The Menace of Increased Productivity

(Updated from an earlier published work.)

Once I heard business guru Tom Peters talk about a study involving a major insurance company in which it was discovered that during the three weeks it took to process an average claim a total of only 17 minutes of productive work was expended.  This was exceedingly shocking to me because, having been employed at one time by a large metropolitan insurance company, I thought the more accurate figure was about six minutes.

Of course, if you've spent any time at all in the business world you know that Peters' example is not an isolated case but rather it approaches the norm.  Government bureaucracies have not cornered the market on waste, they just can't hide it as well.  Private corporations also have vast numbers of employees whose main service to society is that they are not out on the streets breaking into people's homes.

The old adage is correct -- 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work.  Take salesmen, for instance.  For every salesman who is out there closing a sale, there are four others who are spending the day at the airport trying to figure out how to get from Kansas City to Toledo and why.

Likewise, if you walk into a bank these days, what you are likely to see is one teller explaining money market accounts to a confused customer while the other employees are making towers with all of the coins in their drawers.

How, in this land where only the fittest are supposed to survive, do we end up with so many useless workers?

The answer is productivity.  More specifically, the 20 percent who are truly working are producing too much.  Their output is covering for the rest of the work force, whose major accomplishment each day is that they showed up.

A case in point.  By inventing a  machine that will do the work of 100 men, the productive minority  may be increasing the wealth of the nation, but they are also turning loose 99 guys on us who now have nothing better to do than to stroll around the office signing up boosters for their children's soccer teams.

Look what productivity did to the family farmer!  It has virtually put him out of business.  With machinery doing all the demanding tasks, the descendants of once proud farming clans have so much time on their hands they hang around the market thinking up silly things to do, like organizing protests at which they will spill large quantities of perfectly good milk or planning marches on Washington to ask Congress to pay them to not produce anything at all.

Productivity has hurt industrial workers as well.  Take autoworkers.  In trying to recapture the market share it lost to the Japanese, the Big Three car makers modernized their assembly lines and brought in robots to do the work.  The robots have performed so well, and are generally so much easier to get along with, that their human counterparts aren't needed anymore.  In fact, there are only a handful of autoworkers left in the country and the only thing they do is car commercials on TV.

Face it, the way technology is advancing and machines are replacing humans in the workplace, pretty soon there won't be any work left for any of us.  Who knows, maybe then we'll all be marching on Washington demanding to be paid for not working.