I'm sure everyone's noticed the rash of articles on productivity lately and how Canada isn't doing well enough, etc, etc, When the flow started, Carol Goar wrote an opinion piece in the Toronto Star, rightly describing it as a new stick to threaten the working class with now that inflation is no longer around to do the job. Anyway, today as I was going about my boring work, I started thinking about productivity in connection with the reduction of available work. I remain convinced, as I stated before, that Rifkin et al. are correct: technology is reducing the number of jobs especially in the unskilled and semi-skilled areas but also in highly technical areas (eg., the number of computer technicians in Canada declined by 40 per cent in the first half of the decade; StatsCan attributed this to the increased use of modular components). By the way, in my own semi-skilled workplace (manufacturing gas fireplaces) I am seeing a reduction in the amount of work needed. I attribute it mainly to the fact that we are now purchasing some preassembled subcomponents that we used to make from scratch. One that I used to make tens of thousands of is obviously produced by a highly automated process and costs (the head of R&D told me) only half as much to busy as compared to having me do the job. I don't think management has clued in yet that the subcomponents are not only cheaper but cut the labour required. I'm seeing a lot more idleness where people used to be working frantically to keep up with the flow of production. So, if productivity is economic output divided by the number of people employed, mathematically that means that as the number of employees approaches zero, productivity approaches infinity. Many seem to think that could never happen. Personally I believe, based on what I have seen of technological advance in my own lifetime, that it will happen within a century at the most, or at least as near as makes no difference. If there were employment for only 2 per cent of the adults in a society, would productivity be a meaningful measure? It seems to me that we have an analogy here to the Einsteinian revolution in physics. Newtonian physics works very, very well with slow-moving objects like billiard balls. It falls apart when an object attains a significant fraction of lightspeed. As our society approaches asymptotically to zero employment, is there any point to talking about productivity? Live long and prosper Victor Milne FIGHT THE BASTARDS! An anti-neoconservative website at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/pat-vic/ LONESOME ACRES RIDING STABLE at http://www3.sympatico.ca/pat-vic/home.htm DDT - DON'T DO TELEMARKETING at http://www.elosoft.com/ftb/
