 What should we be doing in order to ensure that we have a labor market that can provide good, honest-paying jobs for folks who do not have a four-year college degree and who do not live in one of these metropolitan hubs on the coast but who maybe come from a state like mine, that is majority rural or majority ex-urban, who still want to have communities that are prosperous, who want to be able to support and raise a family, but who want to do that without having to move to someplace else and who have not college, four-year college was either not available to them or not for them, but yet they still want to have access to good quality meaningful work. Well, I think it's an excellent question. I would mention a few things. I think education certainly has to be at the top of the list, and I liked how you described it, which is people get to age 17 or 18 from whatever background they come from with the aptitudes and preparation that they have, and absolutely we should be talking about how to do better reform in society as a whole to make sure we get people to that level as prepared for success as possible. But to the extent that we're not, I think it's a mistake to just wish that we were and proceed from there, given where people arrive at age 17 or 18 today, providing them with more of the apprenticeship-type pathway that we've heard, I think is critically important. And frankly, investing federal money that would otherwise go to the kids who are in college, I'd rather see us investing in the kids who aren't headed for college, in a sense. So I think that's very important, and then one other thing I'd mention is just our regulatory infrastructure right now, wildly undervalued work in the physical economy, whether it's farming, whether it's infrastructure, construction, resource extraction, manufacturing, and favors finance and technology, and we shouldn't be surprised that that's where all the investment goes, and I think we need to recognize and put a much higher premium on the value of the work that people do in the physical economy. Thank you. So I agree with much of that, so I'll just add on the demand side, a tight labor market, strong demand pulls people into the labor market and boosts wages for lower-skilled employees, lower-paid employees. So I think that's very important to overall labor market stability and the health of people who have less of an education or less skills entering the workforce. I'd also say, as I mentioned in my testimony, a healthy churn in the labor market is important for everybody, particularly marginally attached workers, and so the more I'll connect this back to entrepreneurship, the more firm entry you have in the business market, the more that chain reaction flows to the benefit of marginally attached workers, many of whom we've talked about here, who face a number of challenges entering the labor market. One of those is demand, and one of those is a static economy. So when we have static economies, many of those regions you talk about are very static. They're not suffering from business decline. They're suffering from lack of business entry, and they are missing that chain reaction that business entry sets off. And so to the extent that we can focus on entrepreneurship as well, that does create more labor market opportunities up and down the chain and more demand for work of all different types. Right. Dr. Stevenson. So let me also focus on the demand side, putting this a little bit in perspective. So among people in their 20s, their late 20s, 64% do not have a college degree. 16% of our private sector jobs are in the goods producing sector. So there's nothing that this committee or this Congress can do that's going to be able to take most of the people who aren't going to college and get them into some sort of goods producing job. So we need to be thinking about technical training in a way that's very different from the way we used to think about it. So things like computer coding, other types of service jobs are going to be an important place for good jobs. So do we have the training programs to make sure people can do those kind of jobs? That's an important question. And then the spillover effects for things like, are we providing subsidies for high quality childcare? If we provide subsidies for high quality childcare, it makes it easier for families to work. And it also pushes up wages in the childcare industry, which is an important industry. And we can make that a better paying job, a better job for people to feel that both men and women can enter the jobs of taking care of early childhood education. So we need to be both building the skills of the workers who are able and can thrive by having more skills. We need to be rethinking what we mean when we say technical training. And we need to be investing in the parts of our economy like healthcare and education services, where there is huge demand, but right now those are seen as undesirable jobs. They are undesirable because they're low paid. And a lot of that pay interacts with public policy in terms of what's the reimbursement rate for an elder care worker, for example. So there are things we can do on that and that will both support families and work. Thank you. Great question. I listed a number of recommendations in my written testimony, but just five that I want to highlight. Number one, just understanding and making sure that we're clear about the fact that the worker is not monolithic. And so workers are going to be subjected to different barriers and challenges depending on where they're from. But also maybe their race and their ethnicity and their gender, all dealing with different barriers. Also redefining college, a lot of times when we talk about college and higher education, we're just thinking four-year college degrees. Training programs should also be included when we talk about post-secondary education. And we cannot forget community college, which leads me to my third point. Many times individuals are not able