 Well, good afternoon and welcome to our event today talking about mapping the road to a better future of work, care, and well-being. I'm Brigid Sholte. I'm the director of the Better Life Lab at New America, where the Work Family Justice program, looking at how we elevate the value of care, how work needs to change so that it can support our lives and how time for care, elevating that value, how public policy needs to change, business practice needs to change, and our own cultural expectations need to change so that we can all combine work and care across the arc of our lives in ways that are meaningful to us. I'm joined also by my co-host, Molly Martin. She's the director of strategy here at New America. And we're excited to have you all here with us. We'll be giving you a brief introduction about how this is part of a much larger project, trying to understand where we are now in the current reality and what some possible futures might be and how we get to a better one. Molly will be sharing some of our findings. And then we'll have a fireside chat that's been pre-recorded with a policymaker and then very, hopefully very robust discussion with a panel of workers, business leaders, researchers and advocates, very much very reflective of what we have shared in the podcast and the virtual convening that we had last spring. And then we definitely want to have your questions and comments. So we've allotted quite a bit of time for questions, comments and discussion. We began this project really looking at the intersection of work stress and future of work trends. And at the time, there is not a whole lot of discussion about the reality of work stress, if you will. A lot of times we tend to think of work issues or when we think of work and health, are you going into a coal mine or we think about OSHA, what they regulate. And yet there's a growing body of really compelling research pre-COVID, during COVID that's also coming out about psychosocial stress, stress itself, sort of this disconnect between job rewards and job demands that are becoming more and more disconnected, that are creating more and more stress that affect people both in the moment acutely through heart attacks or strokes in the moment or can accumulate over time and lead to chronic ill health and ill well-being. So we were looking at, well, where is that going to go in the future? And then really thinking about the human element in the future of work. A lot of the conversation is around AI and technology and robots. And we really wanted to understand the human element of not only work stress, but this future of work trends and really ask the question, how do we design a better and equitable future? So let's start with, let's see if I can move this forward. We started thinking really big, what's the vision? Where are we going here? How do we get to, say, a good life where there's time, where work is sustaining, it supports human life. And if there's not enough work to go around, there are mechanisms. We have safety nets that work, that help spiral people up rather than have people fall through the cracks. How can we have time, not just for our lives, but for care, for leisure, for joy? And how do we make that equitable so that it's not just, so that it's not another marker of inequality, where only those with the most resources have time and everyone else lives in time scarcity or time poverty? So how do we get to this better future? And we really started asking, sort of thinking big and thinking about, well, who needs, what are the roles? How do we get from here to there? And who plays what role? And we also started to think, well, what if we don't do anything? And what if we stay on the current trajectory? And where could we go? And we're already at a state of really unprecedented inequality. And I called this vision the sort of second more dystopian vision, kind of a Blade Runner. What happens if we don't intervene, if we don't play roles, if policymakers don't get involved, if business leaders don't do anything differently, if workers don't change, or if advocates, if we continue on the current trajectory. And so this was sort of a cautionary tale. And how do we move from here to a better future and avoid Blade Runner? So let's start a little bit with where we are, with current reality. Before we can, this is hopefully setting the stage for this conversation and for understanding sort of what's really at stake here, just as with work stress, it's inequality sort of and power that leads to more and more work stress. Current reality, the, you know, those are the same forces when we think about future of work trends and where human beings fit. It's still about inequality and power, and who has it. So let's look just at work stress. I've mentioned some of the literature that there was one meta-analysis of more than 200 work stress and health studies that had been done over time. And what they found is that the way we work, simply the way we work right now, this is before COVID with work-life conflict, long work hours, sometimes toxic cultures where you don't feel psychologically safe. Many essential workers have unpredictable schedules. Maybe they don't even know how many hours they'll get, which leads to income volatility as well as time volatility. There's been growing job insecurity as we have more contract and independent and gig workers. So there's more precarity and even in sort of the so-called best jobs, there, you know, there is growing anxiety. There's research that shows growing anxiety, because you don't know how long that job might last. We have come to rely on laying people off, has become sort of a business model for, you know, in many cases. And that leads to incredible stress and elevated suicide rates as well. So this is one of the things that we explored in a 10 episode podcast season that we aired with our partners in Slate in the last couple of months, where we really dove deeply into work stress and these future work trends. And the research shows that the way we work, just simply the way we work now, leads to so much stress. It's actually the fifth leading cause of death. And this is before COVID. And so let's look at really what's been happening, sort of in this larger macro picture. And you can see this is research done by wonderful researchers of the economic policy Institute and others have done this as well, where they've looked at rising productivity and for so many decades, particularly after the Second World War, worker wages worked in lockstep with productivity. And then you see in about the 1980s, that started to shift. And so more and more of the fruits of that labor is, you know, even though productivity continued to rise, the workers did not share in the fruits of that labor. So much more of that prosperity became this sort of growing unequal trend, whereas the fruits of the labor went to the owners or the capital, if you will. And so this is key. How did this happen? How do we address this? If technology and automation continues to make productivity rise, efficiency rise, who's going to benefit from that? Will it be the owners of the machines? And then that's a very small pool. And what about the rest of us? If we continue on this trajectory, that could very well lead us to more of a Blade Runner scenario. At the same time, again, growing inequality trend, CEO compensation has really been part of this widening gap between what workers earn and what CEOs earn. It's been really widening in recent decades. And this is a really important thought that came out in the podcast and it came out in a virtual convening that we held, which is if we leave it all to the market, as we have in the past, after the Second World War, the market created a lot of really great jobs, manufacturing jobs, that began to change in the 70s and 80s with trade agreements, with changing the changing economy, with jobs moving overseas. And so now what the market is creating, this is according to a really wonderful report that MIT put together, looking at the work of the future. It's sort of the way that David Otter, the MIT economist, has described it as sort of like a barbell weighted on either end. The market is creating this bifurcated workforce where we have the creation of high-paying knowledge and technical jobs and low-paying service jobs. And what we're not creating are those middle-class sort of medium-paid jobs that we have when we've gone through past sort of industrial cycles or industrial revolutions. So we're going to have high, really great jobs and potentially really crummy jobs. So then the question becomes, what do we do about those crummy jobs? Do we just accept that they're crummy and then we create safety nets around them? Or do we make those jobs better jobs? And so I'm really excited in the panel, we're going to have some panelists speak directly to how we ensure good jobs and why that's so important. Thinking again along the lines of kind of crummy jobs, if you look at just where a lot of our low-skill, which is another misnomer, and that's something that we'll be talking about in the panel, but sort of low-paid jobs in the United States, the service jobs that are being created on that lower end of the spectrum, they're actually worse here than in other advanced economies. And why is that? And who's responsible for that? And how do we change that? And so this is in part policymakers and the public sector looking at minimum wage, this is businesses looking at how we think about workers and how we value them and how we invest in them. And then when we look about at COVID, sort of the brave new world of COVID coming down and just really disrupting so much of work and care in recent years, you can see the real brunt of like who's, you know, we talked about the C-Session and who lost jobs, who is really born so much of the pain of the COVID disruptions. And you can see it's, you know, it's really, it's people with caregiving responsibilities, it's mothers more so than fathers. And when you look, it's really mothers of color who have born most of the disruption of COVID, losing jobs, and the, some of these service jobs that are being created, care jobs are among the fastest growing jobs. This is also where women of color are overrepresented. So there's already COVID has just made an unequal landscape