CASBS Director Margaret Levi leads a panel discussion on the changing political and economic context for workers in light of the COVID pandemic with former CASBS fellows Tara Behrend, Louis Hyman, Phyllis Moen, and current CASBS research affiliate John Irons.
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Social Science for a World in Crisis Series
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. The 2020 global pandemic has a lot of people wondering, How can we redesign work around the material and psychological well-being of workers? From the types of jobs that humans should or shouldn't do, to the amount of labor we expect from workers, and increasingly, the fuzzy boundary between home and office, how can we embrace the value and dignity of humans at work? Today on Human Centered, another episode in the CASBS series, Social Science for a World in Crisis, which broadcast originally on September 16th, 2020. You can learn more about the series and other episodes by visiting the CASBS website or by using the links we've provided in the show notes for each episode. This episode of the series is titled "What Will Become of Work and Workers?" and features panelists Tara Behrend, assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University and a 2016-17 CASBS fellow, Louis Hyman, the Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professor in Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and a 2015-16 CASBS fellow. John Irons, fellow at the Center on Education and Labor at New America and also a current CASBS research affiliate. And lastly, Phyllis Moen, the McKnight Endowed Presidential Chair in Sociology at the University of Minnesota and a 2015-16 CASBS Fellow. Moderating the conversation is Margaret Levi, the Sarah Miller McCune Director of CASBS. In this event, Levi engages the panel in exploring how work is changing globally, both before and during the pandemic, and the implication for workers, governance, and political economies. How do we rethink society's contract with workers in 2020 and beyond? What role should governments play in raising living standards, creating economic security, and reshaping labor relations? We have choices about where we go next. Will it be in a direction that ensures a more durable, inclusive, and equitable prosperity for workers, their families, and their communities? Now, join Human Centered as we listen in on what will become of work and workers.
Margaret Levi: Hi, I'm Margaret Levi, and I'm the director of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, and I want to welcome you to the 7th episode of CASBS's webcast series. Social Science for a World in Crisis. I want to first acknowledge the co-sponsors for this episode: the Institute for Workplace Studies at Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, New America, the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Tara Berendt is an associate professor of psychological sciences and director of the Workplaces and Virtual Environments Lab at Purdue University, and she was a 2016-17 CASBS fellow. Louis Hyman is the Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professor in Industrial and Labor Relations and director of the Institute for Workplace Studies at Cornell University. And was a 2015-16 CASBS Fellow. John Irons is a Fellow at the Center on Education and Skills at New America and is a current CASBS Research Affiliate. Phyllis Moen is the McKnight Endowed Presidential Chair in Sociology and Co-Director of the Flexible Work and Well-Being Center at the University of Minnesota and was a 2015-16 CASBS Fellow. As you know, today's conversation is on what will become of work and workers, a topic to which this panel and CASBS itself brings a lot of expertise to bear. Those who registered were able to submit questions by email and on the registration form, and now during the event, attendees can submit questions using Zoom's Q&A features. We ask that you keep your questions concise and on point We will try to answer as many as we can, but given the expected volume, we will probably not answer all of them, and I will probably combine some. But be assured the panelists will get to see your questions after the event. So let's get started. I'm going to pose a set of questions to the panelists, and then Louis, Phyllis, John, and then Tara will answer. Each taking about 5 minutes. And then we'll all come back together for a group discussion and some other questions. So the big question facing us is the question of whether COVID is changing the course of the future of work, or is it only a temporary disruption? Is there continuity or is there discontinuity after COVID? What we're looking for are solutions, not just the analysis of the problems. So tell us what you see the problem is, but also begin to elaborate what some of the solutions might, might be. And think about where change is accelerating or slowing, where it's retrograde and where it's progressive. So really, we want to know whether what COVID is doing is a long-term impact on work or short-term impact, and what are some of the other factors that are influencing work. So let me turn first to Louis.
Louis Hyman: Thank you so much, Margaret. And my response is framed by the fact I'm an economic historian. So when I was at CASBS, I wrote a book called Temp that was largely a history of Silicon Valley that pushed back against the idea of technology— technological determinism, the idea that the technology determines the course of events. And I think right now we're in this moment where we see a lot of pandemic determinism, that the pandemic is going to shape everything and it's gonna shape it in one particular way. And in my book, when I'm writing about sort of the gig economy or the sort of way in which work has changed for the last 30 years, the story there is not about the technology, it's about the businesses and how they use technology. It's about the choices that people make in solving, using the technology to solve their problems. Now, very similarly today, we're going to have the same kind of choices over how we want to respond to the pandemic. And of course, this is the first that swept the US, but we've had pandemics before all across the industrialized world, especially East Asia, that have really shaped the course of their economies in the last couple of decades, especially SARS. So for me, when people say, oh, now it's going to be all e-commerce, it's going to all be remote work. Well, look at China. They're still building malls. They're still building offices. And so the question is, what kinds of choices are we going to make to restore that kind of normal economy? Or what is the right balance between this kind of remote work e-commerce economy? And the answer is that, yeah, some things are going to change forever. There's going to be a percentage of our workforce that's going to be remote. But we also know at the same time that the majority of our workers are actually service workers. And the service workers are not just office workers, but logistic workers, people who actually have to be in one physical place. And I think this pandemic has really exposed that class divide, the class divide of physical space that I think we weren't very attentive to before. And I think it's gonna attenuate it. So in some ways it's gonna change how, we work, but mostly it's going to reinforce those differences that were already there about who mattered and who didn't matter, who counted, who didn't. And we have a choice to make about whether we want to incorporate those people who are already left out of our workforce and our economy or not. And that's a choice that we're going to probably make in November.
