Full Transcript for What Happens To Class Politics In A Service Economy with Annie McClanahan

ways in which that phenomenon of wage stagnation is related to the rise of the service economy and to the ways that workers increasingly struggle to reproduce themselves in a service-driven economy and the rise of particularly like employment formations like gig work as a sort of way to compensate for the fact that workers are not earning enough in their full-time jobs. 00:03:56.370 --> 00:03:59.009 So that was partly what got me interested in this. 00:03:59.169 --> 00:04:11.329 I'm also very interested in the those longer histories, the ones that you were evoking, that go back to the 18th and 19th century and to the sort of failure of political economy in that period to take seriously this class of workers. 00:04:11.489 --> 00:04:26.290 I mean, one interesting thing is that, like, you know, we tend to say, I tend to say, like, well, we have to update these, this understanding of service work given that we are in an economy where roughly 80% of the workforce is doing services providing work. 00:04:26.449 --> 00:04:28.850 But actually, that was also true in the 19th century. 00:04:28.930 --> 00:04:43.889 Like there's a moment in Capitol where Marx says, like, oh yeah, by the way, the number of domestic servants in England in this period is more than the number of all workers in textiles, metals, manufacturing, and mining combined, but they still don't really count. 00:04:44.050 --> 00:04:55.329 And so it was also true in the 19th century that you have a massive class of domestic servants in that period performing these kinds of work that have a complex relationship to the question of productivity. 00:04:55.569 --> 00:05:02.689 Uh, but but again, this becomes even more relevant in the present because so much of the of the workforce is doing this kind of work. 00:05:03.649 --> 00:05:08.129 Yeah, I think this is this is what got me thinking about it too. 00:05:08.209 --> 00:05:17.730 Because I at first I was hit, I hit the I was looking at the post Great Recession economy, and I left the country because of the post-Great Recession economy. 00:05:18.050 --> 00:05:25.009 And and I was trying to figure out like, okay, there's all this focus on industrial labor. 00:05:27.089 --> 00:05:35.810 Even if it came back, and in fact, the the idea that it completely left is actually somewhat of a misunderstanding. 00:05:38.610 --> 00:05:42.529 You're not gonna have mass mass industrial employment. 00:05:42.610 --> 00:06:01.649 And in fact, I mean, there was already the whole revision crisis in in the 1920s, was the realization that industrial employment, even in the most intensely industrialized society in Europe and Germany at the time, was not hitting 50% employment rate in the industrial sector. 00:06:01.969 --> 00:06:03.409 And it like caused a crisis. 00:06:03.569 --> 00:06:10.610 Like that's what the revision, that's the initial impetus for the revisionism crisis, not even the political calculation stuff. 00:06:11.089 --> 00:06:15.409 And and I was like, huh. 00:06:16.610 --> 00:06:35.730 Well, it seems like Marx is somewhat inconsistent on this because there are times where he does categorize service workers as workers, particularly one of the examples he gives in theories of surplus value is teachers working for a private school being productive of the surplus capital. 00:06:37.170 --> 00:07:05.810 But he seems to just not want to deal with it because the entire wage form exploitation thing is harder to apply to service workers because the fixed and variable capital problems to get you know, I not to bore the crap out of my audience, but the fixed and variable capital problems are different because there's only so much productivity you can possibly get in a service, even with technological help. 00:07:05.969 --> 00:07:08.370 So one person can only cut one person's hair at a time. 00:07:08.769 --> 00:07:12.610 They might get faster at it, but they can't do 20. 00:07:14.370 --> 00:07:31.089 Now, uh your book had me thinking about part of the other part of the problem is not just this productivity issue, but also that like the wage form is treated as the baseline of understanding both exploitation and who counts as a worker. 00:07:31.569 --> 00:07:52.129 And service workers have always had a stranger relationship to the wage form, as they are they do depend on it, it is usually roughly a major component of their income, but it has never been all the income, and sometimes it's not even most of their income. 00:07:52.370 --> 00:08:05.969 And so your book really focuses on all the stuff that's like sub wage, which is a piece rate platform task, which I also find interesting because some more research in the 19th century I realized that that was even true for industrial workers back then. 00:08:06.449 --> 00:08:08.290 Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, yeah. 00:08:08.370 --> 00:08:13.569 It's a hourly wage is a is an entirely 20th century phenomenon, and we completely forget that. 00:08:14.689 --> 00:08:15.089 Right. 00:08:15.329 --> 00:08:24.129 And then tips and then algorithmic gig work, which is even weirder because that doesn't really have a prior parallel. 00:08:24.930 --> 00:08:35.570 If the standard wage really isn't a good organizing principle for the vast majority of the working class, how do we understand like who counts and what is class consciousness now? 00:08:36.370 --> 00:08:37.649 Yeah, yeah, exactly. 00:08:37.810 --> 00:08:39.090 So I think that's a great question. 00:08:39.250 --> 00:08:58.370 So, I mean, I think like, you know, one thing that my book is sort of tried to do is it's trying to say, on the one hand, look, I mean, exactly as you said, it makes sense that particularly 19th century political economy cannot quite accommodate this particular kind of work into its understanding of what capitalist exploitation looks like because it is so different from industrial work. 00:08:58.450 --> 00:09:04.850 It's not centralized, it can't be subject to the same forms of sort of scientific

management and rationalization. 00:09:04.930 --> 00:09:07.970 To some extent it can, but not in the same way industrial labor can. 00:09:08.129 --> 00:09:16.529 It's not particularly mechanized, it tends to be informal, its output tends to be highly variable, it tends to be work that you have to do in person. 00:09:16.690 --> 00:09:18.690 It's difficult to outsource it, right? 00:09:19.009 --> 00:09:26.690 It you can't automate it in anything like the way that you know a technology like the assembly line can can increase the productivity of industrial labor. 00:09:26.850 --> 00:09:28.930 So, in all these ways, it's very different, right? 00:09:29.170 --> 00:09:34.850 As the 20th century progresses, it becomes different in another way, which is that it's largely unregulated or underregulated. 00:09:34.930 --> 00:09:39.410 So it's not subject to minimum hours, uh maximum hours and minimum wage regulations. 00:09:39.970 --> 00:09:45.970 So one conclusion you could draw from that is like, well, we can't really understand service work as a form of capitalist labor. 00:09:46.050 --> 00:09:59.570 And that is the conclusion of a lot of thinkers from the 18th century to the mid-20th at least, and even to some extent today, which is that it has this sort of fundamentally like anachronistic or or or non-modern or non-capitalist quality. 00:09:59.650 --> 00:10:03.090 And so you'll often hear people describe it as like a servant economy, right? 00:10:03.250 --> 00:10:09.570 So even if we're talking about 21st century labor, we're still using this sort of 18th century paradigm to understand it. 00:10:09.890 --> 00:10:11.170 That's one solution. 00:10:11.330 --> 00:10:23.970 The other solution is to say, well, maybe we actually need to update our understanding of capitalist labor processes in order to accommodate this kind of work, which, as you said, right, has always been a key to the to the mode of accumulation, right? 00:10:24.050 --> 00:10:29.490 Whether we imagine it's directly productive of value or not, it's definitely been around and it's been significant. 00:10:29.650 --> 00:10:34.050 And these workers have often been a kind of radical faction in labor organizing. 00:10:34.370 --> 00:10:47.490 And the reason that I think the the the reason that I think that that conclusion is important is because you can also see it from the other side, which is that when we have theorized service work, we have largely not paid attention to its labor process. 00:10:47.650 --> 00:11:00.530 And so we haven't allowed it to sort of like reformulate or transform these categories that we've derived mostly from industrial labor, because instead we've seen it as emotional work, we've seen it as affective labor, we've seen it as immaterial labor. 00:11:00.690 --> 00:11:03.090 And those are useful theories to some extent. 00:11:03.250 --> 00:11:05.810 I think they're limited, but they're useful in a lot of ways. 00:11:05.970 --> 00:11:21.330 But they're not going to tell us anything about how exploitation works in this sector, how direct domination works, the extent to which some amount of de-skilling and rationalization scientific management does happen, especially in the 21st century with the rise of platform labor, et cetera, right? 00:11:21.570 --> 00:11:33.650 And it also doesn't allow us to see the ways in which the differences between this kind of work and industrial work have often been attached to race and gender and citizenship status and perceived ability, right? 00:11:33.970 --> 00:11:55.970 And so I think like to me, it's like most valuable to use the category to like completely rethink the assumptions that we have, both about what working class leverage looks like and what working class exploitation looks like, and what capitalist labor sort of as a broad category looks like, and what the sort of key features of that labor are. 00:12:15.170 --> 00:12:21.970 But because they still have a quasi-industrial space, sort of but there's large concentrations of workers in a singular area. 00:12:22.530 --> 00:12:34.050 But and I think we saw this in the in the second half of the 18s when there was a movement to start unionizing service work, which has been historically pathetically unionized, like I think like 2% or something like that. 00:12:36.050 --> 00:12:50.210 But lack of dependence on the wage fund and lack of a centralized workplace seems to have been an organizing block, at least using the models of early 20th century shop unions. 00:12:51.250 --> 00:13:00.770 How much did this affect your thinking about this and what like maybe we should start thinking about and approaching organizing service workers and whatnot? 00:13:01.090 --> 00:13:02.129 Yeah, absolutely. 00:13:02.290 --> 00:13:04.050 So I think there's like a couple things to say. 00:13:04.210 --> 00:13:17.730 One is that if you look at the history of service work and service worker unions, there's actually a lot of really inspiring examples, you know, from say roughly the mid-20th century of service workers combating exactly those conditions, right? 00:13:17.890 --> 00:13:32.129 Small employers, great degree of decentralization, et cetera, by developing forms of union strategy and union organization that look different than the industrial unions that are the dominant force of labor politics in that period, right? 00:13:32.290 --> 00:13:48.530 So just to give two examples, the domestic workers union, the DWU, in the beginning in the 30s and 40s and really up through the mid-20th century, becomes this really radical site of like what we might today call like relational unionism or bargaining for the common good unionism. 00:13:48.690 --> 00:13:57.970 And that's dealing with an incredibly decentralized labor force, which is like private domestic servants doing often day labor in in homes like across New York City. 00:13:58.210 --> 00:14:08.290 Similarly, the amazing feminist labor historian Dorothy Cobble has written about waitresses unions

