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. No. I'm a professor
Speaker 1: of political economy at Brown University and UH 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 nine. He's written a lot of books on
Speaker 1: the economy. And he's talking to me from a room
Speaker 1: full of bass guitars and drums, which he's been playing
Speaker 1: a lot during the lockdown. Okay, let's do it baby, 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 in one, 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 eightiesies,
Speaker 1: those unions that were helping workers maintain fair pay and
Speaker 1: weekends start to diminish. Employers and big companies start gaining
Speaker 1: more power as the economy globalizes. You start to see
Speaker 1: the growth of um finance and real estate and all
Speaker 1: the sort of high end services to come out of
Speaker 1: the eighties and the nineties, the Wall Street moment in
Speaker 1: New York. You begin to see sort of the beginnings
Speaker 1: of the real beginnings of Silicon Valley in the tech industry.
Speaker 1: And then you start to get the growth of the
Speaker 1: coasts and the fantastic wealth it's accumulated there. So the
Speaker 1: bulk of the economy moves away from things like coal
Speaker 1: and factory jobs in the middle of the country hence
Speaker 1: the name russ Bell. Unions continue to fall apart through
Speaker 1: the nineties and the two thousand's kind of flatlining or
Speaker 1: decreasing wages across the board for most of America. Where
Speaker 1: was the job market at in two thousand nineteen going
Speaker 1: into the pandemic. Largest employee in the United States is Walmart,
Speaker 1: big box, retail, loan services, hospitality, fast food. Basically, you know,
Speaker 1: make jobs and a sense is about one thought of
Speaker 1: the labor market. Mark says, Basically, the U. S economy
Speaker 1: was fueled by US making stuff, and now it's an
Speaker 1: economy fueled by US buying stuff. Basically, eight 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 is really simple
Speaker 1: to understand. There's the top, and that's where all the
Speaker 1: returns have gone. That's where all the money has been made.
Speaker 1: So let's bring this up to the present. What does
Speaker 1: it look like going at the pandemic half of the
Speaker 1: American labor market gets twenty an hour or less. Really
Speaker 1: hard to do the American dream on twenty bucks an
Speaker 1: hour or less. COVID hits. What immediately happens in the workforce?
Speaker 1: Everybody went home. It was very weird. March two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: people around the world start getting sent home from work,
Speaker 1: which meant less stuff was getting made. Less people were
Speaker 1: working and earning wages, but the demand for stuff was
Speaker 1: still there. And as we are now an economy that
Speaker 1: runs on consumption buying stuff, the government needed to send
Speaker 1: stimulus checks out to make sure people could still purchase
Speaker 1: things to keep the economy going, and it was whether
Speaker 1: one likes or not, the right thing to do, because
Speaker 1: the alternative would have been the largest contraction of the
Speaker 1: economy since records begun, which probably would have been worse
Speaker 1: than nodding ten percent on the national debt. People went
Speaker 1: home for a while, collected checks, and then began to
Speaker 1: come back as we sort of started to get a
Speaker 1: handle on the pandemic. As far as unemployment goes, it
Speaker 1: was more that people got furloughed, So COVID technically put
Speaker 1: 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 work,
Speaker 1: and they were looking at their pretty healthy four oh
Speaker 1: one ks and thought, right, gladys were done right. You know,
Speaker 1: there's no point in going back now is ridiculous. So
Speaker 1: they began to actually leave it. So what you had
Speaker 1: is a drop in the overall labor force participation right right?
Speaker 1: How many people are actually in the labor market that
Speaker 1: began to draw. I know Mark said that there were
Speaker 1: two things, but there's a third thing. It's a big one.
Speaker 1: People finally had perspective at home, looking at the Mike
Speaker 1: jobs that they've been working, and started thinking, you know what,
Speaker 1: I kind of normalized abuse. I kind of normalized being
Speaker 1: shouted out and swore for like seven dollars an hour,
Speaker 1: and I'm just not going to do that anymore. And
Speaker 1: while employers are very reluctant to do this, the only
Speaker 1: way to keep those workers or to get them back
Speaker 1: was to raise wages. So if you think, you know,
Speaker 1: Amazon used to do about twelve bucks an hour, I think, uh,
Speaker 1: now sort of there are minimums about fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a gas station down the road from me. It's
Speaker 1: a local company. Whatever you're pumping up the gas station.
