Former New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse visited CASBS to share insights from his 30 years of reporting with fellows and members of CASBS’s Creating a New Moral Political Economy project. While at the Center, Greenhouse also sat down with host John Markoff and guest host Paul Saffo to discuss his new book, Beaten Down, Worked up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor (2019).
Steven Greenhouse on Twitter
Steven’s recent book “Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor”
The CASBS project on Creating a New Moral Political Economy
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
@casbsstanford on twitter
John Markoff: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. I'm John Markoff. Our guest today is Stephen Greenhouse. He is a former New York Times labor reporter and the author of a new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor. He was invited to speak at CASBS and reflect on his 30 years of reporting on the US labor movement and share his insights relative to the center's new moral political economy project. Joining us for this discussion is Paul Saffo, a friend of CASBS who teaches forecasting here at Stanford School of Engineering. Since we're in Silicon Valley, I want to make sure we address the particular intersection of the future of labor and technology. And why don't we start there? Did you burrow into the technology question in your book?
Steven Greenhouse: Somewhat, somewhat. You know, there's all this talk nowadays, and Andrew Yang, that we're going to lose millions, tens of millions of jobs. You know, McKinsey Global Institute says, you know, 30, 40 million jobs. Some economists at Oxford say something similar. I just saw a report out this morning by Richard Freeman at Harvard saying, you know, there have been all these predictions of huge losses of jobs starting 10 years ago, yet the unemployment rate is, you know, lowest point in 50 years, 3.5%. So I discussed this, and I, on one hand, I punt and say people far wiser than I debate whether we're going to see a huge decrease in jobs because of technology. But then I say that too much of the discussion leaves out workers, is not human-centered enough, that it's technologists and billionaire Silicon Valley investors holding these conferences where there's nary rarely a worker representative. I say that's broken, that the people who are going to be most hurt if 1 million or 10 million jobs are lost are workers, and they don't have a seat at the table.
John Markoff: Let me get your reaction to one perspective and then I'll get Paul to chime in. I was sort of part of the problem in the sense that my reporting sort of circa 2010 to '12 at the Times about automation sort of was part of that new wave of anxiety. You know, I began to see white-collar workers were being affected, and I really was in that camp of millions of jobs going away until about 2014, 2015 when I ran into Danny Kahneman. I was making the argument to him that Automation was going to come to China and lead to social disruption because manufacturing workers were thrown out of work. And he cut me off and he said, "You don't get it." He said, "In China, they'll be lucky if the robots come just in time." And at first I didn't get it, but then I began to look at demographic changes around the world. And as I got into what's going on with demography in the advanced world, I completely reframed what I thought. And I even went so far as the question I started asking roboticists was not, "When is there going to be a self-driving car?" I began to ask, "When is there going to be a robot that's sophisticated enough that it can care for an aging human?" and give them a shower, and nobody could give me an answer. So we obviously have this real contradiction you, you've brought out, you know, 3.5% unemployment. We've had the microprocessor around for 50 years. You think that it would have shown up in those numbers in a different way than it has. Maybe, Paul, do you have a take?
Paul Saffo: A question. In 1930, Keynes famously wrote his essay, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, and he eloquently summarized the situation as, "Of course automation destroys jobs, but on balance, it creates more jobs than it destroys." Is this moment different?
Steven Greenhouse: I'm not sure. Again, you know, people far wiser than I say, you know, say we need a universal basic income because so many people are going to lose their jobs. But I agree that, you know, there's, you know, There'll be a huge need for, as many of us age, there'll be a greater need for home care attendants. There'll be greater need for, you know, teachers' aides in schools because so many kids are falling behind. One could think of many, many jobs that we as a society could still create even if many, you know, boring cashier jobs are replaced by robots.
Paul Saffo: So you're sort of ducking the question. And having read your book, out here in California, we know your type. It's the, "I'm not real good at pool, but I like to play for money." I'm not trying to dodge it.
Steven Greenhouse: I'm saying there is a debate by hugely knowledgeable people who've run the economic, you know, econometric equations, and they come out differently. And I'm just, you know, I'm just a halfway smart journalist saying it's not clear what's going to happen. But what pisses me off, pardon my French, is that there's all this discussion that we might lose a million jobs, we might lose 10 million jobs, let's have UBI to cushion it. But there isn't, you know, workers are rarely in the discussion. When there's all this talk about driverless cars, You know, again, workers are really in the discussion. And the big point of my book is that the economy is broken and that, you know, worker voice in the United States, whether in politics or policymaking in the workplace, has fallen to its lowest point probably since World War II, and that we need to figure out ways to lift workers and give them more of a voice at the workplace and the politics in our economy.
