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Timesizing News, Nov.1-10, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, Box 622, Porter Sq, Cambridge MA 02140 USA 617-623-8080

11/08-10/2003   primitive timesizing & worktime consciousness in the news = glimmers of strategic hope - all are 11/07-09 via GoogleNews & searched-screened-collected by Alan Applebaum (AA) of Brookline MA , and excerpts & comments are by Phil Hyde (PH) unless otherwise initialled -

1. 11/07   Unions close to Ford/Genk jobcuts deal, Expatica of the Netherlands.
   GENK, Belgium – Unions and management at the troubled Ford car making plant at Genk appeared close Friday to agreeing early retirement conditions for some 1,100 workers due to leave their jobs this month. The departures are part of a company plan to shed 3,000 jobs at the Limburg assembly plant which has led to widespread unrest including factory blockades, strikes and marches.
   Union representatives have spent the week trying to negotiate a package of social benefits to be written into the terms of the early retirement. Adding pressure to the talks is the introduction of new fiscal policy in Belgium on November 15, when benefits included in early retirement will be subject to a higher tax rate.
   Also under discussion is the introduction of shorter working hours at the plant, which unions support as a measure to reduce the number of jobs to be axed.

2. [and, lest we forget, here's the opposite -]
   11/09   Washington forced his slaves to work 16 hours a day, six days a week, review by William Cain of...Henry Wiencek's book, "An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America," Boston Globe, D6.
   [That's a 6x16= 96-hour workweek, with no wages, just subsistence = minimal bed and minimal board. So if the Confederacy had lasted till the auto age, Ford and Reuther might have said, (F) "Let's see you unionize these slaves!" (R) "Let's see you sell them cars" - instead of "Let's see you unionized these robots!" and "Let's see you sell them cars." Of course, you respond to slavery not by getting rid of the slaves but by paying them wages, limiting their workweek, and transforming them into employees. And you respond to robotics not by getting rid of the robots but by responding to them by timesizing employees instead of downsizing them - and in them, your own and your customers' customers.]

3. 11/09   Sharing a life, a family and a workweek, by Lisa Belkin, NYT.
   Tomorrow morning, Dr. Michele Chai will go to work at the neonatal intensive care unit of the Hamot Medical Center in Erie, Pa., where she is a neonatologist. The next three days she will be on call 24 hours a day. While she is working, her husband, Jonathan, will be home, caring for their three children, ages 6, 4 and 2.
   Then, on Thursday, they will switch. Jonathan will go to work at the same job, in the same intensive care unit of the same hospital. It will be Michele's turn to stay home.
   The doctors share a job. Hamot was looking for only one neonatologist in summer 2002, when the couple applied for the position, together. "We came to them with the idea," Michele says. "Everyone says we're so unusual, but it makes perfect sense."
   It does indeed. One couple, one job - it's an idea that is both a leap forward in the search for a work-life balance and an easing back to the shared work of the mom-and-pop grocery or the family farm. It's hardly for everyone, of course. It works only in professions where a single salary is high enough to support a family, and for couples who work seamlessly together. But it's not just for neonatologists, either.
   "We think this is an ideal way to run a ministry," says Amy Jacks Dean, who shares the job of pastor with her husband, Russ, at the Park Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C. The alternative for dual-clergy couples, she said, is "to pastor at separate churches," meaning the family never worships together, or, more commonly, "to require one of the two to give up their dream" of leading a church.
   Nicholas McCord Schneider, who shares a tenure track position in astrophysical and planetary sciences with his wife, Erica Ellingson, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said: "We are grateful we found a department that was willing to do this." He adds that, "couples in the academic world really struggle" with the prospect that there won't be two tenure track jobs available in the same city at the same time. That is why he "offered half my position back to the university," and his wife applied for it. (If she hadn't been the choice of the committee, he says, he would have taken back his offer.)
   Sharing a job solves not only the problem of location, but also of child care. Professors Schneider and Ellingson, for example, teach classes alternate semesters, and spend their nonteaching months doing research and applying for grants. This allows them to alternate being what they call "the designated martyr," too. "If something goes wrong with the kids," who are now 7 and 5, "then the person not teaching takes over," he says.
   It is not possible for Professor Schneider and his wife to teach each other's classes, he said, because "we're in different specialties and our research is incomprehensible to each other." But other job-sharing couples are far more interchangeable. The "back to school" cruds, in the form of a bad cold, made their way through the Chai house last month, Jonathan says, and "Michele was knocked out of commission." So he took her shifts for a few days.
   Russ Dean has studied 20 other couples who share a single pastor position, and has found a variety of models. Some, like the Doctors Chai, divide the work exactly in half. Some give one spouse a larger load so the second spouse can have more time for the children. The Deans describe their own division of labor as "the 200% model," meaning they both work nearly full time for a single salary but divide areas of responsibility. His are worship, planning and administration; hers are education, pastoral care and mission. They preach equally.
   There are also different ways to be paid, but the Deans insist on separate paychecks. "We each have a job," Amy says. "We each get a salary." They also have separate retirement funds and health insurance. The Chais negotiated for two parking passes to the hospital garage and individual malpractice coverage. Professor Ellingson and her husband each have full voting rights in their departments and will be considered individually for tenure.
   But there are issues that cannot be negotiated; they must be modeled. When the Deans took on their job three years ago they knew they had to send a message from the start. "We are two people filling the role of pastor," Amy says. "We do not call ourselves co-pastors. We are the pastors of the Park Road Baptist Church."
   "You are not hiring Russ and getting Amy," her husband agrees. For that reason Amy took what had long been the pastor's office, and Russ moved into a smaller space. "He can be seen as the pastor while sitting in the associate pastor's office," she says. "I might not be seen that way." For similar reasons, Amy conducted the first baptism. But they did their first wedding together. "We perform marriages jointly whenever we can," Amy says. "We do a great wedding."
   [But there's also bad sharing -]
   Technology has us so plugged into data, we have turned off, by Dennis Berman, WSJ, B1.
   A new plague of inattention is spreading.... The brainy people who study these things call this phenomenon "absent presence." \Or\ it's called "surfer's voice" - a habit of half-heartedly talking to someone on the telephone while simultaneously surfing the Web, reading emails, or trading instant messages....
   For years, researchers have discussed how cellphones have trampled over the once communal public space of sidewalks and restaurants. The idea is that we may be physically on a street corner, but our distracted minds are not.
   [Well that's still better than the idiots on their cellphones and reporting where they are, every step! "I'm just passing the highschool, I'm just in front of the supermarket - ya need anything?..." or worse, inside the supermarket, "I'm just passing the tunafish, do we need any?..."]
   We do little bits of everything, and none well....

4. 11/08   Pursuit of happiness and power suits - Some readers refuse to give up free time to get ahead on the job, by Amy Joyce, Washington Post.
   DC - When Lisa Derrenbacker feels overworked, she thinks of pieces of cherry wood in the attic. And that reminds her to ask herself if she really needs to stay that extra hour, or if she should take a job that pays well but demands a lot of her time.
   That's because her father, Ralph, worked long hours, weekends and holidays. As a self-employed general contractor and cabinetmaker in Washington, he loved his work but kept as busy as many of those 80-hour-a-week Washingtonians I wrote about a few weeks ago. When Derrenbacker's father died of pancreatic cancer at 58, her mother sold the cherry wood her father had been curing in the attic for years. The wood was meant to be made into slant-top desks for Derrenbacker and her brother and sister. Her father just hadn't had the time to make them.
   "This devotion to work meant there wasn't much room for pursuing many of his dreams and hobbies," Derrenbacker said. "My memory of him crying because he would not live to see another spring will never leave me. Since I was 15 at the time, the experience left me with strong feelings regarding the importance of maintaining a work-life balance."
   In some ways, she wonders if that experience and its effect on her held her back in her career because she saw the consequences of putting personal things off. As her power friends canceled vacations to work more, she took time off. As they earned more promotions, she plugged steadily along, making sure to work shorter hours and choosing a job based partly on vacation time and a short commute. "I need that time for 'being' rather than just going, going, going all the time," she said.
   When she was laid off last summer from the telecom job she loved, she took her time finding the best new job she could. When one company told her in a phone interview in April that she shouldn't make plans for the following New Year's weekend because she would be working that entire weekend, she and the potential employer parted ways. She has been employed by another organization since June.
   It is the working huff-and-puff feeling of Washington that has given Derrenbacker "mutinous thoughts" and caused her to consider leaving this fair city where she has lived her whole life. And she wasn't the only one who responded to last month's column by telling me about possibly leaving. Or at least leaving those crazy work habits behind.
   Kate Schwarz, a woman who works in technology sales and management in Rockville, said the column "rang true regarding Washingtonians' pride in workaholism, but this is not a uniquely Washingtonian phenomenon. I have worked with professionals young and old across the country who seem to suffer from this delusion," she wrote in an e-mail. "I work to live [not 'live to work'] . . . since work provides income, the fuel for everything else worth pursuing in life. I have never met a [septuagenarian] or octogenarian who wished they had spent more time at their offices."
   In an interview, Schwarz said she has always tried to achieve a balance between life and work and never feels the need to brag about all the time she spends in her office. That's because she works hard so she can play hard.
   [Funny how little you hear that any more.]
   Her life in recent years has been tipping toward taking care of herself. Of course, making sure her boss, clients and coworkers are happy with her work is a priority. But not at the expense of her own health and happiness.
   "A lot of people I see put time and energy into professional lives, not toward personal things," she said. "I think those are backward priorities." Work will come and go, she reasons. But there is only one life.
   Yes, even in Washington, life outside work exists.
   That's what Adam Korengold hopes to teach his employees, just as he learned it from a former boss. When a major report was due, the boss would work hard the night before so he could leave early if his daughter had a soccer game. "That really made an impression on me. You can be a high-powered person but still take care of the things in life that are important."
   Korengold is a manager at a local consultancy, and many of his employees are new to the workforce. He wants them to start off on the right foot. "I want them to develop a good work and life balance. And it's important for me to be able to demonstrate that to them," he said. He believes, wisely, that employees take their cue from managers. He once worked for someone who came into the office at 9:30 a.m. and left at 8:30 or 9 at night and spent some weekends at the office. So Korengold worked similar hours.
   Now that he's a manager, he sees how much influence his hours have on how long his staff works. "If they see the manager's office is dark at 6:30, they get the sense that it's okay for them to leave. But if it's 8 and their manager is still there working busily, they don't want to leave before their manager does," Korengold said. Korengold knows how important his consultancy work is, but he also knows there is life beyond the cubicle. He is currently getting his master's in business administration, and he has a wife, with whom he would like to have dinner every now and then. So if that means taking work home with him, or getting to the office a little early in order to ensure an outside life, he'll do it. And he hopes his staff follows his lead.

5. 11/09   Putting flexibility into the workplace, by Margaret Steen, San Jose Mercury News.
   CALIFORNIA -...Many employers have taken steps to make balancing work and family easier. A recent survey by the Families and Work Institute found that thepercentage of workers who said they had complete control or a lot of control over their work hours rose from 30% in 1992 to 36% in 2002.
   The concepts
   Proponents of workplace flexibility envision a corporate world in which full-time workers have more control over their schedules and can choose to work part time without penalty. Among the concepts they promote:
   • Flexible schedules for full-time work. A number of companies already allow workers some flexibility in when they start and stop their workdays. Even more flexibility would allow some workers to duplicate Ullrich's schedule, taking a break in the late afternoon and early evening to be with their families and finishing their work at night.
   • More (and better) part-time work. Williams advocates giving an employee who works three-quarters time 75% of the pay and benefits of a full-time worker - and eligibility for promotions at three-fourths the speed.
   Another idea is to let employees negotiate a 90% schedule, for example, in which they would work full-time 90% of the year but take an extra five weeks off, said Kathleen Christensen, director of the program on Workplace, Workforce and Working Families for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
   • Career flexibility. Many professions today have what Christensen describes as ``relatively rigid, probationary, up-or-out'' paths for those trying to enter them. It can be difficult for workers to advance after having cut back, for example, to care for a baby.``We need to change career paths to allow people to stop and start more,'' Williams said. ``Now, if you stop, you do so at your peril.''
   • Better planning. Most organizations assume employees will sometimes get sick. But many don't acknowledge other demands on employees' time: children's doctor's appointments, helping care for elderly parents, parental leave. Similar planning for these events could help make them go more smoothly, Williams said. In addition, planning ahead for business travel would ease the burden on working parents - and make it more possible for them to take the trips that can lead to career advancement.``You need to respect your employees and give them the advance warning,'' Ullrich said.
   The objections
   Even employers who want their workers to have flexibility see obstacles:
   • Cost. Two part-time workers may require more work space, equipment and supervisors' time than one full-time worker. Some companies may balk at this extra cost, though others have found that it's worth it.``There is a cost associated with this,'' said Rick Fezell, office managing partner for Ernst & Young in San Jose. He helped lead an effort to combat the ``brain drain'' caused by women leaving his firm. The solution: Give everyone more flexibility. Workers get the equipment they need to work from home; the company also tries not to have anyone travel on Sundays, even though that means missing part of Monday's work day in transit.
   Ernst & Young decided it was a good investment.``It's a much bigger cost when you have a lot of people walking out your door that you've invested in for three or four years,'' Fezell said.
   • Management. Many employers say that if they allow some workers to work from home or at odd hours, they will have to let everyone do it. Some jobs don't lend themselves to this - and some workers don't either.``For a people manager, the essence of their job is to direct work and lead other people,'' said Cheryl Hannon, vice president of human resources at iManage in Foster City. ``That means you've got to be available to them.''
   • Client demands. The bottom line is that work still has to get done.
   Fezell said that although his office's flexible arrangements have been successful, there are times when they don't work.``You can lay out these plans, you can do everything,'' he said, ``but it doesn't preclude a client calling and saying, `I've got an emergency.' '' Then, he said, employees have to be flexible as well.
   Looking deeper
   Beyond these specific ideas are larger issues about employers' and employees' attitudes.
   ``We need to redefine the `ideal worker,' '' Williams said. ``Why should you be choosing workers based on some scheduling requirement rather than on talent?''
   One answer is that employers use a worker's willingness to work long hours as a measure of loyalty, said Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. ``They want people who are willing to devote themselves body and soul to the company,'' he said.
   But some employers see some of these ideas - for example, advancement for part-time workers - as a sign that workers aren't willing to make tough choices.``You can't have both things,'' said Seema Handu, president and CEO of PharmQuest in Mountain View. ``You can't say that I need a lot of time with my family but . . . I want the same kind of career path that other people are having who are putting in the full-time effort.''
   [Why not? What else is technology for, if not to enable us to have our cake and eat it too?]
   Handu, whose comments were echoed by other employers, added that part-time workers who return to full-time work should have a chance at promotions. Ultimately, experts say, the flexibility dilemma will probably be solved differently by different people. Some will seek part-time work; some others, like Ullrich, may leave the corporate world altogether....

