0:07

Welcome to On the Job. This season,

0:10

we're focusing on how people and businesses

0:12

are getting back to work. Let's call

0:14

it a great transformation, a change

0:16

in the way workers are thinking. Employers

0:19

need people to work more than ever, putting

0:21

laborers in a sort of position of power. We'll

0:24

be hearing from people navigating this new normal

0:26

for themselves as they find their life's work.

0:30

It's season six of On the Job, and the

0:32

job market itself is a lot different than it

0:34

was a few years ago. COVID has shaken

0:37

up the world, put a lot of people out of work, inspired

0:39

others to pursue their passions, and has become

0:41

a new normal that everyone is trying to get used to.

0:44

The job market is messy, it's gone through

0:46

a lot of changes, and it is right with potential.

0:49

So before we launch into the rest of the season, where

0:51

we'll talk to people working within that new environment,

0:53

we're going to start off by setting the stage.

0:59

Hello, sir, welcome to On

1:01

the Job. If you could please introduce

1:03

yourself sure. My name is Mark

1:06

Blythe I am the head of the

1:08

Klingon Invasion Force. No.

1:10

I'm a professor of political economy at

1:12

Brown University and UH

1:15

sometime rock on tour and

1:17

musician. So there'll we go. Mark

1:19

Blythe is from Dundee, Scotland. He's been teaching

1:22

at Brown since two thousand nine. He's written

1:24

a lot of books on the economy. And he's talking to

1:26

me from a room full of bass guitars and drums,

1:28

which he's been playing a lot during the lockdown.

1:30

Okay, let's do it baby,

1:33

Okay, Mark Blythe. The job

1:35

market is a lot different now than

1:38

it was even a few years ago. From

1:40

an economist political scientists point

1:42

of view. How did we get to where

1:45

we are right now? How

1:47

far back do you want to go? Okay,

1:51

So, for our purposes, we're gonna tell an

1:54

incredibly abbreviated story of today's

1:56

economy. Starting around fifty

1:58

years ago, in in one, one

2:01

and five jobs was in the auto industry,

2:03

and one in three jobs was in similar industries

2:05

like steel manufacturing, making electric

2:08

motors, so making things, manufacturing,

2:10

engineering, and a lot of those jobs are unionized.

2:13

Then we get into the nineteen eightiesies,

2:17

those unions that were helping workers maintain

2:19

fair pay and weekends start to diminish.

2:22

Employers and big companies start gaining more

2:24

power as the economy globalizes. You

2:27

start to see the growth of um

2:29

finance and real estate and all the sort of

2:31

high end services to come out of the eighties and the

2:33

nineties, the Wall Street moment in New

2:35

York. You begin to see sort of the beginnings of the real beginnings

2:38

of Silicon Valley in the tech industry.

2:40

And then you start to get the growth

2:42

of the coasts and the fantastic wealth

2:44

it's accumulated there. So the bulk

2:46

of the economy moves away from things like coal

2:49

and factory jobs in the middle of the country

2:51

hence the name russ Bell. Unions

2:53

continue to fall apart through the nineties and the

2:55

two thousand's kind of flatlining

2:57

or decreasing wages across the board for

3:00

most of America. Where

3:02

was the job market at in two

3:04

thousand nineteen going into the pandemic.

3:07

Largest employee in the United States is Walmart,

3:10

big box, retail, loan services,

3:13

hospitality, fast food. Basically,

3:16

you know, make jobs and a sense is about

3:18

one thought of the labor market. Mark

3:21

says, Basically, the U. S economy was

3:23

fueled by US making stuff, and now

3:26

it's an economy fueled by US buying

3:28

stuff. Basically, eight of

3:30

the economy is driven by consumption.

3:32

Okay, so all those strip malls that you see

3:34

if you're drive across America, so that's where

3:36

people are working. That's where people are working.

3:39

And most of these places are run by big

3:41

corporations that can set wages without

3:43

those pesky unions pushing back. Essentially,

3:46

today more people are working

3:48

for less people. So what we've done is we've

3:51

created an economy is really simple to understand.

