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Timesizing News, Dec.11-19, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

12/19/2003   primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope - all are 12/18 via GoogleNews & searched-screened-collected by Alan Applebaum (AA) of Brookline MA, and excerpts [& comments] are by Phil Hyde (PH) unless otherwise initialled -

• Minister Must Take Action On Nurses Shortage - Labour, by David Cochrane, www.politics.ie.
  IRELAND - "The ongoing nurses shortage in Irish hospitals has reached the stage of critical condition," the Labour spokesperson on Health, Deputy Liz McManus has said following the INO statement concerning severe staff shortages in Irish hospitals.
  "Nurses are absolutely vital for our Health service and we need to do all we can to recruit and retain nurses. There is an emerging Health crisis and heralds chronic disillusionment among our Health care professionals. This problem needs immediate attention and action. So far it is clear that the Government effort falls short of what is needed.
  "Only recently, the Health Service National Partnership Forum showed 1,000 vacancies in nursing and detailed some of the reasons why nurses have left the health service. Among the issues raised by nurses was long working hours and so far these concerns have not been addressed. The Minister needs to examine these concerns and look at how nurses can be attracted back to the profession. Unless the Minister takes the concerns of the INO on board and redirects resources to bring nurses back into the profession, we will be facing a very real Health care emergency."

1. [*"Followup" below undermines this story as a case of timesizing.*]
   Opera is suffering from a supply-side crisis, by Melvyn Krauss, WSJ, D6.
   The recent announcement by the Metropolitan Opera that it will take a midseason hiatus in January 2005 confirms the rumors and leaks that, for some time now, business has been bad at the nation's leading opera house.
   [ Timesizing, not downsizing at the Met!]
   The Met blames its bad box office on a drop-off in international tourism.
   [That's probably a big part of it. Who wants to visit George Bush's night'Merica?]
   But the crisis goes much deeper than implied by this superficial[?] explanation.
   [True, but not in the direction Melvyn laments, which is -]
   Opera today is suffering [cuz] the supply of great voices - especially in the Italian repertory - has dried up....
   [Oh yeah? Then how does Mel explain the popularity of the 3 tenors - Pavarotty (love it!) in pawtickler? (For an extra 200 pounds {sterling} you get the white hanky and...Pavasnotty.) Then there's Placebo Flamingo (but maybe he's from Gibraltar = a covert, classed-up Latino), and a host of new ill-mannered prima donnas, like the aptly named Kathleen Battle, a worthy successor to Maria Callous. And what ever happened to Flicka (Fredericka von Stade) - she didn't up & retire on us, did she? She's our favorite Cherubino or whoever the heck sings "Voi, che sapete" in Nosey duh Figure-O, our personal brainstem's happy-signal song as in "For some reason I'm happy, don't spoil it!"
   [The real reason box office is down is that there are thousands of new, tasteless, nouveau-riche workaholics - and millions of new poverty cases. The money isn't in the spending zone in the middle and lower brackets. It's all constipated up in the top brackets where it doesn't get spent, just held for the next stock bubble - which is currently forming.]
   [Followup -]
   At the Metropolitan Opera, all is according to plan, letter to editor by Met's Gen. Mgr. Joseph Volpe, 12/24 WSJ, A9.
   ...Unfortunately for Mr. Krauss's argument, the planning at the Met, as with other major opera companies, is made many years in advance, and this decision dates from 2000, a year before 9/11...at a time when the Met box office was booming. The hiatus is intended to give the company a much-needed break in a very long season. Mr. Krauss also fails to notice that the 2004-2005 season has been extended to the end of May to compensate for the hiatus....
   [Oops, that finishes this case as an example of timesizing.]

2. Polish your resume, e-mailing in bed - A peek at next year's work-life trends, by Sue Shellenbarger, WSJ, D1.
   For people who want to have a life while making a living, 2003 has in some ways been the worst of times.
   ["The Year of Squeezing the Butterfly" - by employers, and killing it.]
   Expectations of increasing flexibility in work setups were trashed by the economy. Instead of offering time off as an incentive, as I predicted back in 1999 many companies would start doing [big mistake in a mounting labor surplus!], employers encroached on workers' personal and family lives by discouraging vacations and ramping up job demands.
   Some also cut back on popular alternative-scheduling programs. CCH Inc., Riverwoods IL, says employers offering...
   • compressed workweeks fell by 18% in the past year,
   • job-sharing by 19%
   • and telecommuting by 4%.
     [Panicked, paranoid, control-freak bosses gotta have that "face time."]
   Worse yet, workers' job-shopping options were closed off by a labor market as forbidding as Mordor in "Lord of the Rings."
   [Sue, Sue, Sue, you should have placed this first. This is the reason all the other bad stuff happened. In a labor shortage, employees can discipline employers by job-shopping and job-hopping. In a labor surplus, employees are too scared to jump. They hunker down no matter how bad their current job and their current boss.]
   Despite signs of economic recovery on the horizon,
   [maybe the horizon of your dreams - but repeat after us, "a jobless recovery is not a recovery" - what is it? a suicidal arm-flailing by bored and frustrated megarich investors, a bubble....]
   the job market has persistently refused to rebound with strength.
   [How can it when our B-schools and CEOs won't let it? They still teach and practice merger and downsizing, merger and downsizing. And you can't base an upsizing alias 'recovery' on downsizing. What can you base it on? Need you ask? - on Timesizing, of course! = sharing and spreading the vanishing work.]
   But there are some signs of hope.
   [No there aren't, but if Sue wants to keep her job at the cheerleading Wall Street Journal....]
   Here are my annual predictions of work-life trends:...
   [We'll spare you. Sue's predictions are happytalkin' nonsense or sugarpills. Those who don't understand the timesizing alternative cling to baseless optimism.]

