You read that a bit wrong. Productivity didn’t go down, productivity growth did.
Economists are for some reason unable to accept that their so called productivity doesn’t grow infinetly. Every prognosis pretty much depends on a constant linear growth, so with a breakthrough in technology you would expect exponential growth.
But what somehow no one of them considers is the fact that human productivity has reached its physical limit hundreds of years ago and the only thing even leading to linear growth in the first place are these technological breakthroughs.
And that’s also the current issue. We haven’t had a major breakthrough in quite a few years. Sure everything gets better and easier to make, but nothing that happened in the last 20 years comes even close to the advent of PCs or the Internet as a whole. So the only way to keep your line from going up slightly less (not down, just slightly less up) is to reduce the number of workers while keeping your supposed output the same, i.e. firing people.
Its the desperate struggle of the current system (capitalism) that depends on the lie that productivity can go up infinetly.
Nah, not even the basic “its capitalism” excuse works anymore for that idiocracy. Capitalism may force companies to increase earnings, which is already stupid enough in itself, but the timeframe that’s measured in got reduced so much in the last few years that even short term goals are impossible without cutting costs.
Ten years ago monthly earnings were at most an indicator, what mattered most were fiscal years. It slowly evolved to quarterly earnings and now we are at a point were a single “bad” (as in, not as much profit as last month) can plunge your stock prices by 10+%.
Yes capitalism always fucked over the working class, bit it wasn’t made to force big, profitable companies to self destruct for 0.5% higher monthly profits.