Want a snapshot of working life today in the U.S.? Private-sector employers have cut employees’ work hours and given them more work, the New York Times of August 10 reported.

American workers’ productivity for the second-quarter of this year grew by an annual rate of 1.1 percent versus 8.6 percent for the first-quarter, according to the Labor Department. Productivity is the measure of a worker’s output per hour.

Productivity increases profitability. So why are workers laboring more intensely as productivity has decreased?

The Financial Times of August 9 noted that the decline in the rate of workers’ productivity was “another indication that the economic recovery has lost steam.” Employers’ profits are being squeezed by the slowdown, so they, in turn, are squeezing their employees more intensely.

It’s a contradictory trend. This is what I mean.

When employers try to boost productivity by cutting employees’ hours (and salaries), this leaves workers with less take-home pay. Yet their consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of the nation’s economy!

On one hand, increasing labor productivity boosts the bottom line for private firms. On the other hand, workers’ buying power depends on their earnings.

With reduced income, workers buy less. It’s a stressful situation for many.

Some of these workers are single-mothers rearing kids while working for wages in retail stores. Others are male manufacturing workers whose hours are being cut as their firms move factories abroad, which Hollywood dramatized in “John Q.”

Meanwhile, employees who remain wage-earners after employers’ cost-cutting have less room to demand better working conditions or more pay. Strikes are risky to workers, who need steady wages to pay for food, rent and transport.

Then there’s the fear of unemployment. To keep employees less militant, there are jobless workers, “the reserve army of the unemployed,” in an old German’s famous phrase.

Welfare reform has also forced many new workers into the labor market. The ranks of the jobless are expanding as the U.S. economy slows down.

Workers being squeezed to work faster respond in various ways. For example, some work through their breaks and meal times.

Also feeling the squeeze are some small business people. They self-exploit themselves by working long hours to keep from being driven to the wall by competitors.

Stress on the job makes for stress away from work. Family and friends suffer in ways big and small.

To relieve their stress, some workers abuse alcohol. It’s cheap and plentiful.

On a related note, there is a constant change in technology to boost workers’ productivity. This spurs economic growth (profitability), as Fed Chief Alan Greenspan and the business press have noted.

“Interest in the productivity numbers is more intense than it used to be because so much of America’s spectacular boom in the late 1990s was attributed to spectacular productivity gains—mainly, it was thought, reflecting the rapid pace of technological development in computers and telecommunications,” the London Economist of August 9 reported.

Technical change in the production process defines a market economy. This helps to force employers and employees to keep pace or fall by the wayside.

Author Ellen Meiksins Woods terms this part of the ”market imperative.” One of its goals is to constantly increase labor productivity.

This compulsion to improve productivity rules the work world and society generally. In her view, the rhetoric of market opportunity voiced by politicians and pundits is false.

Compulsion is one thing. Opportunity is entirely different.

Think of how employers compete against each other for market share and profits. Meanwhile, workers compete against each other for employment.

Against this backdrop, the legitimacy of profits—given the accounting fraud recently flowing from corporate America—shouldn’t distract us from the nature of the market system. It has nothing to do with honesty, contrary to what President Bush recently told the nation.

He did, though, make capitalism the subject. So it should be.

Just ask millions of working Americans laboring at the point of production. Under capitalism, they’re living the productivity/profitability squeeze as U.S. economic growth lags.

Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive newspaper. Email: ssandron@hotmail.com

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