3:53

There's the top, and

3:55

that's where all the returns have gone. That's where

3:57

all the money has been made. So

4:01

let's bring this up to the present. What does it look like going

4:03

at the pandemic half of the American

4:05

labor market gets twenty an

4:08

hour or less. Really hard to

4:10

do the American dream on twenty bucks an hour or less.

4:16

COVID hits. What immediately

4:19

happens in the workforce?

4:22

Everybody went home. It was very

4:24

weird. March two

4:26

thousand nine, people around the world

4:28

start getting sent home from work, which meant less

4:31

stuff was getting made. Less people were working

4:33

and earning wages, but the demand for

4:35

stuff was still there. And as

4:37

we are now an economy that runs on consumption

4:40

buying stuff, the government needed to send

4:42

stimulus checks out to make sure people could

4:44

still purchase things to keep the economy

4:46

going, and it was whether

4:48

one likes or not, the right thing to do, because the alternative

4:51

would have been the largest contraction

4:53

of the economy since records begun,

4:55

which probably would have been worse than nodding

4:57

ten percent on the national debt. People

5:00

went home for a while, collected checks, and then

5:02

began to come back as we sort of

5:04

started to get a handle on the pandemic. As

5:06

far as unemployment goes, it was more

5:08

that people got furloughed, So COVID

5:11

technically put less people out of a

5:13

job than you might think. But what it did

5:15

do was two things. Number One, because

5:18

of COVID, a lot of women who were in the workforce,

5:20

particularly if there were part time workers and

5:22

services suddenly had to do child

5:24

kill. Schools were shutting down

5:26

off and on all the time, so pretty quickly

5:29

someone had to be home with the kids. Right, So if you were

5:31

running a diner and you had three women

5:34

working for you and they had kids, you're

5:36

not get an MBAK, right, that's done. Second

5:38

big thing, a lot of older couples boomer

5:41

age, you know, right before they were about to

5:43

retire. They got put out of work, and

5:45

they were looking at their pretty healthy four oh one

5:47

ks and thought, right, gladys were

5:49

done right. You know, there's no point in going back

5:52

now is ridiculous. So they began

5:54

to actually leave it. So what you had is a drop in

5:56

the overall labor force participation

5:59

right right? How many people are actually in the labor

6:01

market that began to draw. I

6:04

know Mark said that there were two things, but there's

6:06

a third thing. It's a big one. People

6:09

finally had perspective at home, looking

6:11

at the Mike jobs that they've been working, and

6:13

started thinking, you know what, I kind of normalized

6:16

abuse. I kind

6:18

of normalized being shouted out and swore

6:20

for like seven dollars an hour, and I'm just

6:22

not going to do that anymore. And

6:25

while employers are very reluctant to do this,

6:27

the only way to keep those workers or to get

6:29

them back was to raise wages. So

6:32

if you think, you know, Amazon used to do about

6:34

twelve bucks an hour, I think, uh, now

6:36

sort of there are minimums about fifteen, sixteen,

6:38

seventeen. Uh. There's a gas

6:40

station down the road from me. It's a local company.

6:42

Whatever you're pumping up the gas station. It's like we're

6:45

hiring seventeen an hour and benefits,

6:47

right. So there's a way in which when

6:49

you get that big supply shock, that aren't enough

6:51

workers and people have said, you know,

6:53

enough of this crop. I don't want to be treated like crop anymore.

6:56

You're gonna have to change the game. So

7:02

that's what's happening. The game has changed,

7:04

is transforming in a big way. And

7:07

I know there's this term that's been kicking around, the

7:09

Great resignation, basically this

7:11

grand exodus of people leaving the workforce

7:14

during COVID and just not coming back.

