Friday, Feb 4, 2022 • 50min
Work, Play, Rest - Part 1
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The past few years have shaken the fundamental ways we live. It's... disorienting. But it's also an opportunity to reexamine how we spend our time. Over the next three episodes, TED speakers will investigate evolving notions of what it means to pay our bills, feel joy in play, and rest our minds and bodies. This hour: Work. Guests include labor organizer Jess Kutch, social entrepreneur Irma Olguin, and tech reporter Kevin Roose.
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Manoush Zomorodi
Irma Olguin
Kevin Roose
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Verified
Break
Manoush Zomorodi
00:20
This is the
TED
Radio Hour
. Each week, groundbreaking TED
talks.Share
00:26
Our job now is to dream big.
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Manoush Zomorodi
00:28
Delivered at
Ted
conferences-Share
00:29
To bring about the future we want to see-
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Manoush Zomorodi
00:31
Around the world.
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00:32
To understand who we are-
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Manoush Zomorodi
00:34
From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
Share
00:39
You just don't know what you're gonna find.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
00:41
Challenge you.
Share
00:42
You have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
00:45
And even change you.
Share
00:46
I literally feel like I'm a different person.
Share
00:48
Yes.
Share
00:49
Do you feel that way?
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
00:51
Ideas worth spreading, from
TED
and NPR.
I'm Manoush Zomorodi,
and the past few years, I don't need to tell you, have shaken up the fundamental ways we live.Share
01:08
It has been disorienting, but it's also an opportunity to examine how we spend our time. And so, welcome to our special three-part series, we're calling it, "Work, Play, Rest" and over the next three weeks, we'll be investigating evolving notions of what it means to work hard, be productive, and pay the bills.
Share
01:34
There's been this idea in corporate
America
that you're part of a family, but that concept was really turned on its head during the pandemic.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
01:42
We'll explore what makes us happy and fulfilled, feel joyous, playful.
Share
01:48
Yeah, I describe it as there's no wrong way to play.
Share
01:50
It's like seeking the spark that starts the process going.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
01:53
And then we'll examine ideas about how we rest and spend our downtime.
Share
01:59
It's mindfulness, it's meditation that can help calm our brains down.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
02:05
There's a lot to come. But for now, let's get started with part one: Work.
Share
Michelle Eisan
02:13
My alarm goes off at 4 a. m.. I get up, get myself together, get my dog out, my cats fed, and then I'm to my store to be ready to punch in by 5 a. m..
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
02:28
This is Michelle Isan.
Share
Michelle Eisan
02:30
I'm a barista at the Elmwood
Starbucks
location in Buffalo
, New York
.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
02:35
She's been working at
Starbucks
since 2010 and she's loved it.Share
Michelle Eisan
02:39
The customers are are great, it's a lot of people who live around the corner. So you see these people every day, you know, I've seen their children grow up.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
02:48
But when the pandemic began, the job got more demanding.
Share
Michelle Eisan
02:51
The company, they wanted increased productivity. The expectation that we were going to produce above and beyond pre-pandemic levels. And you know, we're being told, well, you know, the store is underperforming, you're not getting these drinks out fast enough. And that was hard.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
03:10
In August 2021, a coworker told Michelle that some of them wanted to form a union.
Share
Michelle Eisan
03:17
And I thought I'd misheard her and I said, "What do I think about what?"
Share
03:21
And she said,
"Starbucks
unionizing," and I said it never really crossed my mind because I just don't know if I ever thought that that our industry could be unionized, but I went, "You know what? This might be the solution I'm looking for," because my option was to leave a company that I devoted an excessive amount of time to, or I could try to change that company for the better, from the inside out. And that just seemed like the better option.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
03:55
Once the employees decided to move forward, they needed to let
Starbucks
executives know. And Michelle says their response felt pretty aggressive.Share
Michelle Eisan
04:06
They shipped in corporate members from all over the country. And they sent these people here essentially to be on the floor with us, day in and day out, kind of there to overhear our conversations and break up any conversations that might be happening between a union supporter and someone who might still be on the fence.
Share
04:27
And it did scare a lot of my coworkers. People were calling off because the mental stress was too much to come in and work in our store every day. But I thought if we didn't win the union, it would probably get worse.
Share
04:40
In December 2021, the decision was put to a vote, and surprising almost everyone, it succeeded.
Share
04:52
History made in
Buffalo
New York
. Starbucks
workers at the Elmwood Avenue location voted to unionize.Share
04:59
First unionized corporate
Starbucks
store in the country.Share
Michelle Eisan
05:02
Yeah, it was pretty powerful. And now to know that it has had an effect. Additional stores across the country have filed petitions for unionization. I mean, if one store can get the response that it has gotten, I have to imagine that every time another store signs on it's just going to get a bigger and bigger response, which is pretty amazing.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
05:30
Events like these come at a time when we're all rethinking how we work, where we work, and even why we work.