3. U.S. workers feel burn of long hours, less leisure, by Stephanie Armour, USA Today, front page of Money section, flagged by Jeanette Watkins of Arlington WA.
   USA - A backlash is building against America's work epidemic.
   More employees are resisting companies' demands for longer hours on the job, the 24/7 pace of business that means operations never cease, and the surrender of leisure time to work because of new technology such as cell phones and e-mail.
   "People are putting in 40 and 50 hours a week, and there's not enough time for anything," says Gretchen Burger, in Seattle, an organizer with *Take Back Your Time, a grass-roots movement aimed at focusing attention on the issue of overwork. "There is an alternative."
   Some workers, unwilling to clock extra hours without extra pay, are suing their companies over alleged overtime violations. In fiscal 2003, the Labor Department collected $212 million in back wages, which include overtime violations. That's a 21% increase over the record-setting amount collected in 2002.
   Some economists also believe that many productivity gains of the '90s can be attributed to longer work hours rather than the efficiency of new technology.
   For the first time, industries that have been notorious for their taxing schedules are scaling back. New guidelines now limit the number of hours that medical residents can work. And starting Jan. 4, federal regulations will require many truck drivers to set aside more time for breaks.
   Some beleaguered workers are also taking action, changing to less-demanding occupations or leaving corporations to start their own businesses, where they can feel more in control of their work lives. Others are scaling back to spend more time with families.
   About six years ago, Steven Rothberg and his wife, Faith, decided to make a change. They sat down, crunched the numbers and took the plunge: Steve cut back his work hours, sometimes as much as 80 hours a week, to about 50 a week, and he downsized his business by reducing products and shedding staff. Faith...who worked in information services at a bank, opted to stay home with children. "My wife and I decided that we needed to cut back on our work hours and simplify our lives," says Rothberg...who runs Minneapolis-based online career site CollegeRecruiter.com. He has two sons, ages 9 and 7, and a daughter, 4. "The result? We started to love our lives again and two years later decided to have another child. Our daughter owes her life to our decision to try to bring balance to our lives."
   Working to the max
   But they're the exception. U.S. workers put in an average of 1,815 hours in 2002. In major European economies, hours worked ranged from about 1,300 to 1,800, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO). Hours were about the same in the USA as in Japan. Combined weekly work hours for dual-earning couples with children rose 10 hours per week, from 81 hours in 1977 to 91 hours in 2002, according to a new study by the New York-based Families and Work Institute.
   Employees feel the strain. Mounting research shows there's a tangible downside to overwork, from mental-health problems to physical ailments and job injuries caused by fatigue and stress. It's also a bottom-line issue: A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that mandatory overtime costs industry as much as $300 billion a year in stress- and fatigue-related problems.
   Cody Mooneyhan...can relate. He works as much as 14 hours a day, getting up at 4:30 a.m. and arriving home at 9:30 p.m. to work two jobs: senior writer for Vanguard Communications and assistant at the American Journal of Pathology. His wife, Renée...works several nights a week as a social worker. His employers don't require long hours, but Mooneyhan feels he must work two jobs to support his three children: Sarah, 1, Zoe, 3, and Zack, 7. He says he works to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, not to have luxuries. He lives in a three-bedroom town house, has a 7-year-old computer and owns a Toyota Tercel and a minivan. Says Mooneyhan, of Germantown, Md.: "Being tired makes everything that much more stressful, but it's like having a baby. You get used to it. It's kind of sad. The kids sometimes ask, 'What's the deal with Dad? Does he still live here?' I've thought, 'This is going to kill me.' "
   Output gains due to longer hours
   Some doubt the effort to curb hours will cause the USA to adopt the more leisurely approach of Europe, where women in Sweden get 96 weeks of maternity leave and workers in France enjoy about five weeks of vacation a year.
   "Good luck," says Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley in New York. He believes much of the accelerated productivity in the USA since the mid-1990s is due to longer work hours.
   An ILO report in September found that U.S. productivity grew in 2002, surpassing Europe and Japan in annual output per worker for the first substantial period since World War II. The report found that the difference was due to the longer hours worked by Americans.
   But much of that growth isn't picked up in government data measuring work hours, Roach says. "This is work that happens outside the workplace," he says. "People work in planes, cars and at home." Government data on hours worked don't capture time put in off the job, such as during weekends, or after-hours work that many salaried employees do on laptops, cell phones and e-mail. They also don't capture the overall rise in hours put in by families.
   But the data do show a recent uptick in the average workweek for production and non-supervisory workers as the economic recovery picks up steam. Hours are rising in part because of new technology, which makes it easier to work outside the office, and a sluggish economy, which has led companies to lay off workers, leaving fewer workers shouldering the same (or more) work.
   Even vacations are going by the wayside: Employees are handing companies more than $21 billion in unused vacation days each year, according to a study by Expedia.com. Andy Lefkowitz...took at least a month of vacation when he worked as a securities lawyer. Now, he's president of Ganeden Biotech in Cleveland. As the boss, he says, he's lucky if he takes two weeks off a year. "The hours are also more intense," says Lefkowitz, a father of three who works about 10 hours a day and some evenings after the children go to sleep. "Information is coming at you from so many different directions. ... I don't take vacations. Maybe just a day here or there."
   Some efforts to curtail hours
   A backlash to the overwork trend is building in Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle and other cities where dozens of events were held in the fall to mark the first Take Back Your Time Day. Organizers of the grass-roots movement want to establish the Oct. 24 event as an annual affair to draw attention to the issue of overwork. Several jurisdictions, including Seattle, officially proclaimed Oct. 24 as Take Back Your Time Day.
   Efforts to ease the leisure-time shortage are also catching the attention of politicians. The U.S. Senate this year passed a resolution designating October as National Work and Family Month — a move that organizers of the Take Back Your Time movement say has put the work and home conflict onto the national stage. It has also become an issue that presidential contenders might have to tackle: This month, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who is seeking the Democratic nomination, proposed a paid family leave program for employees.
   Some proponents trying to curb overwork believe change is already afoot:
   • Starting this year, all 7,800 medical residency programs must comply with new limits on work hours. Guidelines issued by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education include limiting resident hours to a maximum of 80 hours a week. Programs that don't comply can lose their accreditation.
   • A report in November from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies found that "long work hours pose one of the most serious threats to patient safety." The report calls on regulators to bar nurses from working more than 12 hours a day and 60 hours a week. There are more than 4 million registered nurses and nursing assistants in the country.
   • New federal rules for truck drivers — the first major change since 1939 — will require truckers to increase their rest time to 10 hours from eight in a 24-hour period. In most cases, the total time a driver can be on duty will drop to 14 hours from 15.
   Some companies are responding by allowing workers to customize schedules. Jennifer Maler...is a tax compliance specialist at Ernst & Young. Working full time, she wanted more time for other passions, such as modeling and dancing. "I love what I do, but I felt like I was living at the office," Maler says. So she asked — and got permission — to adopt a flexible work schedule. In 1999, she took a pay cut and began working a 30-hour week spread over three days. "It's the best thing I ever did," says Maler, who works in New York. "It's given me the ability to stay with my career, and it's made me a more complete person."
   Although the growing push to reclaim time sounds appealing to some employees, others say long hours and after-hours work have become so ingrained that change might be hard. As chairman and CEO of HealthExpo, which organizes health fairs around the USA, Cynthia Ekberg Tsai...of New York, often arrives at work before her team. After working through lunch, she may leave at 8 p.m. for dinner and return to the office until 1 a.m. "I do not go to lunch, because it gives me the chance to keep on working. Do I have the sense that people are working harder? Yes," says Ekberg Tsai. "Most people overcommit. We haven't learned the magical word...'no.' "

1. 'Four million suffering long hours after work-limit opt-out', by Alan Jones, PA News via The Scotsman [UK].
   UK - The UK’s opt-out from a directive aimed at limiting working hours to 48 a week is being widely abused to the detriment of millions of workers, according to a draft report by the European Parliament.
   The TUC [Trades Union Congress] said the findings confirmed its warning that the UK’s long hours culture was damaging the economy as well as workers’ health.
   The EU Parliament will consider the report in the New Year but was coming under increasing pressure from unions to tackle long working hours in Britain.
   According to the draft report, around four million people in the UK worked longer than 48 hours a week, almost a million more than before the introduction of the Working Time Directive, which aimed to limit hours. More than 1.55 million people worked over 55 hours and 1% of all UK employees had a working week longer than 70 hours.
   It was common for workers to sign an opt out from the directive at the same time as they signed an individual employment contract, said the draft report.
   [Britain should be kicked out of the EU for this.]
   “There is therefore evidence of widespread abuse of this option, to the detriment of the health and safety of millions of workers, who have little or no freedom to decide whether to accept or refuse it in a situation where the administrative authorities have effectively ruled out any real possibility of control and verification.
   “It seems difficult to deny that this option is being used as a means of side-stepping any limit, rather than a technique to operate flexibly or with strict regard for the free will of the workers concerned, as was intended,” said the report.
   TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber, said: “The government and employer groups cannot continue to ignore the evidence of abuse of employees’ working time rights in the UK. “The opt-out is being used to prolong and defend the long hours culture that is damaging our economy, families and health.”

2. Bosch seeks increase to working hours, by Peter Marsh & Hugh Williamson, Financial Times [UK] Dec 16 2003 21:07.
   GERMANY - Bosch, the German industrial group, said it may move more jobs out of Germany to lower-wage countries unless it succeeds in efforts to increase the working hours of some German employees, without paying them more.
   The statement was immediately condemned as "unnecessary provocation" by IG Metall, Germany's largest engineering union. It raises the temperature in attempts by German employers to increase working time in a bid to improve the country's competitiveness.
   Franz Fehrenbach, chairman of Bosch, said that the company was talking to representatives of its 103,000-strong German workforce about increasing the working week from 35 to 40 hours, while pegging wages. "If we don't succeed, then it is likely that we will accelerate the move to setting up new plants out of Germany especially in the low-wage countries," Mr Fehrenbach told the FT.
   [Fine. Then he'll give Germans no option but to bar him from exploiting their consumer base which he is so ready to diminish by outsourcing. If he wants Bosch to become more competitive, let him convert Bosch to more competitive, much lower executive salaries and perks.]
   Bosch has 133,000 employees outside Germany, including more than 40,000 in low-wage countries such as China, India and the Czech Republic.
   Frank Stroh, spokesman for IG Metall's regional office in Stuttgart, said Bosch's "highly organised" employees were likely to reject an increase to 40 hours a week. "Such an increase could mean every seventh employee losing their job. That is completely unacceptable," Mr Stroh said.
   [Suppose there's 1400 hrs/wk of market-demanded work and you're on a 35-hour workweek. That means it employs 1400/35= 40 employees. If you go back up to 40 hrs/wk, it will only take 1400/40= 35 employees. The 5 surplus employees are 5/40= one in every EIGHT of the original employees who lose their job.]
   However, several companies have recently negotiated longer working hours of 40-41 hours, including Continental, the tyre maker.
   Mr Fehrenbach said that if the company could make progress with these talks - which it is conducting on a plant-by-plant basis with representatives of unions including IG Metall - it would cut its costs per hour in the factories concerned by 12%. Mr Fehrenbach said it was vital for the company to become "more cost competitive" if it wanted to increase profits that were vital for investment.
   The Gesamtmetall engineering employers' association covering Germany raised the proposal of employees agreeing to extra working hours - without compensation - at a meeting this week with IG Metall to discuss pay.
   Leaders of Germany's Christian Democratic Union opposition party recently called for longer working hours to boost German competitiveness. Employees in western Germany work an average of 35.7 hours a week, some of the shortest in the world, compared with 37.2 in the UK and 40 in the US. Eastern Germans work an average of 38.3 hours a week.