Speaker 1: It's like we're hiring seventeen an hour and benefits, right.
Speaker 1: So there's a way in which when you get that
Speaker 1: big supply shock, that aren't enough workers and people have said,
Speaker 1: you know, enough of this crop. I don't want to
Speaker 1: be treated like crop anymore. You're gonna have to change
Speaker 1: the game. So that's what's happening. The game has changed,
Speaker 1: is transforming in a big way. And I know there's
Speaker 1: this term that's been kicking around, the Great resignation, basically
Speaker 1: this grand exodus of people leaving the workforce during COVID
Speaker 1: and just not coming back. Now here's the funny thing.
Speaker 1: It tons really looks like we massively overestimated how many
Speaker 1: people had quite I know, we're massively underestimate how many
Speaker 1: people are coming back to work. So it looks like
Speaker 1: there hasn't really beaten this giant quote phone. After all,
Speaker 1: Mark says, economists work with estimates and over time they
Speaker 1: get more accurate. So have people just disappeared from the workforce.
Speaker 1: Probably not. So instead of calling it the Great resignation,
Speaker 1: We're going to call it a great transformation, a change
Speaker 1: in the way workers are thinking because now they are
Speaker 1: needed in a pretty extreme way. Employers need people to
Speaker 1: work more than ever, putting labors in a sort of
Speaker 1: position of power, and everyone's hiring. So employers that weren't
Speaker 1: valuing their employees have had a serious wake up call, like, well,
Speaker 1: what do you mean I can just pay somebody the
Speaker 1: minimum wage anymore and abuse them while that it work? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it looks like those days are done as well. I'm
Speaker 1: afraid because if you can get seventeen or eighteen Amazon
Speaker 1: on a kind of flexible basis and then complement out
Speaker 1: with Uber, then essentially I'm getting up to about six
Speaker 1: Why do I need to take you a minimum wage book?
Speaker 1: Another big transformation which shouldn't come as a surprise, more
Speaker 1: people are getting to work from home. A lot of
Speaker 1: employees and employers have asked themselves, do we really need
Speaker 1: to be in a crowded office to do this paying
Speaker 1: for rent and air conditioning and all that. Probably not,
Speaker 1: But there's real reasons to be in the office even
Speaker 1: in these jobs, because how do you do mentoring, how
Speaker 1: do you do team building? How do you decide where
Speaker 1: the talent should be allocated if basically everybody's on the screen.
Speaker 1: This is why a lot of jobs are now what
Speaker 1: we call hybrid, meaning you can work from home some
Speaker 1: days but also have a place to go into work
Speaker 1: on others. And while working from home has given a
Speaker 1: lot of people the freedom to be with their families
Speaker 1: or just have a more comfortable work environment, it's also
Speaker 1: made people realize everything else that comes with going to
Speaker 1: a job every day. It's about your social networks. It's
Speaker 1: about going out for a drink on a Friday night
Speaker 1: with your colleague that you happened to like so you
Speaker 1: can about the one you hate, right, I mean, that's
Speaker 1: that's part of what the whole experience 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: we continue our conversation with economists and political scientists, Mark
Speaker 1: blythe we're gonna 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 there are a lot different than other generations.
Speaker 1: They're no longer coming at a college, even the ones
Speaker 1: that I know and saying I'm going to Wall Street
Speaker 1: and I'm going to smash it. It's just not that.