to access additional credentialing because of access or affordability. And sometimes community college can even be expensive for our low-wage workers who are seeking to obtain maybe evening classes or additional credentialing so that they can access high wages. And so redefining how we talk about college and then making sure that we're talking about the affordability of all levels of college. And then lastly, aligning workforce development with economic development. It is so frustrating to me. And many other stakeholders, when we talk about economic development and what businesses are looking for over here, and then we talk about what it takes to actually move workers from A, B to Z here. It is important that when we're talking about crafting training programs that we are listening to employers, what is it that you need so that we can craft the curriculum that will ensure that you can draw from these trainees and then you can hire them and employ them so that we're killing a bunch of birds with one stone. And so those, in addition to all the many recommendations I've listed in my written testimony, I believe would help ensure that we're able to get to the labor workforce that we're looking for. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. And before I turn over to Senator Young, just wanted to yesterday I had a meeting with NFIB, which represents a lot of small mid-sized businesses. And for the first time in years, the number one concern in their survey of business owners is the lack, they can't find trained workforce to fill the jobs that they need at the small. Absolutely. And they're willing to train people. But obviously that's an additional burden that they're facing. So I think that's a very important question. Senator Young. Well, thank you, Chairman, for holding this hearing. And I appreciate all of our witnesses for being here. Mr. Literary, you place great emphasis in your testimony on indicating that we should, at the federal level, consider banning the enforcement of non-compete agreements except for perhaps under narrow circumstances. It's a bold proposal and one that in many ways I find attractive. Could you please explain what exceptions might exist to that ban in enforcement, though? Yeah, thank you, Senator. The most obvious exception is probably when a business owner sells his or her business to an acquirer. In that case, in many cases, the transaction itself would depend on there being a non-compete. So I think that's the kind of thing that makes a lot of sense. In California, the most restrictive state in the country, when it comes to non-competes, they allow for that exception. I think that makes sense as a national rule as well. Okay. There's another concern that I anticipate. Should we go this route? And it's the states, this has traditionally been the prerogative of the states to determine whether or not to ban the enforcement of non-competes. And if so, whether they ban broadly or more narrowly. So what would be your response to someone who had these sort of federalist concerns? Sure, I think it's an important question to address. It's been the purview of the states because the federal government's chosen not to have a say in the matter. But non-competes are properly understood as part of employment law. And employment law certainly is an area where the federal government has a strong interest and sets a national baseline against which states can modify and do other types of their own prescriptions that are unique to their states. I think this is clearly a case in which both falling within employment law jurisdiction and being a matter of such importance to the overall health of the national labor market, there's both a compelling economic rationale and certainly a clear legal rationale as well, I think for the federal government to have a say, as it does on many, many other employment law matters. Sure. I can anticipate a number of businesses. I can think, I grew up in a family business and we'd have sales lists, customer lists. And those were very important to our business model. So there's certain information that's important to certain types of businesses. Are there steps that companies can take without the use of a non-compete agreement under the law that can be used to protect those legitimate interests? I think that's one of the, this is one of the questions that gets to the heart of why non-competes are so problematic. It's that for the very reasons that employers often use to justify their use, they're not necessary. Employers have access to trade secrets protection, to other protections of intellectual property if they have the use of non-disclosure agreements and non-solicitation agreements. And when you look at the reasons that employers give for the use of a non-compete, they often fall into one of those other more finely-scoped categories. And those categories, those tools, don't carry the same type of broad harm that non-competes carry throughout the labor market and throughout the economy. So if you have alternatives that are more finely-scoped to the concerns that employers have over legitimate concerns, frankly, for intellectual property and trade secrets, those are the best tools to apply to those challenges and leave aside the broad prohibition on the very thing that our economy is based on, which is competition. And for workers, their knowledge, their skills, that's the only thing they have to trade on. And so this is the kind of thing that I'd say, going further, really harms individual liberty and makes it very hard for us to get the kind of outcomes we all say we want, which is a boost in wages, more entrepreneurial dynamism, more innovation in our economy. So we have to look upstream from that and say, if this is a tool that's being misapplied, what are the alternatives? And when we ask that question, we find that there are many that employers have to reach to. So you mentioned dynamism, and I know that's something that you're intently focused on at Economic