 Well, hello everyone and welcome to this session of the Jobs Reset Summit. It's a real honor to get to moderate a session on a particularly important topic within the broader question of the future of work. And that's how we best value frontline workers. This is a session that's sitting within a day focused on work wages and job creation. And it's touching on a set of issues that I think are front and center due to this pandemic. Of course, the world of work was being disrupted anyway, long before we ever heard of COVID-19 disrupted in part by the realities of a digital economy of a fourth industrial revolution to use the words of the forum. But the pandemic has really changed things and words like frontline workers are essential workers are now part of our lexicon. We use these terms all the time. And I think what we're going to do today in this session and what's going to be a fast-paced session is try to get to what do we mean by these frontline workers are essential workers. And what has our experience been during this pandemic vis-a-vis these workers and how do we think about the future? How do we shape a future that values these workers in a new way, given all the various pressures that we'll get into economic and digital transformation pressures and crises like this pandemic. So we've got an incredible group of forum has assembled for this. I know, of course, many members of the World Economic Forum are joining us as well. And there'll be time for questions as well as people who are viewing this from around the world as we stream it out. So thank you for being a part of it. I'm Raj Kumar and I'm the president and editor in chief of DevEx, which is a media platform that covers issues of global development, particularly in the lowest income and middle income countries around the world. And so these are issues we cover all the time. And I want to welcome our other panelists who are with us today. We have Jeremiah Adams-Prasil, who's a professor of law at the University of Oxford in the UK. We have Christy Hoffman, who's the general secretary of the UNI Global Union in Switzerland. And we have Stephen Klaskow, who's the president and chief executive officer of Jefferson Health here in the United States. We have one or two other panels who may may join us during the course of this, but really honored to have all of you here and all of you who are joining us. So Christy, we could just start with you. You know, you represent millions of members as a union as a coalition of unions, you think about these issues, especially during a pandemic of who's got to be out there, what risks they put themselves. What are the resources and supports for them. Just deafening deafening to you how do you see it from your from your approach. And you're on mute. So thanks. Thanks, Raj. And thanks for that introduction. Yeah, so uni represents workers from a number of sectors, which you could call frontline or essential during during COVID postal workers deliver mail and packages. The finance workers kept the banks open that was considered essential in some countries, contact centers take COVID hotline calls. Some of them put themselves at risk during with through their public interaction during COVID and we lost a lot of postal workers, I must say, but our unions also represent the frontline workers who make sure that we have access to food, keep the schools and hospitals clean and safe and then the care workers for the elderly who, although we would say essential. And very important to us all they live in or near poverty and most of the world, the cleaners, security guards, long term care workers and nursing homes, grocery store workers. And so these are workers that we put a lot of emphasis on recently because they're earning close or on or around the minimum wage. Mostly women this is except security it's a very gendered population, disproportionately people of color ethnic minorities and very seldom do they have union representation so you know we've seen through the pandemic of flaws for these workers how great they are and you know many of them said you know I felt like a hero. During that time, especially the grocery store workers were getting so much positive reinforcement, but I didn't come home to a hero's welcome after the pandemic is over many of them lost their hazard pay or lost their bonus pay. And our living, you know, average wages I think is $12 an hour, which is below a living wage in the United States in the UK food retail is around nine pounds an hour again below living wage. And this was an industry I'm just taking grocery as an example, nobody took that job because they were facing hazardous duty this was not someone who signed up to be a cop or a fireman. And they, many of them were at risk, not only from coven which was initially a certainly very important risk and still is, but also from enforcing the mask rules, for example, the harassment that they get from customers and so on. Many part time workers, and when. So that's the cruelty of taking away their small little $50 a week hazard pay from workers who are already earning, you know, really too little to start with and then they got some amount and it was taken away is something that's been big discussion in some countries but I just want to also touch on care because, especially in the case of nursing homes, which is, I think the number now is 46% of deaths in Europe North America and Australia came from residents of nursing homes which is a stunning a staggering number. And the data is really clear that