1. IBM Japan to adopt shorter work-hour system in Jan., Kyodo 12/15/03 08:22 EST via AOLNews.
   TOKYO...- IBM Japan Ltd. will introduce a new system of shorter working hours in January that includes the option of working a three-day week for 50% less pay, a company spokesman said Monday.
   The new system will enable workers to spend more time on child rearing and care of family members, he said.
   IBM Japan currently requires full-time employees to work a 38-hour, five-day week.
   Under the new system, employees can apply to work a
   1. three- or
   2. four-day week,
   3. or a five-day week of between 40%
   4. to 20% less hours.
      
   The first and third options will involve a 50% cut in pay, while the second and fourth options will be accompanied by a 30% pay reduction.
   Any of IBM Japan's 20,000-odd workers, including managerial personnel, can apply to change their working hours under the new system.
   Successful applicants will be required to reapply each year for an extension.
   In the case of employees who apply to work fewer hours in order to raise their children, they may take advantage of the system from the birth of a child until his or her entry into junior high school.
   By relieving employees of household concerns, the new system is designed to help them produce better results, the spokesman said.

2. Companies offer spa days, gifts to reward, retain employees - Additional time off is another popular perk this holiday season, by Kemba Dunham, WSJ, B8.
   ...Last year, many employers shut down offices from Christmas Eve through New Year's Day. But in many cases, companies sought to cut expenses, so days that weren't official holidays were unpaid, and employees were forced to use their vacation time.
   At many companies, that isn't the case this year..\..
   • Winnie Beattie, president of Siren Public Relations Inc., a New York firm that specializes in fashion and cosmetics...is closing her offices from Dec.24 through Jan.5 but paying her staff during this time and not subtracting it from regular vacation.
   • Similarly, auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP is closing its U.S. offices at 3 pm on Dec.24 and won't reopen until Jan.5. Although Dec.25 and 26 and Jan.1 and 2 are official holidays at the company, the other days also will be paid and won't be counted as regular vacation time for the company's 22,000 U.S. employees.

3. Doubt on French holidays, Reuters via NYT, A16.
   PARIS...- The French prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, expressed his surprise on Monday at a proposal put forward by a government commission to make an Islamic feast and a Jewish holy day official holidays.
   Mr. Raffarin showed little enthusiasm for the idea ahead of a meeting with Pres. Jacques Chirac scheduled for Tuesday to discuss the conclusions of the commission, which aimed to bolster the official separation of church and state in France.
   "I prefer fraternity to fundamentalism," Mr. Raffarin said in an interview to be published in the Tuesday edition of the daily Le Parisien.
   The commission has also suggested banning Muslim veils, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses in public schools.

4. Germany agrees on plan to overhaul economy - Moves on taxes, labor laws address core problems; Businesses call it a start, AP via WSJ, A15.
   ...Companies also expressed disappointment at the failure to loosen the power of trade unions. Opposition parties had hoped to give companies more independence in determining working conditions, such as wages and working time, with their own workforces. Nearly every such decision is determined regionally and sectorwide by unions - one of the reasons the German labor market is considered so inflexible....
   [Damn, they just don't yet have a wide open field to gut their workforce-consumer base like the US, UK & the Third World.]

5. Overtime calculations dig hole for mining company, HRNExt.com.
   Dynatec Corporation USA, a Utah-based mining company, has paid $178,495 in back wages to 221 employees following an investigation by the U.S. Dept. of Labor.
   The Dept's Wage & Hour Division says it found that the company miscalculated the overtime wages earned by workers who routinely worked as many as 70 hours per week.
   The Fair Labor Standards Act requires that employees be paid one-and-one-half times their regular rate of pay for hours worked over 40 per week. In addition, bonus payments must generally be included in the calculation of a worker's hourly rate when figuring the overtime premium. Bonuses that are required by an expressed or implied contract or promise must be included in the regular rate of pay. Examples of these so-called "nondiscretionary" payments include bonuses that are in any way connected to effort and output, such as attendance bonuses, production bonuses, and incentive pay.
   The department says Dynatec did pay workers one and one-half times their regular hourly pay for excess work hours, but failed to add the substantial production bonuses which workers routinely earned to the base pay before making the calculations. The resulting shortfall was $178,495.
   The back wages will compensate 221 miners and mechanics for work performed during the two-year period ending November 22, 2002.

6. European journalists back German strikes over threat to media quality and work standards, Categorynet (Communiques de presse) [France].
   The International Federation of Journalists [IFJ] and its regional group, the European Federation of Journalists [EFJ], today backed their German affiliates the Deutscher Journalisten Verband (DJV) and the Deutscher Journalisten Union in VER.DI [union of unions], as talks began on the fourth round of collective bargaining for a new agreement in the newspaper sector in Berlin.
   The German Assoc. of Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) has issued a list of demands to the German journalists' unions, a move that is regarded by journalists as a general attack on the quality of journalism and the profession as a whole. Employers are trying to increase working hours from 36.5 to 40 hours per week, to reduce holidays by 5 days and to lower holiday pay.
   "The unions have offered to be flexible and accept exceptions to the national agreements in companies in hard times and for a defined period," said Aidan White, IFJ and EFJ General Secretary. "But they are rightly resisting any erosion of social standards achieved in recent years. They know that if they give way further it will damage a healthy independent press."
   On Thursday and Friday last week almost 2,000 journalists joined strikes called by the two German unions. The stoppages were in support of quality newspapers and a stronger commitment to journalism in future. Further strikes were in progress today.
   "These recent protests by the journalistic community in Germany is the strongest strike movement in the newspaper sector during the last ten years," said White. "It demonstrates a determination to defend decent standards at work and quality in media."
   The IFJ and the EFJ member organisations throughout Europe and around the world are being asked to back the German unions and their demands for fair social working conditions in a new collective agreement. "Basic working conditions are the key to quality media. That is a lesson well understood in Germany and all around the world," said White. The EFJ's European membership, with over 200,000 journalists, will back the German unions says White. "This is a crucial struggle in which all European unions have a stake."

