I think we should get started. We are already five minutes over. Welcome. I am david howell. I will be stepping in for janet who could not make it because of family matters. And i will be introducing this conversation between eduardo porter, and exceptional columnist for the New York Times and stephen hill about steves knew brooke. In addition to being an old friend and colleague of janets im going to read this because i have a fiveminute limit. I am going to try to do this quickly. In addition to being an old friend and colleague i am a professor of the new school specializing in labor economics and social policy. This year i have the privilege of being here at the Graduate Center as an art fellow and as a list center visiting scholar. Advance Research Collaborative which eduardo is a board member. So this event is sponsored by the center here at cunys Graduate Center which janet directs. Pioneering the development of consistent Cross National data for the study of Income Distribution in poverty. It is a data center that serves a global community. Now i get to say what janet would not say which is under her leadership liz has taken up tooff to dramatically higher levels of prominence for the study of income inequality which is increasingly recognized as one of the most serious social problems of the modern era. And the reason most of you are here tonight. She has helped enlist the renowned english economist who long ago should have won the nobel prize has the president of the list board and played a central role in bringing paul krugman who did win the nobel prize to listen the Graduate Center is also a hugely influential New York Times columnist and colleague. Without a doubt one of the top researchers in the world on Global Income inequality and according to my students a fabulous teacher. And she helps put on great events like this one. So welcome. Eduardo porter and stephen hill. Ifhill. If you dont read porters New York Times column religiously every wednesday youre making a big mistake. On a variety of topics from income inequality to technological change and jobs to education and wages to the crazy american politics of global warming. If i like him so much perhaps they are not perfectly balanced. I am a new school economists after all. We are very fortunate to have stephen hill here to talk about his new book audio. Stephen is a senior fellow with the new america foundation. He is a veteran journalist and author of five bucks including the internationally praised europes promise comeau why the european ways the best hope in an insecure age. Which is selected as one of the top 15 books of 2010 by the globalist. Well, raw deal is an important and incredibly timely book and happens to be important and timely for me. I am here at the Graduate Center working on what i call a decent wage project funded by the Washington Center for equitable growth which aims to document a great demographic detail the spectacular growth and lost jobs. And consequently the decline in decent ones that we have seen sense in the post 1980 neoliberal policy are up a Big Questions are how to leave the us compared to five other large rich diverse countries in the translation of Economic Growth and decent jobs, what explains our decent Job Performance and what lessons can we learn from the recent experiences of canada, the uk, australia, germany, and france. In the earlier postwar golden age period economists could call for more growth and be competent that it would trickle down throughout the workforce and across the Income Distribution, but since 1980 has1980 has been virtually no sharing of Economic Growth. Has all gone to the top 10 percent and mostly to the top 1 . 1 percent. The republican president ial candidates continue in their kneejerk fancy to call for tax cuts. Whatever you think that the effectiveness of tax cuts we are also experiencing a decline in redistribution through social spending from the top to the middle and bottom. In some there has been a profound underlyinga profound underlying ideological shifts to free market fundamentalism which has led to policy and Corporate Governance choices that have dramatically weakened worker bargaining power. That is the vision that frames our project and what you will be hearing about. So for me, stevens book promises to be a tremendousa tremendous resource detailing at a granular level how this process has worked out while pointing the way to help workers can once again share in our nations productivity growth. Eduardo and stephen will now have a conversation about the book and the issues raised by it. I will join you in the audience. And at 730 sharp if not before i will return appear and help to manage the question and answers. For which we have been allocated 15 minutes until a 7 45 oclock. At that point steve will sign books starting with mine. Thanks. [applause] hello. Good evening. Thank you for the introduction. Steve has written up a really great impassioned book. He is offering us a technological dystopia that pushes hard against the libertarian happy talk that one hears so often from Silicon Valley about how technology will be great for all and deliver this fantastically prosperous world. It has a really strong proposition that i would like to read to you in a nutshell. Whata nutshell. What if smart machines and robots could perform every single job there is to do and sharing economy websites can deliver all the services and goods so thatthe human had to work in a job anymore. Who would reap the benefits of this . This is the question that he sets out to answer and he does so interestingly mixing in enormously detailed accounts of real people, some of which actually has struck very near home. I am a journalist. I make a living out of writing. You have got the story of this pulitzer prizewinning photographer that suddenly loses his job in San Francisco and has to resort to renting out bits of his own on air b b and driving people around via uber and renting out equipment and so if that is happening to