A quick recap on the nation's second worktime
conference in the 1990s series (not to be confused
with probably similar conferences in the 1930s).

About 80 or so attendees.  Some racial diversity.
Good gender diversity.

Sound Bite of the Conference : 
"Chronic overtimers are SCABBING on the unemployed."  
Whoah!  Gotta convert that OT into jobs!

Anders "Mr. 32-Hour Week" Hayden from Toronto was a featured
panelist.  He spoke very crisply and well in the a.m.

Several participants, even "lefties," said they were glad a non-left
perspective had some representation by myself (Phil Hyde) and
another speaker from California.  The Californian speaker (panelist)
was a flextime consultant who actually looked a bit like Juliet Schor.

From the economic design viewpoint, I noticed how specific most
speakers were being and yet many in the audience seemed to have
an underlying curiosity about what a big bird's eye view might look like
over the next 100 years, with an optimal transition IN 
to employment-balancing plus the cues for a smooth transition OUT 
into the next area of balancing (e.g., incomes).  
Meanwhile, many people seem to be having a hard time 
understanding 'time' and how to keep jerry-built worktime
management from killing domestic markets (Rifkin's "consumer base")
and splitting the population into overworked and desperate, or Eloi
and Morlocks (a la 'The Time Machine').

My co-host in what turned into the best-attended afternoon
workshop (Public Policy) was Jonathan King of MIT Biology
(Molecular).  He got off some good sound bites and passion.  He was
great at demolishing the oft-repeated myth that "technology creates
more jobs than it destroys" (he didn't mention the complementary
academic "lump of labor fallacy" myth).  However, some of what he had to say
sounded dangerously close to Jeremy Rifkin's talk about "The End of
Work."  Jonathan neglected the truism that some work, however minimal,
will always be necessary, and so he is open to the criticism
that focusing on abolishing work will simply abolish it for part of
the population and not for others.  Thus the population will split
into workers and drones with potentially disastrous consequences, as
mentioned in a current French bestseller, Viviane Forrester's
"Economic Horror" with its chilling evolution from exploitation (of
workers) to exclusion (from self-support) to elimination.  That, of
course, raises huge anxieties in a social species like ourselves -
rightly so because of the vulnerability of dependents and pets -
i.e., those with whom no work (i.e., usefulness, value) has been shared.

The Schor video at the beginning had problems getting started but
it eventually got rolling and our patron saintess posed the five
questions she wanted us to consider.  She did not, however, give any
answers.  Yours truly was very curious about Juliet's phrasing,
connections and priorities so I borrowed the video from
conference organizer Barbara Brandt.


Here are Juliet Schor's five questions (JS) and my answers (PH) 
about work time reduction (WTR):

JS: 1) What is the rationale behind work time reduction (WTR)? 
What's the core of the message?

PH: I think the best answer here is, it depends on the audience.  If
we're addressing a conservative audience, we stress how WTR
maintains and builds domestic markets and our whole consumer base -
by reducing the labor surplus and harnessing market forces to
rebuild the economy's wealth centrifuge and its vast consumer buying
power.  A centrist audience would be impressed with rebuilding wages
and the whole middle class, with solving unemployment and having
more free time for family and citizenship (last November's voter
turnout - 49% - was the lowest since 1924).  A liberal audience
wants to hear about WTR's ability to obsolete layoffs, cut
unemployment to World War II levels (without war!) and restore job
security (without feather bedding).  (Note: Juliet doesn't think WTR
can be used to solve unemployment because incremental WTR has raised
productivity, not lowered it.  But pursuing that logic, we'd get
infinite productivity with zero worktime, so I think she needn't
worry.  Also, her objection ignores WTR's corrective effects on the
labor surplus and its consequent wealth-centrifuging effects which
redynamize general markets and rebuild consumer demand and the
derivative demand for labor.)

JS: 2) Is the message just work time reduction?  Or is it also job
flexibility and if so, for employers or employees?

PH: Job flexibility is secondary and potentially very detailed - we
can and should leave it up to employer-employee negotiations, as the 
Robien Law in France does with the whole wage issue.  Per-job details
are NOT the province of government (except with its own direct
employees) - only the per-person generalities are its proper realm.

The message is definitely WTR, but this itself has to be done very
flexibly and bidirectionally - to allow, e.g., two steps forward and
one back.  That's why I prefer to call it timesizing and not shorter
time.  Business needs flexibility and control over the per-job
details because of the mind-boggling diversity of situations out
there.  Inflexibility sank the 30-hours bill in the 1930s.  The
thinking should not at all be arbitrary.  The level of the workweek
should be flexibly fluctuating very slowly (MAX an hour a month) and
determined automatically by the unemployment rate - so we don't get
any more solution any faster than we need (and the unemployment rate
would be expanded to include welfare and all need for self-support). 
The cap on the workweek itself should also be flexible in a second
way - insofar as it is not a stifling and negative "stop work here"
but a liberating and positive "start reinvesting here."  After all,
you don't want to stop entrepreneurs and people who love their work. 
They're the ones who have deflationary incentive (job satisfaction),
not inflationary (money motive).  But you do want people working
over a certain unemployment-set level per week to be part of the job
solution, not just part of the job problem.  Call this level a
reinvestment threshold, and notice that if we reinvest at the
appropriate massive level in - ourselves, human factors, human
skills - we have no need for the concept of redistribution - of
anything.