Share
Jess Kutch
05:38
Our work culture in many parts of the economy is simply inhumane. And I think there is zero tolerance for that now.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
05:47
This is labor organizer, Jess Kutch.
Share
Jess Kutch
05:49
We require employers to see our whole selves. We require employers to see that we are parents, that we have children, we have seniors in our family that need our support and care.
Share
05:59
And so I think that this idea that employers can ignore everything else that's going on in a worker's life, that's just no longer going to be the case.
Share
06:08
RIght now,
America
is experiencing a big change in what it means to have a job and especially what it means when your job treats you like crap.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
06:18
2021 set records for the number of U. S. Workers quitting their jobs. Many are calling it the Great Resignation.
Share
06:26
Department says more than 4.4 million workers handed in their resignations in September.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
06:31
We've seen employees going on strike.
Share
06:33
10,000
John Deere
workers officially went on strike today.Share
06:37
Workers at
Kellogg
are in their second week on the picket line.Share
06:40
And workers forming unions in industries where we've never seen unions before.
Share
Jess Kutch
06:45
There's a job quality crisis in
America
. And workers are now having more of an upper hand and being able to decide which jobs are going to best fit their lives.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
07:00
The power dynamic between companies and workers has definitely shifted. But are we talking about a temporary change or something more permanent? Like a real redefining of the employer-employee relationship?
Share
Jess Kutch
07:14
Yeah. I think you're seeing it at all in all sectors of the economy. These, you know, emerging trends around companies like
Unilever
experimenting with 4 day workweeks. Some countries have passed laws banning employers from emailing workers after business hours.Share
07:30
I think there's a recognition that work has its place in our lives, but it's not our whole reason for living. You know, in some fields working 60, 70 hours a week is the norm. And you're starting to see people, even in like, the finance world, pushing back against that.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
07:49
But when it comes to pay, the lower end of the pay scale is where companies are really having to make changes right? Like, especially in the U. S.
Share
Jess Kutch
07:57
Well there there is just the sheer, like, numbers question. Every time people leave a job, that's a cost to the employer to recruit and train a replacement. I think what you're seeing is employers scrambling to improve job quality.
Share
08:13
I live in
Asheville
, North Carolina
and the Krispy Kreme
down the street from me is advertising starting pay at $15 an hour. A couple of years ago, that pay was was half that rate. So you're seeing like, wage increases, but I also think you're seeing, like, job quality improving as well.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
08:31
What about in a place like the tech industry where you really haven't seen unions before? I guess I'm wondering when people organize, are they doing it for different reasons? Are the demands different now compared to, say, 50, 60 years ago?
Share
Jess Kutch
08:49
You know, so I think the reason people have always organized was to confront the power of capital and try to advocate for the needs of workers and the communities that workers come from. But seeing people kind of organize around ethical issues for the companies they work for, I think the reason we haven't heard about that is in part because labor law itself doesn't recognize that issue as legitimate.
Share
09:17
Like workers have no business having a voice on how this organization conducts its business and you're seeing this in the tech sector — just a refusal to accept that.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
09:28
Yeah, I mean, and and we're seeing it in different ways. There was of course like the
Google
walkout before the pandemic, but then we saw people walk out at Netflix
over comedian Dave Chappelle's
content. But it's not that they're not getting paid enough, it's about saying like, "Do you understand the power that you have over society, dear company," right?Share
Jess Kutch
09:53
Yeah. I mean, people want more of a say and how their businesses have an impact in the world, especially given the climate crisis, like
Amazon
employees formed Amazonians for Climate Justice to pressure their company to really live up to its climate pledges that it's made. So, you're going to have folks kind of deciding enough is enough and, you know, joining together with their peers to affect change.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
10:25
What do you say to employers though, who are like, "Well, we can't afford to keep running our company by the standards that you're asking for."
Share
10:34
Because, you know, there are real concerns about companies that are just barely hanging on, and if their employees unionize, they may not be able to continue to exist.
Share
Jess Kutch
10:46
Yeah. You know, I challenge that. I think that often when companies struggle, they look to cutting labor costs as the first place to reduce their costs. But I think it's pretty shortsighted. And you're seeing that in the great resignation: which companies are doing well and which ones are struggling. Like, take for example
UPS
and FedEx
.Share
11:08
UPS
is a unionized workforce. FedEx relies, for its on the ground delivery, like, a network of independent contractors with non-union drivers. Fedex
has been dealing with a labor shortage since the pandemic began. UPS
has not had that problem. So it's like that short-term thinking of, "Well, we need to reduce costs, we need to keep, you know, deliver shareholder value. So let's cut benefits, let's cut wages," and doesn't make good business sense.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
11:41
You know, Jess, it feels like it comes down to a questioning of the entire system, a questioning of capitalism, and maybe questioning whether shareholders should come first. Maybe the whole way we run society is hurting our workforce. Are you feeling that shift?
