ABSTRACT
Every politician and corporate executive should know that it is possible to improve the productivity of an enterprise, while generating more jobs and dramatically reducing pollution. This may appear a bold claim to the proponents of downsizing with their focus on the productivity of labour—how to produce more with less people. Management has taken pride in recent years in turning over higher and higher levels of capital per employee. The creation of wealth for shareholders is now equated with slashing jobs—as if labour productivity is the only type of productivity one could target. Yet, creating wealth for a few, while perpetuating poverty and misery for many (there will about one billion people looking for a job on this planet at the turn of the millennium) is neither ethical nor productive. In fact, the obsession with labour productivity and downsizing is an incomplete and inadequate drive towards competitiveness. It ignores, to a very large extent, the productivity of raw materials.