Innovation Group. You and I have discussed it at some length. And do we have economic literature? Is there some good evidence out there about the impact of non-competes on the marketplace? And if so, what conclusions can we draw? Now, very clearly, the literature agrees on a few fundamental things. One, that the enforcement of non-competes greatly harms new business entry in markets, in some cases up to 20%, that it harms the overall wage environment for workers, even though it's not covered by a non-compete. But it states that it enforced them, it has a depressing effect on everybody's wages in certain fields. So there's an on and on, right? I mentioned in my testimony job satisfaction, the amount of time that a worker stays in a job, all of them are harmed. So it's very hard to find an issue that unites the academic literature the way that non-competes does. It's not really a disagreement, academics, as to whether they're harmful, it's just the extent they're harmful. And the more literature we have, the more ways we're finding that they're harming both workers and entrepreneurs. Thank you all for being here, Mr. Littari. Thank you for answering my questions. And Mr. Chairman, I know it's very unsanitorial, but I yield back the balance of my time. And you had two minutes left, there are. Senator Sheen. So goody, can I take it? Yes, actually. Well, thank you all very much for being here. I apologize for missing your testimony. I wanna begin with you, Dr. Stevenson, because I sort of heard the end of the question about childcare. But in New Hampshire, childcare is next to mortgage is the highest expense that families face. And for an average family with a newborn up to one year old in New Hampshire, it's over $12,000 a year, just for childcare for that one child. So can you talk about the challenges that presents for families as they're trying to get in and out of the workforce? And that is often coupled with the fact that most people don't have access to family medical leave or family leave around the birth of a child. And what challenges that also prevents, where on the one hand they wanna go back to work, the costs of childcare are very high. They don't have leave to stay home with the child. And what kind of a conundrum do families face? Thank you very much for that question. I think one of the real surprises in recent years is that we've been in this long boom and yet fertility continues to decline. Why is it that millennials are finding it so hard to have children? Well, you touched on part of the reason, which is that they're graduating from college with enormous amounts of college debt and then they're facing down childcare costs that are, that is itself actually equal to the cost of going to college or even greater. And so those costs combined with them having graduated in a recession, so not having the job changes they needed to have to get the wage gains they needed early in their career, and then they face unsustainable costs of childcare. They are in jobs where they may not have access to paid leave, maternity leave, paternity leave, or flexibility or parental leave. All of these things are leading some people to say, I can't afford to have children. So we're seeing fertility decline. What we see with these, the challenges from childcare and not having access to these, what I think of as an infrastructure that supports families is some people choose not to have children, but other people get sideline from the labor force. We see in the data very clearly that people who have access to paid leave, women who have access to paid leave are more likely to stay attached to the labor force. We'll be in the labor force for longer and we'll have greater wage growth over the course of their lives. We see quite clearly in the data that women who feel that they need to take time out of the labor force have a really hard time getting back in. One of the problems with our labor force and with a lack of dynamism is that we have, we're failing to provide the on ramps when people take an off ramp out of the labor force. So we get people who exit for some reason or another and they can't get themselves back in. For many women and many families, if you sit down, if you have a one year old child and you sit down and you look at what is the cost of the woman going to work, the what they're gonna pay in childcare, the marginal tax rates on the woman's additional work, the, you know, the costs of her commute to work, they find that the end of the day they're not netting very much. And so many families then get put themselves in a situation where they say, well, maybe we can't afford to have this, and we can't afford to have you stay in the labor force. But when you step out, it becomes really, you come in at much higher wages or maybe not at all. As I mentioned at the end before is that if you, if we have greater support for childcare, there's a couple things that happen. We invest more in children and those children have better outcomes and earn higher wages. We have a large, large body of literature that shows that early childhood education reaps benefits for taxpayers over the course of that kid's life. But it also reaps benefits for families as women are able to get back to work as they're able to support their families. And those kids, particularly lower income kids, will grow up in a household with higher income, which generates its own second set of benefits. So this issue is very, very crucial to the success of American families. I certainly agree and I hope that we can find ways in which we provide more support for families around childcare and early childhood education. My next question is really for any or all of you, because one of the biggest challenges we have in New Hampshire right now is affordable housing. We have an economy that's generally doing pretty well, very well. We have a very low unemployment rate, one of the lowest in the country. We have a lot of jobs that are going unfilled and we have companies