Paul Saffo: So in other words, technology really isn't the issue. Technology's the excuse to avoid talking about— not really.
Steven Greenhouse: Technology is an important issue. I'm not saying it's not an important issue. Sometimes I give talks saying, people ask, why have unions declined? And I say, well, the number of manufacturing jobs have declined from a peak of 19.5 million in 1979 to 12.5 million now, a loss of 7 million jobs, about 40%. And I'll say a lot of that is globalization, jobs moving to Mexico and China. And smart people like yourself will interrupt and say, but what about technology? And yes, a lot of it's technology and automation too. And when we're looking at all the many myriad factors that are affecting the workplace, technology is a huge factor. I totally agree.
John Markoff: You know, there is this argument that globalization was made possible by the emergence of these communication networks.
Steven Greenhouse: Absolutely.
John Markoff: So it was riding on a wave of technology. You know, what I saw in your book was lots of sort of engagement with working people. And did you get a sense of what they think about technology?
Steven Greenhouse: I think there's a lot of fear of technology and a lot of failure to understand. And a lot of workers I interview are not, they don't have master's degrees or doctorates, but they read, they hear that, you know, the McDonald's workers worry they're gonna be replaced by touchscreens. And some porters in hotels worry they're gonna be replaced by robots who are going to deliver things for room service. And that's already happening, and people see that. And they see the articles about radiologist jobs moving to India, work moving to India, and call center jobs moving. So there's a fear, but there's a lot of feeling of worry, precariousness among a lot of workers, not just low-wage workers, but pretty high up the food chain.
Paul Saffo: Of course, for hotel workers, the encouraging news— there, there was a hotel, the Henda Hotel in Japan, that had dinosaur robotic receptionists up at the front of the hotel, and it was a key feature. And they've fired— they've fired the dinosaur robots and returned to humans.
John Markoff: Well, the other thing is, I mean, I think a lot of these things are dancing dogs in the sense that the, the bellhop robots that have been designed so far— the, the funniest story that I came up with is they collect all this video footage of people answering the doors when the robots come, and it shocks the people who design them. I mean, you know, the stuff that they find and the behavior of the people is—
Steven Greenhouse: and they don't have to tip the robots.
John Markoff: And they don't have— well, they— yeah, they don't. That's true.
Paul Saffo: And I was just on the Berkeley campus last week where they have these little food delivery robots all over the streets. I was going down one street, there were 3 of these robots delivering pizza or whatever to students, but there was a fourth abandoned on its side and broken. It had been clearly kicked. So we're already getting robotic detritus out of it.
Steven Greenhouse: So I wrote a story about trying to introduce these food delivery robots in San Francisco, and the Teamsters Union, you know, which does a lot of delivery work, was worried that it might end up replacing a lot of workers pulling down standards, maybe throwing unionized people out of work. And they got the city council to pass legislation to restrict it to a pilot basis. So, you know, sophisticated folks in unions are concerned about this. And, you know, there have been studies showing that we lost, what, 2 million jobs to China after permanent normalized trade relations was enacted under Bill Clinton. And, you know, some smart people in organized labor are trying to think through what's going to happen. And people often ask me, what's labor going to do about technology? I say many of them aren't expert enough. A lot of unions don't have experts on what should be done about technology. The best example I know is the Culinary Union, this huge union in Las Vegas that represents 60,000 hotel housekeepers, bellhops, dishwashers. And a lot of, you know, automation is definitely moving into the hotel casinos in Las Vegas. You know, there are some robots that deliver stuff. And so they reached a contract that says the union is to be given 6 months advance notice before new job-displacing technology is introduced. We'll sit down and try to figure out ways to have workers complement the technology rather than be displaced by the technology. That's easy to say, but much, much, much, much harder to do. But it shows that at least one or two smart unions are really trying to think this through.
Paul Saffo: But hasn't that always been the history of the staged retreat of unions? I think of the early 1960s here on the West Coast as Matson introduced the first intermodal containers and the stevedores union negotiated a deal, but all it ended up doing was just slowing the inevitable slightly.
Steven Greenhouse: So, you know, on a certain level, Paul, you know, we should all welcome new technologies and job-displacing, you know, automation, AI, robots, because it builds a more productive economy. We're all for that. But the question is, the people who lose their jobs to it, you know, if we could all figure out ways to share the increased prosperity in a fair way— and some people say UBI is the way, I say work sharing— that we should go you know, from 5-day work weeks to 3-day work weeks, something along the lines of what Mr. Keynes used to say, we could all live working fewer hours.
