 should we start, do you think, if people could join? Okay. All right. I'll just give a brief introduction. I don't think Ruth needs much of an introduction, but it's a great pleasure to welcome Ruth to our first political economy workshop of the new academic year. Ruth is a leading labor scholar who's done pathbreaking work usually in historical but also contemporary using on gender, de-industrialization, immigration and social movements. One distinctive thing about her is she went to Brown as an undergraduate where she majored in women's studies before it was a discipline at that university. She made her own major, part of her pathbreaking work. She did her PhD in sociology at Berkeley and then taught at CUNY and then at UCLA where I had her as a professor of economic sociology and I was getting my PhD. Then she went back to CUNY grad where she is currently the distinguished professor of sociology and chair of the Department of Labor Studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. She's written a lot of books and edited maybe something like 15 or 16 books. Some of the most famous ones are Gender at Work which is about a job segregation of World War II. Farewell to the Factory where she followed auto workers who lost their jobs. And then LA story about immigrant labor in Los Angeles. She's written about the kind of millennial social movements, kind of the meat, but what was it, Occupy, right, Occupy which Katelyn knows something about was there in the trenches, countless articles and policy reports. She's had many, many honors. I'm not gonna list them all. And in addition to being on my dissertation committee which I don't know if she considers an honor, she was at the minor honor of being the president of the American Sociological Association in 2015 and 16 and the list goes on so I'll leave it at that. But I'm delighted to welcome Ruth and I think what really has distinguished her work for me has been kind of the kind of nuanced theoretical underpinnings but without any kind of bullshit and just kind of the empirical story but really richly informed by the theory and kind of at the intersection of feminist theory and Marxian-ish theory and everyone recognizes how fantastic her work is. So I'm delighted to have her. And with that, Ruth. Well, thank you, Larry. That was a very generous introduction. Thanks for inviting me and thank you all for coming. I'm gonna try to share my screen and let's see what happens. Work before, here we go. Okay, can you all see that slide show? Okay, so I should say before I get into it that a lot of what I'm gonna talk about is elaborated more fully in a recent book called Immigrant Labor on the New Precariat which would have all the gory details which obviously I don't have time to share with you but I'm gonna kind of give you an overview of the argument of that book. So the beginning point for me and you'll see it's the main target of the critique in my argument is what Abrahano and Hajj now call the immigrant threat narrative which you're all familiar with, which goes something like this, that immigrants especially undocumented or unauthorized immigrants are taking so-called American jobs, that immigration is the root cause of the reversal of fortune that U.S. born workers have experienced in the last, in the neoliberal period, if you will. And then this narrative also elaborates its argument that immigration is responsible for rising crime rates, drains public coffers at taxpayers' expense and more generally is culturally detrimental. Trouble changing the page, here we go. And of course, as you all know, having lived through the Trump years, right-wing populists have promoted this narrative pretty ferociously, but it started way before Trump became president. He just elevated it to new heights. Here's one example that you may have seen from his State of the Union address in 2018. I won't read it, but this is pretty typical, not just of Trump but of Fox News and other proponents of this point of view. And it has had its effects. A lot of people believe this stuff. This is, of course, a touchstone of right-wing populism. And from my perspective, it also, politically, one of the reasons it's flourished is that is related to the decline of organized labor which used to offer a different way of understanding the plight of working people and its voice has been greatly diminished. So there's lots of research that documents the powerful appeal that this narrative has. Some of you may know Justin Guest's first book, I think it's called The New Minority, which is a study of what he calls deindustrialized quote, post-traumatic cities where this is the dominant worldview. Other people have written about the, what Kathleen Cramer calls the politics of resentment in rural areas like the ones that were so important in supporting Trump. You probably are familiar with Arlie Hochschild's book, which makes a broader argument of this kind that immigrants, women, African-Americans are unfairly kind of biting in line, as her phrase, ahead of US-born white men who are more deserving, et cetera. And this, like I said, it goes way back before Trump to, I would argue, starts with the Reagan Democrats back in the 1980s, although then the target of the scapegoating was not immigrants, but rather African-Americans. I found this little book by John Judas on populism helpful in which he points out a little quote here is sums it up, that while left-wing populism think Bernie Sanders or AOC is dyadic, in other words, highlighting the contrast between elites and the broader population, right-wing populism adds a third party to that looking, scapegoating an outgroup. And so that to me is the essence of what this is all about. More concerning, this point of view also appears in some progressive political commentary. In a different book, the same guy, John Judas, basically replicates the same kind of argument that you saw in the quote from Trump. And in a somewhat more radical and extreme vein, there's this piece by Joanne Nagel. Some of you might have seen the left case for open, sorry, against open borders, where she says, there's no getting around the fact, and this is very logical, by the way, though I don't think it's true, that the power of unions relies by definition on their ability to restrict and withdraw the supply of labor, which becomes impossible if an entire workforce can be easily and cheaply replaced. Open borders and mass immigration are a victory for the bosses. Okay, so that's a kind of long-winded version of what we're up against here. You probably, those of you who are familiar with the literature on immigration probably are aware that the scholarship has an overwhelming consensus that the net impact of immigration economically is positive. And one could go on to point out that immigrant-dominated neighborhoods have lower crime rates than other neighborhoods that are otherwise similar, et cetera. There are exceptions. And I guess in your field, the main one is George Borjas, who does embrace this narrative. But I'm gonna give you a couple of examples from other fields specifically. Well, one is from economics, actually. This is an old book by Vernon Briggs that made the point that the period of low immigration in the United States coincides with the period when the labor movement was at its peak, which is a fact, right? So the period of the independent CIO, basically from the 1930s through the 1960s is exactly when immigration was restricted and that's when the labor movement flourished. And so he, along the same lines as what you just heard, argues that there's a causal relationship there. And more recently, a historian who some of you may be familiar with Jeff Cowey makes a similar argument in his book, The Great Exception, which argues that that whole period, basically World War I through the mid-70s, that was exceptional. That's why the book's called The Great Exception. And in particular, in relation to immigration, he says, nativism was at bay by the 1930s when the New Deal is constructed because of the restrictions that were imposed in the 20s and actually starting in the early 20s and that this helped promote the unification of working people that the CIO achieved in that period. And then after 1965, when the law changes and the doors are reopened, he says nativism resurges. So what I'm trying to make the simple point that it's not just Trump and his supporters who believe all this, there's lots of other people who do, including our friends. And on the surface, if you just look at the timing of immigration and unionization levels in the United States, it seems very plausible what they're arguing. I don't have here in this chart the CIO period, but we all know that that was the height of unionism and it was also when the foreign born share of the population was at its lowest point historically. I don't really wanna take the time to go through this in detail, but I just wanna complicate the story a little bit by showing you some data from a few other countries where the relationship looks quite different. So you can see that there isn't the same relationship. Look at Sweden, for example, where the unionization rate sort of bounces around even