6. 11/08   Oh no! We forgot to have kids - A fundamental change in the way we work has triggered a rapid decline in the birth rate - So who will look after us in our old age? by Anne Manne, The Age .
   AUSTRALIA - A former career woman told me her story. The crunch had come at 7.30pm on a wintry evening, still at her desk and about to have an important teleconference with overseas colleagues. The telephone rang — it was the police. Her teenage son had been picked up in possession of marijuana. There was no family member she could call, her former husband lived overseas, her family interstate. For years she had struggled with the time bind, working as if she had no family responsibilities, as if she had a wife at home to take care of “everything else”. Suddenly, at this latest family crisis, she snapped and resigned on the spot. A highly regarded professional at the apex of her organisation walked out of her office, out of her career, out of the time bind.
   Work and family: it is the red-hot issue of our time. Prime Minister John Howard has called it the great Australian barbecue stopper.
   In bookshops, whole shelves strain under the accumulated weight of a new genre; The Second Shift, The Time Bind, When Work Doesn’t Work Any More, The Overworked American, The Work/Life Collision, Crowded Lives and I Don’t Know How She Does It: all deal with the scarcity of time. How did that career woman, how did we as a society, get to such a breaking point?
   Let me go back, briefly, 100 years to the minimum wage case of the famous Harvester Judgement in 1907. Then the problem was not time, but money.
   [No it wasn't. The time issue always and only preceeds the money issue, in the sense that the time issue can be solved without the solution of the money issue, but the money issue cannot be solved without the solution of the time issue to anchor to. (That's why, of higher pay and shorter hours, if you only win higher pay you fight market forces and wind up with neither, but if you only win shorter hours, you create a labor shortage and harness market forces in your favor and wind up with both.) Each solution is based on a prior technology of sharing. Money sharing is based on worktime sharing. Worktime sharing is based on the sharing of political voice via "one adult, one vote." (And once your nation's Supreme Court destroys that basis, as the American court did in 1976{?} when it equated unlimited campaign contributions with freedom of speech, the axe is at the root of your progress as a nation, just as the axe was at the root of the American labor movement when it allowed itself to be distracted from workweek reduction by the many nice but fundamentally irrelevant sops of the New Deal.) The whole so-called "invisible hand" in economics that was supposed to automatically balance all the struggling self-interests of the free market was actually merely the very visible "hand" of spreading equality in the political sphere via the spreading franchise of the vote, leaking its balancing, power-centrifuging influence across the mental partition into economic sphere.]
   ...Laissez-faire capitalism first attempted to treat workers adapting to the harsh new work environment of the factory as if they had no human needs beyond their obligations to their employer. Hence the struggles of the workers: paid sick leave, the eight-hour day, annual holidays, unemployment insurance, provision for old age, and a fair minimum wage.
   Few nations were unaffected; concessions to the industrial working class had to be made. In Russia, it threatened bloody revolution. Social democracies, too, faced crises of production via strikes. In Britain, as in Australia, the new economy saw first the emergence of the union movement and then the labour parties. Social democracy saved its skin by brokering a new deal between labour and capital.
   Central to the Australian Settlement and the Harvester Judgement was a new kind of family, the breadwinner-homemaker family, thrown up by the industrial economy. In the old craft and cottage industries all family members contributed, including wives and children. The work of care for the sick, the old and the very young, continued alongside productive work.
   The brave new world of mass production and the assembly line, however, needed speed, undivided attention and a capacity to work without stopping. No longer could caring be carried out while working. Rather, a family [bridging] two separate spheres was needed. The man did paid work in the new industrial system, freed to do so by virtue of the unpaid labour of his wife. She provided the haven in the heartless world, caring for him and their children.
   Justice Higgins, in the settlement of a minimum wage, was dealing with the scarce commodity of that era — money.
   [He didn't settle it. It had to be repeatedly revisited, with political battles each and every time. And each time it was raised, the first step at the bottom of the ladder for new entrants into the job market got steeper. Contrast automatically unemployment-countering workweek adjustment: if un(der)employment is too high or rising, the workweek gradually shortens; if it's too low or undesirably falling (if there is such a thing), the workweek gradually lengthens. And overtime triggers, targets and finances training and hiring. It's a natural homeostatic system. If the workweek is low enough, wages take care of themselves in free-market negotiations, because there's no longer a wage-depressing labor surplus and the steep power gradient between employee and employer is more of a level playing field. This is not an interference with the free market. This is a fundamental definition of the free market - a definition of its sphere of free variation and control. It's not unfair, because everyone is treated the same way. In short, it's no longer just "the discipline of the workforce," but also some discipline for management, just as universal suffrage disciplined the ruler(s).]
   But the family organisation of that period also carried another, less visible temporal assumption — about how much total household [work]time can be reasonably sustained without stress. Husbands worked for 40 hours and spent about 10 hours on yard tasks; housewives worked a 50-hour week — a combined total of about 100 hours of paid and unpaid work. Two jobs between two adults was considered enough.
   Cut to 2003. On the dawn of our new century we, too, have experienced a period of turbocharged economic change. A resurgence of free market ideals has ushered in what sociologist Richard Sennett dubs the “new capitalism”. It, too, has profoundly reshaped our social and family landscape. The old Australian Settlement has been swept aside. Protectionism is a thing of the past.
   [Oh no it isn't. It's come back in the American steel industry, and it's merely changed its form in American agricultural subsidies and Bush's recent attempt to get Japan to self-tariff against their own interests with US-favoring currency manipulations....]
   We have moved from centralised wage fixing [back] to enterprise bargaining.
   [This is a step backward that would have been impossible if we'd done the "fixing" in the right order: time first, then money; that is, employment first, then income. Note also that there is a secondary distinction here that must be observed - you cannot successfully govern or balance or fix (or whatever) per-job variables. They are the province of the free market. You must only govern per-person variables (or per-job variables only when they are completely subsumed by per-person variables). So, you cannot, should not, must not control wages = money per job. You will eventually have to directly control incomes = money per person. But trying that first is out of order and will not work. It will only create dependency. You must, can and should first control/govern/balance employment = worktime per person - being careful to leave worktime per job as free as possible while you're doing so. France observed this fundamental stricture by annualizing the constraint of the 35-hour workweek, which is especially important for seasonal industries like agriculture where you need a lot of hours per week during harvest and few hours per week during winter.]
   Greater competitiveness under globalisation has meant labour shedding
   [no it hasn't - labour shedding has meant hollowing out your domestic consumer base and weakening your own domestic markets and economic momentum. It has also meant creating management-spoiling labour surplus, so that management gets more and more lazy and venal, as in shortcuts (takeovers instead of market-share building through innovation) and corporate fraud (accounting fraud, conflict of interest between banking & brokerage & insurance, client cheating by mutual-fund market timing, golden parachutes that make the incentives to wreck the company equal to the incentives to build it...) ]
   and efforts to raise productivity.
   [The narrow scope of the GNP/GDP scoring system had to eventually start ruining economies, and that eventuality has come. The narrow obsession with productivity regardless of marketability has merely brought back the narrow supply-side focus that induced the Great Depression and evoked the equal and opposite narrow demand-side focus of John Maynard Keynes. It's time we designed and implemented a "balance-side" economics that automatically guarantees a rough (but much smoother than now) alignment of producitivity and marketability, of supply and demand, and as indicated, that can easily be done by ensuring full employment via "fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against unemployment" (Walter Reuther's term). What do we do about runaway wage-push inflation? We harness qualitative, deflationary "I love my job" incentive to balance and neutralize quantitative, inflationary "I'm just doing it for the money" incentive. See Timesizing Program Phase Two and Phase Three.]
   One consequence is the intensification of work. It is a ["Gospel of Consumption"] high consumption society, characterised less by the export of natural resources and more by its importation of cheap consumer goods. It depends less on [human-populated] assembly lines and [labour intensive] factories and more on [thousands of automated assembly lines and robots, and] a highly skilled, well-educated workforce delivering human services. If the distinctive face of industrial-age capitalism was the male factory worker, the representative face of the new capitalism is most likely a female service worker.
   Working time has also dramatically changed. British writer Patricia Hewitt calls it, appropriately enough, the new revolution in working time.
   Old working times — the eight-hour day, 40-hour week, uninterrupted 40-year working life — are disappearing. Retail trading seven days a week, sometimes 24 hours a day, alters the times of the day and week we may be expected to work. One job per life is finished too. We have multiple job changes during a lifetime. Each year during the 1990s close to quarter of those in the Australian paid workforce left their current jobs.
   [That is, rising employee turnover - but like Anne Manne's take on free trade, this is also outdated by the more obvious labor surplus (higher unemployment) of the last few years of recession and "stumbling recovery" - employees are now clinging to their jobs no matter how much they dislike them because they have fewer alternatives.]
   Part-time jobs increased by 300% between the early 1970s and the early 1990s.
   [That was so employers wouldn't have to pay full-time-tied benefits.]
   According to a background paper prepared for National Families Strategy by work-family expert Graeme Russell, the “norm of a 35-44 hour week has given way”. Non-standard hours are increasing. The labour market is increasingly divided into
   • either long-hours jobs for the highly skilled professional,
   • and part-time or casual positions for the less skilled.
   Men’s full-time, life-long employment is in decline; their overall participation rate dropped from 83% in 1960-61 to 72% in 2000-2001. Many men leave the workforce - voluntarily or involuntarily - earlier than their grandfathers. Since 1975, Australia has experienced the largest decline in workforce participation rates of men aged between 55 and 59 in the OECD countries.
   [This at a time when CEOs are eroding traditional retirement and looting pension funds.]
   Phillip Selznick, an American social theorist, has commented that feminism saved capitalism. Given such changes to male breadwinning, there is truth in his remark.
   [Only in the sense that it hastened the crisis of the short-sighted downsizing-oriented type of capitalism by making it OK for women to enter the job market at almost any point - and thereby worsening the pre-war (WW2) labour surplus that was already restored by the coming of age and job-market-entry of the first wave of postwar baby-boomers around 1970. The babyboomers slowed down pay raises and the women entered the job market to try to make up for that slowdown in family income. From another viewpoint, feminism was another link in the huge underground transition from the Economic Age to the Ecological Age, triggered by human population growth to the natural limits of the biosphere in a number of dimensions, such as ground water, ozone, forests, fisheries, clean air, arable land.... We no longer needed half the population dedicated to quantitative expansion dba reproduction. We now needed to refocus on quality of life, not just quantity. So a huge shift started in the basic social unit, away from the reproductive pair to the productive person and away from the procreative couple to the creative individual. The traditional Roman Catholic definition of marriage as something essentially for reproduction started changing to something essentially for companionship. Social sex overtook reproductive sex. The birth-control pill greatly helped. AIDS later somewhat hindered. The "zero-th commandment" (be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth - Genesis 1:28) became a "been there, done that" - in fact, "done that to death!" type of thing, and people began looking around for the Next Big Thing. As you've gathered, Phil Hyde's suggestion-by-demonstration is, identify and solve the biggest human problem of your lifetime - but modify it with Bucky Fuller's caveat - "if someone else is doing it, it's not the most important thing for you to be doing - find something no one else is doing." Most of the "Next Big Things" are in the realm of quality, not quantity, once we make two final quantitative adjustments. We need to adjust -
   • our economist's short-term timeframe from the next quarterly report or the next federal election to an ecologist's long-term timeframe of the 30,000-year decay cycle of spent nuclear fuel rods or the 10-billion year remaining life cycle of our Sun,
   • and our economist's near-sighted, less-extended self-interest from my company or non-profit or city, or my industry or state or region, or my economy or global looting zone, to an ecologist's far-sighted, more-extended self-interest in my biosphere, my solar system, my "local" star system (Sirian - see Rodney Collin's Theory of Celestial Influence, pp.14-15), my galaxy (Milky Way), my "local" galactic cluster....]
   Feminist ideas legitimated the new family mores, helped create a social revolution in women's roles and emphasised the benefits of paid work for women.
   It arrived in the nick of time. Even when presided over by social conservatives like John Howard, the imperatives of the new economy are at least in tension, but more often in direct conflict with the single-income male-breadwinner model. Rather, it is the dual-earner family that is better placed to survive the new capitalism.
   [Again, this is not a "new" capitalism. This is simply a reversion to the old steep power gradient between employees and employers occasioned by a restoration of the general peacetime labour surplus.]
   Job insecurity, reduced farm incomes, the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, declining male full-time work, the hollowing out of middle incomes, as well as high consumption patterns [based increasingly on high consumer borrowing] and spiralling house prices [based increasingly on the affluent's feeling that real estate may hold its value (ie: store their money) better than stocks], all give impetus to the growth of the two-income family. More than half of all families with dependent children now have two parents in the workforce. Much ink has been spilt on gender equity, on getting men to do more at home.
   Yet even redistributing that time between the sexes will not alter the brute fact that as total work time goes up, so does stress. If in the old family model there were two jobs and two adults, an increasing number of families have three jobs between two adults. According to one survey, well over two thirds of mothers in families where both adults worked full-time often felt rushed or stressed, compared with half of women with no dependent children.
   Robert Drago and Yi Ping-Tseng's recent study showed where both parents worked full-time, they struggled under a much heavier overall workload - 84 hours total paid work-time alone, double the paid work component of the traditional family. These families were more stressed about their marriages and parenting, they had fewer children and continually complained about time stress.
   While more workers nowadays - men and women - have family responsibilities, many occupations are still organised as if there is still a wife and mother at home, or make only minimal concessions to a worker's family responsibilities. If in Justice Higgins's time the scarce commodity was money, in our age the scarce commodity for many families is time.
   [It's still also money, but the futility of trying to solve the money scarcity first may be gradually sinking in by some sort of through-the-pores osmosis.]
   What is striking is how little accommodation the new capitalism - like its 19th century counterpart - has made to the distinctive needs of the new workforce.
   [Not surprising when viewed from the key perspective of labor surplus leads to devaluation of labor leads to cheapening of labor leads to disrespect and disregard for labor....]
   That has led feminist economists, such as Nancy Folbre, to re-evaluate the whole shadow economy of care. In her book The Invisible Heart (a play on Adam Smith's idea of the importance of "the invisible hand" of the market), she shows that the market economy is vitally underpinned by the less-visible world of care. Our society has been little like a chauvinist husband who does not notice his wife's child-rearing and caring work until she walks out. We have taken it for granted. There is now a clear "care deficit", with children doing worse on many measures.
   It is also economic folly, Folbre says, to treat "children as pets" - expensive private indulgences like a yacht or a racehorse.
   [Yet as longevity increases and the reproductive imperative eases, that is exactly what children are becoming - and should become! A freely chosen, easily afforded hobby - not a grinding mandate. A 'labor' of love, not a vital key to social position in a must-expand human population.]
   For the care economy depends not only on altruism but also reciprocity. It has a gritty economic dimension. Children are not just a private matter, but a crucial part of intergenerational reciprocity.
   [Less and less crucial as world population flies over 6,000,000,000.]
   It is by families having enough children that our society provides collectively, through their taxes as adult workers, for all of us in old age.
   [Nonsense. It is by the collective inventions of previous scientists, designers and entrepreneurs. Automation and robotics are quite capable of providing collectively for all of us in old age. Why does Anne Manne pretend to be so futuristic if she still has these pockets of pre-technological 18th-century thinking?!]
   And having children is just what we are not doing.
   [Oh no? Then how did we get to 6 billion world population?]
   We do not face a crisis of production via the combined collective power of the worker and the strike.
   [They never created crises of production - they conduced to having fewer crises of over-production and under-consumption!]
   Strikes have all but disappeared.
   [Maybe in Australia, the U.S. and the U.K, where labor is weak, but not in Brazil, South Korea, France, Germany....]
   Instead most Western nations face a crisis of reproduction, a new kind of strike, a birth strike.
   [Simply a welcome and natural response to global overpopulation - and by no means yet strong enough. Indian states are intensifying their population control measures. See yesterday, "States in India take new steps to limit births," 11/07/2003 #5.]
   It is this factor, the dramatic shift to low fertility societies, which, I suggest, changes everything.
   [No, it's the general feeling of over-busy crowding, of devalued commonness, of running faster and faster for less and less, of the need to shift from quantity to quality of life, of the need to move beyond the Economic Age to the Ecological Age, that has changed everything, including our erstwhile high-fertility societies and our "default" life plan of getting married and having children.]
   Just as in industrial-age capitalism, moral suasion, the language of rights and needs, however morally powerful, are not enough. It is falling fertility that has produced the need for change on work and family policy. It is low fertility, above all, which means there is no turning back to old solutions.
   Consider: in all Western nations, to a greater or lesser degree, fertility is in long-term decline. Except for New Zealand and America, none are at replacement levels, of 2.1 children per woman per lifetime.
   [Thank God. But she should have discussed this before feminism and the entry of women into the workforce and the two-income family (along with the labor-surplus issue she completely ignores).]
   The causes are complex and multiple, the cure uncertain. There is no doubt, however, about the central problem presented by declining fertility.
   [Untrue. There is considerable doubt, because number of workers, in the context of automation and robotics, is virtually irrelevant to amount of production. Wakey wakey, it's the 21st century, not the 18th.]
   It is the emergence of unfavourable ratios between workers and that part of the population dependent on government assistance.
   [Such thinking is obsolete. And a constant technological inroads can be made on the dependent population by job designers working with new technologies, such as those employed by Stephen Hawking.]
   The taxes of an ever-shrinking working age group must provide social security for a growing aged population.
   [How quaint that so many partyline spouting commentators are concerned about an ever-shrinking age group when CEOs are downsizing all ages much faster than the parts of the population are passing any arbitrary age threshold - which is agist anyway.]
   The facts are dramatic. In the pro-family Catholic states such as Italy and Spain, the fertility rate is 1.2. At current fertility rates, by the middle of this century the size of the Italian population over 60 would double. Those aged over 65 would outnumber children by seven to one.
   [So what?! Under downsizing-oriented economics, they don't even have jobs for 100,000s of the people under 65 right now.]
   The Japanese are also worried. Their fertility rate of 1.32 means their population would be half its present level by 2100.
   [Same dismissal. The Japanese currently lhave unemployment rates of 4-5%, which for them are far above what they're used to. What's the good of panicking about supposedly low birth rates when you don't even have 40-hour jobs for millions of the people already here (even supposing you've got no population-tied ecological problems)?! This whole line of argument has always baffled us with its stupidity and self-contradictory assumptions.]
   The baby bust means taxes would have to rise to 60% of incomes, at least, just to fund current pensions and standards of health care. One former prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, offered the sinister suggestion that childless women be denied the public pension. "The Government takes care of women who have given birth to a lot of children as a way to thank them for their hard work," he said. "It is wrong for women who haven't had a single child to ask for taxpayer money when they get old, after having enjoyed their freedom and had fun."
   [What tommyrot. First let's see Yoshiro Mori find self-supporting jobs for the millions of unemployed Japanese today. Only then is he in a position to obsess about an insufficient labor force to support the retirees of tomorrow. And what's a supposed feminist like Anne Manne doing spreading this blatantly sexist crap anyway?! What about childless men?!]
   In Australia our fertility rate of 1.7 is of great concern [yeah, by the Chicken Little's], although less dire ['dire', shmire]. Here, too, we face the challenges of a sharply altered demography. Soon a large cohort of ageing baby boomers will have to be supported by a shrinking group of workers.
   [and an expanding army of robots. So no problem.]
   The Federal Government's Intergenerational Report argued that the tax burden on the next generation will be 5% of GDP by 2041-42, or a staggering $87 billion in today's dollars.
   [So phase out arbitrarily fixed-age retirement and institute unemployment-determined worksharing. What's the big deal?!]
   Much of this cost is due to increasingly expensive medical procedures, the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, as well as pensions and aged residential care.
   Some demographers have criticised the report for being too pessimistic, but the consensus is that we confront a real problem.
   [Piffle.]
   Several entry points for a better outcome [note the escalation of buzzwords as the argument gets shakier] for the dependency/worker ratio exist: increased immigration [fatal to a non-worksharing economy], extending the working age by arresting or reversing the present trend to early retirement [just hold a referendum on it], and increasing women's labour force participation.
   [Lord, what a bunch of worry-wart control freaks.]
   If greater workforce participation means women have even fewer babies, however, our demographic problem will only worsen.
   [The only "demographic problem" we have is this outdated "we still need bigger population" thinking.]
   So we must help them to combine work and family, whether by exit and re-entry, or by doing both at once.
   [Hooboy.]
   Here we should learn from the experience of other nations, which have faced low fertility for much longer. Eastern Europe, France and Scandinavia have all had to experiment with the right policy mixes to encourage women both to work and have children. The evidence shows that state or market-provided services, such as childcare and nursing homes, are not enough. In every case it has been necessary to make existing rigidities of working time more flexible:
   • extended parental leave,
   • the six-hour day in Sweden,
   • and in France recently, the 35-hour week.
   In each case where fertility either improved or halted its decline, it coincided with the introduction of work/family policies based on softening the austerity of industrial-age time.
   [A Luddite statement if there ever was one. The only 'austere' time is downsizing-age time.]
   Many countries are now following suit. Most of Western Europe has extended parental leave options. Italy has recently introduced a new parenting payment. Canada has offered one year's paid leave.
   [Canada has paid "baby bonuses" forever.]
   In the latest work/family thinking, the question of time flexibility is central. Thus far, as American commentator Sylvia Ann Hewlett observes, we have been very good at creating "off ramps", points of exit from the workforce. If, Hewlett says, we regarded, for instance, the regular disappearance of expensive computers from office desks with the same carelessness we do the vanishing of career women from theirs by the absence of adequate work and family policies, it would be rightly seen as a form of economic delinquency.
   [Huh? We know of no particular careless regard for the vanishing of career women. In fact, we know of no particular wave of vanishing career women. This is adding layer upon layer of silly alarmism.]
   Moreover, thus far, we have not been nearly so good at providing "on ramps", although there are signs that this might change.
   [What about recent welfare "reform" in the U.S. and the whole employment-creation purpose behind the Robien Law and the 35-hour workweek in France?]
   Recently, Victorian nursing shortages prompted the retraining and re-employment of older nurses no longer working - to the great approval of patients who appreciated their well-honed human skills.
   We will need such new "on ramps" for men as well. In the late 1990s, Drake Management Consulting surveyed 500 senior executives and human resources managers nationwide. Not one said they would employ managers in their 50s. Job seekers aged between 45 and 69 made up almost two thirds of all unsuccessful job seekers.
   [Our case rests. Why worry about a bogus retiree/worker overbalance in 2050 when you can't find 40-hr/wk jobs for increasing millions here and now?]
   The necessity of improving the worker/dependency ratio and possible labour shortages means we can no longer afford such discrimination on the basis of age.
   [Can somebody puhleez tell us how an otherwise sane person can argue, at one and the same time, that there is an intractable current and growing labor surpluses that allows 500 senior executives to sniff at job candidates in their 50s, and that there are "possible labour shortages"?!]
   As the number of families with dependent children declines and the ranks of the elderly swell, the work and family issue will no longer primarily concern women of reproductive age. It will shift significantly to include elder care. The typical future representative of the work/family conflict could well be an only son with substantial responsibilities for his elderly parents.
   [And even today, elderly parents have no binding claim on their children and there are increasing numbers of childless people anyway.]
   Flexible working time for men also matters if we wish to increase the participation of those aged 55-65.
   [At last, as an afterthought.]
   Patricia Hewitt found senior management, while at first reluctant to embrace flexible work for women of reproductive age, changed their view when they considered the advantages to themselves [such as ??] of staging a gradual retirement; easing down through part-time work.
   If the old Australian Settlement is dead, a new one is not yet born. Today we need to broker a new kind of deal, reflecting the new economic realities, the new social and family ecology
   [High fallutin' puff.]
   If in 2006, a Justice Mary Higgins was presiding over, not an arbitration commission, but some 21st-century equivalent - an inquiry into the contemporary needs of workers and their families - she would need to confront what can be called a new care economy. She would need to roll up her shirtsleeves and calculate the minimum-time budget needed for families to flourish, placing at the very centre the collision between work and family, work and life.
   Any new Australian Settlement must consider not just the money requirements of a worker's family, it must also consider our human needs for care, that labour of love that sustains us all, but which depends so deeply on that new scarce commodity of the 21st century - time.
   [a scarcity that will persist only as long as we stupidly deny ourselves the worksavings of technology by responding to it with kneejerk downsizing and mounting disemployment, instead of kneejerk timesizing and mounting leisure.]

