John Ahlquist (2017-18 CASBS fellow), Oren Cass, & Veena Dubal (2022-23 CASBS fellow) join in conversation with Roy Bahat to explore how we can build effective workers' organizations in an era of precarious employment, fissuring workplaces, distributed supply chains, & outmoded labor laws & regulations.
This is a podcast version of a live CASBS webcast event. View video of the event here.
The event was produced in association with CASBS's program on Creating a New Moral Political Economy. Learn about the program here.
CASBS's moral political economy program guest-curated the Winter 2023 issue of Dædalus, a publication of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The entire issue is open access here. Panelist John Ahlquist's essay in the issue provided impetus for the organization of the event this podcast episode draws from.
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Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Existing US labor laws and regulations are terribly out of date. Is it possible to build more effective workers' organizations without changes to those laws and regulations? If boosting so-called worker voice is so important, as many claim, how does that actually happen?
Today on Human Centered, another panel discussion from our Social Science for a World in Crisis series. This episode, which originally webcast May 2nd, 2023, is titled New Visions for Effective Worker Influence, and it features a breadth of intellectual perspectives from John Ahlquist, a professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, and a 2017-18 CASBS fellow, Oren Cass, the executive director of American Compass, and Veena Dubal, a professor at the University of California of Law San Francisco, and a 2022-23 CASBS fellow. Moderating the conversation is Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta.
Current labor laws incentivize overly narrow and parochial bargaining units, which enable employer resistance, hamper organizational experimentation in unions, and preclude some organizational alternatives altogether. But changing the law requires workers' organizations and their allies to apply sustained political pressure beyond what they appear capable of delivering. Precarious employment, fissuring workplaces, and distributed supply chains are making it harder for workers to develop occupational identities and networks that support the organization building of the past.
So what should change first? How do we crack this chicken and egg problem? And one quick special note to listeners.
This episode and several others in our webcast series draws inspiration from the winter 2023 issue of Daedalus, a prestige publication of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, that CASBS is creating a new moral political economy program curated from top to bottom. The entire issue is open access and we'll drop a link to that in the episode notes. But for now, let's listen in to the panel conversation about new visions for effective worker influence.
Roy Bahat: Welcome everybody to the 23rd episode of CASBS webcast series, Social Science for a World in Crisis. I'm Roy Bahat, and I'll introduce myself and the other panelists in a minute. First, we want to acknowledge the partners for this episode, who are the Hewlett Foundation, the Cowie Center on Global Transformation at UC San Diego, and the Center for Commerce and Diplomacy at UCSD.
This event is produced in association with CASBS program on creating a new moral economy, a new moral political economy. And we'll drop a link to that program into the chat. And today, we're here to talk about new visions for effective worker influence.
We're going to talk about to what degree we may or may not need legal change to achieve those visions, how we get to them, what visions we may want to achieve, etc. You've probably read the bios of our panelists. It's probably why you're here.
And we'll link to them in the chat box as well. And I'll just introduce everybody quickly. John Ahlquist is Associate Dean and Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UCSD.
And he was a CASBS Fellow in 2017, 2018, and also the instigator of this event, bringing us all together. So thank you for that, John. Oren Cass is the Executive Director of American Compass.
We'll let him tell you more about that. And Veena Dubal is a Professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, and a current CASBS Fellow, 2022, 2023.
And I'm Roy Bahat. I'm the moderator. I'm a Venture Capitalist at Bloomberg Beta, where we focus on the future work. Faculty at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. And my relevance here is that I chair the Aspen Business Roundtable on Organized Labor. So all of us are here because we care deeply about this topic, and we bring very different perspectives, occupationally, politically, geographically, to bear here. So we'll get into all of that.
And so the way that we're going to proceed is broadly, we'll talk in three general areas that I think will give us room to talk about all the things we need to talk about. And those three areas are, we're going to talk a little bit of context about what is it that we actually believe workers want. Because I think we have areas of overlap and maybe some areas of difference and disagreement in that.
We'll talk about some of the actions that we recommend, changes we think our society, economy, legal systems and otherwise may need. And we'll talk about some of the paths to get there, sort of how do we arrive at those changes. And before we jump in, I just want to do a little bit of housekeeping, which is our intent here is we want a conversation that breaks out of the traditional silos that we're in.
I'm sure everybody here goes to endless panels with people who do more or less a similar thing to what they do. This is very different from that. As a moderator, I'll try to focus on bringing out all of your opinions, although I may occasionally take off my moderator hat and inject my own.
And I'll just say, I think everybody here is perfectly capable of being in a free flowing conversation. Feel free to interrupt me. If you do it respectfully, you can feel free to interrupt one another.
You know, welcome to all of that. And then I'll just say, if it turns out that somebody is going on a little too long, what I'll give you is the heart to ask you gently to stop. And then we'll move on and make sure we all get moments of conversation.
And for all of the folks who are attending, you can use the Q&A feature here to submit questions. And we ask that you keep your questions concise and on point. We may not be able to get to all of them, but we'll certainly try to navigate through, and we will read them after the event concludes.
OK, so let's just jump right in. So we're going to start first with talking about what workers want. And so I'm going to ask each of you to just sort of cast the present moment in terms of what you think.
Presumably, we all think workers have some unsatisfied wants. If you don't feel that, you can say so. And Veena, maybe if we can start with you, we'd just love to hear your analysis of how you think about what workers want.
Veena Dubal: Yeah, I mean, I think that a preliminary question is who we're talking about when we're talking about workers. And I think there is an assumption that we're making or that I'm going to make in answering that question that we're primarily talking about low wage workers who have very little economic and political power. And so I would say that workers want the same thing that they have always wanted, which is security, higher wages, more voice in the workplace, more sort of control over how they work, when they work, and with whom they work.
No one wants a boss and no one has ever wanted a boss. I think that although there are sort of vast technological shifts taking us in the opposite direction, the sort of underlying sense of what workers, again, low wage workers want in their workplace and what they want in their life really hasn't shifted over the last century or so.
Roy Bahat: Great. Thank you. And I think we'll pick up on a bunch of those assumptions, but maybe Oren, can I turn to you and ask, how do you think about what workers want?
Oren Cass: Yeah, sure. I think it's a great point to start with sort of how we define workers. And I would at least argue for defining it a little bit more broadly. I think Bureau of Labor Statistics has a good definition of something like production and non-supervisory workers.
Roy Bahat: What does that mean? Well, keep going. I want to make sure we untangle some of the words.
Oren Cass: In a sense, it aligns quite well with who the NLRA would define is eligible to form and join a union. But I think management is probably beyond the scope of the conversation. Entrepreneurs, interesting question.
But I think workers, I raise this just to say the typical worker in America in that category median wage is about $28 an hour. So we wouldn't say that person is necessarily a low wage worker or barely getting by. But the problem is that 50 years ago, that median wage was also $28 an hour adjusting for inflation.
And so I do think it's important to think about the sort of mass market in a sense of American workers who have been collectively left behind. And in terms of what they want, I think I would agree with a lot of what Veena said, I think certainly security, high wages, control. I would probably disagree with the nobody likes a boss point.
I think most people do actually tend to to some degree choose to be in a place of employment and actually tend to care a great deal about positive labor management relations. I think nobody wants a bad boss. But at least in our research, we've found, you know, generally speaking, workers really want collaborative rather than adversarial relations with management.