Share
Jess Kutch
11:59
Oh yes. It feels very different. And this idea that capitalism will deliver the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, I think is being questioned by everyone.
Share
12:11
And I think that like, workplace organizing is sort of a social contagion. Like when people see other folks going on strike, or staging walkouts, and being successful, they're more likely to try it themselves. So I think we're only at the beginning stages of what's going to be a prolonged period of labor activism in the
United States
and elsewhere.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
12:35
That's Jess Kutch. She's the co-founder of coworker. org. You can see her full talk at
TED
. com. And just a note on Michelle Eisen's story: We reached out to Starbucks
for a comment and Starbucks
denies any claims of union-busting and says the additional staff sent to Buffalo
were there to support employees on the ground; none of them came from their corporate offices. So far over two dozen other Starbucks
locations across the country have filed petitions to unionize.Share
13:10
On the show today: the first part of our series, "Work, Play, Rest", I'm
Manoush Zomorodi
, and you're listening to the TED
Radio Hour
from NPR
.Share
Break
Manoush Zomorodi
14:40
It's the
TED
Radio Hour
from NPR
. I'm Manoush Zomorodi
on the show today. Part one of our series: Work, Play, Rest. So let's get back to work. Like so many booming industries, tech has completely changed some of our cities, creating hubs and uplifting certain places while leaving others behind.Share
Irma Olguin
15:04
You know, you think about
California
, you think about palm trees and beaches in Hollywood
and the Bay Bridge, and that's not where I grew up. That's not at all where I grew up.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
15:15
This is Irma Olguin, and her hometown isn't exactly known for innovation.
Share
Irma Olguin
15:20
Yeah,
Fresno
is a place that you drive through to get to somewhere else.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
15:25
If you do drive through
Fresno
, you'll see a very different kind of industry.Share
Irma Olguin
15:30
You see miles and miles of Agland, which could look really different depending on the season. If something is in season, it's gonna be green and you might see the irrigation dripping. If it's not in season, you might see, you know, entire orchards being ripped out. Piles of trees and wood waiting to be burned.
Share
15:52
If you are in raisin land, which is where my family spent its time, part of the process is that these giant sheets of paper are laid out in the dirt. You pick the grapes and they are left to bake in the sun. It's like this really thick, almost sweet, dusty smell that smells like home. It's really hard to put words to it.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
16:17
How long have you and your family lived in
Fresno
?Share
Irma Olguin
16:20
So my grandparents migrated from
South Texas
and from Mexico
to California
following the crops, following the work, and they became field laborers right there in the Central Valley
. My life is different from say, my parents, who all of their formative years were spent in the fields and I did not realize necessarily that we were poor.Share
16:42
Everybody that I knew at that time had a similar story to mine, immigrant parents or grandparents, farm labor being the story, never enough money, always trading, you know, rent for your electricity bill or your electricity bill for groceries or, you know, it's always that. And so you've got folks who have started with very little trying to make their way, claw their way to something else.
Share
17:09
And the stress of that and the sort of community around never having enough didn't feel abnormal to me. That is- that was the truth and reality. It wasn't until much later that I realized that not everybody struggled in that way.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
17:26
Yeah. And you actually got the opportunity to leave
Fresno
and go to college. I mean that must have been quite a culture shock.Share
Irma Olguin
17:34
Yeah, so I ended up with a scholarship offer across the country in
Ohio
and arriving there, it was just like, "I shouldn't be here. I don't know any of the things that you guys know, I'm so far behind."Share
17:48
You know, when I got my email address for the college, it was my very first email address ever. And they had to show me what that meant, like what email was. And so yeah, you just feel in so many ways like this is for other people.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
17:60
And that's kind of crazy because you ended up getting a degree in computer science.
Share
Irma Olguin
18:04
That's right. I was very young and in a place that I didn't know, understand, or recognize. And I really wanted to take classes in the most beautiful building on campus. And for me that was a glass building, it turned out to be the College of Engineering and somebody said that that's where computer science took place, and there were computers, you know, scattered all over that building.
Share
18:25
So it was, it was serendipitous that I ended up being able to choose a major that I would never have seen for myself.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
18:34
And how did it go?
Share
Irma Olguin
18:35
Well, getting a computer science degree was a slog. It was- I won't say that it came easily to me, but it did feel pretty obvious over time that a person could muscle their way through this industry.
Share
18:51
I think there's like this mystery that surrounds the technology industry which makes people believe that it's super hard and super "for other people," but spending time in it, I got to see kind of how the sausage was made and it was like, "Oh, there's a lot of different types of jobs inside of this industry and a lot of different places for folks, even like myself."