1. Production up, but jobs won’t be, by Issei Morita, Special to the New Haven CT Register.
   Productivity is increasing among manufacturers in the state, but that will not necessarily translate into new jobs.
   The Connecticut Manufacturing Production Index rose to 104.8 in September from 103.9 in August, according to the state Dept. of Labor. The index stood at 106.6 in September 2002. The average work week for manufacturing advanced to 41.9 hours in September, up from 40.4 hours in July.
   "It is in a positive direction and certainly a good sign," said Jamison J. Scott, president of the New Haven Manufacturing Association. But he said it’s unclear whether the trend is long term. Frank Johnson, president of the Manufacturer’s Alliance of Connecticut in Waterbury, also remained cautious. "It will be surprising if any manufacturer starts hiring workers," he said.
   Steve Lanza, executive editor of The Connecticut Economy magazine, said manufacturers are not likely to rehire many workers, even if production levels reach the peak of 128.7 set in August 1999. "Connecticut’s manufacturers became very productive and efficient," he said, so the industry can produce more goods without rehiring a lot of workers.
   Productivity is measured by the amount of output each worker can produce.
   Roger Harrison, research manager of the Regional Growth Partnership of New Haven, said manufacturing is going through a wave of transition. "Manufacturing is not all about assembly lines and noisy and repetitive types of work," he said. "It is becoming a highly skilled and high-paying industry."
   The state had 200,800 manufacturing jobs in September, down 10,900, or 5.1%, from September 2002.
   Pete Gioia, an economist for the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, pointed out that many steel fabricators have not fully recovered from the March 2002 steel tariff, which raised the price of steel and damaged their competitiveness.
   The higher price of imported steel prevented local fabricators from importing raw steel and forced them to purchase more expensive domestic steel instead. That forced many fabricators to cut hours and jobs.