some of this is linked to low staffing ratios poor conditions for the workers, they were among the last to get PPEs weren't even entitled initially under the WHO regulations, a lot of them work two or three jobs bringing the virus from place to place, no sick pay which is a fundamental public health issue if you expect people to stay home when they're sick, and they don't get paid and they already earn an average of $9 an hour or nine euros an hour in OECD countries. You know that's the recipe for disaster. That's what we had this is a really important time to lift those workers to change fundamentally the framework in which they work and live. I could say a bit about cleaners to but I'll stop there. Yeah, let's let's keep the conversation coming going come back to you on that you know you raise a couple of interesting points one that calls out to me is this idea that, you know, in the title of the session is valuing frontline workers and one, one kind of indicator of value is who got the PPE and who didn't. Right and there are many cases where you know you saw for example community health workers in low income countries just weren't assumed that they needed the PPE and they were asked to go door to door and continue doing their healthcare work without even a basic mask. So you know it's become an interesting indicator of what we value what we don't. The other thing that calls out to me and maybe this is a good segue to Professor Jeremiah's is that you know grocery workers, you're right they never took these jobs expecting hazardous work conditions, but they knew that their jobs were under threat from other forces in the economy right the the gig economy the digital transformation there's so many new models out there that are looking to reduce the labor input costs. In many industries, and Jeremiah's you you study this issue of gig workers and kind of where the digital transformation is taking the economy and the role of workers in that can maybe you can add a little context to that and then we're going to get to a very specific question when we talk with Steven about his work in health care. Go ahead Jeremiah's. Sure. Thank you very much indeed Raj. And I think what we've seen in the COVID pandemic is really a sort of extreme acceleration of as you say many of the trends we've seen before. And so I think one of the most interesting questions we've seen is that this problem of how we distribute risk in the labor market has really come back to the fall. There's no question that we've always had risk in the labor market, whether it's a lack of demand, generally in the economy, or now very specifically the dangers of the COVID pandemic. And so the question from a sort of labor market broader perspective then is who should bear that kind of risk, and really in the sort of triangle there are three options. A, the worker should bear the risk as health. We could say B, it should be the state who should bear these risks, or we could say, well maybe the employers are very good to intermediary in terms of bearing that kind of risk. And I think one thing we've seen is the real danger, particularly with health risks but I think with economic risks more generally, if we concentrate all that risk on the individual worker. It's completely perverse incentives. So early service, for example, found and I think Christie's also hinted at that when she was speaking, that there were lots of gig economy frontline workers, who even though they were sick, even though they have clear symptoms, still felt they had no choice but to report to work. Right, again, how does the state, how do employers and platforms react to that. The state can put in all sorts of broader support measures. And again, that's what we've seen. We've seen unprecedented support for working people from governments, but of course that's time limited. And also empirical evidence has shown time and time again that it's really inefficient. Paying benefits to the state is a much more inefficient way than actually mandating employer benefits, or at least in the sort of pandemic scenario, actually have a scenario where the money is distributed via employers. I think something else that we've seen that's really, really important is to ensure that people have the ability to stay with a particular employer. Again, you could say, well, let's let's get rid of them during the pandemic and then rehire. Well, another big theme we sort of have in in our work with with the World Economic Forum is skills and how we can ensure skills and upgrading and sort of continuing working on skills. And actually, again, the empirical evidence is extremely clear, but the only thing that keeps people skilled is to keep them in work and any kind of period outside of work, very quickly, kills off skills. There's a final and third point I'd very quickly just make, and that's another big trend which we'd already seen before the pandemic, but which is now exploded. And that's the rise of algorithmic management, which is really why I'm sort of taking my research these days. And so we've seen this rise of the use of very clever algorithms to collect a lot of data about workers, and then to analyze that sometimes even use it to supplant management functions. There have been a lot of concerns about that kind of development, rightly so when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to some of the uses of the data. But I think it's also really important to highlight a positive aspect here in terms of various health and safety aspects. In terms of