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
19:16
When you say, even like yourself, meaning that you didn't have a PhD, or that you were a Latinx, or how do you mean?
Share
Irma Olguin
19:23
So there were a number of things where it felt like that phrase, even for me, comes in. First of all, I'm a woman. I am Latina. I was a queer young person in a time when being a queer young person was still really, really loud, and in many rooms, unwelcome. And so yeah, there was a lot of "even for me" feeling but more importantly, I felt like I didn't have to be a genius to be in the industry, I could be just me.
Share
19:54
I could put my shoulder into it and be tenacious and do the same thing I've done all of my life, which was you know, fight to survive and I could find my place in this industry,
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
20:04
Irma Olguin picks up her story from the
TED
stage.Share
Irma Olguin
20:08
Something miraculous happened. I got a job in tech. And I remember the first time I didn't have to count the change when trying to figure out how much to tip for pizza delivery. When I realized that this industry, the technology industry, was going to change my life forever. And I remember thinking to myself, if it can happen to me, a poor queer brown woman from nowhere, why can't it happen to entire cities of people like me?
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
20:38
So to find out the answer to your question, instead of going to
Silicon Valley
or New York
, you decided to go back to Fresno
.Share
Irma Olguin
20:47
I did. It seemed like the only thing where I would sort of be able to live up to what the world gave me. So yeah, it was pretty simple decision: Go home and figure out how to how to bring this back — all of these lessons. How do you give them away?
Share
21:04
And so for the last 8 years, that's what I've been working on in
Fresno:
Building a business that could expose what it takes to cause an entire city, and not just a select few people in it, to thrive.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
21:20
Fast forward a bit. You founded a company called Bitwise Industries. Can you just describe in a nutshell what you do?
Share
Irma Olguin
21:29
Yeah, certainly. So Bitwise, we build tech economies in underestimated cities, which is a sort of fancy for "we ignite the technology industry in places where you don't expect to find it and invite people to that new economy that don't expect to be there."
Share
21:46
So the cornerstone of everything that we do is job training. The communities that we work with are often from very poor populations. Maybe folks who are learning
English
as a second language, maybe they were unhoused, the formerly incarcerated, veterans, folks who are very often from retail or factory work. These folks, their issue is not their ability to learn technical things.Share
22:10
The problems center on things that are a lot less obvious. Things like childcare, transportation, hunger, money. So those are the things that we focus on. A person's ability to break into the technology industry has nothing to do with their ability to learn
JavaScript
or whether they were good at math in the fifth grade. What is a factor is creating room in that person's life to see if they're good at JavaScript
or if they can be good at math.Share
22:40
And to create room in a person's life, you really have to attack the things that stand in the way of that time. How do you justify learning to do something like write code when there are bills to pay? Wouldn't it be better for the family if you just got a job at
Mcdonald's
and put in as many hours as you can? Because that's a check, and who's gonna watch your little brother?Share
23:02
That's what we do as a family: we pitch in. But how do you justify to the people around you when it looks to them like you're just playing around on the computer. We didn't invent a new way to teach
JavaScript
. We just focus a lot more on the things that actually prevent people from learning it.Share
23:22
In addition to connecting our students to things like bus tokens and free regional transit options, we also just deploy a fleet of vehicles whose only job is to pick these folks up before their study groups and drop them back off after class. If they need food, we get them food.
Share
23:40
We work with food cupboards and pantries and making sure that boxes of food are delivered to these students homes with enough for a family of 3-5 people. We connect them to childcare options that make sense for their schedules and their budgets. But most importantly, because cash is such a center of energy and decision-making for these families, through our apprenticeship program, we literally pay them to learn.
Share
24:10
So not only do they get to earn a wage and are exposed to real world work, but now they also have that first line on the resume, the one that's so hard to get and the one that builds confidence in the rest of the world that you might know what you're talking about.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
24:26
You know, it's interesting you describe Bitwise as providing a technology education, but what you're really kind of doing is igniting an industry, a tech economy, from the bottom up.
Share
Irma Olguin
24:39
Yeah, once you remove those as the problems, now you've got access to a wide population of folks who have never been invited to this segment of the economy, who could take advantage of the jobs that exist in that economy and change the reality for the generations that come after them.
Share
24:58
And so you might be thinking to yourself, "OK, Irma, that sounds great, but it sounds really expensive. So how do you pay for it?"
Share
25:06
We've turned a long-held idea on its head. We have to stop putting the burden — the financial burden — on the student and the families who are already struggling, and start putting it on the people and the entities that benefit most from their untapped potential.
Share
25:23
Entities like government, corporations, philanthropy — these are the entities that benefit from the development of that talent. And so that's how we get to pay for it. The U. S. spends a trillion dollars scaling up a workforce for this country.
