Behind the Scenes of Global Labor: Asia and America

With us today is John Russo , who is a visiting scholar at Georgetown University and a specialist in analyzing the working poor and middle-class employment . Author of Steel Town , usa . Work and Memory all about Youngstown and Rob Kepp . Rob is the executive director of Chapman's Asia-Pacific Geoeconomics and Business Initiative . He is an expert on China .

He ran the Economist's Executive Network in East Asia . Gentlemen , welcome .

John can address what's happening here , but is that happening in Asia ? We always think of Asia as a bunch of workaholics .

I think by and large we could maybe debate that and be interested in John's thoughts as well . But what's going on in Asia is fundamentally different . They're not having babies .

It first began in Japan , but then we've now seen it in South Korea , even Taiwan , which is the better version of mainland China democracy and freedom and all that , but still a Chinese society . Even there they're suffering through this .

But China is really taking it on the chin because of their draconian population control policies coupled with what's now a stagnating economy and stifling political environment . So it's the same but different .

But yeah , so I mean , but to me , when you think of that lying flat as opposed to quiet quitting , to me quiet quitting is like I'm going to do something more interesting . It reminds me of the sitcom Was it Portlandia ? Or , like you know , or 20-somethings go to retire . You know that Portland is .

But I mean , but the idea , but the skit was always about , you know , they would go to Portland and do something . It wasn't giving up on life , it was just thinking , like you know , take this job and shove it . To bring up another musical analogy there . Whereas tongping , that's like Taoist monk type , you know , retreat into a cave and meditate .

That's just getting out of society , which , by the way , as that reference brings up , I mean , there's a historical analogy there . But typically when you see that happen throughout Chinese history , that's when people have really thought I can't take this anymore , I'm getting out of society . So it's a little bit different .

I think what we see in the West is younger people wanting a better kind of life , and so it's aspirational , whereas in China it has the ring of hopelessness .

I would say the same thing with this kind of voluntary , you know , childless couples , or just men and women , particularly on the female side , females in Asia just not wanting to get married and have children . They're rejecting what's expected of them at all . And then , on top of that , one other thing I'll just throw in is , of course , the US .

I mean , it doesn't matter if white people , what about if white folks stop having kids ? We've got immigration , and it scares the magos of the nation because they think of it as replacement theory . But it's a phenomenon because we are a nation of immigrants .

Even younger people are not coming in to fill in those jobs because maybe they don't want them . I mean , it's always interesting .

I don't know it's the same for you guys , tabin , but at Youngstone State you have a lot of ex-steal workers , ex-auto workers , trying to get retrained , re-skilled and then when they finished there wasn't any jobs out there that paid anywhere near the amount of money that they were making .

And I saw and met a lot of them over the years and I was there for 40 years is that they just gave up or they got involved in their hobbies cars and things like that . There was no hope for them , because you get to be 45 and 50 and you've lost your job . You're not going to reskill real quick . So you've got that generation .

So that's one particular , you know problem . But I think the pandemic really exacerbated all that . And the thing that during the pandemic that people don't acknowledge , and I think is the expansion of technological innovation and displacement . And so what is the future of work ?

That's the that , that's the question I'm sort of asking is you know what are the future of work and what will be the arrangements ?

I've got to , you know , have some obligation , and it may be uncomfortable , may not be the perfect thing , but I've got to start somewhere . It seems that that very notion is actually eroding . Right , you could live in your parents' basement , you can .

You know , I mean the , the impetus to actually take the bull by the horns and participate in society from an obligation , obligatory perspective . Right , I've got to survive . That seems to be eroding on both sides of the Pacific .

Is this something , john , that you hear , and is there also something that you're hearing in China ?

And so I think , as we discuss this , as the changes in the modes , in the means of production Joel , you know the term and you know and how that all sort of plays out in this rapidly changing world , and what does it mean to younger people ?

I mean a lot of my students , and again , I don't know the students at Chapman , but for many years you know the idea .

They were the sons and daughters of steel workers and auto workers and hospital workers , and they came through the workforce and they were going to do something , they were going to be skilled and get a better job , but those jobs never appeared , and so there's a great disillusionment about the future of work .

Because this is where I see the problems is that increasingly , people can either say screw it , I'm going to just get out of society as we know it , and we're not going to , we're just going to get by , taking precarious jobs , one job to another , in order to survive , because I think precarity is no longer just the first five years out of college .

