Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 9, 1992 TAG: 9202090274
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TERESA WATANABE LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: TOKYO LENGTH: Medium
JAPANESE RESEARCHER: FACTS PROVE AMERICANS AREN'T LAZY
On the fifth floor of the Japan Productivity Center in Shibuya, Tamisaburo Sasaki stabbed a finger in the air and sputtered: "It's all misinformation!"All around him, the Japanese press, politicians and public have been perpetuating the image of lazy, inefficient and non-productive Americans. They paint a picture of America on the slippery slope of decline. Television flashes images of drugs and crime; newspapers spin out story after story about shoddy U.S. products.
Two recent Japanese newspaper articles, for instance, blithely mentioned that the "U.S. productivity rate is low" without citing any supporting data. Another article quoted an unidentified Japanese auto executive complaining that government pressure to buy low-quality U.S. auto parts was so fierce that "even if we throw the parts away in the Pacific Ocean, we still have to buy them."
But Sasaki, a counselor in the research division of the Productivity Center, a private research organization, is trying to combat those skewed images with hard, cold data from all over the world. His figures show that Americans still outperform almost all the rest of the world - including Japan - in productivity - or getting the highest value of products and services from the fewest workers.
And what about those lazy Americans? Ministry of Labor statistics show that Japanese worked an average of 2,044 hours in 1990, 95 hours - or a fraction above two weeks - more than Americans. But Americans worked more than Germans and French. The average annual difference between the Japanese and Germans was 402 hours, or roughly 10 weeks.
Sasaki added that the greater number of hours worked in Japan actually lowered Japan's productivity rate by requiring workers to spend more time producing its goods.
Of course, the researcher's statistics do not measure "quality" or market share or other indicators of industrial competitiveness. And Japan's productivity has steadily increased at a faster rate than that of the United States, a trend that worries several U.S. policy-makers. Still, Sasaki said, since 1980, U.S. manufacturing productivity has been on an upward trend and appears headed for a "revival."
Some of the facts Sasaki likes to point out:
Among 11 Western industrialized nations, all but Sweden had higher rates of overall productivity than Japan, as measured by gross domestic product per employed person. As of 1988, Canada led with a rate 34 percent higher than Japan, followed by Belgium at 32 percent, the United States at 31 percent and France at 30 percent.
In manufacturing, U.S. and British workers produced 24 percent more than Japanese workers.
The gap grows even larger when productivity is calculated by work hours, because the Japanese work more hours per year than Americans, Sasaki said. Overall, Japanese manufacturing workers produced just 61 percent of the value of goods that American workers turned out.
Of 21 manufacturing sectors examined, U.S. productivity outstripped Japanese in 17 of them - including motor vehicles.
"That's always the biggest surprise," Sasaki said, explaining that the reason is that many American cars are larger than Japanese cars and therefore of higher value.
One of the biggest reasons for the misunderstanding, Sasaki said, is that most people, including the Japanese press, tend to calculate and compare the value of goods produced using the exchange rate. But the center employs a more accurate international measure, also used by the United Nations, called "purchasing power parity."
Unlike the exchange rate, which is based solely on the value of imports and exports, the alternative measure includes the cost of local services and thus is better able to calculate the real cost of goods in respective countries.