Phyllis Moen: I, I agree with Louis about it not being technological determinism. But I do think that the new technology are really contributing to the extent of work, that the intensification of work is a problem, a challenge, where and when you work. And it can increase stress if we don't change the way work is done. We need to rethink work in line with working from a distance, just as the way we've needed to rethink learning when it's online versus in person. A second trend that I see that has also been exacerbated by COVID is this idea of the intensification of work, that a competitive global economy, automation, artificial intelligence, are producing a combination of fewer jobs and more work for each individual worker, worker, increasing demands, pressures, new levels of intensity. And that has been exacerbated by COVID because at home it is overlaid with schooling obligations of children and family and personal obligations and needs. It's also constrained by the old model that rewards face time being visible and instantly responsive. So instantly responsive in terms of messaging calls and emails is the new FaceTime, how people feel they're capturing whether or not you're working. Working without, uh, from home without rethinking the way work is done can have very deleterious consequences. And I'll just add that international studies of large cities found that since COVID there's been an increase in the number of meetings, the number of participants in each meeting, the number of emails people write and receive, and the workday has increased by 48 minutes. If I have just a minute, I'll go to the third trend that I see that is exacerbated by COVID, and that's the chronic uncertainty and insecurity that was there prior to the pandemic, but has really been accentuated by it. There are few, if any, remaining career ladders, no security with seniority, and fear of displacement, layoffs, and closures. It's exacerbated also by an aging and more heterogeneous workforce that can't afford to retire, and a workforce that faces age as well as race and gender discrimination. It's also exacerbated by the gig economy.
Margaret Levi: So, John.
John Irons: Great, thanks Margaret, and thanks for pulling together this conversation. It's great to see everyone in the room. So it's, I think, really needed to— needed conversation to have. I think a lot of people are wondering what's going to happen to work and workers in the future. I should say for completeness too that I'm also a visiting scholar at The New School, who's hosting this event too. So I just wanted to to get that out there. In terms of the trends, I think you framed it up exactly right, that there are some things that COVID is changing, but there's also some trends that are pre-COVID that COVID might be accelerating or even decelerating. And so I've got 3, which, which match fairly closely Phyllis's 3 kind of broader trends that I see. One is on technology and automation, right? So is COVID going to accelerate automation, slow it down? I think there's reasons to believe it might do a little bit of both. One can imagine in very high-touch, you know, interactive occupations, you can imagine that might provide an additional incentive to automate either roles or tasks. So that might push some areas of occupations to increase automation. At the same time, we have a surplus of labor, and that might slow down the pace of automation. We have less business investment, which would also slow down the pace of the adaptation of technologies. Going forward. So it's very hard for me to say which is going to win out at the end of the day. I think it's likely that some occupations will be accelerated and others will be decelerated. I'm doing some work up at the New School with a student there to try to answer that exact question. What industries might be highly susceptible to automation and high touch, and can we expect those to be at higher risk due to COVID? The second area is is changing how we work. I mean, Phyllis mentioned a lot of those, those areas. The one area that I'm both concerned about and also maybe excited about is how networks and teams are forming. Without face-to-face, teams have to work in different ways, which provide challenges. At the same time, the 5 of us on this call are in 5 different parts of the country, and we can team up in different ways that we couldn't have or wouldn't have before COVID So again, I see some ways that there are some harms, but also maybe some potential, potential benefits. And I think the third area that I've been thinking a lot about is, is precarity. And by that I mean part-time, temporary, outsourced, gig-like, fissured, with uncertain incomes and uncertain schedules. This was a trend before COVID Technology had a role in that, but it wasn't just technology. But I'm kind of concerned now about how COVID is going to increase precarity of work, especially with higher levels of unemployment. And I think what we've also seen is that in terms of precarity, those who have most risk are those who are the most vulnerable in society. So there are very stark discrepancies in risk, both health risk and economic risk, by income levels, by race, by age, even by gender, and the intersectionality between all of those as well. So I think that COVID has, at least for the time being, greatly exacerbated that problem. Is that gonna be a permanent feature of the economy moving forward or not? It's certainly gonna accelerate those trends in the near term. Longer term, I think, is still an open question. A lot of that depends on the policy response we see coming out of this.
Margaret Levi: Terrific. Thank you. Okay, Tara, I should point out that, uh, before you speak, Tara, that John used to be, um, the vice at the Ford Foundation and prior to that at the Rockefeller Foundation, and he's been key in supporting, um, the CASBS work on the future of work and workers, as well as an active participant, as have all, all of our panelists, um, in the various discussions and products that we've had come from that project. Tara, who I introduced in one way, is also, I should tell you, associated with the National Science Foundation these days. Congratulations. And we may come back to that issue at some point as well. So, Tara.
