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One Cedar Rapids corporation had 100 in-house calls per week streaming into its help desk.
Like everywhere, Cedar Rapids techies, if you can even lure one, don't come cheap. So executives called on Productivity Point International to train all their employees in Windows 95. The help-desk calls dropped to three per week.
Doug Forret, director of operations for Productivity Point of Iowa, says the move not only freed up help-desk time, but also reduced work stoppages for the rest of the employees.
"If you compare wages in the U.S. to other places," he says, "it would be awfully hard to be competitive without high productivity."
America's productivity is the envy of the world. Better motivated, better equipped and better compensated, the average U.S. worker generates the most economic output per hour on Earth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates productivity has grown at more than 3 percent annually over the past two years. The fourth quarter of 1999 was a sort-of watershed; productivity spiked to a rate of 5 percent annual growth.
Alan Greenspan revered labor productivity enough to stave off interest rate hikes in a blazing economy until last summer, launching productivity to a quasi-economic indicator status.
But BLS productivity statistics are too much of a black box to be considered reliable. The entire service sector is ignored in its reports, and the estimates almost certainly err toward the low end.
"You've got to remember that only...