journalists the world is going into a bad place. But my question is, here it is hard to tell how significant these different examples or these different dynamics happening in certain markets and with certain services, does this really look like the wave of the future on a massive scale . Maybe this is more of an exception. How do you feel about this becoming the norm . Well, you know, whenever you are trying to sift through huge amounts of data, stories, and project where we are today and where we will be ten years from now, 20 years from now, everyone has there crystal ball out. And no one knows who will be right. What i wanted to do was make it really clear what is at stake. Everyone can agree that we are about to go through a transformation of the economy, society, technology will be used in a way that penetrates into every corner of our lives in a way we never would have conceived. That will be wanting to put things into our bodies that will keep track of health, want to have our cars that drive themselves to my going to want on and on and on. I was looking at all of these different spreads of the dialogue in wanting to put it together into some sort of picture in which it was clear what is at stake. You know, myknow, my fear is that we are going to look back 20 years from now and say wow, we did not get that right. We did not put the right rules and regulations around the technologies that are coming in the companies who are pushing them to make sure that we end up with a society that works for all of us instead of just for a handful. Because you know if we have all of these unimaginable Labor Productivity increases , you know, who will benefit . We look at the last 30 years in fact, i was doing the radio show. A guaranteed minimum livable wage 25 or 30,000 a year, what would be wrong with that . We can all do our art and culture in these kinds of things. They have not even giving you a pay increase the last 25 years. The political system has not managed to harness the Economic System to make that happen. Think of the political system will somehow harness the Economic System in a way a way that will turn over a guaranteed livable wage without more struggle and more people getting involved in saying this is not right. You know, that is, you know, fondled mentally what i wanted to write about. I looked at people stories. Chrisstories. Christiane, and autoworker in tennessee working for Nissan Comeau working doing the exact same job as the nissan worker who has the nissan shirt on but he does not have the nissan shirt because he is working for contractor and doing in the exact same job for half the pay come as no job security. A lot of you have heard about google buses and such out in San Francisco. What you have not heard about is the drivers to drive those buses. A work for a contractor, and that contractor has told them, report to work by 5 30 am and youd it is not end until 9 30 pm. You dont see your kids when you wake up in the morning or come home at night. And so they do not violate this federal wage law about how many hours you can workaday the make and take four hours off in the middle of the day, and they do not live close enough to go home for those four hours. They do not allow them to get a 2nd job during this for hours. They have to hang around the parking lot, basically in endangered servitude. There are lots of stories about people like this as they are grappling with these trends in our economy that are for a lot of people not working. I have a quote from tina brown where she says, you know, a lot of my friends and i started doing the freelance thing, and for the 1st six months it is great. I lovegreat. I love the flexibility. A year later no one writes that story anymore. These are the things that are happening. In fact i just recently heard the craziest job, i dont know if you would talk about it in the book. This Service Called invisible girlfriend where people will be your the service will be your girlfriend and he can be very many people that are just texting you are earning pennies on the text to say, yes, i love you were lets meet up later, something that you can show your friends. I write about this, not that particular business but in this sharing economy, ondemand economy, peertopeer economy, you have gigs. Gig is just you contract with someone through the service whether is uber, lift, task rabbit, and they come up with micro games because the algorithms are getting so good at squishing jobs down into smaller and smaller bits. Now they have nano gigs. You go out into places like mechanical turk on amazon and others that you can do jobs or you identify photographs for 0. 5 per photograph. People doing searches and you type in a keyword to lay the signs that a word to a particular type of shoes. A handbag with brown. A handbag that is black. They are just assigning these different terms to photographs. Here ishere is the beauty, you can do it in your spare time. They call it monetizing your down time. Monetizing your down time. Time. Standing along starbucks, waiting on the bus, waiting at the dr. s office. Who needs that . You can sit there identifying photos. So these are the nano gigs that they have lined up. Here is the other thing to keep in mind. Uber and lift, the thing that they do not want to address is that if you work for a traditional job, go to the job and are paid nine to five and everything you do is paid time which includes meetings with the coworkers, lunch break or a break that you get to my, time talking in the hallway with your coworkers brainstorming ideas. That is all paid time. In time. In this new economy you are not getting paid for any of that. The time youre absolutely productive, producing that report, that image. It would be as if eli manning was paid only when he throws a touchdown pass. This was a profound transformation. This is how we should construct a work goingwork Going Forward because this is what they are saying. It is liberating you to have more flexibility. You get to work when you