Value, time and productivity: what are we working for?

We are in the middle of one of the great industrial revolutions, and it may prove to be the biggest yet. The pace is overwhelming. New tools arrive every few months, each one asks something new of us, and most of us are trying to keep up while doing a full job.

Firms have done remarkably well with it. People in law and accounting practices have taught themselves a technology that was barely in workplaces a few years ago, and they have done it around client deadlines.

The speed is new, but workers and business owners have been through industrial revolutions before, and each time they faced questions we would recognise. What will this do to our jobs? How do we keep up? Who benefits? We can look back at what they did, see what worked, and use it to manage the flood of AI arriving in our working lives.

1Four revolutions

When most of us think of the Industrial Revolution, we picture Henry Ford and the motor car. Ford belongs to the second one. A common framework describes four, and each has followed a similar pattern. A new technology arrived, output per worker rose, workplaces were rebuilt around it, and over time conditions for workers improved, including the hours they worked.

The first revolution began in Britain in the late 1700s, when water and steam power let factories mass-produce goods for the first time. Life inside those factories was hard, with very long days, and it took organised workers decades to bring the hours down.

Australia played its part. In April 1856, Melbourne's stonemasons, led by James Stephens, downed tools on the University of Melbourne building site and marched through the city. After months of negotiation they had an eight-hour day, paid at the rate they had been getting for ten, according to the National Museum of Australia. It applied to a fairly small group of tradesmen at first, and many workers, women and children among them, kept working longer hours for years.

The second revolution, from the late 1800s, brought electric power, the electric motor and the assembly line. This is Ford's revolution, and it changed working hours as well. In May 1926, Ford moved its factory workers to a five-day, 40-hour week. "It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either 'lost time' or a class privilege," he said.

Australia moved in the same direction. According to the Fair Work Commission's history, the Arbitration Court set a 44-hour week for the engineering industry in 1927, and after the Second World War the Standard Hours Inquiry set a 40-hour week, which took effect in January 1948, with some industries exempt at first.

In the middle of all this, in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay called Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. He predicted the standard of life a hundred years on would be "between four and eight times as high as it is to-day", and suggested his grandchildren might work "three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week". He also wrote about a fear that sounds very familiar now, which he called "technological unemployment". His hundred years are up in 2030.

The third revolution began with computers and software from the 1960s, although many businesses did not reorganise around them until the 1980s and 90s, when they became something everyone in the office could use. Even in the year to June 1994, only 49% of Australian businesses used a computer at all.

Computers also arrived as Australia's workforce moved from making things to providing services. Services made up 63% of Australian jobs in the 1960s and 84% by the 2000s. The Reserve Bank links the shift mainly to rising incomes and changes in trade, but it meant computers arrived just as office work was becoming most of the work. From 1983, the standard week came down to 38 hours, award by award.

The idea of a fourth revolution was popularised by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, who set it out in January 2016, when automation and machine learning already seemed well under way. Ten years on, the pace has picked up beyond what most people expected. Generative AI came into offices only a few years ago and is now being built into many of the tools firms use every day. And the fear Keynes wrote about is back, with many people worried that AI could take their jobs.

Put those dates side by side and the pattern from the first three revolutions is easy to see, up to 1983.

2Since 1983

For more than a century, better technology went hand in hand with a shorter working week. Since the 38-hour week began spreading through awards in 1983, the standard has not moved in 43 years.

For a while, the hours people actually worked went the other way. The Australian Bureau of Statistics found the average full-time worker did 38.8 hours a week in 1985 and 40.9 hours by 1995, the decade computers moved onto most desks. Usual hours across all workers have eased since, from about 37 a week in 2001 to around 35, and part of that fall comes from more people working part-time.

Productivity has slowed as well. In February 2026 the Reserve Bank told a Senate committee that labour productivity growth has slowed in recent decades compared with the 1990s and early 2000s. On AI, it said the "measured benefit of this is yet to be observed in Australia."

Economists have been puzzled by this before. In 1987, Robert Solow wrote in the New York Times Book Review:

You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.

Robert Solow, 1987

The economic historian Paul David went looking for the reason and found a parallel in electricity. Many of the first factories to buy electric motors put a big one where the steam engine had been, and ran the building the old way, with the same layout, the same drive shafts and the same flow of work. The large gains came decades later, once factories were designed around electricity from the ground up.

What we are seeing in firms today looks a lot like that first factory. AI is often going into ways of working that were built around a person at every step. A person drafts, a person checks, a person forwards, a person files. Each step gets a little faster while the shape of the work stays the same, however hard people work at it, and the time saved tends to drift back into more of the same work.

3Rebuilding the factory

The stonemasons answered it by marching through Melbourne, and later generations answered it through the arbitration system. This time, a firm can answer it for its own people before the saved time disappears into more work. We look at the options in What to do with the time AI gives back.

And don't worry too much. Computers came into business in the 1960s, and thirty years later more than half of Australian businesses still did not use one. Electricity took decades to pay off. We are only a few years into this revolution, which means there is time to get it right.

A firm can start with the foundations now and take small steps. Most of the early work is practical: an agreed set of tools, a few shared rules, time set aside to learn, and a decision about what the saved time is for. Done well, this revolution can give people better working conditions, with less of the burnout and overwhelm so many are feeling right now.

4Where we come in

Every revolution so far has meant rebuilding the workplace around the new technology, and that starts with knowing how the work is done now. Our investigation maps your firm's work step by step and measures how long each part takes, so you can see which parts are ready for AI and which need rethinking first. The findings belong to your firm whether or not we go any further together.

If you would like to work out what rebuilding looks like for your firm, reach out to our team. The first conversation works out whether your firm is the right fit for the AI Uplift Program, and whether we are the right people to help.

Lessons from the last three revolutions