Timesizing® Associates - Homepage

Timesizing News, Nov.11-20, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

11/20/2003   primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope - all are 11/19 via GoogleNews & searched-screened-collected by Alan Applebaum (AA) of Brookline MA (except #1 & 4 are from the 11/20 WSJ hardcopy), and excerpts & comments are by Phil Hyde (PH) unless otherwise initialled -

  1. [a different kind of exempt-from-overtime-pay work, i.e., slavery -]
    Drafted volunteers: Employees face pressure to work on company charities, by Sue Shellenbarger, WSJ, D1.
    Days before holiday feasting begins, a Phoenix engineer is already suffering from too much of a good thing. Last week's office email brought three requests [i.e., orders] from her employer, an aerospace company, to take part, on her own time, in a company-sponsored charity homebuilding project. Already straining under her employer's "unwritten rule" demanding work on weekends and holidays, the engineer, a mother of two, is fuming.
    She has no argument with community service; she gives thousands of dollars to charity each year and recently ran a $20,000 online fund-raising drive. But "I simply don't have the time" to do company-ordered volunteer work on top of everything else, she says.
    [Is anyone noticing that "mandatory volunteerism" is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms?! And at bottom, what's the difference between this and the likes of Wal-Mart ordering employees to clock out and then do another hour or so collecting shopping carts from the parking lot. In plain language, that's unpaid work alias slavery. Might as well repeal the Emancipation Proclamation. See 6/25/2002 #1.]
    The 1990s' boom in corporate-sponsored employee "volunteer" programs [our quotes] is threatening to go sour. More companies are "asking" employees to give time this holiday season to designated charities [employees can "designate" their own charities thank you very much!] - 23% of employers with 1,000 or more workers, up from 17% last year, says BNA Inc., Washington, DC, based on a survey of 339 employers set for release today [not a very big sample]. Amid corporate scandals, dispatching employees to serve food at homeless shelters or sing carols at nursing homes has become a central strategy in many companies' drive for a do-gooder image.
    [That sounds like company PR (public relations) which the company must pay employees for doing.]
    ...But the "volunteer" programs are colliding head-on with accelerating job demands. As employees pile holiday "volunteer" projects on top of the hard work [ie: long hours] that underlies the explosive gains in U.S. productivity,
    [the productivity gains, if any, are only "explosive" when you inflate the figures by ascribing only 40 hours a week to each employee and ignore how many hours they really work]
    the result is often resentment and burnout.
    "It's tacky to ask" employees to give up even more of their time, says the Phoenix engineer, who declined to add to her load. "Do they think we're stupid and disengaged? I have my own charities to support."
    [Touché.]
    ...Many frazzled workers place a premium on their time these days. When Jim Kelton's boss at a former employer pressed him to spend big chunks of weekend time each month deliverying gifts to the poor or doing other company-designated good deeds, Mr. Kelton often resisted. He was already working 45-50 hours a week with a long commute, and he had to weigh the clear value of the projects [huh? to whom, his employer?!] against his need for time at home with his wife.
    [Never mind his "need" - it's his right if he's not getting paid.]
    When Mr. Kelton did "volunteer," he missed some of the joy of giving because the company stressed its own image-building, rather than communicating with employees about the projects.
    [If it's company image-building, it's company PR. If it's communicating with employees, it's company training or orientation. Either way, the company must pay employees for their time.]
    One Saturday, he and 20 co-workers spent eight hours working on a needy family's property, but they never got to meet the family.
    [Today's employees are either turning into major patsies, or they're so scared for they're jobs that they're turning into doormats. How could they be sure in this case, for example, that they weren't really just spending an entire unpaid workday on a company executive's property?]
    Because he lacked a sense of purpose, the time demanded for that and other projects "seemed never-ending," says Mr. Kelton, who now heads his own Irvine CA software concern.
    [Any "time demanded" by an employer is work and needs to be paid for, period. Let's hope Kelton doesn't turn around and enslave his own employees as he allowed himself to be put upon and enslaved.]
    Other companies [also] blur the boundaries between job duties and "volunteerism." An employee of a manufacturing company says his employer awards points on the performance evaluations of employees who don a company T-shirt six Saturdays a year and work for free on selected "volunteer" projects.
    [At last, Sue Shellenbarger herself has put an occurrence of the word "volunteer" in quotes - for the first time in the article.]
    While the company gets good PR, "the employee is compelled to take time away from being a father and husband to make the company look good," this worker says in an email.
    Fortunately, a small but growing number of companies offer paid time off to volunteer.
    [That's more like it.]
    While no one counts employers who do this, Carol Sladek of Hewitt Assocs., Lincolnshire IL, estimates it's still fewer than 10%.
    The best volunteer programs give workers some flexibility in choosing projects.
    [What is this, the Soviet Union reborn? The real "best volunteer programs" have nothing to do with employers. Employers are for making a living. Volunteerism is none of their business. That's personal. Have Americans lost the ability to distinguish? If so, nothing on earth will save their world leadership in any area, except perhaps in the areas of cowardice, confusion, resentment and stupidity.]
    Salesforce.com, a San Francisco software concern, gives its employees six paid days off each year to volunteer, either on company projects or their own causes.
    [Maybe it's time American CEOs got a little clearer on their corporate mission and quit expecting a 'free lunch' of PR at the expense of their employees. The more they tax their employees, the more they tax their customers' customers, in other words, their own markets.]
    Mr. Kelton, now president of Software Unlimited, takes pains to make sure employees feel deeply involved in charity efforts.
    [Oops, sounds like he didn't learn the lesson at all. What an invasion of privacy! Now employees have to be good actors too. "Oh yes, Mr. Kelton, I really feel deeply involved in these volunteer charity efforts that you have chosen to make people think Software Unlimited is a Good Company regardless of our products or services." Companies have no business meddling with charity efforts. If it's PR, call it PR and cut the hypocrisy. And if companies have extra money, it should be going into employee bonuses, stockholder dividends, lower prices, more advertising, or more R&D. "Shoemaker, stick to thy last!"]
    In the past, the company co-sponsored a computer-building competition for students and adjusted employees' workloads so they could get involved.
    [That's not charity, that's PR. Call a spade a spade and cut the crap.]
    As work picks up along with the economy this year, Mr. Kelton is picking projects that require less employee time.
    [Kelton must be a pretty bad manager if he can't distinguish between PR and distraction & implement direct PR for his products and services instead of messing with indirect PR of tenuous relevance.]
    He knows it's getting even tougher for people to break away from their jobs.
    [No he doesn't. He's confused. His themesong from Rossini's opera, L'Italiana in Algerie - "Confusi e stupidi, incerti pendono, non soi comprendere tel novita."]

  2. Good jobs don't equal happy workers, study says, by news staff, CTV.ca.
    Ontario may claim to be Canada's economic engine, but according to a national study of the connections between employment and lifestyle, workers in the province aren't very happy about it.
    The study, called "Where to Work in Canada: An Examination of Regional Differences in Work-life Practices," is based on a Health Canada survey of how 32,000 workers countrywide are balancing the demands of their work and family lives.
    Report co-author Linda Duxbury, presenting her findings at the Work-Life Summit in Vancouver, B.C. on Wednesday, said the numbers paint a picture of stark contrasts in Canadians' coping abilities. "The lesson from Ontario is money may make people come to work, but it doesn't buy their passion and loyalty," Duxbury told the Ottawa Citizen.
    While they may earn the nation's highest average salaries, Ontario workers reported the lowest levels of job satisfaction and the highest intention to leave.
    It's a different picture in Atlantic Canada, where Duxbury says she's discovered workers toil in relative nirvana. "What strikes me about the Maritimes findings is what a huge difference community and lifestyle can make," Duxbury said, describing workers on Canada's east coast as hard-working and committed. "There's a vast difference between a five or 10-minute commute to work on foot to facing a 45-minute commute along the QEW in Toronto."
    And that means even though they work the longest and hardest, Atlantic workers are the happiest with both their jobs and their personal lives.
    Carleton University professor Linda Duxbury and Chris Higgins of the University of Western Ontario based this latest report on their broader Health Canada study, "Work-Life Conflict in Canada in the New Millennium - a status report". They surveyed some 32,000 workers in 100 major organizations across the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors. Using that data, they examined regional differences in three main areas:
    1. hours spent at work and home;
    2. workplace culture and benefits;
    3. and work and family overload.
    The report found that in British Columbia, the "Lotusland" stereotype has good reason to flourish. A typical worker in the province has been with their employer for 16 years, during which they've spent more time in educational and leisure activities than their counterparts across the country. And in the Prairies, employees - who work more shift-type jobs than the rest of Canada - spent the least amount of time on the job. And for their effort, the report says, they are rewarded with the least workplace benefits.
    If an employers' social conscience is important, some of those Prairie workers might consider moving to Quebec, which the study portrays as distinct in its above-average support of employees' needs. Based on the province's attitudes to flexible working hours, on-site daycare and paid leave to deal with personal emergencies, Duxbury suggests Quebec is the "social conscience'' to which all provinces should aspire.
    But the study also uncovered some nationwide trends. Most working Canadians are living in dual-income families, sandwiched between children and aging parents, for example. And everyone, on average, is working harder and longer hours than they did a decade ago. According to the report, one-in-four Canadians log more than 50 hours on the job every week. Ten years ago, that figure was one-in-ten. As a result, work demands are eating into leisure and family time, while absenteeism, stress, job turnover and medical costs are all on the rise.
     The findings are considered accurate within 1.5%, 19 times out 20.

  3. Urgent Action Needed On Nursing Shortages, by David Cochrane, Politics.ie [Ireland].
    More news from Labour
    "An imaginative and flexible" response carried out urgently is what is needed to entice nurses back into the Irish Health service, the Labour spokesperson on Health, Deputy Liz McManus has said. Deputy McManus made her comments after figures released by the Health Services National Partnership Forum show there are more than 1,000 vacancies in nursing. While 44% of nurses who have left the Health service said they did so due to family commitments, 53% said shorter working hours would encourage them back to work.
    "The numbers of nurse vacancies has been at this chronically high level for years and despite Filipino nurses being recruited, it has remained at a high level. The concerns of nurses are just not being met and the system has to respond to that. According to the research, some nurses have left the profession citing mental and physical exhaustion due to inadequate staffing levels and increased responsibility. Nurses are leaving at an alarming rate and this is completely unacceptable and needs to be immediately addressed. "The figures reflect the horrific conditions nurses are being asked to work in. Many will not work in accident and emergency departments because of Dickensian conditions and this staffing shortage only makes the situation worse. Tragically, this is not an abstract problem and can manifest itself with the loss of life, as we saw in the summer with the tragic death of toddler Roisin Ruddle, who died after a vital operation was cancelled due to staff shortages of intensive care nurses.
    "Our country's hospitals have been suffering serious problems for some time due to Government cutbacks and unless these figures are taken seriously, the situation will only get worse."