They really like the idea of work organizations that have management playing a role in them also. And what I found most fascinating was when we looked at what's the most important driver of job satisfaction, not asking directly, but looking at correlations across different responses. By far the strongest driver wasn't those sort of absolute determinants of how we would measure job quality, but whether or not people reported having excellent relationships with management.
And so I think that that's certainly a big piece of the puzzle as well.
Roy Bahat: We have a lot of juicy stuff to dig into there, and we'll come back to it. But John, let me just turn to you and ask, how do you think about what workers want?
John Ahlquist: Yeah, I'm going to pick up on this thread of the contested definition of who we're talking about and what counts as being a worker, and I think we all, in many respects, agree with what Veena kicked us off with. But I would actually think that it's quite contested politically who is categorized as what sort of worker, what that means for what they have access to, and we know that at least at some levels of firms, managers and executives are strategically deploying categorizations and titles and so forth for a variety of their own profit-driven and other interests. So I'm a little hesitant to just go along with current NLRA or legal definitions.
And I would broaden it to include people who may have, as a big chunk of their time, the role of managing other people. And I think that also would extend to, say, frontline retail and similar workers where a big chunk of their job is actually managing customers or relationships with customers.
So the role of management or what managers might want is something that I think is understudied and underappreciated. There's a little bit of a current thread of work highlighting the kind of moral and emotional toll that being a mid-manager can place on those individuals in terms of what they may be asked to do or the types of decisions they may confront with their own workers or the teams that report to them and so forth. So yeah, I think that's a really rich area to continue to talk about who we'll be talking about in terms of workers.
But if we're going to look specifically at frontline workers in the kind of major growth and sectors where we've seen a lot of job churn and upheaval and demonstrable unhappiness, especially during and after the pandemic, we are seeing, I think, a broad sense of dissatisfaction, but a relatively, at least in the survey work that I'm in the midst of doing with the Worker Empowerment Research Network, which is a big interdisciplinary group of scholars trying to help understand this, you're seeing a very broad sense of dissatisfaction, but also I think relatively thin understanding or engagement with some of the opportunities that might be presenting themselves, whether that's a formal union or something else, in part because some of these opportunities are hard to access for many workers and they may be distant in time and space in terms of what that actually means.
So we can get a lot from, say, survey data, but I also think it's limited in some really interesting and fascinating ways. In terms of what translates into job satisfaction, I'd agree with what Oren said, but one thing I would add is that we're seeing very strongly is as if not more important in predicting job satisfaction is the kind of vertical voice at work, whether and how they have relationships with their managers and voice in some domains on the job, but also the quality of their interpersonal relationships with their coworkers on the horizontal level. And what is their ability to know and connect with and understand who their coworkers are and what they're doing and what types of relationships or shared interests they may or may not be able to construct.
And we know that at least in some industries, say, warehousing is one of the industries in our survey, we know that there's actually, you know, production processes and other management techniques that are breaking apart and minimizing the ability of workers to actually interact on the job.
Roy Bahat: Okay, so let's dig into a lot of that, that I just want to recap. I heard some areas of agreement. So just to make sure, I think I heard everybody in some form or another express that there's broad dissatisfaction.
And I'm inviting you, I'm saying this so if somebody disagrees, they can speak up. I think I heard everybody say that regardless of where you draw the line about who we want to talk about, that we are talking about a wide range of occupations. I mean, we're talking about warehouse work, we're talking about technologically mediated gig work, we're talking about potentially, we can discuss whether we're talking about middle management or not, retail work, you know, presumably, we're also talking about people who are doing, you know, talking and typing work, like all of us do, maybe with different challenges and different wage levels.
And the other thing that I think is really interesting is that we talked about different ways. I think a fascinating question is, how do we know what workers want? So I think I heard reference to a few surveys, I think all of us are in a place where anecdotally we're in conversation with people a lot, you know, and I'm curious if there are other tools that you think as scholars, which all three of you are and I'm not, how you think about how we know what workers want.
Veena Dubal: It’s an interesting heuristic device to to say what workers want, because it becomes very easily easy to contest what comes out of surveys, how people describe different ideas, like flexibility, etc. And so, you know, what I have what I have adopted as a scholarly methodology as an anthropologist is a deep ethnography. And the interesting thing that I found is that when I do survey research, and then when I do, and then when I sit in the communities for extended periods of time, the things that I discover are actually sometimes divergent and different.
Roy Bahat: Can you talk more about that? Because for folks who are not anthropologists, when you say deep ethnography, you know, what exactly do you mean? And what are, I mean, as a person who's done a lot of market research, oftentimes it's wonderfully useful. And oftentimes it's totally points in the opposite direction of what it seems the truth is. And so what do you mean there?
Veena Dubal: Yeah, and I don't mean to say that surveys aren't useful. I just mean to say that there's a lot, I mean, I use surveys as well, but a lot can be disentangled from kind of survey research.
I'll give you maybe an embedded example. So, you know, probably people know my research is on on-demand work, and I've spent the last decade of my life researching on-demand workers. This means I spend a lot of time with them and their spare time and their organizing time. I go with them to protests. I go with them to regulatory meetings. I'm on text message change with them, exchanges with them. They are, I am embedded in their communities. So this is not like sort of one-off research.
That said, years ago I did, in 2016, I did a survey that sort of asked people about whether they wanted to be employees or independent contractors. And sort of no matter how I cut the data, whether people were more dependent on it, not dependent on it, I got sort of 60-40. 60% of people said they wanted to be independent contractors, 40% of people said they wanted to be employees and I was sort of struck by this.
But then when I went back to those same interviewees, 265 different people and we did long in-depth interviews, it turns out what they were describing when they described independent contractor, what they were saying when they said they didn't want to be an employee, was actually quite different than what I meant by the term, what the legal definition of the term actually was.
And this is an important example because this gets deployed all the time in political discussions, right? It has very sort of important regulatory implications that firms can say, well, our workers don't want to be employees, they want freedom and flexibility. These surveys end up meaning something, having real implications for people's lives when maybe that's not actually what was being captured by the survey.
Roy Bahat: Yeah, I mean, I think we've all seen sensitivity to wording. We did a survey a few years ago together with New America, where we just tried to ask the general population what they wanted out of work, and we tried to be very careful to get at it in as unbiased way as possible, which obviously everybody does. What we heard at least in that survey is we forced workers to rank different things they might get out of work, because I was tired of going to conferences and having people say, oh, what people really want from work is meaning, and for that to mean different things to different people.
And so the way we phrased it was something like my work, I feel my work is important to me. And what we discovered is below $150,000 a year, meaning barely ranked. And in fact, wanting higher wages also barely ranked.
What ranked was stability and dignity. And so people preferred more security. And one of the ways that, of course, economic data doesn't tell us very much in the US is we don't really see things like volatility in the data.
We look at things like annual household income, and so that was one of the things that set me on this journey. Let me talk about a few areas where there's maybe some disagreement. So one was about who we ought to talk about and sort of how high up the wage scale should we go.
Another was, are we talking about folks who are covered by the National Labor Relations Act or not? My view is we have a lot of Americans who are not covered by that act and still work, and we ought to think about them too, of course. And that includes contractors who are independent contractors. It can include domestic workers, people in plenty of other categories. And then the last thing that I heard was this nobody wants a boss question. And having been a boss and having been bossed, I'm often surprised that there are some people, and this is now ANIC data, but some people who really do want that daily guidance from a human being.
And I think we can all agree nobody wants a bad boss. But maybe Veena, say a little bit more about what you meant, and then Oren, I want to tug at that thread a bit more.