2. New rules prompt drop in German jobless, Roundup via WSJ, A9.
   BERLIN - German unemployment fell more than expected in October [but still only "slightly"] to 10%. But the gains came as new labor-market rules encouraged people to stop claiming benefits. Labor office chief Florian Gerster attributed the slight improvement to seasonal factors and job placement offices pushing government programs promoting self-employment and pressuring the jobless to accept vacancies. The figures "still show no turning point in the labor market," Mr. Gerster said, pointing to a decline in the number of people with jobs.
   [Huh? Sounds like the same kind of statistical chicanery we're used to in the U.S.]
   ...Jobless numbers [are] now about 4.1m people. ...Surveys suggest German companies are unlikely to take on signficant numbers of additional staff soon, relying instead on gains in productivity [ie: worksaving technology] to cope with accelerating demand as the 'recovery' [our quotes] takes hold.
   [Same jobless 'recovery' as here in the U.S. and with same cure - either a huge labor-surplus eliminating war or - spread the vanishing employment by further workweek reduction, preferably not just another rigid and arbitrary step down in hours per week but a constantly (tho gradually) unemployment-offsetting adjustment in the workweek - coupled with overtime-targeted&financed training&hiring.]
   The government is pushing for changes to labor rules
   [a caught-in-the-box thinking gov't pushing for longer workweeks which will only concentrate vanishing market-demanded employment further and further damage domestic German consumer demand!]
   and cuts in social programs
   [which will also further damage domestic German consumer demand]
   to revive Europe's largest economy.
   [Actually, like the Bush administration in America, the German government couldn't be killing the German economy more efficiently if it were doing it on purpose. The general problem here is putting more onus on the least powerful, the unemployed, to find good 35-to-40-hr/wk jobs that no longer exist in the context of an industrialized economy that is constantly increasing its hyper-efficient, worksaving automation and robotization.]
   Lawmakers yesterday approved a first batch of measures to shore up the national pension-insurance system.
   [which will also further damage domestic German consumer demand and worsen the wage-depressing labor surplus by forcing many Germans (similar to our situation here in America) to postpone retirement indefinitely despite an already supertight job market.]

1. Shipyards agreement - Number of working hours raises hornets' nest, by Natalino Fenech, Valetta Times of Malta online timesofmalta.com.
   MALTA - The signing of the shipyards' collective agreement has raised a hornets' nest over working hours with employers seeking reassurances from the government that it has not introduced the concept of a 35-hour week, sources said.
   Clause 10.1 of the agreement states that "the normal working week will be 40 hours spread over five days". Clause 10.4 lays down that workers will be engaged on two shifts: the first from 7 a.m. to 2.30 p.m. with a 30-minute break between 10.30 and 11 a.m. and the second from 2.30 p.m. to 10 p.m., with a half an hour break between 6 and 6.30 p.m.
   Contacted yesterday, GWU secretary general Tony Zarb said "shipyard workers will work seven hours a day from Monday to Friday. That's 35 hours a week. I am very happy the union negotiated this.
   "The workers, however, will continue to be paid for 40 hours a week
   [This is a 35/40 plan. Compare Ron Healey's 30/40 Plan® in Indiana.]
   and because they will be working shifts, they will be paid a shift allowance. If there is not enough work at the yard they will only work in the morning and still be paid the shift allowance," Mr Zarb said.
   However, sources argued that the workers used to be entitled to, or lost, between one-and-a-half and two hours per day walking to the yard's canteen situated away from their dock and taking a wash. "The new shift system is expected to result in workers spending about an hour a day more doing productive work. Workers will have to report for work at the dock to which they are assigned and management is bound to provide facilities next to each dock to ensure there is no more lost time travelling to the canteen or to the showers," the sources said.
   Mr Zarb said the wage "increases" were justified as work practices will be changed and workers should be compensated for it.
   "According to the agreement, in October 2005 we will start negotiating the financial package again," he added. "But the more important issue was that the government has accepted to remain responsible for the 900 workers who will be transferred to the new company, Industrial Projects and Services Ltd," Mr Zarb said. Negotiations on a collective agreement for the workers of the new company are expected to start shortly, he added. "The agreement lays more responsibility on the government and management to attract work. It would be futile to have new work practices without attracting work," Mr Zarb said.
   Sources close to the government argued that the shift system and the elimination of overtime was expected to result in huge savings in the shipyards' wage bill, in spite of the new pay structures. "Overtime payments amounted to thousands of liri per employee. This will be cut down drastically as the shifts will reduce the need for overtime."
   It is estimated that productivity at the moment amounts to 2.5 hours a day and this is anticipated to rise to at least 4.5 hours a day, the sources said.

2. Unions unhappy with Ford social plan, Expatica of Netherlands.
   BRUSSELS – Initial announcements of redundancy plans for workers at Ford's Genk plant received a tepid reaction from workers' unions Tuesday.... The announcement that Ford Genk would be downsizing its workforce by 3,000 led to widespread unrest including factory blockades, strikes and marches..\..
   Ford management announced that...at the age of 50..\., 1,150 workers would be eligible for early retirement – a figure unions had hoped would reach 1,350.
   Unions are eager to prevent unnecessary redundancies [US: layoffs] by cutting working hours and promoting early retirement for employees aged 50 or older.
   [Aha, we're hearing from the intelligent half of the labor movement for a change. In short, they want to prevent job loss by cutting worktime - though cutting workweeks is a lot better than cutting worklife via early retirement. The whole concept of retirement is unsustainable in the age of improving longevity since it gives employees a blank check on taxpayers.]
   The talks are intended to lead to a deal on social measures to accompany the large-scale redundancies....
   [Economies run on jobs and paychecks and consumer spending, not on "social plans."]

3. For the young workforce, it's not life - It's just a living, by Cindy Goodman, Miami Herald.
   [This columnist thinks that 20-somethings "work to live, not live to work." Do we believe her?]
   MIAMI - Cristina Alicea is on her fourth job. But unlike the over-30 set, Alicea and other 20-somethings have greatly different expectations of their employers.
   ''My father is a workaholic and works 14 to 15 hours a day,'' Alicea said. "The younger generation puts more value on their time outside work. I'm trying to stick to my 40 hours a week.''
   In many ways, Alicea's comments capture the attitudes of America's newest labor force. The workplace gurus call these 20-something workers more demanding, distrusting and smarter than baby boomers. The biggest difference is that they seek job security but have no expectation of it. They want a casual work environment and opportunities to sharpen their skills. They want to make more money and work less.
   ''There is less loyalty amongst employees,'' says Alicea, human resources professional at JM Family Enterprises in Deerfield Beach. "Even though they may not be actively seeking a job, if a phone call comes they will listen. They always have their résumés ready.''
   Alicea's history is an example of why the younger set may be less loyal. A former human resources executive with Rexall Sundown, she recently was laid off when the company was sold and headquarter employees deemed redundant. Now, as Alicea approaches her 30s, she is part of a generation of workers that already have felt the jolting effect of the slack job market.
   This time, Alicea believes she's found a good fit for the long haul - a company close to home with good benefits, good pay and employees with an average tenure of more than 10 years.
   Still, no matter how bad the economy gets, these young workers won't work in an environment they don't like. Some even have cut off interviews with employers who expect continuous 60-hour-plus work weeks. Recruiting and managing them present a challenge.
   At Alicea's new employer, Bruce Koesar, vice president of human resource operations, says his company realizes that 20-something workers change jobs more frequently. JM tries to entice and retain them with more cash up front (401Ks, stock options and the like aren't as important), learning opportunities, up-to-date technology and an on-site gym. He's familiar with their demands. ''Many are looking for flexibility in hours and work schedules and insist if they don't find it, they're going elsewhere,'' Koesar says.
   Each new job for these 20-something workers is a new negotiation - for pay, for training, for balance.
   Aldo Granda...took a job in March selling cars at Maroone Dodge. He says he was lured by the prospect of job security and growth opportunities. The dealership is owned by car giant AutoNation. Granda says he had worked at Ralph Lauren at Sawgrass Mills Mall for nearly two years when the company eliminated the product line he sold and his position as well. Granda says he likes his flexible schedule at the dealership in Pembroke Pines because he can still have an outside life. He can negotiate his days off. ''I've already been able to take two little vacations,'' he says.
   Like Granda, Frank Cambeletta...also suffered from corporate cutbacks. He was laid off while working as an account executive for an ad agency in Miami. ''I was making $55,000 a year and living that life,'' he says. ``Then came 9/11.'' Now a server at Macaroni Grill, Cambeletta says he enjoys the supportive environment at work and the ability to work days or nights. Still, he's searching for a profession that offers job security and thinks he may become a police officer. ''I want a profession that's always hiring [dream on, unless you mean soldiering], I want to get good training, I want to work hard, but I also want a personal life,'' he says.
   Clearly, this workforce is far more savvy about work and home life than baby boomers.
   [This must be written by a 20-something. Smarts have been denied to everyone but them.]
   Yes, they are likelier to bring their personal lives into the workplace, with instant messaging and chatting on their cellphones.
   [Not too smart right there.]
   And their technology skills are a huge asset. ''They've seen technology ramped up and expect more in the way of immediacy with everything being real time,'' said Marc Muchnick, author of Naked Management: Bare Essentials for motivating the X Generation at Work.
   To recruit, Darden Restaurants, owner of Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze and Smokey Bones restaurants, makes on-campus visits and dangles the benefit it thinks will lure the younger workers. ''We offer them opportunity to make good solid friendships in a fun atmosphere that's fast paced,'' said Gail Frye, senior operations director for Darden.
   [Oh brother, "good solid friendships" at a restaurant chain?]

1. Daylight saving time pitted farmers against the 'idle' city folk, by Cynthia Crossen, WSJ, B1.
   [We forget about that perception of idleness - the megahours of the agricultural sector (except in winter) made the limited and decrementing hours of the manufacturing sector look lazy, even when they were still up at 60-70 hrs/wk.]
   ...In 1918, when daylight savings time was adopted by the U.S., some Americans didn't even own clocks.
   [Hey, let's not confuse 1918 with 1818.]
   ...The father of daylight time was William Willett, an Engish builder who, in 1907, proposed advancing clocks 20 minutes each Sunday in April and reversing them similarly in September. "While daylight surrounds us," he wrote, "cheerfulness reigns and anxieties press less heavily."
   [That's why we should stay on daylight savings time all year round and double it in summer! Give us back our evenings! And think of the lighting energy it would save!]
   America[n] advocates of daylight saving time [DST, or] "summer time" as it was known in England \were\ led by Marcus Marks, then president of the borough of Manhattan. [He] claimed that people would stay out later on summer evenings, playing games and spending money, which would make everyone healthier and wealthier. Federal legislation to initiate [DST] was supported by baseball teams, chambers of commerce, restaurants and bars, the American Medical Assoc., insurance companies and many labor unions. But even this coalition might not have won the day if America hadn't been fighting a war [WW1, 1917-18 for U.S., 1914-18 for everyone else]. Fewer lamps lit at night meant more fuel for the war effort; and people could use the extra hour of evening sun to cultivate their victory gardens. Furthermore, Germany had adopted DST in 1915. If the system worked for the enemy, it should work for Uncle Sam too....
   [Hey, we should have a special interest group (SIG) of annual Take Back Your Time Day to take back our time from darkness in the evening, via DST all year round and doubled in the summer.]