Tara Behrend: Thanks, Margaret. So, I think my fellow panelists did a really nice job of identifying some of the trends. I want to raise a few more questions that I didn't hear touched on. The first question to me, when we think about this issue, is what is education really for? Specifically, can we make an education system that actually creates mobility? The classical answer to this question is that education is for creating citizens who can contribute to democracy. And then other people would say that education is for giving people job skills. I would say we're not doing a very good job of either of those things right now. And part of the issue is this very narrow set of metrics that we've generated to evaluate the successfulness of education. That sort of directs our energy in one way away from other pursuits. The other panelists are completely correct that the pandemic did not actually create any new problems with regard to mobility or equality, but it did make them much more visible and it made them worse in many cases. We've got pod schools for rich children, right? And everyone else is going to lose a year of education. Women are experiencing more hardship with work-life balance. They're contributing less to their careers, and that will have repercussions for a long time. The second question that's related here is, which skills will be needed in the future? And as the other panelists mentioned, we're moving away from routine skills towards non-routine skills. But there's this other category of skills having to do with creativity and stress tolerance and trust in others and flexibility that has a lot to do with being a well-rounded human that also allows us to adapt to new circumstances. There's this sort of fallacy of teaching coal miners to code that, you know, I always kind of react negatively to that cliché because first of all, coal miners aren't going down into mines with pickaxes and lamps on their head, right? They're operating complex machinery. But there's also this entirely different skill set that will translate to other work. And when I say other work, I'm thinking of the kind of work that is uniquely human. I saw a YouTube video of a Zoom teacher, a Zoom kindergarten teacher trying to keep her class engaged. And that's something that will never be automated. So how do we value care work like that? How do we value these things like emotional labor and stress tolerance that turn out to be incredibly important in a situation like this? The third question that raised for me is what makes work meaningful? If we think about work as any sort of mental or physical activity to achieve a tangible benefit. The benefit doesn't have to be money. It can be community welfare. And work itself doesn't necessarily have to be meaningful, but it can make your life meaningful. It can give you structure. It can give you connection to others. It can give you social status and a sense of autonomy. And those are the things that are being lost when people are losing their work. So what can we do to sort of find other ways for people to fulfill those needs? And relatedly then, too, how do we design future careers? This is one of the questions posed in the advertisement for this session. Uh, and I think before we start designing future careers, we should agree upon what success will look like.
Margaret Levi: What will—
Tara Behrend: how will we know if we were successful? What will change look like? Uh, we have to measure things like feelings, which a lot of engineers balk at when they're trying to design these systems. So how can we specify what are the things we need to measure? What are our metrics for success? And, uh, and then work backwards from there. Fantastic.
Margaret Levi: Okay, I'm gonna start with some questions and try to integrate some questions we've gotten from the audience as well into this. There were a couple of themes that I picked up that most of you had in common that I want to stress here and then think about what the solutions are. So one is precarity. Another has to do with the intensity of work. And a third has to do with the unequal implications of the changes that we're seeing, whether they're caused by COVID or not. And in all of those areas, it would seem that government or corporations or both would have a role to play in addressing those issues. But obviously there are lots of different solutions. One of the— Mike Liveright asked, for example, about guaranteed income programs and an improved minimum wage. Ellen Snee asked about what will be the impact on women over time of all of this. So there, you know, thinking about those questions, what are the roles that government and corporations should play and what are the ones that they could play in trying to create some correctives to those problems of precarity and sensitivity and inequity and inequality in the workplace? I'll let you just jump in. If you just talk, that's fine. If you raise your hand, that's good too.
Phyllis Moen: I think we need new social inventions. You know, we need to— and COVID could really be a catalyst for this, for us rethinking what we mean by good work, as well as successful careers. And just like we look at technological inventions, we need new social inventions. And some of them may be found in some of the activities that have gone on thus far, like for instance, recognizing and even paying workers that are essential workers, even the title essential workers, recognizing that they are not getting paid. And this idea of giving people higher unemployment rates because of unemployment money because they were laid off through no fault of their own. Well, we know that people have always been laid off through no fault of their own, and maybe it's time for government to recognize and rework the social protections around income, recognizing that this is a volatile and insecure and, as John says, precarious economy. The second area, and then I'll stop, is around time. We need policies around the temporal organization of work. We can no longer deny that people who are workers also have lives. We see it in the cats going across their screen, in their children interrupting Zoom meetings. And so we need to recognize that and make time for life out of work, including things like paid family leave, paid time off, guaranteed vacations that people actually are able to take, and setting a ceiling on work hours, so rethinking the Fair Labor Standards Act so no one is exempt.
Margaret Levi: Thank you, Phyllis. One of the things, as you mentioned, essential workers, it seems to me that we've been talking really about what has become essential work, but the workers seem to be pretty disposable. They've been, you know, much more subject to the COVID virus, to poor pay, to terrible working conditions, to incredible stress. Louis, you've done a lot of work on, you know, workers of that sort and who have to come in and out of the workplace. Maybe you could speak to that a little bit and what some of the solutions to those kinds of problems are, both precarity— Phyllis spoke to intensity particularly, but let's speak to precarity and some of these kinds of essential work, unessential workers.
Louis Hyman: Yeah, for a very long time we've drawn a line around who matters and who doesn't matter in our economy, and that line is often one of gender and race and national origin and citizenship status and all the rest. And it is the case that now, of course, when the sort of white middle class is feeling this precarity again, it erupts into the mainstream conversation. But we've also seen many solutions to this as well. We've seen the, you know, the largest experiment of basic income of anywhere in the world, you know, $600 a week. We've seen an expansive conversation about a minimum health guarantee for all Americans? And then, you know, a lot of ways the answers are very straightforward and obvious. Provide people enough money, provide them guaranteed childcare, provide them guaranteed healthcare. And these kinds of things matter more than ever, especially because the people who are losing their jobs now, those service workers, many of those jobs are not going to come back as those kinds of retailers get replaced by e-commerce platforms and things like that. So in a lot of ways, this is an acceleration of trends that have gone on since the 1991 recession, which is the first recession. You know, of course, in our econ classes, we learned that after recession, companies hire people back, but after '91, that wasn't the case. It was the first jobless recovery. And we're seeing this now. And the question is, are people are going to be automated away, their jobs are going to be automated, outsourced. And I think one of the things we're going to reckon with is that some people will not find a place because of the reasons that Tara is talking about, this education, right? That we've educated people for 100 years. You know, it's interesting the distinction you made between citizen and worker, right? Because one is about freedom and the other is about obedience for a lot of people, not being free, a state of unfreedom. And yet so many of the high-paying quality jobs today are really about that creativity, about that freedom. And so we shouldn't be surprised that if we've taught people to be robots for 100 years, that when the robots finally come, they take our jobs and they take our children's jobs. And so we do need— I completely agree, we need to rethink what our educational system looks like. And of course now, as we see it completely collapse all around us, there's not a better time to do so. Me personally, I think it's about trying to think about, well, how can we create more labor-intensive childcare and education and things that cost a lot of money and can absorb a lot of people and give them purpose? Like, I'm the— I have a child. Gives me a lot of purpose in life to see him clean and reading a book and being happy. And if we're thinking about purposeful human labor, there's few things that are as human as education in this way.