Veena Dubal: Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree with what either you or Oren said. I think that some people do function very well with direction. I think that I mean that nobody wants to be subjugated in the workplace.
And the line between good and bad boss is very, very, very thin in any given moment. And so maybe the flip side of that is another way to say it is that people want autonomy and they want the ability to make decisions without being berated. I mean, I think this really relates to what you and Oren were saying about dignity.
I mean, I'm in a particular line of research, a particular group of people who really, really, really do not want a boss, which is part of why they do this work. And so I hear it all the time and so I articulate it in that way, but I think it can be more universally articulated as, you know, and this is again not anything new about this particular moment, but people want autonomy and dignity at work.
Roy Bahat: Yeah, what's interesting to me about what both you and Oren said was that there was a relational, actually John, you said this too, that it wasn't just about what their experience as individuals, it was a relational kind of an experience in terms of the community, that's the word I heard at least, horizontally and vertically. Oren, do you want to expand on that included? I know you've done a bunch of survey research on what workers want, either on the questions of how we know and or on this question of what people want out of their managerial structure.
Oren Cass: Yeah, sure, I guess I should clarify, I think we all agree on the National Labor Relations Act point that it is a subset of the folks we're talking about. I do think it's distinction of management versus not management is important. And I think we have a fascinating conversation about the challenges of middle management in America.
And there would be some areas of overlap, but I think it would have to be a quite different conversation in a lot of ways. And the types of solutions we might want to look at would probably be pretty different as well. You know, I think the how do we know question is a really interesting one.
And I found that the two best ways to look at it are one to just look at what is actually going on out in the world, and then use survey data to try to better help understand that. I think there's a lot that we can learn just by looking around at the choices people are making in the aggregate, in different situations. And that at the end of the day, that has to certainly receive a lot of credit as particularly probative of what they see and how they want to make choices, given the constraints of the world.
And then I think what I find really useful about survey data as a way to supplement that, is that it provides a way to look at some of those broader themes. I think one point that's sort of the glib obnoxious panelist point that I'm glad none of us has made is the like, well, workers are different. They all want different things, right?
That's less helpful in some respects. And there is, at the end of the day, sort of broad categories that you have to think in terms of if you're going to understand the world and especially make policy. And I think surveys especially help you to understand who those groups are and how they relate to each other, even if you don't get the kind of color that the individual conversation gives you.
Roy Bahat: Well, so let's get into it in the context of some trends that are affecting all workers. I'll just take off my moderator hat for a second and say, I'm an advocate for including some management in this conversation. And the reason I feel that is that if I think about who has aligned interests, the junior most manager in a very large corporation, I mean, I teach in Cal at the business school, and most of the people who graduate go into some job in a corporation and a very common job title for them is manager.
Even when they have zero people who they are managing. Now, some of that is, I think, specifically actions by companies to make it more difficult for them to be in unions. And some of it reflects the changing nature of the modern organization, which is that management does not necessarily mean this distant, imperious capital-owning boss.
You know, the interest of, you know, I've talked to a bunch of the Starbucks workers who organize, the store manager feels in some ways in the same bucket that the baristas are in. But not in every way. There are meaningful differences and meaningful power differences.
So that's just my one little plea for that. And so let's talk about, you know, I think everybody's kind of made the point that many of these wants are somewhat stable over time, and that makes them know worse that they're still unsatisfied, that American workers feel like they're not getting, they're following the rules of the society and not getting what they deserve. But I just want to give a minute to talk about some of what's changing.
And so, John would love to just put you on the spot for a second. Some of the trends in my mind are things like remote work, introduction of technology mediated work, artificial intelligence where we were the first investors to focus on it, so I'm happy to talk more about that, inflation and macroeconomics, but those are some of the ones on my mind. How do you think about what's changing right now for workers?
John Ahlquist: Yeah, I mean, you've already laid out a great list of things. I think the one that subsumes or touches on all of those is the pace of what's changing and the rate at which things are emerging simultaneously and in ways that feel very disconnected and remote. You add into that the upheavals we're starting to see connected to climate change and things of that nature, whether it's tornadoes blowing the roofs off of Amazon warehouses in the Midwest or fires and air quality or whatever.
Those are some of the big changes. Going back to this, how do we know what can we say and the perils and benefits of survey research? I'll give you another example trying to learn about how these changes come about across generations.
We're in the midst of this survey. We're comparing younger workers to older workers, and we're asking them about different ways in which you might have voice or influence on the job, what's more or less important to you. What we're seeing kind of unexpectedly, and we use the word voice in the survey, like having voice over wages or benefits or promotion opportunities or these types of things, and we're seeing that younger workers actually reporting that they have more voice and they perceive themselves to have more voice on many of these topics than older workers, but then when you ask them about the objective conditions of their work, scheduling instability, when their shifts were canceled, whether they have access to health insurance, their likelihood of feeling that they're going to get promoted in their current position, their jobs are worse, they're way worse.
And so, we don't have the, this is where something like a Venus strategy would be really beneficial to go and have long deep conversations to really try to tease out what do they mean by, what do they understand voice on the job to mean, and it sounds like a combination of two things. One of them is much diminished expectations about what is reasonable and appropriate to expect from your job and your employer compared to older generations of workers in the United States. And the other one is they are also much more likely to report, there's more, they're less attached to their employers.
They're more likely to say they're going to quit, and they're more likely to say they have quit over a problem at work in the last five years. And so, what they are interpreting or construing as voice may be what the rest of us, especially those of us who've read Albert Hirschman, would actually call exit. And so, how do we understand that and how is that changing?
Largely, I think, a result of the pandemic and many of the technological changes you've already outlined is, I think, really interesting and exciting and hard to wrap your head around.
Veena Dubal: John, can I ask a... I just have a question for John, a genuine question. I've noticed over the last decade or so that there is decreased use of the word power, and instead a replacement of the use of the word voice. So instead of work or power, we say work or voice. And I'm curious as to why in that survey you use that word.
Roy Bahat: John and I discussed this very point in the naming of this panel. So, you know, John, go ahead.
John Ahlquist: That’s a great prompt. And I think part of the title of the session, we used the word influence, which I think was not coincidental, and it came partly out of some of these considerations, that, you know, especially if you talk to corporate HR types, voice to them means surveys of their own workers from the perspective of management, right? Not that workers are going to have a direct influence on conditions of work that would bind or constrain.
So back to this notion of a boss, I think the thing I am willing to say we all agree on is that people may actually benefit in like direction and focal points in large scale group activities. I know I do, but what people really dislike is the arbitrary exercise of authority without any ability to discipline it. And that's what I think I mean when I talk about influence, is the ability for workers to have some ability to discipline the arbitrary exercise of authority over their day-to-day lives.
So why did we do choice? Partly because it is entering into a broader conversation that was of interest to some of the funders. Partly because we thought it did speak to this exit voice, you know, loyalty framework that we all, I think, rightly like to engage with.
But in retrospect, I think there could have been more probing in there that would have been fruitful.
Veena Dubal: I just, I want to pick up a little bit on this arbitrary exercise of power point, which I think is really beautifully put. And it relates to a point, Roy, that you stated earlier, which is about one of sort of the shifts that we're getting at in relationship to worker influence or power or voice or whatever is the use of specifically digital technology to surveil, to allocate work, to allocate wages, to analyze work, to evaluate work, to do all kinds of things. And one of the hardest things for workers in this process is the obscurity of it.