that can't get workers because they can't afford housing in the communities that they're in. So does anybody have any suggestions about how we better spur affordable housing? So I'll go first. I'm sure that John may have some comments around how there are a number of initiatives to provide for housing opportunities within the context of opportunity zones. However, and we have those in New Hampshire and we're seeing some benefits from those as well as we also have hub zones, but they're not providing the incentives that builders need to actually put in housing that's more affordable. Correct, so from a workforce perspective, this is something that the Job Opportunities Task Force has recently started to take on because we're finding there for low wage workers, about 40% of their wages or more is going towards housing costs and we're talking about renting, right? CNN, there was recently a study on CNN to show that in Maryland we were fifth in the nation for how much you must make an hour to rent a two bedroom home, right? It was somewhere around $29.50, right? And so housing instability is a workforce challenge. And so I think that this also goes towards an earlier comment that I made around aligning economic development with workforce development because you're absolutely right, employers and businesses, in addition to looking for a pipeline of educated skilled workers to determine where they're gonna move, they are also looking for the livelihood and what's it gonna take to ensure that our workforce is gonna be able to live and thrive. And one of that includes housing, are there actual options and are they affordable options? And so I would highlight of course or uplift opportunity zones as a way to encourage localities and states to get creative with how to ensure that housing is provided at an affordable rate across income levels. I think that you're starting to hear creative options for whether they be housing co-ops for particular populations. For instance, we have individuals that are returning from incarceration and they need a place to stay as well. And so how do we provide those housing opportunities for them so that it's not contributing to the larger homelessness situation? So that might not necessarily answer your question of what we can do to incentivize builders and others to move into our communities to ensure that we're providing these housing. I would say that the only solution is how can we use opportunity zones as a way to provide incentives to connect some of these dots. I don't know if John wanted to- And that may work in 20 years. It ain't gonna work next year or in the next three years. Do you wanna add something, John? I was just gonna add as we look at housing challenges around the country, the most fundamental relates to zoning and land use regs that are local. So that the prohibition on building towards density and scale of housing close to where the jobs are is a fundamental challenge that no matter how effective a subsidy, there is no way to get around that principal challenge and no subsidy is going to be effective at overcoming that at scale. So I agree there's tremendous opportunity with opportunity zones to make certain types of deals more affordable and especially I think in workforce housing where there's a huge missing middle. In the labor market, I see that as being a perfect match but that doesn't compensate or only partially compensates for the fundamental challenge which is too many places are far too restrictive about allowing for local building and density and their housing policy. Oh, certainly appreciate that. We have a project in downtown Portsmouth that has been held up around concerns by a betters. It's multifamily affordable housing that is right downtown. Now, I think it's gonna go forward but as you say, there are too many, there's the ability of too many restrictions to be put in the place of going forward with that housing. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator Romney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and to each of the panelists, thank you for your participation. It has been a puzzle I think for many to see that we are one of the very wealthy countries in the world, perhaps the wealthiest of the major nations in the world. If you look at a GDP per capita basis, we have a lot more stuff than we used to have as middle-class families 30 years ago. The things we have in our homes are extraordinary and yet the degree of anxiety, unhappiness, anger, anger directed towards our politics and towards elements in our life that we're not happy with is at a very, very high level and I think it's been instructive to recognize that perhaps some of this is too much focus on, if you will, GDP, a dual track, if you will, in education and I wanna put in a plug and then get to my question. The plug is that some years ago in the state of Utah, a few of the state colleges decided to make a change and became four-year colleges, at the same time said there's no admission requirement, everyone is accepted and you can come in and you can get certification to go into a job, you can get licenses to do various things, you can get an associate degree or if you want you keep on going to get a four-year degree. So as you come in, you don't have to say which one you're gonna do, you take different classes, you find which ones that you find most compelling and most interesting, you pursue that course and off you go. Some go the four-year route, some do two years, some get certification, but I'll put that aside but it's a very successful effort in providing people a wide range of tracks, if you will, in the same institution. But what I wanna turn to is something which I have seen time and again, which is even with community colleges that talk to the local business community to say what kind of jobs are you looking for, what kind of training do we do? It seems to me that some of the most effective training is done by the business itself, by the company itself. We