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By MATTHEW DOLAN

DETROIT—To dig out of a fiscal mess, the city of Detroit has reached tentative labor deals with the leadership of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the United Auto Workers and International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Then it had to win over Herbert Jenkins.

Mr. Jenkins is president of the Assistant Supervisors of Street Maintenance and Construction Association, the union representing the leaders of Detroit’s pothole-repair crews.

He also is the only member of that collective-bargaining unit.

Since 2008, Herbert Jenkins has been a member of the union representing the leaders of Detroit’s pothole-repair crews. But thanks to recent downsizing, not only is he now the union’s president — he’s its only member. WSJ’s Matthew Dolan reports.

As recently as last fall, the union was double the size. Then the other guy retired. That left the presidency, uncontested, to Mr. Jenkins, a married father of six who has worked for Detroit for more than two decades.

No ballots were cast, no convention convened. The 49-year-old Mr. Jenkins assumed command by writing a letter to the city, affirming that, as the last man standing, he was the union’s new boss. The city recognized him as such.

He concedes that it doesn’t make much sense. It is “probably bad for the city,” he says from his office at the Department of Public Works’ maintenance yard on Michigan Avenue. “Each union should consist of at least more than one.”

Such incongruities keep turning up in Detroit’s disordered government, which, like the city itself, is shrinking fast. The city of 713,000 now employs 11,000 workers, down from more than 13,000 when Mayor Dave Bing took office in 2009. Another 1,000 workers are scheduled to lose their jobs this year due to budget cuts.

Yet this labor force retains a complex organizational structure, a vestige of a time when it served a population of nearly two million. Workers are represented by 21 unions and 48 bargaining units, several of which now have fewer than 10 members. The five police officers in the city’s health department have their own labor council. An independent union for city field engineers has two members.

Then there is Mr. Jenkins, who constitutes the only one-man union recognized by the city. His union could have more members. But because of a citywide freeze on hiring and wages, no one in the Street Maintenance division has been granted the rank of assistant supervisor in years, says Mr. Jenkins, even though several people are doing the job.

The union muddle frustrates city leaders who are trying to negotiate their way out of a $200 million fiscal hole and stave off a takeover by a state-appointed financial manager. Mayor Bing is seeking $102 million in cost savings, including labor concessions, to prevent the city from running out of cash by this spring.

“This is inefficient and not productive,” says Kirk Lewis, a top aide to the mayor. He says the city has tried to get unions to develop coalitions for bargaining, but more needs to be done to encourage smaller unions to merge.

Other shrinking industrial cities face similar challenges. In Cleveland, the city’s 31 separate collective-bargaining agreements include pacts with individual unions representing four plumbing inspectors, three box-office cashiers and two seasonal ticket sellers. In Chicago, a glazer, a heat-frost insulator and a journeyman plasterer are all one-person unions.

It is tough on Mr. Jenkins, too. “It’s strange, because you don’t have anybody to help you out with any questions or any negotiation,” he says. “I have to do a lot of thinking on my own.”

Mr. Jenkins started with the city more than 20 years ago as a Teamster-represented garbage-truck driver. He heaved the trash cans himself. “You had to pick up 27,500 pounds of garbage by yourself in one day,” he says. One perk: If he finished his round early, he would still get paid for a full shift.

The seasonal job ended in a layoff. Mr. Jenkins found his way back into city government months later as a laborer with the Department of Public Works. He toiled on jackhammer duty for five years. Since 2008, he has been managing the crews who resurface miles of Motor City roads, fill potholes and clear snow and ice.

When Mr. Bing took office in 2009, the Assistant Supervisors of Street Maintenance and Construction Association had four members. The union president would call a meeting by phoning up the other three.

“We just met at the yard,” says Mr. Jenkins. There was no set time, no reading of minutes, no formal agenda. “We would just discuss whatever the president heard when he went downtown to meet with the city.”

The downsizing started that year, when that president retired. The next year, one of the rank and file died, leaving just Mr. Jenkins and Jerry Graham, who had taken over as president.

The two men would meet once in a while to discuss a contract when it came up, but otherwise didn’t talk much, Mr. Jenkins says. So it was a surprise last fall when Mr. Graham announced his retirement, elevating Mr. Jenkins to the presidency.