as immigration continues to grow. In the UK, it's more like the US, but there is a period in the 60s and 70s where immigration, sorry, unionization is growing even as immigration is growing. Anyway, you get the point that the US is not necessarily typical in this regard. Okay, so against that background, I'll try to lay out what I argue in that little book. So basically what I'm gonna try to convince you of is that the influx of low-age immigrants in the period since the 1970s is more a consequence than a cause of all the things that we know about that period, the labor market restructuring that went on, including de-unionization, and also the rise of inequality. And I should start by saying that the kind of underlying premise of a lot of my argument is that, as Michael Peoria argued long time ago, low-age immigration is basically driven by employer demand. And so I'm gonna walk you through a couple of examples of this. They're roughly coincide with the gender of the workforce, though not 100%, it doesn't 100% correlate with that. So my first example is gonna be from male dominated industries that experienced labor degradation through de-unionization, deregulation, et cetera, in an neoliberal period, think meat packing, for example. And the second example, which is in the more female dominated parts of the labor market has more to do with the growing inequality and new job opportunities that open up for African-American women specifically that lead to demand for immigrant labor. And I should just mention those jobs were never good jobs. They weren't degraded unlike, say, construction work when it was unionized. They were always crummy jobs. So the outcome is similar in that immigrants replace low-age US-born workers, but the mechanism is completely different. Okay, so these are some examples of those two kinds of industries. And so I'm gonna start with the blue collar ones, which I'll say a little bit more about. And this is probably a more familiar story to most of you anyway. So as you all know, starting in the 70s with growing international competition and stagflation, we see capital hypermobility and de-industrialization. In Justin Guest's book, which is about what he calls post-traumatic cities, as I mentioned, which they're Youngstown, Ohio and Sheffield in the UK, the immigrant threat narrative takes root very firmly. And it's kind of ironic because there are hardly any immigrants in those places at the time he's doing his research. So no one suggests that closing factories led to growing immigration. There's no direct relationship and yet, well, there's a connection to the other changes that occur in the same period. So this is just a little quote from David Harvey that the disciplining of organized labor was also, of course, a big part of the neoliberal agenda and was very effective in that unionization declined very dramatically in this period, along with the virtual disappearance of strikes in the private sector and in the public sector too until 2018. And then another factor is deregulation, which basically eliminated the legal constraints in some industries that took wages out of competition. So this, of course, often led also to degrading labor conditions and the unionization think of the trucking industry as probably the most dramatic example of that that's relevant to my story. So again, this is very familiar to most of you, real wages especially for non-college educated men declined dramatically as a result of these changes, benefits erode or disappear, pensions evaporate. Think about an industry like meatpacking where working conditions that had been greatly improved in the union period deteriorate dramatically as the industry has transformed and all the other things that go along with unionization, the disappearance of job security and voice. So again, I'm interested in low wage labor in this study but I wanna share an example with you about another occupation that I think reveals the basic dynamic. So I'll just read this out loud. The latest wave of, this is from the New York Times a couple of years ago, actually right before those big teacher strikes that you may remember. The latest wave of farm workers sweeping into American jobs brought Donato Soborano from the Philippines to Arizona. He had to pay thousands of dollars to a job broker. He lived for a time in an apartment with five other Filipino workers. The lure is the pay 10 times more than what he made doing the same work back home. Mr. Soborano is not a hospitality worker or a home health aide. He is in another line of work that increasingly pays too little to attract enough Americans. Mr. Soborano is a public school teacher. School districts can't find enough American educators willing to work for the pay that's offered. So obviously that hasn't taken off in the teaching profession. Most teachers are still US born but you can see the logic that they're pointing to and that is indeed what happened in a lot of these other sectors. So I'm just gonna give you like a little taste of how this played out in different industries and we can certainly talk about the details later if people are interested. So this is a quote from a trade journal, the Journal of Commerce that covers the trucking industry in copious detail. And they reported back in 2005. As long as trucking paid as well as flipping burgers the Chrome and cowboy aspects of the job were reason to be driving. However, today fast food jobs look increasingly attractive to many former truck drivers. Qualified drivers are migrating to better jobs in truckload construction and other sectors. So the point is they leave these jobs and then employers look for others to fill the vacancies and those are often immigrants. Construction which I've studied myself in much more detail in California in one of the publications where I mentioned the beginning LA story there's a lot about construction. And here is this is the one case where we kind of know what happened to the workers who abandoned no longer desirable jobs which is that they moved into a different sector of the construction industry. So this is from an interview from my own research with the memberships of many construction locals nearly fully employed on large public or commercial projects. Unionists weren't interested in but he means organizing residential construction work. The unions were not oriented toward organizing new workers. So in this industry, the change takes place in the midst of a building boom. It's very easy to get jobs in commercial construction. And so as a residential construction it's systematically de-unionized workers who have construction skills migrate into the still unionized commercial sector and then employers hire immigrants in their place. And one more example is meat packing which I learned much more about than anybody wants to know in trying to research this. So this is one of many studies that shows that in this case the employers did not intend to hire actually in all these cases they didn't start out getting rid of unions and squeezing labor because they wanted to hire immigrants. They did it to save money but then once they did it they found that they had a very difficult time attracting US-born workers and so they turned to immigrants. So here's an example of that again from meat packing. This is just one of many such examples but it's very well documented one. So that's why I'm gonna share it with you. And this is in Nebraska. This plant opens in 1990. Let me just pause for a minute and remind you that this is an industry. It's hard to remember this now because we think of it as a especially in the pandemic period when there's so much discussion of meat packing as an essential industry in all. Everybody knows it's immigrant dominated today. Some of you may have seen this old film by Barbara Koppel a long ago. It's called American Dream and it documents the split in the United Food and Commercial Workers back in the 70s or it was the early 80s I guess in Austin, Minnesota, which was the kind of beginning of the end of that union. And if you watch that film you see that virtually all the workers are white US-born folks. So it really has completely transformed as a result of de-unionization. It's more complicated than that the industry moves production or I don't know if that's the right word disassembly some people call it from places like Minnesota to where the cattle are growing or are raised to save money and there are other innovations in the industry. So but those the places they move to happen to be right to work states. So like Nebraska. So IDP, Iowa Beef Processing which has since merged into other companies no longer exists under that name is one of the leaders of that restructuring that took place and it did lead to the basic the effective defanging of the union which had been quite powerful. So they opened this plant in 1990 and originally their expectation is that they're gonna recruit local folks from that area including women to the point where they actually set up an on-site daycare center because they thought that that would attract those workers. So this is just evidence that the plan was never and was not initially that they would hire immigrants