  4. Looming trouble - As end of a quota system nears , Bangladesh fears for its jobs [can't be too worried if it allows 1 person to hog 2 jobs via 70-hr workweeks!] - Not ready to compete, nation lacks fallback for millions tied to garment trade - Fundamentalist Islam on rise, by Peter Fritsch, WSJ, front page.
    DHAKA, Bangladesh - For six years, Sabina has supported four siblings by stitching blue jeans and baseball caps. She works 70 hours a week and averages about 20 cents an hour with overtime.
    ["Whether you work by the piece or the day,
    Increasing the hours decreases the pay.]
    Soon, [even] these wages may be hard to find.
    [Not if Bangladesh enters the 20th century and reduces the workweek.]
    The MultiFiber Arrangement [MFA - not to be confused with Boston's Museum of Fine Arts], an international pact that uses import quotas to regulate the $350B world trade in garments, will expire at the close of next year. Without the MFA, many less-developed countries favored by the quotas will have to compete with more-efficient producers elsewhere. For Bangladesh, the shakeout could devastate a garment industry that anchors the economy and sustains millions of families.
    [They call .20x70= $14.00 a week 'sustaining a family'?]
    "I worry," says Sabina, who is 20 and has only one name. "Without this job, there is nothing for us."
    [If Bangladesh spread whatever work there is among everyone who needs to support themselves, wages would rise and so would domestic markets - they'd be less and less dependent on exports. If garment manufacturers packed up and left, fine - the locals could still maximize-by-sharing whatever work there is and thereby maximize their domestic markets - which would actually grow once extra profits stayed decentralized in the populace instead of getting immediately drained off to the top brackets and possibly then siphoned out of the country.]
    The prospect of soaring unemployment
    [isn't that what they've got now if Sabina is supporting four siblings? isn't that what they've got now if she has so little job security that she's forced to work 70-hour workweeks for 20 cents an hour?]
    is particularly worrisome to Bangladesh, a mostly Muslim nation of 140m where lawlessness and Islamic conservatism are fast gaining ground.
    The country's vulnerability spotlights a debate gathering steam since the global trade talks in Cancun, Mexico, broke down in September: With heightening concern about poverty fueling sympathy for extremism, can the world afford unfettered free trade if it works to erode stability in marginalized states?...
    [(1) "Lawlessness and Islamic conservatism fast gaining ground" is not "stability" now, so essentially trade is irrelevant to this situation, free or fair, 'unfettered free' or 'fettered free.' (2) "The world cannot afford" to continue to focus exclusively on superficial 'solutions' like trade and interest rates while ignoring and/or denying that there are two deeper structural problems raging unaddressed and largely unidentified virtually everywhere, and they would be (A) the dramatic insufficiency of rigid- and arbitrary-workweek jobs in the age of increasing machines, automation and robotics, and the kneejerk response to machines, automation and robotics in terms of market downsizing via workforce downsizing (instead of the obvious alternative, market upsizing via workforce upsizing via workweek downsizing - "it's not rocket science").]
    "The end of the MFA will be a catastrophic thing that will turn back the clock on our society," says Nazrul Islam Khan, a senior leader of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
    [Nazrul has evidently not noticed that the clock on his society is already back in the 1830s and 40s with the "dark Satanic mills" of Dickens, and he has also failed to notice that developed non-marginalized states all cut their workweeks from the 70-80 hours' level to the 35-45 hours' level between 1840 and 1940, thus multiplying wages by diminishing labor surpluses and creating a strong domestic consumer base to anchor the economy, not compulsive export dependency.]
    The MFA fostered Bangladesh's garment industry a generation ago.
    [An industry where people work 70 hour week for 20 cents an hour is not being "fostered" by any stretch of the imagination - the MFA is a no-op = an ineffectual distraction from the real problem area = the rigid and arbitrary workweeks that concentrate limited and diminishing market-demanded employment on a mere fraction of the working-age population and keeps everyone insecure, over-controlled, and underpaid - in short, too close to the brink of starvation.]
    It guarantees poor countries reliable access to apparel racks in the U.S. and Europe by using quotas to limit competing garment exports from more-efficient producers such as China.
    [It's time Bangladesh started developing its own prosperous consumer base to rely on and stopped relying on the U.S.'s and Europe's.]
    ...Free trade proponents hope the end of the MFA will mean cheaper clothes everywhere....
    [How cheap do these cheapskates want clothes to get? With clothing prices so low in our local stores here in the Boston area of the U.S., they're practically paying us to wear them already! Jeans for $20, shirts for $12. It's high time for these ossified "free trade proponents" to get a new cause to fight for. They're like the people who still want more population, more "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth" - haven't they noticed that we've "been there, done that"?]

11/19/2003   primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope - all are 11/18 via GoogleNews & searched-screened-collected by Alan Applebaum (AA) of Brookline MA (except #1 is from the 11/19 WSJ hardcopy), and excerpts & comments are by Phil Hyde (PH) unless otherwise initialled -
  1. Jefferson initiated slavery's extinction, letter to editor by Richard Jencks of Mill Valley CA, WSJ, A21.
    [Slavery is the ultimate in unlimited workweeks.]
    Alan Crawford's review of Garry Wills's "Negro President" (Bookshelf, Nov.5) notes that Mr. Wills cuts Thomas Jefferson no "slack." But it is past time for Mr. Wills and other historical revisionists to concede that, though Jefferson's memory is associated with the obloquy of never having freed his slaves, even in death, none of the Founding Fathers did more than he to put slavery on the course of eventual extinction.

  2. United front urged in fight to organize, by Kelly Lecker, Toledo Blade.
    PUEBLA, Mexico - North American unions should have a trinational meeting to look at the impact of trade agreements on workers in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, Mexican union leaders told a U.S. delegation yesterday [11/18?].
    Unions in Puebla, home to Volkswagen of Mexico and many auto parts suppliers, said they need the help of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and other U.S. unions to stop what they say is a ploy by the Mexican government to keep workers from organizing. "When companies come here and see the flexibility they have with unions, they take advantage of it," said Jose Luis Rodriguez Salazar, general president of the union that represents workers at Volkswagen of Mexico. "We should not allow companies to take jobs and move them where there are lower wages. That is labor scabbing," Mr. Salazar said.
    The Teamsters sponsored the trip for the delegation of Democratic Congressmen who came to Mexico to see the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement on Mexican workers. The Congressional group [was] led by U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo)....
    Workers in Mexico, particularly in the maquiladoras, or manufacturing facilities, have been trying to form unions to raise their wages and improve working conditions. Leaders say they have been faced with intimidation, firings, and government interference.
    Only about 10% of unions in Mexico are independent; the rest have an affiliation with the Mexican government, said AnaElsa Aviles of the Mexican Solidarity Network. She said workers in independent unions have better wages and benefits.
    One of the largest independent unions represents Volkswagen of Mexico and is hailed by some as a success story for Mexican workers. At the plant, most of the 10,000 unionized workers make $26 per day. When Volkswagen said it was eliminating 2,000 jobs, the union was able to persuade the company to cut hours for all employees instead of firing anybody. In 2000, workers saw an 18% increase in wages and 3% increase in benefits after workers walked off the job. Yesterday, union leaders said the pay at Volkswagen is not ideal but it provides employees with a livable wage.
    Mr. Salazar said the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO have helped members organize and fight for a contract. But the approximately 8,000 workers at plants that supply Volkswagen with parts and supplies get paid much less. Workers at parts and logistics companies say they are paid $9 per day, often without many benefits. "It’s just enough to exist, and barely exist," said Guillermo Hernandez, general secretary of a union of workers that supply parts to Volkswagen....
    Volkswagen spokesman Mike Patzwaldt said the relationship with the union is improving but criticized the workers for demanding high wage increases in 2000 when the economy was in trouble. "Everything is going down and you ask for 30% increases - is that good? I don’t think that’s good," Mr. Patzwaldt said.
    [On the other hand, the economy is going down because more and more corporate revenues are going to the top where people are already spending all they're ever going to - ergo, less and less revenues going anywhere on the income continuum where people actually spend. Reinvest more in your markets via your employees and you'll reverse the down-spiral of the economy.]
    Mr. Salazar said the only way to improve working conditions in all three countries since NAFTA was passed is to unite as trinational unions and demand decent working conditions throughout the continent. "Before globalization, we need solidarity," he said.
    The delegation toured the Volkswagen plant and questioned a company spokesman about the wages and living conditions of workers. Mr. Patzwaldt said the company offers the highest wages of all auto companies located in Mexico and offers a leasing plan [to employees?] for autos of $60 to $170 per month. Workers countered that most don’t lease the cars because they cannot afford it.
    This was the second time in six months an Ohio politician visited the Volkswagen plant. In May, Gov. Bob Taft brought a delegation of state business leaders to talk to Volkswagen officials about the possibility of making parts in Ohio and exporting them to the Mexican auto giant.
    [Maybe some of Dennis Kucinich's progressiveness is rubbing off on his fellow Ohio politicians.]

  3. EU hours 'disaster', by Jon Griffin, Birmingham Evening Mail [UK].
    BIRMINGHAM, U.K. - Small businesses in the West Midlands say EU scrapping of the 48 hour week opt-out agreement would prove disastrous for trade. The majority fear mayhem if the agreement was ditched, according to a survey by Birmingham Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
    Britain is the only member state which negotiated the opt-out rule in the EU Working Time Directive in 1997, but now moves are afoot to review it amid claims of implementation abuse. The Chamber’s survey reveals that 62% of the companies that responded were not in favour of putting a ceiling of 48 hours on the working week while a massive 85% also agreed with the principle of the optout clause even if employees chose not to use it.
    [Like employees have sooo much choice in these matters.]
    And when asked about the implications of the removal of the opt-out clause on their businesses, employers replied that in some cases it would trigger additional recruitment and higher labour costs which could not be passed on in prices to the customer. They also said that the lack of flexibility would result in loss of staff because they would no longer have the option to work overtime.
    [Don't they get overtime pay between 40 and 48 hours?!]
    The loss of flexibility on working patterns was the greatest worry among employers. Although a number said that their employees worked under 48 hours, they wanted the optout to ensure meeting orders when the demand was there. Nadia Shah, policy executive at the Chamber, said: “The Chamber has been working to retain the 48 hour opt-out clause. It is quite obvious employers want it, and that many employees like the option of working overtime if they want to.
    [Again, the tenuous spin that it's "for the employees."]
    “In many businesses orders come in at irregular intervals, and, without the flexibility to meet customers’ needs, companies are worried that they will lose competitiveness.
    [What about the rest of the EU, that didn't do the same amount of whining as UK businesses and never had the sissy opt-out clause?! If long hours equate to competitiveness rather than merely to incompetent and abusive employers, then the UK has had an unfair competitive advantage for the last six years and it's time for it to get in line or get out of the EU. "Sh*t or get off the pot."]
    “While we would never condone businesses taking advantage of or exploiting their workforce, it has to be recognised that without the flexibility to enable companies to meet their customers’ needs, the employers may not have the jobs to offer to employees.”
    [As if there are plenty of temps available, and as if oveloading the technology-diminishing market-demanded employment on fewer employees makes for more jobs rather than less.]

