Nonfarm productivity fell at 4.6% annualized rate last quarter, after having declined by 7.4% in the first three months of the year, the report showed
U.S. worker productivity fell sharply in the second quarter and on an annual basis posted a record decline, the Labor Department said on Tuesday.
Economists polled by Reuters had expected productivity would decline at a 4.7% rate in the April-June period.Large shifts in the composition of the workforce in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have made it harder to measure underlying productivity growth, which some economists put at about 1.0% or less, making the Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation more difficult.Unit labor costs - the price of labor per single unit of output - accelerated at a 10.8% rate. That followed a 9.