Thank you for joining us for work isn't working with Eyal Press and Sarah Jaffe, moderated by Sarah Bernard.

Before we begin, thank you to our founding sponsor , the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

This panel is called Work Isn't Working and maybe you're even skipping work right now to be here.

We really appreciate it I'm Sarah Bernard - Crosscut Podcast Producer and other things, I'm the host and producer of a podcast that we launched in spring 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

It's Everything.

So I've spent a bunch of time over the past two years looking at the ways that the pandemic has impacted all or in some cases, kind of just pull back the curtain on realities that have long existed and work is no exception.

From essential workers to the great resignation There's a lot to talk about right now.

So today I want to , how we got here and where we're going.

I'm here to speak with two journalists who spent a lot of time exploring the issue Sarah Jaffe is the author most recently of Work Won't Love You Back How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps US Exploited, Exhausted and Alone.

She's also a type media center reporting fellow and co-host of Dissent Magazine's Belabored Podcast and Eyal Press is the author most recently of Dirty Work, Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America.

Fellow at Type Media Center and a contributor to The New Yorker.

and New York Times, among other publications.

Sarah and Al much for being here.

Thank you so much, Sarah Great.

So, Sarah, your book came out in January 2021. and books take a while, so I imagine that you were working on it before the pandemic hit.

But of course, it feels incredibly relevant right now.

Even just exploited, exhausted and alone.

That's really resonates for a lot of people in this moment.

I So I was wondering, did the pandemic change these work dynamics that you describe in your book or just shed light on something that was already there?

I think, you know, I often talk about what's been going on with work 40 years or so as being like all of us are of the frogs in the pot of boiling water.

Right things have been getting worse, And then we've had a few moments where it gets worse.

A lot all at once.

So 1973, you had a lot of job loss at the beginning of rapid deindustrialization.

You have the 2008 financial crisis and then you had COVID where you had basically people into three groups.

You had people who lost their jobs, you had people who are suddenly working from home doing a lot of had people who were still going to do the same job, except it has now just gotten a lot more dangerous than maybe it already dangerous in ways that you never expected.

Your retail job could be Mm-Hmm.

Mm-Hmm.

And how about you, Al It's the same thing.

I imagine you're working in your book for a long time What did you originally set out to do with that at all or impact the ultimate thesis?

I was definitely working on the book before the pandemic and the pandemic in a way brought home and echoed a lot of the themes that I was writing about because the central thing in terms of work that I think it revealed is that as a society, we had this sort largely hidden class of what are now called essential workers delivering food.

You know, cleaning hotel rooms, doing all kinds of things, driving buses that that when the pandemic happened, they were the folks who were not allowed to shelter in place.

They had to keep going to work.

And as Sarah just said, you know, working under very dangerous circumstances.

Well, my book Dirty Work is about hidden class of workers that I contend society depends on, but doesn't generally want to see or hear from folks who are undocumented immigrants who work on the kill floors of industrial slaughterhouses or mental health aides who work in jails and prisons, which are largest mental health institutions.

These are I call this dirty work, and what I mean by that is it's morally troubling.

Jobs and activities that go on in the shadows because of policies we've all bought into to some extent or gone along with, and that keep our society running and those jobs continue to be done as well during the pandemic and for me, what the pandemic kind of brought home.

And crystallized was this sort of relationship.

The relationship between , you know, for lack of a better word, the privileged and the folks who are running around incurring these both physical hazards and safety hazards during the pandemic, And and in the case of the folks who are doing do the dirty work in my book, also emotional and psychological hazards because many of these workers suffer hidden injuries Hidden injuries of class is the term that comes up in my book It's from the sociologist Richard Senate, but it refers to things like shame and stigma and feeling degraded and feeling demeaned and experiencing trauma or moral injury.

These things are pervasive in a lot of occupations in this country, but they're not really part of our conversation about jobs and inequality.

Mm hmm.

Mm hmm.

Yeah, there they're more or more hidden.

I think that seems like a big theme in your book.

Is that essential jobs?

These are essential workers are considered essential in some way, but but a lot of people don't even realize they're happening.

I mean, that was you mentioned, you know, And in some way you were already sort of profiling essential workers before they were called essential workers.