When Mr. Jenkins came home with the news, his wife thought it was a joke, like something out of a Hair Club for Men ad.

“I said, ‘Well, I’m a member of my unit and I’m the president,’” Mr. Jenkins recalls. “And she said, ‘There’s only one of you?’ And then she started laughing.”

Earlier this winter, a coalition of 25 bargaining units represented by the federation of municipal workers reached a tentative accord on concessions with Mayor Bing, followed by the city’s police and firefighters in February. Union members must still ratify the agreements.

In a private meeting last month, Mr. Jenkins says Detroit’s human-resources director showed him a copy of the contract that the other unions tentatively agreed to. It calls for a 10% wage cut by ending furlough days and an increase in health-care costs borne by employees. Mr. Jenkins decided to accept the deal, calling it fair despite the givebacks. As one of the last unions to sign and the only one with one member, he figured he had time to think it over.

“The other unions still have to get the agreement ratified,” he says. “But that’s not a problem for me.”

Write to Matthew Dolan at matthew.dolan@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared March 5, 2012, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Labor Force Faces The Ultimate in Downsizing.

By ALINA DIZIK

Selcuk Demirel

Even after spending hours behind a computer screen, we’re often surprised by how little we get done during a workday.

Indeed, frittering time away is epidemic in the office: A 2007 survey of 2,000 workers from
Salary.com
Inc.,

a Web site that provides compensation data, found that Americans waste about 20% of their time at work; with 34.7% of those surveyed saying surfing the Internet is the biggest distraction.

An emerging crop of software now aims to make individuals more conscious of how they spend their screen time. Previously meant for free-lancers looking to keep track of billable hours, software developers are realizing that time-management applications are useful for anyone who wants to track which Web sites they visit and how much of their day is spent on certain work tasks or computer applications.

Some services record and categorize users’ computer activities—often allowing workers to classify chunks of time as either productive or unproductive. Other services operate by having users set goals for how much they’ll get done in a set period of time.

While it is easy to see how hours spent on YouTube or Facebook can crush your productivity, time-management experts say one of the biggest culprits is the constant transitioning from one computer-based task to another.

“Multi-tasking is a complete myth,” says Peter Bregman, a time-management expert and chief executive of Bregman Partners Inc., a management-consulting company. “We lose time in the switch from one task to another,” since it takes time for the brain to adjust to each project.

Tony Wright co-founder of Seattle-based RescueTime Inc., a time-tracking software company, agrees. In an October data audit, Mr. Wright found that RescueTime users switch to an instant message window 71 times per day, which means every 5.2 minutes or 11.5 times per hour. Users to the site visit an average of 57 Web sites or applications per day, he says.

To track our productivity, we tested four online services for a week each: RescueTime, Slife, Klok and ManicTime. Each site provided an eye-opening look at our workday without too much of a hassle. We also found that just knowing our activities were being watched made us a bit less likely to dawdle on non-work-related sites. But the services themselves required some upkeep—which, ironically, took time away from our work.

After signing up for a free two-week trial of RescueTime Pro (usually $5.30 per month), the software downloaded quickly and showed up on our task bar. The site recorded our activities accurately, assigned them to categories and put them into graphs. Some of the findings were surprising: When looking at the day’s graph on a random Friday, for example, we realized we spent about 10 minutes of every hour reading the news.

But we thought some of the category titles—such as “Business”—were a bit vague. “We’re still chipping away to distill this stuff into something actionable,” says RescueTime’s Mr. Wright. We liked the feature that let us designate individual sites and applications as productive or unproductive. Additionally, each time our computer was idle and we returned to our desk we were prompted to say whether our task away from the computer was work related, like a phone call, or something that shouldn’t be recorded, like a trip to the fridge for a snack.

Klok doesn’t automatically track what you do on the computer (so no Internet connection is required). Instead, it asks users to set tasks for themselves throughout the day to help manage projects. Then users note when they start and stop each project, making it easy to compare your goals to reality. One morning, for example, we saw that a writing assignment took 3½-hours instead of the two we thought it should. We also realized we did far fewer tasks than anticipated each day.