7. [more crying 'shortage' amidst surplus to ease outsourcing and visas for cheap labor -]
   We need to deal with shortage now, by Richard Hogg, Australian Computer Society via Australian IT.
   AUSTRALIA - It seems absurd to talk about a skills shortage at a time of high unemployment among ICT[?] professionals and falling wages for those who have work.
   However, recent [Chicken Little] reports from the US are warning of a global skills crisis far exceeding the problems experienced during the Y2K challenge and the dotcom explosion.
   Although some observers say demand for ICT skills in Western nations will diminish as more projects go offshore, Business 2.0 magazine claims demand will far outstrip supply.
   Technology today underpins every other industry, enhancing service delivery and improving productivity while enabling organisations to reduce costs. Anecdotal evidence suggests those applying for contract positions today are being offered as little as half the remuneration the role might have attracted two years ago. With competition rife for every position, it's a buyer's market.
   Companies prefer to offload workers with outdated skills and hire new staff to fill their skills gap, with little or no thought given to retaining those workers' corporate knowledge.
   At a recent meeting organised by the Victorian Government to discuss ways of growing the professional and technical services sector and to encourage local firms to increase their innovation, skills and competitiveness, concern was raised about the need to better recognise the skills and experience of workers.
   Rather than encouraging early retirement, a reduced working week and roles that allowed best use of these workers' experience was suggested.
   [Good idea. The blank check involved in retirement is unsustainable anyway, and with a workweek length that automatically adjusts to minimize unemployment, you've always got plenty of jobs for people regardless of youth or age (so, no agism!). Also, the greater incidence of overtime can be designed to automatically target and trigger, even finance and pace, training and hiring. And note that economywide bursts of on-the-job training remove anxieties about skill shortages as never before.]
   Business 2.0 identified several US companies that subscribe to the impending skills shortage theory and are moving to shore up their skilled resources.
   Given the lack of loyalty many organisations have shown towards their ICT professionals in recent times, any company demonstrating greater commitment to its skilled staff would prove extremely attractive, particularly for the highly experienced professionals who have been discarded in large numbers.
   Rather than shipping projects to lower-cost software factories in Asia or Europe, businesses should consider investing in local resources to ensure we maintain a credible level of skills and knowledge.
   Coca-Cola Amatil is to be commended for rejecting outsourcing and increasing its spending on ICT projects by 500% in 2004. Although the ACS recognises some organisations have achieved cost benefits through outsourcing, there are many examples where cultural differences, poor project management, testing and integration issues have resulted in less than satisfactory systems, with little money saved overall.
   If we lose our innovative capability, either through the departure of baby-boomer skills, a smaller number of graduating students in the near future or a growing reliance on offshore resources, it will be very difficult to get it back.
   The drop in first-year enrolments in ICT courses this year must be taken as a warning. A similar fall in numbers already predicted for next year means we can expect a smaller pool of ICT graduates coming through the pipeline in 2006-07, when any skills shortage will really start to be felt. Let's not wait until then!
   This is my last column as ACS President. Edward Mandla takes over from January 1. I'd like to wish all our readers a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

8. The fear factor - Why I'm sitting out this recovery—for now, by Kevin Kelly, Fortune.
   Call me [a 'non-spender',] Alan Greenspan's worst nightmare. Lower interest rates another 0.25%? Don't bother. I'm not spending.
   Who can really blame me? Fear pretty much drives me these days.
   That might seem odd, since our plastic-bag-manufacturing business is thriving. Sales are up 30% this year, thanks to both new accounts and more business from existing customers.
   But I'm convinced my luck will run out at any moment, and I have my reasons. My bogeymen include -
   • competition from cheap imports,
   • industry overcapacity,
   • price slashing by rivals,
   • and a nagging dread that the economy hasn't really turned the corner—that my customers could go belly up and leave me bereft of orders.
   So you won't find me buying new equipment to handle the increased demand. Instead I'm boosting overtime [OT] and running more machines seven days a week.
   [Note that neither of this business owner's alternatives - more machines or more OT - increase economywide spending by increasing the number of people employed economywide. In fact, both this business owner's alternatives strengthen his bogeymen. By decreasing the number of people employed with OT and/or machines, he is decreasing Greenspan-linked spending and increasing industry overcapacity, price slashing by rivals, and the kind of desperation that drives people to cheap imports. This business owner is locked into the death spiral, the race to the bottom, and only a considerable change of economic policy can stop this economic death spiral that's being replayed thousands of times throughout the economy today despite our obsolete economists' and scared analysts' attempts to happytalk us into a recovery. Simplistic 'free trade' has got to go. Business advantage from substituting overtime for hiring has got to go. Unaccountable individual spending power from overtime earnings has got to go. And the 1940-level long-hours workweek frozen despite 63 years of worksaving technology has got to go. Because if these don't go, we're Third World.]
   And my resolve not to spend won't end soon. I just rejected a loan proposal from my bank offering a $1.2 million equipment line at 5.25%, a rate I thought I'd never see in my lifetime. In fact, I recently canceled an order for a used printing press because I didn't want more debt. Just too scared.
   When I look around my industry, I see huge overcapacity, thanks to capital spending during the '90s boom.
   [Overcapacity was one of the big characteristics of the Great Depression.]
   Troubled ventures litter the landscape. One rival—a 76-year-old family business—is in bankruptcy. Others are slashing prices just to generate cash, even though raw-material prices have increased 20% this year. Meanwhile, Chinese companies take over sector after sector of the bag industry. Hard experience has contributed to my paranoia. During the late 1990s our company aided the economic recovery by spending more than $5 million on new equipment. We leveraged the family firm [with debt] - just in time for the recession.
   Then for the first time in 38 years, we lost money in 2001, and it seared me. I don't want to relive the days of having our bank pull our credit line or lying awake worrying about meeting payroll.
   So I've found creative—or at least cheap [and at most destructive]—ways to keep up with our sales increase. The simplest has been to add time to our workweek. Our hourly employees now log around 1,000 hours a week of overtime as a group, up 30% from a year prior.
   [# employees? Avg OT per employee?]
   We're running four of our five printing presses around the clock. Our bag-making department, which almost never chalks up OT, routinely runs on Saturdays. We haven't closed for a holiday yet this year. I've also outsourced jobs to friendly rivals.
   [That's his only strategy that genuinely strengthens American jobs - unless his rivals are heavy into OT.]
   Since so many are hungry for work, finding willing partners has never been easier—or cheaper.
   We're also starting to look outside the U.S. for partners.
   [Here's where he really gets suicidal on behalf of the American economy.]
   Like so many manufacturers [= the usual rationalization], we're asking ourselves why we should make here what we can buy cheaper elsewhere.
   [Obvious answer that this moron is trying desperately to partition OUT of his thinking just here = because if everybody does that, his business is history. This is the exact behavior he's been complaining about, and if he models the behavior he doesn't want, it will spread, regardless of his wants. So here's another American businessman committing business suicide.]
   We've even had preliminary talks with Chinese manufacturers.
   [Shooting himself in the foot and starting up the leg.]
   In the meantime we've imported some finished product from a company in Mexico, steadily increasing our volume with each order.
   [No wonder he's scared and pessimistic - he's his own worst enemy. His worst nightmare is ... himself.]
   Of course, those solutions have diminishing returns. Paying overtime may be cheaper than buying new equipment in the short run, but I know that eventually it won't be. There are all sorts of headaches associated with outsourcing—late deliveries and reduced quality control being two. And our lead times are usually so short, typically three to four weeks, that going abroad works for only a portion of our business.
   Which means that someday Greenspan, or his [pro-spending] successor, will get me. Yes, we'll have to buy that new $2 million printing press and then kick in a few $150,000 bag machines to go with it. I'll do my bit to spur on the long-suppressed recovery. When, you ask? Well, let's just say it'll be someday. I have too many ghosts rumbling around in my head to imagine signing loan documents anytime soon.
   [And too strong a death wish. The only real recovery-building strategy that this or any other business owner could switch to would be to quit downsizing his staff and at least maintain existing staff by timesizing [trimming hours] in response to technology, not upsizing overtime or downsizing his staff and the markets they and their dependents represent. Today's CEOs and business owners have gotten The Seventy-Year Stupidity = they've forgotten the connection between their employees and their markets. In fact, they're trying not to think about the equation between their staff and their customers' customers. With businessmen this suicidally stupid, America is not going to be leading any real recovery. It's going to happen in some little economies that "get" the timesizing imperative, like Iceland or Israel or Denmark - we'd like to say Canada but the noises the new Prime Minister is making are not encouraging. Maybe the isolated worksharing experiments going on in Japanese cities and prefectures will gel and standardize and work their way up to the economywide level. That would save the world fastest. Or maybe rightists around Robien and leftists around Aubry will get together to pound some sense into race-to-the-bottomers in France - unfreeze the new 35-hour workweek and adjust it further downward to really reduce French unemployment. God knows what the Germans will do. Despite their self-proclaimed efficiency, they never got their 35-hour workweek to the national level like France, and they recently reversed their drive to integrate their own east German economy by perpetuating longer union hours there (38/wk) than in the west (35). Lord God, the Germans are stupid these days - the Japanese came over to study worksharing in Germany two years ago and the Germans themselves still don't get the worksharing imperative. Granted Timesizing is a big step. It involves a very different mindset, on two levels. It involves -
   • not only an innovation that flies in the face of the pre-technological but long-established and deeply grounded Puritan work ethic, with all its accumulated supportive baggage like "I'm busier than you, ergo I'm more important than you," and "I'm working sooo hard, I KNOW I can count on your sympathy with my socially sanctioned victimhood,"
   • but also an innovation that involves messing around with the one background feature that people do not want to touch - their constant reliable time context. The hardest thing for people to change is schedule.
   So we're operating on our own retinas on two levels here - it's our own socio-economy, which we are inside of during the operation that we are trying to do, and it's the time dimension, that we'd really rather not think about too deeply (tho' defining it would help for starters).]

