Labor productivity problem?

There was an article the other day about how the US has a labor productivity problem. Meaning, workers are not being as productive as they used to be, or as they, I guess, should be. According to data, the US has seen five consecutive quarters of declines in worker productivity. Says Jason Furman, former Council of Economic Advisors chairman under Obama: “Sluggish productivity means sluggish growth. It means sluggish wage growth and increase in living standards. It matters for just about everything in the economy.” So the neoliberal elites are blaming workers not working hard enough for the economy being in bad shape. This is predictable—they will always find a way to blame workers.

But is declining productivity a bad thing? If you take a longer view of it, it is actually a good thing. According to a study, productivity grew 59.7% from 1979-2019 while worker compensation grew by 15.8%. This means that workers were far more productive than they were paid for, for forty years! That is a lot of extra work, for a very long time, which made the employer class very rich, and the working class very poor. This is now ending, which is a bad thing only if you are part of the parasitic class that has gotten rich from this situation.

What is productivity? It is the value that workers give their employer. You produce something that your employer needs, and they pay you in return. In a capitalist system, they always pay you less than you’re worth. Why? Because that gap—between what you produce and what you’re paid—is where profits come in. Employers make a profit by paying workers less than they are worth—by getting more value from them than they pay them for. If employers paid workers exactly what they were worth, then they wouldn’t make profits, and that wouldn’t be capitalism. Capitalism is based on workers producing more value for their employers than they are paid for. This has always been the core of capitalism, but over the last forty years, it has gotten out of control.

Over the last forty years, the gap between rich and poor grew to enormous levels. I don’t have to tell you about how so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and the elites have more money than ever. How did this happen? In part, from workers doing so much extra work, without being paid for it—which is how massive profits where created for corporations and the rich.

Now this appears to be stopping. Media outlets like CNBC, which exclusively serve the interest of neoliberal economic elites, are upset—because their profits are being impacted. Corporate elites are upset that their formula for massive profits—productive workers who are paid low wages—isn’t working anymore.

There would be one easy way to fix this—by raising wages. This would get workers to produce more. But this won’t happen, because that would eat into corporate profits, and that must be avoided at all costs. So instead, they are blaming workers for not producing as much.

I think that this is actually a good thing—workers should be working less hard, they should be producing less. Profits for corporations and the rich are too high, and less productivity by workers is one way to bring that down.

Now, is this a conscious thing by workers? Are they making a stand against decades of exploitation by refusing to be as productive as they were before? In some cases maybe, but by and large, probably not. So what is causing the decline in productivity? I would say it’s a mix of things: an awareness that they will never be able to have any kind of decent life with what they’re paid; exhaustion from so many years of work that never paid off; customer behavior getting worse; and other factors. I think that customers are far ruder and more obnoxious than ever before—they treat workers they interact with as subhuman, as like robots or animals, and that takes a fucking toll. Why put yourself through that, just so you can live paycheck to paycheck, and have the corporate entity that owns you get rich off your work? Most workers also know for a fact that they will have no future beyond just desperately surviving, barely eking out a living, no security, no stability, nothing. So why put in any effort above the bare minimum? Life is being reduced to its bare minimum—people are being turned into fucking animals, forced to live desperate untenable lives without any hope of anything changing—so why would anyone put in any effort beyond the absolute bare minimum?

The decline in productivity is inevitable—the capitalist class has burned through the main asset that brings them profits, their workers. And workers are tired, hopeless, fed up—and that will only continue. There is no talk of the minimum wage being raised—the last time it was raised was 2009, to $7.25 an hour. That wasn’t enough to get by on back then, and it certainly isn’t now. Life is so much more expensive now, but you never hear any talk of the minimum wage being raised. The ruling business class has given up on workers—and workers are giving up on them. It’s inevitable and fair, and it’s the only card that workers have left to play.