Share
25:39
We apply for allocations of that same kind of money, and use it to pay people to learn. We also work with corporations. We can train up entire cohorts, or a generation of junior-level and apprentice-level technologists trained directly to their systems, ready to be hired on day one. We've worked with all kinds of companies, getting them to pay for things like tuition and money for students to accomplish exactly this goal.
Share
26:06
We've worked with over 5000 students. And of those entering our career programs, over 80% earned technical employment. And in
Fresno
, this means that that new technology workforce is greater than 50% female or gender-nonconforming, greater than 50% minority or Latinx, and 20% 1st generation. And those demographics mirror the demographics of our county.Share
26:33
These are folks leaving restaurant, retail, factory, and field labor, earning on average, less than $20,000 a year exiting the programs earning $60-80,000 a year. And we can do this. You know, it's not at all a mystery. It's worked in
Fresno
. It's working in Bakersfield
and Toledo
, Ohio,
and it can work in underestimated cities all over the world.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
27:02
So you've been doing this for 8-9 years now. And have you started to see the city change as a result? And you mentioned other cities, what is happening in terms of not just the people in the program, but the places where they live? They're not leaving, I guess.
Share
Irma Olguin
27:19
No, no. It's one of the best parts of what we do, and by doing this specific work in an underestimated city is 90% of the folks that we train stay at home. That's where they want to be. They're not looking to leave.
Share
27:31
We talk about the lift from, you know, earning $21,000 a year to in 3 years, $80,000 + a year. But that is really just one ingredient in a person being able to participate in their community. And when people participate in their community, you see homeownership changing, you see reliable cars being driven, you see new businesses springing up. You see better support of local businesses that already exist, and you see people voting differently and leadership changing over time in that place.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
28:00
But we know what happens, Irma, when tech comes into a city and makes the cost of living that much higher, it keeps out the people from whom you came, the families. Are you worried that other families won't be able to afford to stay if you are? Could you be a victim of your own success?
Share
Irma Olguin
28:18
I think if we forget who we are, we absolutely could be. But what we definitely don't want to do is create an unworkable situation for the next generation. I think the topic itself is, of course, complicated. There's a housing shortage across the nation. There's a lot more units that need to get built.
Share
28:38
And so yeah, of course we're asking ourselves that question, you know, can or should Bitwise participate in that or is there another way to attack the problem so that we're not perpetuating the issue of sort of gentrification? It's the last thing we want to do, but we're built for and by the community of a place. And we deeply, deeply believe that people who know and understand real problems can solve real problems.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
29:03
It's all awesome Irma. But I mean, I have to ask, a lot of these jobs are entry level and it makes me worried because when you look at job trends, you know, the next 10, 15, 20 years, these are the jobs that will likely get automated. Is it just a continual process that these people will need to be re-skilled over and over again? Or you know, I guess what is the potential for some of these jobs?
Share
Irma Olguin
29:35
Well, the potential is pretty extraordinary. So I think that with the technology industry, we think about it and I think a lot of times you think about, "Oh, it's, you know,
Google
and Facebook
and it's big tech."Share
29:46
But the truth is that just about all companies are becoming technology companies or technology-enabled companies. And that includes the school district, that includes the local hospital, that includes the, you know, county office of education, and the nonprofit down the street, and Joe's logistics on the corner.
Share
30:04
And all of those being powered by technology, there's an incredible sort of gap in the industry right now where we actually need way more entry level folks into the industry than ever before. And I think importantly, that entry level job is still transformative income. This is life-changing money, and by extension, community changing money.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
30:29
It sounds like your life is just completely different, much more than you ever could have imagined as a child. And now like in some ways, you want to help people realize that, you know, they can do this too and maybe they don't need to be so surprised or shocked at what they're capable of or what they can achieve. Like, everyone should have that opportunity. They shouldn't doubt it and maybe they should even expect it.
Share
Irma Olguin
30:58
Yeah. You know, there were these moments in that experience where during that very first job pulling down a check, I had never seen four digits on before. And you realize that like even without a whole lot of skill, you're going to out earn anything you could have ever done, you know, in a different industry or in agriculture, it was a really big deal for me.
Share
31:22
But then you have to ask yourself what kind of person you're going to be when you are not constantly in survival mode. That is awesome. And there's a lot of agency there, there's a lot of accomplishment, but it's so dark.
Share
31:38
Your entire existence, you understood the world to be one thing, which was a fight. And you put on your armor every single day, and you go get it. And now you realize that there's a different way to exist and you have to ask yourself, what am I going to do with my armor? Is that still mine? Do I carry that around?
Share
31:57
So yeah, there is a lot of questioning yourself. I'm talking to you today from a pretty nice hotel room in a pretty nice city, and I got here on a plane that I never would have dreamed of 15 years ago, taking this trip to think about the expansion of our company. But it's not comfortable.