Overall, the service helped us get more tasks done because setting goals required us to think through how we would build our days’ work. Tasks can be broken up into subcategories, making larger projects seem more manageable. But it was a bit of a pain to remember to notify the service every time we stopped and started a task. And even when we did make sure to mark our stop time, the service sometimes didn’t register it, making our data inaccurate. Rob McKeown, co-founder of Mcgraphix Inc., which developed Klok, says this issue will be resolved in the next version.

Next up was Slife. The service costs $5 per month, but a 30-day trial is free. To sign up for the trial, however, we had to provide a credit-card number. (A redesign will soon enable users to log on without one, says Edison Thomaz founder of Atlanta-based Slife Labs LLC.) After a quick download, we could see an icon on our task bar. Clicking on the icon took us to various time-management graphs, which were easy to read. The software lets users customize their own categories, such as news or research. You can also add labels to specify your activity even further, such as detailing what kind of research is being done.

During one particularly unproductive day, the service showed us that we spent 22 minutes on Twitter, 40 minutes on Facebook and almost three hours on email. There was also a “private” mode that turned the tracking function off, allowing us to browse frivolous stuff guilt-free.

One big headache was that we were often randomly bounced off the Slife service, causing it to miss some of our activities and requiring us to repeatedly log in. (Mr. Thomaz says Slife is working on fixing the problem.)

ManicTime, a desktop program that only runs on Windows systems, was next. Our computer usage was tracked with line and bar graphs; we could color code activities and tags to better understand how we spent our time. That made it clear that email was our biggest time waster. (Though the service doesn’t distinguish between work and non-work related emails.)

One nice feature: The service spit out a summary showing what percentage of our total time was spent with each application (like a Microsoft Word document) or Web site. The graphs also showed when our computer was idle, which helped us see how many little breaks we tend to take throughout the day.

All in all, the services really helped us get a handle on how we spend our work time. And having a written account of where our minutes went pushed us to modify our work habits—and get more done. The guilt element was motivating, too: Just knowing that the length of our Facebook session was going to be recorded made us think twice about lingering

Write to Alina Dizik at alina.dizik@dowjones.com

By DENNIS NISHI

When Michelle Merino interviewed for a senior product-designer job at a software company in Portland, Ore., she was promised a creative work environment and quick advancement. So she worked hard to move up the ladder, often staying late and taking work home.

But the stuttering economy and reticent managers didn’t help. She was passed up for raises, promotions and even regular employee reviews. Appealing to her boss didn’t help.

“Negotiation isn’t always enough when the company isn’t paying attention to employee needs. Sometimes you just have to leave to get what you deserve,” says Ms. Merino, who took her two years of hard experience to another software company that happily gave her a director position and a big bump in pay.

Dennis Nishi

Now that the economy is picking up and companies are starting to hire again, employees might be able to finally cash in on their years of recessionary sweat and sacrifice.

But a successful pitch for an overdue raise or a promotion may still require proof of real performance, say experts, since companies are now expecting more from their employees. At the same time, companies don’t want to lose good employees and will do what it takes to keep them.

“If you’ve kept up with rising expectations, that might not be enough to get what you want. Just as you would during good economic periods, you have to justify that raise or promotion by beating the assumptions,” says Mike Starich, president of Orion International Consulting, a recruiting firm in Austin, Texas. “Of course, high-performing employees who really are being overlooked have every right to look around at other opportunities.”

Back up your pitch with research since hard numbers are tough to dispute. You also want to verify that your performance has been more than historically average, says Mr. Starich. That includes comparing your numbers with colleagues who may be having as good a year as you are, and even peers at other companies. To your past accomplishments, add plans for how you’ll do even better in the future. Base your case for a raise on merit, not need, and be sure to pad your figure with some negotiation room.

Keep detailed work notes so you can remind your boss of what you’ve done, says Rebecca Weingarten, a career coach based in New York City. “You want to list all of your markers of productivity and income generation, or what you’ve done to minimize loss, and something that shows how well you’ve done despite having less to work with.”

Try to understand issues your manager may be facing, such as frozen budgets or workplace politics. It can help to steer the conversation in the right direction and allow you to scale your request. “At the very least, you can try to bargain for some additional perks,” says Ms. Weingarten.

Write to Dennis Nishi at sjdnishi@gmail.com.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page WSJ2