A Holiday Wish as the Least Productive Congress in History Wraps Up Its Year
As American workers, those fortunate enough to be employed anyway, rush to complete year-end projects, let us take a moment to marvel at the outgoing 113th Congress. As our own Sarah Jones reported last week, this group is the least productive on record. As of this writing, the sorry bunch of elected officials has passed just 55 laws this calendar year, seven fewer than the 112th Congress of 2012. The 62 pieces of legislation that last year’s bodies managed to get off the floor was, at the time, the lowest bar ever set.
Let’s set this overpaid, under-performing inertia against the productivity levels of the typical American worker, the one that hasn’t been desperately seeking employment or experiencing imminent fear of losing it. In the great Mother Jones piece, All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup, from the magazine’s July/August 2011 issue, writers Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery observe, “We’d hear from creative professionals in what seemed to be dream jobs who were crumbling under ever-expanding to-do lists; from bus drivers, hospital technicians, construction workers, doctors, and lawyers who shame-facedly whispered that no matter how hard they tried to keep up with the extra hours and extra tasks, they just couldn’t hold it together. (And don’t even ask about family time.)”
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