Actually, I think at least part of the reduction starts with the phrase "they have a UNION!" uttered in terms of abject horror. Because yeah, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union is fairly active, and it does recruit regularly, and no, they aren't able to knock the union reps out of the worker population without actually being called on it. So, start with a 25% reduction in potential productivity for the existence of the union at all, and work up from there.
We also have an industrial relations regime which involves the employer and the main unions for an industry negotiating in the presence of an arbiter regarding workplace conditions, and wages. There's a national award wage (a national legislatively set minimum set of wages and conditions) that they can't legally go below as well.
This means that if they're doing what I suspect, and starting their calculations at a mythical 100% efficiency (unachievable by beings which eat, sleep and crap, and indeed unachievable even by robots without doing some serious things to the laws of physics in regard to entropy, but that's never stopped an economist from insisting something should exist) and then subtracting things along the way to obtain their efficiency figures, Australian sites are going to always rate lower than the US ones, because we actually have a government that does things like insist that people be paid a liveable minimum wage for a weekly work cycle of 40 hours. Once they've done the usual calculations for subtracting out the inevitable consequences of humans being frail, biological creatures, then I suspect the main things making up the differences will be cultural, and the figures will be sufficiently low to ensure that small differences in actual numbers will result in a large difference in percentage.
(Or in other words, 1 is 1% of 100, but 50% of 2).
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timeasmymeasure
no subject
We also have an industrial relations regime which involves the employer and the main unions for an industry negotiating in the presence of an arbiter regarding workplace conditions, and wages. There's a national award wage (a national legislatively set minimum set of wages and conditions) that they can't legally go below as well.
This means that if they're doing what I suspect, and starting their calculations at a mythical 100% efficiency (unachievable by beings which eat, sleep and crap, and indeed unachievable even by robots without doing some serious things to the laws of physics in regard to entropy, but that's never stopped an economist from insisting something should exist) and then subtracting things along the way to obtain their efficiency figures, Australian sites are going to always rate lower than the US ones, because we actually have a government that does things like insist that people be paid a liveable minimum wage for a weekly work cycle of 40 hours. Once they've done the usual calculations for subtracting out the inevitable consequences of humans being frail, biological creatures, then I suspect the main things making up the differences will be cultural, and the figures will be sufficiently low to ensure that small differences in actual numbers will result in a large difference in percentage.
(Or in other words, 1 is 1% of 100, but 50% of 2).