throughout the 20th century and the way that they develop what she calls occupational unionism, right? 00:14:08.450 --> 00:14:16.930 Where like you're you're saying, for instance, like protecting job security even when a worker moves from one employer to another in the same occupational sector, right? 00:14:17.090 --> 00:14:27.330 So waitresses that might sort of move jobs but still remain in the occupation, trying to fight for some degree of job security and wage security in that context. 00:14:27.570 --> 00:14:37.490 And I mean, Koble has pointed out, for instance, more recently that like these that model of occupational unionism could be very easily applied to contemporary gig worker organizing. 00:14:37.730 --> 00:14:53.010 So I think it's less about like saying, okay, these are these are groups of workers that are impossible to organize, as has sometimes been said, but more saying like they're groups of workers whose working conditions require new forms of organizing and new ways of understanding it. 00:14:53.170 --> 00:15:05.570 And if you think about like where most of the sort of most powerful union campaigns in the last couple of decades have been, they have been largely in service worker unions, mostly in public sector service workers, right? 00:15:05.810 --> 00:15:23.650 So teachers, nurses, et cetera, in sort of like semi-professionalized portions of the service working class, like workers organized again via AFT or the nurses unions or AFSME, so again, public sector workers. 00:15:23.970 --> 00:15:29.170 But also in some cases, like lower wage service workers, like the workers organized by Unite here. 00:15:29.490 --> 00:15:35.730 So to some extent, like the strongest union campaigns of the last couple decades have been in that sector. 00:15:35.970 --> 00:15:48.930 And often those campaigns have suggested that far from having less leverage than manufacturing workers or industrial workers, service workers potentially have more leverage when they can organize regionally, right? 00:15:49.170 --> 00:15:55.890 So for instance, like a labor stoppage among teachers has like an immense and immediate impact on the regional economy, right? 00:15:55.970 --> 00:15:57.250 Because parents can't work. 00:15:57.490 --> 00:16:18.050 And so labor stoppages by teachers, labor stoppages by childcare providers, by healthcare providers, they can have immense ripple effects on the community in ways that sort of suggests that the that the common claim made by sort of proponents of like reindustrialization, right, would suggest that, like, oh, service workers can't possibly achieve this kind of leverage. 00:16:18.129 --> 00:16:19.010 But that's not actually true. 00:16:19.090 --> 00:16:22.129 You just have to think about leverage in slightly different ways. 00:16:23.410 --> 00:16:29.490 So I I am I'm greatly interested in this question because I've been thinking about that too. 00:16:29.570 --> 00:16:38.210 It's just like I think of course we can organize these these different areas, but we have to completely change the model of organization. 00:16:38.850 --> 00:16:48.930 One thing that comes up to me though is that I think around I think it was in the mid-aughts, I started seeing this sector kind of subdivided. 00:16:49.010 --> 00:16:53.090 I mean, now it's subdivided in some really strange ways because there's all these PMC debates. 00:16:53.170 --> 00:16:54.450 I'm gonna bracket that out for now. 00:16:54.530 --> 00:16:55.810 I don't want to get into that. 00:16:56.129 --> 00:17:02.290 But you started hearing about emotional labor, invisible labor, and then the precariat. 00:17:03.810 --> 00:17:09.250 Do you think any of these categories are really helpful for understanding this broad phenomenon? 00:17:09.410 --> 00:17:10.769 Are they limitedly helpful? 00:17:10.849 --> 00:17:20.049 And if so, how do you think they've limited understanding of studying and trying to aid in organizing these sectors of the economy? 00:17:20.690 --> 00:17:22.210 Yeah, that's a great question. 00:17:22.450 --> 00:17:31.730 So, I mean, I think I think like the proliferation of categories to understand this, these phenomena to the extent that they're new is really can be really useful. 00:17:31.809 --> 00:17:36.769 I think like we need categories to sort of tease out these ideas. 00:17:37.009 --> 00:17:53.569 Ultimately, I think I think the emotional labor or effective labor stuff is good insofar as it allows us to think about, for instance, like what does it mean to perform a kind of work where the commodity is intangible or can't be resold, right? 00:17:53.649 --> 00:17:59.809 Like to use your haircut example, like, you know, if somebody gives me a haircut, I can't go out and resell that haircut on the market, right? 00:17:59.889 --> 00:18:05.569 Like it's not detachable from either the body of the of the customer or the body of the service worker themselves, right? 00:18:05.809 --> 00:18:10.929 So I think the emotional labor stuff is useful for getting at what is complex about that kind of work. 00:18:11.009 --> 00:18:17.250 And it's also useful for getting at the relationship between service work and feminization, right? 00:18:17.329 --> 00:18:26.689 Why is it that these kinds of work where the worker is often being called upon to either perform or produce effective states often is work that gets ascribed to women. 00:18:26.849 --> 00:18:32.689 Like there's obviously a long history of that that the Marxist feminist tradition helps us think through really capaciously. 00:18:32.929 --> 00:18:43.169 Where I think that category kind of runs aground, though, is as I said, A, it tends to focus mostly on like what workers are doing rather than the conditions under which they're doing it. 00:18:43.329 --> 00:18:51.569 And then it loses this opportunity for us to think about service work using these categories that we all have always used to understand industrial work, right? 00:18:51.649 --> 00:18:55.889 So wages,