but that is what happens in the end. So people did try working there and the turnover was out of control and people would try it and leave almost immediately stories like you used to hear about the auto industry and its infancy. So this is just a quote from some employer a manager given the plant size the limited labor pool in the area and high turnover they run through the local supply of labor and then so and you can see that at the beginning it was essentially a white workforce and that begins to change. Well, very fast through the nineties and well, so this is a we could talk about this more later if people are interested. This is typical in many of these industries that the labor recruitment isn't done necessarily directly by the employer but they rely on immigrant bilingual middle people almost always middle men who recruit workers. But this is a little different from some of the other industries where these kinds of changes happen say residential construction in that people are paid in checks they're not supervised by the same people who recruit them they're actually part of the formal economy. So it's a bit different but nevertheless one of the more dramatic cases of this kind of thing. So I assume many of you are familiar with this stuff of the research on labor and job cues. So in this case, as this transition takes place even though the employers don't start out eager to employ immigrants in fact, some of them are very skeptical that this is gonna work out they don't speak the same language, et cetera. Pretty quickly they develop an active preference for this labor force and begin to talk in ways that reflect that. So here's, this is another construction example from my old research. The good old days of the Anglo-Saxon worker in construction in California, it's basically in residential it's almost completely Latino dominated. There were good sides to it and there were bad sides to it. Communication was good, i.e. we all spoke English. Work ethic was bad. You really got the bottom of the work status in the white Anglos where in the Hispanic you're getting mainstream you're getting more of the family oriented for them, it was a good job. It was a much better job than picking strawberries. So you got a better class of workers. So this guide by now is by the time we're having this conversation is totally committed to hiring immigrants and thinks that they're the better workers. And this is echoed in a lot of other accounts of these kinds of industries. So native born workers are too uppity. This is particularly said about African-Americans but more generally they feel that US born workers don't have, employers feel don't have the work ethic that immigrants do. You've probably all heard versions of this at some point. So the point is that once the shift occurs these jobs become understood by all concerned as what one commentator calls brown collar jobs. They're no longer seen as jobs that US born workers would do even though they did do them before. So here's a summary of what I've tried to outline so far that with deregulation, de-unionization you see the deterioration of jobs that once were well-paid so-called good jobs. The US born workers exit and employers replace them with immigrants. And then these boundaries defining brown collar jobs and employers strong preferences for immigrant workers crystallize. Okay, so that's the one example. And now I wanna just turn more briefly to another one which is maybe less familiar. So this is to do with, well, I'm gonna talk mostly about paid domestic work but it does apply also to things like low-age restaurant jobs and some others home care work and stuff like that. Here, the driver is not de-unionization because these were never highly unionized jobs never hardly unionized at all in fact but rather growing inequality which helps create more demand for employment in these sectors. And that demand growth occurs in the same period that African-American women who used to dominate these occupations experience their opportunities for work expand to other sectors. So I'm just gonna start with a couple quotes from various commentators who's pointed to this the way in which inequality drives all this and we all know about skyrocketing inequality in the late 20th and well continuing now century. So this is Danny Schneider and I think it's Kristen Hastings who write the ability to hire a maid, gardener or cook to purchase meals prepared by others depends not on the level of one's income but on the gap between the income of a prospective employer and the wage of the employee. In other words, if you, well, that's self evident I think to you. This next quote is from a piece I wrote with some people Larry may remember a couple of his fellow or rather sister graduate students at UCLA where we looked at the relationship between inequality growing inequality and the demand for the share of the workforce that was made up of paid domestic labor. So this is just from what we wrote that demand for help with domestic tasks is always present. Late in demand becomes effective demand when domestic assistance is easily affordable. Well, you can read the rest I'll just share a little anecdote about this one. We were working on that project which ended up being about the United States. We started out looking around it looking for data on other countries and it didn't really turn out to be feasible because the way in which different countries collect the data is so varied but we did have a amazing correspondence with statistics Sweden at the time in the published census data for Sweden back then, this is in the 90s there were no reports of domestic labor. So we knew there must be unpublished data on this so we write them in the responses in the 1990 census, I guess it was. Yes, they have unpublished data and the Senate shows that there was there were two domestic workers in Sweden in 1990 one male and one female and the guy writing says well, obviously this is not accurate but really there's very little of this kind of labor in our country. This is no longer the case by the way since Sweden too has become more unequal but I'm a well-paid professional and I don't know anyone who has who hires domestic labor. So that's the extreme version of this but we saw this by analyzing data on the largest metro areas in the US we found the same pattern that the more inequality, the more domestic labor. And then this is from a well-known in sociology anyway article by Rachel Dwyer who writes about the expansion of care work and points out that this is the largest group of jobs fueling growth at the bottom of the labor market. And here's one more in the I'm not gonna talk about this in detail but in the book I look a little bit at nail salons which is another case of the same kind of dynamic. And so this is a journalist postural who says human beings of all incomes and levels of technology crave beauty and diversion but as people get richer they can spend more on such luxuries by historical standards, Americans are very rich. It's not surprising then to find smart entrepreneurs creating lots of new jobs catering to our happiness as well as our physical needs to find them. You have to look try the yellow pages on dramatic just so you all know about the proliferation of this industry in recent decades. So anyway, the point is that the driver of all this is growing demand. Think about the Swedish case if income compression is such that there's very little difference between someone in the bottom 20% and in the top 20% how are you gonna afford to hire someone to serve your needs at home? You have it's not affordable but it is as income inequality grows. So okay, so that's one piece. And then meanwhile on the supply side something very important is happening in the labor market in the 1970s namely the opening up of job opportunities to African-American women from which they had been almost completely excluded before. So this was domestic work in particular that's what I'm gonna talk about now was entirely dominated by African-American women and not only that but many employed African-American women were in that kind of work. So you can see the exodus in 20 years in those numbers. And as a result, basically what happens is African-American women enter clerical sales and service jobs that were previously done by and still are done by white women. And as a result, the pay gap between black and white women pretty much closes in that period. There's still a big gap in 1980 between women and men, of course. This is a quote from France, Cyn Blau and Andrea Beller who point out that they say this is the largest increase in relative earnings of any group in the period. And it's just a mass exodus from a kind of work that many of the people doing it despise, they see it as tainted with the legacy of slavery. It's also very poorly paid and understood as degrading in various ways. But so again, it was never a good job. In this period, people, sociologists among them were predicting the disappearance of this kind of labor because of the stigma attached to it, but instead the opposite occurred in the late 20th century, not only because of growing inequality but also the aging of the population