Worker Productivity Soars!

  • Worker productivity is soaring to massive heights.
  • This is a trend that has accelerated rapidly over the past 10 years
  • National and local media constantly report this as 'good for workers'.

Nonsense. It is good for profits and VERY bad for workers. If you have a team of 10 and they become twice as productive, guess what happens in profit driven enterprises? Yup, half the team are laid off and half the team are now seen as being "twice as productive" in the production of profits. Totally false dichotomy for humans when half the team loses their jobs and their income. The remaining team members also don't get a bigger reward in terms of salary because the job market is now flooded with cheap but highly qualified talent, laid off from other companies, desperate to work. Over time this supply-demand imbalance inevitability leads to significant salary drops for those that remain. A side effect is that toxic and dysfuntional workplaces filled with fear increase.

There is also an assumption, also repeateded constantly in the media, that the 'answer' to these labor issues is that this displacement will mirror other labor displacements seen over the last 200 years, leading to new and different industries and jobs for highly skilled workers. There is a basic failure to recognize that this time is different. Companies are increasingly 'built to scale' so that when demand ramps up it does not lead to more jobs. There are approaches and solutions that can help but first we need common understanding about the details behind headlines such such as ' 'worker productivity soars!' and what that really means for the people in our society.

No AI was used in writing this.

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