want. They try to say uber drivers have this flexibility, and there is a certain degree of truth to that. But i have interviewed a lot of drivers for this book. Those drivers who drive at the least are the happiest, the ones who have been doing it for a while and are therefore year, the do not last for a year. After you have gone through a few pay cuts which come on a regular basis you know, after a while you think ii am not making as much money as i did when i started. There are a lot of factors like that. I was interested in identifying the role of the technology. We have had bad jobs and the economy. The retail sector, enormous amounts of bad jobs like the starbucks employee who gets a shift. Shift the next day. I have seen pushback is the notion that the economy is causing a tremendous part of this bad work. The number of workers that are selfemployed have declined somewhat according to government statistics. There is a little bit of the pushback. And then there is the other thing, they are not like the great jobs. Not an ideal job but the job that is sitting is not an ideal job either. It is an economic advisor, the work for uber. I comment. I was not impressed with that report. They made more than hire drivers. Thirteen bucks for a caveat was hired by company. That suggests certainly not a fantastic job but in unraveling of the labor contract. I wasi was surprised he put his name on that. He was in the respected economist. This is a company that plays fast and loose with the facts. When he came up with a how much they get paid they did not take into account how much drivers spend or how much their expenses are to drive. Insurance and all these sorts of things and they did not take that into account at all. The other thing now is problematic is they gather the data struggling. And 50 percent of the drivers drive. If he paid that much more they would be driving a lot more than they are. So then in terms of the data , it is definitely the Us Government 1st of the study back in 2,005 and i feel like the way we are counting this is not capturing what is really going on out there. I will give you one simple example. The Unemployment Rate is coming down. In traditional economic theory and we are living in a time where the Unemployment Rate is coming down the Unemployment Rate has been coming down and holding steady. And so where are these workers going . They have to make money and live. They are becoming discouraged workers and going into the great economy. Even janet yellen testified they are not confident. So the statistics that i put out there, these things like household surveys, job surveys. It depends on people reporting a certain viewa certain view point. There is a sense that maybe they are not reporting accurately as we do see things like 1099 forms also gone way up like 20 percent. The number of people filing schedule c those are up by 20 . We will have have to see how it plays out over time. It might be more hitting certain areas than others. Hitting more than it is, but in San Francisco it is up quite a deal and really impacting the labor force. Some of the statistics we have seen on that, 47 percent of us jobs are replaceable over the next 20 years people have disappeared, but still you cannot just you know the response to that is technological change what other experts are saying, not this time, the ability of these algorithms in the technology to take a job and cut it down and little bites and hand big parts of that job off to different parts of technology in the human part is left to hit the button and they can just hire anyone to do it as a contractor. They do not need to hire a regular w2 because the thing that people dont know , if you hire a contractor versus a regularly employed w2 worker you get out of paying about 30 percent on labor costs because you dont have to pay for Social Security, medicare, healthsecurity, medicare, health care, injured worker compensation, unemployment compensation. Basically, vacation. And we have seen it in the book, i have an example of the Pharmaceutical Company merck had a plan in philadelphia. They sell it to another company. The company lays off all 400 workers, hires back all 400 workers and proceed to make the same drugs for mark that from mark that mark was making for themselves when they had these employees. What is a giga giga economy . It is not a matter of how big it is. It is the technology that is pioneering. If i an employer and you are an employer and diane employer and you are employer and i can hire all 1099 workers it is going to put pressure on you and becomes a race to the bottom. You cant not do it because everyone elses. At the end of the day the underlying story is what is Technology Going to do . The future with lots of uber drivers is not as bad as a future where every car is a google car and some Company Called google rinse out time in the car which seems to be within technological possibility. So the job constrained future which is a term you use in the book of the central theme and as you related, this is a fear we have had for a long time, at least since the industrial revolution. And it is always been to date proven wrong and you are suggesting there is evidence to suggest that this might be different. Had to push back a little bit if you look at Labor Productivity stats technology really increasing a lot you would be seeing Labor Productivity increasing robustly because they would be machines. And in fact that is not happening. That leads me to a little bit of skepticism. Is technology having a big bite . It is a healthy skepticism. We are not sure where we are on this will yet. Labor productivity is notoriously hard to measure. There is all sorts of controversy over before this about whether we are measuring accurately. You know, i dont know. I dont think anybody knows whether this is going to all flameout and we will just be left with the same old economy we have or if you know this automation and robotics indicate economy and already using technology for things like