An employee perspective on Productivity

PasturesNew

kabayiri wrote: »

25 years ago you could put your money into a machine and an automated car wash would clean your car. Flash forward to today, and I can watch half a dozen Iranians wash my car, all bustling away. .

In 10 years' time you'll press a button on an app and a robot will turn up and wash it, wherever it is - and you'll pay instantaneously with an online currency.

kabayiri

PasturesNew wrote: »

In 10 years' time you'll press a button on an app and a robot will turn up and wash it, wherever it is - and you'll pay instantaneously with an online currency.

..and those 6 Iranians will be on the dole, moaning about the influx of all these cheap Martians coming over to take the jobs still available.

(Reassuringly, though, Philip Green will still be as obnoxious as ever)

globalds

It does look like any future decent gains in productivity are going to be made with mass unemployment.
Delivering goods on our roads can't be that inefficient comparably.. But the only real leap forward from 38 tonne trucks is driverless 38 tonne trucks.
Same for farm vehicle or trains

cells

kabayiri wrote: »

We have pretty much outsourced all the industry which needs high volume of labour. We are never ever going to create a factory complex with half a million employees, like the FoxConn site.

This leaves doing more with fewer people. That requires capital investment, and why would you do that, when you have a queue of cheap migrant labour to pluck from.

An example. 25 years ago you could put your money into a machine and an automated car wash would clean your car. Flash forward to today, and I can watch half a dozen Iranians wash my car, all bustling away.

I don't care because it seems cheap. The government doesn't care because it can crow about another half a dozen people in employment.

But, efficient and productive? I hardly think so.

Human labour in the UK is not cheap. A task that can be automated often will be. It's only those that can't be automated to a simolar standard or the end customer doesn't like machines that stay as human tasks. The car wash is one example of people not liking machines for fear of them damaging the car.

Manufacturing productivity is also global. It doesn't really matter how cheap or not a pole is to hire in England. The Americans will automate all that can be automated and the technology (software and hardware) once available will be deployed everywhere including the UK

There are multiple reasons why UK productivity is lower than it was 8-10 years ago but the availability of poles on min wage is probably not one of them

cells

globalds wrote: »

It does look like any future decent gains in productivity are going to be made with mass unemployment.
Delivering goods on our roads can't be that inefficient comparably.. But the only real leap forward from 38 tonne trucks is driverless 38 tonne trucks.
Same for farm vehicle or trains

Self drive land vehicles will do much much more than make deliveries more productive. Its a potentially £100B a year productivity improvement in the UK alone. Most of it stems from the theoretical -90% in accidents and large reductions in the need for cars.

You can think of it like this. Car accidents cost a lot of legal time and insurance and other professionals who deal with that side of things. It cots us in the region of £10B a year for that. We could try to make the legal profession much much more productive with software or whatever or we could invent self drive cars which crash 90% less thus reducing the need for the legal professions by about 90%.

Self drive vehicles really are one gigantic leap in productivity which will hopefully happen in the next decade.

The next two big ones are healthcare and education. Healthcare can potentially be largely robotised once the bots have true Hunan perception. Or maybe there will be leaps in regenerative medicines.

buglawton

chucknorris wrote: »

Before I became a quantity surveyor (long story, but cut short, I was not sufficiently motivated when I was younger to strive and put enough effort in to be a 'success' in life), I was an electrician, and time served in the shipyards on Tyneside. When I was 21, I went to work in a German shipyard In Hamburg, I was immediately taken, and very impressed with how proud the Germans were of the work that they did. I had never seen anything like that before in my life, I immediately knew why they were doing so much better than us.

As a student on German work experience I was able to directly compare the metal bashing company I'd worked for in the UK with a German equivalent. The German production control office (this was all pre-computer) was shockingly better organised, just by using a meticulously well thought out filing system combined with a massive wall chart. They knew where everything was all the time. In the UK it was typical to have to do a walkabout to find whole batches of in-production items. Around this time in the late 70s the Sunday Times did a big article examining why a Belgian Ford car door production line was 50% more productive than Ford's direct equivalent in Essex.
Long story short, UK unions were unconstructive and the UK work culture meant that jobs had a lot more entertainment value if the line broke down often, rather than a dull boring roster of preventative maintenance being the norm as in Belgium.

Side note: Those were the long bygone days when the Sunday Times did serious investigative journalism on non -celebrity topics.

So let's stop wondering why Germans with lower working hours get longer holidays, have much more living space and even commute much shorter distances.

wymondham

Employee productivity wont change as long as you can go to work and work your but off, or 'pretend' to be busy and still earn the same...

I know lots of people who work hard, and some that don't and all get paid 9-5 even though some only actually work a few hours....

Going self-employed made me very aware of productivity and needing to earn...

regprentice

Interesting report.

I think you have to look at workloads/productivity over time for certain roles. I read an article recently where Goodie/springwatch presenter Bill Oddie reminisced about his first job driving a tyre delivery lorry. If he finished his route early (as he often did) he drove his lorry off to do some birdwatching for the rest of the afternoon. Halcyon days...

Those days are long gone....

Now a lorry driver (i suppose im thinking specifically about outfits like dpd..referring to an older thread) will be self employed,on only 2 weeks holiday a year, fined by his employer for taking days sick (£150 a day in 2011) expected to work minimum 11 hour days, buy his own vehicle, monitored constantly by gps, have hard/impossible routes planned for them by computers squezing every ounce of efficiency out of his routes. Personal use of a company vehicle might also result in a 3.5k fine from hmrc (birdwatching, or more likely nowadays dropping kids off at dentist etc). (https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3012966)

Also reminds me of the till monkeys at tesco who, if not replaced by a self service till, now work on the tills AND as self service till technicians.

Personally (as an accountant) i've been squeezed by offshoring (75% of my daily contact is with colleagues in india), efficency drives (lets make 10% of our staff redundant each year and leave the same amount of work for the 90% left to do, 7 years and counting) and even mandatory working from home where my employer only provides me a desk and computer 3 days out of 5. Ive had 4 pay rises in 9 years (ranging from 0.25% to 2%) yet the 'productivity' ask has gone through the roof. Ive recently moved internally as, in my old department, the 10-14 hour days were beginning to affect my health.

The report is actually about employees being pessimistic that they will see any 'fair' increase in wages/conditions/ benefits to compensate them for more productive (harder) work forced on them by employers. In modern britain the employers line is clearly 'you're lucky you have a job at all'.

buglawton

The offshoring is due to the £ being still overvalued. But since it's a safe haven rule-of-law world-tradable currency it'll continue to be overvalued - international investors seem to need a 'grain store' of £.

Due to that over-valuation of the £ there's constant downward globalisation-pressure on UK salaries. Better accept it. What MSEers need to do is take their meagre frozen salary levels and then apply ruthless logic to their spending.

mwpt

buglawton wrote: »

The offshoring is due to the £ being still overvalued. But since it's a safe haven rule-of-law world-tradable currency it'll continue to be overvalued - international investors seem to need a 'grain store' of £.

Due to that over-valuation of the £ there's constant downward globalisation-pressure on UK salaries. Better accept it. What MSEers need to do is take their meagre frozen salary levels and then apply ruthless logic to their spending.

Are you saying that in order for us to compete internationally, we have to sell our goods and services more cheaply? But at the same time you guys want brexit because you want salaries to rise? You can't have both.