11/18/2003   primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope - all are 11/17 via GoogleNews & searched-screened-collected by Alan Applebaum (AA) of Brookline MA , and excerpts & comments are by Phil Hyde (PH) unless otherwise initialled -
  1. Subtracting Stress, by Bob Losyk, Lawn and Landscape.
    According to the National Institute of Safety & Health, job stress has increased up to 45% in 2002. We know it won’t decrease in 2003. Stress is one of the top five reasons why employees leave. Most people can’t remember the last time they worked a 40-hour workweek. Many people do work at home after hours. Top management looks at this as increasing productivity. Employees look at it as indentured servitude. My own research shows that close to 40% of employees have already mentally checked out, and as soon as a better job opportunity pops up, they will physically check out.
    What we fail to realize is the side effects of stress. The overload leads to short tempers, employee arguments, poor morale, family problems and burnout. You may be raising productivity on the one hand, but you are adding costs when people make mistakes, take time off and, eventually, leave. You are increasing employees’ health problems by adding to the possibility of high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes.
    The best thing you can do is stay close to your people. Savvy management is always tuned in to what their people are thinking, feeling and saying. Your management team needs to be talking with people and keeping their finger on the pulses of their people. Find out, if they were to leave, what the number one reason is that is driving them out the door. ...Consider putting a manger in charge of surveying your firm to find out exactly what the stress and burnout levels are – and what can be done about them.... A few months ago, I suggested that someone should be in charge of employee retention. This would also be the ideal person to determine the stress levels at your organization....

  2. 'India can eat Europe for breakfast', by Shyam Bhatia in London, Rediff.com.
    [Not if Europe gets rid of the rigid and unrealistic "free trade" dogma. The idea that unregulated competition automatically and unavoidably leads to anything but a race to the bottom is not proving out anywhere in the world.]
    Corporate Britain's concern that it is losing its competitive edge has prompted the head of the UK's Confederation of British Industry to draw attention to the rapidly expanding economies of India and China. On the eve of the annual Confederation of British Industry conference, which began in Birmingham on Sunday, Digby Jones - director general of CBI - warned how India and China could easily outperform Britain and the rest of Europe if they fail to stay competitive.
    ["Could" easily? Face facts. On sheer miserable lives, they already are.]
    Jones' warning comes hard on the heels of economic predictions by Standard Chartered Bank chief economist Dr Gerard Lyons who told rediff.com last week that the rapid expansion of the Indian and Chinese economies invoked memories of the early 19th century when the two countries accounted for 45% of global gross domestic product....
    A spokesman for the Confederation of British Industry told rediff.com...that the movement of call centres to India was an example of how Western professionals could no longer compete with their less well paid and often better qualified Indian counterparts.
    He said European Union restrictions on hiring temporary workers and plans to restrict the working week to 48 hours would also affect competition.
    [Hey, restricting it to 54, 60, 70, 77, 84... - anything less than all 168 hours a week - can be argued to constrain competition - but drop all limits and you get unlimited work concentration on fewer and fewer people - and more and more people without earnings, and fewer and fewer confident consumers. Result? Huge over-capacity, huge under-consumption, constant depression.]
    "The point of Digby Jones' comments is not about China and India, but the UK and how our competition is faring", the spokesman explained. He drew particular attention to Jones comments where he said, "What does it say about the 21st century world of choice when someone is trying to pass a law that says you can't work more than 48 hours a week even if you want to? India must think it is their birthday."
    [India has less on its birthday than we have on the worst day of our lives. And what it says about the 21st century world of choice is that we've turned over so much of our market-demanded work to automation and robotics that we should have been working a 30-hour workweek in the 20th century and a 20-hour workweek by now. The fact that we aren't and are still handing control over 40-48-54-60 hours a week and more of our lives to someone else called "employer" or "market demand" instead of having 10 or 20 hours a week of additional free time under our own control says we've bought Jones' load of bull - he's convinced us that we prisoners love our chains, the more fools we! Under Timesizing, you can work over the workweek cap (wherever unemployment determines it should adjust to) but only if you love your job so much that you're willing to reinvest 100% of your overtime/overwork earnings in spreading your overtime-targeted skills. If you want more money than you can make on straight time in your present job, you're going to have to upgrade your skills to make the buck you think you need within the regular workweek. But there will be plenty of on-the-job training programs to help you.]

  3. HR Zeitgeist - a matter of opting-out, HR Gateway, online www.hrgateway.co.uk.
    UK - Simplify, simplify, urges the 48th chapter of the Tao Te Ching. Simplify until all contradictory thinking is eliminated – or words to that effect. Thousands of years old, it is strange that Chinese master Lao-Tzu should choose the 48th chapter to deal with the need for simplicity in life. Maybe it is a pattern throughout history but something as simple as the number 48 should not cause so much complexity, but it does.
    Like an impending audit, the 48-hour working week opt-out from the Working Time Directive [WTD] has been hanging over the UK since it was implemented in 1998. The UK is the only country to truly retain the opt-out and we knew all along that this was something the EU was keen to change. The time for the WTD’s 10-year review has arrived and already the EU is dropping hints that it plans to try to remove the UK’s ability to opt-out following a report from the University of Cambridge suggesting employers were ‘abusing’ it.
    The European Commission in the UK said that they were ‘very concerned’ about the accusations made by the report and will themselves be releasing a report at the end of the year, but for now said they were ‘keeping quiet’, and who can blame them because it a complex matter without a real win-win scenario. Nothing fuelled UK debate like the introduction of the health and safety conscious Working Time Regulations in general and the battle to retain the opt-out is likely to be just as vociferous.
    Unions welcomed the hints by the EU last week. Too many employees are forced to work long hours, said the Trades Union Congress (TUC) head, Brendan Barber, and it is time that the opt-out was taken away. Its own poll suggested that one in three respondents who signed an opt-out were given no choice, he said, and that two out of three people who work more than 48 hours have never even been asked to sign away their long hours protection: ‘Employers argue that working more than six 8-hour days a week should be a matter of free choice, but all this research shows that too many of them simply cannot be trusted not to bring unfair pressure on their staff,’ he said. UK men work such long hours because the UK is the only EU country that allows every worker to opt out of the 48-hour limit on the average working week. This is because the law is widely ignored, and only a minority of people know their working time rights, he said.
    There is no doubt that the number of people working over 48-hours a week is increasing. According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) the number of people working over the limit has risen by 16% since the law was introduced while 9% of people work over 60 hours a week. However, of those working over 48 hours a week 48% thought that they had struck the right balance between work and life, and this is where the complexity lies.
    The working environment is not what it used to be. As Baby Boomers and even Generation X start to age, Generation Y is taking over. Their concept of ‘job security’, according to a new Work Foundation report, is to get as much training and development as possible to make themselves increasingly attractive to employers. According to a Lever Faberge Family Report released last week, this same generation is afraid that if it has children it will impact on their lifestyle. In this situation, life and career blurs, not in a negative work-life balance sense but in the sense that Einstein made space and time space/time.
    [That too was an error. Space and time, matter and energy actually interleave to form an accountable paradigm of dimensions 3,4,5,6:
          speck times length is line: first dimension
          line times width is area: second dimension
          area times height is volume alias space: third dimension
          volume times density is mass alias matter: accountable fourth dimension
          mass times uniform or balanced velocity is momentum, a special case of which is time: fifth
                dimension
          momentum times unbalanced velocity is energy: sixth dimension
    If we finesse the fifth dimension (time) and jump from fourth to sixth, we get:
          mass times velocity times velocity equals energy,
    and if we 'special-case' the velocities, finessing the vectors and limiting the speed to that of light, we get:
          mass times lightspeed times lightspeed equals energy,
    which written short is,
          m x c x c = e, or shorter, mcc=e, or shorter, mc(2)=e,
    or sides-changed, e = mc(2), "ee equals em cee squared," Einstein's familiar equation of energy in terms of mass.
    So why was Einstein always speaking of time as 4th-dimensional instead of 5th where it belongs, even though Newton pointed the way (see Volume I of our Millennium Orienteering Trilogy - Defining Time)? Lots of reasons. For example, unless we're deep-sea divers and have to go into a compression chamber if we come up too fast, we're all in the same general density range so we take density and mass for granted and seldom speak of it in giving locations, and even then we're more apt to speak of it in terms of distance above or below sea level ('altitude' or 'depth') instead of explicit density. Plus time is pervasive and part of our mental retinas - it's hard to think about detachedly unless you're a linguist, and some things are inherently harder to think about, as linguist Martin Joos pointed out, we believe, in "The Five Clocks" - you run into the extreme difficulty of "operating on your own retinas." Meanwhile, "you heard it here first." Back to the article -]
    To many in Generation Y and X there is only work/life; there is no divide.
    [Yes this is a foolish generation that would reconfuse all the things their ancestors carefully distinguished: state from church (alias politics from religion - note the prototypical confusion in the ancient Sumerian priest-kings such as Gudea), whose separation we should now be building on to separate market from state (alias economics from politics - note the birth of economics under the term 'political economy') so we can move on to ecology before we destroy our planetary habitat...and ourselves. (The six social-science stages of human evolution are explained in Volume II of our Millennium Orienteering Trilogy - The Football of Time - you heard it here first.)]
    Outside of the obvious ramifications this has on society – plummeting nappy [diaper] sales [ie: ending overpopulation] and retail taking over the world – how can you tell someone who enjoys what they do so much that work and life become the same item, that they cannot work 48 hours a week? You cannot - lawyers would make millions in the...melee that would follow.
    [Yes you can and must tell someone who enjoys what they do so much that work and life become the same. A few weeks ago we ran a poll on the site to see how many hours people worked in a week. A quarter said that they worked over 48 hours a week and as Mike Emmott of the CIPD stated, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Ending the opt-out wouldn’t work: ‘You cannot take one rule and apply it across professions,’ he said.
    [Every profession wants to think it's special, it's the exception. But it isn't. The clock takes the measure of its activities same as everyone else's. The only economically relevant question is, are you doing it for love or money, and if you're only doing it for money you're going to have to stop at a certain unemployment-determined point in the week and leave some of that good but vanishing market-demanded employment for someone else. Nobody else can do it? You're indispensable? Get over it!]
    Of course, some believe that it is the fear of losing jobs that makes people work long hours and findings last week from RightCoutts would suggest that UK is the top of the list when it comes to fear of redundancy. The twice yearly RightCoutts Global Career Index suggests that while the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy experienced some of the largest growths in redundancy fear, the UK contains the most people scared of losing their job. Almost three in ten (29.1%) workers in the UK said redundancy was very likely compared to 27.5% eight months ago. This compares to 7% in Spain and only 5.4% in Norway.
    There is no doubt that fear plays a part in some people’s long hours experience as does lack of employment rights knowledge, enjoyment of a job well done, the need for money or just blatant coercion but it is doubtful whether changing the law will remove the latter and the points unions object to. Sex discrimination is as widespread as ever and it has been outlawed for decades. However, a change in the law may get employers to think more carefully about performance and productivity when they have limited hours in a week from their workforce. It may be just the jolt the UK needs and get it focusing on engagement and performance. Whatever the outcome of the review – and the EU needs to get a majority of member states to ratify a change in the UK – it certainly won’t be a simple matter and there is no win-win situation. Someone will lose.