John Markoff: What about retraining and education?
Steven Greenhouse: I'm all for retraining and education, but A, you know, will the new full-time jobs be there? That's unclear. And in the meantime, you know, so during the terrible 2007-2009 recession, a lot of companies laid off 30-40% of their workers, but some others in states that have laws allowing work sharing would change their workers, convert their workers to 4 days of the week, 3 days a week. So instead of laying off 40%, they had their workers working 3 days and getting partial unemployment insurance. I think work sharing should be part of the discussion about what to do if automation and robots take up, do a lot of the work that workers now do, and that's hardly part of the discussion now.
Paul Saffo: I think you put your finger on a really key issue. What gives me indigestion is I'm less worried about the jobs that are lost and much more worried about the jobs that are never created to begin with. That to me feels like what's going to change. Were you encountering that as you were traveling around the country?
Steven Greenhouse: Yeah, I got into a little discussion with Mr. Yang on Twitter where, you know, he and some others are saying You know, I said UBI of $1,000 a month, $12,000 a year is not nearly enough to live on. And people who lose their jobs to automation and robots, you know, they, you know, I think it'd be very sad if they're, you know, relegated, consigned to living on $12,000 a month and watching TV or playing video games. That's not a life. And Yang and others say, but a lot of these people can become entrepreneurs. And I say, you know, not everyone is designed to become entrepreneur. I think that's unrealistic. So I think we need to think through more, you know, what's going to happen to these people. Yes, many can be retrained, can be reeducated, and then what— and I agree with you totally, Paul— we need to figure out what new jobs we as a society should have, and then how do we pay for these jobs, because we're in an age when a lot of people hate big government. So, you know, they'll be opposed to the increased taxes on those who make lots of money from new technologies, They'll be opposed to those taxes that might create more jobs for home care aides for the poor or more jobs to provide teacher aides for poor schools.
Paul Saffo: Could we talk about Yang? Set him against the last 100 years, seeing where he fits as a visionary. Is he the next Thorstein Veblen or the Howard Scott?
Steven Greenhouse: I'd probably say you're as much of a visionary as Andrew Yang, so seriously, I mean, you know— We're in trouble. Yeah. Andrew Yang, you know, he hasn't invented the UBI idea. You know, a lot of other people have. Andrew Stern, you know, one of the most prominent labor leaders in the country who headed, you know, the Service Employees International Union, union with 2 million members, one of the 2 or 3 largest unions in the nation, has also been a huge champion.
Paul Saffo: And Frances Townsend in the 1930s. Yeah.
Steven Greenhouse: Well, Townsend was really just for the elderly. Yueh Long was more for, you might call it UBI, soak the rich tax. And, you know, many people here in Silicon Valley have embraced the idea of UBI, and I guess Yang thought that's a good platform to run on for his big ego to run for the presidency. And it is a subject definitely worth discussing. And, you know, Martin Luther King Jr., Milton Friedman, not exactly people who agree with each other, they both supported some type of basic income. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard Nixon. So, I think they wanted it more tilted towards the poor somehow. And Yang's would give billionaires and poor people the same $12,000 a year. And I am somewhat concerned that billionaires don't need it and the people who were consigned to living on $12,000 a year Good luck with that.
John Markoff: Paul brought up this question of which jobs are being created. It's much easier to predict which jobs are going away than which jobs are going to emerge. If you read BLS data, it's very pessimistic. It's all healthcare workers going forward.
Steven Greenhouse: It's optimistic that people are going to live to be older.
John Markoff: I guess that's true. I mean, if you're looking at it from a labor movement point of view, is that actually— I mean, is that a part of the workforce that's more easy to organize or traditionally?
Steven Greenhouse: Well, I mean, there's been a lot of unionization of home care workers. But, you know, I live in New York City, in Manhattan. And, you know, 20 years ago, I don't think there was— if there were any nail salons in Manhattan, I didn't know about them. Now, there are 2 in every block. And who foresaw that there's going to be this huge explosion? And I know they're big out here in California as well. So you're right, it's hard to predict. I do think the healthcare industry is one of the more unionized industries, and the Service Employees Union, especially nurses unions, are doing a pretty good job unionizing them. You know, one of the biggest unionization victories in the past, you know, 70, 80 years was when they unionized 73,000 home care workers in Los Angeles County, which was the biggest unionization victory since Ford Motor Company was unionized in 1941.
