Productivity always slows as the economy slows. If labor and wage costs are still on the rise and productivity slows, either corporate profits decline or prices increase.

As productivity slows, wage costs tend to rise -- one has an inverse relation to the other.

Productivity growth helps keep inflation at bay and allows real incomes to grow, but it makes businesses even slower to hire than usual.

At labor market turning points, the household survey does better because it picks up self-employed workers and others not reflected in the business survey. But I'm still not convinced the labor market is quite as strong as the household data say it is.

In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.

Trucking is incongruous with what we've come to expect with the blue-collar economy these days. Productivity improvements mean that other industries are scaling down whereas it still takes one driver per truck to move goods, and there is little way around that. What's more, other industries can outsource, but trucking can't.