The Great Transformation

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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? 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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,

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 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. 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 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. 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

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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 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 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.

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, 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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, 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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.