PRODUCTIVITY, WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

We hear so much about productivity, mainly from the bosses.

We hear about how we need to raise our productivity for the future wellbeing of the Nation from our PM.

One wonders if they are talking about the same thing.

I suspect not.

With the bosses, the answer is simple, the worker just has to do as ordered and work harder.

For the country to reach the productivity needed to make bosses wealthier, the boss has to have full control.  The right to treat workers as they do all their other inputs to the company is the first requirement.

The right to hire and fire, at will is the first on the list.  Without this, they say, they will go offshore and we will all be sorry.

One wonders who is correct.  I will push for the PM and the union movement.

Our greatest increases occurred during the Hawke/Keating years.  What stood out was the cooperation between government and the union movement.  This along with opening up the economy to completion was very productive.

The unions acting with the Rudd government also played a part in getting the Nation through the GFC relatively unscathed.

In my opinion, the workers are just not there to serve industry.  They are a vital clog in the wheel that ensures industry survives.  Workers are just not another tool in industry and can be disposed of at the will of the employer.  They are an important cog in the wheel of industry.

Education is the key, but not education for education sake.  It has to meet the needs of our future economy.  I also believe it has to be lifelong endeavour.

Gone are the days that one leaves school at fifteen or eighteen years, completing the education they leave for life.  It does not even end at the completion of a degree or apprenticeship.  That is only the beginning.

School and later university is not where we learn the skills for industry.  School is   where we obtain the skills to be able to learn.  We will be gaining new skills throughout our working life.

Education means a better life for our children.  Is that all productivity is about.  I suspect not.  I think the industry needs the skills to rake advantage of an educated workforce, they have to learn to treat the workers as humans and in the scheme of things, equals.  Is that a step too far?

The PM it said does not have a narrative or a view for the future.  Ever since the[E1]  Rudd government came to power and since the Gillard, government took over, the PM has been saying that the most important thing this country needs is an educated work force.  The PM has worked tirelessly towards this end.

The PM has concentrated her interest in learning from early childhood, through to middle or later age in life.

She does not believe as Mr. Pyne has stated all that one need is good teachers.  He went onto say, with the right teacher, one can teach under a gum tree.  I am waiting to see Mr. Pyne educate his children under the nearest gum tree.  I feel it will be long wait.  I am sure his children will have the latest technology and be taught in comfortable surroundings, as I am sure he was himself.

All we hear from the boss is “WorkChoices”.

It is conveniently ignored, the fact, that productivity did not improve under WorkChoices and is the same under FWA.

We already have a flexible workforce, one I suspect that has too many workers on casual or short-term basis.  The boss does not appear to be having problems shredding workers.  The Opposite appears to be true.

Yes, days lost due industrial strife has increased al little.  Most appears to be from the bosses lockouts and new State Premiers attacking their public servants.

Even with this action, the numbers of days lost are still minimal.

Productivity is the most important matter facing the nation.  Education and training is the key to a prosperous future.

Good, successful employers do not need strict industrial laws to get the most from their employees.

Unions, as back in the Hawke/Keating days still have a part to play.  Without unions, the worker does not have a voice.

It is so important that the politicians should see it as needing bipartisan approach.

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“That is, both the performance of countries in ensuring that almost all students achieve at basic levels and their performance in producing high-achieving students seem to matter,” they say.

Just why this should be so is not hard to imagine.  Even if a country is simply making use of new technologies developed elsewhere – as we do – the more workers who have at least basic skills, the easier it will be for them to make use of those new technologies.

On the other hand, some workers need a high level of skills so they can help adapt the new technologies to their countries’ particular situation.

Of course, it’s not just the broad community that benefits from the accretion of human capital.  As Dr Ben Jensen, of the Grattan Institute, has pointed out, improving the effectiveness of teaching – which is what increases students’ cognitive skills – has substantial benefits for the students themselves.

And

“Young people who stay in school and invest in further education can expect to earn an additional 8 to 10 per cent per year for each additional year of education they undertake,” he says.

But while we’re focusing on the acquisition of education as a means to raise our material standard of living, let’s not forget that education is also an end in itself. It allows us to lead broader, more inquiring, more comprehending lives.

Want better productivity? Try better education

and

It seems just about all our senior business people have taken to preaching sermons about the need to improve our flagging rate of productivity improvement, but I’m not sure how sincere they are.

Why not? Because the specific changes they say they want sound like a child’s wishlist for Santa: industrial relations “reform” to reduce their workers’ bargaining power, and tax “reform” to reduce the amount of tax they pay.

If chief executives were more sincere in their thirst for higher productivity – as opposed to things the government could do to make their jobs easier – they might have asked what the empirical research tells us about which changes would do most to enhance our productivity.

Had they done that, they would have found the biggest gains come from adding to human capital – that is, to the education and training of the workforce

And

The researchers collected data for 50 countries over the 40 years to 2000. They found that each additional year of schooling raised a country’s average annual rate of growth in gross domestic product per person by 0.37 percentage points.