2. Advertising - Network TV officials ponder their own financial whodunit: Where have all the young men gone? - Is it elementary, Watson, or something harder to fathom? by Stuart Elliott, NYT, C2.
   ...The case of the missing younger male viewers...why have the data from Nielsen Media Research...been showing declines in viewership among men aged 18 to 34 watching prime-time programs on the 6 broadcast networks...ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, UPN, and WB...unexpectedly - and inexplicably - compared with 2002? ..\..Tens of millions of dollars in advertising revenue could be at stake. Male consumers are harder to reach for marketers than women because they watch less TV, and younger men are hardest to reach of all.
   ...There have been virtually no declines in viewership of cable TV by these younger men. Nor...during other parts of the day like late at night. \But\ from July thru Sept...the decilne in broadcast primetime [had ballooned to] 9%, and as the 2003-4...season got underway, it [subsided to] about 7%. Last Thursday [10/30]...the decline had dwindled to 1%, raising hopes that it had been some kind of...bad dream.
   But in the evenings since, the decline has worsened significantly...down 21% on Friday [10/31], 13% on Sat [11/01], 9% on Sunday, and 19% on Monday [11/02]....
   Jordan Levin, president at WB Entertainment...wondered why the ratings for younger men watching popular series with large audiences were all falling at the same time.... [True,] the primetime schedules of the 6 broadcast networks for the fall season include more new series that appeal to women and older viewers....
   [Well, there's that. And there's the onset of dark evenings thanks to dropping DST (see story above) on Oct. 26 - followed shortly by the death theme of Hallowe'en five days later but trumpeted all week on TV and ever since Labor Day in stores (Hallowe'en in America, believe it or not (we didn't), has become an even bigger retail feeding frenzy than super-xommercialized Xmas!). And while everybody's going phony-scary-kiddy-candy, partying waaay-overpaid CEOs are still downsizing and overloading survivors, and the brainless junta in the White House is still wringing its hat and trying to distract attention from the young, mostly male, American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where are the young men? They're scared to leave the office, that's where they are. They're working megahours surrounded by worksaving technology, because our CEOs respond to that technology with kneejerk downsizing instead of kneejerk timesizing. CEOs in a grotesque pervasive labor surplus get sooo spoiled and stupid. They downsizing their workforces and wonder where their consumers have gone, and they intimidate their employees - most vulnerably, young men - into working megahours, or at least putting in the "face time" playing computer games into the evening at the office, and then they wonder why they've disappeared from primetime broadcast viewership. Dumb dumb dumb. And by the way (Sherlock's way), "Elementary, my dear Watson."]

3. [Betcha there aren't too many nurses watching primetime broadcast TV either -]
   Report Cites Danger in Long Nurses' Hours, by Robert Pear, New York Times, A20, and online at nytimes.com.
   WASHINGTON...— Many hospitals and nursing homes are endangering patients by allowing or requiring nurses to work more than 12 hours a day, the National Academy of Sciences said on Tuesday.
   Such long hours cause fatigue, reduce productivity and increase the risk that the nurses will make mistakes that harm patients, the academy said in a new report commissioned by the federal government.
   Donald Steinwachs, chairman of the health policy department at Johns Hopkins University, said fatigue was a "major cause of mistakes and errors" in hospitals and nursing homes. Mr. Steinwachs was chairman of the panel of 18 experts who conducted the study.
   The report said many nurses and nursing assistants worked more than 12 consecutive hours, with some working double shifts of 16 hours. To reduce "error-producing fatigue," the report said, state officials should prohibit nurses from working more than 12 hours in any 24-hour period or more than 60 hours a week.
   In one study for the government, 27% of nurses at hospitals and nursing homes reported that they worked more than 13 consecutive hours at least once a week. The report, from the academy's Institute of Medicine, said, "Long work hours pose one of the most serious threats to patient safety, because fatigue slows reaction time, decreases energy, diminishes attention to detail, and otherwise contributes to errors." Many hospitals and nursing homes have too few nurses to take proper care of patients, the panel said.
   Intensive care units at hospitals should have one licensed nurse on duty for every two patients, the report said. Nursing homes, it said, should have one registered nurse for every 32 patients and one nursing assistant for every 8.5 patients.
   The Bush administration said last year that it had no plans to set minimum staffing levels for nursing homes, in part because such requirements would generate billions of dollars in additional costs for Medicaid, Medicare and nursing homes.
   [But how many costs would it save by catching errors and mitigating problems? Sounds like the basis of their decision was one-sided.]
   But the National Academy of Sciences said the administration should do what it declined to do last year: set "minimum standards for registered and licensed nurse staffing in nursing homes." The academy found overwhelming evidence that as levels of nurse staffing rose the quality of care improved, because nurses had more time to monitor patients and can more readily detect changes in their conditions. "Studies show that increased infections, bleeding and cardiac and respiratory failure are associated with inadequate numbers of nurses," the report said. "Nurses also defend against medical errors. For example, a study in two hospitals found that nurses intercepted 86% of medication errors before they reached patients."
   Dr. Andrew Kramer, a panel member who is a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, said nursing assistants "work double shifts on a fairly regular basis" at some nursing homes. The academy said the nation's 2.8m licensed nurses and 2.3m nursing assistants accounted for 54% of healthcare workers. Thus, said Dr. Harvey Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine, "It is nurses who deliver most of the care we receive."
   But Dr. William Rupp, a member of the panel who is president of a Mayo Health System hospital in Mankato, Minn., said, "Virtually every other industry in the country pays more attention to fatigue than we do."
   Pamela Thompson, chief executive of the American Organization of Nurse Executives, a subsidiary of the American Hospital Association, said it was "an accepted practice" for nurses to work 12-hour shifts."
   Alan DeFend, vice president of the American Health Care Association, which represents nursing homes, said: "The shortage of nursing assistants has reached crisis proportions. Sometimes there's just no alternative to overtime."
   The panel did not distinguish between voluntary and mandatory overtime. AdaSue Hinshaw, a panel member who is dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Michigan, said: "The fatigue effects are the same. Medical errors start climbing after 12 hours of work."
   [Oh right, just like a trucker's, or an airline pilot's.]
   To reduce such errors, the panel said, nurses should be more involved in the day-to-day management of hospitals and nursing homes.

4. Productivity on the rise - Can work/life balance be achieved?..., Silicon Valley Biz Ink via PRNewswire.
   PORTLAND, Ore...- There is good news on the economic front. The U.S. Labor Dept. has reported a substantial rise in productivity, providing early signs of an economic turn-around.
   [That would be true if productivity regardless of marketability had any significance in the economic deep structure.]
   Given this trend, The Career Exposure Network^tm recently conducted a poll to ask employees if they are...able to manage [ie: achieve?] a healthy work/life balance. As a whole, employers and employees are always looking for the elusive work/life balance, because a happier, more satisfied workforce contributes to overall productivity and success at work....
   [Would it were true that employers were always looking for work/life balance, but the higher official and hidden un(der)employment and labor surplus, the greater the downward pressure on employee wages, benefits, and general solicitude by employers for employees.]
   "Given the downsizing of organizations over the last few years, coupled with technology advancements,
   [or rather, "given technology advancements and the kneejerk organizational response of downsizing,"]
   today's workers have become extremely efficient - they are productive, multi-tasking, working long hours, and contributing to the bottom line," said JillXan Donnelly, president, The Career Exposure Network....
   [In fact, they are contributing to a bottom line that they benefit from much less than their jump in efficiency would suggest.]
   According to the poll, MBA graduates trend towards longer work hours, yet the majority of the respondents appear to be managing the balancing act.
   [Like they're going to be honest when their opinion might leak to their employer and lose them their job in a tight job market? But here's a party-line spewer who's brown-nosing for all he's worth - he has no fear of downsizing - or does he?]
   One male MBACareers.com respondent commented, "The American economy has been built on the efforts and hard work of those who have come before. I think too many people are afraid of working hard. Yes, it does require compromise, but what doesn't?"...
   [Another supposedly educated American with his head stuck back in the pretechnological era and never a thought to working smart, not hard.]

5. Arvin: Contract negotiations over, by SCOTT HALL (shall@thejournalnet.com), Daily Journal staff writer [Johnson County, Indiana].
   ArvinMeritor has no plans to continue negotiating terms for closing its Franklin plant, despite union employees’ rejection of the company’s proposal.... Monday’s vote will not change the timeline for phasing out production and terminating the plant’s 850 employees..\..ArvinMeritor spokeswoman Colleen Hanley said, [which is] a process that could begin as soon as December and is expected to conclude by late September.
   The closure will follow the terms of the current labor contract, which expires Sept. 26.... Aside from permanent layoffs or terminations, the contract also allows the company to reduce work hours for limited periods of time..\..
   Aside from general dissatisfaction with the severance terms, longtime employees said the agreement would have exposed them to possible termination months earlier than their contract allows and also would have eliminated their rights to grievance procedures in some cases....

1. Opel, workers reach deal to reduce hours, AP via Seattle Post-Intelligencer online seattlepi.nwsource.com.
   BERLIN - Adam Opel AG, the German arm of automaker General Motors Corp., has reached an agreement with its workers' council that would see working hours cut at its main Ruesselsheim plant.
   Company spokesman Ruediger Assaon said Monday the deal would lead to a "clear reduction" in working time at the factory near Frankfurt, which produces the mid-size Vectra among other models. He declined to say what impact the deal would have on pay or give other details, saying those would be announced Tuesday. The standard German manufacturing work week is 35 hours.
   [We assume they mean the standard west German mfg workweek, since it has just been blocked at 38 for 310,000 east German 'engineering' workers. And taking care of just the mfg sector is all well and good, but if the same thing is happening in Germany as has happened in the U.S., German manufacturing jobs are rapidly vanishing to robotization and outsourcing, and people are scurrying to the service sector for jobs, so it's really the service sector where the new definitions of "full time" are needed. That's why France's nationwide 35-hour workweek, for all the nearsighted resistance of its employer federation, is more advanced than Germany's manufacturing-specific 35-hour workweek. And of course, while we're at it, let's remember that any new rigid level, however "low" sounding to our Puritan ears, should be replaced as soon as possible with automatically, gradually fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against un(der)employment. Without the tie to un(der)employment, any rigid level we set is just arbitrary guesswork - and who needs the rigidity when labor-saving technology is constantly pouring into the economy?]
   Opel has some 20,000 employees at Ruesselsheim, where its headquarters is located. In September, Opel chief executive Carl-Peter Forster said the company was being weighed down by the weak German economy as it seeks to return to profitability. During the 1980s, Opel contributed hundred of millions to parent GM's earnings, but it lost euro502 million in 2001, when it embarked on a five-year turnaround plan to modernize its cars and return to profit. In 2002, Opel lost euro345m.
   [And a backup article from the Financial Times of London with a rather silly headline -]
   Germany faces the cost of poor growth, by Bettina Wassener & Hugh Williamson, Financial Times online FT.com.
   In spite of six months of growing corporate confidence over business conditions ahead, the Berlin government has recently acknowledged that Germany's economy is not expected to grow at all this year.
   [Fine. The chief value of the Ecological Age is sustainability, not cancerous speculator-scintillating 'growth.']
   The optimistic IFO surveys, published by the Institute for Economic Research, will not change the prospects of another year of poor German growth expected in 2004, nor for the tens of thousands who have already lost their jobs. But the country's managers are now increasingly seeking alternative ways to cut their wage bills further.
   One of the most eye-catching proposals came from Deutsche Telekom last week. The telecoms giant, which spends E13.5B ($15.7B) a year for its 250,000-strong staff, is aiming to shed 55,000 jobs worldwide - 40,000 of them in Germany - by the end of 2005, through a combination of job cuts abroad and moving German staff into an employment agency.
   [Huh?]
   Last week, Heinz Klinkhammer, Deutsche Telekom's personnel chief, proposed cutting weekly working hours for 100,000 Germany-based employees from 38 hours to 34 or less. That would be an effective pay cut of at least 10% for those affected [but not a wage cut or a loss of job] and save the company an estimated E500m, according to analysts.
   But union consent for the proposals, which will be discussed in wage talks later this month, would allow Deutsche Telekom to maintain 10,000 jobs and to continue beyond 2004 its policy of no compulsory redundancies in Germany. Similarly, carmaker Adam Opel is considering cutting its working week from 35 to 30 hours in a bid to cut costs and secure jobs, while EnBW, Germany's third-largest utility, is aiming to introduce a four-day week for its staff.
   Such proposals are music to the ears of chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose government is expected to breach European Union deficit targets for a third year running in 2004 amid sluggish growth, persistently high unemployment, and frustratingly slow progress on structural reforms.
   [Then why is Schroeder blocking the 3-hour cut to the 35-hour workweek for 310,000 engineering employees in eastern Germany. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." If cutting the workweek at Telekom and Opel cut costs and maintain and secure jobs, cutting the workweek industrywide and regionwide in eastern Germany do the same thing.]
   For companies such as Deutsche Telekom and Opel, retaining often highly qualified staff on their payrolls, albeit for fewer hours per week, can be preferable to parting with them altogether, and then having to re-hire and retrain staff once conditions improve.
   [Is the nearsighted Financial Times finally beginning to see the light on this issue?]
   For Deutsche Telekom in particular, Mr Klinkhammer's proposals would also allow the group to cut its wage bill despite a major constraint on cutting domestic workforce [AND consumerbase] numbers: in a legacy of its past as a state-owned enterprise, many of Deutsche Telekom's German workers are civil servants, who cannot be fired. Shortening their working hours instead would bring the much-needed savings.
   VERDI, the service industry union that managed to secure a hefty wage rise for Deutsche Telekom's workforce in 2002, has rejected [Telekom's] proposals as "out of the question".
   [Like roughly half the labor movement, VERDI has apparently never figured out that, if you can only get one of the two traditional labor goals of higher pay and shorter hours, if you get higher pay you'll be bucking market forces and wind up with neither, but if you get shorter hours you'll harness market forces and wind up with both, because with shorter hours you're shrinking, or at least not growing, wage-bashing labor surplus.]
   But observers say that proposals such as those from Deutsche Telekom stand a better chance now than ever of succeeding despite union opposition. And both Lufthansa and Volkswagen have demonstrated that such packages are possible.
   
