Timesizing, Not Downsizing

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

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

Calling all political candidates, all parties, all countries. Free consulting if you want to save your nation's economy and bring your country or language-area honour by making yourselves the pioneers of the next generation of economic design. We've run against the Kennedy's on this platform three times in USA (won 1000 times more votes per $) and pushed an old tried-and-true approach further than anyone else - this is the largest website on work-sharing in English - worksharing has a sustainable timesizing future, yielding a pattern for 4+ upgrades and a future, in round figures, of 500+ years of rising living standards. If you're tired of surfing the buzzwords (nanotechnology, ecofeminism, postmodernism..) and you want some real design smarts applied to the big problems, this is your site. We grab the best of Bucky Fuller, Herman Daly, Ben Hunnicutt and system science, cut through the contradictions on the Right, Left & throughout contemporary economic "science." We jump to the heart of the matter, & get it done.
To "save the world," we need to start at the right place. We can't start with hunger, because no one with money is hungry. And we can't start with lack of money (poverty), because no one with a good job is poor. It all comes down to – jobs. And jobs come down to on-the-job hours. Mess up your time arrangements and you mess up your whole society, because time counts it all. Keep injecting worksaving technology into a frozen 1940 workweek and you create so much job insecurity you get people working 90-hour weeks nextdoor to people caught in the latest round of downsizing and about to lose the house. The question of the century is - how far into the age of robotics can we maintain a pre-computer workweek before employment collapses and with it, our markets?
This website straightens out the time mess and creates jobs by economic design, defined as the answer to the question, "What's the smallest change that would yield the greatest good for the greatest number?" The new design should be simpler than the tangled web we've woven and should actually be a series of designs to satisfy ever-rising expectations.
It should answer the obvious question: How do we solve our economic downturn? and the unasked question: As we concentrate our national income and wealth in the top brackets, is there a point where the process starts to undermine itself? The problem here is that, as the money supply is redestributed up the income brackets, its circulation gets slower and slower because fewer and fewer wealthier and wealthier people spend smaller and smaller percentages of their total money...
It also answers: How do we get wartime prosperity without war? That prosperity depended on a labor shortage that harnessed market forces to raise wages, spread the national income to the 'bottom' 90% who wanted & needed to spend it, and boosted spending, & marketable productivity, & sustainable investments. But can we get a labor shortage without killing people? We had actually found a way before the war interrupted and upstaged it = workweek reduction (1938,39,40: hrs/wk 44,42,40; unemployment 19,17.2,14.6%) – Walter Reuther called it "fluctuating workweek adjustment vs. unemployment." Wage workers & consultants already track their billable time via systems like *mytimeforce time & attendance. Salaried & piece workers will need "shadow timing." Pay & markets will rise as labor gets scarcer = wartime prosperity without war.
Use this website for worst-case planning, economic design, and news on the economy's doom du jour, spun anxiously as a "recovery" by both right and left, and critiqued from the 3rd way viewpoint of a student of ecology, linguistics and history.

Today, as the lead-in to the Great Depression replays (with better *spindoctoring), we bring you

doom du jourtm

(below), but first,

hope du jourtm – sun-mon-tue 8/29-30-31/2010 ::: triweekly updates (archives) -
TIMESIZING instead of downsizing in the news (archives) - Google Search newsclips of what the world's doing that's on the right track - the core solution is so obvious, nobody's noticing it - usually it's just one item on a list - few yet realize it's the ink & paper of the list itself - it's our closest candidate to a single all-sufficient control and despite *dismissal by the 'experts,' it's reinvented thousands of times a day in every downturn by businesses & governments, for ex.,*Washington State's video on replacing downsizing with timesizing alias 'shared work' -
[editor's comments in square brackets] (editor= Phil Hyde, timesizing@aol.com) -

German official unemployment rate stable at 7.6%, 8/31 Agence France-Presse via AFP.com
FRANKFURT, Germany - .."While unemployment is still rising elsewhere in the euro-zone, the German labour market has been particularly resilient, thanks initially to the Government's 'Kurzarbeit' subsidy scheme, but perhaps now reflecting the underlying economic recovery," McKeown said. The German government had subsidised shorter working hours to help companies make it though the global economic downturn, but most companies have now put staff back on full-time hours. Germany posted record quarterly growth in the second quarter of 2010 thanks to strong exports and a pick-up in domestic consumption underpinned by improving job prospects... - see whole article under today's date.
HR European news roundup – August 2010 - A selection of the latest European HR news from the Federation of European Employers (FedEE), 8/29 (30/8) Expatica France via expatica.com/fr
LONDON, England - ..Much of Germany's success is based on its strong export markets and its labour market initiatives. Major improvements have been made in labour flexibility during recent years and although the short-time working scheme (Kurzarbeit) has been a costly investment by the state it has helped industry to retain its core workers.
[Not as costly as USA's failure to preserve its consumer base and employment basement - but the U.S. has so much more self-anesthetizing news and media chauvinism.]
Trade unions have also focussed on job security rather than preserving real income levels... - see whole article under today's date.
[If you focus on full employment however short a workweek it takes, market forces will look after real wages and income levels as employers compete against one another for good help.]
Less Work, More Life, by John de Graaf, 8/30 Progressive.org
[Way to go, John!]
SEATTLE, Wash. - ..Progressives would do well to advocate reduced working hours instead of demanding unsustainable growth. . . . Reducing work hours and sharing available work is essential for our families, health, economic security, and the environment... - see whole article under today's date.
[More compelling than this plea-for-mercy type of argument is the fact that if you can only get one of labor's two traditional goals, higher pay and shorter hours and it's higher pay, you wind up with neither because you're just tacking an unsustainably high price on a surplus commodity, yourself, but if you can only get one and it's shorter hours, you wind up with both because you've cut the labor surplus and harnessed market forces on your side in raising the price of a commodity that's become scarcer, namely labor hours relative to currently demanded employment hours. No more 5000 resumes coming in for every 5 job openings!]

