The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk-Members Only Pod: Returning To Work - The Liberal International Order

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

Munk Members Podcast provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. This week’s Munk Members podcast starts with a discussion of Canada’s stalled out effort to “return to work” two years into the pandemic as the risks of severe illness and death from COVID-19 plummet. What are the costs to companies, community and social equity if broad swaths of Canada’s professional class permanently turn their backs on the office? Second, Janice and Rudyard introduce a new feature for the show in the form of occasional deep dives into an idea or expression we use to explain geopolitics, society or the economy, but don’t necessarily agree with or understand what it actually means. This week’s phrase: the liberal international order. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.W.Munk Debates.com and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Roger Griffiths here. your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our regular bunk members only podcast, a weekly program digging into the big issues and ideas in the news with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director,

the Monk School of Global Affairs, an international acclaimed scholar and author. Janice, great to be in dialogue with you. I hate to say it. It's September, Janice, the second Labor Day weekend. I don't think there's a Canadian alive who doesn't. A great Labor Day. with mixed feelings registered. The winter is closer. Yes. I'm here having my Labor Day weekend in the Eastern Townships in Quebec. And, you know, it was the first evening last night where I put a sweater on.

And I always, each year, that's kind of like a semi-traumatic event. It is. The putting on of the first sweater, because you know it's basically the next nine months. It's not a good sign. Well, look, on on better news, we have had a winner for the very, very helpful kind of informal contest that we created the last few weeks to create a better name for this podcast. Yeah, something punchier. It captures the essence of what we try to do each week. So thank you for all your suggestions.

We're going to debut that name next week on the show with some new graphics and just basically a new plan for the show coming up into the fall. So thank you everybody for the suggestions. We crowdsourced it, Janice. The Wisdom of Crowds comes through once again. And it really worked. And there were really hundreds of entries into this. So really grateful for all the engagement. Absolutely.

Well, two topics. Every show. Let's kick off with number one, which has to be, Janice, is partly driven by the calendar. It is the return to school next week. But more importantly, for, many people, especially white collar professionals, a drive to return to the office. This is understandably a little bit more advanced in the United States, just maybe a different ethic

there around work in person. Here in Canada, Janice, you have to have a sense here of real resistance on the part of white collar professionals to get back into the office reports that most are functioning at under 30% and that there is kind of large scale resistance. I want your thoughts on this. I've got some views, some strong ones actually on this. I find this topic elicits maybe some concerns I have about a broader sense of where our society is at and where people's values are at in terms of what their employers and their coworkers. But what's your take on the so-called return to work? So among listeners, I'm guessing what Rogers views are and I'm preemptive here. So I'm going to say, look, we need to be able to innovate in the way we work.

So models that we developed in the 19th century where everybody showed up on the factory floor is not necessarily the best model for our 21st century economy. I really do think we have to be open to a whole series of hybrid models. And we learned a lot over the last two years, both on what technology works and what work patterns we can innovate around. And I get the resistance. People were spending in our big cities and even in our smaller cities like Ottawa, 40 minutes of traffic each way, all kinds of.

of child care problems and drop off problems and working from home is just so much easier. But that misses a big part of the story, which is the value of coworkers, what you learn from being in the office every day with people that you bump into, the opportunity to talk about new ideas and either to diss them right away or say, hey, that's interesting. Let's explore this further. And look, we have so much evidence now, Richard. We're actually getting hard data that online Zoom experience is not the equivalent of interacting personally in a given, you know, back and forth way. So there are, let me give us, let's talk about two examples.

The banking sector in downtown Toronto, which is a well-paid sector, is having huge, trouble getting their staff back to work. And what's the ask, by the way, not five days a week in the office, two, two days a week. They're still getting pushback. The federal public service is getting huge pushback. And the clerk has not yet formalized the request. She wants everybody back in the office two days a week. Now, if we're talking about innovating, creating new high patterns, that seems a reasonable request. At the university, we're all back five days a week, frankly, and we're back last year. So I think a resistance to coming back at all for most people, we will be a big loss.

Yeah, I have two kind of kicks of this can. The first has to do with, you know, equity. And I think a new type of divide that worries me. We're all concerned about equity. We're all concerned about inequality, rightly so. Let's acknowledge the growing inequality of work, that there are people, primarily blue-collar workers who throughout this pandemic, including during surges of the virus, worked 9 to 5 Monday to Friday every day. They drove to a place of work, a Tim Horton's food processing factory. A supermarket. A warehouse. And they worked and they worked hard, often in circumstances where, you know, again, there was increased virus circulating. They dealt with that anxiety. And what we've had, thanks to technology, is a white collar professional class, often the very first people to put their hands up in favor of, you know, pulling kids out of school or having much more restrictive COVID measure.

than other segments of society, those people stayed at home on their Mac Air books, often at their cottage, often taking nice long breaks as you could as you should to walk your dog or see your kids off to school in the morning. In short, they enjoyed a very different lifestyle. At the same time, very little Janice in the way of loss of income or opportunity. In fact, often their net hustle worth went up because they were spending less. So I'm concerned here, Janice, about an equity issue where can we really say to blue collar workers, hey, you're the Morlocks and we're the Eloy.