The fact that when technology is doing it, when it's done by a machine and not by a bad boss or a good boss who you could sort of engage with and have a conversation with, it feels like an arbitrary exercise of power. And I really think that this is one of the most important ways in which we need to think about increasing not just worker precarity, but real angst and dissatisfaction in the workplace.
Roy Bahat: Yeah, there's a great book by Cliff Nass, the deceased Stanford professor, that I think it's called The Man Who Lied to His Laptop. And it's about how the very same actions that come from a person versus a machine, we psychologically interpret, of course, in very different ways. And so people can be very arbitrary.
But if software is arbitrary, we relate to it very differently. And it produces anger in different ways, some of which are fair and some of which I think are unfair. But it's definitely a different kind of a transaction.
And certainly I think you use the word obscure, Veena, which I think is a really good one. And I'll just say I'm a fan of the word power. And the reason I'm a fan of the word power is because voice, some people hear something different than what the person is saying it intends.
And of course, because it's a more anodyne word, funders tend to like it a little bit more, which, you know, shame on them. But power, whether it's scary or not, I think everybody hears the same thing when we talk about worker power. And so I prefer to use the more difficult word because I think it's more straightforward.
Oren, thoughts on what's changing now that's relevant to what workers want before we move to soon talking about some of the actions that we recommend, you know, changes we think we need?
Oren Cass: Yeah, sure. I would actually jump in on the on the voice versus our issue, because I think they're obviously very different and both very important, but I think they are both important because they are different and that they meet different needs that workers have. And I think, you know, as we've been talking through some of these, you know, factors about what workers say they want, what we think that workers do want, there is a way in which I guess I would distinguish them as voice means being heard, having an opportunity to give your opinion, feel like somebody has taken you into consideration, almost in the way that, you know, in the due process sense, we require a hearing, right? And that means something even if you have no power in some governmental adjudication, whereas I think power implies that you have a conflict in interests and you want to prevail in that conflict.
And I think, you know, obviously all things equal, power is a very good thing. I think, you know, funders may not like the word power. My sense is that in a lot of cases, workers don't necessarily like the word power either and that they are not excited about the adversarialism that power tends to bring in the workplace.
And I say this because this was always one of what I found most surprising in all the research that's been done on what workers want. And this goes back to Richard Friedman's work, the book being called What Workers Want, where I think this result held steady over several decades of asking a really interesting question. Would you prefer an organization that was opposed by management but had power or that was supported by management and had no power?
And they used the word power quite directly there. And the supported or cooperative with no power was preferred like two or three to one.
Roy Bahat: What’s your hypothesis on why that was?
Oren Cass: Well, I think what I'm saying is that, you know, power as a sort of adversarial mechanism, I think in part people of all stripes, in all situations, don't tend to like it and tend to resist it and want to be in a more cooperative relationship. I also think the experience of workers to a significant degree over this time period has been that exercising that power, especially to the extent it means formal unionization, striking and so forth, doesn't necessarily actually get you what you want. I think there's a strain of skepticism that finding places where you disagree or are not happy with management and exerting your will over them is simply not desirable relative to a cooperative relationship, even if it means you get less of what you want.
And so, well, sorry, just to say one more thing, I think there's a really interesting distinction between wanting voice in the workplace and wanting power in the marketplace. And what I mean by that and saying that we do a lot of work on is just the idea that worker power in a lot of instances comes down to being needed. And whether that comes through something like organizing at the sectoral level, whether it's merely a matter of a tight labor market, being needed is an incredible source of power that actually promotes cooperation instead of adversarialism.
And so I think it's worth saying you can be for power and voice, but also recognize it's almost sort of an extension of Hirschman, right? You might need exit voice, loyalty and power to talk about the sort of different situations in which people want to use and get the positive effect of using these different tools.
Roy Bahat: Yeah, I think that we'll move into talking about some actions we might recommend in a minute. I'll just say I don't have the same adversarial read of the word power. As a business person, one thing I think about is that the threat of adversarialism and the possibility of cooperation often in partners not only frequently live side by side, but maybe have to live side by side in some cases.
That a cooperative relationship without threat of exit or power in some form can be more hollow. And at the same time, as you know, and we've talked about this a bunch, I strongly feel that we have unnecessary, in many cases, not every case, but in many cases, an unnecessarily adversarial relationship between workers and bosses where nobody gets what they want. And so I think it can be a little bit both.
And you also raised this issue of the workplace versus the marketplace, i.e. I heard you say they're the industry or the economy as a whole, which I want to make sure we talk about in the context of solutions. And then the last thing I'll just chime in in part because we got a question from the audience about AI and in particular, generative AI models that can be conversational interfaces.
And the question was, will these benefits or costs land equally across the workforce? How will they be distributed? Will the gaps between the haves and have nots widen further?
And my read on this, first of all, nobody knows, that said, I'm not sure that the current generation, despite being an active AI investor, I'm not sure that the math of how AI and the current generation of AI, generative AI plays out, is all that different from technological introductions in the past, in the sense that, yes, in general, they have made prospects more unequal, especially in the US where the rules of the game are set up in a certain way. And what I do think is very different is what John said, which is I think the pace and the word I like to use is unpredictability of change. You know, I worry much less about all the jobs being automated, because 100% of jobs will be automated over some period of time.
I worry a lot more about pinpricks where one individual occupation could wink out of existence in a year or two because of a technological development, because I think those tend to be, because they're rapid and unexpected, they tend to be a lot more destabilizing. And so I'm now going to transition us to talking about kind of the next section of our conversation, but just so we have it for a minute. You know, we talked about who we were talking about.
We talked about what people want, how we know. We talked a little bit about nobody wanting a boss, and we talked about what's changing. We didn't even get to talking about some things like political extremism, et cetera.
And now I'd like us to talk about, okay, given all this, given our agreement that there is some broad dissatisfaction, what are some of the changes that we think we need? And obviously, we all have slates of things that we care about. John, maybe I can turn to you first here and just ask, if you had to prioritize, what's at the top of your list for things that you believe we ought to be, you know, we ought to, actions we as a society or economy or country ought to take?
John Ahlquist: That’s a huge question. And I might even throw this, you know, do the ping pong maneuver to kind of throw it open to the rest of the panel as well. One of the motivations for this kind of provocative motivations behind the panel that I used to lure these great participants was the idea of, you know, should we just junk federal labor law because it's so ineffective and passe and really not doing much for anybody, but yet still not changing in a way that allows for experimentation or for the design and implementation of new things.
You know, I wouldn't necessarily subscribe to that wholeheartedly, but I think it's a question that more and more people who care about the distribution of the benefits of our economy in general, the quality of life people have, things of that nature I think are taking much more seriously because our existing rules and regulations are just so wildly outmoded. So, you know, if I'm going to kind of give a lame answer, it would be, you know, I want more ability to experiment within and across organizations and firms to enable some of, I think, Oren is right that there is a desire for collaborative relationships, but also power or another way of saying is that when you ask workers about power, I think they get nervous because they're usually the victims or the, you know, they aren't in the place to wield it. And they're fairly far removed from a world in which power is more balanced or countervailing in the language of political science.
And what you're really engaged in is a long-term bargaining relationship where there are gains from trade and there are collaborative outcomes. And there are ways in which you can introduce and build new technologies that complement your workers and the products you're trying to build and not aim at just necessarily replacing them.
