myth, never mind automation and robotics -]
   City on budget home stretch, by Richard Valenty, Colorado Daily.
   [This one's about Boulder, once a new-age haven for flower children who got disgusted with Harvard Square once they closed Buddy's Steak pit and the 5-and-dime. Now it's going down right along with the rest of us, for lack of worktime economics.]
   BOULDER, Colo. - It's almost time for Boulder citizens to "speak now or forever hold their peace" on the city's 2004-2005 budget process. City council will take public testimony on the budget, as well as other issues, at tonight's meeting at 1777 Broadway at 6:00 p.m.
   The budget has been a trial-by-fire experience for first-year City Manager Frank Bruno, who started the job in Feb. 2003 and almost instantly had to sharpen his budget cutlery. City sales/use taxes, for a variety of reasons, has declined dramatically in Boulder, so jobs and programs had to go....
   "There's always some 'fat' in a large corporation, and we're a large municipal corporation," said Bruno. "I think that the fat trimming occurred years ago as part of a four-year, $5 million reduction. The further cuts on the table now go into the meat and in some cases the bone of the municipal corporation."
   Some critics have also suggested that highly paid city officials were spared the knife, and also that the city should reorganize its budget instead cutting the budget from the bottom up.
   "I don't know how a person could come here in February as a new city manager, start the budget process in March, and be able to evaluate the organization and restructure it before making cuts," said Bruno. "The reality is that the people in high-level positions are the ones doing the heavy lifting [oh yeah?], and are generally the ones doing the 60-70 hour work weeks that we require.
   [Long hours do not necessarily equate to heavy lifting.]
   "After this process is completed, I will continue to look at the organization in a way to craft more efficiency in the organization, and that might require restructuring," said Bruno.
   [70-hour workweeks and efficiency in the organization are mutually incompatible, but Frank "Duh" Bruno seems to have bought the illusion that long hours and general busyness equal Importance = another American crisis manager at work, creating crises for himself to manage.]

10. [And then there are the employees who seek work-life imbalance, but only if they're getting a big enough bribe -]
    Culpeper dispatchers in dispute over pay - Culpeper dispatchers fuming over change in pay for overtime hours, by Donnie Johnston (DJohn40330@aol.com), Fredericksburg.com (VA) via freelancestar.com.
    Stacy Carpenter, a dispatcher for Culpeper's E-911 system with nine years experience, worked 36 hours of overtime in September.
    For those hours, almost an entire extra week, the salaried employee made a little more than $200 in additional pay, about $5.50 an hour. [But] that was better than August, however, when he says he made $4.56 per hour for his overtime.
    Culpeper dispatchers - all of whom are on salary - are fuming over a confusing new system where they are not paid time-and-a-half, but rather get half of the hourly pay rate...for any hours over 40.
    [That should come with a clear option to refuse any overtime.]
    They are further incensed because that half-time pay is calculated on a sliding scale that tilts downward. The more hours the dispatchers work, the less their half-time pay. "Everybody wonders why we are losing people," Carpenter said. "It's because we are treated like dirt."
    [When we allow a 1940-level workweek to survive on indefinitely regardless of in rushing worksaving technology, we all make ourselves as common as dirt and consequently as cheap as dirt. And the only way of disciplining employers is "losing people" - but that means the people have to have options - other jobs to move to - and that means we have to reduce the workweek to suit current technology levels and get a surplus of jobs rather than a surplus of jobseekers.] Although the county has them working alternate weekly schedules of 36 and 48 hours, until July 1, dispatchers were paid based on a 40-hour work week.
    Then Culpeper County decided to change dispatchers' pay schedule. Contending they were on a fixed salary with fluctuating hours, the county employed a little-used section of the Fair Labor Standards Act [FLSA] that cut overtime from time-and-a-half to half-time.
    [Another little design flaw in the FLSA.]
    At the same time, a dispatcher's option to either take overtime pay or compensatory hours was taken away.
    The new policy, which applies to no county employees other than dispatchers, took effect the same day as a long-awaited departmental pay raise.
    "Look how long it took to get a pay raise and then they take it away," said dispatcher Courtney Roy. "Sometimes we aren't even getting paid minimum wage [for overtime hours]."
    This last statement seems to apply in cases like that of Carpenter's August pay. This would appear to be in direct violation of the FLSA, which strictly forbids half-time rates that are less than minimum wage.
    Dispatcher Cathy Gorfida said the new pay system is so unpopular that its is becoming a public-safety issue.
    "If someone calls in sick, we don't want to come in [and work as a replacement]," Gorfida said.
    "I refused to go in several times in August because I wasn't getting paid enough," Carpenter said.
    The joint town-county dispatch center is required to have at least two qualified employees on duty to work the system's nine E-911 telephone lines.
    At times, however, such as during Hurricane Isabel, two dispatchers can't properly handle the job.
    "During the hurricane, there were six of us working, and it was all we could do to keep up," Gorfida said.
    County Administrator Frank Bossio said the change in pay systems came about after dispatch center manager Steve Basnett complained that his people weren't being paid properly.
    Bossio said the county legal department looked at the system in place and agreed. Because they are salaried rather than employees paid on an hourly basis, the FLSA allowed half-time overtime pay rather than time-and-a-half wages.
    Bossio said there was "no intent" by the county to shortchange dispatchers and said the change in policy had nothing to do with saving money.
    Gorfida said dispatchers heard a different story during a July 29 meeting with county Human Resources Director Suzanne Taylor.
    [Compare Catbert, the "evil HR director" from the Dilbert cartoon strip.]
    "We were told at that meeting that it was done to keep taxes down," she said.
    [That's not a different story. It's just that Gorfida didn't connect the dots. Employees really better get focused on the strategically central worktime issue before they shifted from sweatshop to slavery or poorhouse, still muttering, "Duh, dat's not what dey said at de HR meeting!"]
    Bossio also contends that dispatchers agreed to the new pay system when they signed and returned a July 29 memo outlining the plan. The memo, however, reads only that dispatchers "have read and understand this memorandum."
    Bossio said he does not know how much - if anything - the new system is saving the county. Dispatchers, however, know that it is costing them dollars from their paychecks.
    One week, Gorfida worked 53 hours at a gross weekly salary of $548.08. To arrive at her overtime pay, or rather her half-time pay, it was first determined that the dispatcher's hourly rate was $10.34 (dividing her gross pay by 53, the actual number of hours she worked).
    That amount was divided in half and came out to $5.17. This half-time rate was then multiplied by 13, the number of overtime hours worked, and Gorfida took home an additional $67.21 for her extra work.
    Had she been paid time-and-a-half for her overtime, she would have received $201.53.
    What is even more confusing is that a dispatcher's hourly wage fluctuates according to the number of hours actually worked. For example, had Gorfida worked 60 hours that week, her gross pay would have been divided by 60 and her hourly wage would have been set at $9.13. Half of that would have been $4.56.
    That's the same amount Carpenter received in August, which is below minimum wage.
    Town police Chief Dan Boring, a member of the six-member E-911 board, said he had heard only rumors concerning the half-time pay.
    "I don't think there's been any presentation to the [E-911] board, either formally or informally, on the matter," he said.
    Sheriff Lee Hart, who chairs the E-911 board, said he had only recently become aware of the situation and refused comment.
    "It's a county matter," he said.
    Hart's opponent in the Nov. 4 sheriff's race, however, Capt. Rick Pinksaw of the Culpeper Town Police Department, called the situation "a mess" and "a real shame."
    "The thing that bothers me most is that even if you could [legally] do it, why would you want to do that to your people, your most valuable resource," he added. "It's a joke."
    Dispatchers, who are considered essential emergency employees, aren't laughing and have taken their concerns to county officials, supervisors and town councilmen.
    Bossio said Basnett has brought complaints back to his desk, and the matter is being re-evaluated.
    "The county is looking at it, and the county will do what's right," Bossio said. "We're not finished with this, I want to stress that point."
    He added, however, that he feels the dispatcher pay strategy is legal, citing a 1997 court decision on the matter. He said he was not aware of individual cases where dispatchers were paid below minimum wage for overtime hours.
    Roy wonders how the shoe would feel if it were on the other foot.
    "If they [county officials] were being paid like us they'd be putting up a fuss, too," she said.