and the resulting demand for elder care, growing demand for childcare and related services among mothers who were, as you all know, entering labor force and big numbers in this period. So there's actually a resurgence and black women are no longer available, immigrants become the dominant group. And again, I already said this, unlike the male dominated jobs I was describing before, these were never good jobs, they were always degraded, but still you get the same kind of dynamic of US born workers exiting for different reasons and being replaced by immigrants. So here's a little diagram summarizing that. And so again, it's different but parallel to what's happening in the male dominated industries I talked about before, which meatpacking by the way, doesn't quite fit that stereotype in that, there's quite a few women in that industry. So basically what I'm trying to argue again is that the proliferation of employment, of low wage immigrant dominated jobs is not the cause of the reversal of fortune of US born workers, but rather the consequence and that claiming the opposite in the immigrant threat narrative just distracts attention from those dynamics. I argue that US born workers have every reason to be enraged as we have seen they can be, but that anger should not be directed at immigrants but at employers and not just employers, but people who have created the policy arrangements that have promoted growing inequality. So I'm just gonna stop there and happy to hear from you. Let me get rid of the screen sharing. Thank you. It's weird to see you putting your hands together by not being able to hear anything, but that's okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. So the floor is open for questions. I think there's only 17 of us and we know who you are. So just unmute and ask a question. We'll try to do it that way. See if that's manageable. David? Thank you. That was a very interesting presentation. Sometime around the late 90s, the AFL-CIO apparently changed its position on immigration. How do you do an explanation for that development? I do. Well, I mean, it's not really related to what I was just saying, but I have studied that too. So it's actually at the turn of the century when it happens in 2000, they do 180 degree turn. So most unions prior to that are support immigration restriction and partly because of the success of efforts to organize immigrants into unions in some of the industries where they've begun to be widely employed. The unions sort of shift gears and decide that they'd rather organize, that they accept that these immigrants are here to stay and they recognize that they can indeed be organized. And so they become instead supporters of immigrant rights and legalizing the unauthorized and all the rest of it. And that takes place in 2000. So it's true that they don't really resist the kinds of changes I described in unionized industries. In other words, they don't immediately try to organize the new meatpacking plants or the residential construction. But once it becomes clear that that's possible because many unionists are skeptical that they can do that. I myself was skeptical before I ran into this. I remember when one of the first successful campaigns in California where, as Larry mentioned, I was at the time in the late 1980s was among janitors. You've probably heard of the famous Justice for Janitors campaign, kind of the icon of immigrant organizing. And I myself was sort of astounded by it, like how could you organize undocumented immigrants when they'd be terrified to stand up for their rights, et cetera, which many people still believe. It turns out that the opposite is true, that at least if you scratch a labor organizer in the more recent years, they will say, oh, it's much easier to organize immigrants than US-born workers. So once that becomes apparent, the unions completely change their tune. I think it is connected with your talk and that it suggests that the argument you give should find a receptive audience among the in the union movement today. Yeah, I think it would today, especially the part about blaming employers, not workers for this stuff, sure. The labor movement remains somewhat varied. And as I'm sure you guys know, there's individual unions have a lot of autonomy from the AFL-CIO and so on. So there are sectors in the labor movement where the restrictionist ideas are still alive and well, but more and more, they've come around to this kind of point of view, maybe not with my analysis of it or whatever, but that their job is to organize immigrants not to try to get rid of them. Could I ask a brief follow-up question, which is you mentioned earlier about the argument that labor gets its strength from being able to restrict employment. Isn't that an old split in the labor movement between craft unions, which have some hope of controlling the supply of labor versus industrial unions, which are stuck with organizing whoever the company's hired. So that means in the labor movement, there's always been this opposing view. Yeah, there aren't that many pure craft unions left, but it is true that it's in the building trades where you will still see the more restrictionist attitudes which is very consistent with what you're suggesting. Yeah, I mean, Andrea Nagel, who you're referring to, who makes that claim, is doing it from a kind of, I don't know, I would call it an ultra-left kind of position of saying that we just have to recognize that as good Marxists or whatever, this is the dynamic and therefore we should not favor open borders, hardly anyone favors open borders anyway. I mean, there are some people who do, but that's not like the mainstream view in any case, but really the division is between people who think the US should try to keep immigration to a minimum and those who think that, A, there's a bunch of millions of immigrants already here who should have the same rights as everybody else and that there should be some kind of orderly system that allows legal immigration to expand. It's not, I know you didn't mention this, David, but I'll just say I'm struck by the current discussion of these labor shortages in industries like restaurants that, and no one really brings up immigration in that conversation. And yet to me, it seems obvious that that's part of the problem. Like if there were, if we did have a lot of immigrants arriving, those jobs would not be so hard to fill and even in the pandemic. And well, all the evidence that's out there that immigration actually contributes to economic growth, not the opposite. You would think that there'd be more support than there is for changing the situation, but we're still, you know, most people are, I think, captured by some version of what I called the immigrant threat narrative at the beginning. Lisa, you wanna jump in? Hi, thank you for that. It was very reassuring, but also enlightening with regard to some of the findings. Hypothetically, I'm doing a research project on, I might do a research project looking at rising labor force participation among women in major cities as a function of the share of the labor force that's low, has low level of education immigrants. And I would add, the question is, am I barking up the wrong tree? Or should I really be looking at the relative level of inequality among women? Or maybe both, or maybe both, yeah. I mean, I think what you just put your finger on, that inequality among women is a very understudied phenomenon. We all know that inequality more generally has skyrocketed in the last few decades and continues to, but not everybody zeroes in. I mean, people still think of women as part of the short end of that stick, the short end of that stick, so to speak. When in fact, there's increasing polarization among women. I mean, the people in the 1% are still overwhelmingly now, but you get to the 20% and there's a lot of women like some of us in this room, or this, whatever this is, and that you're seeing on your screen who are professionals and have gotten access to jobs that women didn't used to have. And not only that, but they're likely to be partnered with or married to other professionals and therefore experiencing a very affluent lifestyle because their partners, especially if they're male, are earning even more money and so on. And they're the ones employing the low wage service workers at the other end, right? Not just domestic workers, but going out to have a nice meal in a restaurant, whatever, that's really not that different in terms of what's going on with income inequality. So, and many of those workers are women. So I think that is something to think about. Tell me more, why did you think that rising labor force participation would be correlated with the higher percentage of work? Well, the real reason is that the wages for immigrants doing childcare in the home would be lower than for non-immigrants. And then in relation to the ongoing research is not being done by me, it's being done by a student I'm supervising. Okay. Will your slides be available so that I can share? Oh, sure. Sure, and not only that, but in the book, there's a lot of discussion of this kind of stuff. So she could look at that. And I think Larry is