Dec
24
Milepost 400
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9 | 1 Comment
This is my 400th regular blogpost since starting this blog shortly after the launch of “Sunrise on KGMB9″ in September of last year. Thanks for reading it, and I promise to continue posting sometimes lengthy articles most days.
This week is a milepost for me in another way as well — my public television show “Everybody’s Business” is going off the air, and the final episode will be Friday night, Dec. 26.
The recession has cut into ad revenues and underwriting income at television stations both commercial and public — KGMB9 personnel have rearranged their work scheduled or simply worked harder to cover several unfilled vacancies.
At PBS Hawaii, cost-cutting meant moving me from a free-standing program that took a dozen people to produce, to being a contributing editor in Dan Boylan’s Thursday night show “Island Insights.”
Because this is happening during an economic crisis, I expect that “Island Insights” will cover the same economic issues I would be handling on my old show. I could be discussing the same stuff on a different night. We’ll see.
“Everybody’s Business” started as “PBN Friday,” which premiered July 1, 2005. For its entire run it was half an hour long, airing Friday evenings at 7:30 p.m. and taping Friday mornings at 9:15 a.m.
The original concept was to rely heavily on video from KHON and news that I developed while on the clock at Pacific Business News. Both organizations were heavily involved in reviewing audition programs.
But once the show aired, it stopped using spot news video and relied less and less on PBN content as we devoted more time to guests. The show wound up supplying me with breaking news to write up for the newspaper rather than the other way around.
In its final year we went from four interviews to three, and booked more economists and bankers, so we could explain the week’s news in the banking crisis. It became, perhaps, less snazzy, but more urgently relevant.
I’m glad still to have a relationship with the nice people at PBS Hawaii, though I will miss a program whose week-to-week make-up was entirely left to me.
Dec
24
SUVprime vehicles
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General Motors has closed SUV assembly lines in Ohio and Wisconsin, leaving just one in Texas. Chrysler has just one, in Detroit, after closing one in Delaware. Ford also has just one, in Kentucky. One newspaper headline said, “End of the line nears for SUV.”
The headline writer doesn’t get it. SUVs will survive, just not the big, heavy, gas guzzling ones that the Big Three made. SUV, going forward, will have to stand for Small Unthirsty Vehicles. Like the ones Japanese automakers already make.
This isn’t news to anyone except Big Three labor and management. And it shouldn’t be news to them. Their market share has been shrinking for years. The problem was that they deluded themselves with an endless supply of excuses, allowing them to live in denial.
You can argue that this was actually a good thing, up to a point. A strong union got really high wages for its members, wages that were utterly unjustified by the economics of the industry. And they got away with it for years. More power to them. But now the gravy train is over.
Now the same union and its members will have to decide whether they want to try to prolong the gravy train for a fraction of the work force, or downshift to reasonable wages that might actually save the Big Three. It’s really up to the rank-and-file, because the management of a union cannot stay in power if it works for goals not supported by the regular workers.
Dec
22
Laying off on the layoffs
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9 | 1 Comment
As the global recession deepens, more employers are looking for ways to save money without simply letting people go.
Cisco Systems has decided to do a four-day end-of-year shutdown. Employees won’t be paid for it, but they’ll all still have jobs when the new year starts.
Dell Computer is also down an extended unpaid holiday, and something similar is happening in Korea at Samsung and in Taiwan at both of the world’s biggest makers of custom semiconductors.
Cathay Pacific offered unpaid time off to pilots and flight attendants, and so many flight attendants agree that it works out to five days for each one, more than the airline can handle. Some will be told they can’t do it.
At Brandeis University, some professors got the idea that if they all took a voluntary 1% pay cut, it would save some jobs without hurting too much. After all, even if you make $80,000 a year, 1% is just $800. But only 30% of instructors agreed to do it, and only two or three jobs will be saved.
On the other hand, in South Carolina, the state health department says it will save 75 jobs by making each of its employees take five days unpaid leave.
When people talk about four-day work weeks, they usually mean four days, ten hours, still adding up to 40 hours; managed well, this is often an excellent idea, since you can save on HVAC costs on whatever day the building is closed, and the employees have eight commutes a week instead of ten. But some Nevada casinos are doing four-day work weeks — staggered shifts, so casinos remain open all the time — that amount to 20% cutbacks in hours to save money.
It is against this backdrop that Gov. Lingle is proposing that hundreds of senior officials, including judges, state legislators and herself, forgo their next scheduled pay raise. Anyone in this comfortably compensated group who finds this a hardship isn’t managing his money very well.
That is not to say that I automatically expect everyone to go along with this. It seems to be human nature that everyone, no matter how much he makes, no matter how much help he has, no matter how little he works, no matter how poor a job he does, feels fervantly that he is superbly competent, insufficiently appreciated, criminally overworked, and woefully undercompensated.
One way to cut through all that and find out how overworked someone really is, I find, is to invite him to tell you about. The more time he has to tell how overworked he is, the less overworked he actually is.
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