Margaret Levi: So both of you have really emphasized, um, the role of government here. Do corporations have a responsibility? Tara, is that what you were about to talk to?
Tara Behrend: A little bit. I think the point I wanted to make is that the government, of course, has a role to play— the federal government, state government, local government— but the federal government moves slowly. Some people would say too slowly to really be useful. And corporations do absolutely have a role to play. I think the other player I would add to that Margaret, you'll be happy to hear me say this, is unions. I think that unions are incredibly necessary for protecting the most vulnerable workers, and counting on corporations to just do the right thing out of the goodness of their heart will never work. On the other hand, I think work is fundamentally about solving problems, and corporations big and small are very good at identifying problems that need to be solved and bringing people on board to solve them. And it partly has to do with how we value those problems, but it also does depend on our creativity and our ingenuity in identifying them.
John Irons: If I could jump in a little bit here too, because I think on the role of government, you know, I just want to kind of, you know, reflect on like the absurdity of, you know, millions of people being thrown out of work and losing their healthcare in the middle of a pandemic, right? So that is a pretty stark recognition that something's not quite right with the system. Just, just that fact alone, you know, there's a million other things to add on to it. But I think it points to how we oftentimes view the role of government in this kind of situation, which is the private sector, corporations, markets do the work, and then government comes in when something fails. That's kind of the attitude. I think that's wrong, right? I think, I think we need to think about government more as a problem solver in partnership with others and to be more active, right? So it's not just a passive— we give people relief when people need relief, but a more active— how do we make sure that people have the income they need, the jobs they have, the quality of work in different kinds of ways using a variety of tools? So, you know, I tend to be a— I call myself a kind of a kitchen sink economist. We need to do everything. So corporations need to do their part, unions need to do their part. And governments need to do their part as well. So it's an all hands on deck kind of moment.
Margaret Levi: So I want to raise a couple of other— Phyllis, one second. I want to raise a couple of other questions about what you— that have come in from the audience. And then I want to turn to the question of automation itself a little bit before we go to the solution space. So one of our questioners, Howard Morphea, a former research affiliate of CASBS, asked about cultural workers. So you've all mentioned all kinds of workers who are doing basically physical work, except for the education care workers, but what about the cultural workers? How do they fit into this space? The people who produce art, the people who produce the things we're consuming like crazy on Zoom these days. The art museums, the librarians, all of those people? And what's government's responsibility about that and our responsibility as a society about that? Anybody have a thought?
John Irons: I mean, my quick thought there is it just reminds me of the WPA. You know, there was a deliberate effort to employ artists of all different kinds. Now, it fell short of a guarantee of work, but It was, I think, a different attitude of being very proactive about how we support, you know, essential services. And I'm going to define that really broadly because there's a lot of things that are essential. I believe art is essential. So again, I think it goes back to what I was saying before, which is we need to have like a more proactive stance towards how we approach the economy or how we approach this kind of crisis.
Tara Behrend: Yeah, I agree with John. I think I paused when you asked that question because to me, those artists and creatives are not different than any other part of the public infrastructure. And so we should think about them just like the rest of the infrastructure that's all holding us together.
Margaret Levi: Any other thoughts on that?
Louis Hyman: Well, I guess the question of the creative economy really changes in the era of YouTube, right?
Margaret Levi: Right.
Louis Hyman: I think Hollywood is in tatters. I was just talking last night with a friend of a friend who was very successful at making film trailers and now has nothing to do. And so he's turned to making ads for YouTube stars. So I think it's a question of how does that work? What's the revenue model for the people who produce all this content for YouTube? Very few people make a lot of money. It's the same kind of winner-take-all. There's no equivalent of SAG-AFTRA. For YouTube. And so it's the same kinds of questions that we confronted again in the 1930s. I'm glad it wasn't me bringing up the '30s as the historian, but the economist. You know, but I think one of the things about the New Deal was that the early days were these sort of direct, you know, fear-driven relief kinds of activities, but then it turned more interestingly in the later '30s towards bootstrapping new industries, new economies that produce growth for corporations and also growth for workers' wages. And it's those kinds of things that all, all the above that we really need to be considering right now.
Margaret Levi: So we have a series of questions that really speak to the issue of the social isolation that remote work may be contributing to. We have one from Cannon Yusol. I'm sorry if I'm— you lose all—
Tara Behrend: soy—
Margaret Levi: about that, and from Gabriel Bertone. And Phyllis, this might speak a little bit to the question of what's happening to women, particularly, in terms of— but just generally, how is the remote work contributing to social isolation? And will we be able to fix that post-pandemic?