**Roy Bahat:**Great. So I heard experimentation loud and clear. Veena?
Veena Dubal: Yeah. I mean, I think that to have this conversation, well, I have to first sort of, you know, push back a little bit on how Oren described the workplace as a place where sort of workers and bosses see their interests as being one or being intersecting, because I think that it is very common for workers to want to be collaborative, to want to work for their bosses, to want to make their bosses happy. I don't doubt that research. What I doubt is that it goes the other way around, which is where the adversarial relationship actually comes in.
It is very possible for an employer to voluntarily recognize a union and engage in a collaborative process, and that very, very, very infrequently happens. If you gave me a magic wand and everyone in Congress thought like I thought, I would get rid of Tapp Tartley. I wouldn't get rid of all labor law or the Wagner Act as passed in 1935, but I would get rid of all of the limitations that have been put on workers' collective activities.
If I as a consumer want to organize with my fellow consumers, there are very few laws that limit what that activity can look like. If I as a tenant want to organize with my fellow tenants, there are very few laws that limit what I can do, but workers, through federal labor law that ironically was passed to empower them and their unions to prevent the kind of criminal liability that workers in the early 20th century were facing as a result of injunctions, as a result of employer powers, as a result of police action. Ironically, those laws are now disempowering workers from engaging in secondary boycotts, the lack of protections for workers or lack of enforceable protections for workers who are organizing in their workplace are laughable.
The fact that when Google fires workers that are organizing, that all they have to do is put something up on the wall and maybe pay a small fine really speaks to how little law workers have in their corner to have voice or to have power, to have influence. And so I think that it's very clear that to grow the interests of workers and the economy, you have to enable them to do things with one another. In the same way that firms can do things with one another.
Roy Bahat: Well, firms also have a lot of limitations on their ability to do things with one another. You know, one of the barriers on sectoral approaches is antitrust in certain forms. And I think that I want, Oren, to get your opinions on this and what we might need.
It strikes me that labor law also has some very positive things for workers. For example, compelling management to bargain, which management is not compelled to bargain in the case of a consumer boycott, let's say, or a landlord doesn't have to bargain with tenants necessarily. And at the same time, my take, I speak to a lot of CEOs and investors about this issue.
I speak to a lot of labor groups and as much as I can to workers, because I feel like that's the perspective that I can least sit in myself. And so I want to listen. And I hear everybody being dissatisfied.
I hear everybody saying the law is designed for the other side. It seems to me that the absence of enforcement resources is really ridiculous, that the National Labor Relations Board's budget is roughly one-tenth the budget of the district attorney of the city of Los Angeles. Seems to me a little bit insane, but also on this adversarial nature and the experimentations.
I'm a big advocate for experimentation. I'm a startup person. I think that whether it's nonprofits or labor organizations or businesses, we get a lot out of just trying things.
And I think corporate opposition to labor is a big oxygen remover from the environment for experimentation. And I'll just say, Veena, on the point of voluntary recognition of unions, I can't tell you how many CEOs call me and they're like, I consider myself a progressive person. I would like what they may not necessarily mean politically, but they sometimes do.
I want to be in good dialogue with labor. But the first day I heard about this union campaign, they threatened me that if I didn't comply within 24 hours, they were going to start attacking me personally in social media. And so the thing about adversarial relationships is it only takes one side to be adversarial.
And then you're in an adversarial relationship and very, very hard to get out of it. And so I think the default playbooks, both for corporations and in a lot of cases for union organizing, snap to grid on adversarial interactions very rapidly. And that also makes it harder to experiment because in that kind of environment, everybody becomes more fearful and cautious and driven by what their lawyers tell them to do and that kind of thing.
But which is not to say that I don't think there is. I agree with everything else you said. Just I think that everybody bears some responsibility for getting experimental and out of this mess and not just corporations, although they often have much more power.
Veena Dubal: Yeah, I was just going to say that I think because we're in a moment where you often see unionization only in places where there is deep worker dissatisfaction because it is so hard. The fact that the ability to get to that point means that something really sort of wrong is happening, sort of makes it such that you necessarily are going to be in an adversarial situation.
Roy Bahat: Oh, yeah. And I don't judge the adversarialism. I think it's understandable in a lot of those cases. I mean, there was this line, which I don't really like, but at GE, apparently one of the management training lines was you get the union you deserve, implying if you are a bad manager, your punishment will be a union.
Now, of course, a labor organization, I don't think should be that. I think it should function differently than that, but I also understand why that happened. Oren, just want to make sure to ask you if you think about what some of the broad actions are that you believe we ought to be as a society, economy, country pursuing, what's on your list?
Oren Cass: Well, I guess I would focus in two places. One is on the labor law side, and I think I would agree more with your characterization, Roy, than Veena's about how labor law works today. I think the NLRA is a bargain in its own right that imposes various constraints on both parties, but also provides a lot of protections for workers in particular.
I think better enforcement of those is important. We were actually especially pleased. The Heritage Foundation just put out this huge compendium of the entire new conservative movement take on everything.
The labor chapter actually calls for much more aggressive use of 10-J injunctions, which is... What is that? As Veena was saying, basically, you can fire workers during organizing campaigns essentially with impunity.
And at best, they have years later maybe get their job back. Two ways to address that. One is to say, OK, you're going to have some huge punitive fine at the end of the period.
And I think that might make sense, too. But in a lot of cases, what makes more sense is what if you could just go to a federal court immediately and get an injunction that they have to put the worker back on the job right away. And that both certainly helps the worker, but I think more importantly, totally undermines the premise of firing the organizer and sort of exerting that power, because instead you get a situation where now everybody's seeing, wait a minute, actually, the organizing activity is protected.
Especially a badly acting employer can't act with impunity, and now the organizer's back. So I think there's actually a potential for a lot of consensus on addressing some of these sort of particular weak points in the way the system works. The weak point that isn't easy to address, though, is the one that you just raised, which is, frankly, the way that unions operate today.
Part of the problem with, and I use big labor, not pejoratively, but because I don't know of a better term for the major unions that represent most organized workers.
Roy Bahat: You can call them unions, major unions.
Oren Cass: Unions? Sure. I don't know, there might be some good unions out there.
I'm talking about, with respect to the major ones, you have a real problem where, as you said, their way of operating vis-a-vis, employers is certainly in a lot of cases not constructive. There's also a way that they've become, and I think are in many cases perceived by workers as largely political rather than economic actors. I think something that we should really focus on in the labor law context is just how do we open that up?
I don't think we need to go through the pain of trying to get rid of the NLRA, let's say. But one problem with the NLRA is it constrains almost any other form of organizing. And so how do we create the space to do things like works councils?
One proposal I really like is create works councils, but pair that with some form of co-determination. If you have a works council, you also put a worker on the corporate board. How do we create worker organizations that are not sort of fought for tooth and nail within a company, but are rather actual organizations of buy-in for workers that we run, including federal money, employer money, through them to provide benefits, to provide training, to do a lot of the things that I think workers want more autonomy over and can do a lot better in a lot of cases.
So I think there's a lot of opportunity there. And then just briefly, I don't know if we want to go in this direction further in this discussion, but I think it's really important, and I mentioned this briefly in the context of power generally, to keep in mind that a lot of cases, the best way to give workers more power isn't through a sort of labor law organizing mechanism, it's through a tight labor market. And I think we are seeing that to some degree right now and over the last couple of years, and very unfortunately, we have a lot of economists and others declaring this a labor shortage and an overheated market and saying we have to do something about it before anyone actually gets a raise.
And the alternative would be to say, no, this is exactly what we want, and in fact, we should push harder. And so I think, you know, that certainly employs monetary policy, it employs immigration policy. I think there's a lot that we can do if we recognize that workers being needed is, in a sense, the best thing that can be done for them.