give R&D credit when companies are willing to invest in stuff. We don't give an R&D credit when companies are willing to invest in people. And I wonder whether you believe that employer-based education and employer-based training might be a highly efficient way of helping people find a satisfying career and whether we might be wise in providing a credit of some kind to businesses that hire someone who may have been incarcerated, someone who's been on the workforce for a long time, someone who's just coming in for the first time, and then providing them this credit for training purposes to get them started in their career. Yeah, thank you. I think that's exactly the right way to think about it, which is that employer-led training is pretty much as far as we know the only way to do training. I mean, when you have government-led programs that try to guess what the employers want, they tend to work out fairly poorly, and partly it's a function of employers knowing better what they want, partly it's a function of just actually getting on the job sooner. And so the kind of credit you've described, I think, is a very good approach. We actually have, to our detriment, I think a wide variety of very targeted credits. So a credit, if you hire this exact kind of hard-to-employed person in this industry and so on and so forth, I think a much better model and one that fits with the tracking concept we've discussed and with apprenticeships generally is to really focus the model on saying, for folks who are sort of in those late teen years, the essentially age 17 through 20, that's a period of time when we essentially wanna subsidize the employment. That getting that person into a job, being able to, while they're still in high school, be on the job part of the time, is gonna be incredibly important to building skills sooner. And ultimately saying we can get someone to age 20 for less than we spend on college with earnings in the bank, years of experience, an industry credential and a job. And so targeting more of our, what we call education spending right now towards supporting that kind of relationship, I think is a very important approach. Thank you. Any others that would like to comment? Yes. Chris Vaughn. Thank you. So I do think you're onto something. However, I do think there should be multiple options in terms of training. I mentioned the Maryland program, the Employment Advancement right now. This is an employer-led program where the employers, you have the jobs. You know the curriculum that you're looking for. And so you tell us the curriculum and we partner whether it's a nonprofit, for instance in construction, it's JOTF and we partner with a training provider, say associated voters and contractors. Or it could be a community college, but you are working with that community college to come up with the curriculum that is directly aligned with the jobs that you're looking for. But I also wanna make sure that we are not moving away from community colleges because community colleges also provide an opportunity to access that training so that you can access the jobs. And then we can allow employers to build on top of that. Regarding your last point, tax incentives for employers who may be interested in hiring individuals with the criminal background. You know, I struggle with this because for the Job Opportunities Task Force we are always interested in ways to incentivize businesses to hire, right? To incentivize businesses to, you know, ensure that they have a robust workforce. But the flip side of that is when we talk about individuals with a criminal background and we talk about providing a tax credit as an incentive, these are actually very qualified individuals. They're able-bodied. There's actually nothing wrong with them aside from the fact that they have a criminal record. And so in today's market when we have an aging workforce, when we have all of these challenges where employers are now having to recruit and consider employees, prospective employees, that before they did not necessarily have to, such as individuals with a criminal background. I worry that we may be sending the wrong message by relying too much on tax credits to incentivize employers hiring individuals with a criminal background when these are probably would be some of your best employees because they're hungry, they have something to prove, and would be eager to come on your job site and would be eager to be trained by you as an employer and everything that comes with that outside of having a tax credit or some type of tax incentive. And so, I mean, to be, I struggle with it because I understand that we wanna incentivize businesses but I also wanna make sure that for individuals with a criminal background, we're not putting them in a box where we are assigning them some particular handicap because the only handicap is the fact that they have a criminal record and we as a society have assigned the stigma to that record but they can work and they're great workers. So I think what we've learned in recent years is that when the labor market gets really tight, businesses hire people that they wouldn't have looked at when the labor market's not so tight. It's not a big surprise. It means that incentives matter. How much of an incentive do they have to hire hard to employ people? How much of an incentive do they have to provide training? One strong incentive is a tight labor market. We're not always gonna be blessed with a tight labor market. So I think it's absolutely a good idea to be thinking about what are the other ways in which you can build incentives into the system when there's not a tight labor market. I do think that it would be very wise for the committee to think about a set of incentives that might actually move with the state of the labor market. You might not need incentives as strongly today with our 4% unemployment but I'd sure like to see those incentives when employment is six or 7% and I'd rather you debate that right now than waiting