recording this too. So you could just share it with your student easily if that's the best way. Thank you. Thank you very much. Wonder if I can just briefly ask a question and make a comment on your reference to the IVP plant in Lexington, Nebraska. I did several studies on that. Oh, really? Well, I was a professor at University of Nebraska for 26 years, so it was an issue. I guess you're fundamentally correct in some of your implications there, but just it's such a complex process that led to that plant in Lexington in that the meatpacking industry was in Chicago. It was in large cities and it's only in the last 30 or so years that it has moved to rural environments. The plant that was taken over by IPP was actually a manufacturing plant of combines, New Holland combines, union jobs that closed in 85. And the local government there with state aid was looking for someone to occupy that plant. And they finally got IBP, which is part of Conagra now, and they finally got them to come and take over. So it was a union plant that closed for five years and then a non-union meatpacking business took over the building and occupied that. I have some doubts from my experience in talking to people on that project that they were looking for immigrants from the start. They ran job ads in Northern Mexico for those jobs at the same time that they hired some local. I think some local hiring was part of the, because there was some state assistance and funding for Conagra and opening that plant, they had to pretend that they were gonna hire locally. I'm not sure quite honestly from what I know about the meatpacking business in Nebraska that they were not looking actively for immigrants as well. Now, that would take local workers if they applied, obviously. So it's a very mixed bag of what went on there, but fundamentally it is an effort to escape the unions to get away from union labor in the large cities and move meatpacking to where the cows are essentially and where the soybeans are. So there's various efficiencies there as well. So many things were at play, but it's a little more complex. The immigration is part of it. If you look at meatpacking plants in Nebraska, they're largely all immigrants. And mostly were from the start. I mean, there were immigrants there from the start and they recruited immigrants. That was very active on their part. In fact, there were accusations when that plant opened. Why are you running ads in Mexico? Oh, that's interesting. Well, maybe I was taken in by the pretense as you said, but I still think the point is that maybe in that particular plant, that was the case, but that the main driver was cheapening the cost of production or production is invited. You're fundamentally correct in what you're saying. All of these things are complex. Absolutely. Many things come into play. And the interesting thing about that plant is it revived Lexington, Lexington disaster area. When New Holland closed in 85, the population fell from 10,000 to 6,000. They lost 4,000 people. The downtown was just boarded up. It was a disaster. It was fully restored economically. It was very positive for Lexington as a whole. If you look at the overall wellbeing and real estate values, we looked at all of those things. And it was largely, again, a positive experience, but again, a complex one. Of course. And of course, this didn't just happen in that one plant. It happened. It was part of a much bigger movement of the industry, as you said, from big cities to the world of catalog. It happened throughout the plain states. I mean, there were numerous cities where exactly the same thing happened. That plant in Lexington, yes, it was dominant. And the true success of all of that was eventually Walmart built a super Walmart in Lexington. So that was taken as it's worked. So it's an interesting overall shift in the complexity of that within. Oh, and I should mention also, speaking of Walmart, that plant ended up, that was part of the anti labor movement within Walmart and other supermarkets. They fired their butchers in all of those markets and they were directly supplied by IBP out of Lexington. That was the regional distribution in Walmart. So they got to fire all their unionized butchers and replace them essentially with immigrant workers at the IBP plant that pre-packaged, it all came out of that plant, pre-packaged, labeled straight into the Walmart delivery system and to the supermarkets. So again, that's why I say, you're fundamentally correct. This was a search for cheaper costs and the labor issue is central to all of that. Yeah, they call it boxed beef, if I recall, that that was another innovation that was meant to save money. It wasn't just about unionized butchers, that did affect them, but more a way of cheapening the whole process. Anyway, I think there are a couple other, that's so fascinating that you were there and know that in such intimate detail. Yeah, it's an interesting story. It really is, yeah. I'll have Catherine and then Kevin and then we have also a question in the chats from a student. So Catherine, do you want to go? Hi, this is actually Noe Wiener. And I are watching this together with our daughter. Thank you for the wonderful talk. Thank you for the talk. My question was whether you had any thoughts on how the political economy of refugee integration or refugee flows is different from the story that you described of refugee, the political economy of labor migration. Given that we might expect more refugee flows in the future and already seeing those flows and how should we think about that differently, perhaps? That is a great question. And by the way, meatpacking, I don't know if Hendrik remembers this but I know those plants also employed a lot of Southeast Asian refugees at the time. Today it would be from the Middle East or Afghanistan, obviously. The Middle East, right. Yeah, exactly. So, look, I think the main difference is that it's much harder to sell the what I'm calling the immigrant threat narrative when it comes to refugees. But yeah. And then the opportunities that they might have vary a lot but here's what I think is the same and I didn't really include this in the talk but it kind of came up in David Katz's question. You all probably heard about the Amazon failed unionization effort in Alabama earlier this year. The one successful organizing drive that did take place in Amazon was in Minnesota involving Somali refugees who made these demands for time to have Muslim prayer sessions and stuff like that and actually succeeded in bringing Amazon to the table to discuss that with them. And I guess what I think about the broader picture is that one of the reasons that immigrant organizing instead of when it's attempted which is not often enough has been so successful is that if you've been through the experience of being either forced to leave the country you started out in as a refugee or crossed the border without authorization say from Guatemala or Mexico into the United States the kinds of ordeals that you've survived successfully are so much more harrowing than anything you're gonna face in trying to organize a union or something like that. So those workers tend to be much more motivated and less easily intimidated than their US-born counterparts at otherwise comparable levels of income and education and stuff. So I don't know. I think the refugee thing is really interesting and I haven't studied it directly but I would think it would be harder to present them as a threat in the same way although in Europe we are seeing some of that. Thanks, Kevin. Hi and greetings from Canada where we've all just voted. Oh yes. Yeah, not much of a change over here. So I can buy your broad argument as an alternative to the conventional narrative but you haven't provided a kind of balance of whether or not a kind of overall ledger of whether or not there's any truth to the kind of more supply side as opposed to the demand-driven argument here or is there like scope conditions under which I should expect the standard supplied-driven model to operate or yours to operate more effectively. Can you tell me what you mean by scope? Yeah, so you have this alternative explanation, right? That's like demand-driven and I understand like the causal chain and whatnot but I guess the standard supply driven model of what's going on, should I not believe it at all or are there certain conditions under which it essentially holds in certain industries? So the supply argument being that because immigrants are available, employers take advantage of that. Yes, and it's not driven by employer demands, yes. So what I was arguing is that immigration itself, low-age immigration that is, this wouldn't apply to Silicon Valley engineers or something, maybe it wouldn't in a different way but is driven by the knowledge that there are jobs waiting for you at the other side of your journey, right? That doesn't mean, no, I think it is sometimes true that if there's a available supply of so-called cheap labor or the perception anyway that these workers are harder working, willing to work for less lower wages and so on, sure, employers will take advantage of that. I mean, that is a necessary condition for the