Recently, I was challenged in one of my claims and I was astonished at the challenge. I don’t have the time to do all of the research but I did want to lay down a marker. Yes, real labor productivity in the United States is flat. Go to the site of the St. Louis Federal Reserve and search for “real output per unit of labor” and it will show you that for some years labor productivity has been flat.
Searches at the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Congressional Budget Office will show the same thing (although their measures of output may be based on nominal dollars). I don’t honestly see how anybody could doubt it. Economists and other economics writers have been pointing it out for years.
This may be an example of a BLS report on the topic:
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-productivity-slowdown-since-the-great-recession.htm
Charts 4 and 5 of the linked report depict the issue I’m talking about pretty well but the shortness of the horizon they’re considering (since 2009) obscures the depth of the problem.
Productivity jumped, briefly, right after the Great Recession. At one level that’s obvious. Companies laid off and terminated a bunch of employees.
But the decline in productivity began before the Great Recession all the way back in 2001. 15 years is a long time with negligible growth in labor productivity.