John Markoff: I mean, it's— I've become sort of, or I was when I was at the Times, a kind of devotee of a labor economist at MIT whose name was David Otter. And he was the guy who sort of pointed out that, you know, the workforce was growing at the bottom and top, and it was not growing in the middle. It was shrinking in the middle. And then there was sort of more research that showed maybe it was not even growing so much at the top. It was mostly growing at the bottom. And that was very worrisome. But when you sort of look into the exact examples, in this debate, when it first started up, there were a couple of books that came out, McAfee and Brynjolfsson's book, for example, that pointed at Instagram versus Kodak as being an example of job destruction. And, you know, there were 13 Instagram employees and they displaced 140,000 Kodak workers. That was the simple, simple way of looking, except that it was, it was totally wrong, absolutely wrong. And, you know, the, the counter argument, which, you know, I think had a lot of weight to it, was, well, that Kodak shot itself in the head and killed itself. It wasn't killed by technology. And the other component of that was that those Instagram were, you know, Instagram as a company couldn't come into existence until the modern internet had been brought into existence. And that created somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million pretty good jobs, basically, overall. So much more complex than it is.
Steven Greenhouse: But a lot of Kodak jobs were destroyed by the new technology. Yeah. And Polaroid too. I mean, but there are all these new jobs that we're not understanding that help create that technology and sustain that technology.
John Markoff: Snapshots.
Steven Greenhouse: And there aren't all these film developing places that used to exist.
John Markoff: They don't exist. And well, the snapshots are really difficult, like automated teller machines are a wonderful example because in fact, the banks, basically used that technology to establish branch banking and put a branch in every corner and turn bank employees from tellers into salespeople. And so that the number of bank employees stayed relatively flat. Although I hear that it may actually now be changing. Do you know what's going on in the banking industry now?
Paul Saffo: The common thread in the banking business, and I think elsewhere, the question for you is, it's the sense of turbulence. It's not just that some jobs are disappearing and some jobs appearing, but Over the last 40 years, it seems like it's been a steady increase in turbulence and uncertainty in the labor environment. How central is that issue to all this, that sense of uncertainty? Is that—
Steven Greenhouse: It's huge. I mean, employers are generally showing less loyalty, responsibility, one might say caring to their workers. And, you know, John, you asked me about my discussion of technology. I have a chapter about gig work. People call it the sharing economy. I borrow Bob Reich's, Robert Reich's description, the sharing the scraps economy. And there's this huge issue, there's this growing workforce, and I know there's a huge debate about how many people are involved in the gig workforce who use apps to get work, whether Uber driver, Lyft drivers, or DoorDash, or mechanical truck workers, or TaskRabbit workers. And here in California, there's been a fierce debate about whether they should be treated as employees or as independent contractors. And Uber, Lyft say that they're really working for themselves, they're entrepreneurs, they're independent contractors, that we are not their employers. And some labor groups say, "What do you mean? They work for you 60, some of them work for you 60 hours a week. Your brand relies on these folks. They are not really entrepreneurs. They don't have their own business. They can't take the names and numbers of their customers to drive them elsewhere like taxi drivers can." There are a lot at stake in whether you define them as independent contractors or employees. If they're employees, then the employer has to contribute Social Security and give them workers' comp and unemployment coverage and pay them overtime and minimum wage. And the companies say, you know, we don't want that. And that if they're treated as employees, we're not going to give them the thing that they most prize, flexibility to work the hours they want. And, you know, the California State Legislature, Governor Newsom just enacted a law that declares that they're employees. And people— there's a humongous debate now among, you know, lawyers, labor experts, economists in California about how, you know, how that's going to play out.
Paul Saffo: Well, California is an interesting example here. It's the world's fifth largest economy. We just had that law signed, and the other law that was just signed by California's governor was prohibiting binding arbitration in employment contracts.
Steven Greenhouse: Is—
Paul Saffo: are these indicators of a larger shift?
