Posted on 08/11/2022 9:23:49 PM PDT by Mount Athos
It looks as if we can add another line to the long list of lockdown harms. Sloth.
This explains so much actually. For months, we’ve been watching working/population ratios and labor participation rates and have been stunned by how they both continue to plummet. We search for explanations. Early retirement. Women driven out due to childcare shortages. Unemployment payments.
All these factors contribute but there is still more to explain.
In the midst of the astonishing hullabaloo over the raid of Donald Trump’s home – and the confiscation of a pro-freedom Republican Congressman’s smartphone – the Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped a remarkable report on labor productivity. Here we see something we’ve never seen before.
It’s low and falling. Lower than it has been than in the entire postwar period. It breaks all records. This chart is from 1948 to the present. It adjusts for all factors including participation, population, retirement, and so on. It only looks at hours over output. Here is what we see.
What does this mean?
The immediate response might be that Americans have gotten lazy. They got used to their Zoom lifestyles and pretending to work. They want to hang around on apps, Tweet, chat it up with their friends on Facebook or Slack, and otherwise fake out the boss who can’t fire them anyway for fear of lawsuits. They aren’t doing much anymore, at least not those in high-end employment in professional office suits.
I resisted that conclusion and looked more deeply into how this number is calculated. It looks at total economic output compared to the number of labor hours from wage and salary employees involved in making that output. The result is a figure that estimates productivity per hour. And yes, it is probably widely inaccurate as these sorts of macroeconomic magnitudes tend to be. We use them anyway because they are consistently inaccurate: the same method used to calculate in one quarter is used to calculate in all. It thereby becomes useful.
And what it reveals is probably what we might expect. American workers have dealt with lockdowns and shutdowns, plus vaccine mandate demoralization, plus inflation eating away at real wages, plus an existing or impending recession, and you have the result. A nation of goof-offs.
It might be more than that. Lockdowns kicked off a national substance-abuse crisis: liquor, drugs, weed, you name it. And depression too. Even today, one cannot help but notice the smell of weed in large cities. This is not the smell of ambition and productivity.
We can combine this with the sheer number of people who have left the workforce completely and you paint a grim picture.
Economist and Brownstone Senior Fellow David Stockman has an interesting take on this. Rather than just fire people outright, companies are keeping unproductive employees on the payroll just in case. He writes:
Today’s Q2 productivity report…came in at -4.7%, on top of the -7.7% decline posted in Q1. Together they amount to the worst back-to-back productivity declines ever reported.
Our point is that this development puts a whole new angle on the so-called “strong” labor market. To wit, owing to the labor market turmoil and disruptions of the Covid-Lockdowns and massive stimmy injections since 2020, employers are apparently hiring on a just-in-case basis like rarely before. This is otherwise known as top-of-the-cycle labor hoarding.
As shown below, since Q4 2021 economic output, which is a close derivative of real GDP, has shrunk by –1.2%. By contrast, the US nonfarm payroll has increased by 2.77 million jobs or nearly +2.0%.
Needless to say, with far more labor spread over contracting output, labor productivity took it on the chin. That is to say, bad Washington policies including $6 trillion of stimmies, massive money-pumping and the brutal Lockdowns of the Virus Patrol have apparently left employers dazed and confused.
At length, however, employers will wake-up to the fact that bloated payrolls against declining sales will result in a severe profit margin squeeze. Then the labor-shedding and layoffs will commence big time, even as the Keynesians in the Eccles Building are reduced to babbling about the “strong” labor market which suddenly vanished.
What he is getting at is what I’ve called (after Keynes) the coming euthanasia of the overclass. It won’t be the people actually doing real stuff who will face layoffs but the Zoom workers who stayed home because government said they could and their employers could not object. Employees gradually discovered that they could be anywhere – at the pool, in bed, on the road, climbing mountains – and so long as they had a Slack app running, no one could tell.
Lockdowns acculturated an entire generation to believe that work is fake, productivity is a ruse, money comes for nothing, the boss is an idiot, and many workers are privileged to be wealthy forever due to papers handed out for $200,000 by colleges and universities. Who needs productivity, much less ambition?
In the old days, in an ethos formed from bourgeois experience over hundreds of years, the idea of working and doing one’s part was ingrained as a moral habit, part of the liturgy of life itself. When the government told everyone to stop in the name of virus control, something went haywire in people’s brains. If governments say that the work ethic amounts to nothing but pathogenic spread, and we can all contribute more by staying home and doing less, it’s hard to go back. It wrecked a generation. We are paying the price now.
The good news for the productive few is that this means higher wages and job opportunities galore, especially if you have actual skill and a desire to work. The bad news for everyone else is that many companies will soon discover that you are useless. That’s when the unemployment numbers will start ticking up, making this recession look more like ones in the past except for the relentless decline in real wages.
To answer the question about whether Americans have become lazy bums, the answer is many but not all. It’s sector specific. And individual specific.
Strange times. Sad times.
1. Supply chain disruptions have made it impossible for many workers to be productive even if they are ready, willing and able to work their tails off. I would imagine, for example, that the productivity level of the sales rep at a car dealership is in the toilet right now.