It is 40% of the workforce , according to recent studies is , you know , has precarious work . So , and precarious work isn't all bad there's just some of it is but there's changes that are going on in terms of work and how much work there will be available .

Right , and so the whole notion that we used to have , which is , hey , I'll bring you along and you'll progress within my organization if I'm the employer , is now kind of like well , I can use you as long as I need you and I have no obligation to continue to use you afterwards .

And also , do Chinese companies feel any more obligation than American companies to provide a future for their employees ?

So Kitsui would be like Lopez , kitanae , dirty Kiken , dangerous so any of those jobs you know it's like they just stayed away from . So there it's more like a kind of voluntary unemployment . Right In China , I mean , the latest statistics for June of this year is 21.3% youth unemployment , that's for ages 16 to 24 .

And then the government said we're not going to continue to report this . The statistic was so embarrassing . So what I've heard about that is you've got the college graduates who are actually interested in joining the workforce . But then to your question there , joel , about what are the employers offering . The employers tell them well , it's a 996 .

So that's the infamous yeah , it sounds like John knows about that 996 system . Is , you know , a thing of the past ? That's like you know early 20th century .

Yeah , it's 9 to 9 , six days a week , 9am to 9pm , six days a week , and the pay is like you know , we complain about millennials in the States , but these are jobs that don't even pay what the World Bank would consider middle income .

But you know he came out saying like a grumpy grandpa when he said you know , young people need to buckle down and work harder . I mean , that's what's going wrong .

But Alibaba is famous , just like Amazon under Bezos Again a celebrated entrepreneur but these guys are not known for really providing hospitable , very important , very you know , personally rewarding work opportunities . So I think that's also part of the problem . It's even in tech .

But you're right , joel I mean , of course , if you're in a more , if you can't get into Alibaba or one of the big tech companies which at least has more prestige and glamour associated with it for the vast majority I mean everywhere in the world you know most employers are smaller companies and they're not necessarily big names it can be even rougher because they

just don't have the same resources .

I've taught labor law for 40 years and I regularly said it's the worst labor law in the industrialized world . It is terribly employer . It was not employee-friendly and makes it very difficult to organize . And that's the history of it . That's exactly what happened . We came out of the Depression .

You had a relatively good labor law , half-heartedly came in and after that it was other than the major industries that were very much related to the war effort . We didn't have many strong unions and then the public sector unions became the important part of the labor movement . Industrial unions were weakened increasingly by offshoring .

I think it's a very difficult time for the labor movement . I am a labor person . You can see my side looking the back UAW signed in the back . I was the UAW . My first job was the UAW as an auto worker . I think the American labor movement is trying to do things better .

There are improvements going on , but being here in DC and being around the international union headquarters and the people and Donald George , donald Macalmonevich is very close ties with the labor movement . I think it's privately . We say it's okay but it's still not very strong .

I think increasingly , with the changes in employment where you get more precarious employment hard-time employment , contingent employment those workers are very difficult to organize and to keep in a union . That's the whole question of Starbucks and trying to organize them . It's easier to organize the Amazon but there's a lot of resistance .

But you get into these types of work organizations that are precarious , it becomes very difficult .

It sounds like there's underpinning here of I don't want your stinking overlord stuff . Joel , what's your sense of this ?

Even this particular discussion is going on all over the place with employers , Wall Street Journal . Everybody started talking about what's wrong with these young people . They don't want to work . What's wrong with them , which has a familiar tone to it ? Or for the old bus that are old enough and grew up in the 60s .

It's a critique that doesn't understand exactly what is happening in terms of the changes of employment and work in the future of work . It does , it does . It just condemns the employees or the workers , or the kids or the young people .

What do you do when your people are basically saying I don't want to do 996 .

Germany , by the way , does this excellently . It had some other problems , whether we're talking modern history or recent economic policies , but in terms of workforce and this whole thing about management-labor relations I mean all my experiences with Germany is I'm just blown away .

Also , before answering the question directly , to just pick up on feudalism , it's very interesting in China they still struggle with that notion . So the average Chinese talks about this all the time because they look at Xi .

In fact they look at the whole Chinese government , even before Xi , and it's not referred to as a communist government like we do , which is an accurate appraisal of what is essentially a Leninist state , capitalist system in China .