actually being able to help spot risk and support workers in these scenarios. So really sort of looking forward to how we're going to deal with future pandemics. I think Stephen is going to talk about this one a bit, but how we're going to deal with these challenges coming up and up again. I think the responsible development of these technologies now would be really important to set us up for tackling the challenges of the future. And well, maybe this will be a segue later on to get into this question of regulation because it seems that if you're suggesting the most efficient model is to have businesses take on the role of supporting workers during a crisis like this. If there isn't a clear level playing field for business, then certainly some can do what we've seen what Christie has mentioned, temporary bonuses that get pulled away, or some may not provide those sick leave benefits. So get understanding that role of government, maybe it's not direct provision of service, but perhaps it is generating the kind of regulatory environment that can allow for workers to trust that their employer must take care of them in a situation like this. Maybe Stephen, that's a good segue to you. You mentioned to me earlier that that Jefferson Health, the organization that you lead has dealt with one of the largest patient loads of COVID patients in the country in the United States. What's your experience been like on that? What has it taught you about this issue of valuing the frontline workers? Well, it's funny because everything that Christie talked about about what happens to quote heroes after they're done being heroes, or that Jeremiah's talked about how the gig economy affects humans is amplified in health care. So I'd start with the fact that some of this is how do we prepare for the next time? Well, there's going to be PhDs written on how we didn't prepare the first time. It's not like this was a surprise, right? I mean, it was like someone on high was teasing us with things like Ebola, H1N1, and SARS, and saying there's going to be a big one. So the first thing about the people is we have 32,000 employees, and it was a war. There was a point in time in Philadelphia where it truly was a war, but the difference between this war for those folks was that they took the war home. So, you know, when you're out on a front, and as hard as that is for your family, your family doesn't have a gun. But here, literally, we had employees that had to go home, couldn't affect their kids. So literally we're playing with their children through screens, and you start to talk about the mental health aspects of those kind of things. And I think that's number one of understanding that we owe it, owed it and owe it to our frontline employees to give them what they need. That gets to supply chain. We were very, very, very fortunate and that we had prepared for a pandemic, had about 60 days of PPE on hand. And we had among the lowest employee infectivity rates in the country where 0.8% of our employees got affected, with an average of about 3 to 5% around the United States. But here's the issue. We had gowns that went up from about 20 cents to $11 a gown, because almost all of the supply chain in healthcare is coming from other countries, etc. So what you saw in almost every country is places using trash bags or not the best masks. So the first thing that has to happen is we have to look at supply chain for those essential workers. And by the way, it's not just healthcare workers, it's Chrissy's workers in grocery stores, etc. And we have to look at that the same way that we look at ICBMs and other things. It's a defense position. And the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, China needs to have their own supply that can easily be dispersed. So that's number one. Number two, I think there are some, since this is a World Economic Forum meeting, there are some positive opportunities for public-private partnerships to protect some of these employees. We partnered with a global company, a web contributor named Eremark, who's one of the largest facility companies in the world. We wrote an article for the World Economic Forum, because originally we had talked about what hospitals can learn from hospitality. We don't do a very good job of that. And we switched that now to what hospitality can learn from hospitals around safety. So starting to use some of those things that we learned. I think on the other side of it, and it gets back to some of Jeremiah's research, as we think about the digital transformation of the economy, there are two pieces to that. We didn't protect frontline workers because healthcare is the least consumer-centric sector in the world. So, you know, 30 years ago, when I had hair, we would have been talking about people lining up in the bank to deposit their checks, and that would have been a problem, and that would have been a risk to bank workers. Well, 90% of banking is done at home. So that wasn't a problem. It's not like we get up in the morning and say, oh, I'm going to tell a bank. It's just that banking became consumer-centric. In healthcare, almost nothing was consumer-centric. You know, so as we start to think about how we move healthcare closer out to home, that will also protect the workers. And then the final thing is, and I think this is something where Jeremiah's and I would agree, that as we get into that fourth industrial revolution, a good part of my work with the World Economic Forum and the digital economy is, we talk about online meeting offline. Then