Phyllis Moen: Isolation that we experience by not being able to participate fully in society yet, and that remote work can really bring people together. This, uh, we— someone talked about teams and the importance of teams, and I see that as— and my research is incredibly important— that it's not individual workers but teams. And, and both organizations and networks of workers need to figure out how to work together, how to collaborate, how to be in touch, but not always on during this pandemic. But I think it is the pandemic-driven, the social isolation. Working from home or from a coffee shop eventually can be energizing and can connect as well as divide. But it can be isolating, and people have to make efforts to be together. When I ask people what they miss when they're working at home, it's their coworkers. So, having a virtual happy hour with coworkers, figuring out new ways of connecting is key. I want to say something about women. I really think this could be an occasion where women The progress that women have made is slowed or even reversed as more women take on family responsibilities, even as they work at home. And it's, it's disproportionately women who are doing that. So, and including leaving the workforce because they can't manage to keep all the balls in the air.
Margaret Levi: So not just social isolation, but stress and anxiety are being created by the situation. Tara, you want to jump in there?
Tara Behrend: And there's also— yeah, there's a big difference between an intact team that knew each other and trusted each other moving to remote and then trying to form a new team and develop those same connections of trust and communication. And I think there have been a number of prominent organizations who have sort of announced, we never need an office again. And I think they're going to discover that they're wrong very quickly because as new people come into the organization, the culture erodes and conflicts arise and teams just don't cohere the same way they should.
Margaret Levi: John, I have a question that's directed at you. Several speakers are asserting that automation and robots are taking jobs away. But most economists— Theresa, Giriducci says, don't see that in the data. So what do you think?
John Irons: No, I think that's right. I know Teresa well. We've had this discussion before. But I think it's— there's a question about how technology is really impacting work, right? So the notion that robots are going to disappear jobs and have already done so is, as Teresa said, not really supported in the data. You would see lots of evidence of that in productivity numbers, in raw job numbers, in shifts across occupations, and you don't see a lot of that. What you do see a bit more of is changing tasks themselves. So the worker themselves may not be displaced, but the tasks they do on the job might differ quite a bit with new different kinds of technologies. And I think, I think it's important to mention also that Technology and business models and work and workers co-evolve over time. So to Louis's point that I made earlier, this is not a deterministic path. It's not like a technology happens and then people are displaced. There are choices about how technology is used, how it connects with people, how people use it. So I think that's an important point to make too. But I think as we see COVID taking over, I think that Again, one of the questions I'm trying to answer is, where are the areas where it's most likely to accelerate over time? And that's where I think we might see a bit more— not an overly dramatic shift, but a bit more movement than we might have seen in the past. It might illuminate some of the broader trends that we've seen.
Louis Hyman: I think that's a really important question too, because it's whether the technology is a complement or a substitute. Institute, right? You know, so one of the things I was thinking about today was Walmart. You know, in the large— we talk about e-commerce and immediately our thoughts go to Amazon, but the second largest e-commerce retailer in America is Walmart, right? And for Walmart, it's actually like a complementary kind of technology in a lot of ways. It's driving people to their website, which then maybe— and as many of you have— it doesn't work when it comes to your house. So you go to the store, you return it, you replace it, and it's part of the way they're trying to enmesh consumers in their grocery, as well as in their retail, as well as now their e-retail. So yeah, a lot of us are going to go to e-commerce now and then we're never going to go back. But then, you know, it could also have this other effect as well. And so I think it really depends on how we use those robots. And, you know, personally, I think robots should do all the mundane tasks. That sounds amazing. So what are we solving for? We're not solving for, like, people just breaking rocks and then gluing them back together again. We're solving for technology that produces better lives. And that's, again, I think that's always rooted in policy and collective action.
Margaret Levi: So a Pollyannish view of technology would be that it will enhance our meaning and dignity of work because it takes the work that is boring and difficult away.
Louis Hyman: It's possible, right? I mean, so I think that's the question. It's like it could go a lot of different ways and it has already, right? So, you know, very few of us planted the wheat this harvest, and yet we're going to eat bread, and that's kind of amazing. So, you know, how do we— what kind of drudgery can we replace? So I think, I think it's a— but again, it's a question of what, who, what we value and who we value.
John Irons: And I think also how we can work together, you know, in more creative endeavors. So, you know, robots— I think we oftentimes use robots as a generic term for new technology, and artificial intelligence and other technologies will be a leap at least as important in my view. But we can work together, right? So you don't, you know, it doesn't have to be job displacement, it can be job augmentation, task augmentation. But that's, Louis, to your point, that's a choice. We can choose to make it replacement, where we can choose to automate away drivers, or we can choose to have safety systems in our cars that augment the work that we can do. And those are all choices.
Margaret Levi: Well, who's making, who's the we here? So I, you know, I know what I would do, and each of you probably know what you would do, but who's going to actually make these decisions? And how are we going to ensure they make the decisions in ways that meet the criteria we're talking about?
Tara Behrend: Well, if the question is about will we allow automation to replace jobs, the technology makes that decision for us. The technologies are not advanced enough to actually replace most jobs. Take a truck driver, you know, you can automate a lot of a truck driver's job, but not 100% of it, because there's also the part when you arrive to the destination and you unload the cargo and a human has to do that, right? And the self-driving cars still require a person to intervene in some situations. And radiologists were sort of a classic example that people were afraid would be replaced. But what the radiology AI does is forward the most confusing cases to a human being to evaluate. So I don't know that we have to put the brakes on because the technology turns out to put its own brakes on for the moment. I think forever.
Margaret Levi: You all agree with that?