And I kind of , ale, do you think that talking about essential workers changed the way the country views and treats essential workers?

I think it did not change the way a lot of powerful politicians and institutions treat these workers I think the term was very cynically exploited Essential workers were rolled out by Trump during the Republican National Convention as the heroes of the pandemic And it was notable to me that there was no one in that group There was an undocumented immigrant like the folks that who worked in poultry slaughterhouses.

And furthermore, there was no mention of the fact that no were given to people working in meat plants and in poultry and other sectors of the food industry.

What there was was an order through the Defense Production Act to make sure they went back to work that they kept producing and showing up.

And the reason for that is that people wanted their chicken and their beef and their pork delivered to their doors again by these kind of invisible workers.

And it's not enough to say, Oh, they're essential , we value them.

If we value them, we have to alter the exploitative conditions they work under, and I don't think we've gotten there.

Mm-Hmm.

Yes.

Sarah, what do you what do you think about that?

I mean, based on your reporting, , what do you what have you come to see about so-called essential work or essential workers?

I mean, I think the important thing here, right, is that their bosses don't treat them any differently and if anything, in the visible jobs, as well as the invisible jobs, right?

I heard from the phrase that I heard over and over and over is they say we're essential, but my boss treats me like I'm expendable.

And I heard this from nurses.

I heard this from teachers as well as from retail workers , as well as from people who are, you know, picking up the trash and all of this essential work that, again, we don't necessarily like to think about.

But is incredibly important and already think about the way the reasons that certain kinds of jobs are devalued and the conversation that we do have around this kind of work, it's I think it gave us an opening to talk about essential work right to say like, Oh, actually, it's really important that somebody keeps picking up the garbage every week, even though they are , picking up the garbage.

In addition to all of the other ways that sanitation work is incredibly dangerous, It's at the grocery store, and that person is probably now taking on an additional emotional burden that they might not have had they're the only person that a lot of people have talked to all week when they come into the grocery store for your once a right?

We have all of these added pressures on health care workers, whether they be in home health care workers or nurses, the cleaning crew in hospitals, right, who have a real extra burden now and are not being given protective equipment are not being given anything.

And then, you know, six months into the pandemic are your boss has realized what you can do in an absolute crisis.

What these hospital workers would do when everybody in on them and they just want to keep that ratcheted up, that production level, which is, you know, how they think about it, talking about production when we're talking about health care.

That is the level they are now expected to work at.

And we're I don't know if I can say it's an unprecedented, but certainly high numbers of strikes and strike activity among hospital because they're, you know, they're being clapped for and told how essential they are and how wonderful they are and how But when it comes time to renegotiate their contract, they're getting offered a two percent raise and they have to to get decent levels of staffing in the hospital because we saw hospitals that got CARES Act, money that literally cut staff the pandemic.

Mm hmm.

Mm hmm.

Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit more about strikes in a moment But but yeah, I think I saw an article that you wrote there about the sort of hidden work of emotional labor and that I believe the headline was we need to pay key workers with more than just gratitude.

So that is the kind of thing.

Yeah.

Addressing this, this like, you know, money where your mouth is , if you will.

Yeah, it's a key part of what I'm writing about in the book, which is that the idea that we should love our right ales writing about the jobs that nobody's expected to love.

I'm writing about the work that we're supposed to show up And be grateful on some level that we get to do this work, whether it be, you know, sort of creative work that is seen as cool and exciting or the kind of caring work where you're expected to sort of put your patients, your students, your And in all of those cases, write that that pressure to to do that work again for the sort of gratitude in the thank you's and that kind of thing.

rather than decent pay time off and protective equipment that you need to do that work well, you know, that term moral injury that I'll mention that I heard for the during this pandemic because you know, again, you've got these hospital workers , you've got teachers, you've got all of do care about it that are having to do it in these horrible conditions without the things that they need to do it well.

that you get when you have to do that is why we're also seeing massive numbers of people leaving these professions right Mm-Hmm.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean that that kind of brings us to the great resignation.

I have actually also seen it called a of other things, including the great renegotiation and even the great exaggeration.

So the first, Sarah, could you tell us who is quitting and why are they quitting?

So I think the best term that I've heard for it actually comes from Rebecca Given, who is a labor scholar at Rutgers University, and she called it the great job like people are quitting work altogether, most of them.

