speedup

Deverbal from speed up.

speedup (countable and uncountable, plural speedups)

1. An amount or rate of decrease in time taken to do a certain amount of work.

   Antonym: slowdown

   Coordinate term: bottleneck

   • 1980, Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, page 230:

     The results of this generalized speedup of the corporate metabolism are multiple: shorter product life cycles, more leasing and renting, more frequent buying and selling, more ephemeral consumption patterns, […]

2. (chiefly computing) The relationship between time taken and number of processors used.
3. (labor, politics) An employer's demand for more output without more pay.

   Synonym: stretch-out

   Antonyms: go-slow, slowdown, work-to-rule

   • 1975 March 20, New Scientist‎, volume 65, number 941, page 711:

     There were, of course, those observers who argued that since in some industries 50 or 60 per cent of those employed were scientific, technical, and administrative staff, the employer would soon include them in his speedup plans.

   • 1987, Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II‎, page 145:

     For the mass of new workers who had not come out of a syndicalist or craft tradition, incentive pay and the speedup idea carried relatively little negative meaning.

   • 1997, Vincent Harding, Robin D. G. Kelley, Earl Lewis, We Changed the World: African Americans 1945-1970‎, page 171:

     The strike was over a speedup of the assembly line, which in the previous week had increased from 49 to 58 cars per hour. Out of this strike emerged the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM).

   • 2007, Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of‎, page 54:

     With constant speedup of the line and with the cold temperatures of the plant, one angry worker told me, “After ten years, people walk like they're sixty or seventy."

• speed-up

• Blum's speedup theorem