The Great Transformation

Brown University economist Mark Blyth sets the stage for Season 6 of "On The Job" by telling the story of how we got where we are today. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're focusing on
how people and businesses are getting back to work. Let's
call it a great transformation, a change in the way
workers are thinking. Employers need people to work more than ever,
putting laborers in a sort of position of power. We'll
be hearing from people navigating this new normal for themselves
as they find their life's work. It's season six of

(00:31):
On the Job, and the job market itself is a
lot different than it was a few years ago. COVID
has shaken up the world, put a lot of people
out of work, inspired others to pursue their passions, and
has become a new normal that everyone is trying to
get used to. The job market is messy, it's gone
through a lot of changes, and it is right with potential.
So before we launch into the rest of the season,
where we'll talk to people working within that new environment,

(00:53):
we're going to start off by setting the stage. Hello, sir,
welcome to On the Job. If you could please introduce
yourself sure. My name is Mark Blythe I am the
head of the Klingon Invasion Force. No. I'm a professor
of political economy at Brown University and UH sometime rock

(01:16):
on tour and musician. So there'll we go. Mark Blythe
is from Dundee, Scotland. He's been teaching at Brown since
two thousand nine. He's written a lot of books on
the economy. And he's talking to me from a room
full of bass guitars and drums, which he's been playing
a lot during the lockdown. Okay, let's do it baby, Okay,
Mark Blythe. The job market is a lot different now

(01:37):
than it was even a few years ago. From an
economist political scientists point of view. How did we get
to where we are right now? How far back do
you want to go? Okay, So, for our purposes, we're
gonna tell an incredibly abbreviated story of today's economy. Starting
around fifty years ago, in in one, one and five

(02:01):
jobs was in the auto industry, and one in three
jobs was in similar industries like steel manufacturing, making electric motors,
so making things, manufacturing, engineering, and a lot of those
jobs are unionized. Then we get into the nineteen eightiesies,
those unions that were helping workers maintain fair pay and
weekends start to diminish. Employers and big companies start gaining

(02:24):
more power as the economy globalizes. You start to see
the growth of um finance and real estate and all
the sort of high end services to come out of
the eighties and the nineties, the Wall Street moment in
New York. You begin to see sort of the beginnings
of the real beginnings of Silicon Valley in the tech industry.
And then you start to get the growth of the
coasts and the fantastic wealth it's accumulated there. So the

(02:46):
bulk of the economy moves away from things like coal
and factory jobs in the middle of the country hence
the name russ Bell. Unions continue to fall apart through
the nineties and the two thousand's kind of flatlining or
decreasing wages across the board for most of America. Where
was the job market at in two thousand nineteen going
into the pandemic. Largest employee in the United States is Walmart,

(03:10):
big box, retail, loan services, hospitality, fast food. Basically, you know,
make jobs and a sense is about one thought of
the labor market. Mark says, Basically, the U. S economy
was fueled by US making stuff, and now it's an
economy fueled by US buying stuff. Basically, eight of the

(03:30):
economy is driven by consumption. Okay, so all those strip
malls that you see if you're drive across America, so
that's where people are working. That's where people are working.
And most of these places are run by big corporations
that can set wages without those pesky unions pushing back. Essentially,
today more people are working for less people. So what

(03:50):
we've done is we've created an economy is really simple
to understand. There's the top, and that's where all the
returns have gone. That's where all the money has been made.
So let's bring this up to the present. What does
it look like going at the pandemic half of the
American labor market gets twenty an hour or less. Really
hard to do the American dream on twenty bucks an

(04:11):
hour or less. COVID hits. What immediately happens in the workforce?
Everybody went home. It was very weird. March two thousand nine,
people around the world start getting sent home from work,
which meant less stuff was getting made. Less people were

(04:32):
working and earning wages, but the demand for stuff was
still there. And as we are now an economy that
runs on consumption buying stuff, the government needed to send
stimulus checks out to make sure people could still purchase
things to keep the economy going, and it was whether
one likes or not, the right thing to do, because
the alternative would have been the largest contraction of the

(04:53):
economy since records begun, which probably would have been worse
than nodding ten percent on the national debt. People went
home for a while, collected checks, and then began to
come back as we sort of started to get a
handle on the pandemic. As far as unemployment goes, it
was more that people got furloughed, So COVID technically put
less people out of a job than you might think.