Share
32:21
I don't know if I'm ever gonna feel comfortable taking advantage of all of the privileges that are afforded to me by this work. And so what do you do with that angst? The only thing I know how to do is to put that energy back into the work, and make sure that you're not the only one who gets to experience these moments.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
32:40
That's Irma Olguin, the co-founder and CEO of Bitwise Industries, you can see her full talk at
TED
. com.Share
32:50
On the show today: Work. The first part in our series, "Work, Play, Rest". I'm
Manoush Zomorodi
and you're listening to the TED
Radio Hour
from NPR.
Stay with us.Share
Break
Manoush Zomorodi
34:55
It's the
TED
Radio Hour
from NPR
. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show: the first part of our series, "Work, Play, Rest". And so far we've been hearing about ways to make work better for workers, for cities, for entrepreneurs. But right now, with millions of people having given up their jobs in the past year, some companies are struggling to fill their ranks. And so they're turning to machines.Share
Kevin Roose
35:23
Companies have been investing in automation to fill the gap in their labor force saying, "Instead of paying people $15 or $20 an hour for entry level work, what if we spent $100,000 and built a machine that could do this job forever?"
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
35:38
This is
Kevin Roose
. He's a tech reporter for the New York Times
, and he says the pandemic is only speeding up the inevitable automation of many jobs.Share
Kevin Roose
35:48
Right.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
35:50
I saw that
Domino's
pizza is putting in place equipment to produce their dough. And people are just saying, "Well, we were going to make the transition, let's do it now because we actually don't have enough humans to do the jobs." Is that a strange knock-on effect of this employment crisis?Share
Kevin Roose
36:09
Yes, there are a lot of economists who think that this sort of acceleration that we've seen during the pandemic could really pull forward by a number of years this looming automation crisis.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
36:20
Let's be clear robots taking over jobs. It's not really a new problem.
Share
Kevin Roose
36:26
In the first sort of wave of automation during the 20th century and early in this century, automation and machines were mostly doing manual labor. They were doing repetitive tasks in factories. They were you know, sorting packages and warehouses, things like that.
Share
36:44
And now you know, there are still people who are performing jobs that are essentially endpoints. You know, they're taking instructions from a machine and they're plugging them into another machine. Basically, the goal is to automate these tasks entirely. Those jobs are the first that are going to be automated.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
37:03
We've known about that kind of automation for a while, but machines are also coming for other sectors. Even professional higher paid jobs.
Share
Kevin Roose
37:11
Now with AI and machine learning, machines can do what we would think of as cognitive work, even complex cognitive work. There was a study a few years ago, and they found that actually the jobs that were most at risk of being automated were white collar jobs, jobs that require college education. Some of them would require graduate degrees. Managers, supervisors, things like market research analyst, or sales manager, personal financial advisor. Those were the jobs that actually AI is now doing quite well.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
37:44
Nearly a decade ago, automation even came for
Kevin's
job and it kind of freaked him out.Share
Kevin Roose
37:50
One of my first jobs in journalism involved doing a lot of corporate earnings reports. The kind of basic, you know,
Toyota
made this much money this quarter with strong sales in their North American division, or something like that. And now that job has been almost completely automated. Most publications and like the AP
and Reuters
now use automated software to write corporate earnings reports.Share
38:13
And so that was my first hint that something was happening in this industry and journalism. And then I needed to start paying attention to it, because the last thing I wanted to do is to wake up one day and find that I had been replaced by a robot.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
38:26
I remember the first time that we heard about these automated journalism and reports going on and I read one and I was like, "Oh. Pretty good. Actually."
Share
38:35
I mean, you know, you start to think, "Well, what am I adding to this work?" Right? It starts to beg a very fundamental existential question when you see that AI or whatever you wanna call it can automate your job pretty well. It starts to make you think, "Well, why am I needed?"
Share
Kevin Roose
38:53
Absolutely. I mean this is happening not just in journalism but in every industry — in medicine, in law, in finance. And so now the question for us is, what can we do that machines can't, where is our distinct human advantage? And so that's what I set out to learn.
Share
39:10
I started off by going to every expert I could find and I basically asked them like, what can we do to avoid being replaced by robot? And what they told me was basically, "No, there is no job that is completely protected from robot replacement, from automation from AI, but any job can be made more resistant to automation by essentially making it more human
.
"Share
Manoush Zomorodi
39:35
Kevin Roose
picks up the idea in his TED
talk.Share
Kevin Roose
39:39
Rather than trying to compete with machines, we should be trying to improve our human skills, the kinds of things that only people can do. Things involving compassion, critical thinking, and moral courage. And when we do our jobs, we should be trying to do them as humanely as possible.
