The Bobby Bones Show - The Great Transformation

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Brown University economist Mark Blyth sets the stage for Season 6 of On The Job by telling the story of how we got where we are today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Air Tasker helps you check off your to-do list. I need the Wasp Nest gone, house cleaned, and my dog taken to his overpriced haircut. Go to Airtasker.com or download the app. Air Tasker, get anything done? Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're focusing on how people and businesses are getting back to work. Let's call it a great transformation,

a change in the way workers are thinking. Employers need people to work more than ever, putting laborers in a sort of position of power. We'll be hearing from people navigating this new normal for themselves as they find their life's work. It's season six of On the Job, and the job market itself is a lot different

than it was a few years ago. COVID has shaken up the world, put a lot of people out of work, inspired others to pursue their passions, and has become a new normal that everyone is trying to get used to. The job market is messy. It's gone through a lot of changes, and it is ripe with potential. So before we launch into the rest of the season where we'll talk to people working within that new environment,

we're going to start off by setting the stage. Hello, sir. Welcome to On the Job. If you could please introduce yourself. Sure. My name is Mark Blythe. I am the head of the Klingon Invasion Force. No, I'm not.

I'm a professor of political economy at Brown University. and a sometime raconteur and musician. So there we go. Mark Blythe is from Dundee, Scotland. He's been teaching at Brown since 2009. He's written a lot of books on the economy. And he's talking to me from a room full of bass guitars and drums, which he's been playing a lot during the lockdown.

Okay. Let's do it, baby. Okay, Mark Blythe. The job market is a lot different now than it was even a few years ago. From an economist, political scientist's point of view, how did we get to where we are right now? How far back do you want to go? Okay, so for our purposes,

we're going to tell an incredibly abbreviated story of today's economy, starting around 50 years ago. In 1971, one in five jobs was in the auto industry. And one in three jobs was in similar industries like steel manufacturing, making electric motors. So making things, manufacturing, engineering, and a lot of those jobs were unionized.

Then we get into the 19, 1980s. 1980s, those unions that were helping workers maintain fair pay and weekends start to diminish. Employers and big companies start gaining more power as the economy globalizes. You start to see the growth of finance and real estate and all the sort of high-end services that come out of the 80s into the 90s, the Wall Street moment in New York, you begin to see sort of the beginnings or the real beginnings of Silicon Valley and the tech industry. And then you start to get the growth of the coasts and the fantastic wealth that's a community.

So the bulk of the economy moves away from things like coal and factory jobs in the middle of the country, hence the name Rust Belt. Unions continue to fall apart through the 90s and the 2000s, kind of flatlining or decreasing wages across the board for most of America. Where was the job market at in 2019 going into the pandemic? Largest employer in the United States is Walmart. Big box retail, low-end services, hospitality, fast, food, basically, you know, make jobs in a sense is about one-third of the labor market. Mark says, basically, the U.S. economy was fueled by us making stuff. And now it's an economy fueled by us buying stuff.

Basically, 80% of the economy is driven by consumption. Okay, so all those strip malls that you see if you drive across America, that's where people are working. That's where people are working. And most of these places are run by big corporations that can set wages without those pesky unions pushing back. Essentially, today, more people are working for less people. So what we've done is we've created an economy. It's really simple to understand. There's the top 20% and that's where all the returns have gone. That's where all the money has been made. So let's bring this up to the present.

What does it look like going into the pandemic? Half of the American labor market gets $20 an hour or less. Really hard to do the American dream on 20 bucks an hour or less. COVID hits. What immediately happens in the workforce? Everybody went home. It was very weird. March 2019, people around the world start getting sent home from work, which meant less stuff was getting made. Less people were working and earning wages. But the demand for stuff was still there. And as we are now an economy that runs on consumption, buying stuff, the government needed to send stimulus checks out to make sure people could still purchase things to keep the economy. economy going. And it was whether one likes it or not the right thing to do, because the alternative would have been the largest contraction of the economy since records began, which probably would have been worse than adding 10% on the national debt. People went home for a while, collected checks,

and then began to come back as we sort of started to get a handle on the pandemic. As far as unemployment goes, it was more that people got furloughed. So COVID technically put less people out of a job than you might think. But what it did do was to do. things. Number one, because of COVID, a lot of women who were in the workforce, particularly if they were part-time workers and services, suddenly had to do childcare. Schools were shutting down, off and on, all the time. So pretty quickly, someone had to be home with the kids. Right. So if you were running a diner and you had three women working for you and they had kids, you're not getting them back, right? That's done.

Second big thing, a lot of older couples, boomer age, you know, right before they were about to retire, They got put out of work, and they were looking at their pretty healthy 401ks. And thought, right, Gladys were done, right? You know, there's no point in going back now. It's ridiculous. So they began to actually leave it. So what you had is a drop in the overall labor force participation rate, right? How many people are actually in the labor market?