until we see unemployment at six or 7% and start debating it then. It's possible to have policies that are automatic stabilizers by increasing the kinds of incentives we provide employers to hire people as the unemployment rate rises. So I personally think that the types of tax incentives that you're talking about are a wise thing for you to be considering and I would add to that to think about ways in which you could think about ramping that up and down as the business cycle changes. Thank you. Just some questions now reclaiming my time but I didn't use it at the beginning. Mr. Work, let me ask you, I support, I think we all would, the goal of helping those who have criminal backgrounds, convictions and their backgrounds from finding meaningful work but we're all aware there's a stigma associated with that. Some employers shy away from it for a lot of different reasons. What's been, other than just the market need, we need to hire people and we're gonna have to hire people who wouldn't have hired at other times, what's been some of the more successful methods that you've been able to use to convince employers to hire people that have had a previous conviction? So I mean, one of the methods is actually one that's not led by JOTF. It's one that Dr. Stevenson just articulated just the fact that we have a tight labor market and so by default they're having to consider workers who they would not necessarily consider. JOTF is also a member of a number of business associations you wouldn't think we are but we tend to be because we have to be responsive to both the worker and the employer and we find that within those groups, those employers that for a long time maybe have always hired individuals with a criminal background, are now able to anecdotally advise and inform and influence their colleagues and their partners on what it's like to actually have an individual with a criminal background on their job site and how the sky has not fallen and actually it's one of my best employees. Outside of that, it's really just getting folks to actually understand, particularly employers, to actually understand the dynamics of an individual with a criminal background and add that humanistic approach because a lot of times we just focus on the fact that you went to jail, you have this record and that's all I see and that's all I care about. These are individuals, these are our neighbors, these are our brothers and sisters and again, if they were not sentenced to life, they're coming home and so if they do not have access to employment, then they are going to jeopardize our communities because they will feel that they have to resort to illegal means. This then becomes a business challenge for those businesses that are looking not just for a stable educated skilled workforce but also a safe environment. So how can we talk about the importance of investing in these individuals, not just for the moral social feel good kind of thing but making the business case for why this actually will ensure that our communities are safer and you have access to workers. But we're really relying on other anecdotes from other employers. We're relying on the fact that if you train them and provide them with the supports, quite honestly it doesn't matter that you have a criminal background because if you can get to work on time and if you have the skills and the training that's necessary, all of that is irrelevant outside of any regulatory challenges that are presented with the criminal background. Mr. Cass, the strategy of productive pluralism that you described I think could have some interesting implications for small business. If the primary focus of labor market policy is on connection, that's what we made it. Connecting workers, especially young workers to productive employment that's consistent and that builds skills, then it seems like that might entail greater engagement with small business and with entrepreneurs. I wonder if you could just discuss that because it sounds to me like that's tailor made for connecting workers to the needs of small businesses, startup businesses and unique industries. Yeah, I think that's right. I think there's two things I would say about the special relevance to small businesses here. One is to recognize the role that small businesses play in the ecosystem of a local economy. Dr. Stevenson rightly pointed out that a very small share of overall employment is in manufacturing, for instance. But when you step back and look at the ecosystem of a local economy, what you tend to have is a few large employers, some of whom need to actually be sending something out to the rest of the world, and that that then supports a much more robust and vibrant service sector around it. So I always say we can't all serve each other coffee. And so to have a vibrant small business sector, it can't simply all be, for instance, child care providers providing child care for each other. We need to make sure that the economy is one in which the types of business that small businesses are likely to engage in can still connect to larger multinational nationwide companies. And that's where a lot of their growth and productivity gains are likely to come from. So small businesses as kind of a key component of local economies in particular is very important. And then the second thing I'd say, and this goes back to what we were speaking about a moment ago with respect to education, is that small businesses are an especially tough place when it comes to training. A small business might need to hire one person every year or two. They can't run a gorgeous global training program with three off sites a year for their one worker per year. And so for small businesses in particular, it's really important to have structures at the local level that allow multiple small businesses to come together, to collaborate with larger businesses. A little bit like Ms. York was describing, where you design the curriculum, maybe it's hosted at the community college, and