In Backbench 18 (Final Issue) | Domestic Politics
The Productivity of My Real Life
By Manuel F. McDonald
An increase in productivity is one of the central selling points of the Howard Government’s industrial relations sales pitch.
You know the PM is talking about productivity when he starts using weird sports analogies that refer to “a never ending race,” in which “you never reach the finish line”. According to this analysis when it comes to productivity “your only goal is to stay sufficiently far in front of your competitors.”
I’m all for productivity. If you can do the same thing with less effort, then that has to be a good thing. If nothing else it leaves you more time and energy to do more of the same thing, with the same amount of effort. You get the idea.
But what I don’t quite understand is how this goal, stated with the sought of awed tones that we used to reserve for “telecommuting”, and “hot desking” in the dotcom boom, ties up with most peoples personal experience of the workforce.
You see most of the people I know don’t feel like they are that unproductive, at least not at work anyway. If anything the most common gripe I hear out on the hard streets of North Bondi is that we are now so productive at work that it’s our “real life” that is an unproductive wasteland.
After generations of protectionist policies defending our lives outside work, policies like weekend and public holiday rates, four weeks annual leave, and a standard 38 hour workweek, our real lives, our lives outside the workplace, have become hopelessly uncompetitive.
For many the lives we live outside work have become the personal equivalent of 1970’s US steel workers, stultified into an uncompetitive complacent mass. Just like those steel workers the improved technology, cheaper labour, and more efficient resource production models of our competitors have eclipsed the capacity of our real lives.
It was cheap imported steel that almost wiped the US steel workers of the map, it is the cheap thrills of wages, and the tokens they can buy, that is doing the same thing to our lives outside of work.
After years of neglect and complacency family dinners, social sports teams, or a Sunday afternoon mowing the lawn just can’t compete with strategy meetings with the New York Office, last minute amendments to a planned radio advertising campaign, or a sales report for an overly anxious boss.
Now of course no set of IR laws is ever going to reverse this decline in the competitiveness of our real lives. But I get a terrible feeling, that the latest set of IR laws are going to make it that much harder to change the competitive balance between work and play if we ever decide we not too busy to do so.
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This article is Copyright © 2005 by Manuel F. McDonald. |
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