The Labor Department report Friday is its first estimate of second-quarter productivity and follows the first quarter’s 0.9% decline. Labor costs more than doubled in the second quarter after rising at a 5.1% rate in the January-March quarter.
Productivity mostly lagged during the record long 11-year expansion that followed the Great Recession, confounding economists. Defined as the amount of output per hour of work, productivity is the key to rising living standards, and the slow pace of growth in recent years has been a major reason that wage gains have stalled.
From 2000 to 2007, the year the Great Recession began, annual productivity gains averaged 2.7%. But since then, productivity has slowed to about half that pace, rising at an average annual rate of 1.4% from 2007 through 2019. The 2019 rate of 1.9% brought some optimism that productivity was on the rise, but the coronavirus pandemic hit in the first quarter of 2020, obliterating the economy and taking virtually every economic indicator down with it.
Economists have warned that the economic disruptions caused by the coronavirus would likely hinder productivity in coming quarters.