Steven Greenhouse: I mean, as California goes, so goes So I have a chapter in my book about how Los Angeles, which was, you know, the most anti-union city in the country outside the South, went from being very anti-labor to being, you know, very pro-labor. And with LA's shift really came a shift in the state legislature, I think. I think the anti-immigrant push by Pete Wilson turned a lot of the state's Hispanics against the Republican Party. The huge inflow of Hispanics from south of the border, many of whom have now become citizens, also helped the Democrats and push the nation to the left, push California to the left. I think a lot of folks in Silicon Valley are more open-minded, more supportive of gay rights, abortion rights, and I think that has, you know, they've gotten turned off to the Republicans. So for many reasons, I think California has moved to the left than before and become more democratic. I wrote an op-ed piece for the LA Times that California kind of leads the pro-worker resistance as Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are very anti-worker. And as you know, Paul, California has passed many pro-worker laws and is kind of leading the nation now in declaring gig drivers, you know, app-based drivers employees and And I was up at Cornell, Cornell's School of Industrial Labor Relations, and the dean there has done the best studies in the nation on how forced arbitration, mandatory arbitration greatly favors companies over employees. And the Supreme Court issued this very important decision in June called Epic Systems that basically said companies have every right to prohibit their workers from bringing class actions and can force them into individualized arbitrations. And the arbitrations, you know, it's often hard for a worker to get a good lawyer. It's much easier to get a good lawyer when you're bringing a class action. And, you know, Dean Allecoven's studies found that, you know, companies have a much greater say in picking the arbitrator than the wee little employee. And that— and as a result, no surprise, the arbitrator often pleases— tries to please the folks who are going to maybe pick them for the next arbitration. So I, you know, and I've argued in my book and in some of my speeches that, you know, saying that workers can't bring lawsuits, saying they can't bring class actions, really makes it much, much harder for workers to vindicate their rights, whether against sexual harassment at work or against racial discrimination at work or against not being paid overtime.
John Markoff: International aspects to this question, you know, the Companies are multinational, they can cross borders, they can pit labor forces against each other. How much, I guess the first part of this question I wanted to ask is how much is what's going on in America a harbinger for the rest of the world's labor forces?
Steven Greenhouse: Great question. So in my book I explain the rise of labor unions and how they helped bring us the 40-hour work week and safer factories and mines. And I discuss starting around 1980, the decline of labor unions and worker power. And all these lefties say it's all Ronald Reagan. I say no, no, you know, Ronald Reagan, you know, was libertarian. He broke the illegal strike by the air traffic controllers, and that emboldened many corporate executives to get more aggressive against unions. But I think the big thing— two big things happened in 1980, '81, '82— was the horrendous recession, and a lot of companies found themselves with huge overcapacity. And second Really, in the 1980s was when the United States started feeling huge pressures from globalization, from cars from Germany and Japan, steel from Romania and Brazil and Russia, many other countries. And that really— I talked a few minutes ago about the huge decline in manufacturing jobs. And I think that greatly weakened unions. And yes, some of that was from technology. Other factors in the 1980s, and started under Jimmy Carter in the '70s, was deregulation, a lot of deregulation. Was aimed at heavily unionized, heavily insulated industries like trucking and airlines, and that also zapped unions very much. But a lot of— I think globalization, you know, has made it much harder to, you know, unionize, you know, manufacturing industries in the US. I think a lot of workers realize, hey, if we vote to unionize, that might just speed the exodus of our, of our operations and jobs overseas.
Paul Saffo: So that's a fascinating observation. Looking at history, revolutions are not started by people in insecure positions. Revolutions are started by people who are secure but empathetic to the insecure. And unions in this country did not come about by accident. Often it happened like at the start of World War II when there was a shortage of workers, there was power for unions to happen. It strikes me, especially after reading your book, this is a moment where there are a whole bunch of ideas floating around out there loosely from the utopian, like universal basic income, to the practical, like making sure gig workers have rights. How does that coalesce into a movement? Is it possible that we could— this is going to be another 1941 or another early 1930s where a new movement moves out of this?
Steven Greenhouse: That's a great question. And, you know, I spent a lot of time talking to experts on labor relations and labor leaders and economists, and, you know, they are all asking, you know, can— you know, during, during the 1930s, '40s, '50s, there was a hugely strong labor movement, a huge surge And we went from maybe 10% of the workforce was unionized in say 1935 during the Great Depression to 35%, 34% in the late 1940s, early 1950s. There's a huge surge. And partly, part of that was from the Great Depression, people, you know, responding, reacting to the horrible conditions they faced. Partly that was during World War II where business and labor worked hand in hand and business didn't oppose unionization as much. And so now, you know, there's been this huge decline in unionization from 35% at its peak in 1954 to 10.5% overall in the private sector, just 6.4%, 1 in 16. And a lot of people are asking the question, you just ask, how do we build a new workers movement? And, you know, Fight for $15 was a pretty successful attempt at building some type of workers movement, and it really rallied hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of low-wage workers. And when it first began less than 7 years ago, it was just, you know, on the very first day of the strike, November 29th, 2012, 200 workers walked out at maybe 15, 20 restaurants in New York. I was the first reporter to cover that, and I thought, this ain't going anywhere, this is nice. And now here we are, less than 7 years later, California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, 7 states have enacted $15 laws. So that, you know, there are various types of movements. You know, there's some great movements right now, the MeToo movement, the anti-gun movement, the climate movement, where you see hundreds of thousands of millions of people taking to the streets. And labor kind of is looking for, how do we do that? And the Fight for $15 sort of did that. And there are questions of, you know, is there another magical issue that would get workers to the streets? And we've seen that with teacher strikes, but not much else.
