A Better Way to Think about the Future of Work (Episode 47)

My guest is Sarita Gupta. Sarita is an expert on the economic, labor, and political issues affecting working people, particularly women and those employed in low wage sectors. She’s the executive director of Jobs With Justice, a national organization that’s leading the fight for workers’ rights and an economy that benefits everyone. She’s also a co founder and co director of Caring Across Generations, which is working to build a movement to transform the way we care. Caring Across Generations has a vision for a world where everyone can age with dignity and caregivers are respected and supported.

Sarita, welcome and thank you for joining us today.

Having said that, that doesn’t change the fact that there are some growing trends that we continue to see around the changing nature of work that are concerning and that we do need to be addressing as a society. First and foremost we continue to see a rise of part time, temporary, sub-contracted work, which we use the term contingent work, but we see a continued growth of that type of work, which involves often misclassify workers as independent contractors, and we certainly see the growth of independent contractors. Often what we hear is this is a good thing, this creates more flexibility for workers.

But the reality is, the growth of contingent work has tremendous implications on working women and men and their ability to have economic stability and sustainability in their lives, because so much of what we see happening is people having to hold down multiple jobs in order to make ends meet. They’re not receiving benefits on the job because they’re part time or they’re temporary, so they don’t have access to health care, they don’t have access to retirement security or any of the kind of benefits that tend to come through a traditional employer or employee relationship. That has tremendous implications on the overall sustainability and ability for working women and men to actually participate in our economy in a meaningful way if they aren’t actually making enough money to survive and thrive, which is what we’re starting to see happen as a result of this trend.

The other trend I would wanna lift up is we’re also in the midst of a massive demographic shift in this country. The implications of that are we’re a rapidly aging nation. Every eight seconds, someone turns 65 in this country. That’s 10,000 people a day. And people are working much longer in terms of age than ever before. The implications of having an aging workforce also plays into the changing nature of work, and what aging workforce may want in terms of flexibility and more part time work vis a vis younger generations. Those are some of the push-pull dynamics that we see playing out in terms of trends right now that are important to keep in mind as we think about how we shape our future.

But the truth is joblessness does not have to be our future, and robots taking over does not have to be our future. In fact, there are many jobs that the needs are growing for certain jobs, particularly jobs that have been in the low wage sectors of the economy and have frankly been pretty poor quality jobs, like care jobs as an example. In a moment, I talked about the demographic shifts as a rapidly aging nation, more and more of the caregiving responsibilities for families are growing, and people will depend on a care workforce. We have an opportunity now to actually create new care jobs, create them to be better quality jobs, that don’t pay poverty wages but actually pay living wages that can provide benefits and really ensure that the workers have dignity.

What I love about Caring Across Generations is that you and your co founders and the others involved in this movement and this initiative have looked out there and said, “Actually, this is a real huge opportunity, that there’s a way in which we could use these trends and these forces to actually transform the economy moving forward.” Can you talk a little bit about what that vision looks like and how we can think of it as an opportunity?

We believe we’re at a moment now where we have to think very innovatively about the kinds of policy solutions that allow us to actually create the kinds of jobs that we want. Similar to the care sector, I think that’s true in so many other sectors right now. A fascinating thing about the demographic shifts we’re in is in the ’60s, when you looked at population numbers, it was a population pyramid. You had the older population was smaller than the younger generations. But the reality is, by the year 2035, our older population will be bigger than the younger generations. So we’re moving from a pyramid to actually a column or a pillar.

If you think about it that way, there’s so much opportunity in that trend. Imagine the need to build housing for seniors, permanent housing and housing for children and families, or transit systems that meet the needs of the youngest and the oldest in our societies. There’s so many expansive ways to think about what we’re going to need and how we are deliberate in planning for those needs on the front end, and to make sure, going back to the conversation about work, that we are actually creating opportunities for people to have good quality jobs that allow them to sustain themselves and their families. That’s where the promise is in this moment, I think.

But I often think about it in the discourse that’s happening around this idea of portable benefits, which is great, and it’s great that people are talking about it and thinking about it, but when we ask ourselves how did we get to the point where we’re asking and needing to think about portable benefits, it’s important to remember our own history. Post World War II, the US, unlike every other country in the world, made a decision that basic benefits like health care and retirement should be tied to an employer versus there be an explicit role for the government to play.