Phyllis Moen: I think the way in a great number of cases, Margaret, is going to be the corporations.
Margaret Levi: And I think so too.
Phyllis Moen: And that's why I study them, because it seems to me that they can be the engines of change. Government moves at a glacial pace. Often, and organizations are more easily, can more easily change. And I think what we'll see is using technologies, if they're smart, they will value their workforce and recognize the need of that workforce augmented, as my colleagues say, by technology. But they also have to recognize that, for instance, flexibility, working from home, can't just be for business needs, but it has to be in ways that enhance the life quality of workers, or you're not gonna get that creativity and the inventiveness that you want from your workforce.
Margaret Levi: I recommend that those who are interested look at a previous CASBS webcast on the future of the corporation. Which is really asking questions about how do we change the incentives of corporations and make them more purposeful and taking some of these concerns into account. We're going to move into the solutions section, or more solutions section, in a minute, but there is one question that I really wanted to raise here that came from one of our registrants. And now this is the name I'm really going to get wrong. Trigve Thronsvæit was very interested in thinking about the workplace as a potential site of civic formation and agency. And I think that's a really interesting question. We've been talking about skills, but we've really been talking about technical skills or the skills to do a particular job. And in the days when unions were much stronger in the United States, Clearly there was a role that they played in engendering a certain kind of civic education and formation. But what's— thinking about the future or even the present in COVID, what could be the role of the workplace in civic formation and agency? Any thoughts on that?
Phyllis Moen: I can take the agency piece. I think people are increasingly demanding, including millennials and as well as Boomers and Gen Xers and, and Gen Y coming along the pike, they all want more flexibility. They all want more control, more agency over their work and the time of their work. And I think they're demanding it. And, uh, to, to sustain their workforce, corporations are going to have to, uh, do that. I saw before COVID I was on a bus and I saw one of those bus ads and it was for some kind of very routine job, but it said, we offer flexible hours. You know, it's like they want to get in on the flexibility bandwagon. People want greater control of their lives and they want to integrate the different pieces of their lives. And I think the employers are going to have to recognize that.
Tara Behrend: I think that's right. And I mentioned the meaningfulness of work earlier, and one of the ways that people derive meaning is by contributing to a goal that's bigger than themselves, right? By knowing that their work serves a purpose other than the immediate. And there are things that corporations can do to emphasize that in a true way, as opposed to paying lip service.
Margaret Levi: It seems to me this question also gets at whether workers have voice and whether they're learning to be citizens at the workplace as well as in the larger economy.
Louis Hyman: I think we do see that with sort of high-skilled, highly paid workers, you know, the Microsoft work walkouts. You know, we see all the tech workers revolting against what their corporations are a part of. And in some ways that's part of this, right? It's about sort of, you know, taking responsibility for the local. In that case, it's your local workplace. And a lot of what we were talking about in the last year with Black Lives Matter is taking responsibility for sort of local ways citizens are treated by the state, right? And if this were a conversation we're having a year ago, I would say— I would do my normal talking point I was doing a year ago, which is the federal government's dead, it's got lockjaw, and it's never coming back, and we should just look to localism, you know. And in fact, a huge swath of the US economy is determined by just a handful of cities, and certainly just a handful of states. States that have realized they have a lot of power over these corporations because they are big markets. And so I think that a lot of the ways in which that vision of what the future we're fighting for is, is coming out of the places where the cities that are most successful, you know, the Seattles, the San Franciscos, the New Yorks. Now, but the change now, of course, is that those cities are being evacuated. It's not clear exactly what's going to happen in the aftermath of COVID So this is a place where the pandemic does—
Margaret Levi: And fires.
Louis Hyman: And fires, yeah. That's right, lots of fires, right? So cities now appear dangerous again in a way they didn't a year ago.
John Irons: And if I could add on a little bit there, because I think it's an interesting question, both in, you know, the substance of, you know, what the community is, but also what is the workplace? And I'm thinking about this as an example. If you're a domestic worker, right, your workplace might be somebody else's home. And so it's— you're less likely to have kind of a community around you the way you would if you went to an office or to a factory. But that doesn't mean that you don't have a community. But there are organizations that are, you know, represent workers where they create a community for those workers. Even though you don't have the same employer, you're not working the same place, you might still be connected through a Facebook group or through another organized effort to connect people. So I think that there's real opportunities to redefine kind of what a work— workplace is to still derive some of those benefits of being in a physical workplace with people together. It's not— I don't think it's easy work, and no one who does that worker-based organizing claims that it's easy, but I think it has some potential there.
Tara Behrend: I think that's a great point, and if I could just give an example on that point. Uber drivers are a great example of people who might not have a built-in workplace. They, you know, their boss is an algorithm and they might be sort of subject to the winds. But in many cities they've self-organized. And my favorite example is at National Airport in D.C. They figured out that if they all turn off the app and then turn it right back on at the same time, they can artificially inflate the price that they get paid for that ride. And they, you know, they walk around every day at 8 o'clock and say, turn off your app. And I think people are very very creative at finding ways to organize even when the system makes it difficult.
Louis Hyman: I mean, the history of labor in America is not the story of lawyers. It's a story of unionists sort of collectively acting, right? So, and even in this decentralized kind of workforce, you know, that's the story of Hollywood, how Hollywood got organized, right? Again, SAG, right? That this is a place where teams come together for a day or a week or a month, make something extremely expensive and perfect, and then go away again. And so we have models for how to coordinate decentralized workforces. And certainly, you know, the, the, the great strike waves of the '30s, the great origins of the CIO, these were all moments just like, you know, just as illegal as Uber is, so was the CIO when it started. So it's not a coincidence that the ways to resist these new kinds of formations of of capital are themselves outside the law. And so I think that's one of the things we'll have to see as well.