even more unequal. And we talk about, you know, essential workers, but then, you know, other than clapping for them and maybe giving a few, you know, temporary wage increases, if you look at, you know, who's been most impacted by COVID, who's died from COVID? In every instance, every age group, every racial and ethnic demographic, it's essential workers who have born more, you know, not only because they had to go to work, the deskless workers, if you will, they have born much more of the, born much more of the health and illness burden of COVID. And another thing that really has come up in the podcast and the convening and in this project is that we've really got a broken social contract between workers and business and government. And in the, in the last several decades, workers are more and more increasingly on their own. When we just look at public policy, we are literally one of the few countries in the entire world developed advanced or not, that does not have, does not guarantee paid maternity leave or paid parental leave, paid family leave. We're one of the few that does not guarantee paid sick days. We had some emergency paid sick days during the pandemic. But that also exempted some of the largest employers where most of the essential workers worked. So that was also, that also led to illness and death. So we don't have a guarantee of paid sick days. We don't have a guarantee of paid vacation or paid time off to recover. In the United States, including healthcare, all of this is left to employers, which is one of the reasons why jobs are so expensive. It's another reason why it's very difficult to get enough hours, because if it's expensive, it's, you know, it's easier to have a contract worker rather than a full job with full benefits. So there's interesting conversations going on about how do we make benefits portable? How do we make them public and equitable and universal? Because if we leave it, the research shows if we leave it to businesses to provide all of these benefits on their own, who tends to get the benefits are those high wage knowledge job, knowledge workers who, you know, then that's seen as a race for talent and who does not get these benefits are the essential workers, the service workers who could use them the most. And we also, when it comes to childcare, I think it was so clear during the pandemic about how broken that system is, you can see that the United States spends about among the least of all of the advanced economies on what it invests in creating childcare system. We also rely a lot on unemployment and yet, you know, the layoffs sort of become a business model and yet it's really unfair. Many, in many states, just a handful of workers might actually qualify for them and in many cases, the benefits don't last long. We did have emergency pandemic insurance and we'll be talking about that during the panel and we learned a lot of good lessons about when it lasts enough time when the benefit is enough to help you survive so that you can find the next better job rather than just take the next thing that comes along to try to survive, but there are some real benefits to that. So that really just leads us to the larger question, the future of work and well-being, you know, how do we make space for humans in this automation? And the real question that we really struggled with is, you know, as we think about that bifurcated workforce, you know, what we know from the past, and again this is work that MIT has done, that technology and automation will destroy jobs. You know, there's no question about it, but there will be new jobs that will be invented, jobs that we haven't even imagined. And the real question will be, will these new jobs be good enough? Will they be big enough to support human life? And if they're not, what are we going to do about that? How do we make them better jobs? How do we support people if we're going to accept that they're not better jobs? If there isn't enough work to go around, then what? So these were all the questions that we grappled with. And one of the things that really has stuck with me is when, again, the MIT economist David Otter said, if we accept that sort of growing bifurcation, what we might end up with in this Blade Runner reality is a society of the servers and the served and where that inequality would become a permanent fixture. And that has enormous implications for our society, for our economy, for our sense of fairness, and for our democracy. So these are some of the questions that we grappled with. And we really came down to sort of two big takeaways. And that is the future is a choice. It's not set in stone and that we all have a role to play. Policymakers, business leaders, researchers, workers, advocates, we all have a role to play in creating a better future. And so with this, I would love to turn it over to my co-pacilitator, Molly Martin, the director of strategy at New America, to take us through some of the findings. Thank you so much, Bridget. My name is Molly Martin, as Bridget said. I'm the director of strategy at New America, but also someone with a keen interest in how we work, how we talk about work and how we treat working people and how we treat ourselves. What Bridget said, obviously, is true. Expertise is live. The future is a choice. And there's a role for all of us. And these kind of mantras guided us in the project that you'll see linked in the lower corner of your screen, mapping the road to a better future of work and well-being. Bridget has been doing interviews for quite a while and working on the podcast, talking to folks from economists, to home care workers, to Lyft drivers, to attorneys, to policymakers and activists. And she's done it with the purpose of learning about what each of these different quote walks of life thinks and believes about work. We all know work has honor. Most of us kind of accept the practical truth of capitalism. We probably will be working or earning at some point in our life. But I think we all believe that our worth does not come from work. Our worth comes from our life. Our role is just a plain human. And we thought you can't have a conversation about improving the balance between humanity and work without talking to some real humans. And that's where the lived experience comes in. And so what we did is we convened a group of people who work in all ways and have all manner of experience with working in America. And we asked them, what do you think needs to happen so that we get away from this intense unhealthy pressure that Bridget talked about? And so we get away from this huge gap between people who left the house every day during COVID and people who didn't, but also understand the stressors of folks who wear lab coats to work and folks who wear work boots. And we all share in common the fact that in America, for many of us, work is killing us. And so we thought the only people who know how to get around it are the people working every day. Next slide, please. So I'm just going to spin through a couple of things that Bridget mentioned, but also a couple of things that you'll find in the paper that Bridget, Angela Speedolette, and I co-authored, and that you'll find again linked in the bottom of your screen. What drives work stress? You heard Bridget mention some of these, but I think it's important to note one of these in particular. Some of these aren't a surprise to you, but the no justice or fairness culture of work. We asked a lot of people again and again, what makes you get up in the morning? What inspires you? And while money is a reality and good wages are important and increasing wages is really important, people said the way I'm treated, the value I believe that I add. And when there's not justice, when I'm not valued as a human being, when there's racial, ethnic, gender disparity, when there's racism, sexism, when people don't understand my gender identity or my culture, it really takes away from my work experience, but it takes little bites out of me as a person. And so I would say the justice culture is driving work stress probably as much as any of the things on this list. Next slide, please. So what do we want people to do? There are lots of different roles to play. There are lots of different players, one of them, obviously, businesses and employers. And for businesses, you'll see this as a common thread throughout the highlights here. We want to change the narrative, reframe the idea that what you produce is what matters. Sure, productivity matters. It's a business reality. But the investment in human capital drives that productivity, even as automation increases, the different jobs that support automation, inform automation, create automation, are there when the automation fails. These actually continue to matter. Besides the fact that we haven't yet found like an automated big-care worker that anybody's super keen to give their kids to, we still need people. And those people are the heart and can be a real asset to your business. And so one of the things that businesses can do is rethink their counting practices and the way they talk about workers. It's not about formula. It's about the people who show up every day to help you live your life or make your product. Next slide, please. Similarly, this is also about narrative. We need to change the way we talk about workers and make it human-centered. We talked about the humane treatment being at the center of a better future of work. We also need to change things like the jobs report, how we report on work. That jobs report about how many jobs we created last month. Certainly that's one important data point. But it matters more that those jobs aren't terrible jobs. It matters more what those jobs can pay folks to do. While there's honor in all work, if we are creating 8 million jobs in one corner and they're not paying folks enough to live a good life, support their family, take time off when they need it, have we really created something that's in the interest of the economy or the American community we all want to live in? Next slide, please. What can researchers do? There are lots, but one really interesting idea that came from another New America colleague was we need to collect the caregiver status of employees. Not to target them, not to punish them, but to support them. We do