(05:14):
But what it did do was two things. Number One,
because of COVID, a lot of women who were in
the workforce, particularly if there were part time workers and
services suddenly had to do child kill. Schools were shutting
down off and on all the time, so pretty quickly
someone had to be home with the kids. Right, So
if you were running a diner and you had three
women working for you and they had kids, you're not

(05:36):
get an MBAK, right, that's done. Second big thing, a
lot of older couples boomer age, you know, right before
they were about to retire. They got put out of work,
and they were looking at their pretty healthy four oh
one ks and thought, right, gladys were done right. You know,
there's no point in going back now is ridiculous. So
they began to actually leave it. So what you had
is a drop in the overall labor force participation right right?

(05:59):
How many people are actually in the labor market that
began to draw. I know Mark said that there were
two things, but there's a third thing. It's a big one.
People finally had perspective at home, looking at the Mike
jobs that they've been working, and started thinking, you know what,
I kind of normalized abuse. I kind of normalized being
shouted out and swore for like seven dollars an hour,

(06:22):
and I'm just not going to do that anymore. And
while employers are very reluctant to do this, the only
way to keep those workers or to get them back
was to raise wages. So if you think, you know,
Amazon used to do about twelve bucks an hour, I think, uh,
now sort of there are minimums about fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Uh.
There's a gas station down the road from me. It's
a local company. Whatever you're pumping up the gas station.

(06:44):
It's like we're hiring seventeen an hour and benefits, right.
So there's a way in which when you get that
big supply shock, that aren't enough workers and people have said,
you know, enough of this crop. I don't want to
be treated like crop anymore. You're gonna have to change
the game. So that's what's happening. The game has changed,

(07:04):
is transforming in a big way. And I know there's
this term that's been kicking around, the Great resignation, basically
this grand exodus of people leaving the workforce during COVID
and just not coming back. Now here's the funny thing.
It tons really looks like we massively overestimated how many
people had quite I know, we're massively underestimate how many

(07:28):
people are coming back to work. So it looks like
there hasn't really beaten this giant quote phone. After all,
Mark says, economists work with estimates and over time they
get more accurate. So have people just disappeared from the workforce.
Probably not. So instead of calling it the Great resignation,
We're going to call it a great transformation, a change

(07:50):
in the way workers are thinking because now they are
needed in a pretty extreme way. Employers need people to
work more than ever, putting labors in a sort of
position of power, and everyone's hiring. So employers that weren't
valuing their employees have had a serious wake up call, like, well,
what do you mean I can just pay somebody the
minimum wage anymore and abuse them while that it work? Yeah,

(08:12):
it looks like those days are done as well. I'm
afraid because if you can get seventeen or eighteen Amazon
on a kind of flexible basis and then complement out
with Uber, then essentially I'm getting up to about six
Why do I need to take you a minimum wage book?
Another big transformation which shouldn't come as a surprise, more
people are getting to work from home. A lot of

(08:34):
employees and employers have asked themselves, do we really need
to be in a crowded office to do this paying
for rent and air conditioning and all that. Probably not,
But there's real reasons to be in the office even
in these jobs, because how do you do mentoring, how
do you do team building? How do you decide where
the talent should be allocated if basically everybody's on the screen.

(08:55):
This is why a lot of jobs are now what
we call hybrid, meaning you can work from home some
days but also have a place to go into work
on others. And while working from home has given a
lot of people the freedom to be with their families
or just have a more comfortable work environment, it's also
made people realize everything else that comes with going to

(09:15):
a job every day. It's about your social networks. It's
about going out for a drink on a Friday night
with your colleague that you happened to like so you
can about the one you hate, right, I mean, that's
that's part of what the whole experience says. The thing
about the job, and we forget this, it's about much
more than wages. We'll be right back after the break.