11. Chicago area refuse haulers association goes back to bargaining table Tuesday at request of mediator, PRNewswire via Yahoo News Oct 6 1:45 pm ET.
    CHICAGO...- The Chicago Area Refuse Haulers Association today announced it has agreed to return to bargaining Tuesday with officials of the Teamsters union representing striking garbage truck drivers at the request of a federal mediator.
    The Association, which represents 17 companies providing waste collection services in the Chicago metropolitan area, said it agreed to the services of a federal mediator to help facilitate an agreement with the union and an end to the nearly week-old Teamsters' walkout. The talks are scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. at an undisclosed neutral location.
    "We are eager to return to the bargaining table, but today remain far apart," said Rich Van Hattem, president of the Association. "We have placed a very generous offer in front of the union. Under our proposal, our drivers would see their wages and benefits rise 24% in the next five years. Next year alone, drivers' wages would rise 3.3%, or 70 cents per hour, their health benefits contributions, 12%, and their pension contributions, 15%. And they won't have to pay a penny for their health and welfare or pension benefits. Drivers working 50 hours a week in Chicago, a typical work week, would earn more than $92,000 in wages and benefits in the fifth year. The Teamsters began this strike and it continues because so far they have been unreasonable in their demands."
    [What's the use of a 40-hour ceiling on the workweek if a whole industry can work 50 hours in a typical workweek? Check out our redesign.]

12. Hollywood screenwriters write own recall scripts, Reuters via backstage.com.
    A film about an action movie hero who becomes governor of California? ...Writer Timothy Wurtz, who wrote "Hungry Hearts," starring Susan Blakely, and "Naked Lie," outlined a spoof on Schwarzenegger's 1988 comedy "Twins," in which [Arnold] and the diminutive Danny DeVito play unlikely twins who are the result of an experiment gone bad. DeVito's character becomes the ultimate low life, while Schwarzenegger's character grows to athletic proportions and is raised to be the perfect being.
    In Wurtz's [new] version [however,] Schwarzenegger would become governor but is actually the evil twin and California suffers because it is run by Hollywood interests.... "Under the action hero's watch, California has yet another bad governor," Wurtz said. "Everything is now run on a 14-hour workday. There is no longer a 40-hour work week because Hollywood now controls California. Nobody gets overtime [pay], but you do get a meal," he said....
    [Big deal.]

13. [Now news from offshore, waaaay offshore.]
    Kanbay seeks to tap local talent, by Diana Thorp, Australian IT.
    INDIA - Global integration and managed solutions company Kanbay is opening a second centre in India, but it is also eyeing Melbourne [Australia] as a possible offshore destination. The company is starting smaller development centres outside India, Kanbay chairman and chief executive Raymond Spencer says....
    "India has been very good at learning and understanding the US and European markets and figuring out how to adapt operations to serve them," he says.
    "Australian companies that are going to be successful serving global companies from development centres in Melbourne, for example, are going to have to make that same adaptation.
    "They do subtle things. Our India operation works Tuesdays to Saturdays because that more neatly aligns with the Monday-to-Friday work week of North America. "We work slightly different hours, depending on whether the client is in Europe or on the east coast of the US, or on the west coast or in the middle. You have to be flexible. It takes that kind of adaptability to be successful."
    Kanbay was established in Chicago in 1989. It started operations in India at the same time and was among the first to open there.
    "In those days it was the beginning of the shortage of IT specialists in North America, so people were looking for resources," he says. "Initially it was a resource shortage issue. Once you started employing a multi-site approach to development you had, of course, economic advantages.
    [The great "shortage of American talent" argument. Compare "they're doing jobs no American wants to do" - not for crummy wages anyway.]
    "Also, frankly, as the 1990s wore on and you got into the whole dotcom thing and so on, probably the biggest advantage offered by companies like us was speed.
    "There was a big shortage of people at that time, but the ability to build up larger teams, and potentially work a couple of shifts and so on - get things done quickly - was really valuable....
    The new centre in Hyderabad, India, opens next month.
    Spencer, originally from Adelaide, says Kanbay turned over U$105m (A$155m) in the past year. It has 1,850 staff, including some 1400 at its centre in Pune, India.
    It employs about 80 people in its Australian offices and about 10% of its revenue come from Australia....
    [So it employs 80/1850= only 4% Australians, but gets 10% of its revenue out of Australia. Sounds like the kind of ratio that is sliding Americans down into the Third World.]

