The Dow hit a record high this week, but who's winning? In all the chatter about our "jobless recovery," how often does someone explain the simple feat by which this is actually accomplished?
US productivity increased twice as fast in 2009 as it had in 2008, and twice as fast again in 2010: workforce down, output up, and voilá! No wonder corporate profits are up 22 percent since 2007. Americans' disposable income has inched ahead 1.4% by comparison. So far in this recovery, corporations have captured an unusually high share of the income gains.
The word "productivity" is a term insidious in both its usage and creep. And so we kowtow to—nay, embrace—a cultural maxim that just happens to be enormously convenient to corporate America. The not-so-subtle implication is always: Don't you want to be a productive member of society?
Except what's good for American business isn't necessarily good for Americans. We're not just working smarter, but harder. And harder. And harder, to the point where the driver is no longer American industriousness, but something much more predatory.
Just counting work that's on the books (never mind those 11 pm emails), Americans now put in an average of 122 more hours per year than Brits, and 378 hours (nearly 10 weeks!) more than Germans. The differential isn't solely accounted for by longer hours, of course—worldwide, almost everyone except us has, at least on paper, a right to weekends off, paid vacation time and paid maternity leave. (The only other countries that don't mandate paid time off for new moms are Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Samoa, and Swaziland.)
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