justintime scheduling where they know exactly when the customers will be there and tell their employees i only need you to days from now and cannot tell you your schedule two weeks from now, you just have to be on call come i, have no life, be ready to come in at a moments notice, cannot plan childcare. Technology is already being used in some ways that are degrading the quality of jobs. Whether it will ever reach the level which i fear it could we will have to see. There are things going on that are alarming. We must be aware of what is happening and tried to make sense of it. We can also allow ourselves to go in the wrong direction. I was having a conversation with an economist at nyu they are going to see this debate over technology. Very much in the sideshow. China happened. In our current fear of technology that seems to have taken a backseat. I remember there was a lot of fear about how they go shooting this trade deal with her american jobs. What we are seeing, the negative effects how more driven by technology. Maybe i think we were sent down that road and lost sight of the dynamics and to be sure china and globalization story have a technological component. A lot of outsourcing. But, i mean, that is really a bigger part of the story than it might seem from reading the book it is all part of it. There is a reason why wages have been flat and many jobs have lost lost safety nets. It is partly due to technology but also did a jobs being exported. There is no contradiction or zero sum game. There going to create these sorts of equilibrium simply have to cope with. Part of the issue is we are not coping with them well. If you look at the type of workers. Typical worker used to have one employer and that employer they worked for many years. For more and more employees there is no question they are working for more and more multiple employers. Each one of them, the working parttime as a hairdresser, driving hours a week for lift and maybe they are doing some other hours on cash crop. For a lot of workers today these are the sorts of realities that they are having to deal with. The safety net is not set up for this type of worker or economy. So regardless of how the numbers ultimately work out we have to look at how to create a safety net for workers who are working for multiple employers, work at ways to make sure people can afford things like healthcare. And so my particular bias is i share your fear. There are robots doing the job that i didnt. Right now they are mostly doing sports scores and market reports. Press a button for skepticism. And so perhaps this is a good moment to think about solutions. You just mentioned now the idea of taking the safety net and disconnecting it from the individual employer. The movement through these different gigs. We have to do something. That is not going to increase wages. There are a lot of challenges, but in a multi employer world you call portable benefits way you can take them from job to job. If i leave im going to lose my pensioner healthcare. And actually in the book what i draw from this construction and mining and other sorts of industries, construction of trade industries, it has been this way for many years. It might work two months for one employer and three weeks for another and four months for another. And what they have a system set up where each employer would pay a certain amount into an account based upon prorated number of hours and that money in the account can be used to pay for things like Social Security, medicare all these sorts of things. They were part of the union. They sit on the transport and negotiate a contract that the carpenters work under. And so obviously organized labor at this point is down to 7 percent, workers organized in the private sector which will not go up anytime soon. I was thinking about how we can do this for workers in general. What i ami am proposing is we create for every worker in individual security. The employer will. Pay into this account prorated. If bro wants to hire a driver they can so hire a contractor. Theyre not goingthey are not going to get out of the responsibility of paying a certain amount for that worker. It works out to 2 an hour about their wage. It is not a lot of money. Five days of paid sick leave and vacation is not a lot of money. Workers can then work from multiple employers and each one would pay their fair share. It is creating legal parity between these different categories because right now , you are just a contractor worker. Your drivers are actually your employers, not contractors. And these lawsuits are tremendously expensive, take years to work through the court. It is just you never quite when. This sort of proposal gets passed all of that. Itthat. It does not matter the category of workers. Every worker would get it, every employer would pay into it, and it is basically insurance. You know, and the biggest insurance pool, you always want to have an Insurance Plan and the insurance pool here would be consumers. They pass that cost onto the on to the consumers, but that consumers will be the ones who are benefiting because they are getting a safety net. This idea is being talked about more and more. An alternative would be to have a richer Social Security and more Generous Health insurance scheme. Parttimers and freelancers and temps killing you cannot treat them that much differently as you can here. It creates a legal parity. Adopting that model and make a friend of it. A spam Social Security now. I think that is got to be. Beyond his people writing offense. Definedbenefit pensions. Workers who were not able to deal with it. Not only risk but the 4 o 1 k system was a complete failure because if wages are flat no one is saving enough money to put into 4 o 1 k which is a federal subsidy. It is an expense with the government incurs. 