Roy Bahat: I want to talk about all of that one category of solutions we haven't really touched on that. I want to make sure we talk about a little bit as well as the industry level solutions that a lot of times when I talk to companies and we've got this Aspen roundtable and they say, well, if I do this and my competitors don't, I'm screwed, which in some cases I think they're wrong and in some cases I think they're right. Regardless, we have some cases where the nature of the labor organization is this organized by occupation, what's sometimes called a craft union, and we see the writers all just went on strike.
They're not going on strike at Disney. They are going on strike as writers. And now part of that is because of the market structure of that industry, but similar things in building trades and in other occupations as well, where I think things work differently.
The role of a tight labor market in all of this, I guess what you're suggesting, Oren, there, is that some of the answers lie outside of traditional labor policy that are really about monetary policy in the Fed and you mentioned immigration policy as well. So, okay, I just want to make sure I heard you heard you correctly on that. Yeah, and I'll just say I'm a fan of co-determination.
I was shocked when, and this is my own naivete, when big unions opposed, the major unions opposed expanding, making it easier to do works councils. I think that, you know, the declared line was that it would, you know, sort of subvert thicker labor organizing activity to have these somewhat less powerful institutions get created. And I guess I see them all as potentially existing in an ecosystem where different places need different things.
And, you know, Veena, just one addition to what you said, I think that you're right that it takes a lot of energy to activate somebody to unionize because there are so many obstacles to it. And so therefore, they must be deeply motivated by something. And it seems like in not all of those cases, is it because the working conditions are poor in an overall economic sense?
Obviously, workers feel that way. But we have plenty of organizing at tech companies. We've had plenty of, you know, among relatively high wage workers. I mean, I had somebody who I know people in their job make half a million dollars a year, you know, talking to me about their class interest in quoting Marx. And I was like, OK, it's at least a second of thought before we, you know, dive down that conversation. And, you know, we've also seen cases where organizing happens at some of the better actors in an industry.
I mean, I don't think anybody disputes, for example, that Starbucks tends to pay more than competitors do or be more generous. And yet the workers there felt some deep sense of dissatisfaction that made them want to organize. So I guess that's my just way of saying I guess I fell in or in the trap you just mentioned, which is the it differs. It's sort of that's my it's complicated view of things.
Veena Dubal: Yeah, I would just also remind remind us that about six percent, maybe less than six percent of the private sector workforce is actually unionized. And so there's plenty of room for experimentation that can happen. You can imagine in an unionized sectors that doesn't require legal change.
What it requires is management desire to engage in these kinds of experiments. And as you said, Roy, the problem, even when you have management that is relatively progressive, is that, well, somehow this is going to make them anticompetitive. That is the underlying fear that if we build our own works council of sorts, if we put workers on the board, you know, I would argue more than one worker on the board to have any significant difference, that this is somehow going to hurt our bottom line.
And I think that that is not necessarily true, that there's a lot of good evidence in the management literature to suggest that happy workers make good firms. And so I don't know, maybe that's work you can do with your fellow VCs and just like a cultural shift, yeah, a cultural shift around, well, how can we experiment in the private sector marketplace without having to go to lawmakers to do it? There's room for that.
Roy Bahat: I mean, I think there's room, by the way. So yes, that is definitely our charge is to encourage that.
And, you know, real talk from the field. You know, we have a CEO who's part of our group who voluntarily recognized a union in part of his workforce. And he said immediately after I did that product, I did that productivity in that group fell off by 80 percent. And it's like, OK, were they just tired from the organizing? And he was pretty sanguine about it. He wasn't treating it as a big crisis. But when other CEOs hear that kind of thing, they think, oh, I better stop everything.
And so I think it's its CEOs and businesses and also labor organizations. I mean, one of the stats that stunned me was we have fewer than 20 new labor unions created in the US every year. You know, the bar to creating a new union is so high that, you know, quote unquote, independent unions like the Amazon Labor Union are truly the exception and not the rule.
And so, and, you know, last thing I just say is I agree with you more than one worker representative would be good, but even one makes a huge difference because the voice gets heard just in the context of voice, because you can't have power without voice, by the way. You can clearly have voice without power. Allows for flow of information back and forth and starts to create the muscles that build real organizations.
I mean, you know, one group that's been public about this, there's a tech startup called Honeycomb that ran an experiment for I think for a year at first and they just renewed it, I think for longer than that, but I can't remember, to have a worker elected representative on their board. And what they talked about is all the ancillary benefits that figuring out the process to elect that person brought workers closer together with one another, by the way, to your point, Veena, about how it can be good for business. It's come up a lot in their recruiting conversations.
And so that's a great example of a form of experiment that doesn't require law. And as one big union leader said to me, he said, you think we need legal change? You think the law was more conducive to unionizing in the time of Carnegie or Gould?
And it's like, okay, that's a fair point too. So I think we need lots more experimentation all around. John, you have a background that includes deep political science knowledge.
And so I'm going to ask you the, maybe, you know, as we move to our last half hour here, the seventh grader question in me, which is about how a bill becomes a law, which is to say we've all articulated different kinds of experiments we might want to see, co-determination, maybe we agree on works councils, maybe we don't, you know, we definitely, I think all agree that more enforcement of existing law is a good thing or at least different enforcement of existing law is a good thing. You know, and then there are other ideas out there like sectoral bargaining. So how do we get from here to there?
John Ahlquist: Yeah, another set of great questions. And I think one thing that is kind of bubbled up between Oren and Veena and you, we're all saying is the interlocking nature of so many things here that it's, and it can be daunting because then it feels like you have to do everything at once, and it's hard to get even, or you have to figure out the one key thing and try to push there. And I think the everything at once strategy isn't feasible or useful.
Where you can start on a particular place is tough. I think one thing that is demonstrably clear is that the US economy is extraordinarily brutal to working people and working families. And it's not just about labor law.
We see it in housing. We absolutely see it in health care. We see it in transportation.
We see it in the fact that rather than pay higher wages, in the meatpacking industry, they want to roll back child labor laws. I mean, these are the laws. You're seeing them rolled back in Arkansas. They're trying to do it in Iowa and Minnesota and other places.
Roy Bahat: You mean like nine-year-olds working in meatpacking factories?
John Ahlquist: Yeah, without parental consent or the need to go and notify educational institutions or anything. And it's not at all clear how is that going to help develop a high intensity, high technology, competitive US economy? It's not. It's divesting in the educational opportunities and the health of the next generation in the service of keeping chicken affordable in the meantime. So, you know, that... What can we do?
And I think these types of things, a safety net without so many holes, would enable things that could...
Roy Bahat: That’s why I prefer the word floor, by the way.
John Ahlquist: I also don't like holes in my floors either. And this is, you know, a long-winded way of getting to your broader point of a set of political institutions and policies undergird the ability of workers' organizations, whatever they look like, and competitive innovative firms to have mutually collaborative things where they can invest in new technologies and skills. Workers have some indication that the promises of the employer are credible and that if technology changes, they're not going to be out on the street or cast aside that there are things they can fall back on. And as a result, they're willing to, you know, reach out the hand, so to speak, and engage in a risky bargain with employers.
We don't have that, but it is possible because we see it happening in other places.
Roy Bahat: Yeah, it takes all of us patterners when the US is engaged in before. I mean, the Treaty of Detroit, which really set the template for at least modern W-2 employment, was kind of a three-way deal between government, corporations and labor unions. And so I think bringing all parties to the table feels essential.