11/15-17/2003   primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope - all are 11/14-16 via GoogleNews & searched-screened-collected by Alan Applebaum (AA) of Brookline MA , and excerpts & comments are by Phil Hyde (PH) unless otherwise initialled -
  1. 11/17   Local staff spending less time on job - But experts unsure why plant employees around the state are racking up the OT, by Norm Heikens (norm.heikens@indystar.com), Indianapolis Star.
    INDIANA, "the Hoosier [whatever that is] state" - As the economy recovers [you wish!], Hoosier manufacturing workers are piling up the overtime across the state while their Indianapolis-area counterparts are working less than 40 hours. ...Indianapolis isn't benefiting from the additional money earned through overtime - which energizes the economy and prompts businesses to create more jobs....
    [Nonsense! - overtime saps the economy and involves businesses overloading existing employees instead of creating more jobs.] ..\..At a loss for a definitive explanation for the divergence, experts offer suggestions ranging from the mix of industries to the size of Indianapolis' labor force [ie: there's a labor surplus in Indianapolis].... Economists, business managers and other observers say the flow of jobs to lower-cost locations ['outsourcing'] and [job] losses due to technology gains will prevent many of those manufacturing jobs from returning.
    [Oops, here again the carefully suppressed truth slips out in America's tightly consolidated and controlled media - technology gains plus downsizing equals job losses.]
    That's the last thing Indianapolis-area business owners want to hear. They wish that area manufacturing workers still were bringing home more overtime pay. Brad Stanley, who owns a Chevrolet and Oldsmobile dealership near McCordsville, said manufacturing workers were spending less on vehicles for fear of losing their jobs. Some scale back to a Chevy Malibu from an Impala, for instance. Others forgo options. "Instead of buying the $40,000 car, they're buying the $30,000" model, he said. People of all walks of life have become more cost-conscious in recent years, said Tim Struthers, an insurance agent for Shelter Insurance in Plainfield.... Laid-off manufacturing workers who made $16 an hour now might earn only $10 in other occupations \so\ manufacturing employees are no exception....
    [Yes they are if they're still paying $30 grand for wheels. Phil remembers the early 50s when his dad got a brand-new Plymouth automatic for $1800.]
    Far from threshold
    Indianapolis is a long way from the threshold of averaging 44 to 46 hours a week that usually persuades manufacturers to add workers - and expensive benefits - rather than risk burning out existing employees. Manufacturers also are wary of swelling rosters until they are assured the economy will improve in the long term, said Mark McNulty, president of the human resources firm HR Dimensions. "Employers don't want to go through (downsizings) if they don't have to," McNulty said.
    It's often a delicate balance for manufacturers - aligning production levels with an adequate work force. Academics, government officials and manufacturers can't explain the two-hour difference between the state and Indianapolis area, but they offer some possible explanations:
  2. 11/16   Dispatches from Wal-Mart's Front Lines, by Stan Cox, AlterNet.
    [Compare our "bad news but" about Wal-Mart yesterday, 11/14/2003 #2.]
    Last spring, I did a little amateur research that illustrated how Wal-Mart's wages can fail to provide for even a rock-bottom living standard – even at Wal-Mart prices.... As the article made the rounds of the Internet and some local newspapers, I started receiving emails from Wal-Mart employees. There was a steady stream of messages over the following months, with some arriving as recently as late October.
    In relating their stories, past and present employees (er, "associates") sliced right through the abstract talk..., and offered a good look behind the big yellow Wal-Mart happy face....
    Here are excerpts from what they had to say:
    There were other stories, too. They came from - For one last quote, I'll turn to Wal-Mart's most well-known ex-"associate," Barbara Ehrenreich, who, near the end of her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, reflected on her experience: Someone has to puncture the prevailing fiction that we're a "family" here, we "associates" and our "servant leaders," held together solely by our commitment to the "guests." After all, you'd need a lot stronger word than dysfunctional to describe a family where a few people get to eat at the table while the rest – the "associates" and all the dark-skinned seamstresses and factory workers worldwide who make the things we sell – lick up the drippings from the floor: psychotic would be closer to the mark.

  3. 11/16   Work to live in 2010 - Companies enticing staff with shorter hours, day care, and cash bonuses will be the workplaces of the future, The Advertiser (Australia).
    AUSTRALIA - Speaking at the CPA Congress, recruitment specialist Bob Cooper said...businesses would need to compete for the best workers, especially in South Australia where there was a large aged population..\.. Employers would become more savvy to attract the best workers.
    [Not if they don't start timesizing instead of downsizing - downsizing means there are so many desperate job candidates to choose from, employers can remain dumb as blocks.]
    The next generation of employees would enjoy an environment where they would not live to work, but [work to live, that is, work] to support a better lifestyle.
    [Here's hopin', but it sure won't happen automatically.]
    "By 2010 there will be more jobs than people to fill them because of the rate at which baby boomers are retiring," Mr Cooper said.
    [This 'specialist' has forgotten to factor in automation and robotization, even in the service sector -]
    "Across the board there will be a need, particularly in the service industry."...
    [A need that can be filled by automation.]
    Changes to the workplace would include: [These are his two best 'forecasts' dba suggestions. But again, neither is happening, nor will happen, automatically. Training responsibilities will continue to be pushed off onto employees and job candidates, and management feedback will continue to become sparser and blunter, reducing more and more to the simple pink slip. All this deterioration is due to one thing - deepening labor surplus. Any commodity in surplus is common as dirt and cheap as dirt, and that includes labor. And how do we know we'll have deepening labor surplus? Because the only way we'll avoid it is substituting timesizing (trimming the workweek) for downsizing (trimming the workforce and consumer base) in response to technology. And that substitution won't happen automatically - it will take pressure.]
    Locher and Associates director Pat Williams said some of the changes already were coming into play.
    [You can always find little pockets of advanced practices, but little pockets need to be consciously connected and spread.]
    However, she doubted there would be an influx of jobs within the next seven years. "I think it's a little bit too soon – unlike the 1990s when people were retiring in their 50s, the retirement age will increase," Ms Williams said. "The skills and knowledge of the babyboomers will help to alleviate the brain drain on the workforce." She said workplaces would adapt by outsourcing or recruiting more staff for specific projects....
    [This lady is a little more realistic - except when she says,]
    Greater communication would exist between management and staff to help cater to their needs.
    [Dream on. As automation and downsizing continue and labor surplus deepens, management skills will continue to degrade, including management communication skills.]
    For Jodie Cairns, working for a progressive employer was vital in her decision to become a mother. A marketing director for Austereo,
    [that probably stands for Australian Stereo, but it sounds uncomfortably close to Austere]
    she has flexibility to work a four-day week. She also can bring her son Riley, 4, to the office. "I was actually in two minds about becoming a mum, talked [at] work about it and they agreed to reduce my hours," she said. Ms Cairns tries to be flexible with the staff she manages. "We spend so much energy and time training staff, we don't want to lose them," she said. "If they've finished all their work they can go home, because I know sometimes they need to work a 12-hour day."
    [Hooboy - 'Austere' was right.]

11/14/2003   primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope - all are 11/13 via GoogleNews & searched-screened-collected by Alan Applebaum (AA) of Brookline MA , and excerpts & comments are by Phil Hyde (PH) unless otherwise initialled -
  1. Study: Shift Workers Put in More Overtime, HRNext.
    U.S. employers are pushing employees to work longer hours, with overtime levels among workers in extended-hours operations rising to an average of 12.6% above the standard 40-hour work week for the first eight months of 2003 compared with 11.9% for the same period last year, according to a report published by Circadian Technologies, Inc.
    "Rather than hiring people back as the economy improves and demand picks up, employers are relying on fewer people to put in more time to get the job done,” says Alex Kerin, author of the report. “At many organizations with extended-hours operations, some employees are at or beyond the point at which long hours will negatively impact productivity, health, and safety."
    Kerrin says a reasonable level of overtime is in the 10-12% range - depending on the nature of the operation. That level would give employers flexibility to meet fluctuating demand and employees an opportunity to earn extra pay, according to Kerrin.
    "But many operations have employees whose work hours far exceeded this limit. Excessive overtime ultimately results in lower productivity, more fatigue-related accidents and injuries, costly increases in absenteeism and turnover, and higher employer medical costs," Kerin says. "It also increases the chances of a mistake or accident that could severely damage brand image and financial performance."
    The report is based on a 2003 survey of approximately 550 U.S. businesses and institutions running beyond the hours of 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