management, mechanization, regulation, organization. 00:18:56.049 --> 00:19:03.089 All of those get sort of like erased when we look at service work solely through this paradigm of like effective or emotional labor. 00:19:03.329 --> 00:19:09.490 And the other, the other thing that happens, and this is particularly something that happens in Arlie Hockstild's work. 00:19:09.569 --> 00:19:22.210 And of course, she's, you know, it's it's it's from her that we derive so much of this theory, even today, even you know, 30 years after the publication of her book, it still has so much, takes up so much space in our understanding of these categories. 00:19:22.369 --> 00:19:27.730 Here I mean her book, The Managed Heart, which is about the labor of Delta flight attendants. 00:19:28.129 --> 00:19:39.089 But Hoxchild basically says like service workers are subject to a specific and a very intensive kind of delusion that they believe the emotions that they're called upon to perform. 00:19:39.409 --> 00:19:52.450 And to me, that really like misses the mark when it comes to again, seeing service workers as like very aware and canny about their own class position, very aware and canny about their own exploitation. 00:19:52.609 --> 00:19:55.569 And again, often a radical faction in labor movements. 00:19:55.730 --> 00:19:58.049 Like even the flight attendants, right? 00:19:58.129 --> 00:20:03.569 Like she describes them as if they're subject to this like sort of particularly pernicious form of false consciousness. 00:20:03.649 --> 00:20:12.609 But if you look at the like labor militancy and flight attendant unions over the last, you know, four decades, like that's totally not borne out by the truth. 00:20:12.689 --> 00:20:26.210 And it's not, and the and the and the emphasis on effective performance doesn't allow us to understand the ways in which like flight attendants have fought for things like banning tobacco on airplanes because it was so devastating to their health. 00:20:26.369 --> 00:20:31.569 They've fought for things like payment for the time that passengers take to board the plane. 00:20:31.649 --> 00:20:38.210 So raising all these questions about like time and the wage form in service work, about efficiency in service work, right? 00:20:38.369 --> 00:20:45.970 Again, things that we will not understand if we solely are looking at the fact that they smile when they bring you a Coke, right? 00:20:46.129 --> 00:20:49.970 And I think that that's one of the limits of that particular category. 00:20:53.329 --> 00:20:54.689 What about the precariat? 00:20:54.769 --> 00:20:57.409 Because that was a big one about 15 years ago. 00:20:57.970 --> 00:20:59.169 Yeah, it's interesting. 00:20:59.329 --> 00:21:01.089 I mean, I'm not sure why. 00:21:01.250 --> 00:21:03.409 I mean, it's I think it's a useful category. 00:21:03.490 --> 00:21:10.609 I mean, I I like that it that it sort of reminds us of the generative quality of the term proletariat, right? 00:21:10.689 -->

00:21:29.329 Which like has increasingly, I think, become a term that people are using in lieu of the phrase working class, because working class does, I think for many folks, like sort of suggest this kind of like 19th century metonymy whereby like the white, mostly white, mostly male industrial worker sort of stands in for the class as a whole. 00:21:29.409 --> 00:21:36.529 And I think people have felt that proletariat was more capacious than that, and that thus precariat sort of like speaks back to that tradition. 00:21:36.689 --> 00:21:46.210 It's very useful as a way of understanding insecurity and understanding insecurity across a wide range of both labor sectors and labor processes. 00:21:46.689 --> 00:21:57.409 And it's useful for understanding the ways in which like independent contractor status as a legal category is increasingly important to the way that the service economy functions. 00:21:57.569 --> 00:22:04.529 That is not a category that is new to the 21st century in the way that like some of these accounts sometimes seem to imply. 00:22:04.609 --> 00:22:12.929 It's a it's an old category with an old legal history, a legal history that in fact dates back to the management of domestic servants in the 18th and 19th centuries. 00:22:13.250 --> 00:22:19.169 So I think it, but I do think it's useful for sort of like reminding us of the importance of that, of that concept. 00:22:19.329 --> 00:22:30.689 But it does seem to me as if people are using that term, that specific term slightly less now, and using instead a term like gig worker, which is maybe a little bit more specific than precar than precariating. 00:22:31.009 --> 00:22:31.329 Yeah. 00:22:31.649 --> 00:22:35.889 My only objection to precariet historically was like, okay, but it's not new though. 00:22:35.970 --> 00:22:47.329 It's basically the primary form of proletarian employment for like most of the 19th century, most of the 18th century, most of the developing worlds. 00:22:47.649 --> 00:22:48.529 In the 20th century. 00:22:48.609 --> 00:22:58.769 I mean, like the period of formal industrial hourly employment is remarkably small, actually, in the history of a total exception. 00:22:58.849 --> 00:22:59.809 It's a total exception. 00:22:59.889 --> 00:23:17.250 And it's wild the way in which, like, so much, I mean, again, even now, you know, five decades into deindustrialization, so many theories take the regulated formal hourly wage paid to manufacturing workers on the basis of productivity, which can be enhanced by machines as the norm. 00:23:17.409 --> 00:23:37.569 And it's really important that we understand why it's not the norm because whereas in the US, you have this, like, and and and in Europe and in much of the rest of the overdeveloped world, you have this like very clear sort of tripartite trajectory where you go from, you know, informal, you know, sort of maybe proto-industrial agricultural labor to industrial labor to a service economy. 00:23:37.730 --> 00:23:48.689 And because you have that middle phase of industrialization, you develop this whole infrastructure of like regulated wages and labor reforms that come solely as a result of industrial labor. 00:23:48.849 --> 00:24:03.490 But in underdeveloped economies where they're often skipping that industrialized phase and basically moving directly from agriculture to services, they have not developed anything like a regulatory infrastructure because that comes only with a certain kind of industrial hegemony, right? 00:24:03.649 --> 00:24:19.409 And so if we don't understand that, the sort of exceptional status of that kind of work and that kind of relationship between the state and capital, then we're not going to understand at all what's happening outside of the overdeveloped world, particularly in the last, you know, three, four, five decades. 00:24:21.970 --> 00:24:26.129 This gets me to a point that ties back to your first book. 00:24:26.210 --> 00:24:45.009 But you you talked about the way that particularly after neoliberalization in the in the 70s and 80s, capital actually had to force wages down relative to cost so much that you had a stealth social reproduction problem. 00:24:45.250 --> 00:25:01.089 Like and so you had debt spending expand to the point that you almost can't imagine a modern functional commercial economy without massive levels of debt. 00:25:01.649 --> 00:25:06.769 But you know, I've also pointed out that's actually relative, that's actually really new. 00:25:06.929 --> 00:25:10.849 That's that's really a post-60s phenomenon. 00:25:14.369 --> 00:25:16.689 How do you think these things relate relate? 00:25:16.769 --> 00:25:46.689 And I want to give a couple of examples so we don't just focus on like the algorithmic gig work, but one of the things I noticed about the time I left the United States in 2009, before I came back in 2017, was that a lot of jobs even before this automated algorithmic gig work phenomenon happened that were clearly would have been under hourly uh labor before. 00:25:46.929 --> 00:26:07.329 So a lot of doctor's offices in my small town of Macon, Georgia, it was not that small, but started moving to turning all of their aids from hourly employees to contractors to get out of basically paying them benefits. 00:26:08.689 --> 00:26:28.289 And the other thing that I started seeing, and this really expanded and was exacerbated when I came back to the United States, is between when I when I left and when I came back, not only did tipping percentages need to increase to make up for the fact that minimum wage hasn't gone up for for service workers since I don't know the 90s, maybe even earlier. 00:26:28.369 --> 00:26:29.409 Yeah, it's been a long time. 00:26:30.849 --> 00:26:44.369 When it did go up a little bit in 2009, uh servers were exempted and they were still at the half rate of the 1990s rate. 00:26:46.210 --> 00:26:56.369 But what I started seeing when I came back to the States was tipping expanded to