I think we’re actually swimming in that conversation right now. But it’s getting taken over by this idea of robots, when really at the heart of it the conversation is about what is the role of government, what is the role of employers, what should we be expecting as a people from our government in helping us be able to have healthy lives.

The other thing I think we have to think about is the question of power, as you said it. Who has power, who does not have power, and what do we need to insure that whatever systems we design in the future and the types of jobs we create in the future are really helping to fuel the ability for working people to be able to come together and negotiate with any entity that has any decision making and power over their wages, their conditions, and their overall well being. That’s particularly important given we’re waiting on a Supreme Court decision of Janus v AFSCME, which would essentially decimate collective bargaining for the public sector, so it’s important for us to not lose sight of how critical it is for working people to be able to have voice and agency in shaping their jobs and their futures.

I‘m really clear looking at the teacher strikes across the country, which are so inspiring right now, from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Arizona. In Kentucky. These are working people who are not only fighting for better wages and benefits, but they are fighting for more funding in the education system that’s been defunded in too many states. And they’re all in right to work states. These are teachers who technically don’t have the right to be in a union the way that we understand it in non right to work states. But the fact that that doesn’t stop working women and men from taking action and speaking up and voicing what they believe is needed and necessary, I think is a hopeful sign of our ability to make sure in the future we’re continuing to create pathways that really support working people being able to have a real voice in our democracy.

When you look out at this landscape, what inspires you, and are there ways in which the organizing that’s happening outside of traditional unions, on the one hand it seems really exciting, but I also don’t wanna overlook the fact that in some ways this is organizing from a much less powerful position. How do we think about that as we move forward?

Retail workers is another. All these exciting predictable scheduling campaigns that are happening across the country. Because people are demanding that we should have control, we should at least know when we’re scheduled to work. We should know that we’re getting enough hours of work. Imagine …

I think a lot about a really good friend of mine. Her name is Kimberly Mitchell. Kim was a leader here in Washington, DC. She was a worker at Macy’s. She is in a union, and the company decided to go to an automated scheduling system. When that happened, she saw drastic cuts in her hours, and an enormous unpredictability of hours, which had huge implications on her budget, let alone her ability to care for her daughter, make it to parent teacher conferences, or make it to soccer games, or make it to things, let alone being able to schedule her own medical appointments and things that she needed.

Kimberly has been a big part of fighting for predictable scheduling campaign here in DC, to say “We need to put a stop to this,” much like what was won out in San Francisco with the Retail Workers Bill of Rights.

But Kimberly’s story is also important, because later Kimberly actually talked to me about her care story, that she has a care story. She also is a caregiver to a grandmother who had cancer. Kimberly’s story for me was again an eye opener of, when we talk about contingent work, there is so many dynamics at play here. When you have part time work and you have to piece together work, and then we don’t even take into account the kinds of caregiving responsibilities that people have. That’s what we need to address as a society as a whole. We need to understand … Then the fights for paid leave across the country, which is another very inspiring set of fights that are happening, in addition to paid sick days campaigns that have been winning. But paid leave, and sick days, and predictable scheduling, and minimum wage higher, Fight for 15, these are all important wins and components of how we better a whole sector of contingent work to make them more sustainable for working people moving forward.

Those are some of the ways in which I’m inspired by campaigns that are in motion right now. Then certainly the coming together of labor with community, with worker centers, with a broad ecosystem of groups to demand more. I think a lot about the Chicago Teachers’ Union strike. That really was framed as a fight for the common good. That was about education. It was about transportation and housing, and being able to take those demands to the bargaining table with the county and with the city to say we actually as teachers care about what is happening to our students, and therefore we together are negotiating for a better deal, and I think we’re seeing a lot of those kinds of campaigns happen around the country, which is also tremendously promising in this moment.

What’s exciting is now through the enforcement of this ordinance, we’re able to talk to hundreds of workers. Every few weeks we’re talking to workers to make sure they know about this law, that they understand what their rights are, and really engage them in ongoing civic engagement. I don’t know how else to say that. We really, our intention all along was not just to win this campaign, but to make sure that these retail workers also had a voice in building their own worker organizations and be able to continue to have leverage, build power and leverage, to make further policy changes that would better their lives and their working conditions, as well as be able to negotiate directly with employers on a wide variety of issues. There have been great partnerships in San Francisco, building that out right now as we speak.