80 percent of the benefits of that accrues to the 20 percent higher income earners. Most of that 7580 percent accrues the top income earners. They have completely in my view failed special interests that it in the system. In 70 percent of republicans say they like Social Security. Over the past year ive been talking to a bunch of the Silicon Valley moguls are talking about this wonderful future. A lot of them agree that there will be a problem in the labor market. That something must be done and that maybe we need to change the social safety net or something. But it seems that the near universal solution is something that you do not really like very much. And i have heard this from a bunch of people. Maybe there will be no highquality jobs anymore. People will be able to reacts and follow hobbies, travel and we will still managed. We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. The bread and circuses in the room. They give people basic food. Maybe id is where we are headed. It would not be the 1st time. Click through Human History and they have done horrible things to each other and come up with terrible systems of governance that have not worked very well. I can see it now. Imperial rome with our technology. There is a movie. You want to go to the movie and see it but walk out of it at the end. And get whatever social safety net we have is tied to jobs. And the quality of jobs is deteriorating and pay is deteriorating for a large share of the work force. It seems to me that the social safety net alone is not the answer that you need to address through policy like market distribution. And i wonder and their ideas out there, put out a whole book about how to deal with it at the market level and propose things like profitsharing which you also seem to support although in a slightly different way. Government jobs at a guarantee so that every worker has a minimum number of hours. And you can take this further. Property rights to reduce rates. But i wonder what will you think is beyond comeau what changes would you call for. There are a few ways to give about it. Everyone needs a certain things in order to live. You can try to give them more income and wages which has always been the us approach, but what they have done is try to take some of the wealth being produced and create different pools of social insurance and use that to design more costefficient systems like healthcare so that the cost is less. If your costs are less than you do not need as much income. That is why if you look at health care andhealthcare in the United States compared to plans for belgium more for my previous book i went all over europe and talk to americans living there had lived a couple of decades in Different Countries and asked them who has the best health care system. The answers i usually got were for the most part france and belgium. Switzerland is also quite good. And what they do is design the system in a way that they can build in certain efficiencies whereas here we have this ad hoc decentralized system overlapping layers of bureaucracy. My covering 85 percent of our population and paying about half the amount. No way that is more efficient, more costeffective. We still have a ways to go. That is one approach that i think that you can do. The other thing i propose with the having germany. Germany has fortune 500 companies. In germany. 50 percent of the members. Isnt that amazing . This is what germany is doing. The Worlds Largest exporter , and most of us have not even heard of it. We just think german corporations are like ours. They arent. Quite a few countries. It would be as if check with that we dont just have to wait for the there already doing this. Whenthis. When you look at the measurements, the charts, the line graphs, the outlier appear. Charts and graphs and so many of these things. And so we just need to be more open to what other places are doing and start coming up. One of the things i have proposed is why not do this at the university level. I dont think of them as businesses that are going to fight this kind of thing. Codetermination whether workers get to elect 50 percent of the workers. Get it in place somewhere. And mr. Spreading into businesses. Red states, right to work states. California we could do this. Almost a blue state. Legislature goes back and forth. There are things that we can do. We do not have to wait for the robots to come and take our jobs. I think the odds that the United States somehow becomes a European Social democracy along. But as much as i like European Social democracies they are pretty much in trouble. Germany has passed labor reform over the last decade or so that has reduced the quality of jobs which really has no protection, pretty much like an american type of job. The stresses that we are seeing are very similar. They had better policies to start off. They too are feeling the same sort of directions we are. I dont see it as a failsafe line of defense. If it is going to be a race to the bottom countries like us are pulling them down. Even the jobs in germany, the workers that have more rights than what contractors are freelancers have, they still have access to healthcare, access to certain labor rights. Those rights cannot be taken away for workers in these sorts of jobs. Yes, they are feeling that pressure, but it is a difference of degree. And so i think we have to be careful about there is nothing we can line. So much of what we are learning has to do with grace. That has to do with how the European Union and european Member States are going through a decades long process. I think i like to remind both europeans and americans that we went through a similar process to attend to forget 70 years and was never slavery. It was over states rights. Slavery was just a subset. We fought a battle over how much Central Government should have, should dominate over states rights and states government. And that is 70 years later. Sometimes i like to say europe, it is kind of like the planet information. It will take decades to play that out. We are used to things changing on the orders of days and weeks and months. That is what is going on in europe and in some ways it is kind of exciting. Ii hope it can prevent a