Productivity

This chapter shows that the drive for higher productivity never attained universal popular support, though in government circles it was widely believed that such popular support was absolutely essential to achieve this goal. While most of the productivity drive came from government, it involved, at times, extensive and ambitious publicity campaigning. Hence productivity improvement is a particularly important theme in the overall story of government attempts to shape economic understanding since the 1940s. In both the 1940s and the 1960s, a Labour government placed increasing productivity at the centre of its economic policy agenda, accompanied by extensive publicity aimed primarily at the ‘shop-floor’ worker. But while there were continuities in the propaganda on productivity, there were also differences in approach and tone, which, along with the differences in the methods of propaganda employed, help us to understand the varying resonance the term had in these two decades.