Speaker 1: Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're focusing on
Speaker 1: how people and businesses are getting back to work. Let's
Speaker 1: call it a great transformation, a change in the way
Speaker 1: workers are thinking. Employers need people to work more than ever,
Speaker 1: putting laborers in a sort of position of power. We'll
Speaker 1: be hearing from people navigating this new normal for themselves
Speaker 1: as they find their life's work. It's season six of
Speaker 1: On the Job, and the job market itself is a
Speaker 1: lot different than it was a few years ago. COVID
Speaker 1: has shaken up the world, put a lot of people
Speaker 1: out of work, inspired others to pursue their passions, and
Speaker 1: has become a new normal that everyone is trying to
Speaker 1: get used to. The job market is messy, it's gone
Speaker 1: through a lot of changes, and it is right with potential.
Speaker 1: So before we launch into the rest of the season,
Speaker 1: where we'll talk to people working within that new environment,
Speaker 1: we're going to start off by setting the stage. Hello, sir,
Speaker 1: welcome to On the Job. If you could please introduce
Speaker 1: yourself sure. My name is Mark Blythe. I am the
Speaker 1: head of the Klingon Invasion Force. I know I'm a
Speaker 1: professor of political economy at Brown University and sometime rock
Speaker 1: on tour and musician. So there'll we go. Mark Blythe
Speaker 1: is from Dundee, Scotland. He's been teaching at Brown since
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine. He's written a lot of books
Speaker 1: on the economy. And he's talking to me from a
Speaker 1: room full of bass guitars and drums, which he's been
Speaker 1: playing a lot during the lockdown. Okay, let's do it, babe, Okay,
Speaker 1: Mark Blythe. The job market is a lot different now
Speaker 1: than it was even a few years ago. From an
Speaker 1: economist political scientists point of view, How did we get
Speaker 1: to where we are right now? How far back do
Speaker 1: you want to go? Okay, So, for our purposes, we're
Speaker 1: gonna tell an incredibly abbreviated story of today's economy starting
Speaker 1: around fifty years ago. In nineteen seven, one and five
Speaker 1: jobs was in the auto industry, and one in three
Speaker 1: jobs was in similar industries like steel manufacturing, making electric motors,
Speaker 1: so making things, manufacturing, engineering, and a lot of those
Speaker 1: jobs are unionized. Then we get into the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, those unions that were helping workers maintain fair
Speaker 1: pay and weekends start to diminish. Employers and big companies
Speaker 1: start gaining more power. As the economy globalizes, you start
Speaker 1: to see the growth of finance and real estate and
Speaker 1: all the sort of high end services to come out
Speaker 1: the eighties and of the nineties, the Wall Street moment
Speaker 1: in New York. You begin to see sort of the
Speaker 1: beginnings of the real beginnings of Silicon Valley in the
Speaker 1: tech industry. And then you start to get the growth
Speaker 1: of the coasts and the fantastic wealth it's accumulated there.
Speaker 1: So the bulk of the economy moves away from things
Speaker 1: like coal and factory jobs in the middle of the
Speaker 1: country hence the name russ Bell Unions continue to fall
Speaker 1: apart through the nineties and the two thousands, kind of
Speaker 1: flatlining or decreasing wages across the board for most of America.
Speaker 1: Where was the job market at in twenty nineteen going
Speaker 1: into the pandemic. Largest employer in the United States is Walmart,
Speaker 1: big box, retail, loan services, hospitality, fast food. Basically, you know,
Speaker 1: make jobs in a sense is about one thought of
Speaker 1: the labor market. Mark says, Basically, the US economy was
Speaker 1: fueled by US making stuff, and now it's an economy
Speaker 1: fueled by US buying stuff. Basically, eighty percent of the
Speaker 1: economy is driven by consumption. Okay, so all those strip
Speaker 1: malls that you see if you're drive across America, so
Speaker 1: that's where people are working. That's where people are working.
