Depends on what you mean by productivity. Taken as a whole, people are working less and less.
> And by and large, much of what's "bought" with those fees and taxes just doesn't fucking work.
I disagree, but regardless, tying benefits to employment is silly and counterproductive. How many people make major employment decisions based on availability of benefits. I think there's common ground in thinking that employer-provided benefits is a broken idea.
I also think there's way to provide for the needy while letting individuals make their own decisions. Health insurance is already regulated and individually mandated.
Productivity is well-defined: output per unit of input. Labor is only one input, but since it's the most common, productivity-per-hour is one of the most measured forms of productivity.
If we assume that wages and productivity are correlated, then while reducing wage floors sounds like a good idea, what actually happens is that we're encouraging employers to use low-skill, low-output-per-hour labor in place of machines that have a higher output-per-hour but a higher up-front cost and no ability to externalize maintenance expenses (ie: between the cost of keeping a machine repaired or a worker fed and housed, we currently allow employers to externalize the latter but not the former).
This is why low wages are a bad idea: they reduce the total output of the economy, but make up the loss by externalizing it onto workers (who then have to take Food Stamps to stay alive because their job isn't productive enough to provide them a living). It means we end up using losses to the total economy to subsidize exploitative and unpleasant working conditions, throwing good money after bad.
Humans aren't capital that is produced to industrial demand; if humans aren't employed productively, they still need to be fed and housed (or, alternatively, the externalities associated with their not being fed and housed must be accepted.)
So its somewhat inaccurate to say that we allow employers to externalize those costs, as they are cost that exist independent of the decision of employers to use labor, and which low wage payments, while not completely offsetting, mitigate somewhat.
If industrial machines were produced independently of industrial demand and produced negative externalities if they weren't maintained whether or not they were productively employed, then it would make sense address them differently with policy than we do now, too.
GDP is Gross Domestic Product, a measure of productivity. Every employed worker could be more productive while the U.S. loses productivity as a nation.
Finding ways to get more people producing useful things is what we need to think about. I was suggesting that we should reduce the cost of providing entry-level employment. This will make it cheaper for employers to hire the under-employed, under-educated, and mis-trained. At some point, the under-educated workers will become experienced workers, and likely more productive (in the individual sense) than the equivalent unemployed worker.
Product(ion) is not productivity. Productivity is product/(some input measure) -- laborers and laborer-hours are common input measures when measuring labor productivity, though there are other less common kinds of productivity one might measure.
I'd like to point out that my assertion that has been basically ignored in favor of less interesting semantic arguments.
Come on. You were wrong, the difference between production and productivity is very important. You can't just cop out and whine that 'definitions are pedantic'. No. Definitions are very important.
And by and large, much of what's "bought" with those fees and taxes just doesn't fucking work. Pension taxes can either go up for low-wage workers (precisely where they impact low-wage employers more) xor they can stop topping out for well-off professionals (and instead scale linearly or progressively with income). Health, life, and disability insurance should be consolidated into a more efficient public system. Company-provided 401k's are often basically just a handout to mutual-fund companies (that is, the fees take away from contributions but the investments don't perform better than a random walk). We can switch people over to firm-independent IRAs or some other supplementary pension system to increase efficiency, and give the gains back to workers as pay rises.
Also, getting rid of the minimum wage - or any other measure designed to decrease mechanization and increase the usage of low-wage, low-skill labor - is exactly the opposite of what should happen. Public policy should never be written to deliberately hamper productivity growth in the name of increasing human toil!