(09:40):
A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done,
sweats over the details. This is the kind of person
you need. Express Employment professionals can help. Finding the best
people requires more than sorting through applications. You need to
conduct a thorough search. Express understands what it takes to

(10:02):
hire the right person. It takes real people, real interviews,
discovering the talents you need. We find good people matching
their skills with the right jobs. At Express, we find
people for jobs and companies of all sizes and industries,
from the production floor to the front office. Sometimes finding

(10:25):
the best new employee really is about who you know.
Express Nose Jobs. Get to know Express, go to Express
pros dot com to find a location near you. As
we continue our conversation with economists and political scientists, Mark
blythe we're gonna dive a little deeper into this great

(10:46):
transformation we're seeing in the workforce. Mark is quick to
say that, yes, the changes we're going through right now
do seem drastic, but that's kind of how it's always happened.
The figure is something and this is just an approximation,
but it's someone like a third of all jobs have
disappeared every ten years. I mean it's remarkable, like so
over a thirty year period or something like that, Like

(11:06):
literally no jobs that were thirty years ago here. Now
that's obviously an exaggeration, but there's a huge amount of
charming and reinvention. Think about the entire technology of the internet.
I mean it was only twenty years ago, like nobody
knew what a website was. This generational shift, the new
face of the job market, young people getting into the workforce.

(11:28):
Mark says there are a lot different than other generations.
They're no longer coming at a college, even the ones
that I know and saying I'm going to Wall Street
and I'm going to smash it. It's just not that.
It's just not And for a while it was big
tech until it became big tech evil big tech, and
now that's that's a bit of a problem, right. Another motivation,

(11:49):
he says, this new generation is acutely aware of the
climate crisis, living in a world where they here Miami
will be underwater by and that we're doing irreparable damn
to the earth. If you really have that kind of
like existential fear that everything is totally screwed anyway, then
you know, why are you going to bust your last
eight hours a week for the man It's just not

(12:10):
gonna happen, right, So I think there's a fair degree
of trading off what would have been seen as the
normal path of like struggling and struggling to make very
very high income, because that's what you do to a
model of I want to do something that doesn't make
things worse and actually has a degree of self satisfaction

(12:31):
for me. Mark says, if you ask executives at oil companies,
mining companies, engineering companies, as far as carbon emissions and
damage to the Earth is concerned. They know the finger
is pointed at them, and it's become a lot harder
to get people to work for them. It's no longer
just about the money because they've got a bad reputation

(12:52):
and people they've got a bad rap. Yeah. I spoke
to the CEO of a very very big carbon intensive
firm who's you know, taking the green stuff and all
the rest of it, very very seriously, and I said,
you know, why are you doing this? And he says,
because my own family think I'm a Bostard. That's a
powerful motivator. That's so crazy. Um, I feel like that's

(13:15):
such a huge shift. That is a huge shift. That
really is a huge shift. Right. He told me another
story about a guy in Florida, a billionaire in his eighties.
He makes millions of dollars every day on the stock market.
He chased the American dream and he got it. Well.
This guy went and gave a lecture to students at
a Miami university about how he got to where he

(13:36):
is and they're just appalled by this guy. Everything that
he thought was what you do. They're just like, why
would you want to do that? That sounds grotesque. Why
don't you just retire? Why do you spend? Why do
you give your money away? You're never going to spend it.
It's really interesting, just this very different set of perspectives.