2. Maybe the COVID fiasco did make workers lazy. What it did more than anything else, though, is completely destroy many critical aspects of the underlying relationship between employers, employees, and government. Through my friends and former associates, I have been following the goings-on at my former employer over the course of the last 2+ years. It has been embarrassing to watch the leadership of that company fumble through one bad (in my mind) decision after another — first by racing to impose every draconian Branch Covidian lockdown measure, then by trying to “return to normal” while maintaining some practices that are dystopian and irrational by any measure.
I don’t think this collapse of productivity is a result of workers being lazy. I think the system has been irreparably broken. Rational people in many, many employee-employer relationships have no reason to ever trust this nation’s government or business leaders again.
And what it reveals is probably what we might expect. American workers have dealt with lockdowns and shutdowns, plus vaccine mandate demoralization, plus inflation eating away at real wages, plus an existing or impending recession, and you have the result. A nation of goof-offs.
Time for personal reflection. What as it revealed in us?
𝘛𝘰𝘰 𝘭𝘢𝘻𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴. 𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘵 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯?
Did the coof make people lazier?
Hopefully that wasn’t too long winded ;)
It sure seems to have made people much bigger jerks driving.
I do think the other part of this is the lockdowns gave millions the chance to recalibrate their family budgets, see what was being taught in schools, some dreamed of the homestead life and moved out, many left the cities...
Lazy? Sure some were lazy. But I see a wide cross section of people on a daily basis and they have just recalibrated their life to put family first. Where it should have been all along.
Raise the wages you’re offering and more folks will apply.
Demonstrably untrue. Wages in many service industries have doubled...remember the push for $15?
Well most have it and jobs still go begging. And those who do show up have little taste for actual work.
I know some warehouse jobs paying up to $25/hr! To pick stock and put it on a pallet.. Really?
Not mentioned was the rent holidays that allowed people to shaft their landlords for months. Thats a large chunk of budget they get to play with without consequence.
The workforce is not the same as it was even 3 years ago....
The average American was lazy, fat, drunk and dumb before Covid. They just got lazier, fatter, drunker and dumber.
Any employer that fired employees for refusing to get a COVID “vaccine” almost certainly threw away their most productive, responsible, self-motivated and conscientious workers. And they KEPT the workers who are most likely to be whining, malingering hypochondriacs.
One of the sites that we support pays very good ($25-30/hour). The problem that they have had with people are no show / no notice sick days, coming back routinely late from lunch, etc. Two no shows / no notice at work gets you fired. You get two warnings - one when you start, one when you do it the first time.
There’s a couple FReepers that insist that if you raise the wages enough, these sorts of people will be weeded out.
Have you ever owned a business with employees? I have. It is not so simple to raise wages. An employer has to have the resources to do that, and other costs then go up as well.
And then..... the prices on the products they sell increase. Sales will probably decrease.
Absolutely correct.
The office was filled with "look-busy" nonsense. Meetings were for incompetent staff to hide behind other employees' work. Senior staff could hide their ignorance from junior staff. In-person work was pushing things around for days to weeks instead of just getting it done. I have incompetent coworkers now and have had coworkers previously who've had almost all their work done by others.
Remote work exposed it all. It showed who had skills and who didn't. The time stamps on shared documents showed exactly who was holding up the processes.
One person creating a document for others to review saved countless days instead of meeting after meeting to get to the point the talented ones already knew.
The American worker isn't lazy; they're just unwilling to go back to that nonsense.
thx
I got through it. Thx
The lockdown, no.
The “free” money and government forcing landlords to take it in the shorts and not collect rent and other government OVERREACH, yes!
Unfortunately, most college grads have been sold a bill of goods concerning Socialist Governments, and they have bought into this BS hook, line, and sinker! They are waiting for the Marxist Democrats to finalize our demise from the Constitutional Republic! These educated idiots are unwilling to help rebuild, restore, or expand our economy because they do not WANT a rebuilt, restored, or expanded economy!!
Before Covid, millennials were abandoning jobs because they don’t like to work. I remember Rush talking about this a few times. Most of us would rather not work, but the current generations have been raised to think they shouldn’t have to do anything they don’t like.
Of course, there are exceptions. I work in aerospace and have some great millennial co-workers. Smart, hardworking, good leaders. I trained one last year who’s as sharp as a tack and has an excellent work ethic. He has become a valuable asset to the team. One of my millennial colleagues says “most of the workers in my generation are worthless.” These are the people who will have to carry the load for the entitled class once we are all gone.
I’ve heard millennials and Gen Zzzz people say that they can’t wait until Boomers and Gen X “die off,” so that they can have their imagined little utopia.
Maybe they need to think further about that.
Short Version ?
.
After my nap
When asked why I work:
“I like to eat.”
Fat, Drunk and Lazy,,,
.
Terrible way to go through Life.
👍🏻
Or could part of the problem be that more people have died than we realize?
Either way good luck to the IRS on those 87,000 new hires. 😆
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