Speaker 1: It's just not And for a while it was big
Speaker 1: tech until it became big tech evil big tech, and
Speaker 1: now that's that's a bit of a problem, right. Another motivation,
Speaker 1: he says, this new generation is acutely aware of the
Speaker 1: climate crisis, living in a world where they here Miami
Speaker 1: will be underwater by and that we're doing irreparable damn
Speaker 1: to the earth. If you really have that kind of
Speaker 1: like existential fear that everything is totally screwed anyway, then
Speaker 1: you know, why are you going to bust your last
Speaker 1: eight hours a week for the man It's just not
Speaker 1: gonna happen, right, So I think there's a fair degree
Speaker 1: of trading off what would have been seen as the
Speaker 1: normal path of like struggling and struggling to make very
Speaker 1: very high income, because that's what you do to a
Speaker 1: model of I want to do something that doesn't make
Speaker 1: things worse and actually has a degree of self satisfaction
Speaker 1: for me. Mark says, if you ask executives at oil companies,
Speaker 1: mining companies, engineering companies, as far as carbon emissions and
Speaker 1: damage to the Earth is concerned. They know the finger
Speaker 1: is pointed at them, and it's become a lot harder
Speaker 1: to get people to work for them. It's no longer
Speaker 1: just about the money because they've got a bad reputation
Speaker 1: and people they've got a bad rap. Yeah. I spoke
Speaker 1: to the CEO of a very very big carbon intensive
Speaker 1: firm who's you know, 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 Bostard. That's a
Speaker 1: powerful motivator. That's so crazy. Um, I feel like that's
Speaker 1: such a huge shift. 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
Speaker 1: is and they're just appalled by this guy. Everything that
Speaker 1: he thought was what you do. They're just like, why
Speaker 1: would you want to do that? That sounds grotesque. Why
Speaker 1: don't you just retire? Why do you spend? Why do
Speaker 1: you give your money away? You're never going to spend it.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting, 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 listening you know, well, what's the
Speaker 1: means and what's the end? Right? The whole point of
Speaker 1: work is to enable you to take time off. I
Speaker 1: mean this is eqon one oh one. Right. We presume
Speaker 1: that you trade leisure for labor because labor enables you
Speaker 1: to have more leisure, right, But we don't. For years
Speaker 1: and years, we did the exact opposite of what the
Speaker 1: text book 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 stopped 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 brakes, which actually happens, right. Uh,
Speaker 1: And just basically getting to a point where going how
Speaker 1: did we get there? 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, that's exactly.
Speaker 1: It's a brilliant to put out exactly. Yeah, the labor
Speaker 1: 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 workers. You can walk the dog
Speaker 1: at better times. It's nice walking the dog twice a
Speaker 1: day gets you out of the house. It actually makes
Speaker 1: you more productive. Okay, so do you think the weekends
Speaker 1: coming back or or do you think we're gonna have
Speaker 1: 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 this new mentality in the job market, and not
Speaker 1: just for younger generations. Everyone who's going back to work
Speaker 1: right now. Um, money is obviously still the point of working,
Speaker 1: but it's maybe less of the point, yeah, which means
Speaker 1: they're going to volue different things. They're going to value
Speaker 1: things like time rather than cash. This is the new
Speaker 1: wave that is washing over the workforce. This is at
Speaker 1: the heart of what we're gonna call a great transformation.
Speaker 1: The way we were has always changed. The industries people
Speaker 1: working 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. Well,
Speaker 1: Marcus saying is that people still really want to work.
Speaker 1: We're human, that's what we do. It gives us purpose,
Speaker 1: but today maybe it's less and less the dominant purpose.
Speaker 1: What advice would you give to someone who's entering or
Speaker 1: re entering the workforce in the new world, That is,
Speaker 1: explore the space and and be clear about what your
Speaker 1: goals are. Right, where do you want to be in
Speaker 1: five years, by which I mean is money really important
Speaker 1: to you? Because if it is, there are certain sectors
Speaker 1: where you can make an obsolete ton of money, and
Speaker 1: you know baking isn't one of them. But if, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, like you really like brioche and you
Speaker 1: like working with your on, then there's a tradeoff, right,
Speaker 1: So be aware of the trade offs and make the
Speaker 1: trade off accordingly. Other advice, he says, you don't need
Speaker 1: to go into crazy debt going to school. If you
Speaker 1: aren't sure what you want to do after, go learn
Speaker 1: on the job or jeesus, 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 in 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 fast. There's more of us
Speaker 1: than over, so that's usually a sign 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.