But they call it Wangchao , which means you know , the Empire , the imperial court , and they always refer to China having Fengjian Shihui , which actually is readopted from a Japanese version of a Chinese concept , but it means literally feudal society .

So the Chinese consider themselves as much constrained by their history and in civilizational culture as they do by specific policies Now getting towards you know , kind of what is Xi doing about this and what is the ruling dynasty , if you want to call it that or party , the CCP , chinese Communist Party doing .

They've actually I mean to me taken exactly the wrong tact . So just real , quickly , three parts One , because it's a general policy too , because there are gender specific kind of attitudes at least .

So the policy goes back about 10 years to infamous document nine , which was announced during National People's Congress , secretly , never revealed to the public , but then leaked , and this basically said look , we're going to prohibit civil society , we're going to clamp down on any form of dissent , we're going to control the media beyond how we've already been controlling

it and we're going to reject Western values . Oh , and also there's this campaign against what they call historical nihilism , which is basically historical reflection , like acknowledging the mistakes of the past to do something better for the future .

So China kind of , along with Xi's whole range of policies , is trying to work against the tide of history , which is fundamentally problematic Now in terms of what that means to the youth . When you start saying , reject Western values , that kind of means don't modernize .

And so they have been trying to inculcate these Confucian values , this nationalistic agenda , which they do have some followers . This is the interesting thing .

Just like to use a negative example from Germany , nazi youth was a thing and you could get a whole society behind an awful , fundamentally inhumane set of policies , because you did target the youth in many ways . But what China's done , instead of trying to kind of bring them into the fold which it does in a way but it's gone after two gender identities .

So one is that we heard a lot more about recently but this is a big part of that tongue-picking line flat and checking out and that is they first went after women with the notion of leftover women , sheng niu , leftover women .

So there was women like if you're not married and getting pregnant by the age of 28 , you're like an old maid kind of thing , which is just bizarre , along with not acknowledging a woman's ability to create a career With that . If you're supposed to both develop your career and be this matriarch before the age of 30 , it's kind of the impossible ask here .

And so that's what you see . In more modern societies , according to our contemporary definitions , women have children later or they can even look at other options , but in China the whole thing was a backlash against women trying to have a life outside the family . So that was one thing . The gender-specific clampdown that was anti-youth was . This is what I love .

It's niang pao , this hostility towards niang pao . And niang pao we translate in English as sissy boy , and so it was like the BTS types . So if you were , and well , we've celebrated that right .

So everything from what Led Zeppelin represented , with this kind of feminine masculinity of the rock stars of the 70s , to David Beckham and the metrosexual , the kind of Asian version of that came from K-pop and these sort of beautified boys or boyish-looking male actors and singers .

Anyway , there was actually an active campaign , politically run campaign against that in China . So just tying . I know there's a lot of big topics , but I'm trying to show that there's a fundamental disconnect between an older generation and the young generation , and the older generation , knowingly or not , has kind of made the future generation its enemy .

And this goes beyond what we saw during the anti-war protests of the 60s and 70s and that kind of rift in society which was ultimately healed through natural processes .

China has made it political dissent or any sort of social voicing of opinion if it in any way infringes on what the Communist Party considers its rights , which it's now , since document nine said , is everything . You really made it attractive , put it that way .

You take religion , which is very prominent in American work history is declining . Okay , it's not just the Protestant work ethic , it's Catholic work , jewish work history .

I mean , it's everywhere , and I think that so modernization , as it's popularly called , has I want to try to put it in kind of the words that Rob did it influenced the conceptualization of work and grounded in perfection that used to be in the goodness of labor and the necessity of hard work .

I think that's kind of what Rob was saying about what's happened in China , but that's the sort of American experience . But it's obviously led to a real political crisis that's going on between generations , which always there's some of it , always has happened . I remember my dad telling the 60s John that you guys just don't know what hard work is .

You know , here's a man who came out of the Depression , worked damn hard , and so there is that sort of tension between the various ages .

You know where it's really just about you . It isn't about anybody else , it's just about you . And , incidentally , if you happen to help other people , well fine , but it doesn't really matter . And I wonder whether this is really what's taken over from a value perspective both in the US and in China .

Okay , these people who are telling us we don't work hard enough , we got to work harder . What do they do for a living ? You know , where do they work , where do they live , you know , and there's a it's not , it is a resentment , and I think that is continuing to simmer underneath this and I think it's sort of shaped politics as we know it today .