I think the path to that is something, you know, we could talk about more of some hypotheses on that. Obviously, nobody knows or it already would have happened. All right, so any other thoughts on actions we should take before we move on to a little bit more of the how?
You know, John, you gave us this not-quite-everything bagel theory, but I'll call it the multi-sector. I'll put it that way, which is you want to see, you know, what I heard you call for is each sector has a role to play, government, business, labor, maybe there are others too. I think, by the way, the cultural sector is big in this.
Sort of what are our changing narratives around work and the role of work in our society? Oren, do you want to share a little bit about sort of, you know, you've obviously, you've got a think tank that is focused on making recommendations for government policy, and I'm just curious how you see us getting to some of those changes or other thoughts on how things might change.
Oren Cass: Yeah, sure. You know, I think the point about all of these things sort of being interrelated is true, but can also be unnecessarily intimidating. I think there always are places to start, and that making any progress, especially in this area where you're trying to mediate between conflicting interests, the process of actually starting somewhere, showing that something wasn't a disaster, maybe even made things a little better, both sides actually sort of behave the way they said they were going to, is incredibly valuable and can kind of provide the starting point that eventually builds momentum.
And so that's something that we work a lot on, not here's the 5,000-page bill that fixes American labor, but what are a few good places to start? And so a couple that I would highlight, at least I think have a lot of potential, one is to the point, Roy, you highlighted around sort of industry-level stuff and what's typically called sectoral bargaining. I actually think there's a huge opportunity here to address gig work that way. I mean, the gig economy clearly cannot be managed through an NLRA union, given the way it's organized.
Roy Bahat: Meaning because the workers are 1099 independent contractors, is that what you mean?
Oren Cass: Yes, yeah, that's right. There's no workplace, sorry, yeah, there's no workplace in which to organize and hold a vote and get where you need to go. But I think we've actually even seen the start of this sort of model in Seattle.
You know, there's nothing to stop a city or a state from saying, guess what, guys, you have two choices here. One, you know, we try and write a law like AB5 that is every way that everyone's going to hate. Or two, we invite you to come to this negotiating session. And you gig platforms come to get, you know, figure out who's coming to represent you. And here's how we're going to choose a representative for workers. And let's see if you guys can come up with something better than that.
I think that is a great place to start in terms of the sectoral model and something that you could very conceivably see, you know, a red state governor or mayor even really liking as opposed to a regulatory solution.
Roy Bahat: I do think cities and states feel like, you know, when they're not preempted by federal law, which is one of the challenges, of course, with, you know, the NLRA and otherwise, can be great places. I mean, I looked at advocating for something in California around gig work. Just to give workers the ability to communicate with everybody similarly situated to them would be a huge step up from, you know, because when you're managed by when you're when your boss is an app, you know, reaching your coworkers that where there is no workplace is an issue.
And, you know, I'll just say part of my theory of change and one of the reasons we're supporters of CASBS and otherwise is I think more scholarship and study is still needed. I mean, we all agreed that there is some broad, widespread problem for workers. John, I think you use the word brutal. When I'm out in the business world, that is not consensus. Like plenty of people still do not believe that there are huge problems afoot. And Veena, I think you've got a paper coming out with Columbia Law Review about wage discrimination. And maybe you can share more about that. But that to me is part of the theory. And maybe, Veena, you can share more about how you see change coming about.
Veena Dubal: Yeah, thanks for raising that. So I would, you know, we do have sectoral bargaining under the US enterprise system. Roy, as you articulated, the construction trades, we have it in the grocery sector, we have it in the writing sector, as we're seeing.
And what's interesting around the nascent discussions around sectoral bargaining that are happening with regard to legal changes, so they're primarily happening with regard to ride hail work and food delivery work, where workers are treated as independent contractors. And what's fascinating is that traditionally sectoral bargaining, both in the US and outside the US, happens in places where workers have a lot of power. And these are sectors where workers have no power.
And so one of the things that has happened in the Washington state example that Oren Cass was mentioning, that I should say both the president of the AFL and the president of the new Teamsters International, the new president, Sean O'Brien, vocally oppose, was that it took away the promise of a guaranteed wage floor. And so this has been a huge concern for me in my research with regard to how quote unquote, sectoral bargaining laws at the state and city level are being discussed. So this isn't true across sectors.
The wage board sectoral bargaining in California, the nail salon sectoral bargaining in New York, I think that there's really interesting promising things that could have happened or could happen in those spaces. But with right-hill work, and I should say this isn't a sector of work, it's really a segment of a larger labor market. You have other people doing very similar work who are treated like employees, even people who are apt deployed.
These folks, we're talking about particular companies who are bargaining, who are engaging in the sexual bargaining. And one of the primary compromises in these agreements is that workers have to be paid by the piece.
Roy Bahat: Meaning for a unit of work as opposed to a unit of time.
Veena Dubal: Exactly. That's well put. And so one of the things that, and this is true both in the Washington state bill, as well as a way in which Prop 22 in California really comports with the Washington state bill.
So what I do in this paper that you referenced on algorithmic wage discrimination, is I show that what firms can do with piecework in particular, is that they can create situations where using data on individualized workers, ensure that the same worker doing the same labor at the same time gets different wages. So that there's, I'm not talking about discrimination in terms of protected categories, but discrimination between individuals like with consumer price discrimination. And the problem with these sectoral bargaining are the ones that have been proffered, is that they don't address this specific issue.
So the devil is always in the details with these, with, you know, sectoral bargaining sounds great. Of course, we have multi-employer bargaining and lots of sectors under our enterprise bargaining system. And what ends up mattering is, well, what are we going to have to give up to get there?
So what does it mean for a primarily racial minority segment of a particular sector to not be guaranteed a wage for, to not be guaranteed workers' compensation, to not be guaranteed unemployment insurance, and then to agree to some sort of bargaining contest, or context in which they can only bargain over some very few limited things? Like, what does that mean for them? Is that really something that we want to, that we want to endorse to ensure that workers have more power and influence and voice?
And one of the things that some of the workers, some of the dissenting workers in the Washington state case said was that they weren't on board with this, that they had been working to organize with their workers for a really long time, and they felt like they deserved the same rights as male salon workers, as fast food workers, as low-wage workers in every other sector.
So, that’s just to say that some of these so called innovations and advancements often mean taking the rug out from underneath the most vulnerable workers in our economy. And that’s not necessarily going in the right direction.
Roy Bahat: Yeah, I mean we talked a little bit earlier about how some of these experiments might have counterproductive impacts on the very people they’re trying to support. Oren, I know it's something you've thought about a bit. And so real talk, this is to me a difficult truth is, experimentation means some of those experiments will go backward. And I'm not therefore endorsing that and saying that's okay. But I do think that we've had this environment where, and Oren, you made a comment that alluded to this, where there are some who feel all unions are bad. And that clearly isn't true. And a lot of folks I talked to in labor basically say, there's no such thing as a good boss.
And when we have that kind of tribal, if you are a member of a certain group, therefore I am institutionally opposed to you, I think it's going to make it really hard to experiment. And when I think about the major unions and about corporations, I think the role of allowing more experiments is really powerful. And by the way, when Microsoft declared neutrality, which of course they did for their own reasons, including in the context of M&A, that they're pursuing and obviously they're in a local labor market in Seattle, where Amazon and Starbucks are two of the other major employers.
