How can the workforce be made more productive?
It is a frequently asked question in the UK, and indeed across Europe during present times, with politicians agonising about the failure of economies to grow and productivity remaining static. Indeed, in post-Covid UK, we seem to be remorseless retreating, with large parts of the population economically inactive; many too “anxious” to seek employment, and sustained by generous welfare payments.
In well-unionised sectors, along with much of the public services, the tendency is to do even less, while demanding more money and flatly refusing to link these demands with even small tweaks of productivity or restrictive working practices.
Meanwhile, taxes must rise and the private sector must sweat its assets to standstill, in a climate that is becoming hostile to innovation and endeavour, from labour laws aligned to the rights of the employee to regulations that make it harder to justify employing anyone.
Is it any surprise that such an environment has become unwelcoming to investment, and that the lights are going out, one by one, in what remains of the domestic industry, not least because the electricity supply has become unaffordable?
If you are seeking an example of real productivity, you could do a lot worse than study the shipping industry.
In the UK, circa 2025, the cost of electricity is among of the highest in the world, as the Labour government pursues its fanatical quest for “net zero”, oblivious of the harm it is so obviously doing to the economy.
It wishes, so it claims, to be seen as an exemplar of sustainability; admired by the rest of the world, although it has yet to discern that virtually no other advanced economy is following its daft example.
The demand of the nose-ringed activists to “just stop oil,” which appears to motivate the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, appears, sadly, to have succeeded. No single oil well has been drilled in the UK sector of the North Sea this year, whereas the Norwegians have managed more than sixty. That’s productivity – UK-style.
If you are seeking an example of real productivity, perhaps to prevent yourself becoming utterly despondent, you could do a lot worse than study the shipping industry. Here, perhaps, we move from one extreme, to another, where by contrast fewer people are doing far more than ever before, in an industry that works at a pitch of frenetic intensity.
Ashore, the debate is about whether the adoption of artificial intelligence can be the magic helper to set stumbling businesses and industries on the road to greater productivity. The shipping industry somehow managed to produce great leaps in production before the concept of AI had even been mooted in the fevered brains of science fiction authors. Just look back in, say, ten-year segments and track the sheer capability of maritime endeavours, from half a century ago to today.
Automation and a workforce required to operate huge ships at a terrifying intensity, with very few people aboard, has become the reality of modern shipping.
True, it has taken awesome levels of investment to build the infrastructure of modern maritime logistics: the massive scale economies, the adoption of astonishing levels of cargo-handling technology, and the communication and data-sharing that has made it all possible.
Globalisation currently has something of a bad name in the mindset of Donald Trump, but it was the innovation and investment in marine enterprise that made it all possible and those who drove this great leap in productivity ought to be given more credit. Maybe they will, when the lunatics are no longer in charge of the asylum.
But it is also important that the contribution to all this productivity gain by the maritime workforce is also recognised, because if seafarers had not been willing to make it all happen, quite simply, it would not have done so.
You might legitimately argue that once the employers had the facility to internationalise both their operations and their workforce, the employees had little choice in accepting what was on offer. Automation and a workforce required to operate huge ships at a terrifying intensity, with very few people aboard, has become the reality of modern shipping.
It is the sheer pace of ship operations that perhaps ought to be questioned rather more than it is, as more is squeezed from less, and the frequency of accidents, with quite ridiculous hours of work being demanded from frail human beings, who would not put up with this ashore.
Arguably unsafe operations, at an intensity far beyond what is reasonable for its operators, shows the other extreme to the productivity problem. It would do us a world of good to recognise this.