7:16

Now here's the funny thing. It tons

7:19

really looks like we massively

7:21

overestimated how many people

7:24

had quite I know, we're

7:26

massively underestimate how many people

7:28

are coming back to work. So

7:31

it looks like there hasn't really

7:33

beaten this giant quote phone. After

7:35

all, Mark says, economists

7:38

work with estimates and over time they

7:40

get more accurate. So have people just

7:42

disappeared from the workforce. Probably

7:44

not. So instead of calling it the Great

7:46

resignation, We're going to call it a great

7:48

transformation, a change in the way

7:50

workers are thinking because now they

7:53

are needed in a pretty extreme way.

7:55

Employers need people to work more than ever,

7:58

putting labors in a sort of position of power,

8:00

and everyone's hiring. So employers

8:02

that weren't valuing their employees have had a

8:05

serious wake up call, like, well, what

8:07

do you mean I can just pay somebody the minimum wage

8:09

anymore and abuse them while that it work?

8:12

Yeah, it looks like those days are done as well. I'm afraid

8:14

because if you can get seventeen

8:16

or eighteen Amazon on a kind

8:18

of flexible basis and then complement out

8:21

with Uber, then essentially I'm getting

8:23

up to about six Why

8:25

do I need to take you a minimum wage book? Another

8:29

big transformation which shouldn't come as

8:31

a surprise, more people are getting

8:33

to work from home. A lot of employees

8:35

and employers have asked themselves, do

8:37

we really need to be in a crowded office

8:39

to do this paying for rent and air conditioning

8:42

and all that. Probably not, But there's

8:44

real reasons to be in the office even in these jobs,

8:46

because how do you do mentoring, how

8:49

do you do team building? How do you

8:51

decide where the talent should be allocated if

8:53

basically everybody's on the screen. This

8:55

is why a lot of jobs are now what we call hybrid,

8:58

meaning you can work from home some days but also

9:00

have a place to go into work on others. And

9:05

while working from home has given a lot of

9:07

people the freedom to be with their families

9:09

or just have a more comfortable work environment,

9:12

it's also made people realize everything else

9:14

that comes with going to a job every day.

9:17

It's about your social networks. It's about

9:19

going out for a drink on a Friday night with your colleague

9:21

that you happened to like so you can about the one you hate,

9:23

right, I mean, that's that's part of

9:25

what the whole experience says. The

9:28

thing about the job, and we forget this, it's

9:30

about much more than wages. We'll

9:36

be right back after the break. A

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pros dot com to find a location

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near you. As

10:40

we continue our conversation with economists

10:42

and political scientists, Mark blythe we're

10:44

gonna dive a little deeper into this great

10:46

transformation we're seeing in the workforce. Mark

10:49

is quick to say that, yes, the changes

10:51

we're going through right now do seem drastic,

10:53

but that's kind of how it's always happened.

10:56

The figure is something and this is

10:58

just an approximation, but it's someone

11:00

like a third of all jobs have disappeared every ten

11:02

years. I mean it's remarkable, like so over a

11:04

thirty year period or something like that, Like literally

11:07

no jobs that were thirty years ago here. Now

11:09

that's obviously an exaggeration, but there's a huge amount

11:11

of charming and reinvention. Think about

11:13

the entire technology of the internet. I

11:17

mean it was only twenty years ago, like nobody knew

11:19

what a website was. This

11:23

generational shift, the new face of the

11:25

job market, young people getting into the workforce.

11:28

Mark says there are a lot different than other generations.