other services that you didn't historically associate it with. 00:26:56.450 --> 00:27:03.569 So you yeah, you associate it with like tattoo artists and and aestheticians and stuff like that. 00:27:03.730 --> 00:27:17.009 But like you know, I would go to a concert and buy a record, and the person telling me the record would be so low compensated that they would ask for a quick tip. 00:27:23.250 --> 00:27:24.849 I'd never seen that before. 00:27:25.569 --> 00:27:54.769 So so w how has the the contraction of debt or the or the the inability to expand debt otherwise been expanding any, but it's actually you know how has that affected these other forms of compensation as a way of of of trying to offset the the the limits of the wage fund? 00:27:54.849 --> 00:28:09.329 I mean, I guess the other thing that I just want to point out is a historical number, we'd already have the wage fund shrink dramatically in the 60s and 70s, which is why you had the end of the household wage, as limited and patriarchal as it was, turn into the two-income household. 00:28:09.809 --> 00:28:22.129 But now the you socially reproducing yourself on the median income as an individual, anyway, and most of the US is pretty difficult. 00:28:22.529 --> 00:28:23.169 Yeah. 00:28:23.490 --> 00:28:24.849 So how has that affected things? 00:28:24.929 --> 00:28:26.849 And how has the change in debt affected that? 00:28:27.809 --> 00:28:46.529 Yeah, so I mean, one of the like another sort of story that I sometimes tell about the starting why I got interested in this book is because in writing this book is because a number of years ago I had this very weird fellowship where they basically pay you or fund you to take extensive coursework in a in a completely other discipline. 00:28:46.689 --> 00:28:55.409 And so I had this fellowship where I took a year and a half of coursework in microeconomics because I was at the time interested in the sort of intellectual history of microeconomics. 00:28:55.649 --> 00:29:07.649 And I was in a class on corporate welfare, and we were doing like basically like pretty basic calculations around wages and like reservation wages and efficiency wages. 00:29:07.970 --> 00:29:16.609 And the professor kept noting that from a from the perspective of microeconomics, the hourly, the guaranteed hourly wage is like completely irrational. 00:29:17.089 --> 00:29:30.049 Like economists basically, like mainstream economists, orthodox economists, think that it's unbelievably stupid that you would guarantee someone a certain amount of money regardless of the their output or their their sort of success at the job, right? 00:29:30.129 --> 00:29:34.609 They vastly prefer performance-based pay or payment by results. 00:29:34.849 --> 00:29:44.769 And that got me curious again, because I think that so many of us, you know, particularly who haven't worked in the service sector, but sometimes even people who have, like they just take the hourly wage as this kind of given. 00:29:44.929 --> 00:29:57.809 But if you go back to Marx, and this sort of comes back to something that you mentioned before about peace rate, if you go back to Marx, Marx actually says, like, okay, yeah, peace rate is like the method of wage payment that is like most common in capitalism. 00:29:57.970 --> 00:30:01.649 It was certainly the most common form of wage payment in the 19th century. 00:30:01.809 --> 00:30:08.369 And it's common in virtually any sector where machines themselves can't be set to guarantee the output. 00:30:08.529 --> 00:30:12.849 So the reason that we get the hourly wage in the 20th century is basically because we also get the assembly line. 00:30:13.009 --> 00:30:24.210 And with the assembly line, you can say, like, okay, the effort that it takes to produce 20 widgets in a day doesn't matter because the assembly line is just going to go at the speed that produces 20 widgets and you just have to keep up. 00:30:24.369 --> 00:30:30.210 So instead of having some people who are producing 15 and some people who are producing 25, everybody is producing 20. 00:30:30.289 --> 00:30:32.210 So you can pay everybody the same wage. 00:30:32.450 --> 00:30:36.129 Obviously, as we've already talked about, like that doesn't really work in service work, right? 00:30:36.210 --> 00:30:48.849 So the reason that tips and and piece rate and various forms of payment by results tend to dominate in service work is because you're you don't have the same kind of like time discipline, you don't have the same sort of regularity of output. 00:30:49.089 --> 00:31:02.450 One of the debates about tipping in when they're trying to decide whether or not to regulate it in the 1960s and subject it to the sort of regular hourly wage is that like, you know, if you're waiting tables, like a as the term suggests, a lot of your time is spent waiting. 00:31:02.609 --> 00:31:08.529 You're not actually working, you're waiting for people to finish, you're waiting to bring the food, you're waiting to clear the plates, et cetera, right? 00:31:08.689 --> 00:31:09.809 Same thing is true of gig work. 00:31:09.970 --> 00:31:13.970 Gig workers also spend a lot of time waiting, drivers spend a lot of time waiting. 00:31:14.210 --> 00:31:19.569 Um, so in these sectors, these other non-hourly forms of payment, like tips, come to dominate. 00:31:19.730 --> 00:31:29.169 But tips actually do a second thing in addition to having this capacity to sort of like control output and become like basically a form of self-management, right? 00:31:29.250 --> 00:31:35.490 Like payment by results means you don't have to have a manager because you're self-managing because you're trying to earn a certain amount, right? 00:31:35.649 --> 00:31:42.529 So, but tips do a third thing in addition to those other two things, which is that they offload the labor cost onto the customer. 00:31:42.769 --> 00:31:59.329 And so, exactly as you said, like as sort of wage pressures in the service sector get more

intense in the 21st century, and as you have more and more problems with people quitting, particularly like in the sort of post-COVID period, right? 00:32:00.210 --> 00:32:08.769 Firms are required to find ways to ensure that they're that their workers are making enough money without the firm itself having to pay for the for that, right? 00:32:08.929 --> 00:32:16.849 And so again, the wage burden gets offloaded to customers who often, paradoxically, are themselves service workers in other places, right? 00:32:16.929 --> 00:32:33.490 And so you basically have a situation where service workers are paying a significant portion of the wage to other service workers, which means that everybody's reproductive costs go up because the cost of getting a coffee or getting a beer or getting a haircut or buying a meal goes up to the worker, right? 00:32:33.889 --> 00:32:41.089 And the the uh firm is depending ever more on that to pay the wages of the workers for the firm. 00:32:41.329 --> 00:32:49.409 And so I think like there's something potentially like very interesting there where you have these sort of relations of like what E.P. 00:32:49.569 --> 00:32:51.809 Thompson would call like moral economy, right? 00:32:51.970 --> 00:32:57.329 Economists are fascinated, also fascinated by tipping because they think it's like fundamentally irrational, right? 00:32:57.409 --> 00:32:58.450 Like, why do we tip? 00:32:58.529 --> 00:33:05.569 Like, why do I feel obliged if I'm not being compelled to pay a tip of 15 or 20 or 25%? 00:33:06.049 --> 00:33:06.769 Why do I do it? 00:33:06.929 --> 00:33:07.089 Right. 00:33:07.169 --> 00:33:14.450 Economists find that like really bizarre because it seems to run against all of their theories of like human behavior and human rationality. 00:33:14.689 --> 00:33:21.889 So, but to me, what it suggests is that we have this sense of like some kind of moral obligation or sort of sense of solidarity with others. 00:33:22.049 --> 00:33:26.769 Everybody knows that the best tippers are people who have worked or are working in tip jobs themselves. 00:33:26.929 --> 00:33:39.889 So there's something really politically interesting happening there, even though it's also this form of like super exploitation and and and uh exactly as you said, a way to shift a portion of the wage fund back onto consumers. 00:33:40.450 --> 00:33:40.849 Right. 00:33:41.089 --> 00:33:56.849 So basically to to think about this, uh because I I one of the things I will say when I I I moved around the the world for 10 years and I was in Mexico, which also has a heavy tipping economy for like pretty much everything. 00:33:57.169 --> 00:34:02.769 And one of the things you'd hear economists complain about first is like, oh, it's a sign of low social trust and corruption. 00:34:02.849 --> 00:34:08.690 And I'm like, well, that's interesting because if it's totally a sign of low social trust and corruption, why would the average person do it? 00:34:09.490 --> 00:34:11.650 Which is not me valorizing tipping. 00:34:12.050 --> 00:34:35.010 Like, I would love for these for everyone to get paid a suitable wage, but it does seem very hard to reproduce without massive amounts of uh of service inflation, which is gonna happen anyway, but it's gonna be worse if you don't offset this with tips if you're still trying to keep profit rates relatively high. 00:34:37.250 --> 00:34:51.490 So I was thinking about this, and I've been thinking about your kind of like three let's call them archetypes and models of this because they're not really separate classes, they're not even entirely distinct sectors in all cases. 00:34:51.730 --> 00:35:08.530 But you kind of lay out the tip service worker, old very long-standing thing, the clerical micro worker, and like piecemeal or contract worker or independent contractors, all kinds of things you might call them. 00:35:09.330 --> 00:35:33.170 But you know, for examples of who they might be, that's both like white-collar temp workers, but also like adjunct professors who you know are yeah, I occasionally get mad at tenure because I'm like tenure's only possible in this current system without getting rid of all this admin because of massive armies of people who are paid sub-minimum wage. 00:35:34.130 --> 00:35:54.289 But anyway, and then gig workers, which uh the reason why I brought up the contractization in other fields though is I don't think we think of like things that used to be hourly service work being transitioned to gig work because of an independent contractor status, but like structurally it's the same thing. 00:35:55.010 --> 00:35:55.650 Yeah. 00:35:57.250 --> 00:36:05.410 So uh one thing you'll point out though is structurally, these workers do face different forms of management depending on what role they're in at any given time. 00:36:05.490 --> 00:36:23.570 And like we said, some people uh are doing all of these actually, and and some people have roles that go back and forth between all of these, but they all actually in some ways require uh intensive uh management, but it's quite different. 00:36:23.650 --> 00:36:30.769 So, like emotional labor is managed quite different from algorithmic policing of uh of work. 00:36:32.690 --> 00:36:44.450 How do you think this difference in management changes the material experience of the work and what does that do to like workers' sense of their relation to other workers? 00:36:44.610 --> 00:36:47.650 Because the assumption seems to be that it totally breaks down solidarity. 00:36:47.809 --> 00:36:51.570 I'm not sure that's true, but I do think it has to look different. 00:36:51.890 --> 00:36:52.850 Yeah, totally. 00:36:53.090 --> 00:36:59.650 Yeah, and I mean you can see you can see a lot of this in the sort of history of like where independent contractor status comes from. 00:36:59.809 --> 00:37:05.970 Like the word independent is meant to connote workers who are not subject to the immediate scrutiny of management, right? 00:37:06.050