then all the small businesses that need a particular skill set have access to those trainees. And so having small businesses be able to collaborate in that respect is critical to having them be able to take on new workers, where they're not going to be able to invest in a full training program themselves. I also wanted to ask you about, it's really impossible to talk about work today without automation. And when people think of automation, they tend to think of a robot or a computer that was going to replace their job entirely you. And I guess that can open us up to the entire panel. I know you, Mr. Cass, have a different view on this. Perhaps those of you have different views on it, but how should workers understand both the challenge and the opportunity embedded in automation and in technology, which does as always create the potential of displacement, but it also creates the potential of increased productivity and thereby higher pay and new fields opened up. So what's the, as you talk to people, particularly in small business world, but even in larger firms, and there's just a lot of fear among workers that they're going to get replaced by a robot. So what's the best way for us to focus on that, particularly as it impacts entrepreneurship and startups? Go ahead, I'll just go from left to right. I'll say one thing about it. I've realized the more I talk about this, that we have a real problem that we anthropomorphize robots. And so it sounds like it makes sense to say a robot could take your job. But a robot is just a new form of technology. You would never say electricity took my job. That would sound ridiculous. You would never say many of the sort of technological breakthroughs that have made people more productive over time took your job. It happens that the kinds of robots we're picturing look more like a worker. But at the end of the day, the effect is the same. And as Dr. Stevenson said, rarely do they actually replace the person. They replace some portion of the person's tasks. And so the key is going to be for workers to collaborate with technology and to recognize that the technology is what makes the worker more productive. I think the one other thing we could focus on as we talk about it and as policymakers talk about it is to realize that workers are actually the constraint on how quickly we can deploy technology. That when we talk about these jobs with we can't find the worker for the job versus not ready. So one effect of that is that's going to slow down the rate at which automation actually happens. But a second is to reconfirm the fact that this is going to accrue to the benefit of workers and really finding ways to design technology for the workers we have and equip workers to work with that technology is going to be the secret sauce for a labor mic market that thrives. Yeah, count me in as an automation apocalypse skeptic. I don't think there's evidence to back up many of the concerns that we often hear thrown around about the rise of automation as it relates to replacing workers. To Orrin's point, there are very few jobs that can actually be replaced in full by a robot of any form. I think the key is that we're missing the kind of safety net that robust business dynamism used to provide. We've always had industries and jobs being phased out of our economy. That's always been true. Productivity gains by definition are displacing of some future potential worker as we get more efficient at doing certain things. The difference is we haven't felt that in previous eras because we've had a more robust firm entry that's caught more of those being left out of certain jobs or taken out of certain industries and brought them back into productive use. So areas of the country that are particularly undynamic are the ones not with high death rates of firms but of incredibly low birth rates of firms. That's what's missing, or one of the major things that's missing I think as we think about the worker piece of all this, we need to think about the entrepreneur as well. Incumbent businesses tend to shed jobs on net every year as a whole, of any size. And so it's where we get net job creation is disproportionately from new businesses. When that fades, that's the engine of job creation. That's the missing safety net for workers. So my testimony focused a much on this because this is something that I'm thinking a lot about and as has been repeated, the idea that automation doesn't take jobs, it takes tasks. But that creates an enormous opportunity for us to create jobs that are more meaningful. And this is one of the things I'm looking at in my research is which are the tasks that are being taken and are they the tasks we like to do or the tasks we don't like to do? In the past, what has happened with technological changes, our jobs have gotten better. We've seen an increase in job satisfaction. We like the stuff that we're able to do more. I certainly know that my job, being a university professor, is something that's much more common today because of all the technological change that has come before. And I like my job a lot more than I would have liked working in an agricultural field. So there's a lot of promise that comes from this, but I do think it's worth keeping in mind that there is a lot of disruption. And when I go to conferences on AI, I will tell you that I'm shocked at how fast the technology's moving. I agree very much with Orin Cas that we can only move as fast as our workers are ready for us to move. So there is a real limit that comes from our workers, but the technology is moving quite rapidly and we need to make sure that our workers can keep up. It's one of the reasons why I have such concern that in the race between technology and education, technology seems to be racing in front of education and I think we need to correct that problem quite rapidly. I do want to emphasize that these kinds of technological changes, this AI is going to allow us to produce services that are more tradable. So the