not have a good sense in this country of the different caregiving roles that people are expected to play every day. We understand perhaps more about parenthood, but you might be caring for an elder parent, a partner, a pet, your community yourself. We don't really have a good way of collecting and keeping data in a consistent manner to understand the different demands on people's time. This was one great idea from a colleague. Next slide, please. What can tech policy leaders do? Technology matters here. Automation matters. We know that as people try to increase productivity, technology is just around the corner, monitoring, surveilling, and these aren't always impacting our productivity. They're often detrimental to our well-being, but we don't have all the information, so it would be worth finding out what does the omnipresence of technology mean for everyone from a home healthcare worker to a technologist who's working on the Google campus. Next slide, please. And what can policymakers and policy leaders do? Accounting practices and tax policy are only so much in our control here at the ground level, and we'd really encourage people to think about human capital as assets. Those are assets and not liabilities. They're not just expenses hitting your bottom line. They are the reason that you can continue to thrive and grow, and it's your investment in a better future. It's the moral and ethical thing to do, but it's also smart economics. Now, next slide, please. You'll notice, as I point you to learn more, these are just a couple snippets of some of the things we heard from the people who would know best, the people living it, so I hope you'll check out the report. You'll notice I didn't list what can workers do. There is absolutely a role for workers, certainly to think critically about what's going on in your own environment, speak transparently about what your pay be open to hearing new ideas for organizing or changing the way you work. But one of the things that we heard again and again in doing this work is this is a systems problem, and we often put the onus on workers, change the system you're in. That's a really big ask and largely unfair. But as individual people, we interact every day with people who work. We can honor them, respect them, talk to them, look them in the eye, advocate for them that they're paid fairly. If you have someone who takes care of your home, maybe you could contribute to a paid leave bank for that person. Think critically about the way that you engage with everyone in your life or all out there working on something. On that note, before I hand it back to Bridget, I do want to acknowledge that a lot of people are working to make this event happen, and we don't want invisible unseen work happening. So thank you to Angela, who is running the event for us. Thank you to Jason Stewart, who does our AB production, and thank you to Riley Rodgerson, who is our events associate. On that, Bridget, I'm going to hand back to you. Thank you so much, Molly. That was wonderful. And yes, thank you so much to all of the people behind the scenes who are maybe invisible to the participants, but really integral, really essential to all of this work. So what we'd like to do now is we'll play a pre-recorded fireside chat. We wanted to, we invited lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to speak with us today, and we're so glad that Representative Jim Himes, a Democrat of Connecticut, was able to join us. Representative Himes, he is the chair of the House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness and Growth, and he's been thinking quite a bit about these visions and these futures and how we get to a better future of work and well-being. So let's listen. Well, hello, we're so grateful to have you with us. We've got Representative Jim Himes, a Democrat of Connecticut, and he's the chair of the House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness and Growth. So Congressman, you were on our podcast. We were talking a lot about the future of work and well being. And let's start with the big picture. So much of what we talk about, we get into the nitty gritty, we get into the details. But what's the vision? What's that North Star? Where should we think about going? You know, it's a great question, Bridget, and it was sort of one of the early questions of the committee, right? Which is, what's your endpoint? What is your endpoint? And if you want to stay in the policy realm and if you want to sort of stay out of the field of philosophy, you know, what you do is you arrive at the point of view that we have such a long way to go to a world where an individual's prosperity, their location on the income ladder is related purely to the extent to which they've invested in themselves and worked hard. That there's a lot to do there. Now, the reason I say we're not getting into philosophy is that, you know, Professor Michael Sandell has a criticism of the meritocratic structure, but that's philosophy, that's not where we are. We have so much to do to yank out the arbitrary factors associated with prosperity, skin color, gender, geographic location, that we don't need to get into that, but we do grapple really hard with how can we, you know, quickly because, you know, we have become so disparate in our economic outcomes, how can we quickly make a difference here? So how can we? So how do we get to that better future of work and well-being? And I love that that you're talking about these sort of arbitrary factors that now play such an enormous role in somebody, someone's work and quality of life and are projected to play potentially enormous roles, gender, skin color, where you live, your background, what's your sort of economic, kind of what your parents did. All of that is really deterministic right now and could be in the future. How do you get beyond that? What are some of those things that? Well, there's so much that can be said on this and we're in the process of writing what will be a lengthy report on all of the things that you can do. And I mean, it's everything from considering things like a national minimum wage, which of course hasn't gone up in an awful lot of places, to considering the fact that our tax code sends an awful lot of government largesse to people who are doing pretty darn well. The bit that's to me most exciting though, because at the end of the day, our society puts such primacy on, you know, what Joe Biden says, the dignity of the individual, that what's most exciting of course is the question of how can we really disrupt the systems that we have education and training to invest in people. And even that's a big topic, right? I mean, you know, if you were to look at the federal budget, a huge slice of the pie, not quite half, but a huge slice of the pie goes to our senior citizens, people over the age of 65 via social security and Medicare and Medicaid. The amount that we invest in our youngest community members prenatal through five years old is infinitesimal. And if a Martian landed on our planets and what they say, what the world are you doing? And, you know, you obviously have to have that conversation without, you know, pitting demographic groups against each other. But that's just madness, right? And another area of madness that I think we should change pretty quickly is that, you know, we still have education and training systems that are set up for a world that is long gone. You know, both my daughters had this summer off so that they could help bring in the crops, right? I mean, it's madness, right? And, you know, shame on us, by the way, and by us, I don't just mean the government. But, you know, we've forever maintained this notion that, you know, the be all end all is to go to college, right? And so we've built all of these massive government support structures like Pell Grants, like student loans, a topic of much conversation lately, that is designed to send you to college, which only 40-ish percent of Americans do. We've almost got nothing for that, you know, kid out there who's really interested in getting a certificate, being an electrician. So anyway, my point is we've got a lot of disruption we can do to a system which is no longer addressing the economic needs of our time. So I'm hearing, raising the minimum wage, I'm hearing addressing tax code. I think one of the things that we talked about is the tax code. Also, it favors you're going to invest in machinery or, you know, sort of technology, you get a much greater return on your investment than if you invest in people, or in human capital. But that's something the tax code could address. Well, that's exactly right. I mean, you know, when you have a tax code that heavily taxes labor, but much less heavily taxes capital, it should be no surprise that you can walk into a McDonald's today and interact with the machine and not see very many people. Now, that's not an argument against technology. It's just an argument like technology is inevitable, but it is an argument for not putting your finger on the scale in a way that damages the ability of people to get compensated for their labor. You know, so you talked about education and training and putting the finger on the scale. One of the things again that has really struck me in so much of the reporting that we've been doing in the podcast and the convening is really the central question of the future of work is not so much technology is a given automation is coming. There's just no way to stop that and technology can drive innovation. And that's a good thing. And we want that the idea that technology can make our lives better is a very exciting possibility. But the central question is there's no doubt that technology is going to destroy certain jobs. It will create other jobs. And the real question is, will these new jobs be enough to sustain human life? And if you look at the trajectory where we are where we've been the past 40 or 50 years, you know, we've had lots of good middle class jobs destroyed and gone overseas manufacturing and and other sort of good life, you know, sort of family supportive jobs, they've gone, they were placed with service sector jobs, low paid jobs, contract insecure gig jobs. And I guess that's the real question. Is there does the government as public policy put its finger on the scale