Margaret Levi: So I want to think about some solutions to some of the problems that we've talked about. And we've— you've all mentioned various things that government and corporations and the workers themselves might do as solutions. Is there something that you want to add to that? And I'll start with with Phyllis because I know she may have to slip away. So, Phyllis.
Phyllis Moen: Well, I think we have to have protections. We have to create a new and updated safety net. So, that's at the very top of my list. But building on what Louis and Tara said, I really think it's important to think of new collectivities, sort of mediating institutions that are between individuals and employers. Like unions were. They might not be called unions, but something like that where people— John mentioned this as well— where people can come together as a Facebook group or some other group to strategize how to make their work and their lives better. I think that's important. And I think we need to recouple work from the rest of life. No longer take the unencumbered worker that was— that is derivative from men in the 1950s who didn't have family responsibilities. We need to recouple work and family and personal lives, recognizing that people have life outside of work and supporting them in that. And we need to uncouple work and health insurance.
Margaret Levi: Terrific.
Tara Behrend: Let me jump in. So I agree with Phyllis. I think the other thing we can do is change a narrative that has been in place for a long time, where parents who want a good life for their kids tell them that the way to have a good life and to enter the middle class is to go to a 4-year university and work in an office. And that just isn't true anymore. A lot of the jobs that used to be dangerous or no longer dangerous, but there is still a stigma attached to those jobs. It's not sophisticated or prestigious to work as a plumber for a lot of historical reasons that aren't true anymore. So I think there are things we can do in terms of cultural messaging to open young people's eyes to a broader range of careers that would really help them engage in some of those mobility activities.
Phyllis Moen: If I could just build on that, Margaret. I really think it's important to think of lifelong education not as education for frivolous, but as essential, that we need to not assume you get all the skills that you need in that 4-year college or 2-year college or whatever you have, but to recognize that and create new paths of new career and educational paths that are more flexible and varied.
Louis Hyman: But this is a big divide, right? I mean, because most Americans don't go to college. Most Americans, you know, aren't the people who have learned how to learn. And so, yeah, we live in an era where you can learn any kind of technical skill you want on YouTube or Khan Academy pretty quickly. But most people don't know how to do that. They're taught to I don't know what they're taught, but they're not taught to think independently and empower themselves. And that's, again, I think that's one of the big changes we're going to have to have in the educational system. So I agree that, Tara, that most people don't need to go to college, but I also think that for those people, the world has to change. They have to be taught differently as well. Been taught in a lot of ways more like people who go to college. That's, I think that speaks to my earlier division between citizen and Freedom and obedience. The college is like an education of freedom, to free your mind, to have these expansive experiences and ways to think creatively, whereas the sitting in a grid asking to go to the bathroom, as you do for 12 years before you go to college, is an education of obedience for an industrial age that no longer exists.
John Irons: So if I could pose a— not a challenge to it, but a, um, what's the next step, right? Suppose we have a lot of brilliant creative people who have been given the perfect education, where do they go to work, right? So you can't have like a fantastic education system and then have dead-end jobs at the back end of it too, right? So I think there's also like— no job or no jobs, exactly, right? So there needs to be like, I think, equal attention paid to what they call the demand side of the equation of how do you make sure that those jobs are both high quality but also And by high quality, I mean all the things, Tara, that you mentioned too, right? The meaning you derive from work needs to be there as well as the paycheck. So it's that multifaceted way of saying we need kind of quality jobs in lots of different kinds of ways. And I'm sorry, we're going the wrong direction on that front. You know, I don't have a magic bullet, and I don't think there is a magic bullet. I think it's just a variety of different approaches that, again, corporations need to take, and there's a role for government to play it too. I mean, Louis, you're the historian here, but, you know, the labor movement didn't do it by themselves. You know, there were ensconced in regulations and rules a lot of things that enable unions to— and unions help put those in place. So, you know, so it's a back and forth, right? It's How do we create the systems that reinforce the private organizing that's done at the same time?
Louis Hyman: I mean, I think just to build on that, I think the answer isn't just labor, but it's capital, right? So the Fed just announced that the interest rate will be zero for the next few years. Well, let's make sure that capital gets into the hands of young entrepreneurs. And to make those young entrepreneurs possible, we need to have a healthcare system that's universal. Right? So there's a— in my mind, people frame these things as very progressive or left, but it's actually very right-wing in a lot of ways. It's a very conservative idea, like, oh, let's empower capitalists to go out and start new businesses that will hire all their friends to do these things that, honestly, people like us, academics, can never think of.
Phyllis Moen: Right?
Louis Hyman: So I think that's part of it, is sort of unleashing capitalism. This is one of the things that also happened in the '30s, not just the union movement and a bunch of regulations, but also putting capital into the hands, through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, of cutting-edge innovative technologies like aerospace industry or the electronics industry that then employed millions of people. So I think capital has to be part of the solution, even if maybe these sort of incumbent corporations are not.