what is the role of the human? And instead of starting to look at healthcare professionals, doctors, and others based on science, GPA, med-cats, and organic chemistry grades, we need to, and be amazed they're not more empathetic, communicative, and creative. We need to recognize that machines are we doing a lot of what we do, which will make our frontline workers safer, which will allow them to do more of the human stuff. The last thing I'd say in healthcare is this, that shame on us if we don't take a look at this and fundamentally disrupt things like supply chain and how we do things. There's a great quote from the NBA. Jason Kidd went to a team that was 2452, and he said, I'm going to turn this team around 360 degrees. We do a lot of turning things around 360 degrees in healthcare after crises, and we have to make sure this isn't one of them. I want to invite everyone who's joining us here at the forum. If you have questions, we're going to get to them soon. Please go ahead and put them into the chat window. You know, I can't help but think Christy and Jeremiah, as I listen to Steven, that potentially one way you come out of this situation is that many industries think, how do I reduce the number of frontline workers that I need in my business? How do I automate, use robotics? And so sure, I'll have fewer that I need to provide PPE to and I can pay them more and I can protect them better. Is there maybe an unintended consequence of the direction that we're all talking about, given that all the costs will go up for employers who have large numbers of employees and that there's all this automation coming in so many of the industries that we're talking about. How do you think about this issue, Christy, of the balance between the number of jobs for whole, you know, these are millions of people who sit in this category we're calling frontline. It's not a niche set of employees. So how do you think about it? I mean, we do a lot of work on what what does the future look like and the impact of technology and digitalization. I would say the frontline workers that I spoke about the grocery cleaning and care and the particular in elder care are probably the least vulnerable to that. I'm not saying there's no vulnerability in grocery but in the scheme of commerce overall it's least impact by e-commerce. Yes, more during COVID, more people have their groceries delivered but not at the same scale as other kinds of e-commerce, right? Sorry to interrupt but maybe that's a shift in worker, not a reduction in total jobs but a shift in gig workers doing deliveries. Yeah, I mean, we take a big, you know, I would say gig workers, that needs to be a category that just disappears. There's no reason that everybody isn't just a worker and I think most gig workers will eventually be declared to be employees. So that's an area where I just think the notion that we have these millions of workers who are automatically sort of disconnected from the formal labor market, not entitled to any of the benefits that other workers get is going to go away after. And as Jeremiah says, that first category where they take on all the risk basically. They take on all the risk. It's a non-sustainable model. There is no reason why there is a gig worker delivering the groceries versus a grocery store employee delivering the groceries other than saving money. And I think that model is totally, it's bad for, you know, you don't get sick pay, you don't have any security, you're working while sick. I mean, this is true across that whole economy. Increasingly in Europe, we're seeing courts decide they are actually employees of, you know, Uber or Lyft or DoorDash or whatever the case may be. So I think that will, that's the category of its own, but it's something we, it's not good for health. It's not good for any, you know, a human-centered economy at all. But I don't, I think just going back to your question about the future of work. I mean, in care, in nursing home care, there's a little bit of robotics in that, helping Lyft patients and so on. But we see an increase in employment in care, not a decrease. In fact, the needs for more workers in that industry are really high. In food retail, we don't really see an increase, although maybe a shift towards delivery right now. But some of that will modify it when the virus, you know, it gets quieted down. And cleaners, you know, there's only so much you could speed up and so on, but we're not really seeing there's some basic services that that are much harder. And also the wages are quite low. So the incentive is less to, to replace them by technology. I mean, I do think yes, of course, in finance and in ICTS and telecommunications, we're seeing a lot of employers take this opportunity to restructure their work and reduce employment. And that's driven by these trends that are accelerating now that, you know, we're kind of there in the beginning. But, you know, e-banking is not really, for example, that common in parts of Africa, whereas now it's speeding up, you know, that's just to use a more extreme example. But, but I think we're seeing the accelerating trends, but not so much in the frontline area and postal workers, to some extent their jobs have been mechanizing and automating and digitally impacted for a long time, especially with the decline of letters. But the packages is going way up. So that's been, you know, modified by that. So, yeah, I think that that the real question is, how do we want to restructure our economy that values the workers who are really