Speaker 1: And most of these places are run by big corporations
Speaker 1: that can set wages without those pesky unions pushing back. Essentially,
Speaker 1: today more people are working for less people. So what
Speaker 1: we've done is we've created an economy. It's really simple
Speaker 1: to understand. There's the top twenty percent, and that's where
Speaker 1: all the returns have gone. That's where all the money
Speaker 1: has been made. So let's bring this up to the present.
Speaker 1: What does it look like going at the pandemic half
Speaker 1: of the American labor market gets twenty dollars an hour
Speaker 1: or less. Really hard to do the American dream on
Speaker 1: twenty bucks an hour or less. COVID hits. What immediately
Speaker 1: happens in the workforce? Everybody went home. It was very weird.
Speaker 1: March twenty nineteen, people around the world start getting sent
Speaker 1: home from work, which meant less stuff was getting made.
Speaker 1: Less people were working and earning wages, but the demand
Speaker 1: for stuff was still there. And as we are now,
Speaker 1: an economy that runs on consumption buying stuff. The government
Speaker 1: needed to send stimulus checks out to make sure people
Speaker 1: could still purchase things to keep the economy going, and
Speaker 1: it was whether one likes or not the right thing
Speaker 1: to do, because the alternative would have been the largest
Speaker 1: contraction of the economy since records begun, which probably would
Speaker 1: have been worse than nodding ten percent on the national debt.
Speaker 1: People went home for a while, collected checks, and then
Speaker 1: began to come back as we sort of started to
Speaker 1: get a handle on the pandemic. As far as unemployment goes,
Speaker 1: it was more that people got furloughed, So COVID technically
Speaker 1: put less people out of a job than you might think.
Speaker 1: But what it did do was two things. Number One,
Speaker 1: because of COVID, a lot of women who were in
Speaker 1: the workforce, particularly if there were part time workers and
Speaker 1: services suddenly had to do child kill. Schools were shutting
Speaker 1: down off and on all the time, so pretty quickly
Speaker 1: someone had to be home with the kids. Right, So
Speaker 1: if you were running a diner and you had three
Speaker 1: women working for you and they had kids, you're not
Speaker 1: get an mbak, right, that's done. Second big thing, a
Speaker 1: lot of older couples boomer age. You know, right before
Speaker 1: they were about to retire, they got put out of
Speaker 1: work and they were looking at their pretty healthy four
Speaker 1: o one ks and thought, right, gladys were done right.
Speaker 1: You know, there's no point in going back now, it
Speaker 1: is ridiculous. So they began to actually leave it. So
Speaker 1: what you had is a drop in the overall labor
Speaker 1: force participation right right, many people are actually in the
Speaker 1: labor market that began to draw. I know Mark said
Speaker 1: that there were two things, but there's a third thing,
Speaker 1: and it's a big one. People finally had perspective at home,
Speaker 1: looking at the mick jobs that they've been working, and
Speaker 1: started thinking, you know what, I kind of normalized abuse.
Speaker 1: I kind of normalized being shouted out and swore for
Speaker 1: like seven dollars an hour, and I'm just not going
Speaker 1: to do that anymore. And while employers are very reluctant
Speaker 1: to do this, the only way to keep those workers
Speaker 1: or to get them back was to raise wages. So
Speaker 1: if you think, you know, Amazon used to do about
Speaker 1: twelve bucks an hour, I think now sort of there
Speaker 1: are minimums about fifteen sixteen seventeen. There's a gas station
Speaker 1: down the road from me. It's a local company whatever,
Speaker 1: you're pumping up the gas station. It's like we're hiring
Speaker 1: seventeen an hour and benefits. Right. So there's a way
Speaker 1: in which when you get that big supply shock, that
Speaker 1: aren't enough workers and people have said, you know, enough
Speaker 1: of this crap. I don't want to be treated like
Speaker 1: crop anymore. You're going to have to change the game.
Speaker 1: So that's what's happening. The game has changed, is transforming
Speaker 1: in a big way. And I know there's this term
Speaker 1: that's been kicking around, the Great resignation, basically this grand
Speaker 1: exodus of people leaving the workforce during COVID and just
Speaker 1: not coming back. Now here's the funny thing. It turns
Speaker 1: out it really looks like we massively overestimated how many
Speaker 1: people had. I know, we're massively underestimate how many people
Speaker 1: are coming back to work. So it looks like there
Speaker 1: hasn't really beaten this giant quite phone. After all, Mark says,
Speaker 1: economists work with estimates, and overtime they get more accurate.
