EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Worker surveillance capital, labour share and productivity

Philippe Askenazy

No 2004, CEPREMAP Working Papers (Docweb) from CEPREMAP

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a basic model with two types of capital: productive capital directly involved in the production process and capital devoted to monitoring workers. Surveillance capital intensifies workers' job strain, while wage recognition encourages their engagement. Firms face a double trade-off between the two types of capital and between incentives and labour costs. Under simple assumptions, up to a certain threshold, technological innovation improves productivity, wages and profits at the same pace, leading to a flat labour share in income. Then, once the threshold is breached, profit-maximization initiates a transfer from productive capital to monitoring tools. This progressive shift generates a decline in the labour share and a productivity slowdown, despite greater job strain. The model suggests the possibility of a third phase in which productivity and wages recover.

Keywords: declining labour share; productivity slowdown; effort-reward imbalances; surveillance; O33; O40; J20; J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepremap.fr/depot/docweb/docweb2004.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Worker surveillance capital, labour share, and productivity (2022) Downloads
Working Paper: Worker surveillance capital, labour share and productivity (2022) Downloads
Working Paper: Worker Surveillance Capital, Labour Share and Productivity (2020) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpm:docweb:2004

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPREMAP Working Papers (Docweb) from CEPREMAP Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mathieu Perona ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:cpm:docweb:2004