Timesizing, Not Downsizing

Timesizing_® not downsizing
We offer world's 1st 500-year view, dot-com political party, design, consulting, & URLs to suit your mood: worstcaseplan.com, masterplan.tv, criticalpath.info

TIMESIZING is the missing plan of the Occupy movement. It means cutting the workweek to spread employment (& markets!), instead of cutting jobs (& markets). Its emergency form WORKSHARING is already saving jobs. Timesizing means more jobs, shorter hours & higher pay cuz you cut surplus of labor. See our time trilogy & blog.

Unemployed? POed at the older generation for leaving you with all these megaprobs? Bored with the same ol', same ol' "crises"? Well here's one fully developed solution, the Timesizing Program. Its 5 phases provide a pattern for upgrades and an improving regional, national & global future of 500+ years. To save the world, you can't start with hunger - no one with money is hungry. You can't start with poverty (lack of money) - no one with a good job is poor. It all comes down to jobs. And jobs come down to time on the job. Mess up your time arrangements & you mess up your whole society, cuz time counts it all. Wage workers & contractors already track their billable time with software like *mytimeforce time&attendance. Piece workers & salarymen will require shadow timing. Timesizing is an economic design for sustainable, market-based jobs by making the workweek lower while making high tech higher.

Friday, February 3, 2012

, while the Great Depression replays today as the 'great recession', and lest you think there's been a recovery, we bring you first a dose of -

doom du jour

tm = today's headlines from helltm (archives)

- face the bad news here in the context of a sustainable solution (see hope du jour below) -
- editor's comments in [square brackets] – editor: Phil Hyde ecdesignr@yahoo.ca -
- headlines in Cambridge from *Porter Sq. Books & updating from Cate's Café in Boston secteur-Somerville MA -

growth-choking DOWNSIZING in the news (archives) - all reversible by switching to timesizing -

AstraZeneca is eliminating an additional 7,300 jobs, bringing the drugmaker's total cuts over the past five years to nearly 30,000, Wall Street Journal, B1.

spiraling ECONOMIC DECLINE via $$$ funnel-up (archives) - solved by war, or smarter, timesizing -

Vital signs - Fewer Americans are being laid off than in previous months [whoopeedoo - but -], WSJ, A1 graph caption.
- the number of workers filing new claims for unemployment benefits...fell...to a seasonally adjusted 367,000 [which] is well[?] below the 400,000-plus new claims filed weekly in the summer and early fall.

A push by Wall Street banks to create a "more-transparent" way [our quotes] to bet on bond defaults has stalled, WSJ, A1 pointer to C1.
largely due to the project's complexity.
[Uh, how do they think they're going to get more transparency out of complexity?]
A push for CDS [credit default swaps] futures sputters, WSJ, C1 target story.
[Thank God! - this would be a derivative of a derivative = complete gar-bahszh.]

Companies in the U.S. are booking higher profits than ever, but corporate tax receipts as a share of profits are at their lowest in at least 40 years, WSJ, A1 pointer to B1.
[The black hole adds mass in the crushing density of money at its tiny and increasingly isolated center.]
Many budget watchers point to a "temporary" taxbreak [our quotes] meant to spur investment as a key factor.
[This on the theory that investment creates jobs? We've been doin' this for decades and, where are the jobs? No jobs, no taxbreaks! Trying to spur investment by giving the wealthy an even huger percentage of the money supply is like pushing on a string. The wealthy already have far too little marketable productivity to sustainably invest in. An officially denied depression is the time to find excuses to transfer megabucks to spenders, not investors. And the less money you have, the more of it you spend. So if you're doing this the dumb way by camouflaged charity instead of the smart way by worksharing and timesizing, PULL on the string by enriching the spendthrift poor who will create more marketable productivity for the thriftspend wealthy to WANT to invest in, because those investments will at least be sustainable and possibly even profitable.]
With tax break, corporate rate is lowest in 40 years - U.S. companies [however] are booking higher profits than ever..., WSJ, B1 target article.
[but not for long because they're passing their taxes onto their customers and cannibalizing their consumer base.]

Stagnant job growth is expected in report, by Catherine Rampell, WSJ, B1.
The economic pie is "growing" [our quotes] but the share going to American workers is at a record low...
[And therefore the so-called growth is just a function of a carefully constructed sinful-not-to-smile index.]

Lack of start-ups is keeping jobs tight, WSJ, B1.
[No, lack of a mechanism [like timesizing] to maintain employment and consumer spending in the face of worksaving technology is keeping jobs tight.]

hope du jourtm

– TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) -

(free consulting to writers interested in setting a play or novel in a futuristic work-balanced or money-balanced society, 617-620-6851)

Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - here's our latest ranking of leading countries - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it is the world's most common (but least publicized and never fully exploited) response to downturn, that's reinvented thousands of times a day in every recession by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Wash. State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' - in each case, more jobs would have been lost without the hours-cuts or furloughs -

Budget uncertainty hangs over Gustine Unified School District, Gustine Press-Standard via westsideconnect.com
GUSTINE, Calif. - ...For Gustine Unified, McWilliams said, the outcome could mean the difference between...continuing to give back to employees and restoring prior cuts, as the district was able to begin doing this year when furlough days were reduced from five to three, and having to look at deeper cuts, perhaps in the form of added furlough days... Furlough days, she said by way of example, could be scheduled for after the election and eliminated or reduced in number if the ballot measures pass and mid-year cuts are avoided. Five days of employee furloughs would save the district about $230000 [and save jobs and the local spending rate]... - see whole article under today's date.