One of the things that they were saying is that part of the cost of just in time scheduling is that it creates an unlevel playing field, that employers who don’t treat their workers that way, who don’t try to cut labor costs to the minimum, are at a competitive disadvantage against those who do, the big chains that do. It was an obvious campaign for them to get involved in. But to me I think speaks to there are more opportunities out there for making common cause, because it feels like in a lot of ways the big issue in our economy right now is concentrated power. If you’re on the outside of that, the losing end of that, whether you’re a farmer or small business person or working person, you’ve all got something in common. Is that your sense?

Or I think about the paid sick days and the paid leave campaigns across the country. This is especially happening around paid leave. Most people don’t realize in the US – I’m always amazed – that we are one of two countries in the world that does not provide paid family medical leave. There is great work happening across the country to change that, to change state policies, local policies, and there have been so many small businesses that have come forward to say, “This is a good thing and we support this, and this is why we need policy in place to help support our ability to actually provide leave.”

So you’re absolutely right, Stacy, that there’s a lot of room for coming together right now and shaping policies of the future that are both good for local economies, and they’re really good for working families.

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And we’re back with Sarita Gupta, executive director of Jobs With Justice, and co director of Caring Across Generations.

Sarita, I wanna go back to a couple of points in the conversation where there are different roads we could have gone down, and I wanna go back to some of the ones that we didn’t. I wanna talk a little bit more about the contingent work, and in particular, I wonder if you can help us get oriented to what all these jobs are, because I think there’s a lot of variety of types of jobs that are in there. What are some of the companies that are prominent in this space?

Some of the major corporate actors who are implicated in promoting contingent work are certainly … Amazon is a big one. Amazon’s been in the news, and you know this as well as anybody else. But Amazon is a major retailer, a major retail company, a major logistics company, a major player in our economy right now, is really a bad actor in terms of contingent work. We see the endless stories in the warehouses of working people who are frankly working under pretty hazardous conditions with very little ability to voice their concerns and their need for change without being retaliated against. Amazon, Wal-Mart certainly is a big retailer who has over the years, as many of us have campaigned for Wal-Mart to be a better company, in terms of how the treat their employees, they’ve been a big promoter of contingent work.

And, we see it certainly in the restaurant sectors, we see it in health care, it’s growing in health care, and frankly it’s even growing in education. There’s a lot of subcontracted work, there’s a lot of temporary work in the fields of education right now. Certainly in manufacturing, we have been seeing a lot of work subcontracted. The auto industry is a great example of major companies, the Fords and General Motors and all, having these subcontractors who are making the auto parts, and a lot of that work is moving to the South right now in right to work states. We’re seeing a lot of the contingent, work happening across the economy, not only in the low wage sectors right now.

It’s also frankly to prevent the unionization of the workforce. We’ve seen endless companies where the workers were employees, like had a traditional employee-employer relationship, then suddenly these workers are misclassified, and they’re misclassified as independent contractors. There’s a long history of that in companies like FedEx and others. Or even if you look at the whole taxi industry. At one time taxi workers were in fact considered employees. They were not independent contractors. When that shift happened is when we saw some of the basic protections, wages, needs of taxi drivers fall. The quality of the work really fell in terms of these being good, sustainable jobs. That’s why we see so much active taxi worker organizing happening across the country right now.

As I understand it, we haven’t been that great about enforcing those, or they really haven’t kept up with the changing times. It sounds to me, although we hear a lot about the companies saying, “Oh, well the purpose of this is flexibility. People wanna have flexibility,” and that sort of thing. But really it sounds like from a lot of these jobs if state and federal government stepped in and said, “No, no, no, I’m sorry, you can’t misclassify workers,” or, “If they are really independent subcontractors, then they have to have more power over their work in order to qualify that way.” That the companies would say, “Oh, well …” Suddenly the flexibility idea would disappear because it really is just about cost.

If you had a choice of a full time job that provided benefits to you, would you take it over driving a Lyft or an Uber or whatever kind of flexible job out there, I don’t mean to target the Uber and Lyft drivers, because again, we see this happening in many sectors. And more often than not, people are like, “If I could get a good job that pays well and gives me benefits, that would make my life so much easier than trying to piece together three, four jobs,” which is what we see all the time. That’s what I feel like I run into majority of the time.