That began to drop. I know Mark said that there were two things, but there's a third thing. And it's a big one. People finally had perspective at home, looking at the McJobbs that they've been working and started thinking, You know what, I kind of normalized abuse. I kind of normalized being shouted at and swore for like $7 an hour,

and I'm just not going to do that anymore. And while employers are very reluctant to do this, the only way to keep those workers or to get them back was to raise wages. So if you think Amazon used to do about $12 an hour, I think, now sort of their minimums about 15, 16, 17. There's a gas station down the road from me.

It's a local company. you're pumping up the gas station. It's like, we're hiring 17 an hour in benefits, right? So there's a way in which when you get that big supply shock, there aren't enough workers, and people have said, you know, enough of this crap. I don't want to be treated like crap anymore. You're going to have to change the game.

So that's what's happening. The game has changed. It's transforming in a big way. And I know there's this term that's been kicking around, the great resignation, basically this grand exodus of people leaving the workforce during COVID and just not coming back. Now, here's the term.

Here's the funny thing. It turns out, it really looks like we massively overestimated how many people had quit. And now we're massively underestimated how many people are coming back to work. So it looks like there hasn't really been this giant quitathon after all. Mark says economists work with estimates. And over time, they get more accurate. So have people just disappeared from the workforce? Probably not. So instead of calling it the great resignation,

we're going to call it a great transformation, a change in the way workers are thinking, because now they are needed in a pretty extreme way. Employers need people to work more than ever, putting laborers in a sort of position of power, and everyone's hiring. So employers that weren't valuing their employees have had a serious wake-up call.

Like, well, what do you mean? I can't just pay somebody the minimum wage anymore and abuse them while they're at work. Yeah, looks like those days are done as well, I'm afraid, because if you can get 17 or 18 at Amazon on a kind of flexible basis and then complement that with Uber, then essentially I'm getting up to about 25, 26.

Why do I need to take your minimum wage bullshit? Another big transformation, which shouldn't come as a surprise, more people are getting to work from home. A lot of employees and employers have asked themselves, do we really need to be in a crowded office to do this, paying for rent and air conditioning and all that? Probably not. But there's real reasons to be in the office even in these jobs, because how do you do mentoring?

How do you do team building? How do you decide where the talent should be allocated if basically everybody's on a screen? This is why a lot of jobs are now what we call hybrid, meaning you can work from home some days, but also have a place to go into work on others. And while working from home has given a lot of people the freedom to be with their families or just have a more comfortable work environment, it's also made people realize everything else that comes with going to a job every day. It's about your social networks. It's about going out for a drink on a Friday night with your colleague that you happen to like so you can b-b-to-it about the one you hate, right?

I mean, that's part of what the whole experience is. The thing about the job, and we forget this, it's about much more than wages. We'll be right back after the break. A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done. Sweats over the details. This is the kind of person you need. Express employment professionals can help. Finding the best people requires more than sorting through applications.

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office sometimes finding the best new employee really is about who you know express knows jobs get to know express go to expresspros.com to find a location near you as we continue our conversation with economist and political scientist mark blithe we're going to dive a little deeper into this great transformation we're seeing in the workforce mark is quick to say that yes, the changes we're going through right now do seem drastic, but that's kind of how it's always happened. The figure is something, and this is just an approximation, but it's something like a third of all jobs have disappeared every 10 years.

I mean, it's remarkable. Like, so over a 30-year period or something like that, like literally no jobs that were 30 years ago or here now. That's obviously an exaggeration, but there's a huge amount of churning and reinvention. Think about the entire technology of the internet. I mean, it was only 20 years ago. like nobody knew what a website was. This generational shift, the new face of the job market,

young people getting into the workforce, Mark says they're a lot different than other generations. They're no longer coming out of college, even the ones that I know, and saying, I'm going to Wall Street and I'm going to smash it. It's just not out. And for a while it was big tech, until it became big tech, evil big tech.

And now, yeah, that's a bit of a problem, right? Another motivation, he says, this new generation is acutely aware of the climate crisis. And living in a world where they hear, Miami will be underwater by 2050 and that we're doing irreparable damage to the earth. If you really have that kind of existential fear that everything's totally screwed anyway, then, you know, why are you going to bust your ass 80 hours a week for the man? It's just not going to happen, right?

So I think there's a fair degree of trading off what would have been seen as the normal path of like struggling and struggling to make very, very high income because that's what you do, to a model of, I want to do something that doesn't make things worse and actually has a degree of self-satisfaction for me. Mark says if you ask executives at oil companies, mining companies, engineering companies, as far as carbon emissions and damage to the earth is concerned, they know the finger is pointed at them,

and it's become a lot harder to get people to work for them. It's no longer just about the money. Because they've got a bad reputation and people... They got a bad rep, yeah. I spoke to the CEO of a very, very big carbon-intensive firm who's taking the green stuff and all the rest of it very, very seriously. And I said, you know, why are you doing this? And he says, because my own family think I'm a bastard.

That's a powerful motivator. That's so crazy. I feel like that's such a huge shift. Yeah, that is a huge shift. That really is a huge shift, right? He told me another story about a guy in Florida, a billionaire in his 80s. He makes millions of dollars every day on the stock market. He chased the American dream, and he got it.

