Labor Productivity

Labor productivity serves as an indicator of a person’s work performance, e.g., output per hour, which is primarily used to measure productivity gains. While this indicator may be meaningful for some sectors of the economy, its use in the care sector is very limited, as people cannot always be cared for and looked after more quickly without compromising quality. Mascha Madörin (2011) refers to the phenomenon whereby productivity increases in the care sector necessarily lag behind productivity increases in industry as the “divergence of labor productivity.”