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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

The reality is that wages have never kept up with productivity increase. Companies are extracting more and more productivity out of their employees, which translates to ever increasing profits.

But this is not an economical law. It's absolutely possible to sacrifice ever increases in growth for more worker time.

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Not everywhere. There are many professions that do not take part in the growth of productivity. Medical Doctors for instance (even though some radiologists try hard to) are limited by interactions with their patients. The same holds for employees at points of sales, they only take part indirectly by selling more higher-priced goods.

So a shop owner that wants to stay open sees a 20% reduction in attendance by their employees. This is going to cost some people real money.

> Medical Doctors for instance (even though some radiologists try hard to) are limited by interactions with their patients

Strongly disagree, productivity increase is everywhere, surgery recovery times have been drastically decreased in the past decades, and recovery protocols accelerated across the board.

Just because doctors have a limit throughput of how many patients per day they can see, it doesn't mean that hospitals and clinics aren't increasing their productivity as a whole. If you are seing less of the same patients per week then your productivity has increased, as simple as that.

The key point GP is highlight is that productivity has basically decoupled from salaries since the 1970's, i.e. we are all collectively producing more value whilst collectively getting payed less in proportion to the value generated.

As a concrete example of doctors practices increasing their productivity: Video consultation preceded with automated triage to push more people to consultations with nurses, pharmacists etc. instead of going via a doctor first. The triage itself reduces the number of doctors consultations by removing a step in the process whenever the triage is successful.

Several companies does this (disclaimer: My employer is an investor in one of them).

> The key point GP is highlight is that productivity has basically decoupled from salaries since the 1970's, i.e. we are all collectively producing more value whilst collectively getting payed less in proportion to the value generated.

This thread is about Spain (which certainly has a lot of economic problems along with the rest of the EU), but wasn't that research mainly about the US?

My impression is some but not all of the cause is because "productivity" numbers are very confused because of how much exponentially more efficient computers have gotten. If you measure in 1970s computers, someone building a PC in 2020 has a million times more productivity.

Employees manning cash registers often also have other tasks they can do instead of operating the register for you - for instance fast food workers also make the food, and clothes workers stand there looking fashionable and tell you how good you look.

These are often things we'd all rather they be doing, in fact. Which is why McDonald's is still popular in Australia when the national minimum wage is ~20USD/hour and they have automated ordering stations.

On the question of MDs, here (in Europe, YMMV) we have doctors who have either have their own practice, and therefore work as little or as much as they want, or are part of hospital staff which is under its own separate legal regimen for work time (with more work hours than the average person, usually). In either case, I think they are not likely to be affected directly by changes to the "typical" work week.

The argument about increased productivity is a fallacy. Only the primary and secondary sectors have a long track record of increased productivity, in services on the other hands -which represent an ever growing share of the working population in western countries- productivity has been stagnating for multiple decades (in some industries it's actually receding, thankfully compensated by the few industries that have good growth).

not sure why this is downvoted. This is known as Baumol's cost disease. Policemen, school teachers, or painters today are no more (or barely more) productive than they were 50 or 100 years ago, yet their salaries have multiplied.

This is so because when salaries in productive industries start to rise every other sector also has to raise wages to attract any worker at all, which in turn raises prices. It's also why coffee is more expensive in Silicon Valley than in Podunk Idaho. It's not because baristas in California are more productive, it's because the region is richer and you can't buy your freshly brewed latte from China or India.

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