14. [now back to our local bastion of the British Em-pye-ah -]
    National PEP Your Workplace Week - Fifth edition October 6-10, 2003 - Executive coaching: How to be an effective leader, press release by Ann Searles of IBT Canada/Caribbean (514-426-2325 or 800-631-9207), IBT via Canada NewsWire Telbec.
    MONTREAL, Canada...- Again this year, the first full week in October is designated "National PEP Your Workplace Week." Created by the Institute for Business Technology (IBT) as the kickoff to Quality Month, this event aims to raise awareness of the importance of personal effectiveness and productivity (PEP) in the workplace. To achieve this goal, IBT provides invaluable tips and tools to businesses - which can be put into practice easily and immediately (www.ibtcda.ca). This year, National PEP Your Workplace Week runs from October 6 to 10. The focus is leadership....
    [Rah rah - hooboy.]
    With the new parameters imposed by globalization, many businesses have downsized and developed teletraining initiatives to maintain their competitive edge. As a result, executives are faced with more intricate challenges, but less people to deal with them. Managers can easily burn out. Overwhelmed with day-to-day emergencies, they cannot take a real leadership role despite putting in longer and longer workdays.
    [How about "they can't take a real leadership role because of putting in longer and longer workdays"!]
    In many cases, though, better organizational skills would help lower their level of stress and heighten both their own productivity and the performance of their teams. Quite simply, they need time to lead.
    Leadership is an acquired skill! Managers must not only be experts in their field but also have what it takes to motivate teams, promote effectiveness and retain the best people. Some leaders are so busy putting out fires that they become inaccessible to their own people.
    [Management skills gradually deteriorate as workhours climb for those still working - and labor surplus deepens. Crisis management takes over because the crisis is such a convenient distraction from the inadequacies of management. Just look at the Bush administration.]
    "Even leaders blessed with natural charisma can drop the ball - if they can't find the time to lead," says Ann Searles, President of IBT Canada/Caribbean.
    [But making time to lead takes delegation, workload distribution and finite job descriptions, and with work-sharing scorners like mainstream economists declining to specify a definite timeframe, what likelihood is there that derivative management theory would be any more pin-downable, accountable, or responsible?]
    "And how do you find time to lead? By learning basic organizational skills required to prioritize your leadership role and the activities of your team."
    ["Basic organizational skills? What's that?!"]
    A...business article recently confirmed that managers can't find the time to solve problems of which they are keenly aware. "A good leader is not someone who runs so far ahead of the pack that the rest of the team can't keep up. Leaders need to be accessible to help their people produce solutions," Searles added.
    As more corporations pay lip service to "work life balance", their employees are not impressed by managers who model 70 hour work weeks. Moreover, those crushingly long hours rarely include time to focus on problem solving and leadership. Such simple things as interpersonal communications, teamwork and clear individual and collective goals fall by the wayside. Managers who cannot - or will not - take the time to delegate often fail to develop a long-term vision for their teams. When the "leaders" finally burn out, no one can easily replace them, because no one was ever allowed to do so.
    IBT's productivity consultants understand these challenges. Since 1990, IBT has coached managers to help them recapture up to 10 hours of time per week - time to lead.
    So during National PEP Your Workplace Week, from October 6 to 10, 2003, try putting a little PEP into your own workplace by applying some of IBT's practical, hands-on tips. Take advantage of this week to stop the "crisis merry go round" and test new, simple and effective methods to help make your work - and your life - better.
    The Institute for Business Technology (IBT) is a consulting firm specializing in solutions to improve the productivity and effectiveness of directors, managers and professionals. Active in some 25 countries, IBT's clients include such corporations as Bayer, Bell Helicopter Textron, Bombardier, Ericsson, Falconbridge, Kraft, Pfizer, Rolls-Royce and Schering. For more information on IBT and the PEP program, please consult IBT's Web site at www.ibtcda.ca [or phone] IBT - Québec, Valérie Gonzalo, (514) 626-6976, or IBT - Ontario, Doug Stewart, (905) 472-3680.

15. [And back over to the motherland -]
    Minimum wage, Online Recruitment (UK) via onrec.com 06/06/2003.
    UNITED KINGDOM - As the new wage rises by 30 pence to £4.50 from 1st October, Adecco, one of the UK’s largest employers across multiple sectors, has urged a reality check on the impact that the minimum wage has had on workers, rather than businesses.
    "Much of the focus of debate tends to be on the impact of the minimum wage on businesses and the competitiveness of UK PLC but as a company that places 35,000 people in work every day in the UK, we feel that attention should turn to what impact the minimum wage has had on the workers themselves and on job creation," said Richard Macmillan, UK MD of Adecco UK.
    "The Low Pay Commission have proved that there has been no adverse effect on British industry as a result but I’d say that there has been no positive effect on the worker either. An hourly rate of £4.50 provides an annual income of £8,190 assuming a 35 hour week - which we need to remember is not an awful lot of money. While UK business generally may be feeling that it has got away lightly, we think that some businesses confuse meeting minimum wage targets as a sign that they are responsible employers. The fact is that £8,000 per annum with no other benefits does not equal a happy workforce. And just as importantly, has the minimum wage had any influence on the number of jobs created?"
    [Whenever you hear someone (like Krugman in #3 today, above) yapping about private-sector free-market job creation in this age of automation and robotics, you know their brains are stuck in the age of spinning wheels and hand looms. They just don't get it. And yet, if we switch to worksharing and cut the workweek sufficiently to achieve full employment, we won't even have to worry about minimum wage targets because market forces, responding to a perceived labor shortage, will take care of wages and benefits more satisfactorily than any legislation could.]