--> 00:37:07.090 To the direct control. 00:37:07.250 --> 00:37:24.370 And so if you look at the history of how we determine who's an independent contractor and who's an employee, that mostly has to do with like this concept that's developed in the 19th century called the control test, which again has to do with whether or not a boss is telling you what to do, when to do it, how to do it, et cetera, right? 00:37:24.610 --> 00:37:28.530 Versus workers who are perceived to have some more autonomy, right? 00:37:28.769 --> 00:37:33.490 And this persists well up into the 21st century with the rise of the gig economy. 00:37:33.570 --> 00:37:35.570 Those same conditions still apply. 00:37:35.730 --> 00:37:51.250 And when there are often worker-led movements to sort of change those definitions to keep up with what a 21st century economy looks like, the companies themselves fight them and try to keep this very old sort of 18th century version because that is serves their interests best, right? 00:37:52.210 --> 00:38:00.930 And then this raises all of these interesting questions, like for workers themselves, because, and it's something that I'm trying to think through in the gig work chapter. 00:38:01.010 --> 00:38:15.250 And I don't know that I ultimately have like a total answer to it, but how do we say, on the one hand, that this idea of independence and autonomy and like being your own boss is like a fiction. 00:38:15.330 --> 00:38:23.170 It's a lie that's cooked up by the companies in order to justify the low wages and incredibly vulnerable status of these workers, right? 00:38:23.330 --> 00:38:25.490 It serves their interests entirely. 00:38:25.650 --> 00:38:37.970 And yet, on the other hand, does in fact reflect a real desire among workers themselves to be autonomous, to not have a boss, to have some degree of control, to have some degree of flexibility over their schedule, right? 00:38:38.130 --> 00:38:44.690 Like things that many people want in their work that are real and real desires and real demands. 00:38:44.769 --> 00:38:51.410 And so partly what I'm trying to think through in that chapter is just like what would it mean to sort of hold both of these things in our head at once, right? 00:38:51.570 --> 00:39:10.130 Which is the fact that this status, this sort of informalized status, is immensely exploitative on the one hand, and the fact that it is understandable that it has been a little bit hard for worker organizations to persuade workers to give up the freedom that they understand to come with that category. 00:39:10.370 --> 00:39:18.210 And so I'm interested in thinking about how workers' organizations and and unions among gig workers have sort of fought through this dilemma. 00:39:19.809 --> 00:39:20.450 Yeah. 00:39:22.370 --> 00:40:05.650 That is interesting to me because I do think you you hit on uh to use a terrible Marxist word, dialectic contradiction, but I'll use a normal word, a paradox, of where the position a lot of these gig work uh service area you know workers have, in that you have to some degree the feeling of independence, but you also are geographically isolated from other workers in ways that I do think makes the easy traditional union model very hard to enact. 00:40:05.730 --> 00:40:28.930 You you have to you have to change it because even though you had Taylorist bentham prison-like panopticon conditions in the factory, which I think people forget, but you really did, um people were still able to organize historically because of their proximity to one another, even if they were doing it super on the DL, particularly in the 19th and early 20th century. 00:40:29.250 --> 00:40:35.010 Um I am interested though in the in in this freedom that you can have doing gig work. 00:40:35.330 --> 00:40:42.130 I know a lot of people who do like it for that reason, because you can set your own hours, you're not gonna get called in at a weird time. 00:40:42.450 --> 00:40:42.850 Kinda. 00:40:43.250 --> 00:41:16.690 However, you also talk about this the increasing pressures of algorithmic monitoring and algorithmic assignments, which actually make a lot of that independence really questionable, because you can get deprioritized in the algorithm and not get work, and people start to learn that, and then they they they start being disciplined by the algorithm in a way that may feel like self-discipline, but isn't how much do you think that's changing the perception of gig work amongst gig workers themselves? 00:41:17.250 --> 00:41:19.809 Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's that's exactly right. 00:41:19.970 --> 00:41:44.769 And I mean, you know, one of the histories that I tell in the book is about the way that those techniques get first are first developed in the management of long-haul trucking, which is like if you look at the history of workplace surveillance, although it's exactly right that we have this sort of like panopticon like level of surveillance in factories, most workplace surveillance begins actually in trains, in buses, in and in in trucks, right? 00:41:45.010 --> 00:41:53.890 Again, precisely because you don't have a manager sitting there in the cab of the truck or the or the locomotive of the train, like watching everything that the that the conductor or the driver is doing, right? 00:41:54.050 --> 00:41:59.890 So to some extent, this like gives us a different sort of story of workplace or history of workplace surveillance. 00:42:00.050 --> 00:42:17.650 So it's in long haul trucking that we have on the one hand the development of these really intense forms of like surveillance and technological management through like, you know, everything from speed gener speed generators to cameras and things that like monitor your pupils to make sure you're still awake, things like that, right? 00:42:17.809 --> 00:42:32.050 Well, at the same time, long-haul trucking is also a profession that in the American imaginary in particular has always been associated with like freedom