JS: 3) Who are our allies? - Are they the traditional
standard-bearers for shorter worktime like unions and women's groups
or are they also the corporate sector?

PH: Obviously we need all the friends we can get, but the unions are
the guys that had every chance to pull this off in the 1930s and
didn't.  They came real close at least three times (1933,34,37) and
just missed each time.  They got tired and shifted from WTR as a
real goal to WTR as a threat to get more of FDR's "messes of
potage."  Thereby they signed their own death warrant, and though
they had a 30-year stay of execution due to the war and its economic
afterglow, they're now down to 14% of the workforce in the U.S.

Women's groups are a good place for early presentations of the WTR
story to get it stress-tested by friendly fire, but the really
efficient allies are going to be the corporate sector, particularly
the top executives who are starting to realize that they are
creating hell, not heaven.  And they do exist.  France's Robien Law
was proposed by the rightwing UDF Party.  W.K. Kellogg was as top
executive.  VW is run by executives.  So are Nucor Steel and Lincoln
Electric, both of which plan for and survive very short workweeks,
Nucor routinely and Lincoln periodically.  And once some of these
folks apply it, the word will spread because of their greater
flexibility and competitiveness, efficiency, employee loyalty - the
list goes on and on!

JS: 4) What are our solutions or visions in four particular areas? 
i) Collective WTR or a more individual company approach?

PH: This depends on where we are in the transition.  At the
beginning, we're more private sector and individual company
oriented.  Later we grow into public sector and whole-economy
orientations - starting local, then state, then national.

JS: ii) What's our focus, workweek or workyear?

PH: Primarily workweek by a long shot.  The workyear is too long and
unwieldy a unit, allowing for too little flexibility in case of
external shocks like natural disasters.  Europe has long annual
vacations and still high unemployment.  And if the six-week
vacations are taken all in one block, employees can really lose
momentum.  Of course, for seasonal workers you have to design a
workyear oriented subsystem.  And auto companies have found
workmonth manipulation useful from time to time.

JS: iii) How do we relate particularly to white collar salaried vs.
blue collar or pink collar workers?

PH: The real question here is, applying WTR to wage workers is a
piece of cake but how do we apply it to salaried workers?  Obviously
we have to set up some kind of shadow time accounting system, a mix
of what consultants have with their billable time concept and
economists have with shadow prices.  The only special problem
offered by pink collar workers is from beauticians etc. who are
self-employed.  The self-employed function primarily as salaried
workers in this question, with special enforcement challenges, as
now with income taxes on the self-employed.

JS: iv) What's our message relative to the economic effects of WTR -
can our economy afford it?

PH:  Our economy can't afford to keep blocking it!  We're turning
into a "black hole economy" where so much income and wealth is
concentrated among so few people with so little time to spend it,
that nothing leaves the core and we're threatening the basic concept
of "currency" itself!  That's why the DOW in our situations is
characteristically record-breaking - the wealthy don't have anywhere
else to put their astronomical skimmings!  We're thrusting ourselves
backwards into the feudal age where there were only two islands of
income and wealth and massive prevailing stagnation (the hallmark
"stability" of feudal society - a place for everyone and everyone in
his place).  The only booming markets today are the "four markets of
the apocalypse" - financials, luxuries, lotteries and prisons
(including general litigiousness).  We either get going on WTR or
we're roadkill - all our worst nightmares - Eloi and Morlocks -
exploitation>exclusion>elimination - the Final Solution etc. etc.

JS: 5) What's our point of view on recent political developments,
e.g., the GOP bill recently passed the House and en route to the
Senate that facilitates comp time vs. overtime?

PH:  We encourage all this stuff without getting into two traps. A)
Getting mired in the details of these little steps.  They're great
but they just aren't the "be all and end all."  Let's keep our
perspective without being anything but encouraging to the frontline
soldiers who are sweating blood for some of these increments of
progress.  Let's not get negative, nagging, and ungracious or
constantly demanding instant gratification of our furthest ahead
vision.  Let's be nurturing to the assembly language programmers in
the legislatures.  It's nasty work but somebody has to do it!  B)
The trap of getting exhausted when one of these baby steps passes. 
Our stance should be that we never put so much into it that we
collapse after a small triumph and assume eternal perfection like
Georgists in NH when they get their single tax on land.  Let's take
the stance of building momentum in this direction, and always leave
room for rising expectations even when we get all our
employment and skill balancing done.

- Phil "Mr. Timesizing" Hyde