Margaret Levi: Well, and as we know, many of the laws about unions then and now are very influenced by what corporate interests are. Veronica Terrakes, who's a current fellow at CASBS, was asking about the conservative turn in the law against labor and whether there are openings right now. And we can and should address that. And I think some of the panelists have already suggested ways in which people are getting around the law. And there are certain states and locales which are creating more liberal laws for organizing. Than others. But it seems to me the, the deeper question here is really about what should be the partnership in the future among corporations and the private sector more generally, and the educational arrangements, and then the national government stepping in with social insurance and health insurance and other such things. And the kind of partnership that we have right now is clearly not working, but I'm hearing all of you really suggest that it has to be a partnership. We're not going to be able— government can't just create the jobs. I mean, it can briefly through WPA programs and building infrastructure, but ultimately we depend on firms, private sector firms of various kinds to create some of the work. And if we're going to have the mix between skills and government, and I mean skills and workers, we need government, corporations, and the educational system to all be playing with each other in a very different way. Do you see any hope for that? Are there indicators that that's going on?
Phyllis Moen: Well, I was thinking of something that we've left out, which is the social sector. And in that way, corporations are often sponsors of jobs. There is work that needs doing, and to answer John's question about where are the jobs, they may well be in, in, in the nonprofits, in the teaching and education and in healthcare and in other kinds of social sector. Yes, right. So I see partnerships around that, that corporations, uh, like to be seen as giving largesse to good causes that can generate jobs. I mean, even the Vikings here now are giving money for social justice. It's become much more popular to take on social issues than in the past.
Margaret Levi: Go ahead, John.
John Irons: Yeah, I was going to echo that as well, and I think You know, the distinction we oftentimes make between the private sector and the government and the social sector, as if they were, you know, like there are bridges in between them that can never be crossed. I don't think it's right. I don't think it was ever correct. And I think it's even more untenable now that you really are seeing, you know, think about how the potential vaccine is being developed, right? It's not purely the private sector that's going out and doing the research and generating. It's a partnership with different agencies who are committing to purchasing a certain number of doses and really getting involved, right? So you can look across all kinds of different areas where it's not a clear distinction between the two. I think we need to maybe abandon that as a concept and think about problem solving. Think about the kinds of networks that are needed to solve problems, the kinds of institutions that are needed. It might be privately owned, it might be publicly owned, but they might be working on similar problems. So I'm somewhat optimistic, because I think Phyllis is exactly right. You're seeing more private sector, which maybe we should rename that, who are taking stances on social issues. I'm mindful of Milton Friedman's essay from 50 years ago, some of you might have seen, that reflected upon in the New York Times, But Milton Friedman said corporations have no role in doing anything but maximizing profits. That, I don't think, is a viable position anymore, if it ever was, even back then.
Margaret Levi: Phyllis, I'm going to give you a last word, because I know you have to slip away, and then I'll give everybody else a chance to say their last words, or to continue the discussion.
Phyllis Moen: I want to quote Daniel Bell, a sociologist a journalist who said that politics is almost always in some measure an argument about the future. And we cannot escape either the normative debates as to what kind of future we may want, or the empirical assessments as to the kinds of futures that may come. I think that that's what we're talking about here is we can't take for granted the future, but what do we want and how do we get there? And thank you for moving on.
Margaret Levi: Thank you. So Louis, Tara, John, a last word.
Tara Behrend: Sure. Well, you know, I want to elaborate on something Louis said about it seems like a left issue, but it's actually a far-right issue. And it's really important that there are these places that everyone can sort of agree and work together, whether it's left and right or corporations and governments. And I think this issue that we're talking about, innovation and jobs, does not belong to any party or entity. And there are these little levers that we can move. For example, career and technical education is something that everyone supports. So if we can get away from the turf claiming, I think we could make more progress.
Margaret Levi: Did you want to add to what you just said?
John Irons: No, no, I think, I think we've covered a lot of ground today. So no, thank you for setting up this conversation.
Margaret Levi: Louis?
Louis Hyman: I'm just trying to remember cool Daniel Bell quotes.
Margaret Levi: Daniel Bell, a former CASBS fellow.
Louis Hyman: But I've been taking care of my 11-month-old, so my brain isn't working. Yeah. So I guess I'm optimistic too, that I feel like a lot of the issues that we've been wrestling with have been exposed exposed, right? They were sort of repressed under this appearance that everything was working fine, which it absolutely was not, right? That employment had completely failed the American working class, like they didn't have $400. Income volatility was through the roof. And yet somehow everything seemed to be okay. And I think what this crisis has exposed is it's not okay. It hasn't been okay for lots of people for a long time. And I hope that we have the collective will coming out of this to reassert the idea that security matters. You know, family security, economic security, health security matters as a sort of foundation for certain kinds of democratic practices, the foundation for a free society, and that we can't be free if we're always afraid. And, you know, that fear can come from lots of places, but it certainly comes out of COVID It comes out of losing your job. It comes out of lots of things. Anyway, you know, I think it's on that will turn the future, whether or not we become the democracy that maybe we always haven't been, but we want to be, and that shared imagination that we embrace together, or something else that, you know, is a lot more frightening. So anyway, thanks for having this conversation.
Margaret Levi: Well, thank you all. This was an incredibly productive, interesting, stimulating conversation, and I'm very grateful to all of you. And again, I want to thank the event's co-sponsors, the Institute for Workplace Studies at Cornell, New America, the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. So thanks again for the panel and to everyone, to everyone for joining us today. Thank you.
Narrator: That was Tara Behrend, Louis Hyman, John Irons, and Phyllis Moen in conversation with Margaret Levi discussing what will become of work and workers. You can learn more about this event and others in the Social Science for a World in Crisis series by visiting the CASBS website at casbs.stanford.edu. We've got more CASBS live events coming to the Human Centered feed, And of course, more original interviews of CASBS fellows and friends with host John Markoff. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss anything. And if you get a second while you're scrolling through the feed, go ahead and rate and review us. We'd love the feedback. It's helping us to tune the show. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.