That’s a significant increase. And it’s consistent with the findings of many other researchers.

And

They also found, once the effect of higher levels of cognitive skills was taken into account, the significance of levels of school attainment dwindled to nothing.

So, the authors deduce, a country benefits from asking its students to remain at school for longer only if the students are learning something as a consequence.

“Higher levels of cognitive skill appear to play a major role in explaining international differences in economic growth,” they say”

http://www.rossgittins.com/2012/03/want-better-productivity-try-better.html

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………Enough of these zombie ideas: let’s be bold

Labor’s leadership struggle, reminiscent of the Howard-Peacock battles of the 1980s, has raised justified complaints that personality conflicts have obscured the need for a new reform agenda. Indeed, neither of the contenders for the Prime Ministership offered much beyond the consolidation of measures dating back to the government’s first term. On the other side of politics, Tony Abbott offers nothing more than opportunistic populism and appeals to the politics of fear. And

That’s the title of my last piece in the Fin (Thursday before last), which was about the zombie push for productivity (code for working harder) and the failure to pursue the genuine productivity gains that can be achieved through improvements in education, and particularly better education for kids from lower-income families. Ross Gittins made a similar argument, with some nice touches a few days later in the SMH. I particularly liked his point that the “productivity agenda” is essentially about making life easier for bosses.

And

Sadly, however, the advocates of reform have little more to offer than our current leaders. Rather, they are pushing an agenda that also harks back to the 1980s: the tired old package of microeconomic reform, workplace reorganization and productivity growth. The benefits of this package, oversold at the time, have long since been exhausted.

And

In reality, the apparent increase in productivity arose from the increase in the pace and intensity of work produced by the combination of microeconomic reform and the adverse labour market conditions that followed the ‘recession we had to have’. These increases in effort weren’t sustainable, and as Herbert Stein famously observed, a trend that can’t be sustained won’t be.

and

The speedup in the pace of work, and the resulting problem of work/life balance were described by John Howard as a ‘barbecue stopper’.The imbalance between work and life was apparent to everyone in Australia except the economists looking at the productivity statistics. Although work intensity can’t be measured directly, we can look at related measures such as the number of people working extremely long hours and the proportion of workers compensation claims citing stress. All these measures rose during the spurious productivity miracle of the 1990s, and fell back again during the 2000s. As a result, measured productivity growth slowed to a crawl in the 2000s, even as good macroeconomic performance and favorable terms of trade allowed steady increases in living standards.

And

The way ordinary Australians understand the push for productivity was underscored by the outpouring of anger against WorkChoices, and the lack of any support for its revival. As has been shown on numerous occasions, Australians understand that ‘workplace reform’ and ‘productivity’ are codewords for ‘work harder and faster, with less autonomy’. Yet, presented with a vacuum at the level of political leadership, the advocates of refrom can come up with nothing better than another attempt to reanimate these

And

Meanwhile, reforms that could produce genuine and sustainable improvements in productivity have languished. Rudd’s ‘Education Revolution’ is barely a memory. Julia Gillard, who once made much of her passion for education, dropped the phrase the moment she left the portfolio behind. Throughout her period as Minister, Gillard pointed to the forthcoming Gonski review of school funding as a reason not to take any substantive new steps in this area.

Gonski’s committee finally reported last week. It made a powerful case, on both equity and efficiency grounds, for a substantial increase in funding to the most disadvantaged schools, almost all of which are in the public sector. If we are to become a more productive nation, we cannot afford to lose a quarter or more of our young people to inadequate education and social exclusion.

The alternative can already be seen in the United States, where what was once the land of opportunity is now characterized by the highest levels of inherited inequality in the developed world, largely because of unequal access to education.

And

Naturally, the advocates of ‘bold reform’ are nowhere to be seen in this fight. The only concern of free-market thinktanks like the Centre for Independent Studies is to protect the class interests of wealthy private schools ‘Gonski: less for private schools, AFR 21/2/12’.

This is, indeed, a time for bold new ideas about reform. What we are getting instead is personality politics and zombie economics.

http://johnquiggin.com/2012/03/13/enough-of-these-zombie-ideas-lets-be-bold/#comments

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I do not believe that a movement representing about two million Australians lacks legitimacy or needs to apologise for being part of a public debate. I see it as correcting an imbalance.

When was the last time you saw a delegation of minimum wage workers flying to Canberra in a private jet for an audience with a minister? When was the last time you saw community sector “workers at an intimate fundraising dinner for one of our political parties? When did you last see a TV advertisement funded by single parents asking for tax breaks for their contribution to society?

We should never think that our democracy is perfect, or that it is not vulnerable. I would hate for our system to become like the USA’s where nearly half the population sees so little that represents them in politics that they do not vote.

If we lose the ability to have the robust public debates that have characterised Australian democracy, then our society will be the loser.”

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/unions-represent-millions-mining-giants-only-a-few/

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