to help ensure that whatever those new jobs are, break from this current trajectory of sort of really great high high paying jobs and really crummy low paying jobs and kind of nothing in the middle? Yeah, yeah, no, what a what a topic. And once again, the answer is, of course, we're doing this wrong, right? You know, more and more, you talked about gig jobs, you know, gig jobs don't come with benefits. Often they don't come with health care, retirement plans, etc. You know, maybe this is an argument made by folks on the left, but I would hope it would have some appeal on the right too, which is that if we're entering an economy where more people are taking gig jobs, because they are between jobs, they want to supplement their income, or the world that my daughters live in and not the world that my parents lived in, where you're going to have, you know, six or seven jobs in a period of 12 years, you know, maybe we need to think more seriously about the model that says that, you know, your health insurance, your retirement, your disability insurance is going to come through your employer. Now, you know, I'm not going to try, the Republican immediately is saying, well, you're just looking to expand government. Well, maybe, maybe not. But the point is, can we have a more efficient system? Because our system today is not very efficient. And so, yeah, yeah, I mean, we really need to be thinking this through because, you know, technology, as you point out, is not going away. And I even worry, you know, I am deeply suspicious of arguments that everything is different now because almost, you know, that's almost never true. And, you know, and I'm a huge fan, I think, like you have technology, and you're absolutely right, it destroys legacy businesses. But, you know, the story has always been that more jobs get created because of technology. And that story has always been true. But something feels a little different to me in this world of artificial intelligence and machine learning. I worry that more and more human jobs are going to be replaced by computers. And it's not just, you know, it's not just the guy on the factory floor anymore, it's radiologists, it's accountants, it's, it's, you know, vast swans of our of our economy, including very high paying jobs are going to get taken out by machines. And what people say, and I agree with this, which is, yeah, but, you know, 30 years ago, there weren't many yoga teachers there, you know, we have a huge need for care professionals taking care of our seniors. Yes. Yes. But as you pointed out, those service jobs, those care professionals, those yoga teachers, those are not jobs that get compensated the way the software engineers do. And so I think we got a grapple with that. You know, you talk about care jobs, I was just looking at BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics projections yesterday, and I knew care jobs were fast growing jobs. But I think what really struck me is that by 2031, BLS is predicting that home care, home health and personal care aids will be the biggest job in the entire US economy. And so those are jobs that pay poverty wages right now, done largely almost almost entirely by women, where women, women of color, immigrant women are overrepresented, really very invisible and really unvalued jobs. So if this is going to become the job of the United States, does public policy have a role to play and making sure those jobs are better jobs? You know, I'm almost certain that it does, because you outlined the problem perfectly. Taking care of a senior, hard to imagine an artificial intelligence robot doing that in a meaningful way. Yay, that's a secure job. But as you point out, it's also a poverty wage job. So how do you alter that? There are analogs to this, right? We all run around saying our public school teachers are the most important job that we have. They teach the next generation. They teach civics. And then we pay them very, very poorly. So you do have these market breaks where we all acknowledge that they're enormously valuable positions. But for some reason, the market doesn't compensate them as such. And I do think that there is even minimum wage, right? My friends on the right object to a minimum wage and they've got some reasonable objections, right? If you do raise the minimum wage to $15, as we would like to do nationally, that actually does have much more of an effect in a low wage geography. You know, in rural Alabama, that has a much more disruptive effect than it doesn't Fairfield County, Connecticut. So it's fair to grapple with these things, but there's just not a lot of history to suggest that if we're moving into a world of, as you pointed out, huge numbers of senior caregivers, we either need to be comfortable with the notion that more and more people will be living with poverty wages or we'll need to intervene in the market. And I obviously would prefer to see the second scenario done in an intelligent and thoughtful way. You know, it's interesting when you look at, you know, the role that public policy or government could play and you look at history, there's no doubt there's been really interesting research about how US investment, you know, federal investment in innovation, you know, can lead to not only greater innovation, technological innovation, thinking, you know, semiconductors, the internet, you know, self-driving vehicles, the list goes on, and there's potential then for that kind of investment to drive better jobs. So is that another avenue that you can see the federal government, the public policy world playing? Well, it's unquestionable that investing more in research and development at the federal level is a very smart thing to do. It's up there with increasing immigration in terms of things that you can do quickly that have profound and rapid economic effects. And, you know, I sometimes wave my iPhone around to tell that story, right? Because the iPhone, in some ways, it's the illustration of the perfect economic partnership. You know, lots of private companies, Apple and all sorts of semiconductor companies, etc., etc., make a lot of money on that technology. But all of the stuff inside that, whether it's the GPS satellites or the early investments in semiconductors or voice recognition, we have that stuff because the federal government invested through programs like DARPA in that basic research that the private sector was not going to do. But again, that takes me back to the worry. You know, let's just imagine that more federal research leads to an even better, you know, nine-dimensional iPhone, whatever. You know, I still do worry that as we advance technologically, technology will at a rate much faster than ever in history, squeeze out the economic value of human being. So I do worry about that. And I do think, you know, UBI, Universal Basic Income, it feels very futuristic and everything else. And I think it is. And people aren't quite ready to grapple with it in a meaningful way. But, you know, you do have to acknowledge that if we do arrive at a world where, you know, software can do most of the functions of a human being so much better than a human being, and therefore in an economically more productive way, and this creates vast wealth, you do need to grapple with the necessity for redistribution. Otherwise, you're going to end up with the masters and overlords of, you know, artificial intelligence and machine learning, you know, capturing all that wealth and everybody else being left behind. Yeah, what is sounds very war of the worlds or what am I thinking of? Time Machine, one of those futuristic novels. You know, one of the other things that you talk about, and it's sort of like builds on that point, is if we do have this future where there's less work to go around, you know, what then you talk about Universal Basic Income or a safety net. I think in the podcast, you said people deserve something that looks better than something out of Dickens, which is sort of what we've got right now. What role does public policy and sort of shoring up the safety net, you know, actually redesigning some of these really antiquated public policies around say unemployment and that whole system, what role does that play? Yeah, yeah, well, you know, you don't even need to get to Universal Basic Income, which again is a conversation that most people are not quite ready for yet to say that, look, in a society that is producing immense and inconceivable wealth, you ought to have a minimum baseline, right? Nobody ever, you know, nobody should be going hungry. Nobody shouldn't have access to health care, right? So that's what you of course referred to as a safety net, right? And there are auto, even though there is a left right fight about this, there ought to be an acknowledgement that, you know, in the context of immense wealth, we ought to set a minimum below which no person will fall. That's more complicated, sadly, than it should be. But then you raise sort of an interesting philosophical question, you know, if we do move into a world, and I'm not sure I'm buying into this sort of dystopian vision of millions of Americans who are being supported, but have no, you know, economically constructive role in our society. I'm skeptical of that. But I'm also a little torn by that, right? Because on the one hand, you know, the futurists tell you, well, imagine a society where tens of millions of Americans have their material needs met, and they're, you know, investing in an understanding of poetry and literature and music and living these incredible lives. Yeah, maybe, but the flip side of that is, or maybe you're just, you know, doom scrolling through Facebook and being manipulated by algorithms. So I used to be more of an optimist until like, you know, until the last four or five years about what humans left to their, you know, to themselves will do. But that's more philosophical. Obviously, we need to get to a place in an enormously wealthy society where we just look at each other and say, look, let's argue about how we do it. But let's agree that there are going to be minimum standards of calories and access to health care and access to education that nobody will fall below. Well, I think that's a great place to end. So, Congressman Jim Himes, thank you so much for joining us today. This