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Originally Posted by onetime2
Ummm, no. The article is discussing US productivity versus other countries not about the growing trend in productivity within the US.
Productivity has been growing by leaps and bounds for the last decade in the US.
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http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default...12-2002_pg5_18
I don't know anything about the pakistan daily times so i don't know how accurate their info is, but seeing as how i how you haven't provided any proof for your assertions it should probably be just fine, right.
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- Businesses boosted productivity at a blistering annualised pace of 5.1 percent in the third quarter, even faster than the first government estimate of 4.0 percent.
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followed shortly by:
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The productivity figures showed firms were squeezing more out of their employees, Martin said.
“Companies are operating on very lean staff and they will continue to so until they see some demand down the pipeline in order to start to build up production,” she said.
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No likey?
Maybe you like bloomberg better.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news...iho&refer=home
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Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. worker productivity grew at a 2.9 percent annual rate from April through June, the smallest gain in almost two years, and labor costs accelerated, a government report showed.
Productivity, which gauges how efficiently the economy operates by measuring the amount of work done by an employee in an hour, slowed from a revised 3.7 percent annual rate in the previous three months, the Labor Department said in Washington. Labor costs rose at a 1.9 percent annual rate, the most since the second quarter of 2002, after growing 0.3 percent in the first quarter of this year.
Smaller productivity gains suggest companies have already obtained most of the efficiency increases they can get from their employees. The slowdown may lead to increasing labor costs and prices, a reason Federal Reserve policy makers are expected to raise the target for the benchmark interest rate this afternoon.
``We are likely to see labor costs increase close to 2 percent in the next year,'' Douglas Porter, a senior economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns in Toronto, said. ``The Fed has a game plan that they will stick to, a quarter percent increase at each meeting and maybe skip a meeting or two here and there.''
The second-quarter increase in productivity was the weakest since the fourth quarter of 2002. Even so, the number ``is still quite healthy,'' Porter said. Productivity rose 4.7 percent over 12 months, which ``is incredibly strong,'' he said.
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Productivity increases are somewhat tapering off because employers are starting to reach the limits of their employee squeezing abilities.
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No Hiring Yet
Other companies have yet to use up all efficiency improvements and see little need to hire.
``We have great productivity increases running at 7 percent, 8 percent in the last two years,'' Dieter Zetsche, chief executive of DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler unit, said in an interview last week. ``Flat employment is what we expect to happen based on considerable growth for us and ongoing productivity gains.''
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Technology probably was the primary driver before the recession, but i think that you'd be hard pressed to prove that it has been the primary driver during the late economic unpleasantness, especially without being industry specific. If you're going to try please provide something more than conjecture.
Some industries have no doubt benefitted from technology, but some more than others. I bet a great deal more have benefitted from layoffs and the squeezing of the worker.