Share
39:59
For me, that meant putting more of myself in my work. I stopped writing formulaic corporate earnings stories and I started writing things that revealed more of my personality. I started a financial poetry series. I wrote profiles of quirky and interesting people on
Wall Street
, like the barber who cuts people's hair at Goldman Sachs
.Share
40:21
I even convinced my editor to let me live like a billionaire for a day, wearing a $30,000 watch and driving around in a
Rolls Royce
. Tough job, but someone's gotta do it. And I found this new human approach to my job made me feel much more optimistic about my own future.Share
40:40
Because you can teach a robot to summarize the news, or to write a headline that's gonna get a lot of clicks, but you can't automate making someone laugh with a dumb limerick about the bond market, or explaining what a collateralized debt obligation is to them without making them fall asleep.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
40:58
Okay, so for journalism, I mean it makes sense right? We live now in a world where journalists have brand names. Their byline is sometimes more important than the name of the publication. But how can that human-centered approach be applied to other jobs?
Share
Kevin Roose
41:14
Yeah, I think that a lot of these more resilient jobs will be the ones that involve providing emotional support for people. You know, home health care workers, occupational therapists, nurses, teachers, career coaches.
Share
41:30
These kinds of jobs that, you know, even if a robot could technically give you advice on, you know, how to talk to your boss about a raise. You're gonna want a human with experience and some real, you know, bedside manner to walk you through that. You're not going to accept a robot substitute.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
41:46
To me, that was proven so much through the pandemic with my kids education. How much they needed the support of a teacher who saw the look in their eyes when they didn't understand something, you know? As much as there is available online with
Khan Academy
and other ways that you can learn remotely, that relationship in and of itself is an education. And I feel like my kids really missed it.Share
Kevin Roose
42:13
Absolutely. I think one of the lessons that we learned during the pandemic is that there are limits to the amount of automation and technology that we will accept into our lives. There are certain things that humans are just better at. So those jobs, they're not totally immune. No job is immune, but those jobs are much much safer than jobs that don't involve meeting people's emotional needs.
Share
42:39
As I researched more, I found so many more examples of people who have succeeded this way. By refusing to compete with machines, and instead making themselves more human. Take
Marcus Books
. Marcus Books
is a small independent black-owned bookstore in my hometown of Oakland
California
. It's a pretty amazing place.Share
42:59
It's the oldest black owned bookstore in
America
, and for 60 years, it's been introducing Oaklanders
to the work of people like Toni Morrison
and Maya Angelou
. But the most amazing thing about Marcus Books
is that it's still here.Share
43:13
So many independent bookstores have gone out of business in the last few decades because of
Amazon
or the internet. So how did Marcus Books
do it?Share
43:23
Well, it's not because they have the lowest prices or the slickest e-commerce setup, or the most optimized supply chain. It's because
Marcus Books
is so much more than a bookstore. It's a community gathering place where generations of Oaklanders
have gone to learn and grow. It's a safe place where black customers know that they're not going to be followed around or patted down by a security guard.Share
43:50
As Blanche Richardson, one of the owners of
Marcus Books,
told me, it just has good vibes. Marcus Books
temporarily closed. And like a lot of businesses, it's future was uncertain. It was raising money through a GoFundMe
page, and if you look at the comments on its GoFundMe
page, you can see why Marcus Books
has survived all these years.Share
44:14
One person wrote that we have a duty to preserve gems like this in our community. Someone else said, "I've been going to
Marcus Books
since I was a child, and Blanche Richardson showed me many kindnesses."Share
44:28
Those aren't words about technology. They're not even words about books. They're words about people. The thing that saved
Marcus Books
was how they made their customers feel and experience out of transaction.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
44:45
I wonder if somebody listening is like, well,
Marcus Books
clearly isn't scalable. But I guess what you're saying is like, that's the point.Share
Kevin Roose
44:55
Right. And a lot of the sort of businesses that we're seeing today are successful because they're not scalable and that's a signal, because what people are paying a premium for in those businesses is the handmade quality of these goods.
Share
45:10
The fact that they're not being churned out in a warehouse in
China
somewhere. So I think that the economy that we're seeing is sort of fracturing into two: There are the things that are done by machines, there are the things that are done by humans. And I think both of those are worthy of exploration.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
45:25
OK, so let's talk about how we actually build this sort of next era of the workforce. Because what you're talking about is a different kind of training. I think it's about emphasizing emotional intelligence. How do you even teach that?
Share
45:38
Because what worries me is that some people who maybe are introverted or shy or you know, a good journalist, but maybe not quite as charming as you
Kevin
, that they somehow get left behind in this emotionally-centric workforce.Share
Kevin Roose
45:55
Yeah, I mean, it's going to take some work for some people. The way that during the
Industrial Revolution
, people had to retrain themselves to work in factories rather than on farms, for this new AI era. We're going to need to learn these more fundamental human skills. There are social and emotional learning programs.Share
46:17
There are, you know, courses you can take to improve your empathy. In medical schools now, there are classes that are purely about how to talk to patients, they're not about, you know, how to diagnose them, it's about how do you break bad news to people?