is the first of many, many conversations over the over the coming years. But thank you so much for being with us at the start. Thank you, Bridget. Really appreciate it. At this point, I'd love to welcome our panel, where we're going to be continuing on with these themes. And I was just going to mention, the Congressman mentioned Michael Sandow, What Money Can't Buy. It's a, it's a, it's a really wonderful book about the limits of markets and sort of what we decide is should belong in the market and what should be more of a public and common good that leads to a good life. So it's a great book. I would suggest anybody read it. But let me introduce our panel. And we've been really guided in this conversation by, again, those two questions, the vision, the imagination, the bold vision for what, what the future could look like, should look like. And then the action, how do we get there and who should do it? And so let me introduce our panelists. We're delighted to have Danielle Williams. She's a home care worker in Arkansas. Her daughter, Brittany Williams, who is a home care worker and a union member with SEIU 775 in Washington State. We have Francisco Diaz. He's the senior policy strategist with the Center for Popular Democracy. We also have Sarah Kaila. She's the executive director of the Good Jobs Institute. And Warren Valdman as he's a partner of Two Sigma Impact. And he's the author of Accountable, How We Can Save Capitalism. So welcome all to the panelists. Molly and I are delighted to have you here looking forward to this conversation. And I'd love to jump in with Brittany and Danielle. Sorry to put you on the spot, you two. But here we've got this BLS data that not only are home care and personal care jobs the fastest among the fastest growing of all jobs, but in less than a decade they're projected to be the biggest job in the United States. And let me turn it over to the two of you. What will it take? What will it take for those workers to be able to enjoy a future of work and well-being? Okay, I'll go first. It's going to take having a workforce where our pay and our benefits is able to compete with other marketplaces. It's going to take developing a pipeline that's bringing high school workers straight into the field of caregiving and showing them that this is a career, not just the job. It is something that you can build off, move up the ladder in, support yourself and your family, have a fulfilling retirement, fulfilling healthcare benefits, dental benefits, vision benefits, understanding that we are the baseline for our nation and what that looks like. Hi. Yeah, Danielle, what do you think? Just to piggyback on, bring me, you know, being in two different states from Washington to Arkansas, the career difference status is very different, where you have union up in the North and down South. The down South you don't, so you consider as just another employer, but you were saying as years to come, caregiving will be the highest job and we should get paid more, because you can't bring machines and take care of somebody's mother, father, sister, brother. They can't replace us. We can't be replaced. We are here and we're here to stay regardless of how much we make, what our job is. Even with doctors, you can replace them, you can replace nurses, but you can't replace caregivers. Caregivers are always here and you really can't pay a person enough to do what they do for its caregiving. I believe that if we had unions to represent down South, we could get the benefits, we could get the retirement and everything that comes with that package to vacation time. It wouldn't be where you're just going in to get a paycheck. It would be where you actually going in, you're liking your job because you're there and you're getting all the benefits that come with that particular job, taking care of full life. Let me turn it over to Molly. Well, Brittany and Danielle, I'm so happy to see you both, happy to see the whole panel, but Brittany and Danielle, we've had the opportunity to meet and I think I mentioned that really grateful daughter of someone who had in-home care for the last years of his life and was able to live the end of his life the way he wished. I am a big fan and great admirer of people who provide home care and you mentioned Danielle, the difference in being between being in Arkansas versus Washington. Well, I grew up in West Virginia, rapidly aging population, lots of history of labor organizing, but it hasn't quite made its way to benefit the home care workers yet and so I'm curious when you think about being in a different state, has either of you ever wanted to move someplace where you heard it works like easier or better to be a home care worker or is the pull of the relationships you have with the folks you care for just too strong? I wouldn't be to live somewhere where it'd be easier because I feel like being a caregiver and being one since 2010 is never easy. I lived in Washington state for 12 years and then I came back here in 2018 to Arkansas, so it's the same work for state. More pay in Washington state, less pay in Arkansas because you're doing the wages, the minimum of the wages, but if the people who have home care and caregivers like me but still have credentials for a CNA to get higher pay, you would have to go into an American home or a hospital, but you're still doing the same scope of practice as we would as a caregiver. You're still doing the same job just a different type, I'll put it that way, just a title. So it's not easy, it's nowhere being easy going from one state to another state because you're still doing the same job, you just have different clients who have different disabilities and the wages are different. And so I will stand in agreement with that because what you have to look at when you're going from state to state, you have to look at the cost of living. So that varies from all the way from Hawaii to Alaska, we're seeing that that's not taken into consideration when people are the businesses or agencies or state are establishing the pay rates, they're not taking into consideration that we're dealing with inflation that's historical. We're dealing with the cost of gas continuing to increase and these caregivers are required to show up at the people's houses, they're required to get there whether they're using their own vehicle like myself or transit like I used to. We still have to continue to do that, provide that service and so as my mom was saying it varies from state to state it's the same work but it needs to match the cost of living. So as a Washingtonian I'm very blessed because I am in one of the best states to be a caregiver in right now. I have had the opportunity in the past month to talk to caregivers out of Alaska where they actually saw a pay cut and now they're fighting for that increase to get back to where they should be and beyond that. So I would say yes being on the west coast does make a difference as a caregiver you do get to get more benefits you do have that voice of the union 45,000 plus caregivers in our union we represent not just Washington state but Montana as well so I do have that backing support which is not seen in every state so you know there's a lot of factors that weigh on that. Thank you so much Brittany and Danielle as Molly said it's just delightful to have both of you here and part of the conversation. I'd love to bring in Sarah at this point. Sarah you're with the Good Jobs Institute and you have also co-authored a paper that has really kind of looks at what some people call quote-unquote low-skill work and that has been traditionally devalued care work being considered part of that. I'd love for you to talk about kind of where that perception came from how it impacts the market and what we need to be thinking about as we move to a to a more equitable future. Thanks Bridget and Brittany and Danielle thank you for being on it's so incredibly important to have you here and I want to start with you and with with direct care work there's a lot of talk about upskilling and I think when you hear that we're putting a lot of the onus on individuals you don't have the skills you need to get better skills not the entire job market and that's really not what we're facing right now so there are a lot of bad jobs in the United States 2019 about a third of workers were in jobs that did not pay a living wage that's 53 million people these are bad jobs for people and they're not going away and I'm so glad that the BLS stats on healthcare and home direct care workers have already come up. We hear a lot about oh you need to be upskilled to the the fastest growing occupations the fastest growing occupation is actually a wind turbine tech and it's 61 percent it's going to grow according to BLS but there's only 7000 of them right now so we're going to add 4300 jobs it's home health care direct care workers who have the largest number of jobs who are going to be added and it's incredibly important for our society so I think there's just such a disconnect between what fast is growing and what the actual number of jobs are that are out there so like let's look at data in a different way let's do some real math we need great home health care workers we need restaurant workers we need all sorts of workers who right now we can't find in our economy and it's making it really hard um so you know a there's a lot of bad jobs are not going anywhere um the jobs that are out there that are low skilled by by terminology are really important jobs these are essential jobs right so most of the essential jobs labeled during covid they are also labeled by many low skill and we just have to get beyond that um these are already skilled jobs and that's again Brittany and Danielle I'm going to tell you what you do but I'd love for you to sort of expand on the kind of work you do home health care we've done work in in senior care and when you're a certified nursing assistant you are getting people out of bed you're helping them get dressed and while you do that you're looking to see about their skin health and making sure that they're you know that they're eating properly and making sure that they're um either gaining or losing weight whatever they're supposed to be doing you're checking on their bowel movements which is incredibly important and might