   • Lufthansa in March reached an innovative deal with its staff that allows it to cut hours by up to 2.5 hours a week if certain key corporate measures breach previously-defined levels [see article #3 today below]. This allowed the airline to react rapidly to the collapse in air travel that was triggered by the Sars outbreak.
   • Deutsche Telekom can also point to VW's ground-breaking four-day week agreed 10 years ago, while Deutsche Telekom's T-Systems and T-Mobile units earlier this year already agreed with unions to fewer working hours.
   Despite VERDI's initial rejection of Deutsche Telekom's plans, Michael Sommer, head of the DGB national union federation, welcomed the proposal as "the right way of securing employment". This relatively pragmatic stance reflects the priority placed by the union movement on job security, even if it sometimes involves effective pay cuts [BUT NOT per-hour wage cuts].
   [So Sommer represents the part of the labor movement with a wholistic view that does "get" the advantage and sustainability of workweek rather than workforce 'mutilations.']
   But while some companies may follow the example set by Deutsche Telekom and Opel, there is unlikely to be a general shift towards shorter working time, as working hours in Germany are already among the shortest in the world.
   [Not necessarily true. Aren't they still introducing labor-saving technology?]
   Indeed, government and opposition politicians, and leading business organisations, last week repeated calls for longer working hours without additional pay, as a means of reducing labour costs and stimulating economic growth.
   [Their problems are self-weakened consumer markets, not high labor costs - and they've weakened those consumer markets by downsizing and concentrating income in their own few pockets instead of timesizing and reinvesting income in their own markets via their employees' pockets.]

2. Lufthansa cuts more jobs, expatica.com (Germany).
   FRANKFURT - Citing lingering 9/11 jitters and competition from no-frills airlines, Lufthansa German Airlines Monday announced stringent cuts in jobs, benefits and overall corporate spending, trimming at least 2,000 domestic jobs over the next two or three years....
   Lufthansa posted an operating profit of E65 million euros in the second quarter, but said it was not expecting a black ink result for the full 2003 business year. While passenger numbers were seen rising in all the important routes, earnings were not expected to improve due to the weak economy and the negative effects of the stronger euro, the airline said.
   Lufthansa said it managed to cut personnel costs by 3.3% in the first six months, reflecting the reduced working week deals made with ground and cabin crew employees last April.
   The payroll as of June 30 was 95,000. This was a rise of 6.2% reflecting new acquisitions by the company. Adjusted for that effect, the payroll was down by 2.4%.
   [Sounds like their real problem now is 'acquisition fever' and the lethal 'takeover-downsizing connection.' Acquiring another company's customer base isn't the same as upsizing your own customer base, and downsizing your own and an acquired company's workforce also downsizes your combined customer base, undermining the supposed purpose of the whole takeover rigmarole.]

3. [meanwhile, back in the workaholic English-speaking economies -]
   Work-home balance under threat - Stress at work is costing us dearly, more people want a better balance, by Nick Easen, CNN.
   As long hours and stress gain ground in the workplace, employees are increasingly struggling to balance office and home life. And as concern mounts, workers are looking to a more flexible routine, rather than the rigid nine-to-five, five-day office week.
   [Flexibility is progress-neutral. It takes workweek reduction to solve our economic problems, because workweek reduction spreads the technology-encroached-upon and vanishing employment to more potential consumers - get it? that's c-o-n-s-u-m-e-r, as in customer, as in MARKETS, as in, effective DEMAND.]
   With a steep rise in work hours over recent years, many people believe that company policy is stopping them from achieving a better balance in life.
   [no kidding]
   "I think there is tremendous stress, everybody is really craving a bit of flexibility. The chance to be a human being rather than just a drone," Allison Pearson, a columnist on the Evening Standard newspaper in London, told CNN.
   On both sides of the Atlantic - from Canada to England - concern is mounting over the costs of the work-life conflict. Last month's MORI market research poll of 1,000 workers in the UK concluded that more than half wanted to be able to control the hours they spent working, with three quarters saying they wanted a four-day working week....
   [Significant only if it's 4 x 8hrs = 32 hrs/wk and not merely 4 x 10 hrs = same old 1940-era 40 hrs/wk.]

4. [and in the biggest of the English-speaking economies -]
   2 units in union vote for state cuts - Third branch in SEIU rejects concession deal, by Chris Andrews, Lansing State Journal.
   LANSING, Mich. - Two bargaining units [scientific&engineering and technical] of Service Employees International Union [SEIU] Local 517M overwhelmingly ratified a concessions agreement with the state, but a third [human services support (HSS)] turned it down, union leaders announced Monday.... The ratifications from the two largest SEIU Local 517M units will provide $12.8 million of the $14.4 million in savings sought from the union, said David Fink, director of the Office of the State Employer..\..
   SEIU spokesman Steve Reck said the HSS members, who work in the Unemployment Agency, were especially hard hit by last year's early retirement program. "Those people are understaffed, overworked and working mandatory overtime hours," he said. "They had to vote on their unique situation and how they feel."...
   Last week, the Michigan State Employees Association ratified an agreement. Ratification votes by UAW Local 6000 members and Michigan Corrections Organization members are to take place in the next two or three weeks. While the agreements vary from union to union, all have included a deferred-pay plan called banked leave time. Employees continue to work 40 hours a week but are paid for 38. They bank the other two hours and can take extra time off or be compensated with contributions into their 401(k)s when they leave state service. Most of the deals also require employees to take a specified number of unpaid hours off before next Sept.30. The agreements also offer protection against layoffs.
   Without concessions, the state has warned it may shift to a 37.5-hour workweek to bring about comparable savings.
   It is unclear whether that will happen in SEIU's human services support unit. The workers are federally funded, so it is not clear how much the savings would help the state with its budget problems. But Fink said it's important for all workers to share in the sacrifice [starting at the top?!]. "While it doesn't address our short-term budget needs, it raises and highlights an important issue of equity," he said.

5. [and Down South, worktime consciousness heightens again -]
   Schools brace for claims of overtime by Robert Tomsho, WSJ, B1.
   ...The School Litigation Group [SLC] a law firm in Jackson, Miss...specializes in seeking unpaid overtime on behalf of school employees. \Now,\ already struggling with budget deficits and new educational mandates, some school districts also are girding for lawsuits....
   Since 2000, the SLC has helped more than 3,500 janitors, cooks and bus drivers take...action. ...The six-lawyer firm has a team of two dozen law students who follow up with potential clients solicited through a website that vows to "try to help get you the money you deserve."...
   Defendants named in the overtime lawsuits include 2/3 of Mississippi's 156 school districts, 60 districts in Alabama and 18 in South Carolina.
   [Sounds like slavery persists in Dixie.]
   This past summer, the litigation group also filed a suit in Oklahoma, its first outside the Southeast, and by linking up with affiliated law firms, it vows to eventually force school districts nationwide to pay overtime to qualified employees....
   [Sounds good. At last some lawyers doing something vital for our future = enforcing time discipline on American management. We need them in every industry, not just education.]

1. [here's a reader who independently picked up our notion that blaming shorter worktime for economic woes doesn't match the facts -]
   11/01   Good news at last, or is it? letter to editor by ... Ira Rosofsky of New Haven CT, NYT, A28.
   The fact that a welfare state like Finland now ranks ahead of the United States in economic competitiveness ("Countries rated by cost of doing business," World Business, Oct.30) gives the lie to the notion that high social expenditures are bad for business. Finland spends almost twice as much as the U.S. on social expenditures - 29% versus 15% of GDP in 1997 - proving that you can have your cake and eat it too.
   This Finnish cake includes 30 days of vacation a year, 26 weeks of maternity or paternity leave at 66% of salary, daycare, and universal health and pharmacy benefits. All this proves that what's good for people is not necessarily bad for business.
   [We missed this item in the NY Times but pal Alan picked it up on GoogleSearch and it appears as "WEF says Finland beats U.S. as most competitive nation" on 10/31/2003 #3. And one of the versions previously picked up points out that Finland has actually beaten the great workaholic USA for the last three (3) years! "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."]

2. 11/01   Companies' calls for shorter workweek stir controversy, dw-world.de/english via Infoshop News (infoshop.org).
   The decision by telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom and carmaker Opel to cut workers’ hours to save costs and jobs has reignited a debate over whether Germans work too little.... With its generous benefits and holidays, Germany has long been considered a worker’s paradise..\..
   Some [however] say only longer hours can help the economy.... Earlier this year, Economics Minister Wolfgang Clement raised the ire of the country’s trade unions and churches by suggesting Germans need to work more.
   But the latest chapter of what has become an ongoing discussion has been sparked by Deutsche Telekom’s and Opel’s plans to actually scale back employees’ hours and wages.
   Industry groups and economists have criticized the companies’ decision, arguing just the opposite is needed to help spur long-term growth in Germany. Ludwig-Georg Braun, president of the German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK), slammed cutting the workweek as a “shortsighted defensive strategy” in an interview with Web site of Germany's ARD public television. “Longer working hours would on the other hand noticeably improve the competitive position of the companies in global markets,” Braun said. “Crisis strategies and cutting working hours won’t make any jobs or revitalize the domestic economy."
   [Downward adjustment of the workweek is hardly a 'shortsighted' or 'crisis' strategy in the Age of Automation unless Ludwig-Georg Braun wants to uncloak as a Luddite and roll back technology.]
   Although some politicians and union bosses have applauded Deutsche Telekom and Opel for seeking solutions that might avoid massive job loses, some economists fear the longer-term effects for Germany’s companies.
   [The longer-term effects for Germany's companies are that they will maintain their domestic consumer markets, which may be the only consumer markets they can depend on.]
   Due to poor economic conditions, Opel is discussing moving to a 30-hour workweek and Deutsche Telekom plans to cut hours for 100,000 employees by 10%.
   Less competitve globally
   Hagen Lesch, a labor market expert for the Cologne-based Institute for the German Economy (IW), told public television broadcaster ZDF that only by working longer for the same wages could German firms remain competitive.
   [These guys evidently think the sweatshops of the Third World are the most competitive things since T-Rex, but then, how come none of them are near the top of the competitiveness chart yesterday? - see chart in 10/31/2003 #3 below.]
   According to the institute, working one hour more per week with no increase in wages would cut labor costs by 2.7%, possibly creating 100,000 new jobs.
   [There is absolutely no mechanism or guarantee to get those labor cost savings reinvested in jobs instead of in more automation or higher executive pay.]
   Noting that the Swiss work on average 300 hours and Americans 400 hours more per year than do Germans,
   [yes and Switzerland, at 40.5 hrs/wk, fell from 5th to 7th place in competitiveness this year, far behind #3 Sweden, at 39 hrs/wk, and #4 Denmark, at 37 hrs/wk, and there's an excellent chance that the U.S.’ 2nd place is due only to its GDP size - see chart in 10/31/2003 #3 below]
   Norbert Walther, chief economist for Deutsch Bank, told NDR public radio that Germans also[?] handicapped themselves by starting work later than other countries. “Whoever wants to get rich and at the same time work less, doesn’t quite get it,” he said.
   [This guy's mindset is back in the 18th-century with Poor Richard's Almanac ("the early bird gets the worm"). Clearly he has been carefully sheltered from Silicon Valley and some of the other centers where many creative/productive hackers stroll into work at 11 am or 12 noon. Perhaps the real name for Norbert Walther is "Puritan" as in "work ethic" or even "a Puritan is a person who has the nagging suspicion that somebody, somewhere, is having a good time." We sense this is all, like rape, really about power - regaining diminishing power over people's lives - combined with a widespread confusion of busyness and importance - "I'm busier than you so I'm more important than you - get the hell out of my way! - let me to the front of the line, NOW! - why shouldn't I take up TWO parking spaces for my new car?! - why shouldn't I stop in the handicapped space/firelane/RIGHT in front of the store regardless?!" etc. etc.]
   However, Thea Dückert, the deputy leader of the Green Party, called the decision to lighten employees’ workload as the lesser of two evils [since when is a lighter workload 'evil'?]. “This model definitely involves more solidarity than the sacking of tens of thousands of workers,” she told the French news agency AFP. At the same time she admitted increasing hours would help companies save, but said lowering non-wage costs such as social security payments would be a better way to create more jobs.
   The corporate model for scaling back hours in order to avoid slashing jobs is that of Volkswagen. Back in 1993 the crisis-hit carmaker moved to a four-day workweek, saving an estimated 30,000 jobs. The increased flexibility enables the company to better respond to changes in demand.
   Currently, however, VW is hoping to increase its workweek from 28.8 hours to 35 by using a “demographic” labor plan stepped according to age.
   [Fine, if they've got the markets. Timesizing goes both ways like a moneyback guarantee. But with constant injections of labor-saving technology, Timesizing makes sure the trend is generally toward the decreased workweek so we stop destroying consumer demand with workforce downsizing.]

