Productivity has become a safe haven for businesses – and society as a whole. Both an economic indicator and an injunction to performance, it generates perverse effects that our Lab expert Laetitia Vitaud aims to decipher in her new book: Putting an end to productivity. Feminist critique of a key notion of the economy and work. As a preview, here she tackles 6 myths around productivity at work.
The concept of productivity is omnipresent: morning rituals here, productive detox there. We have integrated it as a reason for being for ourselves and society. In many cases, we have subordinated the issues that matter most – well-being, health, the environment, peace – to this imperative. Being in good health or being happy makes you more productive... It's as if we had reversed the order of priorities, the teleological order of things: some of us live to work instead of working to live .
Productivity is at the heart of an economic science that has shaped our way of distributing wealth and organizing work. It is both an indicator of the economy and a vague injunction to individual performance. Defined as the “ratio of the product to the factors of production”, it is a ratio which measures the efficiency of labor (or capital). If we apply this concept literally, there would be productive individuals who create wealth and others who undermine the economy. If we believe these indicators of productivity and gross domestic product, we could establish a scale of value among the assets and sectors of the economy according to their contribution to the creation of wealth in the economy.
For many economists, the subject does not seem to be subject to discussion. Who wouldn't want to increase labor productivity? Since it allows us to produce more wealth with less work, how can we be against it? A priori, no one! But in a book published by Payot, entitled Ending Productivity. A feminist critique of a key notion of the economy and work, I express a different position: the way in which we have constructed the concept of productivity is in fact harmful; we should learn to look at and measure the economy differently.
The way productivity has been defined is based on tragic oversights, misconceptions and blind spots that make this measure in no way neutral. At best, she misses the point. At worst, it serves to justify wealth inequalities and destructive behavior. Through 6 myths to bust, I will try to illustrate why it is time to question this sexist and ecocidal heritage that is productivity.
Myth #1: Productivity is easily measured
The first myth about productivity is the idea that it is easy to measure. This idea is certainly convincing in the world of commodities: agricultural raw materials and standardized goods from assembly lines. Obviously, as long as it concerns tons of wheat or the number of cars mass-produced at the factory, the measurement seems clear and indisputable. But as soon as we move away from it, things become much more vague. Are you able to measure the value creation (in euros) of an hour spent processing emails? How to measure productivity in the world of care, personal services and public services? What is the productivity of a nurse or a teacher, for example? The number of patients seen per hour or the number of hours of lessons delivered do not say much about the health of patients or the knowledge and skills acquired by children. It must be said that productivity ignores the quality of the goods and services produced. To return to the example of teaching, it puts on the same level a charismatic teacher who creates vocations in his students and another who boredly spits out lessons developed 20 years previously. It ignores the level of trust produced in a service relationship. In the knowledge economy, it ignores the value represented by the level of knowledge not reflected by prices. The reality is that in services, creative professions, care and the entire knowledge economy, that is to say the essential part of our economy, we do not know how to properly measure the productivity of workers. We rely on arbitrary conventions that have little to do with “value.”
Myth #2: Salary reflects productivity
Economists love mathematics and reasoning “all things being equal”. There is a whole school called “marginalist” which explains the formation of prices and wages on the basis of derivative calculations. For these economists, economic value result of “marginal utility” (the utility of the last unit consumed) and the salary would be the result of “marginal productivity” (what an additional hour worked or an additional worker hired brings) . Except that in practice, we are no more capable of determining marginal utility than marginal productivity... In public services, for example, we calculate productivity on the basis of what people are paid, it is i.e. not much. We postulate that the value added by administrations corresponds to the money we put into it, since there is no “customer” who pays for the service. In other words, if these workers are poorly paid, this will result in them being considered unproductive. And their low productivity will be used to justify their low pay. A snake biting its own tail! If salaries reflected productivity, this would also mean that men are necessarily more productive than women (since they are better paid in all sectors). In reality, since we are unable to precisely measure the individual contribution of people in a collective project, the salary level reflects existing power relations, negotiating power and social origin more than just individual productivity. At best, the latter serves as a “hide-caste”, to use the expression coined by Nicolas Kayser-Bril in his work Full-time imposture.
