Our Phase 2 corporate overtime tax with exemptions for skill training and hiring would enforce the maximum workweek, multiply job opportunities, centrifuge wealth without creating dependency and dynamize the economy, but what if it wasn't enough or if people were undermining its consumerbase-building function by holding multiple jobs?

The obvious answer - an individual overwork tax on overwork earnings (overwork is overtime per person from all sources) with an exemption for reinvestment again in OJT (on-the-job training) and hiring, both targeted by the overwork of course. The goal is to make the whole solution as automatic and self-directing as possible.

This would involve people personally in solving the deterioration of their own wages and their own economy. It would amount to job and wage insurance with the premiums paid in terms of time (sacrificed working hours) instead of money.

Side benefit - Inflation control through incentive balancing. The proliferation of job options as corporations reinvest overtime profits in training and hiring, and as individuals reinvest their extra working hours in job creation, enables hundreds of millions of employees to gravitate to jobs that are have more and more inherent, qualitative, deflationary incentive, thus unburdening the overused money motive which is exogenous, quantitative and inflationary. Thus the individually oriented overwork-to-training&hiring conversion described above would "kill two birds with one stone," because it would direct people's money motive into a safer channel (skill upgrade) and maximize job satisfaction by encouraging people's transformation from grinding "workers" who just do it for the money into playing "workers" who love their jobs - and don't mind overworking for no personal unaccountable gain other than the pleasure of sharing their beloved activity with others - to reinvest their overwork earnings in trainees and assistants. This process would gradually correct our current extremely overbalanced dependence on the money motive.
          And let's just draw out a powerful conclusion with a couple of synonyms for "money motive" vs. "job satisfaction." We could also call them "quantitative" vs. "qualitative" incentives. Or "externalized" vs. "inherent" incentives. Or now that we've got your mind flexed up with these linguistic/paradigmatic calisthenics, we could call them "inflationary" vs. "deflationary" incentives.
          You're already jumping to the right mind-boggling conclusion. This process offers an intelligent way to control inflation, by comparison to our current self-destructive fostering of unemployment - and consequent consumer-base handicapping - in order to control inflation. Almost every central bank in the world follows this unintelligent, economy-crippling practice including our own U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, which in the 1990s coined the term NAIRU (non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment) for the high level of joblessness it wanted to maintain in order to control inflation. Unbelievable, outrageous and an insult to an "intelligent" species. Once some of our national economies make the transition to timesizing-based full employment and unprecedented, active, fully potentialized domestic consumer demand, we will look back on this period as incredibly, head-shakingly primitive and stupid, on par with our current resort to war whenever labor-glut-led deflation and depression loom. (We also have a good run-down of this aspect embedded in one of our timesizing news commentaries on 3/13-15/2004 #1.)

Quick Reference. The 5 phases of the public-sector stage of the Timesizing program (bear in mind there's a long private-sector stage preceding that) are:
1. Referendums, to broadly define unemployment and set target rates
2. Corporate overtime tax with an exemption for OJT and hiring
3. Individual workoholic tax with an exemption for mentoring and employing
4. Making the workweek vary inversely with unemployment, newly defined to include welfare, disability, homelessness, prisons, forced part time and self employment...
5. If the workweek gets too low too fast, shifting the pressure to imports, immigrants, or births

6.=new 1. If the public doesn't want to squeeze imports immigrants or births, we move on to the next program, "Paysizing," and go through the same private and public sector stages of 5 phases apiece with "income and poverty" instead of "employment and joblessness".

For more details, see our campaign piece alias social-software manual, Timesizing, Not Downsizing, which is available from *Amazon.com online.

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