  2. Vote 1 quality of life, The Age [Australia].
    AUSTRALIA - Forget taxes and immigration - the key political issue for the next decade will be work-life balance, writes Tom Morton.
    Walk into a pub, a childcare centre, or a doctor's waiting room in one of the outer suburbs of Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane, and a fervent desire for the expansion of competition policy is unlikely to be the subject that springs to people's lips.
    These are the electorates through which the path to victory at the next federal election leads, the home of the "aspirational" voters whom shadow treasurer Mark Latham believes are the new natural constituency of the Labor Party.
    In recent months, Latham has repeatedly made his pitch to these voters, promising tax cuts, support for small business and a supercharged version of the economic program pioneered by Hawke and Keating. But, according to Latham's colleague Lindsay Tanner, the issues much more likely to be "top of mind" for the ordinary Australian voter are very different: long working hours, loneliness, fracturing families and disintegrating relationships. It's the emotional, rather than the economic, life of the nation that occupies centre stage in Tanner's new book, Crowded Lives. Tanner's premise is simple but compelling: we need to put human relationships - rather than economics - at the centre of our deliberations about what makes a good society and a good life.
    [In other words, quality of life and not just quantity of life or of lives (population) or of possessions (net worth)....]
    Modern social democracy has focused on extending prosperity to the majority rather than the minority and on the economic aspects of our interdependence: on "who does what" and "who gets what". But the price we've paid for material comfort and security is a creeping impoverishment of our personal lives.
    Our crowded lives are "shredding our relationships with each other": as a society, we are "working longer and harder, separating from our partners and children more, living alone more, moving more". As the ties of family, community and locality are loosened, we gain a sense of freedom but lose connectedness. The sheer range of experiences and consumer choices available to us would have seemed unimaginable a generation ago: we can shop, eat and drink at any hour of the day or night, exchange emails with people on the other side of the world who we've never met and are never likely to meet, yet our relationships with those closest to us seem increasingly brittle, attenuated.
    New technology gives our lives fluidity and flexibility but nibbles away at dependability and commitment: we no longer say, "Meet me at the pub at 8pm", but rather "I'll call you on your mobile at 8pm" - unless, that is, I get a better offer in the meantime.
    These are hardly new or blindingly original insights. The motto of Crowded Lives could easily have been the same two words that are the epigraph to E.M. Forster's novel Howard's End, written almost a century ago: "Only connect." Forster opposed an inner world of "personal relations" to an outer world of "telegrams and anger", the crass mercantile culture of the first great age of globalisation. Had Forster been writing now, he might have substituted "SMS{??] and road rage" but the sentiment still resonates.
    It's the same sentiment that echoes through Clive Hamilton's Growth Fetish, which Tanner quotes approvingly. Modern capitalism has proved itself remarkably successful in extending a high material standard of living and a dazzling array of consumer goods to a majority of the population - but the price is that we're running faster and faster just to keep the treadmill turning.
    [ie: just to stay in the same place.]
    What's new, and arresting, about Tanner's book is the suggestion that the emotional costs of our crowded lives can and should have political consequences. Here is a member of the shadow cabinet, and a potential future leader of the party, marking out a new terrain on which Labor might reclaim some of the ground it has lost. What's more remarkable is that the issues Tanner wants to put at the very centre of politics are precisely those "soft" social issues that, for much of the past two decades, have been derided by the economic hard-heads. Even the Prime Minister, despite his opposition to a national paid maternity leave scheme, admits that work and family issues are a "barbecue stopper", as Anne Manne wrote in The Age Review last Saturday. Deeply concerned about the cost that recent changes to our working lives had on personal relationships, Manne argued that our present focus on the economy and paid work was reflected in the declining birth rate. She called on a government-led overhaul of the workplace in recognition of how we live now. Among her suggestions: more flexibility for families, more on-ramps for mothers returning to work, more off-ramps for fathers wanting to spend time raising their children.
    Integrating family relationships with work obligations is, Tanner claims, "emerging as one of the central issues of 21st-century politics".
    Just how concrete and inescapable these issues have become for middle and lower-income Australians is documented in Barbara Pocock's The Work-Life Collision, published within a few weeks of Crowded Lives. In many ways, Pocock's book provides the gritty empirical underpinning for Tanner's new "guiding story". It's a detailed, forensic analysis of what's actually happened to the worlds of work and care over the last two decades, combining a wealth of hard statistical data with focus group and interview material.
    As Pocock argues in her opening chapter, until recently the true impact of the collision has remained hidden. Much of the media debate about "family-friendly workplaces" focuses on the problems of the professional middle class, but these are only the tip of the iceberg. What remains obscured is the impact of longer working hours, the intensification of work itself - and its increasingly casualised and insecure nature - on a much larger group of workers.
    [That's not obscure if we just look back in history to 19th-century England or America - many aspects of which we're returning to in terms of long hours, labor surplus and employee powerlessness.]
    This much larger group includes both Latham's "aspirationals" - typically self-employed tradespeople and small businesspeople - and those one rung below them on the economic ladder: the working poor. This "invisible army" of low-paid and casual workers is especially vulnerable to the stresses and strains of the work-life collision. Australia now has one of the most casualised workforces in the OECD. About one in two casual workers has The daily struggle to get the children to child care and school, and then get to work, can suddenly become insurmountable, simply because an employer requires you to start a shift an hour earlier.
    In his recent Calwell Memorial Lecture, Tanner stressed that "connecting with the reality of people's lives" must be the basis for rekindling Labor's idealism, and he singled out the lives of the working poor as especially deserving of the party's attention.
    It's remarkable enough to hear a senior Labor figure re-introducing something suspiciously like a concept of class to political debate. Even more remarkable is that it's a concept of class seen through the richer refracting prism of relationships, the worker's enmeshment in webs of attachment, care and intimacy. Yet there's also a certain historical irony here. In many ways, that "invisible army" owes its existence to the economic transformation of the Hawke-Keating years. As Tanner himself says, "the statistics tell the story": since 1984 the percentage of casuals in the workforce has increased from 16% to 27%.
     Of course, not all of this increase happened under Labor, but Labor policies, implemented in collaboration with the ACTU in the latter stages of the Accord, began the deregulation of the labour market that has accelerated under the Coalition.
    [Note that the only regulation needed is on worktime. With proper, simple worktime regulation, you don't even need wage regulation. And proper worktime regulation would involve overtime-to-training conversion as well as automatic unemployment-offsetting workweek modulation. The same can be said of many of the other changes in the working world that have made our lives more crowded and put our relationships under growing strain. - all these, in one way or another, are products of the opening up of our economy to the forces of global competition between 1983 and 1996. Yet the work-life collision is no less of a pressing issue for those who've been the primary beneficiaries of that opening-up: the "aspirationals".
    Late last year I spent some weeks talking to families from Sydney's aspirational heartland, the master-planned housing estates on the urban fringe. Again and again, the same stories emerged: These are the hidden costs of the privatisation of hope.
    ['Privatization of hope' echoes Chomsky's phrase about the privatization (and concentration) of profit and the socialization (and centrifugation) of risk.]
    Looking back, the sheer audacity and sweep of the economic changes engineered by Keating and Hawke is breathtaking. In the space of a decade, Labor floated the currency, deregulated the financial system, slashed tariffs, sold off Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank, and - in collaboration with the ACTU - dismantled the centralised wage-fixing system. Hawke, Keating and Kelty made Australia a textbook case of how to globalise [and gut?] a medium-sized economy, pronto.
    If Tanner is right, however, what's needed now is a new textbook. Ever since the Club of Rome's influential report issued in 1972, we've become accustomed to the notion that there are "Limits to Growth" imposed by finite natural resources and the impacts of our economic activities on the environment. We're learning now that there are also inner limits to growth. The emotional and spiritual costs of our economic "Wonder Down Under" are costs that many ordinary Australians are beginning to consider too high.
    D.H. Lawrence once wrote, in a very different context, that life involves a "long, difficult repentance". Repentance is usually about coming to terms with, and admitting responsibility for, our failures. Yet I think Lawrence meant something much larger and harder to grasp: that we have to repent of our 'successes' as well as our failures, for they too can make it difficult for us to change when change is necessary.
    [Our quotes on 'successes' - very similar to our frequent quotes on 'reform' of social security or pensions in America and current employer-led 'reform' of working conditions in France and Germany.]
    Few of the number-crunchers and [political?-]machine men in the ALP [Australian Labour Party?] will think that a dead reactionary poet has much to offer the party in the way of electoral guidance. Yet, in some ways, the party remains a prisoner of its extraordinary 'success' in transforming the Australian economy, a success of which it remains stubbornly unwilling to "repent".
    Bob Hawke is known for many things, but a passion for history is not one of them. This makes him something of an oddity among Labor leaders. Yet Hawke, who celebrated the 20th anniversary of his election as prime minister earlier this year, has expressed some blunt views about his party's relationship with its own history. "F- the past," Hawke said, "or it will f- you.
    [Shades of Canadian PM Pierre Eliot Trudeau's famous use of the F-word in the 80s, which he later edited to "fuddle duddle."]
    "The past is both an inspiration and a dragon to slay. We have been about dragon-slaying. No tinkering, no cuddly blankets. We take the best of Labor traditions and we also change tack. We take the best from the past, but if it's an anchor chain, cut it."
    These remarks, made to his personal staff in the latter years of his prime ministership, are quoted in Geoff Kitney's contribution to The Hawke Government, A Critical Retrospective, a collection of essays by former ministers, staffers, journalists and academics. Hawke's approach to engaging with history is brutal and drastic where Lawrence's is gradual and therapeutic. But their remarks both point in the same direction.
    Labor's 'success', the extraordinary boldness of the Hawke-Keating years, could justifiably be an "inspiration'' to any government. The shadow side of that 'success', the legacy of that great wave of change, is precisely the set of dilemmas, the "reality of people's lives'' that Lindsay Tanner identifies as the new political space, the ground on which the struggle for the soul of Australian society will be fought out. If Tanner is right, Labor will need to be no less bold now than it was under Hawke and Keating in mapping out a new reform agenda - one that makes the quality of our relationships with each other the measure of our aspirations as a society, and as a nation. "Only connect..."

11/13/2003   primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope - all are 11/12 via GoogleNews & searched-screened-collected by Alan Applebaum (AA) of Brookline MA , and excerpts & comments are by Phil Hyde (PH) unless otherwise initialled -
  1. Report: Furniture Brands to cut 200 jobs at Thomasville, St. Louis Business Journal.
    Furniture Brands International's Thomasville Furniture unit plans to cut about 200 jobs at several of its manufacturing plants in North Carolina within 90 days.
    Dow Jones Newswires reported that the Thomasville unit is trimming about 11% of 1,800 jobs at its wood-furniture manufacturing plants, but does not plan to close any facilities. Thomasville said it is working to get its plants on a five-day work week, up from a current four-day work week....
    [Apparently this is another furniture company (like Hooker Furniture, 7/16/2003 #1 etc.) which has been trimming the workweek to avoid, as long as possible, trimming their workforce = timesizing, not downsizing. But then, during a downturn, there are literally thousands of companies that do this, though few are mentioned in the media and few indeed are the management schools that teach this common strategy. Harvard in the 1980s had only one case study about it, involving Lincoln Electric.]
    In the company's third-quarter earnings release, W.G. "Mickey" Holliman, chairman, president and chief executive, said the company is continuing to focus on its balance sheet, including reducing inventories, and would move up plans to reorganize manufacturing that it had been planning to do next year. On Oct. 31, the company announced plans to shut down its Highland House unit, a division of Thomasville Furniture, at the end of the year.
    St. Louis-based Furniture Brands International Inc. (NYSE: FBN) manufactures furniture under the Thomasville, Henredon, Drexel Heritage, Maitland-Smith, Broyhill and Lane brands.