11:31

They're no longer coming at a college,

11:33

even the ones that I know and saying

11:35

I'm going to Wall Street and I'm going to smash

11:37

it. It's just not that. It's just not

11:40

And for a while it was big tech until

11:42

it became big tech evil big

11:44

tech, and now that's that's

11:46

a bit of a problem, right. Another

11:49

motivation, he says, this new generation

11:51

is acutely aware of the climate crisis,

11:54

living in a world where they here Miami will

11:56

be underwater by and that

11:58

we're doing irreparable damn to the earth. If

12:01

you really have that kind of like existential

12:03

fear that everything is totally screwed anyway,

12:06

then you know, why are you going to bust your last eight hours

12:08

a week for the man It's just not gonna happen,

12:10

right, So I think there's a fair

12:12

degree of trading off

12:15

what would have been seen as the normal path

12:17

of like struggling and struggling to make very

12:19

very high income, because that's what you do

12:22

to a model of I

12:25

want to do something that doesn't make things

12:27

worse and actually has a degree

12:29

of self satisfaction for me. Mark

12:33

says, if you ask executives at

12:36

oil companies, mining companies,

12:38

engineering companies, as far as

12:40

carbon emissions and damage to the Earth

12:42

is concerned. They know the finger is

12:44

pointed at them, and it's become a lot harder

12:46

to get people to work for them. It's

12:49

no longer just about the money because they've

12:51

got a bad reputation and people they've got a

12:53

bad rap. Yeah. I spoke to the CEO

12:55

of a very very big carbon intensive

12:58

firm who's you know, taking

13:00

the green stuff and all the rest of it, very very

13:02

seriously, and I said, you know, why are you doing

13:04

this? And he says, because my own family think

13:06

I'm a Bostard. That's

13:10

a powerful motivator. That's

13:12

so crazy. Um, I feel

13:15

like that's such a huge shift. That is

13:17

a huge shift. That really is

13:19

a huge shift. Right. He

13:21

told me another story about a guy in Florida, a

13:23

billionaire in his eighties. He makes millions

13:26

of dollars every day on the stock market. He

13:28

chased the American dream and he got it. Well.

13:31

This guy went and gave a lecture to students

13:33

at a Miami university about how he

13:35

got to where he is and they're just appalled

13:38

by this guy. Everything

13:41

that he thought was what you do. They're just

13:43

like, why would you want to do that? That sounds grotesque.

13:45

Why don't you just retire? Why do

13:47

you spend? Why do you give your money away? You're never going to

13:49

spend it. It's really

13:51

interesting, just this very different set of perspectives.

13:57

People obviously still care about money.

14:00

People need to and want to work for a

14:02

living. But between the climate changing

14:04

and the pretty frequent threat of nuclear

14:06

wars and COVID throwing all

14:08

of our values into question, there's

14:10

a way in which people listening you know, well, what's the

14:12

means and what's the end? Right?

14:15

The whole point of work is to enable

14:18

you to take time off. I mean this is eqon

14:20

one oh one. Right. We presume that you

14:22

trade leisure for labor

14:25

because labor enables you to have more

14:27

leisure, right, But we don't. For years and

14:29

years, we did the exact opposite of what the text book

14:31

tells you. We just worked more and more.

14:35

He says. At some point, time and hours

14:38

put in during the day became directly

14:40

translated into productivity, and

14:43

the more hours we can slog away at work

14:45

every day, the more productive we are

14:47

and the more self worth we have. Because

14:49

of it, and for employers, breaks

14:51

and time off for their workers stopped

14:53

becoming an important part of the equation. The

14:56

assumption was if you give them any freedom at

14:58

all, the slock off and you end up with these horror

15:00

stories of people that work in check in factories

15:03

being told to buy their own adult diapers because

15:05

they get toilet brakes, which actually

15:08

happens, right. Uh, And

15:10

just basically getting to a point where going how

15:12

did we get there? I was not normalized. When

15:14

did that become? Okay? Right? Like, we

15:17

started working for the weekend, but then

15:19

we're working through the weekend. Yes, that's exactly.

15:21

It's a brilliant to put out exactly. Yeah, the labor

15:23

movement brought you the weekend, and you gave

15:26

it away.

15:30

This is the beauty of those hybrid jobs we talked

15:32

about earlier, where you can work from home some days

15:35

but still have an office you can go to. Before

15:37

employers might think there is no way

15:40

people would get their work done with that much

15:42

freedom, turns out they

15:44

were wrong. One of the things that I discovered

15:46

you can do with hybrid workers. You can walk the dog

15:48

at better times. It's nice walking

15:51

the dog twice a day gets you out of the house.