3. 11/01   'Amusement park': The German social paradise faces a battery of crises - With rising unemployment, nearly defunct health and pension systems and budgetary cutbacks, can the country maintain a rising standard of living?, Taipei Times.
   [This is a good question also for the USA, except while Germany ponders, it's enjoying short worktime and generous unemployment and dole benefits and dole whereas while the U.S. ponders, it's suffering ever lengthening worktime and stingy unemployment and dole benefits that are overflowing into costly, wasteful and much less reversible disability, homelessness, incarceration and suicide.]
   BERLIN - From the outside, Germany looks like a worker's paradise with the longest holidays [ie: vacation+public holidays], some of highest pay scales in the world and a comprehensive welfare system. Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl once famously called Germany an "amusement park" because of the long vacations and the big chunk of public holidays enjoyed by the country's employees. But change is afoot and Germany's once steadily rising standard of living can no longer be taken for granted.
   Germany now faces record unemployment, a crisis in the health and pension systems, continuous government spending cutbacks, a hard-pressed education system, and a growth rate that has pushed Germany to the bottom of the European economic league table.
   [The U.S. shares every one of these problems except the last, and its recent much-trumpeted quarterly estimated 7.2% GDP growth spurt will probably be adjusted downward and followed by disappointing next quarters - see "A big quarter - Putting the 'gee' in G.D.P." in 10/31/2003 #1.]
   Cushioned by years of post-war prosperity, German workers normally put in a 35-hour week, have 30-plus days holiday, 16 days off for public holidays [additionally for a total of 46?] and retire at 60 even though the official retirement age is 65. Now German workers are facing calls from across the political spectrum for cutting public holidays, raising the retirement age to 67 and introducing the 45-hour working week as a way of boosting economic growth and ending three years of economic stagnation.
   [Germany is facing the same lack of political choice on this issue as Americans astonishingly faced on the nutty issue of launching an unprovoked invasion of Iraq. And ain't it wonderful how people think that just because they raise working hours the market-demanded work is going to automatically be there, never mind wall-to-wall automation and inrushing robotics? If the German power elite proceeds with this obsolete "work hard, not smart" ethic they will plunge Deutschland into the economic toilet as fast as Japan did in the late '80s when it abandoned its traditional lifetime employment and started copying ever-so-chic American downsizing - never mind the glaring, obvious, fundamental question of how in hell do you expect to GROW (= UPsize) by DOWNsizing?! Why won't longer worktime work, especially in the Age of Robotics? Because it concentrates the diminishing market-demanded worktime onto fewer people. It's not a sharing device, it's an unsharing, hoarding device. And though presentday economists will admit this only when they're going overboard arguing the other side in the limited area of free trade, economics is about sharing and ecological economics, which we're all getting brutally introduced to by a whole conjunction of natural constraints, is about sustainable sharing. But isn't this the stupid ridiculous discredited why-is-this-idiot-still-yapping-about-this?! Lump of Labor(-Demand) Fallacy (LOLF)?!   Not exactly, because the LOLF sneerers never pin down the time frame, so all they're really saying is that labor-demand is infinite in infinity, which is no news to anyone because anything is infinite in infinity. We're talking about the immediate term, Marshall's "market term," in which companies' downsizing would seem to indicate to anyone with an open mind that generally speaking, there is not infinite demand for labor here - there's not even fixed or stable demand for labor here (which is what LOLF scoffers are always putting in the mouths of shorter-hours advocates) - there is in fact, actually, market-demandedly, SHRINKING demand for labor here, which to hear the LOLF scoffers tell it, should be IMPOSSIBLE. LOLF scoffers are just "don't confuse me with facts" defenders of the status quo, particularly the especially stupid status quo of astronomical and still spreading income gap. Let's invent a precisely parallel name for them. Let's see now: lump of labor-demand fallacy ~ mushroom of labor-demand fallacy = mushroom of Mployment pretense = MOMP - "hey Mum, I've got the MOMPs!"]
   With Germany expected to overshoot the strict fiscal targets for euro member states again this year...Schroeder's Social Democrat-led government battles to overhaul a welfare system that was pieced together more than a century ago [and] a raft of elections and opinion have underscored the current political disorientation in the nation.
   Economists believe that the nervousness created by the reform debate has resulted in growing unease among German consumers with surveys showing stagnating consumer sentiment [and] official data showing retail sales unexpectedly falling in real terms year-on-year in September.
   [We're still ignoring here the connection between employees and consumers. The nation's major consumers ARE its employees and their dependents, and why the hey shouldn't they be uneasy when the whole across-the-board ruling elite have swung back to failed policies that were dropped when the nation's welfare system "was pieced together more than a century ago." Like the New Deal in the U.S., the "pieced-together" welfare system could have been avoided if they'd had the economic-design skill, BGOs (blinding glimpses of the obvious) and ability to operate on their own retinas to design and implement automatic unemployment-offsetting workweek fluctuation with overtime-to-training&hiring conversion.]
   While polls show that more Germans blame Kohl for the country's current problems than Schroeder, uncertainty unleashed by the changes has driven down support for the Social Democrats.
   More people abstained than voted in weekend regional elections in the state of Brandenburg, which surrounds the capital, Berlin, raising concerns among some political analysts that the electorate has become disillusioned and exhausted by the stream of changes to the country's welfare state and continuing weak economic growth. "In historic terms the changes represent a quantum leap [backward?!] for Germany," said said Adolf Rosenstock, European economist with the Japanese investment house, Nomura, in Frankfurt. "This is the first time in 30 years that the social welfare state is being substantially cut back," Rosenstock said. "Previously, there ha[ve] been cuts but mainly there has been an expansion in the social state."
   Days after parliament's lower house signed off on Schroeder's landmark 'reform' package [our quotes], the German Chancellor announced a big shakeout in the nation's deficit-hit pension system, including shifting more of the burden onto the retired through a freeze on pensions....
   [As human longevity increases, pensions are under pressure everywhere, and the urgency heightens for overtime- and overwork-targeted training and hiring, preferably OJY (on-the-job training), not to mention the kind of flexible worksharing to provide the easy self-supporting livelihoods for seniors (and single parents, and...everyone - if we make it easier for everyone to support themselves, we taxpayers won't have to).]
   Economists see keeping the lid on Germany's high non-wage costs as crucial in the struggle to tackle the nation's high unemployment, which currently stands at 10.1%.

4. 11/02   Study: EU candidate[-nation]s work longer hours, press reports via Slovak Spectator.
   A Dublin-based European foundation for the improvement of living and labour conditions produced a study that showed that employees in EU candidate states work longer hours than those in EU member states. According to the study, the average workweek in the EU was 39.8 hours, as opposed to 44.4 hours in the acceding states. In Slovakia employees worked 42.9 hours per week, the study showed. While in the EU, an average of 31% of employees made use of access to courses that increase their qualifications, the figure in Slovakia was higher - at 39%. The average in EU candidate states was 24%.

5. 11/02   America's tired masses, by Susan Ives (suives@texas.net), San Antonio Express-News via Alameda Times-Star [probably Alameda, Calif.]
   Friday, Oct. 24, was Take Back Your Time Day, a dismal reminder that we work too much. I would have given you the heads-up sooner, but I was busy.
   Busy! With satisfied smiles, as if their very busyness validated [Americans'] existence. Not to be busy is to be unneeded and unwanted. It's un-American.
   And that's the point. Americans, the day's organizers claim, get 13 measly vacation days a year. Most Europeans get 20 or 25 days - and work fewer hours per day to boot. Oct. 24 symbolized the point when Europeans kick back and enjoy their leisure while we are still hunkered down in our cubicles and factories. A 350-hour gap is caused by less vacation time, a longer workweek and lower wages, which force many low-wage workers to take on additional part-time work to make ends meet.
   One in four Americans gets no paid vacation. Only about half our neighbors took a full week's vacation last summer. We work harder than medieval peasants.
   Americans always have been go-getters, but this modern busyness took root after World War II. Today, most of us could work half as much and still enjoy the same standard of living we did in the 1950s.
   [AA: Unfortunately, this is not the case without government intervention. It's much less efficient for business to hire more people to do the same work. PH: not much less efficient - because there is the paradoxical productivity bump from workweek decrements, documented by Juliet Schor in "Overworked American" p.154, probably due to better prioritization, well-restedness and creativity.]
   Instead, we choose[?] to work even harder, to make more money and buy more stuff. They call it "time poverty." Most of us have plenty of money and tons of stuff [AA: no, we don't - only the upper-middle class does], but we are starved for time.
   Europeans, for the most part, take a different approach. Norwegians work 29% less than most Americans yet take home only 16% less in pay.
   This isn't an anti-work movement, nor is it an invitation to spend more time in front of the boob tube sucking down jumbo bags of peanut M&Ms. Work gives life meaning and structure [or just money and self-support]. But it's just one of the components of a balanced life.
   If we could work less, most of us would choose to spend more time with our families. In a recent poll, four out of five Americans said that they wish they had more time to spend with their families. That's no surprise. But more than half (52%) said they would trade a day's pay for an extra day off each week. [Over one in five] (21%) would take a pay cut in exchange for more free time to spend with their families. That's putting your money where your mouth is.
   Our overwork affects every aspect of our lives. Overworked people are more stressed, contributing to heart disease and weakened immune systems. We exercise less and eat more fast food, leading to obesity and diabetes. We have less time to become engaged in our communities or keep up with current affairs.
   [AA: I suspect the Bush administration doesn't want us to spend too much time keeping up with the "liberal bias" in the news media, though. PH: But he'd love for us to keep up with the "conservative" bias of radio talkshow hosts.]
   Take Back Your Time Day is an initiative of the voluntary simplicity movement. Because of these roots, it emphasizes individual efforts. Take a long walk. Learn to meditate. SOME of us can take more control of our time. But many can't.
   The White House has been pushing a change to the Fair Labor Standards Act to exempt employers from paying overtime to some workers. The administration estimates the proposed rules would affect 644,000 workers; others peg it at closer to 8 million.
   The AFL-CIO speculates the removal of the time-and-a-half disincentive would encourage employers to overwork current staff rather than hire more people [AA: gee, what a surprise!]. Those making less than a living wage need to work two, sometimes three jobs just to pay the rent and put food on the table. [AA: Yes, this contradicts what is said above (about most of us having plenty of money and tons of stuff).] As companies downsize, workers hesitate to jeopardize their jobs by going home at quitting time.
   There isn't one magic law or personal lifestyle change that will give us back our time. It will take a cultural shift, in the kitchen, in corporate boardrooms and in government. In all those places, it's time to change attitudes toward time.

6. 11/02   No such thing as 8-hour day, by Chuck Martin (business@seacoastonline.com), Portsmouth (NH?) Herald Business News.
   The number of hours executives and managers spend working is getting out of control. Not only has the eight-hour workday all but vanished, but the nine-hour day is falling by the wayside, as well.
   In a survey of several hundred senior executives and managers throughout the United States conducted by NFI Research, we found that 93% of them are working nine or more hours per day, and 70% are working 10 or more hours. For executives and managers, the 40-hour work week is nonexistent, with 97% of respondents saying they work 41 hours or more per week, and 64% saying they work more than 50 hours per week.
   And any worker who feels overworked might take consolation that the top executives are working more hours than managers, with almost four-fifths of senior executives working 10 hours or more, and less than three-fifths of managers working that same amount of time on a typical workday.
   The challenge for business people today is to disconnect. Recent research shows that the majority of executives and managers have 90 minutes or less of personal time during the workday. So the workday is getting longer, and businesspeople are taking less and less time during that workday, an unhealthy situation, at best. "I do not know of anyone in our business who is not working harder, longer hours," said one survey respondent.
   The problem is not only the number of hours worked in the course of a day - it is the kind of hours that are worked. The pace of work is continuously increasing, with more meetings, decisions and projects and, consequently, more personal stress.
   For many, this new work has become a way of life that, if left unchecked, can cause great unbalance within the managerial ranks. "A regular day for me is a 10-hour day," said Terry Sullivan, president of the Western Energy Institute, a regional and international trade association of energy companies, based on Portland, Ore. Sullivan sees the "Internet pace" of business and increased focus on short-term results as the main culprit.
   "It’s a hurry-up-and-get-things-done and do-it-with-less approach in business today," Sullivan said. "Somehow, we have to stop the madness." Businesspeople today need to get back to balance. For Sullivan, who has two children, age 5 and 7, that means taking his children to the school bus on mornings he is not traveling.