  2. Brussels to attack UK over work hours, by Raphael Minder & David Turner & Jean Eaglesham, Financial Times [UK].
    Britain [UK] could lose its opt-out from the European Union [EU or 'Brussels'] working-time rules unless it stops companies abusing the loophole, according to officials from the European Commission.
    The Commission is likely to launch an attack on the British opt-out as part of a review later this month of the decade-old EU working-time directive.
    The British government said on Wednesday it would defend its opt-out, even if officials hinted that steps may be taken to strengthen British workers' rights and avoid a showdown with Brussels.
    The working-time directive, which sets a maximum working week of 48 hours, was adopted in 1993 under the proviso that it would come under review 10 years later [ie: this year].
    The UK is the only EU country to apply a general exemption from the legislation and permit individual workers to opt out of the 48-hour limit on their working hours, to the chagrin of some of its EU partners. "An opt-out cannot be part of a long-term solution," said Fredrik Sjögren, a Swedish official.
    John Monks, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, in an article for FT.com, condemned the UK government's attitude over social policy emanating from Brussels: "The Labour government's role as chief organiser of the blocking team of other governments is causing an uneasy and dangerous mood among Europe's unions," he said. The Commission's concerns follow the publication of a two-year study conducted at Cambridge University, which showed that "the way (British) employers have implemented the opt-out is a very abusive one", according to Anna Diamantopoulou, the Commissioner responsible for employment policy.
    Changes to the directive - including any proposal by the Commission to end the opt-out - would need backing from a qualified majority of EU member states. A British official stressed on Wednesday that the UK was not isolated since some of its EU partners also exempted specific professions from the directive.
    The debate about the opt-out has split employers and trade unions in the UK. John Cridland of the Confederation of British Industry, Britain's biggest employers' organisation, said on Wednesday that employees should not be "pressurised or penalised" in an attempt to make them sign the opt-out. But he added: "There is a genuine concern that Brussels wants to prevent people having the freedom of choice to work longer hours and earn more money if they want to.
    [Under no economic design that is adequate to the age of ecology and robotics can people any longer have the license, not freedom, to concentrate scarce market-demanded employment to earn more unaccountable personal spending power. Under Timesizing, people who want to earn more unaccountable personal money are nudged into the plentiful on-the-job training programs to upgrade their skills and win a higher wage per hour or salary per time-limited job. It is this feature which caps purely mercenary, inflationary incentive and allows inflation control without fostering unemployment. Of course, people who have deflationary incentive (non-monetary, inherent, qualitative, "love this job!") are allowed to work unlimited hours per week - because they themselves are reinvesting every bit of their overline earnings in training and/or hiring, and are therefore part of the plentiful-jobs solution and not part of the tight-job-market problem.]
    "The loss of the opt-out would seriously call into question the Commission's commitment to EU competitiveness."
    Brendan Barber, general secretary of the British Trades Union Congress, said: "The real solution is to end the opt-out altogether. More than 48 hours every week is too much work for anyone."
    In another important step, the Commission is expected to leave EU member states to decide how to comply with a court decision which is threatening to increase healthcare costs in Germany and some other EU nations.
    In September, the European Court of Justice ruled that time spent by doctors at a hospital should count as working time even if they are resting. The Commission appears unwilling to step into a legal minefield and push for new EU-wide legislation, in particular since member states differ widely in their interpretation of time spent on call.

  3. Business fears outcome of case on older workers, by Patti Waldmeir, Financial Times [UK].
    WASHINGTON - The US Supreme Court heard arguments on Wednesday in a case that could determine whether US employers can afford to be generous to older workers without being sued for age discrimination. The case is being closely watched by a nervous US business community, which fears that an adverse ruling could make it almost impossible to offer older workers early retirement and fringe benefits to help them weather the transition from work to retirement.
    On Wednesday the justices, several of whom are well over the normal retirement age, expressed strong support for the notion that employers should be able to offer older workers incentives to retire early, as well as inducements to keep on working, such as shorter working hours and the ability to work from home.
    The case asks whether General Dynamics, the defence contractor, wrongly singled out people over 50 years of age to receive health benefits when they retired, at the expense of employees aged between 40 and 49. A group of those younger workers, who are covered under a US antidiscrimination law that protects those over 40, sued the company for age discrimination, arguing that they were penalised because they were not too old, but too young.
    The Bush administration, which more frequently sides with businesses, on Wednesday backed the General Dynamics workers who sued.
    On the other side are the unions and business groups, who fear that a ruling in favour of the workers would threaten collective bargaining agreements which lead to voluntary early retirements rather than involuntary redundancies.
    On Wednesday the US government argued that favouring older workers should not be allowed because it fostered the same negative stereotypes about the old that the age discrimination law was meant to combat.
    The workers accuse General Dynamics of "reverse age discrimination" because of a change in retirement benefits in 1997. Until then, longtime company employees could retire and receive full health benefits. Under the new union contract at plants in Lima, Ohio, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, only long-time workers aged 50 or more as of 1997 could receive full health benefits after retirement.
    The company, which makes battle tanks and combat vehicles, was sued by about 200 people in their 40s, who were no longer eligible for free healthcare in retirement, regardless of when they retired. They won in the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
    [The nice thing about our Timesizing future is that it buries agism by making earning a good living as easy as it should be for everyone in the Age of Robotics.]

  4. Behind China's export boom, heated battle among factories - As Wal-Mart, others demand lowest prices, managers scramble to slash costs, by Peter Wonacott, WSJ, front page.
    [Compare Saturday's lead editorial, "The Wal-Martization of America," 11/15/2003 NYT, A26.]
    SHAJING, China -...It's the survival of the cheapest. At Ching Hai Electric Works Co., manager David Liu has cut his labor force in half, to 1,500 workers, even while maintaining the same level of orders. The company's starting salary of about $32 a month is some 40% less than the local minimum wage. Many workers put in 18-hour days with minimal training and constant pressure to boost output. Despite the cost-cutting, Mr. Liu says Ching Hai is just barely profitable....
    Buyers are moving aggressively to play one factory against another. "As things get more competitive, the pressure that comes along with that, yeah, we try to take advantage of it," says Gary Meyers, a vice president in global procurement at Wal-Mart.
    Ching Hai employees say they are sometimes asked to work as long as 18 hours. Though the city's minimum wage is about $56 a month, Ching Hai starts new recruits at that low $32 level and promises subsidies for food and lodging to make up the difference.
    The competition is making it harder to improve conditions for Chinese factory workers. As abuses come to light, many multinationals are enforcing codes of conduct for suppliers. Among Wal-Mart's "Standards for Suppliers" are demands that factories comply with local laws for wages and work hours. Wal-Mart also forbids forced labor [ha! - see 6/25/2002 #2] and child labor, and promotes proper training, safety and clean restrooms.
    But many low-cost factories in China ignore such codes, and many government officials enforce them haphazardly....
    [Followup - this is the first of three China articles cited in -]
    12/05 China: An object lesson of where globalization is leading us - Is this really the kind of world we want? by *Dr. Chuck Kelly, 12/05/2003 OpEdNews.com, flagged by Peter Applebaum.

  5. Suit by computer workers, NYT, C4.
    A class-action lawsuit, filed yesterday...in Los Angeles..\..on behalf of thousands of employees of the Computer Services Corp., accuses the company of refusing to pay overtime to computer service workers...for at least 3 years..\..in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act....
    [These CEOs are the first to bill others quothing "no such thing as a free lunch" - except for them: they love that big blank check on their employees' lives.]

  6. Easing into retirement - Phased retirement allows an employee to enjoy more outside activities, while the company finds a replacement, by Grant Buckler, Toronto Globe & Mail.
    KINGSTON, Ont. - At 61, with fairly bad arthritis, Kate Pemberton was having trouble finding the energy for her job as a business analyst at Royal Bank of Canada [RBC] as well as for her grandchildren and other interests. "I was really thinking of retiring," she says, "but still wanting to work. But five days a week was really proving too much for me."
    So in July, Ms. Pemberton took advantage of RBC's phased retirement plan. The plan allows employees to work three or four days a week for a transition period leading to retirement. Ms. Pemberton chose four days, and now has Mondays off to do laundry and housework, leaving her [three-day] weekends free to visit her grandchildren and relax. The plan lets her work these reduced hours one month for every year of service [a questionable restriction], which means Ms. Pemberton can work four-day weeks for 19 months before retiring completely.
    RBC started a phased-retirement pilot program in 1999, making it permanent the next year, says Norma Tombari, senior manager of diversity and work-force solutions. To be eligible, an employee must have worked for the bank for at least 10 years and qualify for a pension at the end of the transition period. Between 25 and 50 employees have chosen the option so far, Ms. Tombari says. Though it has been rare to date except in academia, "phased retirement is the wave of the future," she predicts.
    Employers are increasingly interested in phased retirement because some of them fear staff shortages - and particularly shortages of experienced workers - as baby boomers reach retirement age. "Certainly the aging work force is a huge motivating factor," says Nora Spinks, president of organizational research firm Work-Life Harmony Enterprises in Toronto.
    Employees are interested because they need a break from stressful working lives, but they either aren't ready to stop work entirely or can't afford to do so.
    About 10% of workers aged 50 to 69 who leave full-time jobs move into part-time positions within two years, reports Wendy Pyper, an analyst at Statistics Canada in Ottawa who studies the work patterns of people approaching retirement. About half the people in that age group who leave jobs don't work again, and about a third are in new full-time jobs within two years.
    "We hear about it all the time," Ms. Pyper says. "We hear about people that say ,'Oh, well, I've retired,' but they continue work in some way, shape or form."
    True phased retirement is something more specific than leaving full-time work for a part-time or contract job, though. The strict meaning of phased retirement is that an employee keeps the same job but works reduced hours for reduced salary, sometimes topped up with prepayments from a pension plan.
    Ms. Spinks says all major Canadian banks have phased retirement programs, as do some high-technology firms. Governments are showing interest - New Brunswick recently announced a program for nurses, Saskatchewan issued guidelines for phased retirement for its civil servants and teachers nearing retirement in Nova Scotia can work reduced hours for as much as two years.
    While large employers favour formal programs, she adds, smaller companies sometimes make informal phased retirement arrangements with employees. New Brunswick says any nurse who is 56 or older this January will have the choice of working 50 or 60% of normal hours for up to five years. In 2005, the age of eligibility will drop to 55. A nurse who chooses this option will receive 50 or 60% of regular salary - depending on hours worked - plus pension payments to bring the total to 85% of full-time pay.
    Not all phased retirement plans include pension payments during the transition period. Like RBC, McGill University in Montreal simply pays phased retirees a reduced salary in proportion to their reduced workloads, while their pensions continue to accrue as if they were working full time. Full-time faculty aged 52 or older are eligible for McGill's plan, says Stuart Price, associate vice-principal for academic staff and planning. They phase out of their jobs over three years, often reducing workload in annual stages.
    Phased retirement programs usually have time limits. New Brunswick nurses will be able to spend up to five years working part time before leaving altogether. At RBC, the limit is 30 months.
    Universities were pioneers in phased retirement - Mr. Price says McGill's plan has been in place for a number of years. Ironically, the original purpose of phased retirement in academia was the opposite of the reason more employers are considering it now. Universities wanted to nudge older faculty toward retirement to make room for younger replacements. Today, though, McGill sees phased retirement as a way to keep older professors around for a few more years, giving the university time to find replacements in an increasingly tight market. Shortages of PhDs are developing in some disciplines, notes Robert Savoie, executive director of McGill's human resources department, and "to search for a certain individual can take up to a year before we find the right candidate who wants to come work for us."
    Nurses are also becoming scarce, and that is a major reason for New Brunswick's plan. "The main purpose was to try to retain our most experienced nurses for a little bit longer within our health-care system," says Rose-May Poirier, Minister responsible for the Office of Human Resources. Younger nurses will get more time to work alongside experienced colleagues and learn from them, Ms. Poirier adds.
    "If somebody phases into retirement," Ms. Spinks says, "it's a golden opportunity to job share with somebody who's phasing into the position."
    Attractive as it may be to many employers and employees, phased retirement isn't without its pitfalls, and both sides must do their homework before agreeing to a phased retirement arrangement. For employees, pensions are one obvious concern. Many plans base pension payments on the last five years of income, so reduced income in those years can have a lifelong effect. Ms. Spinks says many employers are dealing with this by changing the rules to base pension income on the five highest-earning years of the employee's career, rather than the last five.
    This is just the beginning of the pension issues phased retirement raises, though. Sheryl Smolkin, a pension lawyer at the Toronto office of human resources consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide, explains that Canadian tax laws won't let an employee contribute to a pension plan and collect from it at the same time. So an employee drawing pension money to top up reduced salary during phased retirement must stop contributing to the plan. New Brunswick nurses will stop contributing to their pension plans when they begin phased retirement, but their pensions will continue to accrue as if they were working full time and contributing. To help pay for this, the province is increasing pension contributions for all eligible nurses and their employers by 0.1%. Nonetheless, nurses' pension income once they retire will be affected, government spokesman Dan Toner says.
    A simpler answer is that chosen by McGill and RBC: Employees get no pension during the transition period. Their pensions continue to accrue as if they were working full time, so their pensions when they retire are the same as if they had worked full time until leaving.
    Unlike in other provinces, Quebec employees can receive annual lump sums from their pension funds during phased retirement.
    Quebec is a good place to take phased retirement for another reason, too. An employee working part time as a transition to retirement can keep contributing to the Quebec Pension Plan at a rate based on his or her full-time salary. Elsewhere, Canada Pension Plan [CPP] contributions are scaled back along with pay.
    An employer and employee must agree on how the retiring worker's responsibilities will be reduced. In some jobs, cutting hours can simply mean working fewer shifts. In others, particularly professional jobs, agreeing that an employee will cut back to three or four days a week without deciding what work that employee will give up and who will take it over could lead to unpaid overtime, Ms. Spinks says. One answer may be to have the retiring staffer share the job with a designated successor, who gradually takes over duties while continuing with some of his or her own previous job. This lets the person leaving the job be a mentor, but it takes careful planning to ensure someone doesn't end up doing a job and a half.
    In Ms. Pemberton's case, another employee whose previous position was eliminated is gradually taking over her duties. Because she works in the growing field of information security, Ms. Pemberton says, "right now it's keeping both of us busy."
    Leaving the office at three in the afternoon may seem attractive, but Ms. Spinks suggests that coming in later in the morning instead can help avoid the problem of "have you got 15 minutes?" requests keeping the part-timer in the office longer than planned.
    An additional challenge for employers, Ms. Smolkin says, is tailoring phased retirement plans so they achieve the desired result and not the opposite one. Employers may be looking to phased retirement plans to keep older workers around in the face of anticipated labour shortages, but making the plans too attractive could have the opposite effect, encouraging people who would otherwise have continued working full time to cut back. "To make any phased retirement work, it truly requires a partnership between the employer and the employee," Ms. Spinks concludes.
    Phased retirement questions
    Questions employers should ask:
    1. Who will be eligible? Some jobs may not lend themselves to reduced hours, or there may be no benefit to offering phased retirement to some employees.
    2. When will they be eligible? Most phased retirement plans specify a minimum age or number of years of service. Setting this too low may encourage employees who would otherwise remain full time to retire.
    3. How will pensions be handled? Does the employee's pension continue accruing as if he or she still worked full time?
    4. How will benefits be handled? Do your benefit plans need revising to address the needs of workers phasing into retirement?
    5. How can employees taking phased retirement transfer knowledge to younger workers? Can the phasing-out employee share the job with a successor and act as a mentor?
    Questions for employees:
    1. What effect will it have on my company pension once I am fully retired? Some plans allow your pension to keep accruing as if you were working full time; others don't.
    2. What effect will it have on my Canada or Quebec Pension Plan? Your CPP contributions are based on your income up to a maximum of $35,000, so if phased retirement cuts your salary to less than $35,000, your contributions will be reduced, and that means lower CPP benefits later.
    3. What about supplemental benefits such as my dental plan?
    4. What duties will I give up and to whom? Unless employer and employee agree on what you will stop doing - and who will take it over - you could end up working the same hours for less money.
    5. How will the schedule work? How will meetings and other obligations affect this schedule?