15:53

It actually makes you more productive. Okay,

15:55

so do you think the weekends

15:58

coming back or or

16:00

do you think we're gonna have a three day weekend. Well,

16:03

here's the interesting thing, right, did you hear

16:05

about Iceland in the four day week? They

16:07

put the whole Iceland in a four day week and

16:09

everybody took a long you know, essentially a

16:11

long weekend. Product everyone up across every

16:13

sector, every single sector was

16:16

more productive. They got the same output

16:18

plus and everybody got an extra day off. Wow

16:21

wow. So so

16:24

yeah, this this new mentality in the job

16:26

market, and not just for younger generations.

16:29

Everyone who's going back to work right now.

16:32

Um, money is

16:34

obviously still the point of working,

16:37

but it's maybe less of

16:39

the point, yeah, which means they're

16:41

going to volue different things. They're going to value things

16:43

like time rather than cash.

16:48

This is the new wave that is washing

16:50

over the workforce. This is

16:53

at the heart of what we're gonna call a great

16:55

transformation. The

16:59

way we were has always changed. The

17:01

industries people working have also always

17:04

changed and will continue to do so. But

17:06

what has been consistent, at least in

17:08

the US, is the hustle mentality.

17:11

It's always been there. You know if you're not

17:13

working someone else's and they're

17:15

going to get ahead of you, so you better

17:17

get back to it. Well, Marcus saying

17:19

is that people still really want to work.

17:22

We're human, that's what we do. It gives

17:24

us purpose, but today maybe

17:27

it's less and less the dominant purpose.

17:31

What advice would you give to

17:33

someone who's entering or

17:35

re entering the workforce in the new

17:37

world, That is, explore

17:40

the space and and be clear

17:42

about what your goals are. Right, where do you want to be

17:44

in five years, by which I mean is

17:47

money really important to you? Because if it is, there

17:49

are certain sectors where you can make an obsolete

17:51

ton of money, and you know baking

17:54

isn't one of them. But if, on the other hand,

17:56

like you really like brioche and

17:58

you like working with your on, then

18:00

there's a tradeoff, right, So be aware of

18:02

the trade offs and make the trade off accordingly.

18:05

Other advice, he says, you don't need to

18:07

go into crazy debt going to school.

18:10

If you aren't sure what you want to do after, go

18:12

learn on the job or jeesus, if

18:15

you're interested in something technical, go learn

18:17

off YouTube. Curious about coding,

18:19

take an online class and see if you like it.

18:22

Explore the space. I mean

18:24

in crazy. Amazing thing about capitalism

18:27

is it creates all these different opportunities

18:30

for doing stuff. Explore it, try

18:33

it. There's so much stuff you

18:35

can do. So

18:37

this season, that's what we're gonna do. Explore

18:41

and hear from people within the transformation

18:43

who are changing jobs, changing the way

18:45

that they've always done their job, and thinking about

18:47

the world differently. People who

18:49

are working in a seemingly uncertain

18:52

world where anything can happen, and

18:54

exploring the space despite it all.

19:00

So, as a political scientist economists

19:02

are you? Are you hopeful for the future?

19:05

Yeah? Absolutely. Um, we've been

19:07

doing this for a couple of hundred years and we're stole around

19:09

and fast. There's more of us than over, so

19:11

that's usually a sign that we're not screwing up completely.

19:19

Thank you for listening for On the Job.

19:22

I'm Otis Gray. Mark

19:25

has actually written a book called Great

19:27

Transformations, and you can find that

19:30

and his many other books on Amazon

19:32

dot com. We'll also put a link for it in

19:34

the description of the show. On

19:36

the Job is written and produced by me Otis

19:38

Gray. Our executive producer is Sandy

19:41

Smallens, with mixing by Matt Noble at

19:43

the Loft Recording Studios in Bronxville,

19:45

New York. Music for this episode

19:47

is by Blue Dot Sessions.