The "quiet quitting" strategy was not well accepted and now they are trying this.
> Since the pandemic started, “the link between hard work and reward has been broken”
More like "since the 1970s"
U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
111–120 of 751 posts
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for the fact that you won't have healthcare
They have access to the same health insurance, it is just expensive, which goes back to needing capital. It is trivial to go to healthcare.gov and buy the same health insurance an employer subsidizes for employees.
> It is trivial to go to healthcare.gov and buy the same health insurance an employer subsidizes for employees.
This is so shockingly false in most states that I don't understand how you feel you have enough personal experience to state this so confidently.
Neither California nor Texas have any PPO-style plans available on healthcare.gov. For all the public / self-employed plans, "Out-of-network" means "Pay for it yourself, this is not covered at all." That's a huge barrier to care when you need an urgent care and it's not clear which doctor at which urgent care might be covered.
Additionally the rates aren't just different due to subsidy, but due to quality of the participant pool. Many large employers are self-insured / self-funded, and the insurance company just administrates the fund, reimbursements, etc. However, the unsubsidized rates (made known to us via COBRA) are still much, much lower than the healthcare.gov rates because the participants are generally healthy, wealthy, and young.
When you buy healthcare.gov you get the shitty rates. This isn't just a difference of degree ... having a $100 deductible vs. a $6,000 deductible, or a $1,000 OOP max vs. a $22,000 OOP max literally makes the difference whether I can get my gastrointestinal cancer kept in check every year or not. I can afford the COBRA premiums for that $1,000 OOP max, but I absolutely cannot afford the healthcare.gov plan with >$15,000 in premiums on top of the $22,000 OOP max that I'm guaranteed to hit every. single. year. to get the care I need.
Anyone who is pro-business, pro-entrepreneur, should generally be for good public healthcare. This would relieve businesses of a LOT of administrative burden and overhead to let them focus on their core value proposition. It would also facilitate a lot of good startups by freeing people to go build something great. A lot of potential capital growth, innovation, and disruption is being wasted because the people who can do this are stuck in place.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#113These things always really need a giant flashing neon note that "productivity" doesn't mean how much workers get done but how much money is made off of what workers get done. They're only loosely connected, and most productivity gains have come from workers having to "do less" to "make more".
This is not how productivity is defined or measured.
I'm really curious how you think it's defined or measured then. I'm obviously abstracting a bit, but a lot of people in the replies here seem to think it's related to how much time you spend watching cat videos on company time and it's definitely not that.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#114My guess is Covid. I don’t know about anyone else but I was so burned out focusing on work isn’t a priority. It’s going to take a year or more before people feel like they’ve recovered.
I feel like what we're hearing about excess mortality etc. is also related. The pandemic has been exhausting for so many people, and the multiple sources of uncertainty that have popped up in its wake have made things even worse.
I do hope we find a way to recover.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#115I've read that doctors now spend as much as 50% of their time documenting their work. Companies such as Epic, which provide the software that hospitals use to build databases of patient data, have been big winners in the new world of hospitals-depending-on-software. But did the doctors become more productive? By almost any measure, they became less productive. People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problem…
> I've read that doctors now spend as much as 50% of their time documenting their work. Companies such as Epic, which provide the software that hospitals use to build databases of patient data, have been big winners in the new world of hospitals-depending-on-software. But did the doctors become more productive? By almost any measure, they became less productive.
It’s less the software, and more the users, site-specific configuration and the environment they work in.
Non-US Epic users spend 20-60% less time on various EHR activities than their US counterparts. One of the most dramatic differences is time spent on ordering, which you would think would be as optimized as it could be.
Time spent documenting was 40 minutes/day for US users and 30 for non-US on average. Maybe some spend 50%, but that’s far from average.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
Another study found US clinicians write 4x longer notes (cited in above).
Now, does any of this improve clinical outcomes?
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not how productivity is defined or measured.
Then perhaps you'd like to enlighten us?
Workforce productivity at the national level is typically defined by some measure of output, the amount of goods or services produced (typically GDP), over some measure of input, the number of hours worked/workforce participation.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#117I'm pretty sure I know why... The working environment changed. Bit by bit I moved from an environment with gentleman's agreements and so on towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant, etc. In the UK over the past few years I went from going into a nice office in a number of beautiful old buildings, getting my stuff done with cameraderie, having lunch together and playing board games,…
> But is it just me? No. I go into the office every day because I feel the same. I need to get out of the house and see people. (It is OK if you, reader, do not feel this way! People are different!) There's a handful of other folks who come in every day. I'm starting up a project this week to revive our office culture a bit, to try to spring back from the COVID devastation.
I think a lot of us work-from-home preferrers also like (good) offices better than WFH, just not to the tune of hundreds of dollars and tens of hours lost per month.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#118Surely, it cant be financial insecurity, uncertain future, and not getting anywhere regardless of how much work they put in. It definitely cant be that the capitalist system has already squeezed the last drops of productivity from people in the last few decades and there is no more. It definitely can't be that what Marx predicted already happened and the majority of people don't have access to means of generating wealth/income, being unable to consume, therefore putting the economy into a crisis of growth and profitability.
No one is sure why. Its just a mystery.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#119Lots of people are productive WFH, but loads are taking it easy. Often in my team Fridays people barely dial in, maybe are connected a few hours max. Thursday afternoons now are dead as people get ready for the weekend... Job market is still strong so no one really cares that much as we know we're difficult to replace.
Excellent, this provides productive evidence for a 4 day work week if everything still runs with folks checked out on Fridays and they’re not in the office performing work theater.
Labor power in the face of a recession comes from dwindling labor supply. 360k boomers retire each month in the US. 1.8 million people over the age of 55 die every year. Not enough folks to backfill.
https://archive.ph/2022.10.27-015740/https://www.businessins...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/09/the-pace-of...
https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/rising-number-of-baby-...
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#120Can I be naive and argue a simple explanation?
Cheap money the last 13 years = hire more people who do less and get paid more. Or even hiring people for positions that aren't needed.