11/12/2003   primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope - all are 11/11 via GoogleNews & searched-screened-collected by Alan Applebaum (AA) of Brookline MA , and excerpts & comments are by Phil Hyde (PH) unless otherwise initialled -
  1. So far so good, but which way is DT headed? by Bettina Wassener, Published: November 11 2003 18:48 Financial Times (UK).
    When Kai-Uwe Ricke presents Deutsche Telekom's [DT's] third-quarter results on Thursday he will have an easier task than the one he took on almost exactly a year ago. The...chief executive has spent the past 12 months returning Europe's largest telecommunications operator to profitability after last year's record E24.6B ($28.8B) loss via a strict diet of cost cuts, asset disposals and debt reduction....
    Deutsche Telekom, which has a 250,000-strong staff costing E13.5B a year, is aiming to shed 55,000 jobs worldwide by the end of 2005. The company has also proposed cutting working hours for Germany-based staff by at least 10%, in a move that would safeguard 10,000 jobs and generate savings estimated by analysts at E500m....

  2. Lufthansa's earnings grounded by catering unit, by Sapa, AP via South African Independent Online.
    BERLIN - German airline Lufthansa slumped to a loss of E409 million (Rand 3.26 billion) in the first nine months of the year, the company said Tuesday, as problems at its catering business compounded the effects of weak passenger and air cargo traffic.
    Lufthansa, which made a profit of E344 million in the year-earlier period, has trimmed staff working hours and culled unprofitable routes to protect earnings in an industry smarting from the sluggishness of the world economy and fallout from the SARS outbreak in Asia....

  3. Costs of trucking seen rising under new safety rules - Drivers' shorter work day, aimed at relieving fatigue, could hurt retailers, others, by Daniel Machalaba, WSJ, front page.
    [Why does progress always get spun as hiking costs and hurting business? Where are the researchers, the number crunchers to prove to these idiots that they're saving a lot of money by reducing their sick days and traffic accidents and deaths and new-driver training&orientation and lawsuits?]
    The first major changes in truck-driver work hours since 1939 are expected to reduce highway fatalities, but also contribute to the biggest increase in trucking rates in two decades.
    [If they were really concerned about transportation rates, they'd quit sending stuff in huge semi-tractor-trailers - individual, huger-than-train-size freight cars, each with its own huge, individual, diesel engine and driver. There is absolutely nothing efficient about these monstrosities. They are one of our grossest examples of private-sector makework (see makework realm #13).]
    The little-noticed changes, mandated under new federal safety rules that take effect in January, are designed to reduce fatigue among truck drivers, a major cause of accidents. The new rules increase the time that truck drivers must set aside to rest in each 24-hour period to 10 hours from 8 hours, and the total time a driver can be on duty will fall to 14 hours from 15 hours.
    [And the morons at the Journal are trying to spin this as radical?]
    The biggest impact on safety will result from drivers being required to include as workhours time spent waiting at loading docks or fueling their rigs. But in a concession to the trucking industry, the rules will actually allow drivers to spend one more hour a day being the wheel than they can now.
    [Oh great.]
    The [Bush] government estimates the new rules could cost trucking companies about $1.3B/yr.
    [And what quality of humanoids opposing such a basic and minimal safety increment? -]
    Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which unsuccessfully opposed the new rules, believes the more stringent 14-hour rule will reduce its drivers' daily work time by 6% on average and cause it to add 275 new drivers and 300 new trucks to handle the same amount of cargo.
    [Good! That's fewer costly unemployed people and more orders for the truck manufacturers.]
    The giant retailer expects the changes to cost it $24m just for the additional trucks.
    [Ah, isn't that toooo bad. $24m less for the CEO and his croneys to waste.]
    "The rule will impose serious costs on society [ie: the 'society' in the Wal-Mart board room], not only on motor carriers but on shippers and receivers as well," the company said.
    [Carriers and shippers and receivers are "business," not "society." And somehow we think business will survive, just as it did over the 150 years when we were cutting the workweek from 80 hours to 40 and multiplying wages.]
    Because trucks haul so much commerce, accounting for more than 81% of the nation's $571B freight-transportation bill last year,
    [what a disgrace! - that should be 81% by train, not truck]
    the effects could be far-reaching.
    [Great - let's switch to rail and save fuel and road repair and highway accidents....]
    Some users of truck transportation say higher trucking rates could lead to a broad-based increase in prices of goods from paper to chemicals, diapers to trash cans....
    [Fine, we consumers can handle it. And if we can't, we'll just buy less and prices will come back down and CEOs won't get that 32nd million $$, boo-hoo.]

  4. I quit! - Overworked employees are fed up: a survey finds 8 out of 10 Americans want a new job, Your Money column by Leslie Geary, CNN/Money (CNN and Money Magazine), flagged by Jeanette Watkins of Arlington WA.
    NEW YORK - Ready to quit? You have plenty of company. Many employees are overworked, stressed out, fed up - and eager to quit their jobs once the economy picks up. In fact, worker angst is so pronounced that it has surprised even the most tuned-in human resource professionals. Consider, for example, that more than 8 in 10 workers plan to look for a new job [if and] when the economy heats up, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Professionals [SHRP]. While there's a difference between looking for a new gig and actually jumping ship, that kind of number is "very, very high," says SHRP spokesman Frank Scanlon.... "Employees have hunkered down through the downturn," said Scanlon. [As soon as they have some options] "they're going to start looking aggressively"..\..
    How did things get so bad? To be sure, the economy hasn't helped. Cash-strapped employers have been cutting back on benefits like health care, paid vacations and retirement benefits.
    Belt tightening [however] is one thing; greed is another. In an era of Enron, mutual fund scandals and ludicrous CEO pay packages, employees know the difference, says Jeff Taylor, founder and CEO of Monster.com.
    "Companies behaving badly" have been all too common during the downturn, according to Taylor. "That's an environment where the employers call the shots," [says Taylor]. The threat of pink slips has prompted plenty of people to work scared and to give everything [or at least lots of 'face time'] to their jobs....
    [Yep, a gross surplus of labor hours flooding the job market will slopes the power gradient steeply in favor of employers. Forget about the "discipline of labor." It's management that needs some discipline during a labor surplus, alias a hidden depression.] Heading for the door
    Take the case of David Garrison, 40, a facilities manager who worked for an oil company for 20 years before he finally called it quits. Pulling 60-hour weeks was normal for the Los Angeles father of two. That's because he was expected to do much of the work of five other peers who had been fired. The message: Don't complain or you'll lose your job, too. So Garrison kept his mouth shut - and paid a price.
    By the time he did quit a little over a year ago, he had to swallow anti-anxiety prescriptions to get through the day. When he did care for himself - and took a second sick day within a six-month period - he was called in for a "counseling" session by his employer, who warned him not to take too much time away. "It was infuriating," he recalls.
    Infuriating but not uncommon, judging by the e-mail postings on worker-geared Web sites like *Ihatemyjob.com that have flourished in recent years as a way for beleaguered employees to vent.
    Meanwhile, labor-friendly movements - such as the *Center for a New American Dream's effort to simplify lives and the *Work To Live Web site, which exhorts workers to lobby lawmakers for change - are gaining momentum. "I get flooded with e-mails from people, and you get a sense of the desperation," says Work to Live's founder and author Joe Robinson. "People have been traumatized by the last 15 years of downsizing and the last few years of recession. Everyone's afraid they'll be next." The high cost of desperation
    "In the last 15 years I've had a total of four weeks of vacation," writes one woman in a typical posting found on the Work to Live site. "We receive no paid vacation, no paid holidays and no paid sick leave. . . .I used to have three people in my office doing what I do. Now there is just me. . . . I can't keep going like this." Now there may be a glimmer of hope for some. The most recent job report from the Labor Dept. shows that employers are finally adding to their payrolls. And human resource managers are bracing for a stampede.
    [Don't hold your breath.]
    Gerald Ledford, senior vice president at Sibson Consulting, notes that if 16% of workers do leave their jobs - as his firm predicts - that will match the high turnover rates of the late 1990's, when employees hopscotched from job to job. "It's a very expensive problem," says Ledford.
    [But it's the only real discipline tool and skill upgrade opportunity that employers have.]
    For example, a national clothing chain must sell 3,000 pairs of $35 khakis to cover the price of replacing a salesperson who quits, including recruiting, training and lost productivity. The tab to replace a typical white-collar middle manager runs about $100,000....

