"Irish workers are second most productive in the world" headlined the business section of the Irish Times (4 September) reporting on an International Labour Organisation (ILO) study on productivity in various different countries.
Productivity as measured by the ILO is a pretty nebulous concept. They take a country's total GNP and divide it by some measure of the amount of work done, either the total number of hours worked by workers in that country or this divided by the total number of workers (work per hour). It was on this second measure that Irish workers came second (to US workers).
The result is not really a measure of productivity in the true sense of output per workers who actually produced it. This would have to be the total amount of new value produced in a year divided by the total number of hours of productive work. But this is not what the ILO is measuring.
For two reasons.
First, GNP includes some double-counting (for instance, by including government spending -- which has to come from the total amount of new wealth and is not an addition to it, as assumed) and also, for some countries, income that has nothing to with what's produced by workers there (for instance, Norway's oil rents and, in fact, Ireland's income from "financial services").
Secondly, because the hours of work of all workers are included, even those in engaged in non-productive work (for instance, most government workers and also the domestic staff of the rich).
But the ILO figures still tell us something: that despite the enormous waste of labour under capitalism, "productivity" still increases from year to year. This is a distorted reflection of the increase in real productivity that also goes on and which is why socialists say that the world is capable of producing enough for all, once the profit barrier and the waste of capitalism is eliminated and production re-oriented towards the satisfaction of people's needs.
Also, the whole concept of productivity (even in the ILO's form) brings out that the only way wealth is produced is by the application of human labour to materials that originally came from nature, and that therefore wealth is produced only by those who so apply their labour, the producers -- under capitalism called, appropriately enough, the working class.
ALB
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1 comment:
great blog - even for a man like me who has never been able to make sense of economics - still like this article clearly shows - capitalist economics are not made to make sense, but to make workers transfer the largest measure of the value and wealth they create to the capitalist class.
They don't really even own the MoP in some sense.
Land, e.g. 'was made to be a common treasury for all', not for rents and deriving profit.
The factories and machines were all made either directly by our working class ancestors, or 'paid for ' with the surplus value the capitalists extracted from their wages.
Now Blair's gone, i s'pose the SWP will be calling for and making signs calling for Brown to Go.
I prefer the SPGB and WSM message of capitalism must go -
you know it makes sense.
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