mean you need to sort of move around medications you are the first line of medical defense and you are deeply caring for people in a way that I I can't even fathom doing so you are you know people's favorite shirt and their favorite way to do their hair and you know and you get them ready to see their families in a way that is dignified you are doing something that I can't even imagine doing and someone somewhere has decided that it's low skilled and why because it's done by women and it's done by women of color and it's done by immigrants and it's done by people who don't speak English as a first language and that's really what our paper looked at. Zaynab Tan, Amanda Silver and I wrote an MIT teaching note on this and you know we found that you know a typist would be considered less low skilled than a a tight machine setter this is again in the sort of 70s and 80s we don't really have those jobs anymore but very interestingly a nurse and a nursery school teacher those jobs were rated as having less complexity than a dog pound attendant there that is not coming from any kind of reality except for racism and and misogyny and so we really have to get over that just wanted to to sort of add all of that in I'm going to stop here but let us never use the term low skill again when you're doing that you are you're you're you're making you're you're not dignifying deep amount of skill that every American worker brings to their job. I absolutely love that yeah that's agreed to banish the word low skill you know but speaking of Francisco if we could turn to you at this point you've worked with an awful lot of workers essential workers in particular and before COVID certainly but during COVID as well and I'm wondering if you can if you can kind of talk about sort of the advocate and the worker role in trying to create fairer systems moving forward. Absolutely and I think these are kind of in order to kind of create fairer systems I think we need to be first and foremost working with and alongside and in solidarity with workers who are in these essential roles right without without home care workers so much of our entire medical system would fall apart so much of our economy and our society would have fallen apart without essential workers who were very much kind of the base of CPD's network Center for Popular Democracies and National Network of Community Organizations we have worker centers unions and and other community based groups that really work with communities of color around the country and so you know really kind of first and foremost kind of fighting and organizing alongside a lot of workers who are just trying to improve their workplaces and find ways to build dignity at work you know whether that's to have more benefits to avoid wage theft you know and whether you're a dollars to worker in Alexandria Louisiana or Starbucks workers in Hartford you know we are we're trying to support that but the other thing too is to help them and I'm thinking very much from you know an advocate side who is on the worker side often in these discussions to win demands that improve both improve the material conditions of workers in their workplaces so we try and do that through stable scheduling or through or through greater accountability in the workplaces by having better enforcement mechanisms but also something we try and win demands together with them that make it easier for workers to have a real say in their workplace and to make it easier to win future improvements in their workplace and obviously these improvements are not always going to be in conflict with employers but it is something that you know we are often trying to think through so by doing these kind of two steps of both organizing first and foremost alongside workers to find whether the problems to address those problems to and then to win demands that both make things immediately better and make it easier to organize and bring people together and have a real say I think we can build that kind of transformative change that is necessary really fundamentally necessary I think to reorient and avoid the Blade Runner future because that's actively what I think we we are potentially facing if we don't have more value and I think you know we really see a difference in between Washington and Arkansas for example just as an immediate example where workers in in Washington have a little bit more say a lot more say because they are in solidarity with their fellow home care workers through a union and you know have allies like working Washington which is an affiliate of ours you know who work closely together with the local you know and I think that's kind of a key distinction to think about about on the advocate side how do we bring these different steps together to move things to move you know the economy forward and really change the labor market in the United States we've we've heard a lot about kind of the importance of networks and grassroots organizing and things that I think all of us associate with making great change in this country now Warren obviously business has driven a lot of change in this country too but we often see business and investment sectors as kind of independent actors they can kind of do what they want play by their own rules and they have a tremendous amount of influence you've done quite a bit of writing and speaking about how as an impact investor and as a business innovator you see a way to to making positive social change for workers I'd love to hear more about that especially based on what you've heard from your fellow panelists so far well first let me just say I'm deeply sympathetic and and and agree with many of the remarks that have been made already you know I'm the son of a of a social worker who's got paid almost nothing working with old people and I'm the husband of a preschool teacher so I've seen up close how hard those jobs are and how disproportionate the the pay is to the value but my you know my role in in this sort of conversation I sort of I'm a believer that business can be a force for good it can't solve everything but if business doesn't solve some things then we're in a lot of trouble because just to give you a sense of proportion you know philanthropy in the United States has been pretty consistently at about two percent of GDP for a long time you know many decades you know the you know business contributes something like 90 percent of economic output and if we don't harness that to some degree I think many problems especially problems as big as this one are going to be hard to solve so I you know I helped start a business called Two Sigma Impact we're an investment business that aims to invest in good employers and to foster good employment practices with the idea you know the sort of simple tagline is you know good jobs equals better companies and and that's not just something I believe that's something we've done a ton of research around so we've spent much of the past few years trying to figure out what exactly that statement means so what is a good job and how does it foster better better companies you know we came to the view that you know a good job is one that has four factors the first is fair treatment so you know living wages and things like that benefits and scheduling flexibility the second thing is promising future so some ability to you know you know grow with a with overtime in your role and and at your at your company the third is psychological safety or a tune leadership this idea that you're kind of connected in some way to your company in a way that you can actually speak your mind and and also get feedback from from the people that you work with and then finally a sense of purpose and what greater purpose than what Danielle and Brittany do you know helping the elderly you know when when when a company truly embraces its purpose it often finds that it can you know it often finds that it has more energizing satisfied applied workers now these factors are important socially but they're also important business issues because today north of 50 percent of workers in the United States describe themselves as disengaged but something like one in seven or eight workers is so disenchanted by how they're treated on the job they actively work against the interests of their employers so you know one in eight workers in America and that's that is a big economic drag we have found conversely that when you do invest in companies and and try to foster you know good jobs and better employment practices you often have much better companies much more valuable companies you do have to make an investment in the first instance so you do have to make some somewhat of a leap of faith but when you make that leap of faith I have found that it pays off the most successful investments I've made in my career have been ones where the organization was truly a great organization in words its workers particularly its workers you know closest to its customers or patients are truly engaged and energized and by the way I've worked with with Sarah looking at a restaurant company looking at some other companies and trying to figure out where is this overlap between what's socially socially interesting but also economically interesting and there is a bigger overlap than most investors assume certainly many people in my industry are private equity I think I have a bit of a blind spot for for this well I'd love to to go back to Sarah at that point Sarah can you talk about that what is the research show that when you treat workers well and you invest in workers it's actually better for business yeah so to start there is great research that shows this and there's also research that shows you can offer really bad jobs and make a lot of money you can offer really good jobs and make a lot of money so my colleague Zana Ton and one of her colleagues from MIT came out with a paper that show that there are those two sort of points so we we need to have a lot of pressure to sort of change the narrative of what it means to run a good business but you absolutely can make great money really satisfy your customers and offer great jobs so that's that's been the bulk of Zana's work she wrote the good job strategy which I've subtly placed right here on my bookshelf and and she has studied a set of retailers mainly low-margin