A Latin verb meaning to lead forth became the metric by which factories measured human beings.
The Latin verb producere combined pro (forward) and ducere (to lead), meaning to bring forth or to draw out.1 The French productif entered English around 1610, initially describing soil or land that yielded abundantly. For two centuries, the word belonged to agriculture, not to factories.
The economic meaning emerged gradually. By 1827, political economists were using produce to mean creating value, bringing goods into a state in which they would command a price.2
The noun productivity, meaning the rate of output per unit of input, is a later construction. The concept became central to industrial management through Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management at the turn of the twentieth century. Taylor timed every motion of steelworkers at Bethlehem Steel, seeking to maximize output per worker per hour.3
The Bureau of Labor Statistics began publishing labor productivity statistics in the United States in 1899, measuring output per worker-hour in manufacturing.4 The concept was older, but the systematic measurement was new. From that point forward, productivity became a number that governments tracked and companies optimized.
A word that once described the generative capacity of the earth became a metric applied to human beings. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics continues to publish quarterly productivity data, measuring nonfarm business output per hour worked.5