Myth #3: Productivity is an individual subject
If we are to believe the talk about productivity, we only owe our productivity to ourselves. But in reality, productivity is a societal and collective subject. We are more productive if we are well fed, in good health, in a situation of emotional well-being and if we breathe clean air. Without collective infrastructure (roads, Internet, schools, nurseries, etc.), not much is possible. But all of this also requires work! The latter may be low paid or free, but it is nonetheless essential to any productivity. It is like this: for every hour of work deemed “productive,” there are an unknown number of hours of free or low-paid work that make that “productive” hour possible and support it. It is time to finally take an interest in the submerged part of the productive iceberg by looking at all free domestic and extra-domestic work. Indeed, if the labor force is not “reproduced”, productivity stops: feeding yourself, taking care of the home, looking after the children, this should be included in the calculation! I dream of a ratio that would measure the amount of free labor incorporated into each “productive” hour. In Germany, where I live, the vast majority of mothers work part-time because childcare and school hours are not compatible with full-time work. These women, officially less “productive” than the majority of men, therefore sacrifice their economic independence to the work of others. But if a German productive hour requires more hours of free labor, is this productivity not artificially inflated by this more massive free labor? Furthermore, while we talk more and more about collective intelligence, we still evaluate performance at the level of individuals – ignoring collaboration, the influence of individuals on each other, the quality of relationships that they maintain and build everything together through shared infrastructure and culture. In companies too, there is a lot of free work that productivity ignores: emotional work, cultural glue and everything that nourishes collaboration, most often without financial compensation. No, you don’t owe your productivity to just yourself!
Myth #4: Productivity has nothing to do with gender equality
When I first talked about my plan to write a “feminist critique of productivity,” some people initially reacted with surprise. What is the relationship between productivity, a “universal” economic concept, and gender equality? “You are making us drunk by wanting to put feminism everywhere! ”, someone even wrote to me (in a more insulting way than that… but that’s another subject). In fact, productivity has a lot to do with gender inequalities! We might think that this sexual division of labor which formerly associated “production” with the masculine and “reproduction” with the feminine is over – if only because many “reproductive” tasks such as cooking or taking care of children have entered the commercial sphere and are then remunerated. But this gendered division persists: most jobs in personal services are occupied by women. Wherever productivity is said to be “low” (care professions in particular), we find practically only women. It’s as if measuring productivity served to better justify paying them less. On the other hand, as soon as a sector experiences productivity gains, either there are only men there, or women are gradually ejected – as was the case in the world of IT. In sectors where women and men are a priori more equal, productivity still ignores the free work of women, their emotional burden, everything they do for the collective without being paid in return. Where private life and professional life are increasingly blurred under the effect of our digital uses, productivity is particularly harmful to their mental health. They experience more burnout in the race for productivity because half of the work they do is not valued or measured. This is why the critique of productivity that I make in my book is feminist.
Myth #5: Productivity is neutral for the environment
Productivity is not ecological in the etymological sense of the term because it ignores both the interactions of living beings with their environment and those of individuals with each other in this environment. The great ecological advantage of productivity is that it does not care at all about negative externalities. An externality is a secondary effect which is not the main purpose of production. There are positive externalities (when your activity has beneficial effects on neighborhood life, for example) and negative externalities, as in the case of air pollution caused by a factory. Negative externalities always require additional work: when volunteers are called upon to clean up after an industrial disaster (for example, barrels of oil spilled into the ocean), or if children have to be taken to the doctor because air pollution causes respiratory problems. It is very convenient not to integrate negative externalities into the calculation of productivity because this allows it to be artificially inflated. But it has become impossible to defend the environmental neutrality of productivity. As luck would have it, it is the most polluting activities that display the highest productivity, while low-polluting activities, such as personal services for example, are deemed not very “productive”. As with the gendered division of labor, we see a close link between negative externalities and free labor. The most polluting actors are made more “productive” by delegating the work of cleaning up the damage to the community.
Myth #6: being productive means knowing how to optimize your time
Productivity recipes generate countless clicks on social media. Many of us are frantically looking for morning routines, evening routines, rituals and methods of all kinds with the hope of better optimizing our time and being more efficient. Productivity has transformed our relationship with time into a productivity affair which consists of cramming as many tasks as possible into a limited time. Unfortunately, not only does this not make us more efficient, but it makes our relationship with time frankly unhealthy. As far as I'm concerned, I notice a troubling paradox: the more I try to optimize my time, the less I feel like I have! The more I want to control time, the more it escapes me. It's a hellish trap. If I manage to become more efficient, trying to do more and more will still make me busier. Being “underwater” is made worse by each of my attempts to “get my head above water”. New tasks arrive as soon as I get rid of the old ones. Being more productive, for me, means speeding up the pace of an assembly line. I often notice that my attempts to be more productive cause two deleterious effects: the first is a feeling of worthlessness, because despite all my efforts, the optimization is disappointing; the second is the mania for living in the future rather than in the present moment – when I reach the end of my to-do list, I will finally be able to live. But I never get to the end of this list. What if I tried to live now instead? This is what I invite you to do in my book!