You know, I've talked to a few people who had been restaurant take early retirement.

So there are some people who are trying to check out of work altogether, but most people are either that no longer feels safe, which is happening a lot in the restaurant industry.

for instance.

I just finished a We're seeing people leaving industries that they've been desperately trying to stay in and can no longer stick it out, and trying to find something else to do.

And we're also just seeing people looking for a different job in the same field So you might be a nurse and you might decide to go to this hospital across town that has slightly better wages and So that's that's the renegotiation part in some ways, right And so you know what we're seeing in many cases is a slightly tighter labor market in some of these industries, particular only the ones where we are seeing people the entire industry.

This is why the service industry is seeing wage increases for the first time in quite a long time for tipped workers in America is still the same as it was 20 years ago when I was last waiting tables at two thirteen and a lot of places not, I think in Seattle.

I think you have a normal wage scale there, but in a lot of places it's still two 13 cents an hour.

So you see different dynamics in different places, and it's really hard to get to drill down into these numbers because we just don't have good numbers.

Cities and states collect them differently.

So it's hard to say a lot of things with a lot of certainty about what's going on right now.

I worry that sometimes it's a little bit a real phenomenon happening here with people's understanding , you know, and a lot of cases that, you know, people realize Mm-Hmm.

Exactly.

I mean, there's a sort of feels like there's this re-evaluation of one's relationship with work, and we're still kind of trying to collect the data on it.

But you know, something about that is sort of a central narrative out there about how the great resignation in particular, but in general, where we're just seeing a lot of headlines about this shift in the balance of power between workers and employers We see lots of headlines like the worker.

People are fed up.

They want Work-Life Balance.

They want fair compensation benefits.

And they believe they have the to get it.

Maybe just because of this hot labor market at the moment, But you know, what do you think of that narrative?

Sarah, I mean, are we at a turning point or that's it?

Yeah.

Well, I you know, I think we have a long way to go in a lot of cases, right?

There's been a lot of really genuine excitement about the organizing search among Starbucks workers, right?

And in Seattle right now.

So I have to talk about Starbucks and you know, I'm getting emails from the NLRB every day with But there are something like, I don't know how many thousand Starbucks in the country and there are, you know, 40 had union votes so far.

So it's it's, you know, these things sound exciting because we're coming up from nowhere.

We're numbers in terms of unionization.

We're coming up from stagnant wages for 40 something years.

We're coming up and a lot of places.

So we've got a ways to go before we're going to see a real shift in the balance of power.

You know, the with the Amazon labor union vote, which is, I mean, just a stupendous victory for this independent union on Staten vote that they held, even though that, you know, was held after the first win.

So it's a reminder that this is this is , really rough time to be a working person in America and in the world.

And if things are getting slightly better in some cases they're getting slightly better after having gotten a lot worse for the last two years, too.

Mm hmm.

Mm hmm.

Yeah, ale, what do you think?

I mean, I definitely have seen the arguments out there that that really refuting this narrative all.

Things are just as bad, if not worse, for a lot of workers, especially low income wage workers.

Yeah.

What do you think about this?

I mean, I think that the pandemic has opened these, these these questions in a lot of people's minds and created the possibility for pretty profound rethinking.

But change is hard And, you know, unionizing a workplace is hard that the Amazon story is a great reminder of how much, you know, if you read any labor history or any history of any kind of struggle for for rights and freedom , it's not linear.

It doesn't just happen that things click into place and people are treated better.

It's a huge it's a long, difficult, challenging struggle that that often takes downturns before things actually improve and that could well be what what happens now.

What Sarah mentioned about unionization rates , where it's such a low point that even if things improved, they wouldn't be near where things were in the 1950s in this country.

So it's I think a lot of that remains to be seen I also think that , you know, I was skeptical of the great resignation narrative , particularly the idea that this was some kind of lasting thing because to be able to the book I wrote is about workers whose choices and opportunity , these are very limited.

And that is why they end up getting stuck, doing society's dirty work and we still have a very large number of people who toil in conditions that they would love to be out of.

But they don't have those choices.

They they can't, you know, the the I'm the immigrants.