16. [And thru the Chunnel to Canada's other motherland, or maybe it's "fatherland" cuz the national anthem says "Allons enfants de la patrie" -]
    French government reviews 35-hour week, AFP via Expatica.com/Netherlands.
    PARIS, France - French Budget Minister Alain Lambert on Sunday called on unions and employers to launch negotiations to examine the country's 35-hour work week, which he described as being "harmful" for the embattled French economy. Speaking on France Inter Radio, Lambert vowed the government would not impose changes to the system by pushing through new laws but by reopening negotiations between unions and managements to undertake a necessary relaxing of the rules.
    "These questions have to be rediscussed by the social partners," he said. "Some softening is necessary and it would be good to achieve that ... by examining the issue job by job."
    ["Job by job"?? Sounds infinitely time consuming.]
    Last week, Lambert sparked a heated debate over the future of the 35-hour week by blaming the costs of implementing the system for France's failure to meet its EU deficit commitments.
    "I think that the consequences are almost incalculable," on the French economy, Lambert reaffirmed Sunday, repeating the government's estimate that the system costs the state EUR 15 billion (USD 17.4 billion) a year.
    By saying that the system was "harmful", Lambert maintained he had "simply asked a question that was on everybody's lips".
    According to newspaper reports, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has given the nod to a group of deputies from his Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party who want parliament to vote in a special committee of enquiry which would examine the effects of the 1998 law.
    Unique in the world, the 35-hour week was designed to encourage employment by sharing out the existing work among more people, with companies compensated for their longer pay-rolls by more flexible rostering, lower social charges and a promise of wage restraint from unions.
    However many economists say that while the reduction in working time helped form between 200,000 and 300,000 jobs, many of these would have been created anyway as a result of the country's strong performance in the late 1990s, and that now the measure is acting as a brake on growth.
    [Another version -]
    French PM seeks to soothe week tensions, AFP via Business Day via bday.co.za.
    MOSCOW - French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin appears to back off from threats to rescind the previous Socialist government's decision to cut statutory working hours, telling a meeting of French business leaders in Moscow that "social dialogue" was his top priority.
    ["Dialogue" meaning "hornswoggle."]
    "We believe that social dialogue provides a fertile terrain in France, and we really want it to be revitalised," he said, in a clear signal that negotiations with the trade unions would precede any attempt to change the law on the reduced working week via a parliamentary vote.
    It was the first time Raffarin had spoken on the issue of working hours since his budget minister, Alain Lambert, sparked controversy by saying that it was largely responsible for the country's failure to meet its European Union commitments on its public sector deficit.
    Lambert said on Thursday that the reduced working week was costing the state some 15 billion euros (17.4 billion dollars) a year.
    [And how much is it saving it?]
    Already on Sunday Lambert appeared to back off from suggestions that the government might seek to use its large parliamentary majority to rescind the law, which brought in a statutory 35-hour week for many employees.
    While still describing the law as "harmful" for the economy, Lambert stressed on the France Inter radio station that the government would seek to reopen negotiations between unions and managements in a bid to try and "soften" its provisions.
    "These questions have to be rediscussed by the social partners," he said. "Some softening is necessary and it would be good to achieve that... by examining the issue job by job," said Lambert.
    Speaking at a working breakfast with French business people in Moscow during a visit to Russia, Raffarin said: "We are ready to bring about the changes needed to strengthen social dialogue, make it more fruitful and make sure that dialogue comes before legislative action, as regards the 35-hour (work week) and any other issue."

1. 10/04   3,000 state workers rally, call cuts unfair - Granholm says steps are necessary, by Chris Andrews {377-1054 or candrews(at)lsj.com}, Lansing State Journal of Michigan 10/3/2003 via lsj.com via GoogleNews.
   Concessions sought [blowout]. Here are the concessions Gov. Jennifer Granholm is seeking:
   • Workers continue to work 40-hour weeks, but get paid for 38. The rest can be taken as unpaid vacation or as contributions into employees' retirement accounts after they quit or retire.
   • Dec. 26 would be a paid day off, Jan. 2 an unpaid day off. Workers would take four other days as unpaid time off.
   • The co-pay for brand name prescription drugs would climb from $15 to $30 if a generic equivalent or preferred drug is available.
   LANSING, Mich. - About 3,000 defiant state-government workers marched, chanted and shouted Thursday outside the Capitol in opposition to concessions. On a crisp fall day with clear blue skies, workers from as far away as the Upper Peninsula raised signs and voices against givebacks sought by Gov. Jennifer Granholm. "We've given and given and given," said Rodger Brown, a mailroom worker in the Attorney General's Office. "I can't afford to cut back my wages."
   Six unions representing state employees sponsored the rally, but nonunionized workers attended as well. A thunderous chant of "Just say no" echoed across Capitol Avenue, within easy earshot of Granholm in her Romney Building office. Hundreds marched along Capitol Avenue with signs that said, "No Layoffs" and "Jenny, pay us," and "Laptops mean layoffs," a reference to a state plan to give computers to sixth-graders.
   [Sounds like luddism but it's just resentment against forced sacrifice of pay for education.]
   Granholm is seeking $230 million in concessions or other savings from the state's 55,000 workers. If state officials can't get [pay deferral] concessions, they have indicated they will reduce the workweek to 37.5 hours. That would have a greater impact on pay, seniority, leave time and retirement benefits than the concession proposal by the Granholm administration.
   "Asking state employees to defer their pay is among the most difficult decisions this administration has had to make," Granholm said in a statement. "Unfortunately, given the dire budget crisis this administration inherited, this was a necessary step."
   No-layoff guarantee. Granholm has made some progress. Leaders of the 4,000-member Michigan State Employees Association [MSEA] agreed to concessions that would save the state $14 million and give workers a no-layoff guarantee. The members will decide whether to ratify the deal later this month.
   The Civil Service Commission is expected to approve a deferred-pay plan and five unpaid furlough days for more than 14,000 non-unionized workers next week. Projected savings: $75 million.
   [This is a form of primitive timesizing embedded even in the deferred-pay plan.]
   But Thursday's rally left little doubt that many state workers believe they sacrificed too much during Gov. John Engler's 12 years in office and steadfastly oppose concessions. The crowd booed loudly when any references were made to the MSEA agreement.
   • Michigan Corrections Organization delegates voted Wednesday not to consider concessions. That is likely to lead to a change that gives corrections officers an unpaid lunch period.
   • Many workers at the rally said the state shouldn't be coming to them for concessions until lawmakers give back the 40-percent raises they received in 2001-02. "The concessions are too much. They need to go back and cut the pay of the Legislature," said Yvonne Johnson, a Family Independence Agency field worker from Detroit.
   • Millions for contracting. UAW Local 6000 President Mary Ettinger said the state continues to waste millions of dollars by contracting out services. "We believe if management seriously looked at subcontracting, they would see state employees could do it cheaper and better," she said. "We believe and we know there are too many people in management."
   Ettinger and other leaders said repeatedly that Granholm was left to address problems that were created by Engler [the previous governor].
   Phil Thompson, executive vice president of Service Employees International Union 517-M, said the Legislature could solve the budget crunch by delaying a scheduled income-tax cut or making other tax changes. "The culprits are not in the governor's office; they're in the Legislature," he said, pointing to the Capitol behind him.
   Granholm wants unions to accept a banked-leave-time plan, in which employees continue to work 40 hours a week but are paid for 38. They could use the other time as unpaid vacation and would be compensated for unused leave time calculated at their final wage when they quit or retire.
   [Working 40 hours but being paid for 38 is on the face of it, reverse timesizing. The full 40-hours payment is deferred in various ways. Michigan employees would be much better off with simple no-deferral timesizing involving the 37½-hour workweek Granholm has been considering. Why? How do they know the state won't be in a worse financial "crisis" when the complicated and atomized payback times come round?]
   Nancy Hill, a Treasury Department analyst, said a smaller paycheck would be tough to swallow. "I'm a sole income provider," she said. "I'm actually working two jobs to keep things going."
   [You and lots of Americans, Nancy, and it's not going to get any better until we all focus on cutting the workweek down to where it should be for our level of technological efficiency and productivity. We can't tell in advance where that level is, and it's a (downward) moving target anyway, but we can keep gradually adjusting the workweek downward, giving everyone lots of adjustment time and rigorously converting overtime and overwork to training and hiring, and as employees get more options and start dumping the dopiest employers, powerful - inexorable - market forces start forcing wages and benefits upwards. How do we fix the outsourcers' "wagon"? You don't contribute to our consumer base with jobs - you don't get to use our consumer markets for your exports. Tariffs, automatic by company or even product to stabilize employment, automatic by currency to stabilize currency gyrations. "But that's against free trade, that's against the WTO/GATT/NAFTA!" etc. etc. It's also against the "race to the bottom" and identical to the way every single developed economy in the world today behaved at certain periods of its early development. There's no simple one-stop trade response like "free" trade. There's only common sense.]