So they did it for their own reasons. But that was done in collaboration with organized labor that was informative and supportive of that. And so there are even at the very highest levels, these examples of trying to stretch and build bridges where folks may not have thought that it was possible.
So I definitely believe in calling for a lot more of that, calling for a lot more storytelling. I mean, one of the things about the writers striking that I think is so interesting is Hollywood in many ways shapes the way lots of folks in America think about our country. And writers, while being grateful for their union, every single one I talk to, producers, Hollywood actors, et cetera, don't necessarily, haven't necessarily seen themselves as part of the broader struggle to figure out how to make things better for workers.
And these stories are human, they're dramatic, they're about love and loss. And so I'd love to see the cultural sector really step in. And there's been plenty of that already.
And National Domestic Workers Alliance has been an active advocate of this. And I just think more of the same would be good. So that's my one contribution to the how we get change place.
And then let me just ask them maybe for some parting thoughts before I encourage folks to follow our panelists. And John, I'll start with you since you brought us all together. Any things you want to make sure we leave this conversation aware of?
John Ahlquist: Sure. Let me think about at least two, possibly three. And the first one broadly, especially with regards to the rapid change you've already mentioned and experimentation. And it's very easy and I fall into this myself to be negative or pessimistic or upset. But there's extraordinary opportunities around here. And so we talked about AB5 and I thought AB5 was a big missed opportunity trying to solve a very clear and demonstrable problem by really trying to force things back into a set of categories that were emerging from a vastly different economy and historical moment rather than trying to build new categories and ways of thinking about things.
I mean, so that's one. The other one is the real hard moment that we're facing is how can we find points of where's the deal space politically between the major political actors, whether it's at the state or the federal or whatever government level? How can it be seen that a compromise here that takes advantage of many of the things Oren has highlighted is one that will be taken up by a segment of our political elite that basically refuses to bargain and also not shut down by the other big part of the political elite that sees anything that isn't a total reworking of our system as a failure.
The way the kind of politicalization of unions has happened in other countries is you typically have multiple parties where unions can work with and not or be multiple unions can be aligned with multiple parties or unions can work with a variety of different parties. What we've ended up with in the United States is one where a whole set of interests is housed in one party very imperfectly and opposed in its entirety with no ability to compromise or bargain by the other. And that breaking that logjam in labor as in so many other issues like climate, reproductive health rights and a variety of others is just so important.
And all the narrative strategies and whatever else that we can try to throw at that problem will be important.
Roy Bahat: Amen. I mean, I think that that dialogue is essential. I remember LaborNotes has a training called What to Do When the Union Breaks Your Heart. And it just reminds me that compromise is hard for everybody. These organizations are not monoliths. We all have to stretch.
Veena, final thoughts?
Veena Dubal: Yeah, I would say that three things. One, I think that the way that employment rights are talked about politically actually don't comport with the history of employment rights or how they actually function. So these rights, most of which were passed individually, correspond to human need, right?
So one of the things that the ABC test, which is not just in place in California, but has long been in place in Massachusetts and DC and any number of other states with regard to different rights did was to, which is the 85 law that John and Oren are referencing, was an effort to get out what David Wallace called the fissured workplace. So franchise associations, subcontracting associations, all these different sort of business associations in which firms by contract have attempted to slough off labor costs and legal risks and liabilities. So one of the things that 85 had attempted to do was to sort of get at this sort of activity, at the sloughing off and to sort of make clear that franchisees, firms that were subcontracting, et cetera, that these folks were what Wilde calls the central entity and actually held lots of responsibility in that sense
And so rather than understanding 85 as a mispolitical opportunity, I think the real miss here is that it hasn't been effectively enforced against these sort of actors in the economy. So one thing I would say is that we should really grow employment rights and not limit them. The second thing I would say is that I think there needs to be a lot of attention paid to the way data is being extracted from workers, particularly workers in low wage sectors and how that data is being used to affect their wages, their working conditions, not just at particular firms, but actually across firms, which is something that I'm very concerned about that's happening.
And then the third thing I would say, again, in my bucket list of things I'd like to see is actually not a focus on restructuring labor law from the perspective of what unions look like, but actually restructuring labor law with regard to what workers can actually do to build their own democratic institutions that grow the power that they have in the economy and in the workplace.
Roy Bahat: I love that re-anchoring and what individual workers want, because it's easy to remember that there are always going to be principal agent differences, you know, even with with representative organizations. Oren, final thoughts before we wrap?
Oren Cass: Yeah, sure. Just two and maybe they're related. One is, you know, I was a little surprised to hear Veena sort of objection to or criticism to the Washington deal and legislation with Uber and Lyft and so forth, because I think it speaks to an important point, which is that when you actually have the parties at the table and negotiating, you're not necessarily going to like the outcome.
And I think we sometimes confuse sort of means and ends and think that if we have the kind of power representation for workers that we want, we'll also get, therefore, the set of outcomes that we like, but that's not necessarily the case. And so I think whether you have a traditional union or sectoral bargaining or anything else, you're always going to have a large segment of workers that aren't happy with the deal. Part of the upside or downside of unionization or any form of worker organizing is that sort of majority rules.
And so I think if we want to push further in this direction, it means accepting that we are going to get these outcomes and not just that experiments are going to lead to a range of outcomes we don't like, but that even if we don't like them, that doesn't mean that the experiment was a failure. Sort of subpoint of that that I just had that I think is really important to think about is, you know, I think the exit polls in the 2020 election showed that Biden won union workers 56-40. But that of course includes all public sector union workers as well.
I think it's probably safe to assume that Trump won the majority of private sector union workers or union households. And so that's a descriptive statement, not a normative statement. But I think it again speaks to the fact that what a activist organized set of work organizations that were truly representing representing workers interests look like may not look anything like the priorities that the progressive movement has has traditionally had for it.
And then I think the last thing I would just say is I it's really important, I think always to remember that what worker organizing or power can accomplish or influence can be significant, but it is also to some degree going to be marginal. That is that the true factors that are going to drive outcomes in labor markets and in the economy are going to be a wide range of economic policies, the types of businesses that are getting built, the types of productivity gains we're getting for workers, the tightness of the labor market. And we can't expect labor to sort of countervail all of those other things if they're going in the wrong direction.
But I do, it can be, I think, a really powerful piece of the puzzle when we're moving in the right direction broadly.
Roy Bahat: Great reminder from the very micro to what do individual workers want politically, legally and otherwise to the very macro that there are factors outside of the sphere of traditional, call it labor work, that obviously affect workers deeply. So I've got some of those notes on what we've said about some of the paths, different sectors, you know, on my plea for more scholarship because things are brutal. We talked about some of the experiments, we didn't even get to talk about fast food legislation in California, which is another major area for this, the role of the big institutions and allowing more experiments and then the surprising effects of those experiments and the need for change in culture, both leadership culture and mass media culture.
So thank you all for a conversation that definitely hit our goals and which is to say, get deeper across occupational and belief differences. And then I just say every single person here is active in this conversation and other fora. And so please look up our panelists in all the places where they share their writing, their thinking, their advocacy, John, Veena and Oren, thank you.
And again, I want to thank our co-sponsors, the Hewlett Foundation, the Cowie Center on Global Transformation at UCSD and the Center for Commerce and Diplomacy at UCSD. And again, thank you all for all the work that you do as individuals for being willing to lend some of your time and John bringing us all together. Thanks everybody.
Narrator: That was John Ahlquist, Roy Bahat, Oren Cass and Veena Dubal discussing new visions for effective worker influence. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.