I spoke to who worked at this poultry slaughterhouse had been working there while they were denied bathroom breaks because the line , so fast.

And this is the inhumanity of that and the humiliation of it was so extreme.

And when I asked them, why didn't you quit?

They said, Well, there's what else am I going to do?

You know, I can find a job cleaning for $12 an hour, but I was getting a couple of dollars more than that at the plant and I need it for my family.

And we still have a very large class of people whose choices are not good if they're stuck and in many ways And even if and so so when we think about the great resignation and this sort of moment of questioning work, we the fact that the very idea of sort of pausing to think about whether you want to do your job and whether it's it's the right what were the conditions like?

That's a privilege.

It's a privilege everyone should have.

It should be something that that we empower people to to do because work is so central to the way we fill our days and our lives.

But it's not universal and that applies to so many different types of workers.

Home health aides, janitors, grocery clerks, truckers as well as the folks I wrote about in my book Mm-Hmm.

Yeah, it's a privilege that should be a right Yes.

Mm-Hmm.

Mm-Hmm.

Mm-Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that was sort of where I was going to go.

Is this this You know, this privilege of great resignation that every day everyone has the choice to quit and not everyone has that choice.

given, you know, opportunities or lack thereof.

You know, it's like if you can't get another job that pays as well, then And so, yeah, it sounds like that that was the case.

Was that you would say that was the case for a lot of the people you One of the central ideas in my book, I borrow it from the political philosopher Michael Sandel, is the idea of he has , the pressure of economic necessity.

And he uses that phrase to talk about who ends up fighting our wars.

Who ends up volunteering for this all volunteer military.

And in theory, that's a military composed of a random assortment of citizens who just happen to want to serve their country.

And while that is true to some extent, there are people who really feel idealistic and are drawn to that.

We know better.

We know that, you know, if you're on a, you know, from an upper middle class background and you're on a track to go to college, it's not even a when you're not even going to think about it.

Whereas if you're from you know, a depressed rural area or a town there's really not a lot of ways to get access to education, or to travel or to, you know, get some of the things that you can , perhaps by joining the military that is a big spur And so we have a military that is disproportionately working class, disproportionately black and brown, disproportionately Recruiting and targeting areas of the country that are less privileged.

And I think the pressure of economic necessity shapes the labor market in other ways, and it shapes what I call in the book The Moral Division of Labor.

Who does these sort of morally treacherous jobs?

These jobs that expose you to moral injury and to shame and to stigma and to these other things.

It's not the kids going to Stanford and Harvard.

It's not the sons and daughters of senators and congressmen, certainly not CEOs and the folks at the top of the income ladder.

It's it's the less advantaged Exactly, exactly.

So the hidden toll of inequality in America.

And it sounds like that's the really, you know, big emphasis is this is this is another part of inequality that Yeah.

And I think that and I think that that inequity inequality in both the terms that Sarah described of jobs are ultimately ways to make a living.

And so, you know, not raising the minimum wage for poor folks working in years is going to get people to wonder, should they, should they work in those jobs.

But there are also other burdens to different kinds of work the psychological and emotional burdens and those don't show up in charts and statistics.

But I they are part of the inequality story.

There is a thing called moral inequality, which which mirrors and reinforces the economic kind Exactly.

I'll just bring in here real quick and say that if you have a question, if you're a member of the audience, you have a question.

We are taking questions in the chat, so 10 minutes or so Yeah.

So I wanted to talk about unionization.

I know that you both have brought that up It's a big of the moment topic right now.

And so we've discussed a little bit, but Sarah, I know that you have done a lot of coverage of sort of past slave labor movements and research on sort of the history of of these conversations over the course of the last century.

And so I was just wondering if you could see this moment sort of in history?

Like, how do we I mean, we touched on a little bit already, but a little deeper.

how do we sort of situate ourselves right now in the conversation about, you know, unionization efforts going on at stores and Amazon and these high profile labor strikes You know, it feels like a lot is happening.

But compared to the , yeah.

What's the context here?

Yeah, I think, you know, you always run into trouble when you try to look at the past as an indication of what the future is going to be like.

Henry Ford wishes he had the surveillance So one of the things that's really important right now is to understand and this is a sort of undercurrent in my book is that an industrialized country anymore.