important, these, these very, you know, service industry workers who are so low paid, who aren't going to go away. And are we do we have a sustainable model, both for public health but also just for addressing inequality and democracy if these workers are so far left behind. Yeah, Jeremiah, maybe you can just pick up wherever you want on these things or add one more element to it, which is, you know, we've heard Stephen talk about how governments probably need to in the future maybe they should have already been better prepared around things like PPA having the supplies on hand to protect workers. I wonder how that fits into the framework you're thinking through, you know, if we're in an era now where there's going to be more crisis. The global health experts say this is not the last pandemic. Of course, the climate scientists say we're going to see more natural disasters. Where should the government fit in vis-a-vis employers in preparing to protect their workers given a reality of more cascading crises that's something that kind of we need to get used to. So I think the single most important lesson we've learned in terms of government responses is that government response needs to be flexible and responsive to employer demand. So let me give you a very concrete example that's born out in the data. What to do with workers while on furlough while the business is shut. Right. And there's two case studies you can look at the German scheme, which is sometimes called Kurzarbeit or short term work and compare that with the UK scheme, which was the furlough scheme. And the big problem with the UK scheme was that it was an all or nothing. So in order to get 80% of wage support, your workers were simply not allowed to work at all. What's another German scheme, employers can much more flexibly negotiate with their workforce, how much they actually want them to work, say just keep them in for 10 to 15%. And then the government tops up in response to that. Right. Now, very straightforward to guess I've set it up easily when you look at the data and the impact of that scheme on the labor market. The harm done to the German labor market in the early months of the crisis was significantly reduced in comparison to the UK scheme. Right. So very clear lessons have schemes ready that are really flexible and responsive to employer demand and workers demand in those scenarios. I also quickly just want to jump back to that point you made earlier, Raj, about the sort of pneumatic pressure, right? This idea, gosh, if workers become more and more expensive, robots don't need fancy gloves and masks, let's stick them in instead. And I think what Christy has said, so look at the work of my colleague at NYU, for example, Cindy Estlund, she's written about this. And I think Christy's sort of idea that actually a lot of frontline jobs won't be the first ones to become automated is very much borne out. And this goes back to this point about algorithmic management, but we are seeing very much in a lot of these frontline jobs, they are very much their sort of testing grounds for a lot of this new innovation when it comes to people analytics. And so, again, what's changing with automation and with artificial intelligence, very much as a result also now accelerated of COVID is not necessarily workers losing their jobs. It's more managers, I'd be worried about. And then of course, less quickly worrying about what the impact of that changed any is on the quality of work and the way work is actually done. It sounds to be a bit like almost turning workers into robots and I know there's been conversation about how these algorithmic management systems are used already in a measuring the productivity of each employee, their steps they take between one place and another to move a package or a piece of goods. And I guess, in a way, maybe you're saying the good news is workers won't be replaced by robots, maybe the bad news is they will be asked to act a bit more like a robot would and managed like a robot might be. I think I think some of this is that we need to really start to look at how we do some retraining for some of the, for some of the new jobs. I mean, you know, again, I'm probably older than anybody here but I'm, you know, the number one job for semi skilled workers in the United States was phone operators. Well, there's one operator now her name is Siri, and you know so millions of jobs have been lost. Look at all the people working at AT&T and T mobile and Verizon, you know, that were would have been in those jobs and in other jobs so I think you start to what we're doing it at Jefferson is looking at our folks that could be replaced by by the fourth industrial revolution. We're going to call an Institute for emerging health professors what jobs are going to be 10 years from now, where we start to give them certificate programs even before they get potentially displaced by that robot or that drone. So that they're prepared for that and that's become a real frankly recruiting tool for us that we're saying we're ready for now, and you have a job, and we're also ready for the future in case you know that robot wants to come and take your job. Yeah, you know this is you layer on top of the pandemic with with these fourth industrial revolution trends and it is a little hard to wrap your head around what might this look like you mentioned you know we sort of knew the pandemic was coming. And you know I think we published a report at DevEx in 2017 where we asked global health leaders including Dr. Tony