Paul Saffo: I know I can't get you to make a forecast, but what's your intuition? If we were looking back on this conversation 10 years from now, are we going to see a coalescence around a new movement in the next 10 years?
Steven Greenhouse: You know, I wrote this first book talking about— called The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, saying there's this horrible disconnect that, you know, during the first decade of the century, corporations are making record profits. Wall Street was kept reaching new records, employee productivity kept climbing to new heights. Yet, you know, after-inflation wages were really stagnant and corporations were trying to take away things on pensions and healthcare and vacation days, and that something was really broken. And that was an indication of unions and worker power getting weaker. In this book, I really, you know, the focus is kind of, you know, here's a quick history of the rise of labor and the decline of labor and what that all means. But I also say there's this other, you know, great disconnect that, you know, a new survey by Gallup shows that 64% of Americans approve of unions. The strongest approval is with younger Americans, 18 to 34, at 67%. A new MIT study says that 50% of non-union, non-managerial workers say they would want to join a union tomorrow if they could. Yet only 1 in 16, you know, 6.4% of private sector workers are in unions. I think a lot of people are frustrated about income inequality, about not being able to repay their college debts, about seeing all this BMW, Mercedes-Benz on TV and not being able to— I think a lot of people are frustrated and they want to do something, but it's very hard to unionize because employers have gotten so sophisticated in beating back unions. You ask the key question is, Can there be some type of labor movement, maybe not through direct unionization of one's employer, but some broader movement like the Five for Fifteen, but even broader to push, to lift workers?
John Markoff: Let me harp on technology just a little bit more in that context of the role that technology might play as technology in preventing mobilization or the building of movements. Doesn't technology, as it's being deployed, atomize workforces? And by keeping people out of contact from each other, I mean, you know, it's classic in a call center or in gig work, you're only in touch with the employer.
Steven Greenhouse: Absolutely. And, you know, some labor experts say that's a problem. I mean, it cuts both ways that when you have, you know, when you had 1,000 people working in an auto plant in Flint, Michigan, and all the Slovenian-Slovakians went to the nearby bar afterwards and cursed out their boss and said, "This stinks and we got to do something." Yes, it's probably easier to unionize them than 1,000 workers at home working on their computer, and it's not clear whether they even have a common employer. But I think some smart people also say that with much better communications networks, it's easier to inform folks. People ask me, Well, Donald Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, you know, by winning all these blue-collar whites, many of them union members. How do we reverse that? I say, well, if unions were smarter, they'd use computers to reach out to all these people to send them like a weekly political newsletter or whatever, really smart videos like folks on the right use to say, you know, this is how Donald Trump is hurting workers. He's rolling back overtime protections. He's scrapping the rule that requires Wall Street firms to act in workers' and retirees' best interests on their 401(k)s. I mean, you know, the internet can be used in many ways to help workers and bring them together. I mean, look at the teacher strikes. You know, I write about these two teachers in West Virginia, Paul O'Neill and Emily Comer. They were upset about that the governor, West Virginia's richest man, Jim Justice, gave a speech saying, "I'm gonna give you raises of 1% a year for the next 5 years, even though you already rank 46th among all states." and teacher pay. And these websites in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, they took off astoundingly. They go from zero to 260 miles an hour in a night or two. They go from like, you know, in like less than 48 hours, some of them went from zero to like 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 members. So the internet can also be used as a powerful way to mobilize.
John Markoff: There were these examples of platforms. I mean, A friend of Margaret's here at Stanford in the CS department was building sort of an open-source platform to allow, you know, sort of counter-gig, to sort of shift the balance and allow, you know, the workforce to basically get information and have a counterweight to employers.