1. 12/12   Colusa may furlough workers, by Rob Young, Appeal-Democrat [California].
   COLUSA COUNTY, Calif. - The Colusa County Board of Supervisors will decide Tuesday whether to furlough many county employees over the holidays to help close a $500,000 budget gap. Employees in departments funded by the county's general fund would not be paid for seven work days between Dec. 22 and Jan. 2, saving the county $32,000 per day, Supervisor Mark Marshall said. The plan was proposed Monday when Marshall met with department heads.
   Employees of the Sheriff's Department and other departments that provide essential services, including road maintenance, health and welfare, would not be furloughed, he said. The departments that would be affected are those which the public tends to use less during the holidays, he said.
   The furlough would cover only part of the budget shortfall, created when the state Legislature failed to come through with $500,000 law enforcement grants for rural counties, Marshall said. "That still doesn't get us to $500,000," he said about the furloughs.
   Other measures being considered include a four-day work week for employees, or cutting hours worked per day, he said.
   Marshall called the furlough "not desirable" but the least painful option for county employees. New revenue sources, including a possible half-percent increase in the 7.25% sales tax or an increase in the county's development impact fees, also will be considered, Marshall said. But a sales tax increase would need voter approval and, like the development impact fee increase, probably could not be approved in time to help the county's current budget, he said.
   The Sheriff's Department would have received the $500,000 grant but cannot sustain further cuts, meaning other county departments need to be cut, Marshall said.
   The Sheriff's Department, which already has had $1 million cut from its budget, "is starting to run on a skeleton staff," he said.
   County Planning & Building Director Stephen Hackney, who attended Monday's meeting, said the county had figured the $500,000 grant into its current budget.
   As part of an effort in October to cut $5 million from the budget, supervisors cut their own salaries 20 percent and eliminated 38 county jobs, including that of the county administrative officer, David Shoemaker.

2. 12/12   A work ethic is good, but an insane overwork ethic actually lowers productivity - Bring back the eight hour day, by Simran Bhargava, Financial Express [India].
   USA - On the 24th of October, a small but momentous event took place in the US. Thousands of Americans left their offices to participate in a "*Take Back Your Time" day. This was designed to trigger a national conversation on work-life balance in much the same way as the first Earth Day was designed to bring awareness to environmental issues.
   The date of the protest was significant. It fell nine weeks before the end of the year. Nine weeks is how much time, on average, that Americans work more than the western Europeans, making them the most over-worked nation in the world. They have now surpassed even the notoriously workaholic Japanese by 2.5 weeks.
   Joe Robinson, who runs a “Work to Live” campaign and is a prime advocate for a saner lifestyle, says: “Millions of Americans have disappeared off the face of regular life, an abduction worthy of an X-file.” Americans are working too long, too hard and too late, while the real stuff — life — passes them by. Many don’t want to continue this way anymore. Many are realising that they need time for family, education, spirituality and vacations as much as they need more money.
   The goal of the event: Bring back saner work hours. Bring back the eight hour day.
   Ultimately, living a quality life is about choices. The Europeans, for instance, have chosen differently. They have chosen to live simpler, more balanced lives and work fewer hours. Many nations have even cut back to between 32 and 37 working hours a week and have paid vacations — of up to five weeks — built into the system. By contrast, the Americans get ten days a year and most don’t manage to take even that. Work overwhelms everything. Many American single women in their forties say they were so busy working they “literally forgot to get married”.
   Which way are we Indians going? Even though I wasn’t able to get official data, you and I know the answer, of course. Alongwith fast food and TV shows, our choices have been more American than European. Like the Americans, most of us (at least in private industry) work 50 to 60 hours a week. We take abbreviated vacations — two or three days, never getting the full recharge only a longer vacation can give. When we sit with our kids, our cellphones keep going off. When we are with friends, we aren’t really listening, we are thinking of what else we need to do. Our heads are overloaded, like a gun waiting to go off. I know a working couple who won an all-expenses paid trip to Europe for 10 days but never managed to take it. They couldn’t find the time.
   Somehow, we believe that extra time at work = higher productivity. That the more pain we suffer on the job the better the quality of our performance. But we have the math wrong. Take a country like Holland, for instance. It has a productivity rate higher than the US but its workweek is only 37 hours and its paid leave the longest in Europe: 31 days.
   Of course, work is supremely important, it is one of the things that brings meaning to life. The problem isn’t the work ethic, it’s the overwork ethic. We’ve been brainwashed into believing that if we take any time off, we’ll fall off the map professionally. We wouldn’t dare overload an expensive information system in our office till it crashes but we don’t think twice about doing the same to our workforce.
   How did this happen? Life used to be sane once. People went to work at nine and left at five. I remember dozens of languorous summer holidays where my father and uncles — all working men — managed to take entire months off. They were mentally available in conversations. They spent time helping us with our homework. Today, my friend Rahul, called at 8 pm. He was still at work. He says this is quite normal. But his voice sounds tired, his tone demotivated. His days are an endless treadmill of work, collapse, then work again. No time for friends, a hobby, even a concert. It’s a caricature of what a good life should be.
   People everywhere are mourning this loss. Hear folk singer Charlie King in this evocative song: “They got cellular phones for your car, they got notebook PCs for your lap, when you go to sleep you stay close to your beeper. Now why do we stand for this crap? Bring back the eight hour day. When did we give it away? There’s so much to do when the workday is through. Bring back the eight hour day.”
   When did we give it away? Possibly when recession-hit firms discovered that it was more profitable to pay more money to a few people to do twice the amount of work. Over time, this became the norm.
   Our search for personal time reminds me of the punishment given to Greek mythological character Tantalus, who is suspended in a river — with fruit hanging just above his head. But each time he reaches for a bite of fruit or a sip of water, it recedes — leaving him always hungry and always thirsty. So it is with time: you see it approaching and just when you reach your hand out toward it, they give you more work to do.
   The title of the American protest “Take Back Your Time” is interesting — because it implies someone stole it. When I look back at a previous job, being asked to work late night after night did feel exactly like theft. But what bosses don’t realise is this: when they continue to steal employees’ time, employees steal their time as well. Oh, they may come into office but they drag their heels, they spend the day surfing. It would be smarter management practice to let staff take the weekend off, catch up with their personal lives and return motivated on Monday.
   One way to rebalance, according to Robinson is to have a counter-commandment to the overwork ethic: a leisure ethic. That is, an identity outside the job that comes from doing things you are passionate about. He suggests using another standard of living: the Photo Album Index. Measure your life based on photos taken on your vacations or during off-hours. And while you’re doing that, dump your excess baggage of guilt. He says: “Hard as it is for some managers to believe, beaten-down burnout cases just can’t do the job of a rested energised employee.”
   Re-set the norm to 40 hours a week because quality time off creates quality time on.

3. 12/13   Some departments' adjustment to new rules easier, by Gigi Wood, Iowa City Press-Citizen.
   IOWA CITY, Iowa [Ben Hunnicutt's town] - From surgery to pediatrics, there are 110 medical specialties practiced throughout the country. Those specialties have dealt with new resident work hour requirements differently. Those rules require medical residents to work no more than 80 hours a week, far fewer hours than many were accustomed to working. Many departments at the University of Iowa have come away with few major changes to their departments.
   The radiology department has always had a night float system - where a team works at night, relieving day workers from excessive hours. "Radiology has always felt that poorly rested physicians cannot interpret radiographs accurately, so we have had the new 'culture' for a very long time already," said Laurie Fajardo, head of the department.
   Medical residents in the radiology department have been taking the new requirements in stride, she said. "They seem to have made the adjustment very well," Fajardo said. "Our residents' work hours were not above the new limits, so we don't have to make a lot of changes."
   Each hour that residents are in the hospital counts as a work hour toward their 80-hour limit, whether they are eating in the cafeteria or operating on patients. Hours worked at home are not counted toward that limit.
   [Error! Error!]
   Dr. Richard Williams, head of the urology department, said residents are on call at home more often. The department also reduced the number of times a week the residents are on call in the hospital to meet the new requirements.
   Input from residents about the new rules has led to the creation of a community advocacy and afternoon float rotation in the pediatric department, said Dr. Thomas George, director of the pediatric residency program. "In the mornings, this new advocacy rotation has our residents becoming actively involved in the community - going to daycares and schools to educate children on a broad variety of topics and other ventures," he said. "We would like to avoid night floats if at all possible, as there are so many tremendous learning opportunities during the day in our educational curriculum."
   Dr. Jennifer Niebyl, chair of obstetrics/gynecology, said her department has been using the night float system for years. She added a second night float when the new requirements went into effect July 1. There are 16 residents in the program.
   Dr. David Brown, head of the anesthesiology department at UI, which is training about 50 residents, said his department has been in compliance with the new rules for years. "These new requirements haven't been a real challenge for us. It's the nature of anesthesiology," he said. "We always have people in house, 24 hours a day, year round. We always need operating rooms ready to run."
   Nor have they affected the radiation oncology department, said John Buatti, who chairs the department. "It's not an issue, and we're 100% compliant," he said.