Share
46:31
How do you empathize with someone who's going through one of the hardest times of their lives? And that's the kind of education and skills that we're going to need across lots of disciplines. One of the fastest growing, you know, jobs in the tech industry right now is basically trust and safety.
Share
46:47
It's people who can manage the health of these enormous platforms to prevent people from misusing them. And that's something that requires a lot of complex understanding of, you know, human dynamics and human nature and, you know, understanding threat models and that's the skill that they're not teaching in a lot of college computer science classes, but that has turned out to be hugely important.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
47:12
I mean no matter how much we need humans to do certain work, it sounds like in the future there will simply be fewer jobs period.
Share
47:22
Is that something we need to hear governments address more? Because right now politicians still seem to run on a platform of, you know, bringing work back to a region saying, "We will train for new jobs," but perhaps what we really need is more of a paradigm shift.
Share
Kevin Roose
47:39
I think we do. I mean, I think we should take a lesson from some of the other countries that have implemented structures and systems to help people through times of technological change. In
Japan
for example, there's a longstanding practice among factories where if your job is automated, they can basically loan you out to another company that needs your skill set until they find something else for you to do. It's a practice called Shukko and it's been going on for decades.Share
48:10
In Sweden, there are these job councils that basically catch people who are laid off because of automation, and they pay for these sort of public private partnerships and they pay to retrain people, to teach them interview skills to get them out onto the job market again, to basically serve as a kind of safety net for people when their jobs are displaced by automation.
Share
48:35
And then of course, the most basic thing we could do to help people through this time of transition, is to provide things like universal healthcare, which you know, would prevent a lot of people from feeling like if they lose their job, they also lose their access to healthcare. And would kind of decouple these things that we need to survive with the jobs that make us money.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
48:58
But
Kevin
, maybe we even need to pay people if they don't work, right? Some people have been talking much more seriously and it's actually being tested in certain places. This idea of a universal basic income. Is that what the future holds?Share
Kevin Roose
49:12
Yeah, I think that, you know, I support universal basic income. But I do think we will need a broader safety net, not only because there will be fewer jobs, but because it's going to take some time for people to make the transition from one set of jobs to another. I think that this often gets lost when you hear people, you know, at big fancy conferences saying, "Oh, there will be, you know, new jobs created to replace the old ones that disappear to AI."
Share
49:40
And it's like, well, yeah, but that's not going to be a seamless process. It never has been. You know, during the
Industrial Revolution
, there was, you know, lots of dislocation, there were, you know, labor riots and horrible working conditions and many years where wages were not catching up to corporate profits. And it took a lot of real effort and activism to make that work for workers.Share
50:04
And so I think that we need to be conscious of the fact that some people are not just going to seamlessly leave their, you know, automated job and go become, you know, metaverse therapist or whatever the new jobs will be. They will need skills. They will need to be taught.
Share
50:18
So we actually want to differentiate ourselves to leave our own distinct mark on the things that we create. So that people on the other end, people who are, you know, listening to podcasts know that we are humans doing this conversation and not robots, you know, feeding each other laugh lines.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
50:36
That's Kevin Roose. He's a technology columnist for the
New York Times
and the author of Future Proof: Nine Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. You can see his full talk at TED
. com.Share
50:50
Thank you so much for listening to our episode about work today. We couldn't, of course, get into all the ways that people are rethinking their jobs and how they make a living. But I hope the broader themes of this show brought you some context. Maybe it even gave you a different perspective on any dissatisfaction with work that you're seeing or experiencing yourself.
Share
51:14
Some old ideas, like collective bargaining, they are coming back. Other old ideas, like who gets to access high paying jobs, are being toppled. But perhaps most reassuringly, to me at least, there are signs that in the future will put a higher value on humanity. The work that only humans can do. Even in an economy increasingly run by algorithms and machines.
Share
51:41
Quick reminder. This was the first show in "Work, Play, Rest", our series about how the fundamental ways we spend our time are changing, which means that next week we explore play with musician,
Jacob Collier
and many others.Share
51:57
Subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss it. And as always, to see hundreds more
TED
talks check out TED. com or the TED
app.Share
52:06
This episode was produced by Katie Monteleone, Matthew Cloutier, and Deba Moti Shem. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and Rachel Faulkner. Our
TED
radio production staff also includes Jeff Rogers
, James Delahoussaye, Fiona Gearan, and Harrison V. J. Choi.Share
52:22
Our audio engineer is Brian Jarboe, and our intern is Margaret Sereno. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at
TED
are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan, Michelle Quint. Sammy Case, and Daniella Belorizzo.Share
52:37
I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you've been listening to the
TED
Radio Hour
from NPR
.Share
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