retailers so grocery convenience store chains look at that not even a plant who you know are able to offer outsized fantastic jobs for their workers so this is a Costco who you know starts in retail at $17 an hour but the average wage is 25 and you get there fairly quickly so you get to a living wage that way two quick trip which is a gas station convenience store in the midwest we just visited one in Dallas and they're starting wage for a full-time night assistant is $55,000 a year in retail which again is sort of outsized and they have outsized customer satisfaction and you know if you if you follow Costco on the stock market they've done really well and the key to them is they understand that turnover and in team instability is not good for their customer and that's not going to be how they win with their customer we've worked with more than 20 companies over the past five years who've been implementing the good job strategy and I don't know why I'm still shocked every time many of them have not even calculated the direct cost of turnover so what does it cost to hire train and get someone to base productivity this can be a couple of thousand dollars in the service sector this can be up to $40,000 with one call center that we worked with because I've got licensing fees and really intensive training if it costs you $40,000 to replace somebody you best hold on to them and you best do that in a way that really supports them and at the same time those couple of thousand of dollars to replace a worker that in no way is the real cost so you've got the direct cost of turnover then you've got the indirect cost of turnover which can be really big what are all the costs that you're incurring because you've got high turnover safety costs waste costs shrink costs what are all the lost revenue that you you are not capturing because you're not serving your customers well and finally something that that very very few companies have thought about is what is the competitive cost and this is huge what are you not able to do over time because you have high turnover because you have a lot of staff instability so we really encourage companies to be thinking about every one of those steps and and going back to home health care as well like there is real human costs and all of this too the turnover cost is huge in home health care during COVID so many nursing homes were shut down to family but workers were still coming in and out and they were literally coming in and out because we don't pay nursing home workers enough they would often have to have two or three jobs and so they're bringing COVID to multiple places with them and there's research that shows that we would have had about 44% less either cases or morbidity if if home health care workers had one good job that they could do instead of being forced to have multiple jobs so the costs here are to your employees it is to the sustainability of your business and it is to our society very strongly you know what you're saying Brittany it reminds me so much of what you and Danielle talked about you know that and I'd love for the two of you to reflect on that that when you have a good job when you you know in this this case care or home care workers when that is a good job and the turnover you know is low the quality of care gets better and people are able to stay in their homes and then in Washington state we had another podcast that you were on where the state was really thrilled with that idea because then people were able to stay in their homes and not go to more expensive nursing home care so people were happier that cost the state less money that when you had a good job you know there were just so many so many cascading positive benefits to people and businesses and society I'd love for the two of you to reflect on that a little bit more okay um yeah exactly as you said it's it's that ripple effect I always like to take it back to the ripple effect when you have those amazing caregivers doing their job happy they're fulfilled they're able to keep the family of those clients employed and they're able to go to work they're able to go to school they're able to put that money that they're making back into our economy especially right now we really need to see that recycling of money back into our economy we need to see where people aren't having to call into work because no one's there to take care of grandma or mom or dad or nice child uh we also know that well I know that from having conversations from caregivers and legislators to everyday people that some of those very important people that we call essential depend on caregivers because they have family as we as we've seen from the statistics that have been presented to us today people are living longer and you're seeing because of inflation multi-generational homes so they're depending very much on us and what we what we supply is is um workers so that they can continue to work continue to be the doctors continue to be the lawyers the legislators the teachers the even our fast food workers they're continue they're able to continue doing what we need them to do to keep our society moving so it's a ripple effect and whenever you mess up that ripple it affects every other economic structure and business in some type of way um small example when our teachers went on strike that was a whole community that had to figure out oh no what do I do with my children for a week because unfortunately caregivers fortunately and unfortunately caregivers are one of the only careers one of those one of the fields that you cannot go on strike because that's abandonment and a lot of our clients rely on us to stay alive just pick it on what Brittany was saying I was a daycare teacher for like 15 years so basically I look at it as I'm saying field but I just went to the if they would say the older age the baby stage when they went to from one baby to the baby that's how I look at it that's my babies regardless of the age difference and you know we see here we listen I listen to one of the big I can't remember the name where he was saying um we have benefits but I look back where my biggest benefit would be like no health care and um the time is great but you worry you have nurses in the uh the medical systems and all of them they schooling why you can't if you don't give us raises why you can't benefit us with grants where we can continue our education to go up the ladder but we still uh putting back into being home care we just we actually just have you just happen us to benefit more into nursing I'm where I'm trying to become a uh REN but I still can have the benefit of getting that education you you pushing that education on me you know you helping me to get to that point where knowing that I can do this because I have the because I take care of people that's where my heart is I take care of people regardless of what kind of illness they have and the example is when I got out of child care I was kind of tired of that career so I went into to uh home care and not knowing what I was doing but everything that I learned I learned through my clients I have no clue of how to take care of somebody who had diabetes or uh asthma or seizures my clients taught me that so being next to my client was like having my being next to my parents taking care of my parents so I treat all of my clients as if they would love relatives they are relatives to me because I'm not I don't do buy if I don't I don't look at colors and I don't you know I don't look at if she what female male however I look at them if they need help and bringing them back into the home it it's great because you put in the nursing home regardless if it's not being abandoned you are because you still continue work and they're outside people that they don't know and it's like leaving a baby on the doorstep you know you can let y'all on the doorstep you're abandoning a child so it's like Brittany said when pandemic hit it was a lot of clients who lost their caregivers but there was a lot of us who kept working because that was the way paid off we had to do that we we had to interact with maybe one or two clients I'm not knowing if I'm going to catch COVID or if family member or someone in their own head COVID we had to continue to work so my my suggestion is for us you know representatives just help us to further our education push us for a little bit more away yeah come on take this class take this take this class to help you further your help you further your education for home care because when I was in Washington state I took a home care class where I was able to be a nurse dedicated and I took medical medical but when I came back to Arkansas none of that applied to this state so I would just consider a home care worker even though my credentials for C.A. was transferred was here but none of the other credentials that I had took earlier didn't apply to the state of Arkansas we've spent a good amount of time importantly so talk about providing care and who cares for our elders our children and what care does to keep the economy moving so I have a question just kind of go around the horn Francisco I'm going to put you on the spot first and that is how do we provide space for workers to care for themselves we know that whether people have underpaid punishing hours whether they have a lower paid job or higher paid job that work stress is something that kind of unites us all it's taking a major toll so tell us what you see as a role for your organization or for other organizations or institutions to create space for workers to take care of their mental and emotional and physical health oh my gosh um I say this maybe as a union member because I it's a really hard thing not to say this because I think that it's really like we have to if in the in the in the realm of organizing just generally working with workers is always about respecting boundaries be practicing those boundaries that they don't always feel or experience at work but at the same time there's a we've talked about how structural this problem is how pervasive it is how much business has to you know on the broader scale change in order to in order to actually create those spaces for care and I really think that there is rarely such a a powerful self-care kind of manual other than workers coming together to express