The NPR Politics Podcast - Jobs Are Open But People Of Color And Women Are Struggling To Return To Work

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

The labor market shifted dramatically during the pandemic, and as employers once again begin to hire, many black and brown Americans are finding it difficult to return to work. Plus, women are participating less in the workforce than in the 1980s. We look at the reasons why.This episode: White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe and Labor and Workplace correspondent Andrea Hsu.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi NPR, this is Sarah from upstate New York. I just finished planting over 600 cloves of garlic for next year's harvest. This podcast was recorded at... It is 1 50 p.m on October 27th, 2021. Things may have changed by the time that you hear this, but I'll be mulching these beds and hoping for a very bountiful harvest next year. All right, enjoy the show. Well, good luck with that. And, you know, hopefully that will, you know, protect you from any and all vampires. Hey, there is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And today we've got NPR's labor and workplace correspondent, Andrea Hsu, here with us. Hey, Andrea. Hey, Aisha. Andrea, you're joining us today because

we are talking about the state of the job market. Yes. Big topic. Yes. And, you know, obviously when COVID hit, it decimated the market, put millions of people out of work. But now there's this dynamic where there are more jobs available than Americans looking for them. And you've been reporting for months about the different reasons that people may have decided either, you know, not to return to their job or to try to find something new. Like, what have you been hearing from people about why they are like, not looking for work right now? There are just so many reasons, like if an answer could be all of the above, that's basically it. You've heard about people leaving their jobs because they're burned out, especially people who had to work through the pandemic in, you know, jobs that were just really tough, like nursing, for example, or, you know, working in restaurants and hotels where they had

had to deal with customers, you know, in a pandemic where they maybe didn't feel safe. You've heard of people who had caregiving duties that they just couldn't manage while also trying to work a full time job. You know, this was more of an issue, I would say, at the beginning of the pandemic than all last year and this past spring when a lot of schools were still closed. But it's still a problem for a lot of parents. And then I think you may have heard the term, Aisha, pandemic epiphany, like people who had a lot of time to think about what they were doing with their lives and came to the conclusion that I don't want to spend my life doing this job that wasn't that great or isn't paying me enough money or whatever. And then some people retired.

You know, we had about two million workers retire earlier than they had expected in the pandemic. And I talked to a couple of them. And it's totally different reasons. Like one woman had been working in a grocery store, a Publix in Florida, and her children said, Mom, you have to stop working. It's just it's not safe for you to be at the store. She was in her 70s already. Another woman I spoke to really liked her job, she was able to do it from home. But she realized she didn't really like her job when she was just by herself working at home. She loved being in the office with her colleagues. she at one point looked at her 401k and it had grown so much in the pandemic and she said you know what you know I'm going to talk to a financial advisor and she did and you know she was told yeah you can retire you know it's all of these

reasons and more that I'm sure I have you know know, not even mentioned here. Yeah. And it's such a, I mean, obviously, this pandemic is like, you know, Lord willing, a once in a lifetime type of situation. Yes. And it just seems like it's really complex, like how it's affected the job market. And I talked to William Spriggs, he's the chief economist for the AFL-CIO, which is a federation of many, many, many unions across the country. And I talked to him to try to get some insight on what's going on labor shortage doesn't really provide the whole picture, especially because when you look at how the pandemic has affected black and brown people. A lot of people focused on the elderly during this crisis because such a large number of people who are over 65 died from COVID. Well, that was true for whites. For blacks, for Hispanics, for Native Americans, that was not true. For Latinos, overwhelmingly, this was a disease

of working age people. And again, because of the nature of the work they did, a lot of it being the central work and the kind of person-to-person service kind of work that got people exposed well before we put in any safety measures. And I know you focus a lot on how the labor market is for, as you're talking about, for different kinds of workers, because the labor market is different if you're a Black worker, if you're Hispanic, if you're Native American. And I know that you've pointed out on Twitter at times that the idea that there's a labor shortage, that as long as employers are still able to discriminate, that means that there's not really a labor shortage. Like if you can still discriminate and not hire Black people, then you're probably not as desperate for workers as you say you are.

Am I explaining what I've read on Twitter from you correctly, or am I misrepresenting that? That's it. Exactly. When we have economic downturns, Black workers who have longer duration unemployment than other workers quickly become discouraged and drop out of the labor force. There was a study done over the last year and a half to look at the typical resume response. They send out two resumes that are essentially the same, except one has a black-sounding name and one does not. And the disparity and response rates to the black resumes continue to be there. That gap continued to be there. That gap continued to be there well into the early months of the summer

when firms were claiming, we can't find any workers. So if you're getting similar resumes, but you're still disseminating against a resume because it has a black name, then that means you can't possibly be serious that I'm looking for anybody. And I think we've all kind of heard about these types of studies, Andrea, but hearing as Spriggs, you know, talked about that, that type of discrimination was still going on, even as we're, you know, hearing, oh, can't find any workers, people don't want to work anymore. Like, that's striking to me. Yeah, that is really striking. And it just goes to show you that some of these things

