May 20, 2016
Economists have been largely puzzled by the sharp slowdown in productivity growth over the last decade. (Sorry, robot fans, they aren’t taking jobs yet.) Anyhow, productivity growth has fallen from nearly 3.0 percent annually from 1995 to 2005, to less than 1.0 percent over the last decade. We’ve actually seen negative growth over the last two years.
Anyhow, there are no widely accepted explanations for this sharp falloff. (My story is that in a weak labor market with workers desperate to find jobs, many employers are hiring them at very low productivity jobs. Think of the midnight shift at a convenience store or the greeters are Walmart. In a stronger economy, these workers would move to higher paying jobs and these low productivity jobs would go unfilled.)
The NYT reports on a possible way of increasing productivity, shorten work hours. It reports on the situation in Gothenburg, Sweden, where the city put in place a 6-hour workday for public employees last year. According to the piece, the workers hugely value the shorter workday. They claim that it has improved the quality of their lives and also made them more productive workers.
While there is no hard data to support this contention, the one numerical example given seems to support the claim. The article reports on a hospital that had 89 workers before the experiment started, which hired an additional 15 workers to compensate for the shorter workdays. If all of the 89 workers had previously put in 8-hours days, and all 104 workers (counting the 15 new hires) now work 6-hour days, this would imply an 14.1 percent increase in productivity, assuming no change in output. This would be an enormous gain — more than the U.S. economy has gained over the last decade. In fact, the piece indicates there actually has been an increase in output, implying an even larger gain in productivity.
In general, it is not easy to find ways to increase productivity. The standard recipes involve investing in more capital and better education and training for the workforce. While both of these routes are good, they are expensive and the gains will typically take a long period of time to be realized. If shortening work hours actually does lead to gains in productivity, this would be a remarkably easy route to accomplish this goal. And, it would make workers’ lives much better.
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