7. 11/02   Job-creation schemes don't work, by Richard Teather, mises.org.
   Free-market economists like myself attack government tax-and-spend policies as being damaging to prosperity, accusing the government of "sucking money" or "leeching resources" out of the economy. We claim that taxes damage not only the welfare of the person from whom they are taken, but the whole country.
   Politicians, supporters of state spending, and even questioning students often challenge this negative view of taxation with the positive effects of public spending. In essence, the argument runs something like this:Say man A makes $100,000 and man B is unemployed. The State decides to create a government job for man B. To do this, they tax man A $50,000 to pay for man B's salary. Surely the $50,000 that man A lacks is now in the hands of man B, who will spend it in the economy instead?
   Therefore shouldn't there be no overall loss to the economy, but more people employed?[1]
   This is the old 'zero-sum' fallacy; the politicians' belief that the size of the economy is fixed and they only have to decide how to divide it up.
   [Never heard it called that before - it's usually called the Lump of Labor(-demand) Fallacy. But the only way Mises followers and their crowd can get it to be a fallacy is to misrepresent the "politicians" as focused on the size of the economy in an indefinite or even infinite timespan and of course, everything is infinite in infinity. They are, however, focused on the immediate term, not infinity, when CEOs are practicing mass layoffs of employees (alias consumers!) which presumably they wouldn't be doing if they thought the size of the economy was infinite and they only have to decide how to hold their mouths till that becomes obvious. So if the belief that the size of the economy is fixed or shrinking in the immediate term is good enough for the CEOs intent on downsizing, why shouldn't it be good enough for the politicians and for us?]
   Austrian economists, with their focus on the real world and human nature, know better;
   [Ha.]
   wealth does not just exist, it has to be created, and the disincentive effects of government actions do not just distribute wealth—they actively destroy it.
   [So do private-sector CEOs who downsize rather than timesizing - they redistribute wealth to themselves by the millions and they actively destroy it - and their companies - by downsizing their own vital consumer demand via mass layoffs of their employees.]
   Taking $50,000 from A through taxation reduces the economy not by $50,000 but by more, much more. Studies in the USA and Australia suggest that the damage caused by $50,000 of taxes could be over $130,000.[2] This means that even when the $50,000 taken from A is returned to the economy via B, there is still a net loss of $80,000.
   [Depends what A was going to do with that $50,000 otherwise. Probably look desperately around for a rising stock, regardless of already bloated P/E ratio. A Hawaiiain financial newsletter in the early '90s identified the reason for unprecedentedly high P/E stock ratios = such astronomically concentrated national income that the wealthy literally have nowhere else to put it but the stock market - where it's wasted on the equivalent of a pyramid scheme dba stock bubble.]
   This comes about through a variety of disincentives, of which the most important is the impact on A. A's $100,000 job now only brings him $50,000 of after-tax income.
   [No tax rate in the world takes 50% of a mere $100,000 job. This guy's examples are bogus.]
   Now a $100,000 job commonly involves more time, responsibility and stress than a $50,000 job, hence its higher rewards.
   [AA: As a general rule, this must be false. In a market system, salary is determined by supply and demand, not the nature of the job per se. PH: Amen.]
   A used to be compensated for this by his higher salary, but now part of that has been taken away by the state; as A effectively now has a $50,000 job, he will want to reduce his effort and stress to levels commensurate with his after-tax pay.
   [AA: He may want to, but why should he be able to? Is there no one else in the marketplace waiting to take A's job if he slacks off? His alternative jobs would be taxed at the same rate, would they not? Alternatively, why wouldn't he want to work even harder to maintain his lifestyle?]
   Traditionally, economists thought of this being done by working fewer hours, and found little evidence of it happening in the real world. However this downshifting could equally be by working less hard, not working, hidden [and/or] unpaid overtime, or even by trading down to an easier job (perhaps even that soft government job created for B).
   [AA: See above comment. Also note the sneering assumption that a government job is easier than a private-sector job. If true, it's only because the public-sector job is unionized and the private-sector job is not. Public-sector jobs are often, by their nature, more, not less stressful than private-sector jobs. That's why we have the expression "going postal".]
   Economists call this the "substitution effect"; by working hard A can now only get 50% of the salary that work brings, but if he works shorter hours he gets 100% of the benefit of the extra leisure time, as that isn't taxed. Effectively A opts for leisure (or just a less stressful life) instead of paid work.
   [AA: But it's quite obvious that few workers have this option. PH: And if they do, what's wrong with leisure? Or is it only OK for the heirs and wives of the super-rich?]
   Society therefore loses out, by getting less of the useful work that A was doing.
   [AA: This assumes that the volunteer, social and family activities of A have zero value - a typical assumption of economists, certainly, but not a valid one. PH: It also assumes that the "useful" work that A was doing was in some non-controversial area besides, for example, weapons manufacture, forest clearcutting, fishery dragnetting, groundwater polluting, and the many many private-sector jobs that rely on taxpayer handouts - mining, agriculture, borderline and high-exec-pay non-profits.... Things are so simple for Mises-ensians (after Ludwig von Mises, another black&white thinker who said "Private-sector GOOD, public-sector BAD, duh."]
   Yes, society now gets the benefit of B's work, but since society wasn't prepared to pay for that voluntarily through the market it clearly doesn't value it as much.
   [AA: Another typical economist-assumption that fails to take into account government's ability to organize large projects that the private sector cannot.]
   The common counterargument to this is that once A is being taxed he will have to work harder, or longer hours, to earn more and maintain his after-tax income. This may have been true in the past, but in the modern economy it has probably been pushed as far as it can without us all dropping from exhaustion.
   [AA: Fascinating point. Note the contrast between A, the stressed-to-the-breaking-point private sector worker, and B, possessor of the "soft" government job. PH: especially questionable in the context of today's government budget cuts.]
   Also greater general wealth means that very few of us are close to the bread line any more;
   [AA: Well, A certainly isn't. PH: What planet is Richard Teather living on? More Americans than ever are just a paycheck away from the bread line - see 9/27/2003 #1, "More Americans in poverty in 2002, census study says." This guy not only picks wildly unrealistic examples, he is uninformed - doesn't read the newspaper - doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.]
   a drop in income will not mean starvation or homelessness [for those in Teather's gated community], just a drop in lifestyle that can be compensated for by other lifestyle gains from an easier job.
   [AA: Yes, that's why working less is a GOOD thing, not a BAD thing].
   So the effect on A is damaging to society [oh sooo damaging], but what of the effect on A's employer, X? If A is working less hard, or threatening to leave for an easier job, X faces a loss of profits (more damage to the economy)
   [AA: why is a loss of profit to X damaging to the economy as a whole? PH: especially at a period when the concentration of national and global income is far beyond its point of diminishing returns alias marginal utility.]
   To prevent this, X could of course increase A's pay, so that his after-tax pay returns to its old level. Alternately, X could hire someone else to help A, with two people doing the job of one (if possible; A may have rare skills).
   [Fine, that would be job sharing, a primitive and inflexible form of work sharing, but still better than job hoarding.]
   The left, especially the unions, like this because it appears to increase employment. Unfortunately it also increases X's costs, which X will have to attempt to pass on to its customers.
   [But X now has an additional customer to pass costs along to - so X doesn't need to make as much money on each sale.]
   In the short term, this will result in an increase in living costs (and therefore a drop in welfare) for the whole of society, as products become more expensive. In the long term, domestic producers like X will be undercut by foreign competitors who do not face these tax costs. If X goes bust (or relocates its activities to a more favorable country) then A's job goes, and the tax to pay for B's job goes with it.
   [This is such a caricature of reality by a true simpleton.]
   Advanced technology can help keep home producers [meaning?] like X competitive despite tax-driven labor cost hikes, but not for long; the rest of the world soon catches up.
   [AA: Yes, there's less work to go around, all right.]
   So there are two sources of hidden costs, the effect of the tax on A and X. But there is another problem that is even less visible; the effect of the tax on C. Who is C? C is the man [or woman?] who would have come up with a new invention, or improved a business process, or just run a business very efficiently, creating jobs and probably providing real employment for B.
   [Oh brother.]
   If taxes were low then he would try this, because the potential rewards would make the effort and risk worthwhile. However at a 50% tax rate the potential rewards are halved while the risks and effort remain the same, so many Cs will not bother and instead choose the easy life of a less well-paid but more stress-free and risk-free job.
   [I don't understand. The tax is on the worker, not on a business. Besides, if these C's have a more stress-free and risk-free job (if such a thing does in fact exist), aren't they better off?]
   This opportunity cost is invisible, and difficult to measure; it is the loss of wealth that would have been created in the future were it not for the tax. However, long-term comparative studies have suggested that each 1% of GDP taken in tax reduces long-term growth rates by between 0.2% and 0.4%.[3] This may not sound like much, but that is an annual loss; if taxes are raised by 3% of GDP (the U.K. government's current plan) and then kept steady at that higher level, there will be a loss of growth of around 1% a year. Over 25 years, the cumulative effect of this would be a national economy around 30% smaller than it would otherwise have been.
   That's a lot of real jobs that B could have had.
   [AA: Assuming no value to the government-sponsored work that B does.]
   Notice that these problems apply to all taxes (other than a poll tax); even if you could design a perfect non-distorting tax system, it would still have these costs.
   [The perfect non-distorting tax system is a fees-for-service system, which would hopefully spare us these disingenuous rants from little Mise(n)sians.]
   In reality of course, actual tax systems produce their own additional distortions; special tax concessions for different types of activity that divert too many resources into particular sectors of the economy. There are also the administrative costs of collecting the tax and of advising the taxpayer, resources wasted on merely transferring rather than creating wealth.
   [AA: The airline industry has not generated net profit over its 100-year history. Are we arguing that it has "created no wealth"? That it never should have existed? PH: Then there's passenger rail....]
   The effect of taxation is therefore overwhelmingly damaging.
   [Braindead over-simplification.]
   Even if taxes are 'invested' in projects that are expected to increase national wealth (an argument frequently advanced in Europe for publicly-funded transport networks), the threshold for success is enormous; the benefits of the project have to not only cover its costs, but also outweigh all the hidden costs of the tax. And that's without taking into account the massive waste and inefficiencies of the public sector.
   [AA: I suppose the author just wouldn't feel comfortable if he got through this entire article without throwing in this make-weight argument. All monopolies tend toward inefficiency, whether public or private. All private enterprises strive toward monopoly. That's why "barriers to entry" are so often trumpeted to potential investors by authors of business plans. PH: And we have a few massive wastes and inefficiencies of the private sector noted on our makework pages. The only advantage between privatizing and nationalizing lies in whether more good managers happen to be in the sector you're switching to at the time - as The Economist has pointed out.]
   If that is the case, then why does public spending still happen? We know that real jobs are a better guarantee of prosperity for the unemployed than welfare.
   [Agreed. But real jobs are a function of market-demanded employment divided by the common workweek, and if there's no automatic mechanism that adjusts the workweek as labor-saving technology pours in, downsizing is the default and there are increasing numbers of unemployed whom the public has to support on welfare or makework, or kill off in foreign wars or domestic starvation. Generally the public prefers welfare or makework, ergo public spending still happens.]
   If reducing taxes helps the economy to grow, the main beneficiaries will be the unemployed who find jobs.
   [Correct, but if that were true, the great American tax reduction experiment of the Bush administration would not have lost 6m jobs.]
   Why then do politicians insist on higher taxes? Partly through ignorance, of the politicians and of the electorate, especially of the hidden opportunity costs.
   [And let's be honest, partly through empire-building, same thing as private-sector CEOs scrabble for.]
   Unfortunately though, it is also through something more sinister. The 'harmful effects' [our quotes] of taxation are spread throughout the economy, but the benefits can be concentrated on smaller groups.[4] Therefore, although the economy overall suffers from tax-and-spend policies, special interest groups can actually benefit. These special interest groups may be formed on regional, ethnic, class, or even industry lines; anything that allows the politicians to target a bunch of voters. In today's low-turnout elections, politicians can make the tradeoff between a diffuse, and hidden, disadvantage to the many (who probably won't vote anyway) and a well-directed and well-advertised benefit to the few.
   [AA: I assume he has Halliburton and Bechtel in mind as examples. PH: Except Bush isn't exactly trying to advertise the benefits to Hallibechtel - that dirt is being dug out by the media. Teather may also be thinking of Bush's (recently abandoned) attempts to curry the anti-Castro vote in Cuba, etc.]
   There is also a marginal cost/benefit problem; the losses due to taxation are spread throughout the population, so to do anything about it the concerned citizen would have to campaign successfully against billions of dollars of public spending to reduce his own taxes by a few hundred. Against him are the special-interest groups who only have to be successful in one campaign to reap massive benefits. In the middle of this sit the politicians, deftly plucking the taxpaying goose without letting it squawk too much.
   What can we do? Squawk loud, squawk long, squawk often.
   Richard Teather is Senior Lecturer in Taxation [students must be getting a pretty onesided view] at Bournemouth University, England. Previously he worked as a professional tax adviser; see A above. He can be contacted through his website (www.teather.me.uk ) [we'd love to tether him, ukk], or directly by e-mail on rteather@bournemouth.ac.uk
   [1] My thanks to a Mises reader who recently sent me the question paraphrased here.
   [2] The actual amount is very difficult to quantify; the economy never stands still, and so changes in taxation take place against a backdrop of other changes. For a summary of recent studies, see "The negative impact of taxation on economic growth", Leach, Reform (London), September 2003.
   [3] Again Leach (footnote above) has a very good summary of the various studies over the last 10 years.
   [4] See Tullock's work on "logrolling" for a more detailed analysis of how this works, or just look at your representative's voting record.

Click here for spontaneous cases of primitive timesizing in -
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Oct.21-24/2003
Oct.15-20/2003
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Oct.8-9/2003
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2002
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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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