We have to be very careful about the way in which the language of flexibility is used, and really be thoughtful about asking the question, is it true flexibility, is that really by choice, or is it because they have to, because they don’t have any choice? That’s an important component of many elements of contingent work. The misclassification piece is huge. It’s a huge problem, and you’re absolutely right, there’s not enough enforcement of the laws that are on the books, which is why we also have to figure out how to continue to work with local labor agencies as much as we can where it’s possible. I’m really heartened by the number of community based organizations right now that are doing community based enforcement of some of these laws across the country.

In thinking about that and talking to Wal-Mart workers, for example, over the years, I’m never … When they talk about what they do, what their day is like inside … It doesn’t strike me as low skill. It seems like a job where you’re juggling a lot of different things and a lot of different demands from the public, and many different types … it does not strike me as low skill. It seems like pretty high stress and a lot of stuff going on. Is there some magic to manufacturing jobs? Were they really so much more skilled that that’s why wages were good, and why retail wages are bad?

I say that story because there’s a way in which it’s true. There’s a narrative, and we culturally believe somehow service sector jobs mean they have to be low wage jobs. That’s simply not true. We actually can reimagine what service sector jobs can and should be given, again, the growing needs of many of the services in our economy right now. There’s no reason why service sector jobs can’t be good middle class jobs. There’s no reason for that. That’s the push through the Caring Across Generations campaign that we’re making, is how do we have these jobs that have been poverty wage jobs that the workforce is largely majority women, lots of women of color, lots of immigrant workers, very many of them are dependent, about 30 percent of them are dependent on food programs. They’re dependent on the social safety net. And they don’t have the right to organize and collectively bargain. This has been a workforce that’s been historically excluded from basic labor protections in our country due to a legacy of slavery.

When you understand all of that, and you realize there’s a growing need for care workers in our society, what prevents us from reimagining these jobs to be good high paying jobs where there’s a real pathway to your point of the Wal-Mart workers who you talked to, a real pathway for training and career ladders that actually allow people to have a pathway into a career versus be stuck in a job. We can reimagine a lot of service sector jobs in that way. We don’t have to abide by this paradigm that service jobs equals low wage jobs. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us to think about that.

As we think about jobs moving forward – this is a little bit off the topic of retail – but there are really good efforts under way right now about how we create more access to good career pathways. One sector is the construction sector. How do we create more pathways for women and people of color who have historically been excluded from these career pathways. How do we create more access and supports for women and people of color into these jobs that are good, well-paying jobs with real training and growth opportunities. And if we can look at that and make that happen, again, we shouldn’t limit our imaginations and what’s possible in the service sector as well.

Also, the opportunity to have it be smaller scale and more community based care, both at home in a supported way or in smaller scale, different kinds of arrangements that people could make if we had the right kinds of policies in place.

I know that states are sometimes … I think states are beginning to lead the way on how do we make policies to make this vision happen. It seems to me that that’s a message that there would be so much popular support for, given those dynamics. I read some about something that’s happening in Hawaii, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about that law, and if there are other good examples like that?

This campaign was really born out of talking to so many people in the state, particularly women who are saying that they often felt like as their caregiving responsibility was growing that their only option was to leave the work site, because they couldn’t afford the care that they needed for their loved one. We heard endless stories of people saying they need more supports in order to truly stay in the workforce.

It’s worth saying for a moment, the reason I’m so proud of the campaign that Caring Across advocates won in Hawaii is it was a huge step in the direction that we need to go. But it also is a way that we address this new trend, which is we’re seeing actually a decrease in women’s labor force participation. First time in decades.

Again, we can rethink the kinds of supports that working family caregivers need in order to stay in the workforce and care for their loved ones, which is one major tenet of our campaign. Building off of the Hawaii victory, in Washington state, there’s great working being done by advocates in Washington state to move a long term care trust act, which is doing something very similar, like creating a financial benefit for any working person over the age of 18 who is caring for somebody else and/or themselves to make sure that they have the supports in place for long term care. Again, this is creating more options for families.

Those are two really exciting campaigns that are in motion. Certainly, in your great state of Maine, we have this incredible ballot measure that’s moving for universal home care. This ballot measure is really important, because it’s an opportunity to ensure that people have access to home care services and supports, and if one will create an influx of money into the system, that it will allow for the creation of good care jobs, and the training and support of a workforce that is very much needed in the state of Maine.

Thank you so much Sarita for taking the time to talk with us today.

This show is produced by Lisa Gonzalez and Nick Stumo-Langer. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Disfunction Al.

For the institute for Local Self Reliance, I’m Stacy Mitchell. I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.