idea that when we hear services, you think cup of coffee, I think that's not the right way to think about it. That's, the US is really succeeding with a lot of trade and business services. They're a really important source of not just international trade for us, but of course cross-national boundary trade. Remote work is allowing us people to live in places that they couldn't have lived having the kind of job that they were having before. So technology will create a lot of opportunities. We need to make the space for it to happen, not try to get in the way of it and then help make sure that the prosperity that comes from it is shared so that lots of workers are able to benefit from this change and not just the few owners of the people who own the technology. Now the anecdote I always like to tell people is I've had a long conversation once with an Uber driver who told me that he thought self-driving cars were the worst thing in the entire world. And towards the end of 20 minutes of him railing against how terrible self-driving cars are, I asked him, what if you owned the car? What if you were the one sending it out to do your work and you could stay home? And all of a sudden his attitude towards self-changing cars changed a lot. So the real question about this technology is not gonna be that it replaces workers, it's gonna be about who owns it. I have nothing else to add to the remarks of my eloquent panel, besides that absolutely for workforce advocates, we're looking at how we can use these opportunities to turn them into training opportunities for workers. But we're also struggling because, you know, we also like self-checkouts at the grocery store, but also know that that is, you know, taking real jobs away from real people. And so how do you balance efficiency and easy access and quickness with ensuring that folks are able to still be employed and have good jobs? And do you have something? Just two quick observations. One, as you point out, innovation is where job growth will take place and good jobs will take place. Whereas where we started, because innovation occurs much more frequently among small businesses and large businesses. So our tools to preserve a healthy, small business community very much as part of having the type of economy we need and the type of jobs that we want. So I just make that sort of bringing this together. The second observation is on these tax credits. And we recognize that the labor market changes at times, so there's different periods in which employers have different incentives. But I can tell you, as one of the champions of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, and having talked to a lot of employers who have used the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, there is a higher risk factor by those employers and it has to be compensated somehow. And we can talk about getting good workers as we all want, but we know that our workforce programs are not equitably distributed, particularly people coming off of welfare, returning citizens and the Work Opportunity, or people who are unemployed. If you're an employer and you have a choice between trying to take someone who currently has a job or somebody who's unemployed, there's an actual bias in favor of someone who's already employed. So long-term unemployed individuals have a much more difficult time in getting the attention. And the Work Opportunity Tax Credit has compensated for that and has worked very well over time. I just really wanna put that on the record because there was some conversation about the values of tax credits or compensation issues. And I certainly understand that discussion and we really need to focus on what is the right policy. But I do believe that our current tool, the Work Opportunity Tax Credit is one that has worked well and is very valuable. I wanna thank all four of you for being here and all the members that attended. For this is really meaningful to us for two reasons. One is we, the jurisdiction of this community, small business and entrepreneurship. And it's important to mention those two because they're not always the focus of small business. Obviously we have oversight responsibility over the small business administration and we're gonna be undertaking the task, I hope, of reauthorizing it because it gives us a chance to help modernize its programs, to deal with some of the things we're taking testimony on. And on the entrepreneurship side, the notion that we want to continue to be an economy and a society in which new business and new ideas are being pursued. And in many ways, technology is intimidating to people but it also has lowered the barrier to entry in a lot of fields. It used to be that in order to have a business you had to have a big marketing department, you had to have people you could send out to find customers. Today, a small business is everything from an Uber driver who's an independent contractor to someone selling things online. And they don't have a massive sales force. It's the, so technology's empowered entry into the marketplace that would not have been there. So it's actually, in many ways, opened up entrepreneurship access to markets but it also has lowered the barriers to entry in a business you would normally need more traditional constructs around you in order to pursue. So these are the kinds of things that we need to be thinking about as we not just try to reauthorize and modernize SBA but writ large public policies that help incentivize all this. So again, I'm, we're grateful to you for your time, for your forward thinking ideas across the board on strengthening the nation's labor markets on which I think go hand in hand with enhancing small business dynamism and entrepreneurship. The record for this hearing is gonna remain open for two weeks and there are any statements or questions for the record by any of the members that should be submitted by Wednesday, March 20th at 5 p.m. With that, thank you again. This hearing's adjourned. Thanks.