civil war. Exactly. The changes you have identified as necessary. The new deal out of the Great Depression. What does the Great Recession the liver . Turn this crisis into an opportunity command generate the type of social policy sense change that might lead us into the suggest the direction we suggest. The answer to that is no. I am not sure if it is been burning keys fault. We did not really get radical policy. What kind of a child, one of the necessary ingredients for this kind of political change to happen. Here is my response. You have a lot of work to do. The federal level is dead. Nothing is going to happen at the federal level for many years. Written on politics and political reform. The democrats even when they get majorities saying the thumb the ball a lot but it will be increasingly hard to get majorities. The demographics of partisan demographics of the districts and what have you not due to deep not due to redistricting but where people live. I live in San Francisco and it is not possible for a republican to win in San Francisco. It turns out most of the districts, we can tell you when 90 percent of them. They cannot only tellcan only tell you who will win but the margin of victory. It is so predictable. Here is the thing, democrats have become such an urban based party that it is much harder to draw districts for them even if you do a gerrymandered to what have you because they are just too concentrated. Well, she won in a landslide. No, she actually wasted 29 of29 percent of the votes that could have been given down the districts. Even though obama beat mitt romney by five Percentage Points mitt romney one about 20 more congressional districts nationwide. That is what the democrats are facing. The federal level forget it. The battle will be at the local and state level. Right here in new york city you can pass a safety net, multi employer safety net for every employer in the city. It does not require a federal law. You can do some of this at the state level. But i am suggesting local and state level is where people get working. What it stands for, the far right legal arm. And it ready for state legislators to come. There is an Organization Called six. You should check out there website. They are bringing progressive legislators together in order to help them start meeting each other. It is just organized. We can do that. I am going to open it up now. If you want to make a comment do so in a reasonably linked symptoms, not a paragraph or page. And there should be one question. The floor is open. Not everybody can hustle like that. Maybe we all should be able to. Maybe they will come up with the drug it makes us all hyperactive. The funny thing about it comeau one former ceo of the dead company was saying it turns out we overestimated. We got everyone we hired would be like me. It turns out they are not. And so somehow the whole basis of their model was founded on a lot of assumptions about human nature and people that turned out to not be true. Hailed by all sorts of media. They have done the pivot. The Business Model is failing. Venture capitalists are saying they are not sure we want to give you more money. They had become a glorified temp agency. And you are seeing this and a lot of the labor brokerage websites. Over and air b b are the two that have kept going. Even there iseven there is a great deal of smoke and mirrors involved. Again the only numbers come from them. And so in Silicon Valley it all lives on smoke and mirrors. People keep giving you money as long as they think it is Getting Better and better. They have to keep the charade going as long as they can. I have an oped in the New York Daily News yesterday. Did anyone see it . You dont know how much i went through. Here is in case we dont get to you. Started out as a good idea to let people write out there spare homes of grounds and make extra money in a down economy. It has morphed into something completely different, loophole to basically circumvent the law because all of the cities that you know passed laws a long time ago saying you cannot rent for fewer than 30 days. The Housing Needs are different. If you let this shortterm shortterm rentals suddenly your Housing Stock gets used up by tourists. That prevailed for many years and then craigslist came along and started doing it a little bit. It was still okay. Suddenly they bust the whole thing wideopen so that now you have so many people who are renting out. I have interviewed tenant after tenant who was evicted by their place by a landlord and the landlords are doing unconscionable things that seem to target elderly people, disabled people, people who are language minority challenges, people have a harder time defending themselves. What is going on is really horrible command is going on in new york, too. Air b b knows it because they have the numbers. There are people who scrape the website and get these numbers. It is taking over the website. They are voting this november 3 proposition that and that is not who it is anymore. A short question. Their seem to be two narratives. One is robotics are taking over. That is one narrative. The 2nd is that work is taking more and more of our normally leisure time and free time. We should here lots of job and work. The others that we wont have leisure time anymore. They are both true. The loss of jobs will happen over time. It already has happened to some degree. In my book i have an example of the university of california San Francisco having now big robot that can fill prescriptions, do 10,000 a day. They are basically making pharmacists obsolete. These robots can take the pills out. They have they knew who is going to slap a barcode on the plastic bag and he goes up to shoot and goes to the patient. This is the type of thing we are being told will happen more and more overtime. People are working harder and longer for less. And i think we extrapolate 20 or 30 years from now if the doomsday scenario comes true, you cantrue, you can imagine there may be a lot of jobs for people