Speaker 1: So have people just disappeared from the workforce. Probably not.
Speaker 1: So instead of calling it the Great resignation, we're going
Speaker 1: to call it a great transformation, a change in the
Speaker 1: way workers are thinking, because now they are needed in
Speaker 1: a pretty extreme way. Employers need people to work more
Speaker 1: than ever, putting labors in a sort of position of power,
Speaker 1: and everyone's hiring. So employers that weren't valuing their employees
Speaker 1: have had a serious wake up call like, well, what
Speaker 1: do you mean a cont just pay somebody the minimum
Speaker 1: wage anymore and abuse them? Well that it work? Yeah,
Speaker 1: looks like those days are done as well. I'm afraid
Speaker 1: because if you can get seventeen or eighteen an Amazon
Speaker 1: on a kind of flexible basis and then compliment that
Speaker 1: with Uber, then essentially I'm getting up to about twenty
Speaker 1: five twenty six. Why do I need to take you
Speaker 1: a minimum wage boat? Another big transformation which shouldn't come
Speaker 1: as a surprise, more people are getting to work from home.
Speaker 1: A lot of employees and employers have asked themselves, do
Speaker 1: we really need to be in a crowded office to
Speaker 1: do this paying for rent and air conditioning and all that.
Speaker 1: Probably not, But there's real reasons to be in the
Speaker 1: office even in these jobs, because how do you do mentoring,
Speaker 1: how do you do team building? How do you decide
Speaker 1: where the talent should be allocated? If basically everybody's on
Speaker 1: a screen. This is why a lot of jobs are
Speaker 1: now what we call hybrid, meaning you can work from
Speaker 1: home some days but also have a place to go
Speaker 1: into work on others. And while working from home has
Speaker 1: given a lot of people the freedom to be with
Speaker 1: their families or just have a more comfortable work environment,
Speaker 1: it's also made people realize everything else that comes with
Speaker 1: going to a job every day. It's about your social networks.
Speaker 1: It's about going out for a drink on a Friday
Speaker 1: night with your colleague that you happen to like so
Speaker 1: you can about the one you hate, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's part of what the whole expedient says. The thing
Speaker 1: about the job, and we forget this. It's about much
Speaker 1: more than wages. We'll be right back after the break.
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Speaker 1: continue our conversation with economists and political scientists Mark blythe
Speaker 1: we're going to dive a little deeper into this great
Speaker 1: transformation we're seeing in the workforce. Mark is quick to
Speaker 1: say that, yes, the changes we're going through right now
Speaker 1: do seem drastic, but that's kind of how it's always happened.
Speaker 1: The figure is something and this is just an approximation,
Speaker 1: but it's someone like a third of all jobs have
Speaker 1: disappeared every ten years. I mean it's remarkable, like so
Speaker 1: over a thirty year period or something like that, Like
Speaker 1: literally no jobs that were thirty years ago here. Now
Speaker 1: that's obviously an exaggeration, but there's a huge amount of
Speaker 1: charming and reinvention. Think about the entire technology of the Internet.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was only twenty years ago, like nobody
Speaker 1: knew what a website was. This generational shift the new
Speaker 1: face of the job market young people getting into the workforce.
Speaker 1: Mark says they're a lot different than other generations. They're
Speaker 1: no longer coming at a college, even the ones that
Speaker 1: I know and saying I'm going to Wall Street and
Speaker 1: I'm going to smash it. It's just it's just not
Speaker 1: And for a while it was big tech until it
Speaker 1: became big tech evil big tech, and now nah, that's
Speaker 1: a bit of a problem, right. Another motivation, he says,
Speaker 1: this new generation is acutely aware of the climate crisis.