4. 12/14   At the crossroads: Tech-heavy future can be viewed in divergent ways, by Brice Wallace & Alex Nabaum, Deseret Morning News.
   DESERET, Utah - Technology can be interpreted in different ways -
   • enabler
   • efficiency-builder
   • moneymaker
   • Jeremy Rifkin sees it as a crossroads.
   Rifkin, an author of many books about technology and the economy and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, believes the early 21st century information age could lead to either huge unemployment lines or "a great renaissance." Speaking recently as part of the Weldon J. Taylor Executive Lecture Series at Westminster College [in Deseret, Utah?], Rifkin described sweeping changes technology will bring to employment worldwide and the possible resulting societal ramifications.
   ["Will bring" or "already has brought"?]
   "We're in the midst of a fundamental transformation in the nature of work. This is a long-term historic shift that is taking place," he said. "If you're a file clerk, secretary, middle manager, factory worker, telephone operator, librarian, chances are your job has already disappeared. If not, it's going."
   The world already has more than 1 billion people either unemployed or underemployed, and technology likely will cause that figure to rise because it allows for greater productivity with fewer workers, he said.
   Much as technology moved people from the farms to manufacturing more than a century ago, factory jobs now represent only 15% of U.S. employment, down from about one-third 40 years ago, he said. "We're seeing a long-term structural change in the nature of work. These jobs aren't coming back," he said. "What I'm going to tell you is that we're beginning to see the end to factory labor, just like we saw in agriculture. By 2040, we will see the end of factory labor in the United States and around the world."
   Even foreign countries, where supposedly cheap labor can be found, are having factories go high-tech. "You cannot compete in global markets with old-fashioned, labor-intensive factories, no matter where you are," he said.
   A study of 22 countries indicates that the manufacturing sector's productivity has been soaring, but those countries gained not a single manufacturing job during the past seven years, he said. "The 20th century was about mass labor — human beings working side by side with machines. The 21st century is about boutique labor forces — small, elite. You're never going to see tens of thousands of people walking out of the factory gate at biotech companies, nanotech companies, computer and software companies," Rifkin said. "The cheapest worker in the world is not as cheap as the intelligent technology that's going to replace them in the 21st century." In 30 years, a world of 6 billion people may have only 1 million manufacturing jobs. "And we're not wrestling with the implications of what this means," he said.
   At issue is how to prepare people for the changes and to share the fruits of improved productivity, he said. Depending on how society handles those, the tech-induced employment changes could be bad news or "the greatest single potential success story in the history of our species. It could go either way now."
   A move from manufacturing could free up people from simple-repetitive tasks making things for others — a duty comprising 75% of the world's jobs. "They are boring. They are not fun," Rifkin said.
   But the transformation will include rewiring people's brains to think of themselves as something other than machines. Rifkin asserted that politicos, human resources executives and company heads refer to people as being marketable and productive, with machine terms of "stress," "breakdown," "burnout," "overload" and "disconnect" being associated with people. "We have become as our machines," he said. "It's because we can't imagine what a human being would do if we weren't preparing them to be marketable and productive in the workplace. We have so narrowly defined the human spirit that we can't get out of that box, that we can't be anything more than a machine. And still every parent is saying to their kid, 'We want you to get the right courses so you can be marketable and skilled.' Hi ho, hi ho. It's off to work we go.
   "What we have is a lack of imagination, because what I'm talking about is a qualitative leap in human consciousness. If we make the leap, we could have a great renaissance in front of us. If we don't make the leap and we're not courageous enough to move beyond work as a way to define our life, we're going to be in deep trouble. We're already in deep trouble."
   "Sharing the fruits" is not a strength of a capitalist structure, Rifkin said. The divide between the "haves" and "have-nots" has never been bigger, he said, noting that the 356 wealthiest people in the world have a combined wealth equal to the annual income of 40% of the world's population and that "two-thirds of the human population has never made a single telephone call in this global village we call a high-tech, neural grid."
   One option in keeping more people working is to shift to shorter work days, he said. European countries with shorter days have found that productivity remains the same, if not better. But America has yet to consider that option. "We've got CEOs in this country who say, 'I want you to be first in and last out.' . . . The mentality of American business leaders is 'we want them in there long hours,' " he said.
   [And they want them on overtime-exempt salary so they have a blank check on their lives - effective slavery after 40 hours a week.]
   A shorter work week means more people can work, bring home paychecks, pay taxes and spend their earnings, while businesses get a flexible labor force. Some Americans consider the French "lazy and dilettantish and not good workers." But their productivity is higher than Americans'. "Work smart and get out," he described the French philosophy. "Work to live, not live to work, but do your job."
   The ultimate goal of technology is to increase free time. "But the problem is, it's a cruel joke we've played on ourselves. We've developed all this labor-saving, time-saving technology to increase productivity so we'd have more leisure time. The United States is leading in this technology and productivity revolution, but we also have the longest hours of work of any country in the world — higher than Korea and Japan. In Europe, they have 12 weeks off, we say, 'Oh, that's terrible.'"
   Rifkin predicted that the European Union will have 35-hour work weeks by the end of the decade. "We're not even talking about this here, in the nation of stress, where long lines of people are underemployed and some working too long and too hard," he said.
   In addition to the other benefits, a shorter work week could provide people more time to help out cultural organizations, such as nonprofits. That help could be paid from a fund from taxing productivity gains or through penalties for corporate "negative activity." That would represent a forging of human bonds, something computers can never do, and leave a legacy for future generations to "develop our empathetic relationship to life and the metaphysics of our existence," he said. "This is an opportunity, the loss of jobs. It's not the loss of jobs; it's the discovery of being able to free the human spirit."

5. 12/14   Germany's welfare state under threat, by Andrew McCathie, Sydney Morning Herald [Australia].
   BERLIN - Having taken for granted a lavish welfare system, Germans are facing a shakeout in the nation's social state.
   [Never mind the much much more lavish welfare system of the top income brackets. Never mind that even a second-line Microsoft billionaire like Paul Allen owns his own entire Caribbean archipelago, and not just his own personal jet but his own personal fleet of jets, and employs hundreds of personal servants to maintain all this. And yet all he and his ilk can do is direct their media to target the "lavish welfare system" of the middle and lower income brackets. "Let him that is without (lavishness) throw the first stone.]
   The Social Democrat-led Government and the conservative opposition are expected to hammer out a compromise this week on an unpopular economic plan of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. This will allow the opposition-controlled upper house to approve the policy, which has been passed in the lower house.
   The changes come more than 20 years after the US, Britain, New Zealand and Australia embarked on makeovers of their economies. Germany has spent much of the last 14 years preoccupied with the changes unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
   Mr Schroeder's so-called Agenda 2010, which, with a batch of changes already introduced, represents the biggest overhaul of the country's welfare system since World War II, includes tougher rules for the unemployed, trimming pensions and E15.6 billion ($25.8 billion) in tax cuts.
   [And just as when Japan started copying the West "tougher rules" in terms of trimming lifetime employment and adopting downsizing, they suddenly found themselves with no domestic consumer base and a permanent depression, so Germany will now follow the pattern.]
   While it is hoped the tax cuts will help end three years of economic stagnation, many economists believe that they will only offset other costs introduced by the Government, notably those resulting from the changes to the lumbering health system.
   With unemployment at 10% and fears that it could rise again during winter, Germany's once strict hire-and-fire laws have been moderated.
   [There it is. They're adopting downsizing, just like Japan, just like US & UK. And you can't base a solid recovery on downsizing. Why is this so hard to grasp? Why isn't it obvious?]
   Decades of steadily rising prosperity have led to most workers enjoying a 35-hour week, in many cases with six weeks' annual leave and looking forward to being able to retire at 60. The official retirement age is 65. The talk these days is of lifting that to 67.
   The average age for students entering the workforce is 28. However, moves by several state governments to cut university budgets and to introduce mandatory tuition fees for long-term students have sparked the biggest student demonstrations in years.
   The Government's zeal for change has deepened the despair and frustration in the beleaguered former communist east, where a group of unemployed workers has recorded a pop song aimed at political leaders. Its chorus line is: "You can piss off."