and independence and this sort of like almost like a kind of non-capitalist non-wage labor relationship, right? 00:42:32.289 --> 00:43:03.330 And I think we see something really similar in contemporary gig work, but I think that again, like I think gig workers themselves, even though they may prefer this form of labor for the fact that it lets them like build their own schedule, I think that they're becoming increasingly aware of the ways in which they're like intensely controlled by the by the algorithm and by the app, in part because, and I talk to, you know, when I when I do, you know, ride share, which I try not to do very much, but I do sometimes, I always ask them about this. 00:43:03.490 --> 00:43:11.330 Like they're very aware that they have to, you have to really know how the algorithm works and how the app works in order to make sure that you can make as much money as possible. 00:43:11.410 --> 00:43:20.289 Like if you're not understanding at least some piece of that, what gets black boxed from you, how it works, like what's the best, what kind of rides are the best rides to pick up, right? 00:43:20.450 --> 00:43:22.130 Like where to wait, things like that. 00:43:22.289 --> 00:43:25.809 If you're not doing that all the time, you're gonna get completely screwed by the app. 00:43:25.970 --> 00:43:33.970 I mean, you're gonna get screwed anyway, but you're gonna get even more screwed if you're not aware of how the algorithm is basically like managing you and managing your choices. 00:43:34.210 --> 00:43:37.010 So I think gig workers are becoming more and more aware of that. 00:43:37.170 --> 00:43:53.010 And I think the other thing to say is that, like, for many gig workers, and I think this is increasingly true, the reason that they're sort of choosing gig work isn't again, not out of free choice, but because they are for one reason or another barred from other forms of formal employment, right? 00:43:53.170 --> 00:44:04.370 So often that has to do with people who are formerly incarcerated or have some kind of prison record, or people who are recent immigrants or and and maybe don't have citizenship status or don't have work permits. 00:44:04.530 --> 00:44:18.769 And you can see, particularly in in big cities like New York, the ways in which this sector is really taking advantage of both of those groups of people and essentially building this entire labor market around the presumption that you have people who have literally no other option. 00:44:19.970 --> 00:44:30.530 That's an important thing about undocumented and documented immigrants, as well as the in the punitive way in which we handle incarceration. 00:44:30.610 --> 00:44:32.050 I mean, for any reason. 00:44:32.289 --> 00:44:39.809 I mean, I know plenty of people who can't get formal employment outside of three sectors. 00:44:39.970 --> 00:44:45.570 One a sector which is very bad for you if you have a substance problem, which a lot of incarcerated people do. 00:44:45.650 --> 00:44:47.330 That's why they got incarcerated in the first place. 00:44:49.010 --> 00:44:53.650 But the sectors are gig work, meat packing. 00:44:54.130 --> 00:45:02.130 And there's a reason why meat packing, because the the work conditions in meat packing are far are still pretty horrible, even for industrial employment. 00:45:03.090 --> 00:45:14.289 And piecemeal work and things like show rigging, day labor, stuff like that, which is also dangerous and also full of substances. 00:45:14.610 --> 00:45:21.970 So you know, often often if you're like trying to keep clean and straight, straight narrow, your best option is is gig work. 00:45:24.769 --> 00:45:43.330 I do think this, you know, your book got me thinking about this a lot of recently, Robot myself, where I change where we started talking about we were we were trying to like reconceptualize and destigmalize the concept of lumping because it's a kind of incoherent concept, really. 00:45:44.130 --> 00:46:06.690 And we started thinking about it as a verb, and this was what we were thinking about too, is like all these people in semi not really gray market anymore, although in the past they would have been we might call semi-employed because they have a job, but they technically are self-employed, but they aren't really self-employed in any meaningful sense. 00:46:07.730 --> 00:46:09.330 The tax burden is on them. 00:46:09.490 --> 00:46:32.769 I mean, one thing I was trying to explain to somebody is like, well, the cost of doing taxes for a lot of blue-collar blue-collar service workers has gotten exponentially higher because they pretty much have to hire a CPA because they'll get destroyed in loopholes and whatnot if they don't because they are treated like a business, even though they're not, and they're not treated like a business in a way that would help them. 00:46:34.530 --> 00:46:43.170 Because there are many ways in which being a business would make dealing with taxes a lot easier, they're only treated like a business in ways that would hurt them on the tax floor. 00:46:43.410 --> 00:47:04.210 So how much of this outsourcing of social cost and like reproduction cost, not just the obvious stuff like services just trying to live your daily life, but also like stuff to do your job is thrown back on uh these services and not accounted in like the cost that they have to forgo themselves. 00:47:04.769 --> 00:47:06.210 Yeah, I think that's really important. 00:47:06.289 --> 00:47:21.730 And it's particularly important because another version of the sort of like online discourse about service workers that will occasionally show up is a claim like, well, gig workers are not working class or not proletariat because they own the means of production, right? 00:47:21.809 --> 00:47:22.769 Because they own their car. 00:47:22.930 --> 00:47:26.690 So they're basically like they're like peasants or petty proprietors of some kind, right? 00:47:26.850 --> 00:47:30.690 Not like members of the working

class, which I think is like insane, right? 00:47:30.769 --> 00:47:50.050 So it seems important to me on the one hand to to like you know acknowledge the fact exactly as you said, that like these are workers who are having to provide the tools and the and the sort of machines of their own labor, but that is not that does not make them like similar to like an independent artisan running their own shop, right? 00:47:50.130 --> 00:48:02.690 Like, in fact, often like you know, a lot of gig workers now are like getting loans to purchase the cars or purchasing the the car insurance through the through the gig work company itself, right? 00:48:02.850 --> 00:48:15.410 So in the same way that like, you know, in that period of like immense expansion of debt financing, like we got to a point where GM was making more money on loaning people money to buy cars than it was on the cars themselves. 00:48:15.570 --> 00:48:23.170 Um, you have something similar happening with the gig work companies where they're making a lot of money loaning people money to buy the cars to do the job, right? 00:48:23.490 --> 00:48:38.690 And so I think like understanding the ways in which that's another way that like some of the sort of the like what we might call like the fixed capital burden for the service sector gets passed on to workers as well as the the wage fund getting passed on to workers. 00:48:38.850 --> 00:48:51.490 And so I think like thinking about that becomes really important to understanding, like, you know, I don't know, like the vulnerability of the like the potential vulnerability of these industries, like they really depend on that. 00:48:51.650 --> 00:49:05.730 Like the idea that that Uber and Lyft could even exist if they had to classify workers as employees and pay them under sort of like traditional labor regulations in the United States, they would immediately crumble. 00:49:05.890 --> 00:49:06.930 They would immediately crumble. 00:49:07.010 --> 00:49:16.050 They cannot exist because although they are very profitable, their profit margins depend on a specific set of like what are basically socio-political circumstances. 00:49:16.289 --> 00:49:18.450 Like they are not independently profitable. 00:49:18.530 --> 00:49:21.970 They do not work independent of those socio-political circumstances. 00:49:22.130 --> 00:49:39.170 And so I think again, like, you know, there's something very dystopian about this situation, but that also suggests the capacity of sort of organized movements among these workers to really like put an immense amount of pressure on these companies and on this sector as a whole. 00:49:40.450 --> 00:49:50.210 Well, my response is when people try to say that about gig workers is as I'm like one in factories in the in the late 19th century, you often had to own your tools anyway. 00:49:50.450 --> 00:49:56.050 And and two, can you do the work without getting on the platform? 00:49:56.370 --> 00:49:58.370 No, the platform is the means of production. 00:49:58.450 --> 00:50:00.610 Like, clearly, the platform is the thing, right? 00:50:00.690 --> 00:50:02.690 The car is incidental in some ways, right? 00:50:02.769 --> 00:50:05.170 No, it's the platform that matters. 00:50:05.570 --> 00:50:08.050 But but it is amazing that I'm like, people don't talk about this. 00:50:08.130 --> 00:50:28.370 I'm like, oh yeah, these Uber drivers, these Lyft drivers, these DoorDash drivers, they are making between you know, in my area, they can turn between five, they can turn less than minimum wage to about$15 an hour, not factoring in the damage to their vehicle, which is immense. 00:50:29.170 --> 00:50:30.930 Yeah, and gas, right? 00:50:31.090 --> 00:50:32.610 I mean, especially now, right? 00:50:32.690 --> 00:50:34.289 Like fuel, yeah. 00:50:34.850 --> 00:50:38.450 Yeah, and yes, you can say, Oh, well, they'll get that back on taxes. 00:50:38.610 --> 00:50:49.090 I'm like, okay, if the if the mileage rate that year actually reflects the fuel costs, maybe, but also that's from the from the government at the end of the year. 00:50:49.250 --> 00:51:04.850 That's like um I one of the things I liked about your book though is that okay, this can all sound very dry and about as fun as reading a Bureau of Labor Statistics article, which I enjoy, but I know most people don't. 00:51:05.330 --> 00:51:13.090 Uh, you actually use a fascinating array of cultural texts to get the qualitative part of this across to people in the book. 00:51:13.250 --> 00:51:28.130 Uh, you include novels by Uber drivers, uh, you talk about reality television a lot, you kind of map out through supplementary media artifacts, like the landscape of the service economy is represented to the public. 00:51:28.769 --> 00:51:35.809 What do these cultural representations do to capture what you need your audience to understand about this work? 00:51:35.970 --> 00:51:40.289 What does it say about the intimacy and also hostility uh of service work? 00:51:40.850 --> 00:51:44.130 And uh why did you feel the need to include it in your book? 00:51:44.450 --> 00:51:45.809 Yeah, that's a great question. 00:51:45.890 --> 00:51:51.650 Um, sometimes I can like talk about this book for forever and not ever mention that there's like all this culture involved. 00:51:51.809 --> 00:51:56.450 And people often are sort of like, why is an English professor writing this labor history? 00:51:56.610 --> 00:52:03.650 But in fact, yeah, culture is like really important to the book and to to how I sort of like initially came to be interested in the topic. 00:52:03.890 --> 00:52:06.610 So yeah, I mean, I think like I think there's a couple things. 00:52:06.690 --> 00:52:19.170 Like, one is again that it seems to me that contemporary pop culture in particular, like sort of gives the lie to that like Arlie Hockstiled claim about the sort of like false consciousness of service workers, right? 00:52:19.250 --> 00:52:44.210 Like if you look at even these sort of like