(13:57):
People obviously still care about money. People need to and
want to work for a living. But between the climate
changing and the pretty frequent threat of nuclear wars and
COVID throwing all of our values into question, there's a
way in which people listening you know, well, what's the
means and what's the end? Right? The whole point of
work is to enable you to take time off. I

(14:19):
mean this is eqon one oh one. Right. We presume
that you trade leisure for labor because labor enables you
to have more leisure, right, But we don't. For years
and years, we did the exact opposite of what the
text book tells you. We just worked more and more.
He says. At some point, time and hours put in
during the day became directly translated into productivity, and the

(14:43):
more hours we can slog away at work every day,
the more productive we are and the more self worth
we have. Because of it, and for employers, breaks and
time off for their workers stopped becoming an important part
of the equation. The assumption was if you give them
any freedom at all, the slock off and you end
up with these horror stories of people that work in
check in factories being told to buy their own adult

(15:04):
diapers because they get toilet brakes, which actually happens, right. Uh,
And just basically getting to a point where going how
did we get there? I was not normalized. When did
that become? Okay? Right? Like, we started working for the weekend,
but then we're working through the weekend. Yes, that's exactly.
It's a brilliant to put out exactly. Yeah, the labor
movement brought you the weekend, and you gave it away.

(15:30):
This is the beauty of those hybrid jobs we talked
about earlier, where you can work from home some days
but still have an office you can go to. Before
employers might think there is no way people would get
their work done with that much freedom, turns out they
were wrong. One of the things that I discovered you
can do with hybrid workers. You can walk the dog
at better times. It's nice walking the dog twice a

(15:51):
day gets you out of the house. It actually makes
you more productive. Okay, so do you think the weekends
coming back or or do you think we're gonna have
a three day weekend. Well, here's the interesting thing, right,
did you hear about Iceland in the four day week?
They put the whole Iceland in a four day week
and everybody took a long you know, essentially a long weekend.

(16:12):
Product everyone up across every sector, every single sector was
more productive. They got the same output plus and everybody
got an extra day off. Wow wow. So so yeah,
this this new mentality in the job market, and not
just for younger generations. Everyone who's going back to work
right now. Um, money is obviously still the point of working,

(16:37):
but it's maybe less of the point, yeah, which means
they're going to volue different things. They're going to value
things like time rather than cash. This is the new
wave that is washing over the workforce. This is at
the heart of what we're gonna call a great transformation.

(16:59):
The way we were has always changed. The industries people
working have also always changed and will continue to do so.
But what has been consistent, at least in the US,
is the hustle mentality. It's always been there. You know
if you're not working someone else's and they're going to
get ahead of you, so you better get back to it. Well,
Marcus saying is that people still really want to work.

(17:22):
We're human, that's what we do. It gives us purpose,
but today maybe it's less and less the dominant purpose.
What advice would you give to someone who's entering or
re entering the workforce in the new world, That is,
explore the space and and be clear about what your

(17:43):
goals are. Right, where do you want to be in
five years, by which I mean is money really important
to you? Because if it is, there are certain sectors
where you can make an obsolete ton of money, and
you know baking isn't one of them. But if, on
the other hand, like you really like brioche and you
like working with your on, then there's a tradeoff, right,
So be aware of the trade offs and make the

(18:03):
trade off accordingly. Other advice, he says, you don't need
to go into crazy debt going to school. If you
aren't sure what you want to do after, go learn
on the job or jeesus, if you're interested in something technical,
go learn off YouTube. Curious about coding, take an online
class and see if you like it. Explore the space.

(18:24):
I mean in crazy. Amazing thing about capitalism is it
creates all these different opportunities for doing stuff. Explore it,
try it. There's so much stuff you can do. So
this season, that's what we're gonna do. Explore and hear
from people within the transformation who are changing jobs, changing

(18:45):
the way that they've always done their job, and thinking
about the world differently. People who are working in a
seemingly uncertain world where anything can happen, and exploring the
space despite it all. So, as a political scientist economists
are you? Are you hopeful for the future? Yeah? Absolutely. Um,

(19:06):
we've been doing this for a couple of hundred years
and we're stole around and fast. There's more of us
than over, so that's usually a sign that we're not
screwing up completely. Thank you for listening for On the Job.
I'm Otis Gray. Mark has actually written a book called

(19:27):
Great Transformations, and you can find that and his many
other books on Amazon dot com. We'll also put a
link for it in the description of the show. On
the Job is written and produced by me Otis Gray.
Our executive producer is Sandy Smallens, with mixing by Matt
Noble at the Loft Recording Studios in Bronxville, New York.
Music for this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.