When I hear that American productivity has improved, I visualize...
1. Wringing the last drop of sweat from American workers.
2. Stagnating wages.
3. Elimination of benefits like vacation days, sick pay, health insurance and pension plans.
4. Off-shoring every job that can possibly be placed in a country that does not have minimum wage standards.
Labor-intensive sectors suffer competitive disadvantages in an era of productivity gains. The spiraling costs of education, health care and government are often blamed on inefficiency. But cost control frequently results in:
1. Larger classrooms per teacher, elimination of extracurricular programs, dropping "non essential" academic subjects like music, art, foreign languages.
2. Hiring more aides and fewer RNs, using physicians' assistants and nurse practitioners in place of physicians, decreasing the number of minutes per visit a health care professional spends with patients, heavy reliance on pharmaceutical therapies.
3. Privatizing military functions and prisons, infrastructure deterioration, underfunding watch dog agency budgets (FDA, EPA, SEC, etc.).
I suspect automation of repetitive tasks and increased efficiency through the placement of advanced technologies in factories and offices are no longer the major components of "productivity gains."
Here's what I think...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Yup. So whatcha gonna do about it?
ReplyDeleteUnderstanding the difficulty of labor-intensive professions to limit cost without sacrificing quality of service is important. Too often these professions are accused of inefficiency when the real problem is the stagnation of income in the "real" economy. It should change the type of solutions used to address the problems facing education and health care.
ReplyDelete