1. Supermarket chain to trim payroll by 4%, Maryland Gazette Newspapers.
   DC - ...Giant, the largest supermarket chain in suburban Washington, D.C., has asked store managers to reduce hours and increase some prices, according to employees at the Giant at the Kentlands in Gaithersburg MD....
   [We find out later that this is a timesizing to reduce but not completely eliminate layoffs.]
   "We, like other retailers, have to balance many variables to ensure our customers have a quality shopping experience," said Giant spokesman Barry Scher.
   [A "quality shopping experience" from increased prices??]
   "Every decision we make is guided by Giant's commitment to be a long-term, healthy employer and business partner in the community."...
   [Sure sure. Giant just wants to survive in its current precarious state - with ongoing fat compensation for top executives. Why did this situation develop?]
   Last month, executives at Giant's parent company, Royal Ahold NV of the Netherlands, announced plans to combine some of the administrative work of Giant with one of its other supermarket chains, Stop & Shop Supermarket Co. of Quincy, Mass.... Giant Food officials declined to say how many jobs may be lost in the consolidation, but one supermarket industry expert called the move a fundamental shift in how Royal Ahold manages its U.S. operations. Royal Ahold has $12B in debt [from a suicidally short-sighted takeover binge!], which executives hope to cut by $10B by the end of the year..\..
   [Isn't that a trifle overreaching - again? Back to the timesizing arrangements -]
   ..\..Giant employees said managers have been told to cut payroll hours by 4% going into the busy holiday season..\.. The chain's full-time employees are represented by United Food & Commercial Workers Local 400; their hours have not been cut..\..
   Giant Food LLC's decision to cut the part-time workers' hours and raise some prices may help the short-term financial picture, but hurt the company's image in the long run, a retail consultant said.... Fewer part-time employees will mean longer checkout lines and more work for the remaining workers, employees said....
   Mark Millman, president of retail supermarket and retail employment consulting company Millman Search Group in Owings Mills, said most customers probably won't notice any changes.  "4% is not a significant number," Millman said. "It's not a major cut. It's not like 10% or 15% or laying off people completely." The parent company is "just trying to beef up the quarterly revenues to make it more attractive," Millman said. In the long run the cuts "might demoralize" the employees who remain, he said. "Turnover costs you money and people are starting to realize Giant is not forever," he said. "The parent company is seeking 4% cuts today. Next year it might be 10%. People are starting to wonder about their future."
   [No kidding. And here's an additional toxin -]
   Giant also will face increased competition when supermarket chain Wegmans Food Markets of Rochester, N.Y., opens its first three stores in suburban Baltimore-Washington next year, Millman said....
   Giant Food...employs about 27,000 in the mid-Atlantic region \and\ has 194 stores, mainly in Maryland and Virginia, but with locations stretching to New Jersey and Delaware. [It] had $4B in total revenues in the first three quarters of 2003, a 0.7% increase over the same period last year....

2. Combining children and career - More[?] companies interested in offering family-friendly work models, by Mechthild Harting, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
   GERMANY - Matthias Sommer from Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, still gets angry when he is asked about the “family friendliness“ of German companies. In 2001, his employer rewarded the...engineer's 3-year parenting leave with a pink slip; nobody had thought that he would actually come back, he was told, so his job had fallen prey to 'rationalization' [our quotes].
   Michael Meister looks surprised at the question: Flexible working hours and sabbaticals to maintain a sensible “work-life balance“ are concepts that the personnel chief of detergents producer Hychem has heard of, but nobody has inquired about them in his company so far. Hychem's 80 employees are almost exclusively men, and they are content just to have a job at this time of economic misery [ie: high unemployment, scarce employment, and surplus labor] and in a structurally weak area close to Frankfurt. Still, we wouldn't be averse to trying out something new,“ Meister says.
   [Sounds like he's humoring the interviewer.]
   Stefan Becker of the Hertie Foundation, which helps companies introduce family-friendly work policies, confirms that work models aimed at getting time off for fathers to help raise their kids have not met with a great response. He cites a recent survey showing that no more than 10% of large and mid-sized companies in Germany have any plans to offer flexible working-hour models, although experts say they help foster loyalty and improve company image.
   According to Becker, however, more and more companies are showing an initial interest in the subject and are learning that family-friendliness is not always expensive.
   [Pathetic hype.]
   Given the expected future shortage of skilled workers, he reckons that companies will soon be making it easier for their employees to combine kids and career in order to retain talented workers....
   ["Future shortage of skilled workers"? Wishful thinking - or gullible acceptance of the hype employers spin to open the floodgates to more low-wage immigrants or as cover for more outsourcing.]

3. New Euro rules mean more health staff, Ellesmere Port Pioneer via icCheshireOnline [UK].
   UK - A hospital boss needs £4m and an extra 50 doctors to comply with a new European working directive. Peter Herring says, failing that, waiting times and waiting list targets at the Countess of Chester [Hospital] will suffer. The hospital CEO says changes must be made if they are to comply with a European Working Time Directive.
   Senior NHS [National Health Service] managers around the UK have already said they fear the directive, which will restrict junior doctors to a 58-hour week from next August. This means there will not be enough doctors to provide the current level of medical cover.
   [Maybe if they'd stop punishing them by jamming junior doctors through a gauntlet of stress and sleep deprivation, they'd have enough.]
   The knock-on effect is hospitals being forced to close departments, leaving patients to travel to other hospitals, officials say.
   [The U.S. has the same problem. An NPR story on Dec.19/03 described an acute shortage of specialists across the USA outside large metropolitan areas or even in hospitals in the poorer sections of large metropolitan areas. So let's not start the BS about "oh that's socialized medicine for you."]
   Hospitals may have to reduce or close whole wards, including paediatrics, surgery and accident and emergency.
   At present, junior doctors can spend up to 85 hours a week at work. But as well as being reduced to 58 hours, the European Court of Justice has ruled that rest and sleep breaks must be included. This will cause hospitals to lose another 15 hours of medical cover per doctor each week.
   [Maybe this movement will break the bottleneck in medical-skill training. The mystique needs to be shattered. It needs to be a LOT easier. These skills need to be a LOT more accessible, even if that means simplifying and functionalizing medical terms and terminology. Enough of this 'separate language' crap! And enough of the gauntlet of sleep deprivation. "Oh I'm sleep deprived so I'm important so pay me more." ENOUGH already!]
   In a letter to then-Shadow[??] Health Secretary Chris Grayling, Mr Herring said work [huh?] is continuing to identify likely staffing and resource implications for the Countess [Hospital]. He said at least 30 extra consultant posts and 20 junior doctor positions will need to be created so they can adhere to a 58-hour week.
   [Good! You've got an unemployment problem, right? So CONNECT THE DOTS!]
   Mr Herring added: 'The likely cost of implementing this will be around £4m, based on existing working practices. 'If we can't increase staffing numbers, then in order to comply with the statutory rest requirements, and accepting that individual choice may allow the average working week to exceed 48 hours, it is possible that workload and patient throughput would need to be proportionately reduced. Hence there would be a negative or detrimental effect on waiting times and waiting list targets.'
   [Bust open the bottleneck in medical training. It's not nearly this bad in Germany and France.]
   Countess spokeswoman Lorna Jones said Mr Herring's comments follow an enquiry into the potential impact of a European Working Time Directive. She added: 'It was suggested that workload and waiting list targets would be affected only if we did not change existing working practices sufficiently to cope with the impact of it. 'We hope to do so and do not expect any negative impact on waiting list targets.'
   [Colleague Kate, who has just taken EMT training (emergency medical technician) in the U.S., says there should be half a dozen or more levels of medical professionals from casual EMTs to ambulance staff to Emergency Room initial admittance staff to 2-year-training nurses to "feldshers" to general-practice doctors to specialists - in short, a LOT more gradations on the quick-training side. Cut this crap about 6-plus years of training required. What dysfunctional wage-hyping nonsense!]

