WHAT 'PRODUCTIVITY CRISIS'!
Block, James E.
What 'Productivity Crisis'? Let's put the work ethic to rest BY JAMES E. BLOCK Ever since the Presidential camp-paign of 1980, Ronald Reagan has been sounding the alarm about a productivity...
...Come the next economic upturn, their desire for the goods that an extra hour's work makes possible will again decline—as it already had before the current recession...
...Technological discoveries, massive industrial expansion and concentration, the mechanization of agriculture, and a better-educated work force have all nudged the American standard of living higher and higher...
...Let's put the work ethic to rest BY JAMES E. BLOCK Ever since the Presidential camp-paign of 1980, Ronald Reagan has been sounding the alarm about a productivity crisis in America...
...Faith in traditional, job-bound solutions is widespread—and unfounded...
...They question traditional deferment of gratification...
...For this to succeed, there must be an appealing popular strategy— one that, as a start, demands automation, increased efficiency, and the elimination of useless work, while offering a shortened workweek, job security, universal job opportunity, and broad distribution...
...They have turned away from saving and sacrifice, and toward the benefits a post-industrial society has to offer...
...What business requires, in effect, is an economy perversely at odds with its own capacity...
...For all but a handful of Americans, work has been the price of social inclusion, the basis of status, the measure of one's worth...
...So why the frenzied effort to revitalize work when the logic of industrialization has been to decrease its role...
...Ironically, a program demonstrating our resolve to limit work could restore optimal productivity where policies rooted in our commitment to work cannot...
...Business leaders know that public policies reducing work and thus basing the distribution of goods and services on other grounds would cut directly into profits...
...In short, a productivity crisis emerges where there was none...
...Turning things around means first realizing that, in a society with excess productive capacity and plentiful labor, the goal of traditional full employment itself prevents the wisest use of resources and undermines affluence...
...Our economic capacity is well beyond our needs...
...The much-heralded campaign to shore up the economy, sometimes called reindustrialization, promises vast productive gains...
...The way to hold wages down is to increase job competition, and one way to do that is to keep the workweek long...
...Yet these reforms must be clearly, carefully structured—as too often they are not—to permit and even encourage the greatest productive efficiency...
...As people see adequate supplies of goods and selective displays of opulence, they can only grow impatient with calls for belt-tightening, and, in time, force the consideration of new economic arrangements...
...What has gone wrong...
...Sweeping modernization in industry—automation, the introduction of robots, and computers—will result in mechanized assembly lines, farms, offices, warehouses, and distribution systems...
...The question merits consideration...
...And the technological revolution is not over...
...Plants are closed...
...With wages dipping downward, and economic security fading into the past, even our public discourse now shuns the notion of working less while living better...
...The Democrats, for all their mild carping about priorities, have embraced the assertions about our econoniic decline, supporting and even outdoing Republican efforts...
...If profit levels are to be maintained, labor costs must be held in check...
...Otherwise, popular control will be stigmatized as the barrier that keeps us from post-industrial liberation from work, a broader goal...
...or acquire a taste for satisfying jobs that don't pay top dollars, early retirement programs, part-time jobs, and job-sharing, they show over and over that Americans are learning to appreciate the creative, regenerative aspects of a post-work society...
...Yet we are now in the throes of the worst recession—universally dubbed a "productivity crisis"—since the Great Depression...
...The finance and service sectors, where the greatest recent growth has taken place, are rapidly coming up with improvements that will idle many more workers...
...Thus, while cries of scarcity are raised loud and long, we see calculated efforts to hold the supply of goods far below our capacity to produce them...
...In this way, Americans are led to blame their plight not on policy, but on material limits...
...By the 1970s, the middle class had achieved unparalleled wealth...
...A crisis in productivity...
...Unions, and workers in general, fight to keep their jobs—and resist automation...
...The vast subsidies and tax breaks, the regulatory rollback, the frank corporate control over national policy, the market dominance in foreign affairs—all have been held out as a tonic for an ailing economy...
...seek personal skill development and continuing education...
...The very goal of marketing has been to present work as the means to greater leisure time and power to consume...
...This manipulation of the supply of goods and work conditions represents a crisis, all right, but not a crisis of productivity...
...Entrenched, vocal, and unyielding corporate interests are part of the answer...
...While the major parties go on playing on fear and producing the deprivation necessary to maintain market priorities, the democratic Left can move in, challenging misconceptions, demonstrating the public sector's indispensable role in providing universal affluence, and thus outflanking Reagan populism and anti-statism...
...Work is no longer the center of their lives...
...This implicit consensus has won repeated victories for the Republicans as the "party of leadership," and has brought a numbing vacuity to the national policy debate...
...The United States has gone through exceptional economic growth since World War II...
...The outcome is productive stagnation, industry-by-industry featherbedding, outdated plants, unproductive make-work, and employee resistance...
...Goods that had once been scarce became so widely available that demand for them actually tapered off...