It's not necessarily the way people like myself or of the left would have wanted it , but it's certainly part of the right that you talk to the MAGA people and they are . They don't like Wall Street , they don't like business corporations . They all want to be freed from that system . It's kind of hard to think about that . And who ? You know ?

That sort of simmering resentment turns not just the employer but the woke generation , us . You know what do we do for a living ? You're a word merchant , you know . You're out there , you know what do you do with your hands , or what do you ? There's a real is this class resentment . I mean leaving Youngstown and going back to it and hearing that and watch .

You know , until I notice my sort of background . Youngstown was the major Democratic stronghold in Ohio . That's it . This is all Republican now . I didn't see any signs other than Trump signs . This is a year before the election .

You know China , the US , and in a similar fashion , it's maybe more pronounced in the US because Trump is obviously , you know , the narcissist par excellence On steroids . But he , okay on steroids .

In fact , what I love is how I've always been amazed of those , you know those posters that show Trump , his head superimposed on a buff body and the guy is so out of shape .

But that's how he's perceived , right , it's like there is so much wishful thinking in the MAGA movement , but in any way , in any case , the narcissism among the base is considered okay because that's just rewards . That's like you know that Protestant work , ethic being , you know , in the Puritan sense , rewarded from the Almighty .

Because Trump is , whether or not he really is , he defines himself as an entrepreneur and he identifies with , for example , he's very much associated with white nationalists , but he has these successful black entrepreneurs in his camp .

So you know Herschel Walker famously because you know through his own whatever you think about Herschel Walker , through his own grit and determination and talent , you know , achieved what he achieved . They hate another black like Obama because he represents that elitist , globalist class which is also narcissistic to , I think , joel's point , you know .

So it's like the left also has a narcissism problem . I think , generally , relating it to what you guys look at on your podcast , corporate America is extremely narcissistic and this is , you know , 1950s corporate America . There was a sense of , you know , we need to provide for our workers . The ratio of CEO pay to entry level worker pay was much narrower .

I mean , you know Jeff Bezos doesn't know what to do with his money , so he's flying people into space and considering himself , you know , contributing to humanity . Meanwhile , we have people at , you know , kind of below poverty level income in the inner city , you know , as if they never thought oh hey , I could be using .

You know , and I'm not , look , I'm not going to take a political stance here , but I'm just saying that disconnect between social reality and what these guys consider a legitimate use of their gains from the system is , as it is , pinning phenomenal . It's even more contradictory , of course , in China , which is technically communist .

But the elite there , I mean , that's where , although we have more millionaires here , despite popular opinion . I've actually looked up the statistic recently , so , like China has just under a million millionaires , where we have five million or so , and then of course we get the billionaires . You know we have even more .

But in any case , you know , in China you have this deification of the likes of a pony . Ma jack ma , you know the successful entrepreneurs , but a lot of them are also like she , you know they've risen through political connections .

So there's it's almost like what we have here on left and right the globalist elite which are kind of , through their you know intelligentsia or government connections , versus those who kind of , you know , created their own wealth .

But they're there again , distant from what we're talking about today , that general population of ordinary citizens where , when the economy was roaring in China , that wasn't such an issue . But now , as it's begun , you know you've had , from this year , india surpassed China's population .

They have a declining birth rate , growing age dependency ratio and you've got the work conditions we've been discussing . It's like you know , why would you want to throw yourself into that with a career ?

And you've got these narcissistic leaders , whether they're government or business , and you know you're so far from the top , and then they're going to say it's like you know you're lucky to get this minimally paying , extraordinarily difficult job , just to be part of the labor force .

It's like why not just stay at home with mom and dad which , by the way , is another feature of Chinese society ? They don't kick you out of your house like they do here , at least , as I experienced and probably many people can relate to it .

It's like you know once you , once you're out of high school , it's like you figure it out , kid so anyway but it does .

I think we're going to see more of that , but this sort of I caught two ways on this , guys .

On the one hand , I think there is a lot of individual decision making like that , but at the same time , if you look at what's happening in terms of corporate structures and and what's happening and cutbacks , and you know part of this is being driven by what's actually happening in corporations and businesses as they downsize and replace with technology .

So I think , and then the the other part of that is the defunding that's caused it . That's happened in terms of the public sector .

So thank you very much and we look forward to doing a follow up . Thank you , great , the feudal future . Bye .