So shorter hours and worksharing are happening anyway, but not the best way. The argument that work is infinite because human desires are infinite ignores the absence of infinite money to satisfy those desires or pay for that work and the increasing scarcity of good 40-hr/wk jobs to maintain wages and spending in the age of robotics. Thus, shorter hours is a strategy that is being reinvented hundreds of times a day across the U.S. in this recession and thousands of times a day across the world in both public & private sectors, in every industry, and in a variety of ways. Many countries and U.S. states already have worksharing programs to cushion the transition to permanently shorter workweeks that automatically adjust to our rising levels of productive technology in the Age of Robotics. These programs currently are designed to be temporary. Here's what their permanent program will look like when they finally succumb to the inevitable.

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

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

Health care, job engine for state [Massachusetts], is pulling back - Sector sees layoffs, cuts, 8/29 Boston Sunday Globe, front page.

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

August torpor leaves stocks in a hole,
8/31 Wall St Journal, C1.
Stocks are suffering their worst August in nearly a decade, 8/31 WSJ, A1 pointer to C1.
The Dow..declined 140.92 points, or 1..4%, to 10009.73, leaving blue chips down 4.4% with one trading day to go in the month...

The siren song of low bond yields, 8/31 WSJ, C10.
[Or rather, of presumed low bond risk.]

More [Americans] go without life insurance, 8/30 WSJ, C1.
..nearly one third of U.S. households go without...
[Another industry vanishing, another notch downward in U.S. living standards, and another step toward the Third World for the once-great USA - all reversible by disciplining management and wealthy decision-makers by engineering a perceived general labor shortage, however short a workweek it requires. In times like these, "labor discipline" is definitely not the issue, because the gargantuan labor surplus gives management and employers all the bargaining power.]

The decline of the P/E ratio - Once the key measure of a stock's value is diminishing - in size and in relevance[??], 8/30 WSJ, C1.
["In relevance" only in economies that have allowed a waaay-unsustainable chunk of their money supply to get redistributed and coagulated in the topmost tiny fraction of their population, where it can no longer find enough marketable productivity to invest in.]
..as investors focus on global forces whipsawing markets...
[The stronger your domestic consumer base, the less relevant global forces are to your economy. Exports become what they should be = merely the cherry on a big hearty sundae.]

Japan battles soaring yen - Central bank calls emergency meeting in sign on pessimistic view on economy, 8/30 WSJ, A16.
[More nonsense from prevailing wisdom. A strong currency actually means that informed people think you have a strong domestic consumer base and you are relatively independent of exports and the erratic but generally declining "benefits" of sacred Globalization.]

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

Timesizing means full employment without makework or inflation.

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

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

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

accommodating workoholics while blocking inflation, by unleashing "love to work" incentive (deflationary) while capping the money motive (inflationary), & balancing the two

For over six years (1999-2004 and 2009-), we at the Timesizing Wire have been tracking what's rancid beneath the "recovery" via America's top two newspapers, the Wall Street Journal on the right & the New York Times on the left (often from *Wainwright Bank reading room in hip Davis Square, Somerville, Mass.), with occasional input from the London Economist on the right, the Boston Globe on the left, Canada's national paper, the Toronto Globe & Mail, and various regional papers around Ottawa & Quebec. We pick up timesizing stories wherever we find them, but mainly from Google News Search. Then we paused for four years to establish a Canadian branch when the USA failed to get rid of the suicidal Bush regime in 2004, and now that the US has gone back to the slower Democratic rate of self-deterioration, we've resumed our daily updates.
Timesizing’s 3rd way is centrist and deep green, not just light or pinkish green like the Green Party's grocery list of ad hoc, unintegrated & unprioritized issues. Timesizing satisfies the right with smaller government and bigger firmer markets & the left with a simpler stronger social safety net that makes the right clean up their own recessions instead of continuously inducing them by privatizing and concentrating profits & nationalizing and centrifuging losses. Our Timesizing solution is based on working models, American history (especially 1933 ), on economic design, on ecology, and on worktime economics, linguistics, Limits to Growth, and Buckminster Fuller. The deep green center is the future, and we strategize for the next 100-1000 years, not just the next three months (quarterly report) or four years (U.S. presidential term). And we are always and everywhere under construction, & asterisked links take you *outside our site.

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography | Audiences | Research Priorities | Phil's Bio
Politics |The Forgotten Republican Key to Small Government | Sayings
Investment Advice | Why should I be forced to stop work at a certain #hrs/wk?!
America's Massive Pervasive Makework | Letting off steam | Opus Errata
Timesizing Courses | Website History | Website Reactions | Guest Book
This website, best viewed with *Mozilla Firefox, *Netscape or *Explorer, is dedicated to the memory of John Kowal of Buffalo & Brookline, our feistiest friend. The website is under constant micro-enhancement & experimentation.
• basic setup was by John MacMillan of Billerica, Mass., USAF Ret. & Mass. GOP webmaster
• website-host & -registrar coach is Denise Traver, NPS Ret. & webmaster of *HitTheTrail.com
• logo scanning by Paula Archer Information Services of Belmont, Mass. (617) 489-7980
• tactics by *Lao Tzu and *'Obvious Adams' (Robert Updegraf)
• website hit-hiking by Addme.com - if you'd care to try it, click here
If we have more text & less graphics than you like, here's some background.

News tips, commentary requests, questions, comments? Email us at timesizing@aol.com, or Return to Top
* An asterisk (*) before a hotlink means *hotlink will take you outside our website.