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American Labor’s Real Problem: It Isn’t Productive Enough
- Bostonian 3y agohttps://archive.ph/ORMsA https://archive.ph/ORMsA subtitle: "Factory workers want lots more pay and fewer hours, but that’s hard to justify when U.S. manufacturers are losing ground" 'Since 2009, manufacturing output per hour in the U.S. has grown just 0.2% a year, well below the economy as a whole and peer economies in Europe and Asia, except Japan. In motor-vehicle manufacturing, the picture is especially bad: From 2012 through last year, productivity plummeted 32%, though some of this was no doubt due to pandemic disruptions. To say American workers aren’t productive enough isn’t to say it’s their fault; after all, productivity depends on a multitude of factors beyond the workers, including management decisions, the supply chain, public infrastructure and regulation. For example, American manufacturers use far fewer robots than their competitors, in particular in Taiwan, South Korea and China, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank. Nonetheless, workers’ fates are inextricably tied to how these factors in combination perform, and for the UAW, they have performed badly. The Detroit Three—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, owner of Chrysler—have been losing market share for years, to other brands and to nonunion U.S. plants. They account for just two of the 10 most dependable brands ranked by J.D. Power and just one of the 10 best cars picked by Consumer Reports. In electric vehicles, they are far behind Tesla, whose highest-output plant and main export base is in Shanghai.'