We're a post-industrial country.

Most jobs in the U.S. are not assembly line.

Jobs are That's just not the dominant form of work anymore.

That was the dominant form of work when we saw unions at their highest in American history, right?

That's true of most of the world.

We have to actually now figure out what unions look like different forms of work.

And that is the challenge that we're seeing.

You know, unions are undergoing different attempts at ways to do things like organize home care workers right in Washington state, you have a law that home care workers that are publicly funded are eligible to be in the union.

And that means that even though they work individually in different homes, they are still all members of the union or they all can be.

Anyway, thank you to the Supreme Court for screwing with labor law.

But so that was one big challenge, right?

And still continues to be in states where you don't have laws that actually allow home care workers And so you have different challenges in terms of organize in these high turnover industries.

Sort of the opposite the story of the great resignation and of people who feel like they can't quit.

Is the fact that a lot of these fast-food jobs that end up being minimum wage jobs stay that way through constant turnover.

Amazon warehouses have more than 100 percent turnover every year.

So we're looking at the sort of constant churn through a series of crappy jobs, right for a lot of people.

So you won't have the same slaughterhouse job, fast-food job warehouse job for the next four or five years.

You'll have seven of them over the course of five years.

So how do you organize these super high turnover industries when the workforce at the beginning of your union drive is going to look really different drive?

These are all questions that it really is hard to predict what the answer is going to be.

Some of these industries around a long time, and the labor movement, as it is, has a lot to answer for in terms of not thinking that immigrant worth organizing, that women workers in care industries were worth organizing The retail workers and other high turnover guess what, guys?

That's now what we've got.

So because capital is going to go to where it can, you know, have union free industries, so they ship the industrial work overseas to more exploitable places with worst labor laws.

And what we get left is these other industries that now unions have to figure out what it looks like to organize in them.

And that comes with a bunch of different questions.

The good slowly and even something that looks really it is like incredibly fast, like this wave of organizing at Starbucks is still, like I said, kind of a drop in the bucket compared to the big CIO strikes of the 1940s 1930s.

But part of that is, again, because these are our workplaces that have a fraction for the most part of the amount of workers that you would have had , like the Ford River Rouge plant at its height.

a 5000 person Amazon warehouse is nothing compared to some of these big factories that now, you know, are basically gone in America.

Mm-Hmm.

Mm-Hmm.

Oh, yeah, exactly.

Both of you were kind of saying earlier, it's it's like, if there is an uptick, it's it's still the not.

The total number is a lot smaller.

Total of unionization rates right now.

For the industries you profiled in the people you profiled in your book.

I mean, do you see a path toward unionization or ways to improve working conditions?

I mean, do you do you see any of that movement there Is that happening?

I mean, it's it's that question for me to think about another kind of question, which is which my book sort of asks readers to consider whether you know, this type of work, whether the conditions of this type of work should improve And I think that's that's the right answer for things like poultry , because I don't believe we're just going to stop society that consumes chicken and other forms of animal protein.

And but but we've seen such a regression in the conditions and so not just unions, but things like a stronger OSHA, you know, a federal agency that can protect , which is a joke at this point in this country because in my experience, in my reporting, a worker didn't feel safe going to OSHA b if they did The company knew when I was coming this that they'd kind of clean things up and things looked fine.

And see, there's no enforcement mechanisms So look at the meatpacking plants where people Look at the fines that they got.

It's shocking A couple thousand dollars for for a worker who died or, you know, ten thousand dollars.

Twenty thousand.

What is that to Smithfield?

What is that to Tyson?

It's nothing.

literally the cost of doing business.

And so those things in those industries that I looked at, I think improving the is the goal and takes a lot of steps, not just unionization, but also a role for the federal government.

and a role for consumers to consumers who are so conscious of how the chickens they bought were treated because , you know, is it organic or are they humanely treated?

Well, what about the workers being humanely treated?

What about whether they were given bathroom breaks?

Those things are never on the labels , and so we have to actually have a change in around those things.

There were other jobs I looked at in my book where I'm kind of asking readers whether we should have You know, and the first part of my book is about the prison system We operate the largest prison system in the world I think very few people at this point believe that's a good thing.

