When economists say a worker has low productivity, we’re saying the value-added (wage+profit) generated per hour of work is low. That’s not saying that worker is lazy - if anything they tend to be extremely hard-working, as people in the informal sector tend to be…

The problem is that these workers are working in firms that lack managerial capacity, access to technology, finance etc such that the amount of money/value-added they generate through their work is low

From the worker-side, there’s the issue of human capital - how capable you are at doing the stuffs that require skills that are high in demand

So it’s a bit different from the layman’s understanding of low productivity = lazy

they’re* not we’re*