2. 10/04   Shares of parts supplier tumble on Chrysler report, by Micheline Maynard, NYT, B2.
   ...Further signs of Chrysler's problems came Friday when the Canadian Auto Workers union said the company would temporarily shut its big factory in Windsor ONT later this month. Ken Levenza, the president of Local 444, which represents workers at the plant, said the plant would be closed the last week of October and the first week of November, according to Reuters. Windsor, considered one of Chrysler's most advanced factories, makes Chrysler Town & Country minivans, the most expensive version of the company's minivans, as well as the Pacifica, a plump station wagon.... The plant is the largest auto factory in Canada, employing 6,000 workers. It has run on three shifts a day for the last five years. But...overall, Chrysler's sales fell 15% in September compared with those in the month a year earlier....

3. 10/04   Butler library slashes its costs in response to cut in state subsidy, by Karen Kane kkane(at)post-gazette.com or 724-772-9180, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Oct 03 2003 via GoogleNews.
   BUTLER, Pa. - Butler Area Public Library is cutting its staff by 50%, its hours [of operation per week] by 40% [from 65 to 40], and the salaries of its remaining employees by 20%. The budget slashing is the result of a 50% cut in the state subsidy to public libraries this fiscal year, said Gwilym Price, a Butler lawyer and a member of the library's board of directors.... The library board voted on the spending cuts Wednesday and employees were notified yesterday. The cuts will take effect Oct. 13....
   The cut in aid to the Butler Public Library amounted to a loss of $70,000,12% of its total budget, said Executive Director Betsy Gibson.... Gibson said all eight part-time employees will be furloughed and the salaries of the remaining nine employees, who work full time, will be cut by 20% to match an equivalent drop in hours worked....
   "We have this great team of people, all tremendously committed to public service, and now we have to disband," Gibson said. "It's disheartening. It's a real blow to us all and to the community."
   [Not if you cut 20% of hours more consistently across everyone, including the part-timers.]

4. 10/04   DPHSS may pay workers to settle dispute, by Steve Limtiaco, Agana Pacific Daily News of Guam Oct 3 2003 via GoogleNews.
   TO THE POINT [blowout] - The Civil Service Commission is no longer investigating grievances filed by Public Health employees over a shortened workweek because the agency is working to settle the matter.
   GUAM - The Dept of Public Health and Social Services plans to give retroactive pay to 40 employees who filed grievances related to the government's 32-hour workweek. Public Health Director PeterJohn Camacho said the department has not taken a position on whether their work hours were improperly cut, but said the agency might have enough money to resolve the dispute by paying them.
   The employees complained to the Civil Service Commission, saying they should not have been forced to work fewer hours because their positions are federally funded, not locally funded.
   ["Forced" to work fewer hours? Here's another group of employees who don't see the need for sticking together.]
   The shorter workweek [how short? almost certainly they just continued the 32-hour week] - which was in effect through July and early August - was ordered by the governor as a cash-saving measure. It came on the heels of a Legislature-approved 32-hour workweek that lasted from February through June. [So there were apparently two shorter workweeks in Guam -
   1. July - early Aug. = 32 hours
   2. Feb-June = ?? hours
   Administration officials in July said the reduced workweek was applied to federally funded positions because the local government is required to pay those costs up front and must wait for federal reimbursement.
   Civil Service Commission Executive Director Vernon Perez yesterday said the commission has stopped its investigation into the grievances at Public Health after being notified by Public Health management and employees that a settlement was being worked out. He said if a settlement is reached, there will be no need for the commission to complete its work, which means the question of whether the shorter workweek was properly applied might never be answered. "We encourage any kind of settlement for any matters that come before the commission," he said.
   "We're looking at trying to resolve it at this level, without having it go forward at the (Civil Service) commission," [said] Camacho. "I'd like to resolve it within the next week or so. ... These are distractions that take time and attention away from what we're supposed to be doing." The Public Health director said the work hours were cut because the government at the time could not afford to pay up front and wait for federal reimbursement. "If you don't (have the money) to front it, then where is it going to come from?" he asked. Camacho said the agency's cost-cutting efforts appear to have generated enough savings to offer a settlement to the 40 workers. "We'll explore everything to make everybody whole again," he said.
   ["Whole"? This rewards the splintering whiners and effectively raises their hourly wage rates for 1½ months!]
   Camacho did not know how much it would cost to settle with the employees. But it would be the cost of paying 40 people for about 40 hours each in lost work opportunity, plus any related contributions toward retirement and other benefits.
   ["Work opportunity" be damned. They just wanted the money.]
   Based on that premise, it would cost Public Health tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the employees' salaries.
   Perez said if the Public Health issue is settled in-house, the only remaining complaint related to the shorter workweek will be by a Dept of Public Works employee. But Perez said that employee's complaint might be resolved as well, without the need for official action by the commission. He said the employee volunteered to participate in the government's "Thank God It's Thursday" program, which allows employees to take eight hours off each week while continuing to accrue a full 40 hours toward retirement and benefits.
   [So, this is similar to the Dutch approach of giving full benefits for part-time, which does clear the way for city, state or economywide fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against unemployment.]
   Perez said the employee's participation in the program might negate his appeal.

