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 reducing hours to avoid layoffs. It's cutting the workweek, to spread employment & maintain markets, instead of cutting the workforce & markets. The workweek is totally arbitrary anyway, an historical accident. Timesizing means more jobs, shorter hours, same pay, cuz you've cut the labor surplus. Check out our timesizing blog and time trilogy.
Our view: The best hope for real recovery lies in spreading state worksharing programs & converting them to permanent timesizing.

This is the largest website on work-sharing in English. If you're tired of surfing the buzzwords (nanotechnology, ecofeminism, postmodernism...) and you want some real design smarts applied to the big problems, this is your site. We grab the best of Bucky Fuller, Herman Daly, Ben Hunnicutt and system science, cut through the cloud of obfuscation on the right & the left, jump to the heart of the matter, & get it done.
To "save the world," we need to start at the right place. We can't start with hunger, because no one with money is hungry. And we can't start with lack of money (poverty), because no one with a good job is poor. It all comes down to – jobs. And jobs come down to on-the-job hours. Mess up your time arrangements and you mess up your whole society, because time counts it all. Keep injecting worksaving technology into a frozen 1940 workweek and you create so much job insecurity you get people working 90-hour weeks nextdoor to people caught in the latest round of downsizing and about to lose the house. The question of the century is - how far into the age of robotics can we maintain a pre-computer workweek before employment collapses and with it, our markets?
This website straightens out the time mess and creates jobs by economic design, defined as the answer to the question, "What's the smallest change that would yield the greatest good for the greatest number?" The new design should be simpler than the tangled web we've woven and should actually be a series of designs to satisfy ever-rising expectations.
It should answer the obvious question: How do we solve our economic downturn? and the unasked question: As we concentrate our national income and wealth in the top brackets, is there a point where the process starts to undermine itself? The problem here is that, as the money supply is redestributed up the income brackets, its circulation gets slower and slower because fewer and fewer wealthier and wealthier people spend smaller and smaller percentages of their total money...
It also answers: How do we get wartime prosperity without war? That prosperity depended on a labor shortage that harnessed market forces to raise wages, spread the national income to the 'bottom' 90% who wanted & needed to spend it, and boosted spending, & marketable productivity, & sustainable investments. But can we get a labor shortage without killing people? We had actually found a way before the war interrupted and upstaged it = workweek reduction (1938,39,40: hrs/wk 44,42,40; unemployment 19,17.2,14.6%) – Walter Reuther called it "fluctuating workweek adjustment vs. unemployment." Wage workers & consultants already track their billable time via systems like *mytimeforce time & attendance. Salaried & piece workers will need "shadow timing." Pay & markets will rise as labor gets scarcer = wartime prosperity without war.
Use this website for worst-case planning, economic design, and news on the economy's doom du jour, spun anxiously as a "recovery" by both right and left, and critiqued from the 3rd way viewpoint of a student of ecology, linguistics and history.

Today, as the Great Depression of 1929-41 replays, we bring you

doom du jourtm

(below) and

hope du jourtm – 7/25-26-27/2010 sun-mon-tue - triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - 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's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

Shouldn't High Unemployment = Less Work To Do? 7/27 Seeing the Forest (blog)
WASHINGTON, D.C? - ..Suppose we just shorten the workweek? What if we change from a 40-hour workweek to a 30-hour workweek? Economist Dean Baker has been offering ideas for workweek reductions for some time... - see whole article under today's date.
Stimulus funds give Rome kids summer jobs, 7/25 Rome News Tribune,GA via romenews-tribune.com
ROME, Ga. - ..The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program allowed students ages 14 through 18 to work 35 hours a week for eight weeks and earn $8.50 an hour at one of 50 different locations around Rome... - see whole article under today's date.
[35 hours a week in Rome, Ga. USA from the American federal gov't TANF program? Isn't that the same workweek as those "radical socialist communist lazy" FRENCH have?...not to mention those GERMANS! -]
Daimler lifts operating profit targets, 7/27 Financial Times via ft.com
FRANKFURT, Germany - ..Daimler used short-time work and a temporary agreement to reduce the workforce’s salaries to cut costs during last year’s steep crisis. With the end of the second quarter, Daimler dropped all short-time work, while the labour agreement ran out automatically... - see whole article under today's date.
[And there is still an enormous effort to find a downside to cutting hours instead of jobs -]
Germany's Labor-Market `Miracle' Comes at a Price for Recovering Economy, 7/27 Bloomberg.com
FRANKFURT, Germany - ..“Companies have replaced rigidly agreed working hours with flexible labor schemes that allow them to breathe with the economy,” said Joerg Kraemer, chief economist at Commerzbank AG in Frankfurt. “Germany’s labor market is less inflexible than commonly thought”... - see whole article under today's date.
[It can't be working! It CAN'T be! Europe CAN'T be better! The USA is best! The USA is best! ... or are we...? -]
Budget Cut in Newark: Toilet Paper, Work Week, Decorations and City Pools Axed, 7/26 National Ledger
NEWARK, N.J. - ..Workers are also being shifted to a four day work week, essentially a 20% pay cut... - see whole article under today's date.

