Progressive productivity reform,with the aim of boosting per capita disposable income, has to be driven by smart investment rather than brutal cutsEver since Thomas Mortimer worried that the advent of the sawmill “would exclude the labour of thousands of useful workmen”, or progressives have had an uneasy relationship with productivity. Everyone is pleased to see technology and process improvements that make jobs safer,cleaner and less stressful. But many worry that such improvements will also shrink the number of jobs going around and make life much worse for workers who cessation up displaced by machines.
At its best, this anxiety manifests in close attention to who the winners and losers are in nowadays’s changing workforce. At worst, and it results in a rose-tinted yearning for the kind of back-breaking jobs few workers ever enjoyed at the time.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com