...Even the Left, always aligned with the industrial working poor, reveals in its key proposals—worker democracy, job enrichment—a lingering reliance on a work-oriented society...
...inventories are shelved...
...Meanwhile, the monotony of the large-scale, efficient, mechanized workplace will make non-work pastimes even more attractive...
...No one has stopped to ask, What crisis in productivity...
...Business, in turn, exploits the excess labor pool that baby-boom adults, women, and others provide, putting off improvements in productive efficiency and automation...
...Not only do these efforts subvert productivity...
...And those uncertainties are grave...
...It has historically been the work ethic, not leisure, that has shaped the way we view our lives...
...It needs to create a condition of deprivation because it cannot adjust to abundance...
...Here, too, capacity had to be cut back, by stockpiling, restricting production, and dumping a profligate quantity of farm riches...
...As people delve into sports and the arts...
...And while work hours for some are maintained or even lengthened, we see millions of others being laid off without benefits...
...His calls for Federal handouts to entrepreneurs, corporations, and wealthy investors have all been made in the name of restoring our industrial might...
...Similarly, a shorter workweek would require more workers and would generate stronger employee wage demands...
...Two generations of affluence and social diversity have set many Americans free...
...It can do so, moreover, while substantially reducing the burden of work...
...It represents a crisis of distribution, of the way society decides who should benefit from its economic capacity...
...At the same time, Reagan's message of hope to America stresses early-industrial-era bromides: Restore your faith in the work ethic...
...And their yen for more time to use what they already have will grow...
...There has been a deep, collective failure to confront the uncertainties raised by our new abundance and leisure...
...American society lies at a critical juncture...
...The postwar revolution in agricultural James E. Block teaches political science at De Paul University...
...America has within its grasp the productive capacity to put a virtual end to scarcity...
...The same thing happened on the farm...
...they want a more fulfilling life now...
...Don't we make our problems worse each time we insist on individual sacrifice or bemoan reduced employment, instead of encouraging efficiency and automation...
...The farming sector discovers ever-cheaper means to produce ever more abundant food...
...The political forces that perceive the true nature of the "productivity crisis" and understand our new cultural bent will then be at an enormous advantage...
...It is efficiency and automation, after all, together with a fairer distribution of work and benefits, that can bring us both greater personal freedom and economic security...
...Many on the Left have likewise fallen into step, asking plaintively that while we do all we can to solve the productivity crisis, we not ignore the dictates of social justice...
...Various other jobs that must be created simply so that people can go on working and consuming—giant, inefficient government and white-collar bureaucracies, make-work programs, job featherbedding—are also unnecessary...
...On the contrary, post-industrial society now seems ready to turn a long-standing working- and middle-class dream into reality—to relieve the harsh burden of a life dominated by labor, without any extra saving or sacrifice...
...The broader education of the work force and increasing pressure for democratization in American society will inevitably bring about a more egalitarian workplace, as well as a greater public say on worker health and safety, product standards, and investment policy...
...Such trendy, discretionary items as designer jeans and video recorders began to take a larger share of disposable income, and many basic industries found themselves cutting back plant capacity and payrolls...
...The jobs that will be lost to advancements in the steel, auto, and other industries are only the beginning...
...The highest barriers to resolving our "productivity crisis" are the cultural ones—and even those are slowly falling away...
...Over the last twenty years, our cultural attitude toward work has changed dramatically...
...The result is the worst of all worlds: continuing high levels of work together with inadequate distribution and pervasive economic insecurity...
...A work reduction strategy can be one initial part of a larger political plan, one that liberates people from work while assuring them that their wants will be fairly met...
...The only way to keep market values high is to limit production artificially...
...People, many people, now want a chance to pursue their own self-development—not just a hefty paycheck...
...We can no longer hope to employ everybody at a full workweek, but still we try, and our efforts clash with industrial efficiency...
...The productivity issue has been exploited to brilliant effect by Republicans...
...This corporate pressure is important...
...As the public comes to understand its own full productive potential, as it begins to see the way economic crisis has been used to turn excess labor into business profits, a broad constituency will refuse to make more sacrifices and demand a redirection of our social wealth...
...accept the virtues of discipline and sacrifice...
...We do not know what will become of us as a people and as individuals once work becomes less important...
...If they were to produce goods at full capacity, they would make more of them available, and prices would fall...
...But the absence of any significant challenge by those outside the business community raises even more troubling questions...
...efficiency meant that by the 1970s, America could produce far more fruit, vegetables, meat, grain, and dairy products than our people could possibly eat...
...These, together with needlessly elaborate and repetitive sales, distribution, and service networks, and unproductive labor such as advertising and financial speculation, disguise a simple truth: We have the means to produce goods, while working far less...
...they fail even to bolster employment or pay levels...
...For that matter, workers and the middle class have long been motivated by something other than the joy of labor...
Vol. 46 • July 1982 • No. 7
