Good news! Corporations are wringing more out of us workers!

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that labor productivity rose at a sizzling 6.4% annual rate in the nonfarm business sector in the second quarter. To put it in ever-so-slightly less jargony terms, corporate America squeezed dramatically more output per hour out of its employees.

This is partly just a cyclical thing. In the early part of a recession, corporations are taken aback by falling demand and productivity drops. Later on, once companies have laid off a few million people and the fall in demand has become a bit less steep, productivity inevitably rises—”due to hours worked declining faster than output,” as the BLS put it in its release.

But there are also indications that something more than just cyclicality is at work here. Despite the extreme severity of the recession, the nonfarm business sector was able to eke out a 1.8% productivity gain over the past 12 months. A big rebound in productivity growth from that already not-too-shabby number would mean the productivity trend might still be in the 2.5%-plus a year range that had economists going gaga back in 1999-2000.

Which means what, exactly? When I started covering economics back in the mid-1990s, low productivity growth was seen by a lot of smart people as the single biggest problem facing the U.S. economy. So sustained high productivity growth is a good thing, right? Well, yeah, over time it’s what makes societies wealthier. But over shorter periods there’s no guarantee that the productivity gains will be widely shared. Over the past decade the increasing share of income going to those at the very top of the income distribution has meant that the bulk of American workers haven’t seen much of any benefit from their increasing productivity. Another, related development is that corporate profit margins have remained high. A recent report by the Goldman Sachs portfolio strategy team (not available online, as far as I know) found that—if you remove financial companies and carmakers (for obvious reasons) and utilities (not so immediately obvious to me, but whatever)—the corporations in the S&P 500 had higher profit margins during the depths of the current recession than during the height of the mid-1980s boom.

Something’s got to give here, I think. Just not sure what.