trashy reality TV shows about service workers that I find so fascinating, it's very clear that these that these workers are like incredibly aware of like what they're doing, why they're doing it, and that it is pure performance, and that there's no sense that like these the emotions that they're like the sort of affection for customers that they're performing or interesting customers' lives, like it's all totally fake and they're totally aware of it. 00:52:44.450 --> 00:52:53.010 And so in some ways it seems to me funny that like this sort of reality TV gets things right that the sociology of labor itself can't can't quite get right. 00:52:53.410 --> 00:53:07.410 But then I'm also interested in the ways that these texts often like do express, like, I mean, exactly as you said, like a kind of hostility, a sense of anger, a sense of, again, sort of like deep and abiding awareness of the conditions of super exploitation. 00:53:07.490 --> 00:53:21.490 Like you find that in the second chapter, I look at these poems that are written by these clerical micro workers who are being hired by, you know, conceptual artists in the overdeveloped world to write poems as part of these sort of like conceptual art projects. 00:53:21.809 --> 00:53:30.210 And the the point of those art projects is often like, oh, isn't this an interesting idea that I had to hire these workers to write poems for five cents a poem or whatever? 00:53:30.370 --> 00:53:32.930 And nobody actually reads the poems because that's not the point. 00:53:33.090 --> 00:53:44.289 But if you actually read the poems, you find this incredible documentation of sort of like proletarian experience, including in the underdeveloped world, in the in the sort of third world where a lot of these workers are working. 00:53:44.450 --> 00:54:02.850 And again, like a really vivid account of what it's like to perform this kind of work that I think is not that different from, you know, the kind of proletarian poetry that's produced in the late 19th century by by peace rate seamstresses, for instance, as often as part of like organized labor movements or sort of like public awareness movements. 00:54:03.170 --> 00:54:27.490 And then in the in the in the final chapter with looking at these like novels written often by former gig workers, current and former gig workers, I think you can see again this effort to sort of think through that sort of like dialectical contradiction or paradox that we identified before around like, what does it mean on the one hand to want the sort of freedom of the open road that comes with delivery work and the transportation of people? 00:54:27.650 --> 00:54:33.490 And on the other hand, to recognize that that is like this fiction that's been hooked up by the companies to exploit you. 00:54:33.570 --> 00:54:47.730 And so it seems to me that like these cultural objects often allow us to hold sort of multiple things in our head at once in ways that that other, you know, other forms of documentation that are more quantitative, that are more empirical, don't let us do, right? 00:54:47.809 --> 00:54:54.450 Because they tend to be less open to sort of like, yeah, paradox and and and contradiction and complexity. 00:54:57.410 --> 00:55:06.690 Yeah, I I I find it I found it very useful because I also can be very much like talking about this all in terms of structures and stats and and all that. 00:55:06.769 --> 00:55:10.610 And I have to remind myself, I've lived a lot of this, I've been a service worker. 00:55:10.769 --> 00:55:20.210 I was I used to uh work in an insurance company where part of my job was to figure it out who was a pizza delivery driver so we could make them get commercial insurance. 00:55:20.370 --> 00:55:31.330 Because but I would I was even at the time, I had already worked at a pizza, I was an assistant manager at a pizza shop, and I'd already been like, why aren't we providing these people with commercial insurance? 00:55:31.410 --> 00:55:35.410 We're asking them for private insurance, but it's illegal. 00:55:35.650 --> 00:55:44.450 Like, we are like we we have an entire sector that everyone just accepts that it that ubiquitousy at that time was engaging in an illegal practice. 00:55:44.530 --> 00:55:56.930 And I was like, and yeah, yeah, uh and I was like, This is weird, and so I try like I liked your stuff for reminding me, oh yeah, this is not just something I approach when I read statistics. 00:55:57.650 --> 00:57:05.570 Uh one thing that uh to talk about this in a also very weird way, and in uh another seemingly paradoxical way is you trace the history of service work back to you know the 1700s with domestic service, and not only does that illustrate what we've already been talking about for an hour, that it's not a new phenomenon at all, but also that it's deeply racialized and gendered, and this has expressed itself in the US economy in deeply paradoxical ways because these categories of labor are, with the exception of like teachers and nurses, who I still think are are exploited, but relative to everything else, are super exploited parts of capital, but also get reported on often strangely from I can think of a very specific book that I weren't mention a lot, Hannah Rosen's The End of Men was Came Out of the Great Recession, a book that I have a very ambivalent uh relationship to, but that also made it sound like that due to automation primarily not outsourcing, a lot of male employment had disappeared after the Great Recession. 00:57:05.650 --> 00:57:12.610 So there's now resentment at these service workers twice because they're seen as having a job where a lot of men don't. 00:57:13.170 --> 00:57:29.090 This is also very shows up in racialization because outside of municipal service work, where you know the Civil Rights Act was actually enforced, uh yeah, there's lots of ways to get around civil rights legislation. 00:57:29.970 --> 00:57:42.690 And so, like you know, BIPOC, but particularly black

and to and and Latin people are often forced into the services if they can't get a municipal job. 00:57:43.970 --> 00:57:53.730 And now that's true of everybody because usually what happens to the marginalized eventually happens to most categories of society except for the wealthy. 00:57:54.210 --> 00:58:05.730 But uh you I think it's important to to to look at that and talk about that because of the association with gender, and I'll I'll tell you one that cuts deep. 00:58:05.890 --> 00:58:12.370 I'm a teacher, and my day job is a is a high school teacher, been a professor and a teacher off and on for a long time. 00:58:13.170 --> 00:58:26.450 And I was talking to someone about like the need to recruit specifically primary teachers who are men, and what and there was a lot of pushback, oh, they don't want to do it, oh, they want to do it. 00:58:26.530 --> 00:58:31.890 And then I was like, Okay, but how many of you would think it would be weird for a man to want this job? 00:58:32.050 --> 00:58:36.610 And almost everybody raised their hands, and including relatively progressive people. 00:58:37.410 --> 00:58:41.570 And I'm like, what does that tell you sociologically? 00:58:41.730 --> 00:58:47.170 Because you assume if a man wants to be a caregiver, they're a predator, uh, particularly with children. 00:58:47.570 --> 00:58:52.610 And we all, I mean, I do it too, I hate to say, have this as an emago in our head. 00:58:54.050 --> 00:59:03.490 So this gendered, this gendered and racialized nature with this work, I think today is also running flat into automation. 00:59:03.809 --> 00:59:10.930 And with the exception of the gig work driver that we've talked a lot about, most of these positions are considered female positions. 00:59:12.769 --> 00:59:15.250 How what how does this paradox play out today? 00:59:15.490 --> 00:59:17.490 Like, do you think it leaves us? 00:59:17.570 --> 00:59:20.690 Is that part of why we don't take these fields of work seriously enough? 00:59:20.769 --> 00:59:22.210 Is there a gender bias here? 00:59:22.690 --> 00:59:34.130 And also, how do we overcome because you know, we we we've talked about this in the need for primary education, because actually we've had issues with with boys in primary education for a while. 00:59:34.210 --> 00:59:36.690 It's well studied, it's it's kind of agreed upon. 00:59:37.410 --> 00:59:54.690 And there's talk about the demand for for incorporating more male teachers, and yet even people who say this still have these sociological stereotypes in their head, and it's it's deep in our socialization and habitat. 00:59:54.850 --> 00:59:57.570 So how do you think we should handle that? 00:59:58.850 --> 01:00:00.289 Yeah, that's a great question. 01:00:00.450 --> 01:00:04.610 So, yeah, I mean, I hadn't really thought about, I mean, there's this, you know, very interesting history. 01:00:04.690 --> 01:00:28.610 I mean, again, you can look back to like debates around the Fair Labor Standards Act and the