1. N. Manchester Foundry sale pending, by Rhea Edmonds, The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette [Indiana].
   Fears that North Manchester Foundry might close by the end of the year are unfounded, a company official said Tuesday. The foundry, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October 2001, is being sold but not closing, said David Boyd, the foundry's president.... About 130 people work at North Manchester Foundry, said Scott Gidley, unit chairman for Local 626. About 90 of them are union workers, he said. The foundry is at 205 Wabash Road is in Wabash County's North Manchester..\..
   Union members are waiting to see what happens. "All we have is hearsay," said Rick Howard, president of the United Steelworkers of America Local 626. "We've been informed that it might possibly close." But the union has received no official notification of a closing from the foundry, Howard said. "It's speculation," he said....
   Speculation is taking its toll on foundry employees who have been working three eight-hour days a week for about three months because customer orders are down, Howard said. A shortened workweek at the foundry translates into smaller paychecks, and that can be a strain, especially during the holiday season. "They really can't afford to live, but there's nothing out there to go to," Gidley said. He's worked at the foundry for 11 years. "The important message here is the people have stuck together in this and come together as a family and helped each other out. . . . Everybody's thankful we still have a job," he said.
   Foundry officials are waiting for a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge in South Bend to approve an agreement to sell the foundry to NMF Acquisition LLC in Illinois. Yvette Gaff Kleven, an attorney with Adelsperger & Kleven LLP and the foundry's Chapter 11 trustee, expects the sale to be completed before the year ends. "I think it's just real important that the word go out that the foundry does continue to operate. I know that's very important to the North Manchester community, and we're working very hard to make that happen," Kleven said. "We would like to save those jobs."

2. Council struggles with budget woes, by Tom Moran (tmoran@newsminer.com or 459-7590), Fairbanks Daily News-Miner [Alaska].
   ...There were plenty of suggestions, but not much progress, as the Fairbanks City Council tried in vain to [balance] a bare-bones 2004 budget Tuesday night. "The reality is we don't have the money," said Councilman Jerry Cleworth. ...John Guichici, business agent for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers [IBEW] - which represents most city office staff and officials -...offered his own suggestion - reduce IBEW workers' workweek to 37½ hours - but council members didn't jump at the idea....
   [Council members are in the dark ages of time blindness.]

3. Public workers to get 5-day workweek, by Ahn Seok-bae (sbahn@chosun.com), Chosub Ilbo [South Korea].
   Starting next July, public sector workers are to have a five-day workweek twice a month. As of July 2005, a year-round five-day workweek would go into force.
   The Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs said on Wednesday that because the new Labor Standard Act, amended last August, has helped spread the five-day workweek to industries around the country, the ministry has decided to apply the system to the public service sector as well. Currently, civil workers can take only one Saturday off every month. Also, starting in July next year, an additional working system which requires civil servants to work for one more hour, until 7 p.m., on every Monday will be abolished.
   In addition, workers at educational offices, public libraries and museums, who have been excluded from even one Saturday off a month, will have the same workweek as civil servants. For libraries and museums, the system will be put into effect in phases, to minimize inconveniences to other people.
   As the five-day workweek gets more common, the ministry said it would gradually decrease the number of legal holidays, now 16 a year. The ministry is also devising measures to improve the labor conditions for those who work on 24 hour-a-day shifts, like police officers and firemen.

4. Is Europe working? - ...EU's policy-makers have missed one of Europe's key labour-market challenges: eastward enlargement, by Chief Economist Katinka Barysch of Centre for European Reform. EurActiv.com [Belgium].
   With more than 14 million people out of work, unemployment is the EU's greatest economic problem. However, while EU policy-makers ponder Germany's 4.3 million unemployed, [and distract themselves on irrelevancies such as] Britain's low labour productivity and Italy's graying workforce, they have missed one of Europe's key labour market challenges: eastward enlargement.
   If the EU's labour market statistics look bleak, those in the accession countries are desolate. Unemployment in Central and Eastern Europe hovers at around 15%. The key Lisbon target of raising the employment rate to 70% of the labour force by 2010 looks out of reach for most east European economies. Only the Czech Republic and Slovenia come near the current EU average of 64%. In countries such as Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, only around half of all people of working age have a job. And while EU employment has grown slowly but steadily[?] since the mid-1990s, the trend in the accession countries is in the opposite direction. Job creation in the private sector still cannot make up for mass lay-offs in old-style industries.
   Eastern Europe's jobless woes will not only play havoc with Lisbon targets; they will also put a strain on the EU's structural funds for poor regions; and most importantly, they could prevent the new members from catching up with west European income levels.
   It is the member-states, rather than the EU's institutions, which are chiefly responsible for employment and social policy. But the EU is helping to promote employment through the 'open method of co-ordination' - the process of drawing up common guidelines, setting benchmarks and encouraging its members to learn from each other. The EU's employment strategy focuses on cutting back labour market regulations [all depends which ones], revamping tax and benefit systems to create work incentives, and on so-called active labour market policies (ALPs), for example job search assistance programmes. Such measures are unlikely to do Eastern Europe much harm. But they could be beside the point. The enlarged EU will need a more differentiated approach.
   East European labour markets are, on average, less regulated than west European ones. Firing full-time workers can be expensive and time-consuming, but rules for part-timers and temps are flexible. The enforcement of labour laws is often lax, especially in the small enterprise sector. Trade unions tend to be weak, and wage bargaining systems are flexible. Spending on unemployment benefits and ALPs is at a fraction of EU levels. Business people fear that EU entry will make east European labour markets less flexible, since the new members have to adopt EU labour regulations. Most of the 75 employment directives deal with health and safety at work. These rules will add to employers' bills in sectors such as chemicals and construction, but they are unlikely to reduce overall labour market flexibility or hinder job creation.
   The same cannot be said of EU social standards. The new members should be able to cope with current EU minimum standards, for example for working time or maternity leave. But the EU must resist any attempts from the 'old' member-states to export their expensive social systems eastward. Social spending in the East is already too high. Poland, for example, spends a larger share of GDP on social security than Germany. As a result, payroll taxes in most accession countries are even higher than in, say, France or Sweden, often adding 50% to employers' wage bills. High taxes prevent businesses from creating new jobs and drive workers into the shadow economy.
   The real problem of east European labour markets is a double mismatch: one geographical, one skills-related. Vibrant job markets in east European capitals co-exist with unemployment rates of up to 30% in declining industrial heartlands and rural areas. But job-seekers do not move or commute, partly because of poor transport links and ill-functioning housing markets, but also because they lack the necessary skills. Most new jobs are now being created in high-tech manufacturing and services, where professional know-how and flexibility are at a premium. Both are in short supply among laid-off coal miners or farmers. The new members therefore need to concentrate on increasing labour mobility, attracting investors to declining regions and upgrading their education and training systems. More EU money from the structural funds would help.
   [Katinka just wants to throw more money at the problem? Lame. Sounds like overt or covert makework to us. And peacetime makework on the largest scales only appeared to work in the USA when boosted by rules of working hours between 1938 and 1940. ]
   Tighter EU rules on working hours, part-time jobs, workers' participation or collective bargaining would not.
   [Tighter EU rules on working hours certainly would work, as they worked in France between 1997 and 2001 and as they worked in the USA between 1938 and 1941, in each case reducing unemployment by 1% for every hour cut from the workweek. They would work especially well if coupled with overtime-targeted training and hiring. Katinka is yet another economist-in-denial who can't see the nose in front of her face - that market-demanded per-person employment on any fixed or rising workweek basis is shrinking due to the cumulative, downsizing response to new technology, and the only sustainable solution is to shrink the workweek to maintain the same or larger workforce and the same or larger consumer base.]

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For more details, see our laypersons' guide Timesizing, Not Downsizing, 'flung' into print as a campaign piece during the 1998 race for Joe Kennedy's empty Congressional seat. The handbook is available online from *Amazon.com.

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