And you have to do nine to five or longer at a physical place of work and work hard and work with other people and maybe get exposed to new waves and new variants in the future. And hey, we white collar people, we white collar professionals. This doesn't apply to us. we're staying at home. We're maybe coming, you know, you're kind about the federal civil service. They're potentially arguing over one day a week, Janice. That's astonishing.

The hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space and infrastructure that we, Canadians are paying for to allow these bureaucracies to happen to deliver public services to us? Come on, Janice. This is where our values? where is our sense of solidarity of commonality to other people? This to me is again, this is my final part of this rant. There's just a, I worry about a kind of creeping narcissism in our society.

We're narcissistic often about what we eat or narcissistic, understandably sometimes about the friends we keep or not or the places we choose to go or not. And now work has fallen into the black hole of our collective narcissism. It's become something we think we have a choice about as opposed to maybe a mentality towards work as work as work. It's not always enjoyable. Sometimes it's inconvenient. But you're doing it for yourself to earn an income to provide for you, your family, etc. But you're also doing it for your other coworkers, to be part of a team, to be part of a culture, to advance a project together, to get outside of yourself, to get your bloody pajamas off and get into the world to,

define who you are and to help other people define who they are and together, ideally to make a more productive dynamic economy that's going to pay for all the lovely social programs that we all like and support. Okay, I'm ranting way too much back to you. You know, I'm not surprised that you feel strongly about this, but this was predictable. And here's why I agree with you entirely to refuse to go back even one day a week. that I just cannot comprehend it at all. Let's talk about young people who have been hired during the pandemic. They have never met in person, the person they're reporting to.

They've had online mentorship at the best, which is not the same as in-person mentoring. And at the very least two days a week in which you commit to meet with the younger people who are coming into the work stream who will benefit so much from the mentoring, I really find that astonishing. So I agree with you entirely. But let's talk about the bigger issue that you put on the table. Roger, it's about community. That's really what you're saying.

It's not only about the individual. It's what works for the community. So if we look at our downtowns, we're going to haul them out. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Can you think of repurposing some of those big, you know, tall, closed window towers and using them for additional housing, for other purposes? It would clearly cut traffic if people were in two days a week instead of five and you can alternate. There might be efficiencies. You just talk about the cost of the capital infrastructure.

receive Toronto, which is a hundred thousand person community, just said the summer for the first time, they are looking to exist within their current footprint. They're not going to grow their footprint because there's some flexibility now in the way we can do things. So what I don't want to see is throw out everything that we tried over the last two years and say everybody back in the office five days a week. But for public service, who, by the way, the public sector has grown faster. Over the last two years in the private sector, it's hired more young people for them to say one day a week is too hard.

Well, there's nobody that I think that's really not a defensible position. Yeah, 85% of all the new job creation in Canada between COVID and now has been inside government directly or what you call the near state, the hospital education sector. So that's how we've jinnied up the employment numbers. Only 60,000 jobs

since COVID have been created in the private sector. That's wearing a loan record. Yeah. And I would say, look, I'm not in a connoisse, but I would say, you know, if we continue this experiment on people not returning to work,

you are going to see less job creation, arguably lower productivity. I don't know. if you have that sense, Janice, but I don't feel like now when I'm dealing with larger corporations and people who are not in an office, there's a free agency that understandably creeps into everyone. You're kind of an assassin out there on your own. You're going feral, you're going rogue. And we are, we're social animals at the end of the day. And I remember as a younger person, some of my most important career moments were, you know, I'll say this, I had an entry-level job at the Department of Foreign Affairs.

It was not a pretty job. I did a lot of really boring things, but I learned to go down to the parking lot and smoke cigarettes, and I met all the ADMs and directors general. And I had these fantastic conversations with these really wise experienced civil servants who ultimately helped convince me that the future of my career was not going to be at the Department of Foreign Affairs now, Internal Affairs, Global Affairs, whatever it's called. But I'm just saying that there were lots of things about that, my early jobs, which weren't particularly fun, which were, you know, if I'd had a choice not to go and still be paid, I probably would have stayed at home on my pajamas,

but I wouldn't have understood the opportunity cost of that decision. There's something in all of our lives, Janice, where, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. We need to get out of ourselves. We need to be pushed by. factors and forces outside of our control often to know and realize what truly makes us happy. And I realize I'm being super philosophical here, but that's part of the role of work. That work is not a therapy session.

It's not some kind of dialogue with yourself about what you could or should have or, you know, ordering a Starbucks latte with, you know, extra X, Y, and Z. No, work sometimes can be really tough, really uncomfortable. And it's often, again, though, what moves us forward, what causes us, the stress response, sometimes is what causes us to evolve. To grow, to grow. Yeah, because you're right, I think, again, to make this point that we have not made enough of over the last years.