  5. 40-hour week a dream for most, by Harry Wessel, Orlando Sentinel.
    ORLANDO, Fla. - Janet Gartland loves her job but not the hours. A logistics coordinator with Siemens Westinghouse Power Corp. in Orlando, she regularly puts in 11- and 12-hour days, which translates into 55- to 60-hour weeks. Working that many hours week after week, ''you tend to be more irritable, more frustrated,'' said Gartland, who has been with Siemens for eight years. ''Things that don't normally bother you, bother you. You're on the edge all the time.''
    She's not complaining. Gartland prefers being on edge to being bored, and her ''multitasking, fast-paced'' job is anything but boring. Nevertheless, she said, ''I'd love to go to an eight-hour day.''
    So would millions of other full-time workers, for whom the 40-hour workweek is a seldom-to-never occurrence.
    ''Americans work more hours by far than any other workers in the world,'' said Benjamin Balak, who teaches economic history at Rollins College. ''If you want to be a high-income wage earner, you have to work like a dog. If you want leisure in today's economy, you'll be stuck in a low-income job. It's income or leisure.'' For many if not most professionals today, Balak said, working in excess of 40 hours a week ''is expected.''''You don't have an option,'' he said.
    Recent government surveys appear to contradict Balak. They show the amount of weekly hours put in by full-time workers has remained virtually unchanged since the mid-1970s - 43 hours then, 42.9 hours now. But there is more to it than meets the eye because the surveys include both salaried and hourly workers. An unpublished Bureau of Labor Statistics study, for example, finds that those in administrative, managerial and executive occupations spent an average of 45 hours at work each week in 2002.
    Hourly workers, who must by law be paid time-and-a-half for overtime, tend to work about 40 hours a week, just as they did in the Ô70s. It's among the growing number of salaried workers - who aren't eligible for overtime - where the extra hours largely are being worked. Currently, about 50 million U.S. employees are not eligible for overtime; about 71 million are eligible.
    The 65-year-old Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the 40-hour workweek as a national norm, did so largely by requiring companies to pay employees at least time-and-a-half when workers clocked more than 40 weekly hours. The law protected production and nonsupervisory workers, not managers or professionals. With the subsequent decline in manufacturing jobs, the percentage of workers eligible for overtime pay has dropped.
    Another reason the government's published data may be misleading is that they ''only measure hours on the job,'' said Randy Ilg, an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington. The data do not include night and weekend hours spent handling work-related e-mails, phone calls and paperwork from home - homework made even easier with the widespread use of laptop computers and cell phones.''The number of professionals and managers is growing,'' Ilg said. ''The percentage of people working off the clock is growing.''
    There is another shift the government's hours-worked surveys do not take into account - the increased number of dual-income households. ''If you look at family work hours, you see really dramatic changes,'' said Jared Bernstein, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. ''Over the last 30 years, middle-income couples with kids have added an average of 20 weeks of work, the equivalent of five more months a year.''
    In other words, fathers who worked a lot of hours before are still working a lot of hours. But mothers who used to stay at home or work part time are now far more likely to be working full time, as well. ''That's what explains people feeling stressed,'' said Bernstein. ''Middle-income families are running faster to stay in place.''
    A 1997 survey by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute found that employed fathers with children worked an average of 50.9 hours a week, while employed mothers with children worked an average of 41.4 hours a week. Compared with a similar survey in 1977, that represented a 3.1-hour weekly increase for working dads and a five-hour weekly increase for working moms.
    Balak, the Rollins College economist, said the increase in work hours since the mid-1970s has been among white-collar professionals. ''People who were working eight hours a day then are still working eight hours a day. But people who were working more then, professionals and such, are working even more now.''
    Some are resisting, however. Attorney Stefanie Jancewicz knows she could be making more money and doing more for her career if she worked longer hours for a larger law firm. Instead, she works a relatively modest 45 to 50 hours a week for a small Kissimmee, Fla., law firm, Mullins & DeNike. Jancewicz has two children under age 5 and a husband who works more hours than she does. ''There's not enough of me to go around,'' said Jancewicz, 34, who specializes in family law. ''I don't begrudge my job or my kids, but it's hard to do both.''
    Her small firm lets her come and go as she pleases, giving her the flexibility to be with her children when she needs to be.
    But flexibility goes only so far. She doesn't have time during the week to do household chores or errands, making her weekends as hectic as her weekdays. She'd like to work fewer hours, but only because of her family crunch. When her children are older, she expects to work more. She may want to teach law. She may want to become a judge. ''There are more things I want to do when my kids don't need as much of my time. I don't want to deprive them now. Inevitably, I will spend more time at work.''
    Janet Gartland, the Siemens logistics coordinator, would like to go in the other direction. Forty to 45 hours a week sounds about right to her. But for now, it looks like her 55-hour weeks will continue. ''I'll keep holding up until I win the lottery,'' she said. ''Then, I'm out of here.''

  6. Analysis: France's ailing economy - Defiant Chirac could be his own worst enemy - France, along with Germany, is arguably the backbone of the European Union, yet Paris is wilfully ignoring, and thus undermining, the EU's rules on its members' budget deficits, by Colin Donald, Bangkok Post.
    When the British chancellor of the exchequer attacked the performance of the Eurozone last week, he was manoeuvring for domestic political advantage. But even so, the criticism must have smarted in France. Already unhappy at being outperformed by Britain, the French must have been bitterly aware that the talk by the exchequer, Gordon Brown, of sluggish growth and an inadequate monetary frameworks was largely directed at them.
    The government in Paris did not need Mr Brown's intervention to inform it that public dissatisfaction with it was rising, or that a rash of bestselling crisis books, like Nicolas Baverez's La France Qui Tombe (Falling France), was already undermining national pride.
    [How ironic that all France has to do to outcompete them all is push further with l'exception française = worktime economics. Quit feeling guilty about the 35-hour workweek, quit fighting it, and adjust the workweek further downward until all of France's 9% unemployed are transformed into employed, confident and active consumers. Of course, the first step would be to implement overtime-targeted on-the-job training, but these two essential components of timesizing would loft France easily over the U.K.'s unemployment-starved growth figures.]
    More so even than Germany, France's uneven progress in the 'reform' [our quotes] of pensions and public services, and its high-handed defiance [looks more like rather sheepish 'defiance' to us] of European Union stability-pact rules on budget deficits - rules that it was instrumental in writing - are adding to a sense of sickness at the heart of the Eurozone. Those who want their countries to stand outside the political and monetary union - the so-called eurosceptics - are being provided new arguments by the case of France.
    Once hailed as the key to economic revival, the euro currency has done its 12 member countries few favours over the past five years, with a performance that has deterred new countries from joining. Unless France and Germany recover some of their old form, the region is likely to remain in the doldrums.
    Paradoxically, President Jacques Chirac's defiance of Brussels, on the issue of the stability pact and the EU ceiling on state debts, is taken by pro-Europeans as a sign that a powerful country can influence EU decision making (in layman terms: get its own way) when its vital interests are at stake.
    Faced with rising unemployment figures and a looming recession, Mr Chirac, his Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Finance Minister Francis Mer are making quasi-nationalist capital by defying the accountants of Brussels in the cause of escaping recession. It is a new and worrying departure, according to pro-Europeans. The confrontational way France has been dealing with the issue is entirely negative, said Hugo De Sousa of the Paris think tank Notre Europe founded by Jacques Delors, the former president of the European Commission.
    Apart from the fact that it is bad for the credibility of France just to defy the terms of the stability pact without making suggestions to reform it, it does not make any sense to lower taxes or increase spending on public services. This is all about Mr Chirac's electoral promises, nothing to do with any economic theory.
    The criticism that Mr Chirac is supremely concerned with local, European parliament and senate elections in 2004 is in line with widely held perceptions of this tactically fixated politician, in tune with France's natural conservatism, but lacking vision. According to one diplomat in Paris, Mr Chirac's ultimate achievement after many attempts of the presidency, with a compliant prime minister, and with all internal challengers safely dispatched, has led to a prolonged "now what do I do?" moment'. Meanwhile, France's education and health services, once reliably superior to Britain's, are in disarray, and public servants, teachers and ecological activists are increasingly vocal as Mr Chirac's and Mr Raffarin's popularity plummets.
    However, if the French president is emulating Margaret Thatcher, the hard-line British prime minister of the 1980s, in his willingness to defy Brussels, he lacks her tolerance for domestic unpopularity. Paris' reform programme, called Agenda 2006 (to suggest greater urgency than Berlin's similar Agenda 2010), designed to tackle structural rigidities in labour and product markets, health care and social security, is moving ahead hesitantly. But it is moving, accompanied by a rhetorical acceptance of privatisation, long a dirty word in Paris.
    "We have lived for too long with the idea that the state was always right,'' Mr Chirac announced on Bastille Day, July 14, this year, during a bruising confrontation over pension reforms that bought thousands on to the streets. ``We must move out of this impasse. The state cannot decide everything.''
    [One word: referendums.]
    The Raffarin government has since moved to pass a pension law raising the number of years for public sector employees to achieve the full state pension.... There are also plans to make it easier to sack workers, and push the unemployed to take jobs, thou