Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[Kuros]

That just underscores that the crisis is systemic. Its the financial sector who's productivity gains have been so questionable (can't find a link).

I also wonder just how much the demographics are coming into play. The Baby Boomers were hedging their retirement funds on continued and unsustainable increases in housing prices. Lots of young people were complaining just how hard it was to live (especially on the East Coast) in their communities and decided to live with their parents.

But, there are still lots of reasons for a depression that we need not be surprised that it has occurred despite productivity gains.

[sojourner1]

It could have to do with people doing more work while at work due to many positions being eliminated. I've seen it where I did 2 or 3 peoples jobs when downsizing and other cost cutting measures are implemented by company managers. Yes, they're paying the same or less while asking people to do more work and take on more responsibility. These days, you might be paid only $8/hour to run a multimillion dollar sales floor, manage 2 to 6 employees, get only $3 commission per each new credit account you open, and be responsible for profit and loss of the the store. They don't care if you have an education or not, they just care if you're willing to bend over backwards for them. But for what? Your struggle for survival in paying your bills and avoiding homelessness. This fear factor is the motivating factor, not rising to success through increasing productivity. That's what greedy employers are capitalizing on these days. Business and economics is sick shite these days.

What goes up must eventually come down...

[Bigfeet]

Productivity has been going up in the 90s through now mainly because of the outsourcing of work.

[Kuros]

[Bigfeet]

Source? Common sense.

[sojourner1]

Also if productivity is measured in dollar terms, which it is, then the cooked financial markets as well as outsourcing can better explain the larger statistics. It doesn't mean physical productivity is increasing like on a job, it means someone is making more money in the markets. Someone such as investors and executives. They like to report that all is well when it's not. They won't ever tell the truth about anything until they see their dollars worth nothing in the event of a bank and economic system collapse. The government is trying to prevent this from happening right now, but we've only seen the beginning as the government can only go so far and does not have enough money to cover all losses such as through the FDIC. It is true that government is being tooled and engineered for the purpose of rich speculators manipulating the markets. Who will lose? Those who have to work for a living.

[Kuros]

[Bigfeet]

Ok, I've been looking stuff up. Really, I've been wondering about this for years. Especially why productivity have been so high in the 90s through now? The business industry and the federal government likes to puff you up by claiming that workers have been working "harder and smarter" blah blah blah. I don't think it's a coincident that it started going up just when the US started heavily outsourcing and offshoring work.

What started me wondering about this is that I used to work in the IT industry. After a few years it started dawning on me that the best service IT can render a company is to cut headcounts. So all the programs and services I've been implementing is a way to either reduce headcounts or cause it to grow slower than usal. So this is one way to increase worker productivity.

Here's an interesting report I just found:

"While economic theory holds that improvement in a population�s standard of living is directly tied to its productivity growth, one of the great puzzles of the American economy in recent years has been the fact that large productivity gains have not broadly benefited workers in
the form of higher wages (Dew-Becker and Gordon 2005, Yellen 2006). A better understanding of what our productivity statistics actually measure potentially provides some answers to this puzzle. Although a number of economists have suggested that offshoring may partly explain
why many Americans have not enjoyed real wage gains during this period of rapid productivity growth, a contribution of this paper is to suggest a direct link between productivity measurement,
offshoring, and inequality. It is possible that because of poor measurement of imported intermediate inputs, especially services, productivity measures are inflated. Moreover, even when offshored materials and services inputs are accurately measured, productivity improvements that result from offshoring may largely measure cost savings, not improvements to output per hour worked by American labor. Productivity trends may be an indicator not of how productive American workers are compared to foreign workers, but rather of how cost-uncompetitive many are vis-�-vis foreign labor. Although the productivity numbers may capture some net gains to the American economy from trade, there is no reason to believe that these
gains will be broadly shared among workers. The very process of offshoring to cheap foreign labor places downward pressure on many domestic workers� wages and simultaneously increases measured productivity through cost savings."

http://www.upjohninst.org/publications/wp/06-130.pdf