kind of process I described, definitely. I just don't think that's the central driver, you know, historically. And so that, like by looking at the sequence of events over time, you can see that, like why did people come in the first place? Because those recruiters from IBP show up in Mexico and say, hey, we got jobs for you in Iowa. I'm sorry, Nebraska in that case, but Iowa too, they did the same thing. Yeah, I'm just wondering like at a second stage, once those people are let go for whatever reason, if they are let go, there's just an available supply of relatively available low-wage docile workers, then the other kind of standard mechanism might take hold. Well, maybe I would object to the suggestion docile though. I don't think these workers are docile. They're in fact, no, I think more than you, especially now I'm not talking about refugees anymore, but low-wage immigrants, why do they come in the first place, they come to better of their economic situation. So they are more motivated than many US-born workers to do that, that's part of why they are much more receptive to organizing efforts on the rare occasions where they're offered that opportunity. So the desktop part I would reject, that doesn't mean employers don't see them that way though. I mean, you know, and the other thing, what you mentioned, which I think is really important is that these 10 low-wage industries, I feel ridiculous saying this to economists, are also high turnover industries, almost by definition, right? These jobs are easy to get under most of the time. And so, you know, you leave if anything, paying another quarter of an hour, a quarter of a dollar comes along, you'll take it, right? Which means there is a constant need for labor supply. And I think that's related to what we were talking about before and the question in the chat, I guess the questioner has left the meeting, but you know, all these spot labor shortages that we're hearing about now, it's because maybe partly, there isn't an available supply of folks the way they're normally is in these very high turnover industries like restaurants and retail. And that's not just immigrants, but more generally, you know, it's hard to find people for those kinds of jobs even under normal circumstances, much less in the middle of a pandemic. So yeah, anyway, I wouldn't totally rule out the relevance of an available supply if that's what you're asking. Yeah, thanks. Okay, so we think we've answered Isam's answer question. That's in the chat. It was only a little bit. It's parallel to the US retail industry today where unionization is still on conditions for an employer's attention. Yeah, the difference in retail to the industries that I was talking about is simply that you need to speak English to be employed in those kinds of jobs for the most part unless it's an immigrant population that are other customers. So there are some retail jobs like that. But so, you know, but otherwise, yeah, I think it's very parallel. Yeah, Pedro. Yeah, I'm wondering if you could maybe just comment briefly. I mean, I think this is related to what I'm doing. I'm studying like digital platforms and digital economy. And in a sense, I mean, how do you think these as technology evolves, right? If we were projecting one or two decades in the future here and we can think that maybe some of these industries, some of these sectors, they can go fully online, right? Essentially, like for example, call centers and stuff. So like, how would that affect this immigrant threat narrative in your opinion? I mean, does it tone it down, meaning like what does it even mean to be an immigrant, right? Like you call AT&T and most likely that person is not here in the US, right? Or does it enhance it, right? Because now, I mean, it's much, much harder to find a job. Well, first of all, you might have not, I don't know, I didn't call attention to this, but the industries I mentioned are all jobs that can't really leave the country. Construction, right? Mead packing, well, mead packing you could argue about maybe eventually refrigeration and transportation won't be cheap enough that you could do it somewhere else, but not anytime soon, right? Domestic work, obviously not. So what you're talking about are jobs, more like factory jobs that left a long, quite a long time ago in most cases, right? And now we're, I mean, I think the call center thing isn't entirely new either, but it's growing. It's funny, because I thought you were, when you said digital platforms, I thought you were gonna talk about things like food delivery and that kind of thing. I mean, sorry, just an addendum to this. I mean, because when you think of reproductive labor, right? You have digital platforms that you can like hire people to take care of your kids for like a couple of hours. And the users are also the ones that are providing these kinds of services. They just need some kind of quick cash, I guess. Care.com you're talking about. Yes. Yeah, well, no, right. And that, I don't think that necessarily disrupts the kind of labor market I was describing for domestic work, but it exists, forages alongside it. Look, there's a lot of variation in this. So food delivery is something I actually do know a little bit about. And it's a very varied industry. So in New York City, where I'm not right this minute, but where I live, the food delivery workers who are employed by those platforms are overwhelmingly farm-born. They run around on electric bicycles and it's an incredibly exploitative sector. Tip stealing, wage theft, all the rest of it is sort of rampant there. In the rest of the country, mostly, those jobs are done by suburban women in their own cars. Many of the mothers who are using the time while their kid is in school to make some extra money, that kind of thing. And it's completely different, right? But they're both exploding. So I guess what I'm saying is I don't see these things as necessarily competing with the kind of dynamics I was trying to describe, but more like existing alongside them. And some of them do involve immigrant workers, though probably not very many. I think the food delivery thing in New York is kind of an exceptional case, but I could be wrong about that, I don't know. But anyway, yeah. But immigrants are mostly employed in face-to-face work that can't be outsourced, which there's a lot more of, I have to say, than people realize. I mean, it's true the digital thing is growing, but it's still a very small part of the labor force. Well, I'll jump in. Thank you for the talk. That was super interesting. Do you think there's any, I mean, because anecdotally, I could meet people who will complain, who will tell about the other story. Like I have this cousin in LA who worked in construction because he basically was a screw-up. And he complained bitterly about Mexican workers and they don't complain at all and he can't get a job anymore. And I don't know. So there's some local, there's some in some sectors in some places, maybe controlling for education or something. Maybe you find this other story. Well, I don't know anything about your relative, but he probably could get a job in commercial construction if he has good skills in construction, right? Which remains pretty much, well, it's not 100% really white, but relatively dominated by US-born workers. So, I don't know, in that case, I guess I'm, I think he's buying into the narrative more than the facts, but yeah. You haven't seen any evidence of, you don't think that there's a local source of things. I'm sure there must be isolated cases here and there, sure. But in some ways, the best evidence against that kind of view is looking at factory towns where the jobs have evaporated. They've been outsourced to elsewhere and there might not be any immigrants in the population because it's a completely devastated economy. And yet, if you talk to those workers as Justin Guest did, they will tell you it's all because of immigration, which is completely crazy. I mean, that they could think that their factory moved because of immigration, right? It doesn't make any sense. But it's just a very, look, it's a narrative that's been heavily promoted and it's a very comfortable way to understand your own situation. It isn't their fault that I'm not saying that, it's not your relative's fault that he lost his job, but really, to understand what happened to those jobs, you need to look at the ways in which companies have restructured the work and ways to make it much less appealing. And would he be willing to work for the minimum wage at that job when he used to make a decent wage? Probably not. So, yeah. I mean, and on the demand-driven thing, I'll just mention one other thing, which is you probably remember that after the big crash in 2008, immigration basically stops from Mexico and Central America because people know there's no reason to come, there are no jobs. And I don't have any evidence for this and I haven't studied it, but I'll just say I think the recent surges, some of those are refugees from unbelievable violence in their countries, but there's also a lot of single men trying to crush the border. And I think it's because they know their jobs here, or at least