DC's Budget Surplus: The Hand that Itches, Politic365.com
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Washington, D.C. is faced with a problem that is sure to make some other city governments jealous. The District has a $240 million surplus due to some drastic financial moves Mayor Vincent Gray and the D.C. Council made in 2011. Among them were four emergency furlough days for District employees... - see whole article under today's date.
[Timesizing, not downsizing!]

Shorter hours are happening anyway, but not the best way which maintains personal income and vital consumer spending via emergency worksharing and sustainable timesizing. We simply can't perpetuate a pre-computer 40-hour workweek forever into the age of robotics. It may be fun to sneer at those who believe in the "fixed lump of labor fallacy" based on the obviously infinite amount of work to be done, but there ain't an infinite amount of money to pay for it, and without pay, it ain't work - it's just hobby. We need to take charge of this workweek-trimming process, systematize it and make sure it happens in a way that absorbs the surplus of jobseekers, gets employers bidding against one another for good help, thereby harnesses market forces to flexibly maintain and raise wages and spending, leeches money out of the huge black hole of income and wealth in the top 0.01%, and gets those trillions back into circulation. Shorter hours is a strategy that is reinvented hundreds of times a day across the U.S. in this recession and thousands of times a day across the world in both public & private sectors, in every industry, and in a variety of ways. Many countries and U.S. states already have worksharing programs to cushion the transition to permanently shorter workweeks that automatically adjust to our rising levels of productive technology in the Age of Robotics. These programs currently are designed to be temporary. Here's what their permanent program will look like when they finally succumb to the inevitable.

Features: • missed a recent hope/doom du jour? check out past hopes/dooms du jour
• design features • bibliography • site map • LINKS • time trilogy • I • II • III • the big question
• makework • the history of the American workweek • 30-hr. bill • business 'cycles' • courses • legislation
• contradictions in mainstream economics • class in America • growing disparity • worst case plan • economic design

Timesizing means full employment without makework, falling wages, or rising price levels.

How? By adjusting the workweek down & up - instead of firing & hiring - based on a comprehensive blueprint for a green economy & a new worktime economics where, 100 years from now, people will be...

repeating our basic economic slogan - "No Overtime Alone!" - in other words, if a manager 'needs' overtime (OT), s/he either hires temps or makes sure the skill bottleneck behind the OT gets opened up by setting up OT-targeted training

asking one another, "What's the workweek this month?" - in other words, work pressures are dynamically shared as incoming technology cuts their duration but boosts their stress

accommodating workoholics while blocking inflation, by unleashing "love to work" incentive (deflationary) while capping the money motive (inflationary), & balancing the two... - meanwhile, if you're a night person preferring work after normal business hours (and you're in the UK), *evening jobs that suit your lifestyle still exist and may exist in your area

For over eight years (1999-2004 and 2009-), we at the Timesizing Wire have been tracking what's rancid beneath the "recovery" via the top 2 U.S. newspapers, the Wall St. Journal on the right & the New York Times on the left with occasional input from the London Economist on the right, the Boston Globe on the left, Canada's national paper, the Toronto Globe & Mail, and regional papers around Ottawa & Québec. We pick up timesizing stories mainly from Google News Search. From 2005 to 2008, we paused to establish a Canadian branch when the USA failed to dump the kamekazi Bush regime, and now that the US is back to the slower Democratic rate of self-deterioration, we've resumed our daily updates.
Timesizing’s 3rd way is centrist and deep green, not just light or pinkish green like the Green Party's grocery list of ad hoc, unintegrated & unprioritized issues. Timesizing satisfies the right with smaller government and bigger firmer markets & the left with a simpler stronger social safety net that makes the right clean up their own recessions instead of continuously inducing them by privatizing and concentrating profits & nationalizing and centrifuging losses. Our Timesizing solution is based on working models, American history (especially 1933), on economic design, on ecology, and on worktime economics, linguistics, Limits to Growth, and Buckminster Fuller. The deep green center is the future, and we strategize for the next 100-500 years, not just the next quarterly report or four-year presidential term. Our site is always under construction. *Asterisked links take you *outside our site.

the problem, vs.		the timesizing solution
(in deteriorating stages)		(in stepped enhancements)
long workweek; short vacation	clue 1	electronic democracy vs PACs & lobbyists
downsizing; makework		market reinvestment vs corporate welfare
takeovers; bankruptcy; prison	clue 2	job&wage insurance vs gov't jobs programs
unemployment; homelessness		geared to problem vs emotional guesswork
vanishing retirement; disability	clue 3	plugging leaks vs Stinnes and Malthus
suicides; headlines from hell		transitions vs abrupt cures worse than disease

Pie in the sky? Click on Design Solutions for rebuttals of Impractical! Unconstitutional! Socialist! Uncompetitive! Inflationary! Anti-small business! Lump of Labor Fallacy!... And did we mention the Working Models?

For details, see our social-software manual, in simple language -

This numbered, first edition is available from *Amazon.com.

More angles on Timesizing
(Join shorter worktime e-list by emailing swt-digest-request@swt.org with 'subscribe' as msg)

Bibliography | Audiences | Research Priorities | Phil's Bio
Politics |The Forgotten Republican Key to Small Government | Sayings
Investment Advice | Why should I be forced to stop work at a certain #hrs/wk?!
America's Massive Pervasive Makework | Letting off steam | Opus Errata
Timesizing Courses | Website History | Website Reactions
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