are just so endemic, like, you know, a pandemic hasn't changed that. And the current labor market hasn't changed that. I mean, I think that what we've seen, Aisha, from the beginning of this pandemic, that black and brown workers have, you know, borne the brunt of many things about this pandemic in essential work, the kind of low wage essential jobs like bus drivers, like nursing homework, black and brown people are overrepresented in these fields. And these aren't jobs that can be done from home. I mean, most of the people working from home were white collar workers. And so and we're less at risk than of catching the coronavirus and people who had to be out there, you know, dealing with person to person contact, and then still having a hard time getting hired. Yeah, we actually saw the unemployment rate go up for Black workers in

August, whereas for everyone else, it went down. And remember, that's when the Delta variant was really surging. Now, the unemployment rate for Black workers did fall again in September, but it is still and has been for so long higher than it is for white workers. All right, so we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we're going to talk about how child care is shaping Americans' job decisions. And we're back. So, Andrea, we talked about the additional hurdles that people of color face, you know, trying to get jobs post-COVID. There are also another group of people that you've reported on that are also having a difficult time,

women. And, you know, Professor Spriggs said there's one big reason why women are having a hard time. Women's labor force participation rate is down the most. And what should be clear to everyone is the problem with the care economy. We totally devalue the care economy. And their industries were decimated by what happened. And that has frozen women out of the labor force. So you look at the United States and you look at other countries and you go, how did the United States go from in the 1980s having much higher women's labor force participation than other countries to now among the seven largest economies, the G7, we're number six. How did you get from number one to number six? Yeah, not only that, but how did we get to this point where we're back to the same level of women's labor force participation that we had in the 1980s? The pandemic really did set women in this country back a lot.

And something that, you know, Spriggs said is that if women's labor force participation stays at that rate, you cannot have all the jobs created and people getting jobs if those levels remain the same. Is that the case? You know, so many people have said childcare in this country is broken. And what they mean by that is it's something that so many people need. Women need this so that they can actually go to work. Yet it costs way too much for parents. Like families end up spending a third or more of their income on childcare. And then the people who are actually doing the work, the child care providers, the daycare teachers are just paid so little. I mean, it's one of the lowest paid jobs in this country. So in other wealthy countries, the government kicks in much more money for child care. And that's what the Biden administration has talked about doing,

whether they get that or not is, you know, it's yet to be seen. But Aisha, I mean, child care in this country is expensive. And I visited, you know, I mean, child care in this country is expensive. And I visited a couple of child care providers in West Virginia where the daycare workers make $11, $12 an hour. And imagine now the competition there is for those workers when fast food jobs and Amazon warehouses are paying $15 an hour. So the math is really tough. It's like, how do you actually make this work without funding coming from somewhere other than mainly parents' pockets? You know, another thing before we go, this month has been called Striketober, because there have been all of these huge companies, workers at these huge companies, John Deere and Kellogg, to name a few, who have refused to work because of disagreements with management.

And there are other unions that have been threatening to strike. Like, what do you feel like is going on here? Workers are getting vocal about what they want, and they're willing to strike for it. You mentioned John Deere. They've had 10,000 workers on strike for almost two weeks. Tragically, one worker was killed this morning. 6 a.m., it wasn't even light out yet. He was struck by a car in the darkness.

These workers are out there because they say, look, we went to work all through the pandemic. The company did great. The company's bringing in record profits. And now the company's proposing to cut back on what they're really objecting to at John Deere is cutting back on benefits for future employees. And they've suggested wages that they say can't keep up with inflation.

The interesting thing about the strike now, not just at John Deere, but, you know, at Kellogg, a couple other places, too, is that some of what the workers are objecting to does not actually affect their wages or benefits, but could affect the wages and benefits of future workers, future hires. And these are places where you have multiple generations of the same family working at the plants. And so they are looking at this and saying, I don't want my daughter or my son to end up with this worse contract. Is there a fundamental shift going on in the way people relate to work right now or what drives workers? Or is this, you know, likely more of a temporary thing just because people have gone through the trauma of a pandemic? You know, I do think that we will see more people returning to work, people who have sat on the sidelines for some months now. Economists feel like, you know, it's going to happen in the coming months into next year as people's savings maybe run out, as, you know, the fears of the pandemic further recede already, things are much better now than they were back in August. So, you know, I don't think things will ever be the same. Of course, there's like a small percentage of workers who will always work

remotely from now on. And then some things will go back to normal, like we, you know, people will resume their lives, more people will have to be back on a sort of a eight hour workday schedule. So I think it's, you know, again, it's hard to know exactly what's going to happen. But it seems like there will be some things that will be long lasting. Well, we're gonna have to leave it there for now. NPR's labor and workplace correspondent Andrea Hsu. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much, Aisha. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.