some component of it is probably explained by that perception, along with of course the sense that Biden is gonna be softer than Trump and so on. But yeah. Right. I mean, my impression is, I mean, certainly in Central Europe, like Hungary, Orban's making a big deal about the immigration and there's like no immigrants there. Stealing off the border or there's no one there, but it is. Right. Well, that's a very parallel example to what guest rights are about. And here's another example that's from a different context, but very similar to, some of you might know Linda Gordon's recent book on the second Ku Klux Klan rising in the 20s. And she points out that the xenophobic attitudes that those folks had were concentrated in places like Indiana where there were hardly any of the people that they pilloried. There were very few Jews, very few Catholics, very few blacks. And yet they were the most fervent adherents to the idea that this was what was ruining the United States kind of thing. So there's not necessarily any correlation with any immediate presence or threat. And of course there is a whole literature that argues that, you know, actual interaction contact with a scapegoat population reduces that kind of prejudice. I'm not sure if that's completely true either. Like your relative in LA probably has plenty of contact with immigrants and other contexts, but yeah. Xi Yan. Hi, thank you so much for your talk. I have a question regarding whether state, I guess interstate politics has any relation to, you know, the level of immigrant workers, low wage immigrant workers at State. The examples that you and Hendrick was talking about, like me packing, because I spend my undergraduate years in Kansas and there was a lot of talk about me packing. But also whether or not they could attract, for example, a poetry plant to their town as opposed to, you know, letting them go to Missouri. But then, and the main thing is how many jobs would that create? And, but then they also have, if they do demand immigrant as their workers, I'm just wondering how this sort of interstate competition for plans to be placed in those states has influenced the level of immigrant workers at those points. Thanks. That's a great question. I mean, look, that kind of competition exists pretty much across the board when companies are thinking about investing somewhere. So we saw it with Amazon's search for second headquarters, remember that? Which isn't manufacturing or me packing, but it's basically those jobs are like factory jobs. Well, not the white collar ones, but the fulfillment centers as they're called, those are basically like factories. But anyway, so that's sort of standard practice for all 50 states that when the opportunity seems available, they offer all kinds of tax deals and, you know, concessions to potential investors because they do want not just the jobs, but all the other economic benefits of, you know, this is normal behavior, regardless of the industry and regardless of who's going to work there. So, but on the other hand, I don't know. I mean, it sounds like from what Hendrick described, I didn't realize that that was the background to that case in Lexington, Nebraska, but that was another example of that where the state, I assume, the Economic Development Department or whatever it's called. I had a summer job once working for such a department when I was in college. But anyway, so I remember the logic of how they all operate. They wanted that old factory to be active again and to create jobs. And apparently it did create some local development benefits, despite the fact that the local population didn't end up being the ones working there. So insofar as that's happening with industries of the kind I'm talking about where the jobs are low wage and not attractive to the local population, it is going to be tied to immigration, but not necessarily. I mean, a lot of the Amazon fulfillment centers, they're not that many immigrants in those jobs, they're some, but they are paid a little bit better and probably having English skills matters in some of those jobs. I mean, so it's complicated. In Southern California, however, the warehouse industry does have tons of immigrants in it, well, every industry does there. I mean, that's the working class in Southern California as we all know. But so there is some regional variation, but well, anyway, I'm not sure I'm really answering your question, but Kansas I think is a lot like Nebraska in regard to the meatpacking industry if that's part of what you're driving at. And there is a kind of contradictory attitude in some populations where maybe a little bit like Larry's relative, where people are resentful of the fact that there are all these, foreign nurse quote unquote in their community who weren't there before and who have different kinds of ways of life and so on. At the same time, they don't wanna work in those jobs. So there's some, there's a kind of contradictory attitude sometimes, but I still think for us as analysts of what's going on in the world, I still think the challenge is to help people focus their concerns not on the people who are basically victims of it, but rather on the actors who actually have power and are making these changes take place. And that's pretty rare. I mean, you know, that alternative narrative where I was trying to outline is not, you don't hear too much of that. So I guess that's what I think needs to change. And Larry, I think you're on mute. I'm muted. I was asking if there are anybody who has additional questions? I guess I'll jump in. So I mean, this really interesting finding that immigrants are more willing to unionize, right? So they've been, they've faced debt squads and this arduous journey. Have you noticed in your research are, but it doesn't seem employers care about that or they have no choice because, you know, they'll go to a great lens to avoid unionization. So is there- They do. No, I think it's because they buy into this narrative too. They think that, you know, immigrants are docile and willing to work for very low wages and, you know, hardworking, all that stuff, some of which is true. But, well, let me just say what I think about why they're, because the evidence is not that strong in terms of there's very little in the way of survey data, what little there is supports, the idea that immigrants are more receptive than US foreign workers. And the question is why? So, and by the way, most of these data are from pre-Trump year. So it might have been quite different in that period when people lived in very, you know, in great fear of deportation if they weren't documented. So that's a little different, but that's probably not true anymore. And it wasn't true before 2016, quite so much either. So if you think about it, employers themselves help to create a situation that facilitates unionization in many of these sectors. For example, it's very common in low wage work to rely on what some people call referral hiring. So rather than advertising a job on monster.com, you say, hey, Juan, I need some more people. Do you know anybody who wants this job? And Juan lets his cousin know, or his brother, or his compatriot from who lives around the corner. And pretty soon you've got an immigrant social network embedded in the workplace that, you know, people trust each other, they know each other from other places. So if there is, and I have to say for starters, that organizing, it's not like it's that commonplace. There's very little union organizing at all right now in this country and hasn't been for quite some time. But when it does happen in that kind of setting, you know, that network is an incredible resource for the organizers. If they can, you know, figure out the kind of leaders of that network, they've got it made, right? And it did happen actually, even in Southern California in construction. And among drywallers, there was this giant strike that covered several counties in 1992. And the myth was that everybody in the strike was from the same village in Mexico, which is complete nonsense because the whole population of the village was like 4,000. But there were like tens of thousands of workers involved in this thing. But what was true is that those networks were embedded in, and there's not really a workplace in construction exactly, but in the economic networks that they got their livelihood from. So anyway, so besides the having experienced much more fearful things than, you know, losing a minimum wage jobs because you try to organize a union, which does happen all the time. But, you know, is that, I mean, one of the Salvadorans I interviewed a long time ago about the janitors thing, she said, in my country, if you organize a union, they kill you. Here you lose a job that pays whatever the minimum wage was at the time. You know, like that sort of sums it up. But people are also, you know, they do have reasons to be fearful at the same time. I'm just saying that those other things kind of outweigh the fear. And then I also think, I don't know if this is, I can't really document this, but I believe it that in many immigrant communities, especially Latinx communities, that there is a kind of sense of shared