So shorter hours and worksharing are happening anyway, but not the best way. The argument that work is infinite because human desires are infinite ignores the absence of infinite money to satisfy those desires or pay for that work and the increasing scarcity of good 40-hr/wk jobs to maintain wages and spending in the age of robotics. Thus, shorter hours is a strategy that is being 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.

less strategic GOOD NEWS (archives) -

Why jobs, not housing data, is the key, by Kelly Stevens, 7/27 WSJ, C1.
[An uncharacteristic BGO (blinding glimpse of the obvious) in the Wall Street Journal. Thanks, Kelly. Hope you don't get fired.]

doom du jourtm = today's headlines from helltm (archives)
– face the bad news here in the context of a sustainable solution (above):

too little, too late, too artificial, too arbitrary, too eco-stressing MAKEWORK in the news (archives) - all unnecessary with full employment via temporary worksharing & permanent timesizing -

Amid economic bust, a boom at UMass - New academic buildings sprouting up all over, bringing much-needed jobs, 7/25 Boston Globe, A1.
["Education" is our number 3 Realm of Modern Makework as we shove our frozen pre-computer workweek (40 hrs & rising due to insecurity) deeper into the Age of Robotics. It's becoming ever more important to keep young people out of the job market for as long as possible now that our Vulture Capitalism has swallowed and coagulated so many of our private pension funds and we can no longer fund early retirement on the other end of our working lives to open up 40-hr jobs for the young.]

BANKRUPTCY tsunami in the news (archives) - staunched only by risky war or safe timesizing -

U.S. companies suffered a wave of bankruptcies and defaults over the past two years..., 7/27 WSJ, A1 pointer to C3.
..but lenders fared better than in past disasters.
[Guess so! In past disasters we didn't let them steal $700,000,000,000 from the government/taxpayers/consumer base.
Vulture capitalism is eating its own wings.
Compare the plague years and the end of the feudal period when manorial lords got more death fees (heriots) the more of their 'rustics' died - but the labor shortage liberated tenants, market forces raised wages, higher wages raised spending, higher spending decreased inventories and increased marketable production - and higher marketable production increased sustainable (and profitable!) investment and eliminated market bubbles.]

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

Oracle's [@$1.84B Larry] Ellison: pay king - Leads list of top-paid CEOs of the decade; Diller, Irani, Jobs [Barry,Ray,Steve] rank high, 7/27 WSJ, A1.
[and without an engineered wartime level of wage-raising labor "shortage," there is no cap in sight for this funneling of M1 (the money supply) to the topmost brackets - and thus deactivating it, decelerating currency circulation and depressing the overall system. The alternative? Maximum M1 centrifugation via full employment and markets, no matter how short a workweek it requires.]

Course of the economy hinges on fight over stimulus, 7/27 WSJ, A1.
[No, it doesn't. It hinges on whether we can convert to unemployment-controlled workweeks and get full employment and maximum consumption per capita regardless of how much workweek reduction it may take.]

Markets say no to growth companies, 7/26 WSJ, C1.
[Oops, the actual wording was "to expansionist companies"... Now we're deep in the Age of Ecology, Wall Street is finally questioning sacred Growth and they have come up with a negatively charged word for it, "expansionism." Spindoctoring is up to any challenge!]
Investors have punished stocks of companies that are talking openly about plans to expand, a sign that shell shock from a succession of blows hasn't worn off, 7/26 WSJ, A1 pointer to C1.
[The more of their costs they pass along to their consumer base (esp. via their employment basement) and the more of M1 they crush into their own few overbulging pockets, the longer and harder this "succession of blows" will go on and the more of them will experience this "shell shock" as the New Normal.]

Crisis-era munis taunting [Wall] Street, 7/27 WSJ, C1.
[A. The crisis ain't over since the centripetal forces on M1 are still overwhelming the centrifugal forces.
B. The American financial system is termite-ridden.]
..Wall Street firms are being ordered to pay millions to investors who lost big on leveraged muni funds that some thought to be low risk.

Features: • missed recent hope/doom du jour? check out past hopes/dooms du jour
• bibliography • site map • links • time trilogy: • vol.I • vol.II • vol.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 or inflation.

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

For over six years (1999-2004 and 2009-), we at the Timesizing Wire have been tracking what's rancid beneath the "recovery" via America's top two newspapers, the Wall Street Journal on the right & the New York Times on the left (often from *Wainwright Bank reading room in hip Davis Square, Somerville, Mass.), 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 various regional papers around Ottawa & Quebec. We pick up timesizing stories wherever we find them, but mainly from Google News Search. Then we paused for four years to establish a Canadian branch when the USA failed to get rid of the suicidal Bush regime in 2004, and now that the US has gone 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 100-1000 years, not just the next three months (quarterly report) or four years (U.S. presidential term). And we are always and everywhere 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
forced 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
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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
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