..
a productivity crisis
I wondered, how can someone be against the idea of getting more of what they want with less cost? 1
- More productivity doesn’t mean less work for employees. Workers feel pressured to work harder even as they become more efficient.
- Workers aren’t receiving the gains from their increased productivity. The gains in productivity are not redistributed to workers in a way they feel is fair.
- Hustle culture isn’t appealing. Many people aren’t excited about making every work moment more productive and filling every free moment with more work.
- As tasks are systematized, they can become boring and mechanical. Extreme specialization may be more efficient, but it can lead to simple repetitive work that is boring. Many associate productivity with being overly structured or mechanical. For example, one person I talked to for this article said that one of his bosses once said to him, “When you walk in the door, I only want everything below your neck.”
- Many are jaded by failed productivity experiments. Many productivity experiments fail and even make things worse or more frustrating (ie — lifeless call center agents reading empty scripts).
- Increased overall productivity has directly hurt certain groups. Rapid changes in society because of productivity growth inevitably disadvantage people who live in certain regions, who work in specific industries and professions, or who come from certain cultures. For example, outsourcing America’s manufacturing turned many company towns into ghost towns that now suffer from brain drain, falling property prices, poverty, and addiction.