productivity standard

May an employer require productivity standards if the work is paid on a piece-rate basis?

If the employer pays by the piece rate and specifies the productivity standard in the job offer.

Why doesn't the business of higher education have any productivity standards resembling those of the real business world?

Some workers require assistance on the job to learn procedures, organize and prioritize tasks, and meet productivity standards.

Compounding the cost of this overpaid cadre, the productivity standards seem permanently tied to 50's technology - 1850's - with conductors still making a dozen punches to issue a round-trip ticket.

Peter Laarman, a U.A.W. spokesman, said: "There's a great deal of realism among unions and employers about worldwide acceleration of quality and productivity standards.

And over the last year, corporation officials, struggling to keep the beleaguered public hospital system afloat amid calls by the Giuliani administration for its dismantling, have put their private partners on notice that they they plan to cut doctors' salaries and tie them to new productivity standards.

Perhaps in their rush to save every step and every second in order to meet productivity standards, drivers have taken to double-parking their big brown trucks directly in front of a delivery destination even when there is an open space at the curb only a door or two away.

Norm Fruchter, a New York University professor who has written extensively on the city's special-education system, said yesterday that he did not think the privatization plan would lead to sounder evaluations but that it could be a way to bargain for higher productivity standards in the next contract.

The Health and Hospitals Corporation, the agency that governs the city's 11 acute-care public hospitals, has successfully negotiated such productivity standards and greater control over administration into each of its latest contracts with the private medical centers that are paid to staff the city's public hospitals.