fate that's widely understood in those communities it's easy for people to make a leap to think, well, if we do this together, it's gonna be good for all of us, as opposed to the more individualistic orientation that at least stereotypically is so associated with US-born workers. So that's another resource for organizing efforts. So I think all those things together kind of, tip the balance in favor of immigrant organizing compared to the other kind of stuff. Yeah. So the problem is hardly anybody's doing it. So. Right. Okay. Can I ask you a really quick follow up to that? Of course, sure. Do employers know what you know about those social networks you just described? And if they don't, why don't they? I mean, that's a very, that could be a very costly mistake or lack of knowledge. Yeah, I'm sure some of them are aware of it. I mean, how could they not, you know, they create it basically, but I don't know. I mean, this isn't something I invented. I mean, there's stuff written about it. Actually our old, my old colleague who Larry will remember Roger Wildinger has written about this in his book, How the Other Half Works. There's a whole lot about employer reliance on referral hiring. I mean, I think once on the rare occasions where they are confronted with a unionizing drive, then they certainly are aware of it. I mean, it's obvious then to everyone, but whether they worry about this in advance when, you know, probably not. And the truth is for most of them, the chance of being confronted with such an effort is pretty low. So, you know, it's probably not like high on the list. But I think what Larry said before about how employers will do anything to prevent unionization, I mean, that's absolutely true. I mean, we see that all the time that it's sometimes economically irrational. Like they would, they spend more money hiring an anti-union consultant than it would cost them to just agree to all the demands. And that happens routinely. So if this were more on the radar, I don't know if that would change their practices or not. But anyway, yeah. Lisa, you wanna jump in? Yes, I think in addition to the networks that the employers use for hiring, they're economic geographers who study the networks and the communities in the Los Angeles area. And I think that the union, well, I know for a fact that a lot of the union activities happen at that community level, not at the job site. And so I think to a great extent, it's beyond the control of the employer. Right, although, except it's so far as the community is sort of, those same networks are present in their workplace. I think if they'd made an effort to hire from more, from in a different way, where they didn't replicate the community networks inside the factory or the, you know, whatever it is, the workplace. I also think about the community networks as a context for less fear over losing jobs due to organizing, because you might feel, one might feel a lot and always got another job because we have this community of compatriots who are working all over the city and have access to hiring information through their networks. Yeah, absolutely. I also had a quick question and this may not be relevant for what you're working on right now, but I'm curious about the extent to which it matters to the employer who the immigrants are, where they're from. I'm thinking about in a context of some immigrants being preferred, for example, maybe asylum seekers, if they're from the right racial or ethnic group being preferred to others. I mean, I'm sure that exists. You know, there are all these stereotypes sliding around in it and people buy into them. I mean, on the other hand, if you're looking for to hire folks and you're gonna, you know, this is back to the supply question, right? It's not necessarily possible to find asylum seekers, right? As opposed to somebody who's, you know, eagerly looking for work and happens to be available in your location. So I think it's complicated. I've run into this in some of the literature on paid domestic work, especially nannies. Those employers too, who are individual mothers usually, right? Have their own stereotypes, you know? Oh, Salvadorans are better at taking care of babies than Mexican, you know, this kind of stuff. I don't know where that comes from exactly, but I don't think it necessarily shapes their practices that much. It's just kind of, I don't know. I'm not really answering your question, but I'm not sure that they really are able to target particular groups. It's more like who's available in the local area. Except when you're recruiting, like Hendrick was talking about before, that is different. So they go to particular places. In the case of meatpacking, they go everywhere. They actually quite, it's, you know, there's this book by some of my shelf here. What's his name? Eric Schlosser, that somebody is like a popular book about meatpacking and all its profiles. And he points out that in addition to recruiting workers from south of the US Mexico border, those employers, they go to like homeless shelters. They'll go anywhere. They're desperate to recruit anybody who they can get. I did an interview once in a factory in LA and I made the mistake of asking the question to this manager, what criteria do you use in when you hire workers here? He said, if they wear shoes, we'll hire them. That's a quote. So in the low-age labor market, that's kind of how it is. If you have a pulse, they'll try you out. You may not last, but you're, you know. We shouldn't forget Karl Marx and Engels's analysis of industry in Britain in the 1800s where they intentionally put Irish workers against English workers. So to some extent there might be intentional variations to avoid some of this networking or at least keep it under control. Cause I mean, if you look at plants in larger cities where you have access to many immigrants, you get 20 nationalities on the factory floor. Yes, I've seen that in California actually. So some of them, the more savvy employers do do that. Those tend not to be the very bottom of the barrel kind of jobs. But yeah, they, some of them are very savvy, I guess, that way. Yeah. As you say, anything to avoid unionization. Oh, it's so, it's just shocking. Like they're the only people as interested in this topic as people like myself. I mean, it's unbelievable how prominent it is. And even when there's really very little possibility, that's what they, you know, they're like a failure as a manager if they allow this to happen is how they, that's the ethos today in this country. Regardless of immigrants or whoever it is, you know, that's irrelevant. I mean, with such high turnover, you think they might actually be economically efficient to have maybe some unionization? Or at least higher wages, right? Remember the $5 day? I know they don't seem to think that way. I'm often astonished by that because the turnover is extremely costly to them. You know, it's not, it's not cost free to like screen folks and hire. I mean, even if it's true that if they wear shoes, we'll hire them. Still, you know, you're gonna do some kind of background check. You're gonna do a drug test. You're gonna interview them. You're gonna train them. Just the training alone is costly if you're having to do it over and over again if you have 100% turnover, right? Which many of these places do, including like Amazon, which is not the bottom of the barrel wage-wise, but the jobs are so horrendous that they have very high turnover. That's part of the problem in the organizing effort that failed in Alabama, right? That by the time they were ready to have the election, it was a whole new workforce practically. So, yeah. So the, would it be fair to say the kind of the Marxist class logic overwhelms the kind of organizational logic for these employers a little bit? Say more what you mean by that. Well, as opposed to looking at the, it would be economically rational in their sector and in their business, but there's this larger kind of class ideology that we don't want any unionization. And it kind of over, the same reason they're against national healthcare, even though it would drastically lower the wage bill. Right. No, I think that's right. That there's a kind of ideological blindness to some of this stuff. Yeah. Although without having a union, you know, there is this whole history in this country of non-union firms imitating union practice, you know, union arrangements by raising pay, offering generous benefit. They could do some of that with, and still keep unions out. And they'd probably have a more efficient enterprise, but that also doesn't seem to be in the realm of the worldview that dominates. Yeah. Fascinating. Well, we have probably exhausted Ruth enough after all this time. The Zoom talks are extra exhausting, I find. But thank you so much, Ruth. That was really fantastic. And round of applause. And that's a great start to our political economy workshop series. So I'm grateful for your time. I only wish we weren't in a pandemic and we'd take you out to dinner and do a little bit of interaction, but. Yes, I wish we could too. Another day. All right. Well, thanks, Larry. And thanks, everybody, for coming. Thanks. Bye-bye. Bye.