Steven Greenhouse: And they did that for Mechanical Turk, and I write about that in the book, that, you know, 500 Mechanical Turk workers McConnell-Kirk's owned by Amazon. It's kind of modern-day piecework, like our grandparents used to do piecework at home on the Lower East Side in New York 100, 120 years ago. And folks at Stanford had this very smart idea, let's form a kind of internet virtual union hall where people can bat around ideas about how to improve work, how to pressure Amazon to improve of, you know, wages and conditions at Mechanical Turk. And then evidently some folks from Amazon infiltrated the site, and then it became much trickier about what to do. But I think the idea was very good. In the first few years, it, it was doing some terrific stuff.
Paul Saffo: Don't we— I mean, it's clear that technology could be used to organize and people could do things better, but in this moment of all this change, it feels like to me what's missing is a new theory of labor. Who's the next theoretician? I mean, these things have to coalesce around something.
Steven Greenhouse: So I see very bright young people in different cities forming pro-worker groups, and I am sad to say a lot of them don't want to go work for unions, or unions don't want to hire them because they're too iconoclastic, they're too rebellious. And I think union leaders might be a little gun-shy about hiring people who are, like many corporate executives, you know, are a little scared of hiring people who might be smarter than they are or might be willing to talk back to them and have, you know, such great ideas that might make them look bad. And maybe they challenge them someday. But, you know, I write about, you know, these two Brown University graduates who founded this great group that's helped usually to raise standards for farmworkers in Florida. This other great group in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. Founded by two people from the Hotel Workers Union, but they brought in an Amherst University graduate, and it really became this wonderful font of new ideas to help workers. A $15.37 minimum wage for hotel workers. They came up with the idea of community benefits agreement, that if you, a developer, want to build a huge development, we're not going to give you the variances and the zoning unless you agree to not fight unions and hire people from some of the nearby low-wage neighborhoods. So there are a lot of smart people with great ideas, but as for your central question, Paul, how do we build a nationwide union movement? It's very hard, and it's not as if corporate America and the Koch brothers are sitting there and just saying— or Koch brothers are sitting there and just letting left, this progressive pro-worker movement develop. They're trying very hard in every state to weaken unions.
Paul Saffo: It's been famously observed by others that there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. And we have this vehicle for spreading ideas faster than ever. Is that idea out there somewhere?
Steven Greenhouse: No, that's—
Paul Saffo: Have you met the person?
Steven Greenhouse: So, you know, John and I worked together at the New York Times, we're colleagues, and, you know, and some— Reporters at the New York Times did this amazing story about Harvey Weinstein and how he and many other people have mistreated female workers, and the MeToo movement developed. And I tell people the MeToo movement is a workers' movement. It's a women's movement, and it's like, it's a big idea that sexual harassment, sexual abuse must stop. And for labor folks, they say, we need a movement to raise wages to at least $15, that got some wind behind it. And I think a lot of people say we need a movement to end precariousness, but like, that's much harder. And, you know, John was asking— so I can imagine if there's some new technology that all of a sudden wipes out 2 million jobs in 2 months, then there could somehow be this huge movement. I don't know who will head it. I don't know what form it will take. But you can imagine— I mean, one can imagine something like that.
John Markoff: So then What are some of the things that organized labor has given society, you know, things that we may not have thought of as being products of the labor movement?
Steven Greenhouse: So, you know, I started saying, you know, a lot of young— you know, I say one of the reasons I wrote the book is many Americans, especially young Americans, know very little about labor unions and what they've accomplished. I say a lot of young people think that God handed down the 40-hour workweek. And I write about this strike in 1909 by 20,000 female garment workers workers in New York, they were fighting to reduce their work week from 56 hours to 52 hours. And it took lots and lots of struggle to get to the 40-hour work week. And, and again, a lot of people forget that American factories used to be very dangerous. You know, the Rutherfords, who played a key role in building United Auto Workers and winning these landmark contracts that went far to build the middle class, they used to work in these factories in the 1920s where people lose hands and arms all the time. And And it's unions that, you know, that went very far to make workplaces safer. And, you know, France, Germany, Britain, they all have socialized or some type of universal health coverage. The US doesn't have that. And it was, you know, unions that played a very big role helping make sure that many employers provided health coverage. And, you know, unions also played a big role bringing pensions to workers and vacations and paid sick days. On the other hand, I argue in the book that, you know, there's this horrible phenomenon I call America's anti-worker exceptionalism, that, you know, we're the only industrial nation that doesn't have laws guaranteeing paid parental leave, paid maternity leave to every worker. We're the only industrial nation that doesn't have a law guaranteeing paid vacation to every worker. I used to be the NIT's European economics correspondent, and all my friends in France were taking 6 weeks vacation because everyone in France is guaranteed a 6-week vacation. In the 28 nations of the European Union, everyone's guaranteed at least 4 weeks. And, you know, we in South Korea are the only industrial nations that don't guarantee every worker paid sick days. And I've written stories about workers who get fired because they're off for a day or two. And yes, you know, well-paid workers, Silicon Valley workers, you know, they have ample vacation, they have ample sick days, but there's something broken in the U.S. that a lot of workers in the world's wealthiest economy don't have these very basic protections.