still to do, but they will be menial jobs and pay next to nothing if you want to come of the sciencefiction scenario for the overlords will live in the upper floors of the buildings and have land bridges. A species of salamander and never stops on the floor that just lives of the top of the tree. Tree. They will live at the tops of the buildings. The pharmacists sue end of monetizing their time doing odd jobs. You are in a position to tell us what theyrethey are doing. If i could add. We already see it today. It is not like suddenly the jobs are taken out. You see it in the weeds. You just need to work more. The shift in jobs in the retail sector. And you know when people complain about the wages being cut because our prices will below there will be more people, more fares per hour. Sanchez posted drive faster. So i think this is emblematic of how this Silicon Valley mentality is in the type of reality they are expecting us to cope with. Some of the suggestions you are making sounded optimistic. Could you talk about the political implications . We had an incident where the mayor wanted to put a temporary hold on growth so that we could study it and see what it does to labor, traffic for all kinds of things. You dont win every battle. The position the mayor took was correct. Way more difficult and takes a lot more time, so much more congestion. The economy, lived there economy, i lived there for many years and it was good before was bad. There are so many more cooper and lift drivers and ridesharing and sidecar. I think that if you go after them and try to somehow renewed in and if you lose a battle you have to try it again. It sounds like they had to regroup and were not prepared for the storm that came in their direction. Here is the other thing i would like to emphasize. The over technology could be used in a positive way. In finland they are taking the technology and putting it in the public buses. It is like smaller shuttles. You get on the shuttle and tell the driver where you want to go and the driver plots are out for all the passengers in real time. They can drop you doortodoor. There are some things that can be done with technology if we think of our streets as a public utility. Our streets are not for travis county. Flood the streets with cars. The medallion system comes from the Great Depression when cities like new york, people got in their cars to make money because they did not have jobs and it was complete chaos. Too many cars on the road but rogue drivers doing horrible things to passengers. I think we will be going back to Something Like that. So many cars on the road. It is a clash of convenience. As you get in the car sitting in traffic you have not gained very much because it is too much congestion. Not to mention more carbon, more pollution. The other thing that hoover can end up doing, the way Public Transportation works, certain lands a profitable. Other lines are not profitable because they are not using much. You need all of those. If Services Sprint up and down the profitable line and cherry pick passengers it will completely undermine the funding. We have to think about these things and design them more carefully. Flood our street with cars. America is having this great big fantasy that we can have a private memo. And i am sorry. You just cant do that and not expect that there will be downside to what will happen. More questions. Thank you. I have been studying contingent work since 1980. The transition an american employment relations, the university and ain a blue state in the union without a contract for six years. In the you know,know, mostly looked at the identification of Higher Education and its associated demise and i think these are important things to consider as we are talking about this. This happened to universities since 1973. Now here is my question. Question. At the end of you talk you mentioned get out there and do it. We cannot do it federally. What is to prevent the elephant in the room which is exerting forces in our own state and do great things in new york, connecticut, wherever, and those firms and Companies Just move out. State functions cant move. Although they may think about hiring teachers from india one day, but how i dont know if it is realistic given the intimidation factors that go on for many of these workers and bad jobs to be involved in organizing in a way that will change there working conditions unless we are also enlarging and empowering a National Movement of the same time because workers in these red states have bad jobs and want change, too. Many, many things to say in response. It has been fun to do this with you. Thank you for having me. You know, it is i mean, building National Movement sure sounds great, but it is hard to do. I tend to want to focus in on someone who is passing legislation that local and state levels. I noi know that when you pass laws a changes peoples behavior. And sure if you have a National Movement it helps you pass the law. But i think that you know it if you are smart and strategic and find the policy proposals where you can build support and that thing becomes a stepping stone to the next thing, that is the way it will be most effective and takes time command if we are wanting quick fixes i have no answers. We have gotten into this mess over the last 25 or 30 years. And it will it will take that long to get out of it. You had better get going. My fear is we look back 20 years from now and say we did not get this right. We did not realize what the potential problems were going to be. We did not anticipate what we needed to do. As a result we did not do it. Now here we are stuck my task rabbits and pushing buttons below pay lets go see the gladiators. Thank you stephen and eduardo. Next on book tv, her book the witches takes a look at the 1692 salem witch trials. Received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the humanities and an award in literature. Her latest book which is salem 1692
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