5. 10/04   Hyundai, Kia woo workers - After a generous settlement, focus is on more production, by Lee Weon-ho , JoongAngDaily.joins.com 2003.10.03 via GoogleNews.
   The chief executive officers of Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors, both affiliates of Hyundai Motor Group, met the press separately at the Busan International Motor Show 2003 yesterday. Park Hwang-ho, the head of Hyundai, and Yoon Kuck-jin, the chief of Kia, were both named to head their firms in August, and in Busan both stressed better labor relations as a key issue.
   Although the press conferences were separate, the words were similar. "We will develop labor relations in a way that ensures employment stability," Mr. Park said. "We will make efforts to accomplish harmony in labor relations rather than confrontation," Mr. Yoon echoed.
   Both firms made generous settlements with their unions [this] summer after a series of strikes. The two firms[' generosity actually] drew businesses' criticism for their agreements to establish a five-day workweek at the same wage levels and with existing holidays kept intact.
   [This is how stupid some businesses are - they criticize those who are spreading the vanishing work and thereby maintaining the domestic consumer markets that benefit all. Note Kia's success - "Kia Motors Corp.," 11/13/2003 WSJ, A12, "...said its Q3 net profit rose 25% from a year earlier despite production disruption from strikes in the summer."]
   Mr. Yoon will be inaugurated as president of this month if shareholders approve his nomination at a meeting on Oct. 17. The former chief executive at Hyundai, Kim Dong-jin, was promoted to vice chairman....

6. [Now a boatload of articles on the minority rightwing government of France's scapegoating and reversing the nationwide 35-hour workweek - which reversal, if successful, will re-raise unemployment to 12.6% as it was in 1997 when companies started preparing for the 35-hour week. We'll start with the shortest article, then jump to the longest, then pick up the other scattered headlines and soundbytes we found.]
   10/05   France's 35-hour work week under scrutiny, ABC [Australian B'castind Corp?] News Online Oct 4, 2003 5:55am AEST via GoogleNews.
   France's centre-right Government is gearing up to challenge the country's 35-hour week. French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has given parliamentarians from his UMP party the go-ahead to launch an inquiry into what they call the "ravages" caused by the shorter working week. Mr Raffarin's Government is blaming the costs of implementing the move for France's failure to meet its EU deficit commitments.
   The 35-hour week was brought in by the previous Socialist government in 1998 [real traction only in 2000] to encourage more employment by sharing out the existing work among more people.

7. 10/05   Tab for France's short workweek placed at $23.3B - 35 hours under fire, by Jason Chow (jchow@nationalpost.com), Financial Post Oct 4 2003 via GoogleNews.
   For Jack Galerne, a small-town banker in rural France, the shorter 35-hour workweek has hardly been a cakewalk. Ever since his employer, the Banque Regional de l'Ouest, was obliged by law to cut working hours for its employees from 39 hours per week, he was expected to pick up the slack in fewer hours. "I don't even have time to get up from my desk to take a piss," lamented Mr. Galerne, who works at the bank's branch in Briare, a country town located about 150 kilometres south of Paris. He added his bosses have been pressuring him to carry the same workload over less time. Sometimes, he puts in extra hours to complete his work, but it's not always logged as overtime. French law forbids employers from paying more than 90 hours in overtime annually. "It's become very stressful."
   [The way employers are disciplined in a labor shortage is by turnover. Abusive employers get abandoned more often by employees who have more options. Galeme needs to either speak up, or issue an ultimatum, or just leave, assuming he's got options. And if he doesn't have options, then France needs to work on converting overtime and overwork to training and jobs, and possibly shorten the workweek further, preferably gradually and with the government leading by example this time, instead of lagging with the small companies.]
   In North America where the 40-hour workweek is the standard, it may be hard to relate to such complaints, but it's a feeling shared by a growing number in France for various reasons.
   [Ha, many employees in North America haven't experienced the 40-hour workweek for decades, because they've been working 50-60-70 or more hours a week.]
   Once hailed as the saviour for the country's bloated unemployment rate - its intention was to encourage more employment by sharing out the existing work among more people - the 35-hour workweek has become under fire from all sides: the public, politicians, and even its former proponents.
   ["From all sides" gives the impression "from everyone." This is similar to the media tactics seen from the current extremist Bush administration in the U.S. with its talk about the "coalition forces" in Iraq, and its attempt to portray any dissent as lunatic or disloyal fringe, and it contradicts itself below in the paragraph beginning, "Supporters say..." and the subsequent admission that one of the top two politicians attacking the 35-hour week (PM Raffarin) is grappling with "record-low popularity polls."]
   Yesterday, the country's centre-right government launched an attack against the 35-hour workweek law, which has been...gradually implemented since 1996. The controversial rule became the centre of debate once again yesterday when Budget Minister Alain Lambert blamed the costs of implementing the 35-hour work week - the government's estimate is $23.3B - for France's growing budget deficit.
   [Oh goody, a scapegoat! Just like "costly pensions," "outdated" banking and bankruptcy laws, "immoral" reproductive choice, "lax" sentencing, and a host of other targets with which the insulated, isolated and shortsighted upper brackets, in league with the most simple-minded religionists from the south and the most racist hosts of the talkshows, are slamming America down into the Third World.]
   Mr. Lambert said that without the costs incurred by fewer working hours, France's public deficit would "probably be under 3% of GDP" and in line with the European Union's stability pact, the benchmark for those who are in the euro currency zone.
   [No, it would probably be over 5% due to the return to the 12-13% unemployment levels of 1997, the result of a decade of hoard-subsidizing, consumer-taxing policies.]
   Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is mobilizing his forces to repeal the [shorter hours] law. In his first TV interview since the summer, Mr. Raffarin said France had to "rehabilitate work" and added that "the future of France is not to be a huge leisure park."
   [Guess it's going to rejoin the rest of the world in a huge sweatshop.]
   Mr. Raffarin has also agreed to allow a group of deputies from his Union for a Popular Movement (UMP [Union pour un Mouvement Populaire?]) party to call for a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the 35-hour rule's effects on the French economy and society. Businesses and the political right have long complained that the shorter work week has hampered France's economic competitiveness. "Everyone in government admits that France risks missing out on the recovery now appearing in the U.S. [ha! and Asia [at U.S., Mexico, Canada... expense] precisely because of the 35 hours, which simply evaporate economic growth," said Herve Novelli, the deputy leading calls for a committee of enquiry.
   Supporters say the work week is directly responsible for between 200,000 and 300,000 jobs [other articles say 450,000], though several economists have said most of the job creation was artificial and state funded, and add that any new hiring by the private sector was due to economic growth - not the law.
   [Shortening the workweek is work sharing, not job creation. And as such, it simply balances the allocation of natural market-demanded employment. Any state funding that France did was strictly unnecessary and simply because of the squealing of some shortsighted businessmen, too delicate to make the transition for the sake of their own future. Watch and see. If Herve Novelli succeeds in raising the French workweek back to 39, 40 or higher levels, he is going to find out what artificial and state-funded job creation is, in spades.]
   While it's unlikely a reversal of the law is coming any time soon, especially as Mr. Raffarin grapples with record-low popularity polls, public opinion is swaying against the work rule. According to a survey published last week by market research company CSA, 54% of the French believe the 35-hour week should be temporarily or definitively scrapped.
   Moreover, the union opposition is hardly united. Some unions, including the CFTC (French Confederation of Christian Workers [Féderation Française de Travaillers Chrétiens?), welcome an inquiry into the law and see it as an opportunity to confirm their view the law is not delivering as hoped.
   [Like disappointments in democracy, which can only be cured by more democracy, disappointments in shorter worktime can only be cured by even shorter worktime, more centrifugation of the national income, and more activation of the economy's potential but currently anxious or impoverished consumers.]
   When implemented in 1998, the law was essentially a legislated collective-bargaining agreement. While businesses promised to hire more workers at fewer hours, the[y] were also given greater freedom in rostering, lower social taxes and a promise by unions for wage restraint. However, businesses say it's been a nightmare to implement and costly to the bottom-line.
   [In short, businesses are "not delivering as hoped" either, and they're the main ones on whom the discipline of shorter hours has to work for the cure to work. And unions frequently have to make that discipline stick by understanding the shorter hours solution, focusing on it and sticking to it. Incentive? The alternative is continued economic death spiral or major war, much bigger than Iraq, more like World Wars I and II against which the whole EU idea has been designed.]
   "Nobody's found the solution to keep the same level of productivity," said Alain Recullet, who used to head a company that made perfume displays when the law was enacted five years ago. "We had to negotiate and reorganize everything - scheduling, vacation-time, even coffee breaks."
   [Productivity without marketability is meaningless, and marketability requires actual markets, and domestic markets are the only ones you really have any potential control over, and activating passive potential consumers is the easiest way to increase domestic markets, and your potential consumers are passive chiefly because they don't have good jobs or often, any jobs at all, and they don't have jobs +/- "good" because businesses have been responding to worksaving technology by downsizing instead of timesizing, chopping jobs instead of trimming hours - even in "job-protected" France!]
   Now president of a machine tool company called SORM in Orleans, Mr. Recullet's employees are currently exempt from the 35-hour work week rule because the small factory employs fewer than 20 people. But if current legislation holds, he too will have to phase in the shorter hours next year.
   [Good God, they've put it off yet another year?!]
   "What it essentially will do is drive up employee costs by 10%," he complained. "This makes us French much less competitive."
   [SO WHAT? France is only TEN PERCENT dependent on exports, which is LESS than practically ANY OTHER DEVELOPED ECONOMY! They're going to ruin their economy - like e.g. the USA - for the sake of a minority of exporters who have to rely on export markets that are vanishing globally anyway?]
   But both Mr. Recullet and Mr. Galerne, the banker, say it's unlikely the government will repeal the law. Both say the 35-hour work week has become an acquis social - an entitlement to French society. "My son works in a factory and he gets out at noon every Friday," said Mr. Galerne. "You think he's ever going to give that up?"
   [Then ferme ta gueule and listen to your son, you moron! Does he have to drag you kicking and screaming towards heaven? Quit the lip service to freedom and liberté (now that you've already clearly forgotten about égalité and fraternité!) and recognize the most basic and fundamental kind of freedom = free time.]