John Markoff: You did a lot of reporting while you were writing the book, and now you've been on the road talking about the book and talking in some, I assume, to a lot of union audiences. What are you picking up? I mean, what, you know, engaging with people about these issues?
Steven Greenhouse: A lot of people raise the issue of poor rates, you know, the increased precariousness of of the jobs, and especially as the gig economy, Uber and Lyft and DoorDash and how it's also insecure. Now Amazon has this thing called Flex where drivers use their app to sign on to make deliveries for a day. And the New York Times had this great piece a few weeks ago about they're rushing so much to make money that they're driving dangerously and running over people. So like precariousness, uncertainty, volatility is a huge issue. Income inequality is also, a huge issue. I think, you know, and Paul is asking for, you know, about issues that people might really rally around. I mean, I think workers concerned, average Americans concerned about how their incomes are hardly going up even though the 1% are doing great. I mean, in the presidential debates, you know, earlier this week, you could see that those concerns really resonate. And, you know, so you have Elizabeth Warren and Bernie talking about wealth taxes and And even Buttigieg said he'd support some type of wealth tax. And then, you know, I've covered many, many campaigns over the past 25 years, and never before have I seen so many candidates talking about the need to rebuild unions to help build a fairer nation. So something is definitely in the air. And then, you know, and Paul raises the key question is, can a new form of movement be built to propel workers and to help create a fairer nation.
John Markoff: We've been hearing some interesting ideas from presidential candidates to address these issues, like wealth taxes or healthcare reform. I think Elizabeth Warren and maybe others have called for worker representation on corporate boards. In terms of bringing a worker voice to the table or more front and center, what steps need to be taken?
Steven Greenhouse: So in my book I say, you know, there are all these, you know, the Democratic candidates, union leaders are saying we need to pass laws to making it easier to unionize. And I say those might be good ideas, but none of that's going to happen until we fix our very broken campaign finance system. And I know a lot of, you know, the Washington Journal editorial board, a lot of business folks deride big labor, but I explained in the book that in the 2015-2016 political cycle, election cycle, corporations donated $3.4 billion, more than 16 times as much as Labor, which gave $214 million. In lobbying each year in Washington, business spends just under $3 billion, more than 60 times as much as unions spend, $48 million. So the system is broken. I think that has to really be changed. And the second thing I say, I've spent a lot of time in Germany as an economic reporter in Europe, and I think their co-determination system where every workplace has a works council where workers have 50% of the members and they discuss, you know, pace of work and bonuses and vacations and scheduling, and they have a real voice. I mean, that's an ideal that would be great for us to move toward. I don't think many corporations would accept that. And Elizabeth Warren has this proposal to, you know, the Corporate Accountability Act, to require corporations to allow their workers, their employees, to elect 40% of the board members. And I think of all the proposals out there, that would be the quickest one to give workers more of a voice, both in, you know, in their company and in the greater economy.
John Markoff: Thank you, Stephen, and good luck on the rest of your tour.
Steven Greenhouse: Thanks very much. Great to be here.
John Markoff: Will it go on for a while?
Steven Greenhouse: Are you on the road for a while? So I'm, I've had a great 2 weeks in California. I love California. And I'm, you know, I'm going to be going to Detroit and Cleveland and East Lansing and the Twin Cities, the heartland, and I hope to get to Seattle at some point. And I've already been to Boston and Ithaca and Washington several times. Great.
John Markoff: So thanks very much.
Steven Greenhouse: Thanks very much to you.
John Markoff: To learn more about the topics in this episode, check out the show notes. There you'll find links to works from our guests and relevant articles. If you're interested in pursuing this, take a look at Stephen's book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, published by Penguin Random House in August. Human Centered is a show from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and it is produced by Michael Jitani and Joseph Monzel. I'm John Markoff. Thanks for listening.