So to some extent, we're talking about, you know, fewer jobs in those places because a healthier society should not cage, you know, more than two million of in in very brutal conditions and in ways that are both very expensive and actually have no real benefit collectively and many costs.

That said, you know, there are to the conditions matter So, you know, in jails and prisons, in this country, I believe that in some of them, the I call the correctional staff, the other prisoners in one of my chapter, because they endure and and actually are in the same environment just on the other side of this line.

And even though there's this kind of us versus them split that happens between the incarcerated folks and the folks who are working in the system, in some ways they're inevitably both dehumanized and both suffer in certain ways, particularly in prisons where there are no programs that are you The staff is very low, and so the staff, the staff that is there learns to enforce order through brutality and fear And again, the question there is is you know, are these jobs we want and or do we want so much of this in our society?

Or should we be questioning whether whether it's really essential to our society?

But to get us back to where we started , I also think that there's a lot that can be done to change the conditions and improve the lives of folks who get stuck doing, you know, unpleasant jobs So right before we go to questions, I guess we haven't done a lot of where we're going.

It's really hard to predict.

So to put you on the spot.

But I just, you know, based on your reporting, L. Sarah, I mean, what do you think the next few the American workers?

I mean, are we seeing a trend Are are we going someplace that feels clear or is it very cloudy right now?

The thing is that these are struggles, right That Amazon does not want its workers to unionize because them better or give them any say over working conditions.

Starbucks brought back Howard Schultz because it's terrified What conditions will look like in those places is going to depend on who wins those fights.

These are not just sort of trends that like happen without questions of power being brought to bear here and that is these are political questions, but they are also sort of shop floor struggle kind of questions.

And so are in this industry and get worse in this industry?

All of these are going to be really important questions going forward that we should be paying attention to no matter what industry we're in, because our conditions are affected by those of the people who are considered the most exploitable that the wage floor is going to affect me too And I think we often think that that's not true We often think that we are, you know, sort of safe in our middle-class bubble from the jobs that we once had to do in my first job ever was cleaning up trash.

And I worked in the service industry 10 something years, including while I was getting my footing as a journalist.

So, you know, to understand that these fights are actually important, not just because it's really fun to watch the Amazon workers come out of the union account and hug each But it was but like because it actually matters to me as somebody who used to live in New York City, what the working conditions are like for everybody in New York City.

These are issues that actually Mm-Hmm.

I would just add to that that , you know, I think that there's been a yearning among many of us understandable to return to normal to pre-pandemic.

And I hope we don't return to normal when it comes to labor and dirty work and other forms of labor in this country.

Because what was accepted was this system that was grossly unequal.

Gender lines on racial lines, on class lines, on moral lines and largely, you know, see it was normalized, but it shouldn't have been as accepted.

And if we actually scrutinized the experiences of so many during that time, so if we're seeing convulsions and sort of cracks in the figures that held all of that together, I think that's a good thing.

It's an opportunity to go somewhere better Mm hmm.

All right.

There are a lot of great questions from the audience.

I hope we'll get these in.

I mean, I wish we could answer all of them.

Here's one.

Are there other countries that get things more right when it comes to honoring or doing right by workers who do these dirty jobs?

Yes.

I mean, I think that that I say in the book is a study of America.

I think dirty work exists in every society It's this kind of universal.

I posit that it's this kind of universal dynamic and you'll find it anywhere.

You know, India had a whole class of people called the untouchables.

So what is that?

It's people doing dirty work who then don't get to touch, you know, the Brahmins and the elites because they're contaminated So these concepts are general, but in my book, I talk about the German labor minister's response When in Germany, there were COVID outbreaks among meatpacking workers and the factory owners The head of the company blamed this on the fact that so many of the workers were living in unclean conditions and weren't actually German.

They had come from Poland and other countries And the German labor minister just said that's absurd.

You know this this whole industry, he called it, I think a , you know, a system of of irresponsibility where everyone , none of the companies sort of accept responsibility for the they've created.

They did not invoke the Defense Production Act to force those workers back to the plants and make sure that Germans could eat their meat without thinking about the conditions changes were made.

And so it is about power.

It's about politics, it's about what we demand and not everyone does it the way America does.

So although it a lot of us are edging in our direction rather than the other way around.