8. [So now, in order of declining length of original story, we present the headlines of the other articles we found for this weekend, along with any soundbytes missing from the above (longest) article - do note the juicy parts from the above before passing - France has to "rehabilitate work", its future is "not to be a huge leisure park", 35 hours simply "evaporates economic growth," - fun stuff like that -]
   10/06   France pressed to redress decades of economic errors, EU Business (UK) 05 Oct 2003 via GoogleNews.
   ...French budget and finance minister officials say blame for the deficit lies with the adoption of a 35-hour work week and errors by successive governments since 1980, when the country last presented a balanced budget. Budget Minister Alain Lambert said Thursday [10/02]: "Without the 35 hours the French deficit would probably be under 3%." The policy was enacted by Socialists who ceded power to Conservatives in May 2002....
   [Here we get the date and Lambert's full quote. However, the truth is, without the 35 hours and with joblessness driven back to the 12-13% level as in pre-35-hour workweek France in 1997, as we said above, the French deficit would probably be over 5%. And if workweek reduction is so socialist, how come it's in the Ten Commandments (#4) and espoused by so many far-sighted capitalists (Lord Leverhulme of Lever Bros., W.K. Kellogg and Wm. Brown of Kellogg Cereals, Charles Filene of Filene's Dept Stores, James Lincoln of Lincoln Electric, Ken Iverson of Nucor Steel, Paul Toms of Hooker Furniture, AirTran and thousands of small businesses all over the U.S. in every recession?]
   According to Finance Minister Francis Mer, "we have five years to correct 20 years of errors," adding "we might need five more to hit the target".
   [Referring to the cut from 40 to 39 hours a week in 1982? Hey, why not "correct" the last 150 years of "errors" in the process and go back to the unregulated 80-84 hour workweeks of the 1830s and 40s if they're so great for "competitiveness" and "competitiveness" in this race to the bottom is the be-all and end-all?]
   But a leading French economist said France needs "an electroshock to revitalise the economy". Marc Touati of Natexis Banques Populaires also said that contrary to popular belief, French jobs were not going to Eastern Europe and Asia but to the United States and Britain "because of growth in these countries and the flexibility they offer businesses".
   [Yeah, "growth" in the carefully constructed GDP index that glosses over McJobs, welfare, disability, homelessness, prisons, and forced retirement/part-time\clientless self-employment. And never mind this weekend's story about Agco closing a plant in Britain and moving jobs to France - see 10/04/2003 #4.]
   He urged leaders to summon the "political courage for a debate on these questions", calling for a referendum to be held on how the French economy should operate....
   [Great. We like referendums. Give the French people a chance to really screw themselves, or maybe even turn that "record low popularity" of Raffarin into a strengthening instead of a reversing of workweek reduction in France.]