Fauci, what what their biggest fears were and the number one was a, you know, flu like pandemic respiratory pandemic is going to sweep the world. So as you say everyone sort of knew this. Similarly, everyone seems to know the climate is changing and you know there are more natural to that we seem to have a sense of what's coming. But yet, are we really going to be prepared for that as we as we come out of this, maybe we can wrap up before we go into questions with the last thought on what you want to see when you think about the world economic form community governments international organizations and businesses and others. What they should be doing differently, you know now that we've learned this lesson about the importance of frontline workers. So we've heard a bit about Stephen what you're doing, you're but what should what should we be thinking and doing coming out of this anyone want to pick that up as we before we move into questions. So I'll start briefly I think I think you know what what we need it might my talk at the World Economic Forum last year was, do we need a Greta Thunberg for health care. You know, that that you know, to me climate change and these things like pandemics and health equities are the two existential crises. And just like climate change it's not just going to be the oil companies that have to change. Everybody around that is going to have to change so I think, you know the whole health disparities piece remember that frontline workers are also people. And if we have a 21 year life expectancy across zip codes in countries like the UK or the United States. And literally that's affecting those frontline workers at a disproportionate manner than it that would be affecting the managers that has nothing to do with their employment. Yep. Anybody else want to jump in on this or what what your call to action would be as we get as we close out the public session of this the public section of this of the session. So, you know, we have this campaign called essential rights for essential workers, and basically we've, you know, come down to five key demands, one is special status during a crisis which could be hazard pay in some special access to childcare or other benefits, PPEs which is obvious, safe, you know, safe working conditions for many of these workers who were completely left behind during this pandemic, a living wage, the right to have a union to organize which this is a highly these are highly unorganized sectors, and we need to advance those changes in labor law that are required and sick peg and you know those are five key elements that all all workers need but especially acutely needed by these frontline workers. I imagine it's possible some of these larger gig economy companies you know if they're tuned in right now listening to you, saying hey we don't want to see a world where there's no gig workers. Maybe we'll agree to some of these things as it is you know we'll offer sick leave. Well, but but it sounds like from your perspective that's not good enough that we need to get the level of the playing field a bit higher in order to ensure we're better prepared for the next pandemic. Yeah, I mean those are two separate questions but as far as gig workers I know some of them would say yeah we'll pay sick pay but we don't want to treat these workers like employees, I think this sort of hybrid model but we'll do all the rest of it but they're not employees really doesn't cut it because at some stage, you know, let's just define them as employees and then and then go from there. So gig workers just giving sick pay does not really doesn't really satisfy what they need to do. But yeah, I think, but overall we want to see wages lifted one strategy for that we've seen in where I live in Switzerland where just recently the Geneva voted to increase their wage to about $25 an hour. It's the highest minimum wage in the world but the workers who are primarily affected by that are the care workers, the grocery store workers, and the cleaners 30,000 workers that I mean most workers who are already earning that it's a high cost of living here, but it was a substantial increase for a very, you know, for the predominantly female workers who are falling into poverty, living in Switzerland and many of you might have seen the lines of people lining up for food. And they thought, Oh my goodness, even in Geneva, you know, people are lining up for food it really came to that group of workers and I think the people living in Geneva, and there's a lot decided here by referendum it was a vote. They were tested on both sides and their slogan was applause is not enough. And I think that was a perfect slogan for the era in which we live and the outcome was also very obviously very good for those workers. Yeah, that's a great slogan you're right. Let's let's go to Jeremiah stuff for a final thought and then we'll close out our public public portion of the session. One thing we've learned here is that we need the strong sense of agency, whether it's the future of work or even how we react to pandemics. It's not something that's happening to us there's no one sort of predetermined way we deal with it. So I think keeping that sense of agency and actually making choices and debating them and then implementing them is key. I think our panelists, and I know that the people who are watching this at home all over the world are probably virtually applauding you. I appreciate very much the work that you've done as part of this session helping to drive the conversation.