I was on a panel with the lovely young man from the Norwegian labor movement the other day and although his idea of a shrinking labor movement seven percent union density to 50 percent, it is still trending towards the U.S. system in a lot of places.

Mm hmm.

Mm hmm.

All right.

So many great questions.

Okay, here's another one.

Can you talk about parents , particularly women, leaving the workforce over the past few years to care for children?

And what lasting effects this may economy slash social structure?

So I start my book with a chapter on the unpaid work in the home that is mostly still done by women , and there is a big connection with the fact that we are still as women to be responsible for the majority of the caring labor in the home.

Twenty twenty two.

Still true, and the pandemic that.

And the fact that a lot of jobs that are gendered feminine are also low paid jobs and often again , kinds of dirty jobs.

So I think we have to understand the lack of respect and attention paid to the reproductive labor that needs to be done in the home as something again that is connected to all of our working whether or not we have children, right?

I'm a 42 year old woman who is not married and does not have children and does not plan that people have in the home will affect my working conditions everywhere.

So one of the really great things that we probably only big Biden bill that will ever see was the child fam-.

The Family Tax Allowance , right?

That that that would become fully refundable So people would actually get cash payments, a form of basic income , basically for children.

And this comes, you know, 30 years ish, slightly less than 30 years after welfare reform, which took away a lot of the access to family support for single women in particular, So that was in its way, a statement that, like child rearing is work.

It's hard and it's something that all of us in society should be invested in, whether or not we have personally had children and this , like especially important if I can just bring up the leaked Supreme Court memo , it's wants to make sure that I have to have that, you know, so we have sort of a society that mostly wants to make child rearing entirely.

Your individual burden.

And also, at this point, looks like they want to make sure we're forced into doing it.

And that is the opposite of how is that we should have safe, legal abortion everywhere and also fully funded child care programs supports for people who have children, but much better access to preschool , medical care.

All of the things that kids need because we saw in so many ways, the crisis that is caused by an entirely privatized child care system during the pandemic, when even things that people normally count on to take your kids off your hands for a little while, i.e.

the public schools were person.

Not that teachers weren't teaching because teachers were desperately trying to be engaging on one of these of the schools is gone, and it just led to people falling apart And that has led to women having to leave the workforce in women, which is.

High or almost out of time.

Maybe I'll squeeze in one more question.

You guys have touched on this in several ways, but just to ask directly, what can cities and communities do to support , especially when most of these positions are private companies I would say not all of them are at least in the jobs.

In fact, if we think about jobs in the prison system or in jails, those are often public employees or those are employees that are carrying out a public function.

So one responsibility we have as citizens is to be informed of what is being done in our name, even if you don't agree with the policies that led to those conditions, your taxes and often your elected officials are shaping laws and policies that are connected to all of us.

And so that's that.

It's not all in the private sector, in cities and states have a lot that they can do in terms.

And again, we're talking in Seattle , so I feel like you're in a wonderful place for examples on this front for all sorts of things that can help workers and so great.

Like the recent bill about Uber drivers accepting that Uber drivers are not employees.

But anyway, we don't wage you can put in restrictions on hours.

Right?

Starbucks was notorious for so-called Klopp innings, so places have put in things like retail workers and care and service workers bills of rights restricting on call shifts.

There are so many, so can do in your city and state to figure out how to improve workers rights that are public policy that are in the public domain.

You can't fund OSHA on a state level , but you can put in a state labor department that right?

So there was actually a lot you can do politically and personally.

You know, find your local picket line, go walk it If you go to Starbucks, you can order your drink and say, Union Strong as your name.

There are all sorts of ways you can of industries.

It just takes sort of looking around and follow your favorite labor journalist on the internet what's going on.

Great.

Thank you so much.

And such a great way to wrap up.

I feel read these books.

Everybody , and follow these journalists.

Thank you so much out there for being here.

I really appreciate your thoughts today.

Thank you.

All right.

Well, thank you everybody, too for joining us.

Also in the audience.

Thank you for your great questions.

Before we sign off, I just wanted to mention there are also a lot of other sessions happening at the For instance, later this morning, you can tune in to hear from one of the very first people to sound the alarm on Bill McKibben.

Find that session and lots more at Crosscut Dot com slash festival