Molly Ivins March 17

BALTIMORE — How words enter the language is normally a joyous study. A few years ago, I heard a baseball announcer say, "And he nonchalants the ball to second." Some errors of legislative speech are so common, I've adopted them myself, as in "Lemme give ya a hypothetic." The FBI now refers to disgruntled workers' "going postal."

Texans are endlessly inventive with language, particularly when it comes to ways of describing being dumb or drunk (we won't dwell on what this says about us). Computers have spawned a whole new vocabulary so that tech-heads can be perfectly unintelligible to the rest of us. But now comes a new word that stands for "meaningless evil": Dunblane.

About politics on this fine day: Steve Forbes, alas. What can we say about a simple-minded plutocrat who wants to bring back the gold standard and supply-side economics, build Star Wars and exempt the rich from taxation? The nostalgia candidate from the 1980s and the 1880s was doing well there for a while, but then we started to notice a certain mechanistic quality to him. Now all we're left with is the effect of $30 million of negative ads aimed at his opponents. Last week, he endorsed Bob Dole, a man whom, as The New York Times said, "he carpet-bombed with commercials portraying the majority leader as an unprincipled hack."

Perhaps what we need to do at this point is draw way back and look at the Big Picture. For all the blather we've heard about "economic globalization," we don't seem to have noticed that the problems created by same are, in fact, global. Other countries are also suffering through downsizing, economic transition, automation and the uncomfortable shift through some sticky gears from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. And some of them are trying more sensible remedies than building a giant fence along their borders.

Pause for a moment to consider some of the ideas suggested by Jeremy Rifkin and others. Rifkin is the author of "The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era," and he also heads the Foundation on Economic Trends, a D.C. think-spot. In a recent article for The Nation, Rifkin reminds us of some reliable strategies.

"In the past, when new technologies dramatically increased productivity, U.S. workers sought a share of the productivity gains and organized collectively to demand a shorter workweek and better pay and benefits.

Today, instead of reducing the workweek, employers are reducing the work force."

Yet there is no reason that new technologies should not provide us with greater leisure rather than less pay and growing unemployment. Rifkin reports that Hewlett-Packard in France and BMW in Germany have cut the workweek from 37 to 31 hours while continuing to pay at the 37-hour rate. In exchange, the workers agreed to go on shifts so the new high-tech factories can operate 24 hours a day, thus doubling or tripling productivity and allowing the companies to pay more for working less time.

So France is now considering offering to rescind payroll taxes for companies that voluntarily reduce the workweek. The government loses some revenue, but since more people will be working and fewer will be on welfare, the economy and the government will come out ahead.

Two powerful forces are pushing us toward new working arrangements. The first is a decline in consumer purchasing power, according to Rifkin. As more and more workers get stuck in temporary, part-time and marginal employment, their purchasing power of course declines. And then there are the falling wages and benefits of those with full-time employment. As Henry Ford realized long ago, you need to pay the workers enough so they can afford to buy the cars.

Perhaps an even more threatening problem for the economy is the effect on the accumulation of capital when vast numbers of workers are pushed into low-pay jobs with no benefits. Rifkin reports that pension funds, now at $5 trillion, serve as a forced savings pool that finances capital investment in this country. According to Rifkin, in 1992, pension funds accounted for 74 percent of net individual savings, more than one-third of all corporate equities and nearly 40 percent of all corporate bonds. Pension assets exceeded the assets of all commercial banks and made up one-third of the total assets of the U.S. economy. We are slowly draining the very capital that makes the economy grow.

As we shift from industry to information, the same standards we used to judge the net improvement wrought by the current economy should be applied to the coming one as well. Shorter workweeks and better pay and benefits were the benchmarks for success in the Industrial Age, and so should they be for the Information Age.

To point out the obvious, a 30-hour workweek would also strengthen our families; parents scarcely have time to spend with their children these days. And it would give us more time to pay attention to our communities; the loss of social glue in this country is causing us to become ungestucken in some truly alarming ways.

So, since I started this column with words, let me close with one as well. If the editors haven't done too much damage, you should be able to spot an acrostic in the left-hand margin. And may the wind be always at your back.

***

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.