You know, we're all talking about the mental health challenges, especially among kids. And the evidence is out now, Roger. Kids lost a year or two in reading scores and math scores. It's astonishing how costly this whole period of school closures was for kids because you don't only learn from your teacher. You learn from your peers. That's the point. And when you're in the office on a team,

you're learning from your peers as well as from the person that you were to. And that's the part, I think, that we underestimate. And it's very, very important that we not lose it. So I, and the third point, and you've said, you know, workers are going rogue because they can, I have former students of mine living in Toronto and working in the Valley, full time from their house in Toronto. They never go to California, but they're working for a company in the valley. And, you know, I see them. They're isolated. That's not good. They're not getting any social interaction with people in the company whom they've never met personally. And here's the flip side of the story. Because they're working at home online, they are putting in 15-hour

days in front of a screen. There's no separation between home and work, which is not a great thing. So it's actually not about working less at home. Many people worked harder and long. at home during the city. It's about building community. It's about mentoring the next generation who's coming in. It's about learning from your peers. And I agree with you. It's about a commitment that you make to your team and to the organization that you're working with.

And so that's why for me, one day a week, we shouldn't even be talking about it. And, you know, it's really interesting to come back to the federal. public service. The clerk, because there's a union, the clerk is our most senior civil servant, and she will certainly express her views, I would expect next week. But ultimately, it's the political leaders who are going to have to order people back to work. And that's going to be an interesting moment, right? University said, our university said last year, Rudyard, when the when the virus was certainly much more prevalent, I hope, because we were less vaccinated and didn't have as much immunity.

Everybody back in the classroom. Everybody. Teachers, students, you're all back because in-person communication really managed. You wear masks, you get vaccinated. We put great ventilation in, but everybody comes back. Yeah. And they were right. My final comment on this is maybe, you know, this is kind of peak.

absurdity at this moment and that we saw, you know, this week a disappointing number on Canadian GDP growth, much lower than the forecast of the Bank of Canada and the other mainline bank economists. It's quite possible, Janice, the next quarter from now, you know, we will officially be in a recession. And you know what's really clarifying for people? Job losses in a sense that, you know what, you can't have the lifestyle of an entrepreneur who has, you know, all that flexibility. It's fantastic, but also no job security and no income security. And no pension.

And no pension and no dental plan often and no eyeglass. And it goes on and on and on, especially in the public service, as it should be, because those people sometimes make tradeoffs in terms of compensation versus security. But you can't have the lifestyle of an entrepreneur and then 100% job security. and income security. So people may get a very painful object lesson in just the cruelties of higher interest rates, of collapsing consumer demand of an economy that has to deal with the highest inflation in 40 years through a contraction of demand to make demand line up with supply by crushing demand across the economy. So maybe this all goes away. I hope so, Janice, because

you know, Canada has pretty low productivity already compared to a lot of our peer nations. We are not a particularly dynamic economy. And we can't afford to have a kind of crisis around the, I would go a little bit further. I would say ethos and ethic of work. Yes, some people are working hard at home, but others are alighting. They are sliding. They are falling off the proverbial table. Yeah. So one quick comment before we leave this one because it's such an interesting topic, the future of work. And it tells us a lot about what our society is going to look like. The productivity statistics are really interesting, Richard. In fact, we did not see a drop in productivity when people were working at home. If anything, a flight increased.

But so far, Jazz, this is very early on the experiment. You don't know what the consequences of these decisions are going to be three to five to ten years from now. You know, it's being interesting that you're right, and it would be interesting actually to take these numbers apart. Did we maintain our productivity or grow it a little because people were working 15 hours a day at home or 12 hours a day at home instead of the eight that they would have in the office? That's one possible explanation. But productivity is not the whole story. I think that's what you and I are both saying. It's not only productivity, it's creativity. And if you're isolated and you're not part of a community, by definition, you're going to be

less creative. You have to see people and bad ideas around. You just do. We're social. And at the very minimum, two days a week. I don't think one's enough. I think it's at least two. I would say at least three and maybe more depending on your role.

You know, Matt Ridley had his great latest book, you know, this meme that ideas. have sex. You know, there's an evolutionary aspect to ideas and you need them kind of out there meeting each other, hooking up, creating other ideas. It's a great. It's a lovely way to think about it. Okay. We're going to take a quick break when we come back on the other side.

A little new feature we're going to do with the show, occasional kind of masterclass, quick masterclass on an important kind of idea or issue that is shaping a lot of the public conversation, a word, a phrase, a choice. trend that maybe we don't fully appreciate or understand. We're going to get Janice to explain it to us. Hopefully make us all a little bit smarter back after this break. You've been listening to a sample of the Monk members only podcast. To access the rest of the episode, consider becoming a member. Membership is free and available at www. Wunkdebates.com. Once you've joined as a member, go to your membership profile to access the rest of this episode and all of our Monk members podcast.

Thanks for listening.