When COVID-19 erupted across the globe in 2020, we shifted where we spent our time: we watched more movies, baked, and spent more time sharing meals.
Notably, for the economy, many of us moved towards higher-productivity jobs.
However, the pandemic didn’t necessarily shift our career motivations. As the Productivity Commission’s deputy chair Alex Robson said in the most recent productivity bulletin, a lot of the job-switching was due to lockdowns and restrictions.
Restaurant workers and hotel staff, for example – who work in less productive sectors – found their places of work shut down, or drastically cut employees’ working hours, while mining and agriculture firms mostly trundled on.
Once COVID-19 lockdowns disappeared, customers poured back into restaurants, coffee shops and accommodation.Credit: Louie Douvis
That’s not to say waiters and front-desk hospitality staff are bad at their jobs, or less important.
When we talk about productivity in our daily lives, less can mean laziness. But labour productivity, in an economic sense, is simply a measure of how much of something (output) a worker produces for each hour they work – not necessarily a gauge of how lazy they are.
Productivity bubbleCredit: Productivity Commission, ABS
Hospitality and accommodation are lower-productivity sectors, largely because they are less capital intensive: most of the work is reliant on people power rather than machines, and there’s not much room for improvement. There’s only so many ways you can innovatively make a coffee.
Mining and information technology tend to be more productive. That’s because of the heavy amount of machinery, equipment and infrastructure in these sectors. These investments can lead to big innovations, such as automation, and help firms to produce things on a larger scale.
The pandemic pumped up productivity. Then the bubble burst
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18.04.2024
When COVID-19 erupted across the globe in 2020, we shifted where we spent our time: we watched more movies, baked, and spent more time sharing meals.
Notably, for the economy, many of us moved towards higher-productivity jobs.
However, the pandemic didn’t necessarily shift our career motivations. As the Productivity Commission’s deputy chair Alex Robson said in the most recent productivity bulletin, a lot of the job-switching was due to........
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