9. 10/05   £11bn cost of 35-hour week splits the French, by Henry Samuel, news.telegraph.co.uk 04/10/2003 via GoogleNews.
   ..."The law on the 35-hour week is based on an arithmetical illusion - that eight men working for six hours would be as productive as six men working for eight hours," said Jean-Paul Fitoussi, economics professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. "But there is no perfect homogeneity between employees."...
   [Not really. Productivity in isolation, alias supply-side economics, is secondary to workweek reduction. Primary is marketable productivity that we might call balance-side economics - balancing, as it does, supply and demand, which latter "incidental" factor (demand), supply-siders constantly take for granted. But in an age of wave after wave of efficient, productivity-jumping technology, under-productivity is not the general problem - over-productivity and under-consumption alias low consumer etc. demand is the problem.]

10. [Guess we should put in most of Catherine Bremer's piece, cuz both MSNBC and the Malta paper use most of it. Maybe we'll collate them to get it all - for posterity. We'll use little Malta's as the base version, cuz they omit less than big MSNBC and even courteously mark the location with three leads -]
    10/05   France's 35-hour week under fire as economy wanes, by Catherine Bremer, Reuters via Valetta Times via TimesOfMalta.com 10/04/2003 via GoogleNews.
    {We fill in the gap from (same headline), Reuters Oct. 3 via MSNBC News - in curly brackets.}
    With the economy sliding towards recession, France's centre-right government is losing patience with the 35-hour workweek law it has been saddled with since ousting the Socialists from power 18 months ago.
    With anger mounting about an inherited law the Right has always accused of smothering growth, centre-right "reformer" Herve Novelli yesterday [our quotes] demanded a parliamentary inquiry into the economic effects of the cut in the working week.
    A recent survey found most people are tired of a system that leaves them out of pocket and struggling to get their work done in less time than they are used to. "Everybody, for the most part, finds the effects of the 35-hour week to be disastrous, including the labour minister," UMP party member Novelli told yesterday's Le Figaro newspaper.
    "A full assessment, in precise figures, of the 35-hour week has not been done. So let's seize the problem and look for an economically and socially viable solution."
    [Aren't we ignoring here the many assessments done by the previous government?! And if a "full assessment has not been done," how do we know we've got a "problem" that needs a "solution"? So bottom line, shouldn't this read, "Let's create a problem and look for an ideologically and politically to-our-taste solution"?]
    The 35-hour week was introduced by left-wing former prime minister Lionel Jospin five years ago amid rose-tinted visions of a society with lower unemployment and more leisure time.
    But with unemployment at 9.6% [they'd prefer maybe the pre-35hr 12.6% unemployment?] and wage freezes common, 36% of the French want the system scrapped and 18% want it suspended, a survey by pollster CSA showed.
    [And 36+18= 52%, never mind the fuzziness of the concept of "suspending" a shorter workweek that is already still in transition, with smaller firms still at the 39-hour level.]
    Many blamed the 35-hour week for decimating staff numbers in hospitals in August, contributing to 15,000 heatwave deaths. ...
    [Repeat the lie often enough and even you will start to believe it. Hey, it worked for OJ Simpson, the Bush administration and the Third Reich.]
    { Finance Minister Francis Mer told an investment forum on Friday [10/03] that the measure was costing the country at least 10 billion euros a year.
    [Note that this figure is varying wildly. Above it was $23.3B, and the euro is not up at $2.33.]
    ''Fundamentally, the 35-hour week was bad for our country. We have sought to minimise the consequences and I hope succeeded,'' he said, adding the government was considering reforming the measure.... }
    ["Fundamentally"? Economists all over the world looking for the "fundamental" structural problem with the economy, France finds it, starts a solution that delivers fundamental freedom in terms of more free time, but switches governments to a mild dose of Bush, and starts calling the solution "fundamentally" bad. Boy, will we have problems getting beyond our present backwater of progress. "Bad for our country." Never mind the 4% drop in unemployment and the boost for bookshops and healthspas and tourism.... We'll spare filling in Lambert's blaming the 35-hr week for the French deficit and the resulting friction with Brussels, since we've heard that before.]
    Labour Minister Francois Fillon has already watered down the 35-hour week law, raising the legal limit on overtime.
    But rightists want more. The economy is on the brink of recession, the jobless rate has been on a steady upwards path since a low of 8.6% in mid-2001, and an estimated 13B euros lost in labour taxes will add to the state deficit next year.
    [So it did get all the way down to 8.6% in mid-2001. So the 4-hour drop in the workweek did bring it a full 4% down from 12.6% in 1997. Great. That makes our story simpler. Now, how in the world do they lose labour taxes when they've cut unemployment 4% and don't need to shell out all those extra unemployment benefits? And even if unemployment has gone back up 1% to 9.6%, that surviving 3% reduction is still saving the government a lot of unemployment benefits.]
    "At some point or another, we are going to have to lift this lid which is smothering France's dynamism," Le Figaro quoted a government minister as saying anonymously.
    [Ooh, there's a goody, "this lid which is smothering France's dynamism," never mind somothering France's creativity and freedom and family life with longer workweeks again and more CEO control over everyone's lives. No wonder the source didn't want attribution.]
    Critics of the 35-hour week, brainchild of former labour minister Martine Aubry, lament its failure to create jobs.
    Supporters say it preserved or created up to 450,000 jobs....
    [There's the 450,000 figure we mentioned above.]
    "It has created higher labour costs and a real management problem in companies. It is paralysing the economy like removing oxygen," said Morgan Stanley economist Eric Chaney.
    
    [Soundbyte alert! "Paralysing the economy like removing oxygen" indeed. Now this clown has convinced himself that fuller employment paralyzes the economy like removing oxygen. That's when Morgan Stanley's Steve Roach used to think in New York when he went around the world preaching downsizing, but then his sister got downsized and he came to his senses. Maybe Roach should have a little chat with Chaney. We'll forego the many puns that present themselves here.]
    Mr Fillon told the Senate this week that Socialist policies had not prevented unemployment rising as soon as growth slowed.
    [Could be because these not-really-socialist policies were a primitive rigid reduced workweek instead of a workweek that fluctuated downward as unemployment moved upward as soon as growth slowed. The fact is, France succumbed to slower growth almost last among all the countries in the EU.]
    "We have five years to rectify 20 years of mistakes," Finance Minister Francis Mer told the same Senate session.
    [Above, we saw "rectify" translated as just "correct." Was the original French rectifier or corriger? Which transl