If you compare the current labor productivity with the indicators of previous years, you can see that it is growing steadily. This is caused not only by the introduction of new technologies, but also by the high specialization of labor. But why does the specialization of labor lead to an increase in its productivity?
Labor specialization appeared thousands of years ago. The shoemaker was shaking the boots, the baker was baking bread, the tailor was making clothes - each did what he knew best. If someone wanted to provide themselves with shoes, clothes and tasty bread on their own, they would spend a lot of time, while boots and clothes would hardly be distinguished by beauty and practicality, and bread would have excellent taste.
That is why people have long understood that it is much more productive to become a specialist in one area and exchange their work for the results of the work of other specialists. At first it was a natural exchange, then, with the advent of money, goods and services began to be sold.
With the development of society and industry, it became clear that even a seemingly rather narrow specialization, such as a baker or a tailor, no longer corresponded to the requirements of the time. Within the professions, their own specialization began to appear. So, in a bakery, one person could knead the dough, the second measured its required volumes to obtain equal weight loaves of bread, the third sent the dough into the oven and took out the finished bread. The narrower the specialization was, the greater heights a person could achieve in it. His actions acquired automatism, as a result, labor productivity as a whole rose sharply.
The pinnacle of specialization can be called the assembly line invented and implemented by Henry Ford. On a moving conveyor, each worker performs just one simple operation, bringing his skills to perfection. The use of a conveyor not only increases labor productivity many times over, but also has a positive effect on the quality of products. It is easier to do one operation with high quality, without forgetting or missing anything, than several. The need for a painstaking analysis of the situation is lost, for determining what and in what sequence should be done.
Any sequence of operations performed cannot be subdivided indefinitely. Therefore, where the limit of specialization has been reached, the next level is the automation of the process. In many cases, the robot will cope with the task much better than a human, therefore, machines are increasingly being replaced on assembly lines. This is most clearly manifested in the car assembly shops of leading automobile concerns - dozens of manipulators assemble the future car, the role of a human operator is reduced to controlling the situation.