themselves and be able to assert their needs and be able to try and meet those needs and I really think that you know when we think about this on the society wide level being able to have those honest negotiations is going to help undo a lot of the bad trends we've been seeing over the last 50 years and that's my brief answer to that question because I think it's a very complicated one and it's a hard one that you know is constantly contested constantly negotiated that we each negotiate each day as workers I think everyone here does it to some extent you know talking and and figuring out in our own experiences but I'll I'll end it there and let others go thank you Francisco Sarah what do you think how do we create space for workers to care for themselves yeah I would I would say we have an employee pyramid that talks about what makes up a good job and it's meeting basic needs of pay and benefits and stable schedules and career growth and safety and security then it's also meeting higher needs around belonging and achievement and recognition and personal growth and meaning um so you know I think I'm going to answer from the company point of view I think companies really have to have better data on what their their employees are experiencing so that they can create that space for them so if you're an employer and you haven't done a living wage assessment if you're an employer and you don't know the average number of you don't have a histogram of hours worked by your teams you understand are we providing enough hours for people to really be able to make ends meet if you don't know how many people are actually taking you up on your benefits we worked with one company that had health care but only four percent of their frontline workers were taking them up on it because it was too expensive this this is a different company but this happens a lot in health care right in senior living companies um home health aides cannot afford the health insurance offered by their employer like just work on that right like so they're getting health insurance it's often through um you know here in massachusetts through sort of different health connectors but really understand the financial precarity of your workforce if you're not helping make sure that people can meet their basic needs there is not going to be very much space um and in fact that kind of financial precarity adds a ton of stress um to people's lives and there's fantastic research by carry leona at university of pitsburg that you know truck drivers who are under financial stress have more accidents that nurses who are under financial stress don't have as much empathy and empathy is so incredibly important to caregiving so um companies i would just do the call out find out the the financial um how your version are doing financially and really try to figure out how to improve it thank you sarah warren i'll come to you well maybe i'll just build a little bit on what sarah said and this is a this is a tricky and this is definitely a tricky question i mean sarah said find out how your family how your workers are doing financially and and certainly that's important um but i think um that's part of a larger thing which is kind of listening to your employees and having structural ways of listening to your employees um because i you know in my experience and i'm deal mostly with sort of medium-sized companies so um it's certainly possible that larger companies are generally better at this but most medium-sized companies they may only not have a head of hr um if they do they almost certainly don't have any real structural way of getting sort of hearing from the front lines many of these companies they started as smaller companies where the leader cared and could hear what was going on but they've grown into bigger companies and it's just much harder for that leader to understand what's actually happening so we um not only try to look at some of the data that sarah mentioned so for example i'm trying to understand um your living wages and and and where where where folks don't have them but we also um at all of our companies um have structural you know voice of worker feedback um loops and sometimes you hear things that are surprising um by the way as an investor sometimes you hear things that are um that are really scary and lead lead us you know lead us to take action in terms of kind of we don't have the right leaders in this company we don't have the right you know whatever it might be um but but but i i'm in my experience um as an investor i've i've seen um the blind spots that come from just not having a pulse of what's going on and you know with your workers and i've seen what it's like when you do and it's just it's just a lot more it's a lot easier um to address employee needs to be actually truly understand them thank you warren danielle i'm going to come to you next where where do you go to take care of yourself at work do you have a space is there a structure what should be there maybe while danielle's coming back on britney i'll go to you same question okay so i'm gonna answer this so i'm gonna answer this question from the point of not just a caregiver but i also sit on the executive board for my union and i also have the i am blessed to be able to be a trustee on our health benefit trust and so i get to see it from three different actspace and so i i um i love what warren has been talking about and sarah you know and in francisco so our union um under our health benefit trust we have actually used and implemented apps one of them is called the ginger app i always talk about the ginger app because caregiving nurses you know sometimes home nurses we don't get that that co-worker interaction so we use these apps these different tools and this would be a great tool for smaller companies as well where the care can the caregiver can go on the app and talk to a counselor or use calming tools to just release the stress of the day one of my favorite calming tools i have a deck of cards and you pull a card out my favorite card is clean up one room in the house that room no one is allowed to go in that is your your your quiet place your zen room your happy room and that room always stays clean that's just the place where you detox so seeing more use of different apps and tools that are out there available not even very expensive tools something that's just that simple for the caregivers to be able to pull from as an executive board we do a lot of polls and we do a lot of emails where we're having that communication line completely open where we do have a lot of smaller meetings we call them turf breakout meetings where we're making sure that we at least once a month is hearing that input from the caregivers directly how you guys doing how is this looking for you how is your stress level is this main is this at a level where you can maintain paying your health benefits are that too much offering that that communication line making sure that it's always open even if we don't agree all the time politically you want to keep that line of communication open you want to also make sure that you have that we have that different resources with our MRC where caregivers can call in and they can get that needed help outside of just making sure they have an advocate for if anything just happens on the job place do you happen to you know like Francisco said we're partnered with other nonprofits so if we have like people that are dealing with immigration issues caregivers because a lot of our caregivers are immigrants by pop we can we can pull on our none one of our another sister brother locals are organizations like one America and be like hey they need help with this can you help them out just having those different connections it's all about keeping the connections and having that open communication and having tools being able to use those different tools it helps lift the the load it makes the environment lighter especially when you're isolated and I just appreciate I appreciate what I'm hearing today on this panel I just wanted to say that too I don't have yeah I really don't have nowhere to express myself I'm just like learning I just do it on my own because I work seven days a week so when I feel like I'm kind of over weighing my little bit I kind of get to myself but yeah I don't like when I was in Seattle I was on a I was a mentor I had somebody talk to I had the other kids here I don't have other kids to talk to so it's just me and my clients and I carry my son so yeah I take care of a lot of family members so I have to deal my stress a whole different level don't have any or anything like that other people to go and you know just sit down have a coffee with just just a bit too yeah that is thanks for sharing that Danielle before hand back to Bridget to wrap us up I do want to say thanks to folks in the audience who submitted some interesting comments and some questions about some more global kind of statistical questions about how the US stacks up against some other countries I would encourage you to go to newamerica.org and go to the Better Life Lab program and the new practice lab program and take a look at statistics on cater paid leave child care in America there's lots of information on our website and we did have one trailing question that I don't think we'll get to today but we do see you Anthony asking about quiet quitting sounds like a topic for another event and a really good conversation but Bridget I'll hand back to you well thank you so much Molly thank you so much to our panelists we are so grateful to to have you all here we're grateful to the people who have joined us virtually so Warren Francisco Sarah Brittany Danielle thank you so much we also like to thank all of the people Angela Jason Riley all the others at the America who helped put this together thanks to the entire team working on the podcast the convening and now the roadmap paper in this very grateful to have so many so many people who participated in the podcast both on on air and off and we're very grateful to our partners at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and to Paul Terini who's been a wonderful partner in this as well so thank you all and may we all continue the conversation as we work toward a better future of work care and well-being thank you so much