Speaker 1: They're living in a world where they're here, Miami will
Speaker 1: be underwater by twenty fifty, and that we're doing irreparable
Speaker 1: damn to the earth. If you really have that kind
Speaker 1: of like existential fear that everything's totally screwed anyway, then
Speaker 1: you know, why are you going to bust your last
Speaker 1: eighty hours a week for the man? It's just not
Speaker 1: going to happen, right, So I think there's a fair
Speaker 1: degree of trading off what would have been seen as
Speaker 1: the normal path of like struggling and struggling to make
Speaker 1: very very high income, because that's what you do to
Speaker 1: a model of I want to do something that doesn't
Speaker 1: make things worse and actually has a degree of self
Speaker 1: satisfaction for me. Mark says, if you ask executives at
Speaker 1: oil companies, mining companies, engineering companies, as far as carbon
Speaker 1: emissions and damage to the Earth is concerned, they know
Speaker 1: the finger is pointed at them, and it's become a
Speaker 1: lot harder to get people to work for them. It's
Speaker 1: no longer just about the money, because they've got a
Speaker 1: bad reputation and people they've got a bad rep Yeah.
Speaker 1: I spoke to the CEO of a very very big
Speaker 1: carbon intensive firm who's taking the green stuff and all
Speaker 1: the rest of it, very very seriously, and I said,
Speaker 1: you know, why are you doing this? And he says,
Speaker 1: because my own family think I'm a bastard. That's a
Speaker 1: powerful motivator. That's so crazy. I feel like that's such
Speaker 1: a huge shift. Yeah, that is a huge shift. That
Speaker 1: really is a huge shift. Right. He told me another
Speaker 1: story about a guy in Florida, a billionaire in his eighties.
Speaker 1: He makes millions of dollars every day on the stock market.
Speaker 1: He chased the American dream and he got it. Well.
Speaker 1: This guy went and gave a lecture to students at
Speaker 1: a Miami university about how he got to where he is,
Speaker 1: and they're just appalled by this guy. Everything that he
Speaker 1: thought was what you do. They're just like, why would
Speaker 1: you want to do that? That sounds grotesque. Why don't
Speaker 1: he just retire? Why do you spend? Why do you
Speaker 1: give your money away? You're never going to spend it.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting. It's just this very different set of perspectives.
Speaker 1: People obviously still care about money. People need to and
Speaker 1: want to work for a living. But between the climate
Speaker 1: changing and the pretty frequent threat of nuclear wars and
Speaker 1: COVID throwing all of our values into question, there's a
Speaker 1: way in which people are listening. You know, well, what's
Speaker 1: the means and what's the end? Right? The whole point
Speaker 1: of work is to enable you to take time off.
Speaker 1: I mean this is econ one oh one. Right. We
Speaker 1: presume that you trade leisure for labor because labor enables
Speaker 1: you to have more leisure, Right, But we don't. For
Speaker 1: years and years, we did the exact opposite of what
Speaker 1: the textbook tells you. We just worked more and more.
Speaker 1: He says. At some point, time and hours put in
Speaker 1: during the day became directly translated into productivity, and the
Speaker 1: more hours we can slog away at work every day,
Speaker 1: the more productive we are and the more self worth
Speaker 1: we have because of it. And for employers, breaks and
Speaker 1: time off for their workers stop becoming an important part
Speaker 1: of the equation. The assumption was if you give them
Speaker 1: any freedom at all, the slock off, and you end
Speaker 1: up with these horror stories of people that work in
Speaker 1: check in factories being told to buy their own adult
Speaker 1: diapers because they get toilet breaks, which actually happens, right,
Speaker 1: And just basically get into a point we're going, how
Speaker 1: did we get that I was not normalized? When did
Speaker 1: that become okay? Right? Like, we started working for the weekend,
Speaker 1: but then we're working through the weekend. Yes, it's exactly.
Speaker 1: It's a brilliant way to put up Exactly. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: labor movement brought you the weekend, and you gave it away.