Well, this guy went and gave a lecture to students at a Miami university about how he got to where he is. And they're just appalled by this guy. Everything he thought was what you do. They're just like, why would you want to do that? That sounds grotesque. Why don't you just retire? Why don't you give your money away?

You're never going to spend it. It's really interesting. It's just a very different set of perspectives. People obviously still care about money. People need to and want to work for a living. But between the climate changing and the pretty frequent threat of nuclear wars and COVID throwing all of our values into question...

There's a way in which people are saying, you know, well, what's the means and what's the end? Right? The whole point of work is to enable you to take time off. I mean, this is Econ 101, right? We presume that you treat... leisure for labor because labor enables you to have more leisure, right? But we don't.

For years and years, we did the exact opposite of what the textbook tells you. We just worked more and more. He says at some point, time and hours put in during the day became directly translated into productivity. And the more hours we can slog away at work every day, the more productive we are. And the more self-worth we have because of it. And for employers, breaks and time off for their workers stop becoming an important part of the equation. The assumption was if you give them any freedom at all, they'll slack off,

and you end up with these horror stories of people that work in chicken factories being told to buy their own adult diapers because they don't get toilet breaks, which actually happens, right? And just basically getting to a point we're going, how did we get the, how is that normalized? When did that become okay? Right, like we started working for the weekend, but then we're working through the weekend. Yes, exactly. It's a brilliant way of put it.

Yeah, the labor movement brought you the weekend and you gave it away. This is the beauty of those hybrid jobs we talked about earlier, where you can work from home some days but still have an office you can go to. Before, employers might think there is no way people would get their work done with that much freedom. Turns out, they were wrong. One of the things that I discovered you can do with hybrid work is you can walk the dog at better times. It's nice walking the dog twice a day. It gets you out of the house. It actually makes you more productive.

Okay, so do you think the weekend's coming back or do you think we're going to have a three-day weekend? Well, here's the interesting thing, right? Did you hear about Iceland in the four-day week? They put the whole Iceland in a four-day week and everybody took essentially a long weekend. Productivity went up across every sector. Every single sector was more productive.

They got the same output plus and everybody got an extra day off. Wow. Wow. So, yeah, this new mentality in the job market, and not just for younger generations, everyone who's going back to work right now, money is obviously still the point of working, but it's maybe less of the point. Yeah, which means they're going to value different things. They're going to value things like time rather than cash. This is the new wave that is washing over the workforce. This is at the heart of what we're going to call. a great transformation. The way we work has always changed. The industries people work in have also always changed and will continue to do so. But what has been consistent, at least in the U.S., is the hustle mentality. It's always been there. You know, if you're not working, someone else is

and they're going to get ahead of you. So you better get back to it. What Mark is saying is that people still really want to work. We're human. That's what we do. It gives us purpose. But today, maybe it's less and less the dominant purpose. What advice would you give to someone who's entering or re-entering the workforce in the new world that is 2022? Explore the space and be clear about what your goals are. Where do you want to be in five years?

By which I mean, is money really important to you? Because if it is, there are certain sectors where you can make an absolute ton of money and, you know, baking isn't one of them. But if on the other hand, like you really like bryosh and you like working with your hands, then there's a trade-off, right? So be aware of the trade-offs and make the trade-off accordingly. Other advice? He says you don't need to go into crazy debt going to school if you aren't sure what you want to do after. Go learn on the job. Or, geez, if you're interested in something technical, go learn off YouTube.

Curious about coding? Take an online class and see if you like it. Explore the space. I mean, then, crazy, amazing thing about capitalism is it creates all these different opportunities for doing stuff. Explore it. Try it. There's so much stuff you can do. So this season, that's what we're going to do. Explore and hear from people within the transformation who are changing jobs, changing the way that they've always done their job, and thinking about the world differently. People who are working in a seemingly uncertain world where anything can happen and exploring the space despite it all. So as a political scientist, economist, are you hopeful for the future?

Yeah, absolutely. I am. We've been doing this for a couple of hundred years and we're still around. In fact, there's more of us than ever. So that's usually a sign that we're not screwing up completely. Thank you for listening. For On the Job, I'm Otis Gray. Mark has actually written a book called Great Transformations and you can find that and his many other books on Amazon.com. We'll also put a link for it in the description of the show. On the job is written and produced by me, Otis Gray. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallins, with mixing by Matt Noble at the loft recording studios in Bronxville, New York.

Music for this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. Service opens doors, and at American Military University, it can open doors for the whole family. If you have a loved one who's served in the military, you may qualify for reduced tuition. AMU offers flexible online programs designed to, to fit your schedule so you can keep moving forward wherever life takes you. Learn more at amu.

APUS.edu slash military. Open doors to the future for you and your family with the help of American Military University. That's AMU. APUS. Dot E-DU slash military. With Air Tasker, you can check off anything on your to-do list. Okay, today's list. Pick up the cat, get my nails done, drop off the brownies for the fundraiser.

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