Speaker 1: This is the beauty of those hybrid jobs we talked
Speaker 1: about earlier, where you can work from home some days
Speaker 1: but still have an office you can go to. Before
Speaker 1: employers might think there is no way people would get
Speaker 1: their work done with that much freedom, turns out they
Speaker 1: were wrong. One of the things that I discovered you
Speaker 1: can do with hybrid worker is you can walk the
Speaker 1: dog at better times. It's nice walking the dog twice
Speaker 1: a day. It gets you out of the house. It
Speaker 1: actually makes you more productive. Okay, So do you think
Speaker 1: the weekends coming back or or do you think we're
Speaker 1: gonna have a three day weekend? Well, here's the interesting thing, right,
Speaker 1: did you hear about Iceland in the four day week?
Speaker 1: They put the whole Iceland in a four day week
Speaker 1: and everybody took a long you know, essentially a long weekend.
Speaker 1: Product everyone up, across every sector, every single sector was
Speaker 1: more productive. They got the same output plus and everybody
Speaker 1: got an extra day off. Wow. Wow. So so yeah,
Speaker 1: this new mentality in the job market, and not just
Speaker 1: for younger generations. Everyone who's going back to work right now.
Speaker 1: Money is obviously still the point of working, but it's
Speaker 1: maybe less of the point, yeah, which means they're going
Speaker 1: to value different things. They're going to value things like
Speaker 1: time rather than cash. This is the new wave that
Speaker 1: is washing over the workforce. This is at the heart
Speaker 1: of what we're going to call a great transformation. The
Speaker 1: way we were has always changed. The industries people work
Speaker 1: in have also always changed and will continue to do so.
Speaker 1: But what has been consistent, at least in the US
Speaker 1: is the hustle mentality. It's always been there. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're not working, someone else's and they're going to
Speaker 1: get ahead of you, so you better get back to it.
Speaker 1: Well Mark is saying is that people still really want
Speaker 1: to work. We're human, that's what we do. It gives
Speaker 1: us purpose. But today maybe it's less and less the
Speaker 1: dominant purpose. What advice would you give to someone who's
Speaker 1: entering or re entering the workforce in the new world
Speaker 1: that is twenty twenty two. Explore the space and be
Speaker 1: clear about what your goals are. Right, where do you
Speaker 1: want to be in five years? By which I mean
Speaker 1: is money really important to you? Because if it is,
Speaker 1: there are certain sectors where you can make an obsolete
Speaker 1: ton of money, and you know baking isn't one of them.
Speaker 1: But if, on the other hand, like you really like
Speaker 1: brioche and you like working with your then there's a tradeoff, right,
Speaker 1: So be aware of the trade offs and make the
Speaker 1: tradeoff accordingly. Other advice, he says, you don't need to
Speaker 1: go into crazy debt going to school if you aren't
Speaker 1: sure what you want to do after go learn on
Speaker 1: the job or jeezus. If you're interested in something technical,
Speaker 1: go learn off YouTube. Curious about coding, take an online
Speaker 1: class and see if you like it. Explore the space.
Speaker 1: I mean, the crazy amazing thing about capitalism is it
Speaker 1: creates all these different opportunities for doing stuff. Explore it,
Speaker 1: try it. There's so much stuff you can do. So
Speaker 1: this season, that's what we're gonna do. Explore and hear
Speaker 1: from people within the transformation who are changing jobs, changing
Speaker 1: the way that they've always done their job, and thinking
Speaker 1: about the world differently. People who are working in a
Speaker 1: seemingly uncertain world where anything can happen, and exploring the
Speaker 1: space despite it all. So, as a political scientist economists
Speaker 1: are you are you hopeful for the future? Yeah? Absolutely. Um,
Speaker 1: we've been doing this for a couple of hundred years
Speaker 1: and we're stole around and five. There's more of us
Speaker 1: than other so that's usually a site that we're not
Speaker 1: screwing up completely. Thank you for listening for On the Job,
Speaker 1: I'm otis gray Mark has actually written a book called
Speaker 1: Great Transformations, and you can find that and his many
Speaker 1: other books on Amazon dot com. We'll also put a
Speaker 1: link for it in the description of the show on
Speaker 1: The Job is written and produced by me Otis Gray.
Speaker 1: Our executive producer is Sandy Smallens, with mixing by Matt
Speaker 1: Noble at the Loft Recording Studios in Bronxville, New York.
Speaker 1: Music for this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.