choice to exclude domestic service from the act and and the ways in which that was like very clearly, very explicitly built on, you know, all of the sort of assumptions and anxieties that emerge around the fact that like 80% of those performing domestic service in the US when the Fair Labor Standards Act is written are black women, right? 01:00:28.690 --> 01:00:49.090 And like you can see the ways in which, you know, one of the sort of alibis often given for like not regulating service work or not paying it formal wages or not paying it even living wages, let alone family wage, a family wage, is that is that it's somehow like natural to women and and to people of color. 01:00:49.330 --> 01:00:54.210 You can see this again in the tradition of domestic service and sort of post-bellum period. 01:00:54.370 --> 01:01:13.490 You can see it in the ways in which, you know, the importation of like migrant women into the US beginning in the 60s through various schemes to bring in basically care workers into the US, the fact that like particularly informalized care workers, home health care workers, et cetera, still tend to be, still tend to be women and particularly women of color. 01:01:13.730 --> 01:01:21.330 Like there's a long history where the sort of degradation of these forms of work is intimately tied to its racialization and its feminization. 01:01:21.570 --> 01:01:38.530 But I think you're also pointing to something interesting about like the present, which is that it turns out that a lot of these jobs, you know, particularly again, those sort of like semi-professionalized ones like teachers and nurses, are the the most protected from both automation and outsourcing, right? 01:01:38.930 --> 01:01:58.370 And so then, like, what does it do to have a situation where these jobs that have historically been subject to degradation and feminization now look like, you know, reasonable pathways to like, you know, maybe a middle class income and yet remain very feminized. 01:01:58.610 --> 01:02:18.690 And so it almost seems to me that like, you know, there's something about that discourse about like the anxiety about having men do these jobs that like almost feels like a sort of compensatory mechanism to accommodate the fact that like men are sort of trapped between these two facts, right? 01:02:18.850 --> 01:02:28.450 One is that these are forms of work that have historically been feminized and and not and treated as natural to women and treated as thus as like and and and then underwaged and and informal. 01:02:28.769 --> 01:02:34.130 And on the other hand, they're maybe the best jobs that are still available in an economy that is getting worse and worse, right? 01:02:34.289 --> 01:02:36.050 A labor force that's getting worse and worse. 01:02:36.210 --> 01:02:45.090 And so it seems to me that maybe some of this like language about men as predators sort of emerges out of that contradiction as a way to sort of like navigate it. 01:02:45.170 --> 01:02:49.970

But of course, it that that basically, as you said, it fails everybody equally. 01:02:51.090 --> 01:02:54.289 I mean, this is what I've been really thinking about because I have been. 01:02:54.769 --> 01:02:58.289 I watched some discourse about oh, men would rather do X and then teach. 01:02:58.370 --> 01:03:01.250 And I'm like, well, also we won't hire them because we don't trust them. 01:03:01.410 --> 01:03:02.690 And and people are like, what? 01:03:02.769 --> 01:03:04.130 And I'm like, no, it's just true. 01:03:04.289 --> 01:03:12.050 Like, like, yeah, it's illegal, but it doesn't, and I'm like, well, it's let's parse the sociology of this for a second. 01:03:12.210 --> 01:03:39.010 And and the other thing that I think gets missed in this is like, yes, these are jobs, and yes, some of them that we might call them like the higher tier end of the service sector, teaching and nursing in particular, have enough union representation enough dependent on uh on frankly taxation, so we're not as vulnerable to recessions unless the property values fall than we are. 01:03:39.410 --> 01:03:46.450 Um but these jobs for a lot of people are very hard to do. 01:03:47.010 --> 01:03:52.210 Teaching and nursing have a an extremely high attrition rate because of the conditions of labor. 01:03:52.289 --> 01:03:53.250 It's not because of the pay. 01:03:53.330 --> 01:03:57.170 I mean, like the pay is not amazing, but that's not why people quit most of the time. 01:03:57.330 --> 01:04:00.210 Like, despite what people think, it's not usually why. 01:04:00.850 --> 01:04:06.050 It's that they're devalued, they're and devalued is usually coded for feminized. 01:04:06.210 --> 01:04:18.130 It's that they are they have all of them have high amounts of uncompensated labor associated with them, even if the compensation is good. 01:04:18.690 --> 01:04:33.090 And a lot of them, you know, uh teaching nursing in particular are in a hostile middle environment navigating the classes and people that they serve, but also multiple levels of stakeholders with wildly different interests. 01:04:33.410 --> 01:04:36.370 And that's true for the top. 01:04:36.450 --> 01:04:43.490 And when you look at like gig workers, like the number of people they have to appease is somewhat astounding to think about. 01:04:44.050 --> 01:04:56.450 Like, okay, so they gotta appease their aggravate managers, they gotta appease the other customer, they have to appease any number of people who have to service their stuff. 01:04:57.170 --> 01:05:17.970 I I think this is just this is just increasingly problematic in the sense that also like if you look at a declining wage pool, you start wondering like, well, how can the working class continue to support itself if the working class is directly as petty consumers directly subsidizing gig work and whatnot? 01:05:18.130 --> 01:05:37.809 And right now, what's happening is a K-shaped economy phenomenon where increasingly they're just not, and things that used to be services geared towards the statistical average person who's a worker are now geared towards relative elites because that's the only market that really has the money to engage in it at all. 01:05:40.130 --> 01:05:42.530 Do you think that will get people to start caring about this sector? 01:05:42.610 --> 01:06:03.730 If if not the numbers, I mean to me it's like, okay, so you want to talk about like you know, reforms and revolution, and you're talking about uh using as your only base um eight percent of the population that just and increasingly atomized areas of the country. 01:06:04.210 --> 01:06:09.809 I just like it just seems like such a weird self-limitation. 01:06:10.370 --> 01:06:11.570 Yeah, yeah. 01:06:12.769 --> 01:06:22.289 And it's just like we like anyone who's serious, particularly if they're a socialist or a Marxist of some kind, but any I mean progressives too, really do need to think about this in a pretty deep way, I think. 01:06:22.610 --> 01:06:24.370 Yeah, yeah, no, I totally agree. 01:06:24.530 --> 01:06:26.530 I mean, yeah, so like two things come to mind. 01:06:26.610 --> 01:06:43.970 One is like, I mean, to your point about teachers and nurses, like I think one of the most interesting things about those sectors is that again, we've trip typically perceived those sectors to be relatively immune to efficiency pressures, relatively immune to increased productivity, relatively immune to intense scientific management and rationalization, right? 01:06:44.130 --> 01:06:45.730 Relatively immune to de-skilling. 01:06:45.890 --> 01:06:47.170 But a lot of what's happening now. 01:06:47.650 --> 01:06:50.610 Is the use of all of those in those sectors, right? 01:06:50.690 --> 01:07:09.330 So whether that's like, you know, use of technology, uh, use of you know, various forms of like performance-based pay or piece rate pay in those sectors, intensifying, very much intensifying, like you know, in universities, adjunct professors, but also this happens in clinical work as well, use of piece rate pay, use of AI in those sectors, right? 01:07:09.490 --> 01:07:22.450 So the desire to squeeze just even marginal productivity and efficiency gains out of these sectors that have historically been understood as technologically stagnant is exactly the thing that's changing that experience of work that you're describing, right? 01:07:22.530 --> 01:07:30.450 Where like you have basically like insidification or degradation of working conditions, even where compensation remains like relatively stable. 01:07:30.690 --> 01:07:44.769 And I think that is that the what the result of that is the potential for like greater degrees of labor militancy and these portions of the of the service workforce that are historically unionized, but maybe have not been quite as militant as they might, they might become. 01:07:45.090 --> 01:08:11.890 The other thing about about the sort of sort of question of like reproductive costs in a context of a shrinking wage pool, I

think is like exactly what I'm sort of talking about near the end of the book, where I'm sort of saying, like, if you look at the way that like, you know, particularly in the 30s, 40s, 50s, this period of of like high industrial growth, the way that labor, industrial labor unions often made the case for wage gains was by yoking, tethering wage gains to increased productivity. 01:08:12.050 --> 01:08:20.130 So like the UAW has these famous contracts that they signed in the 40s where they basically tie compensation gains to increases in technological productivity, right? 01:08:20.210 --> 01:08:22.769 In ways that appear to serve like labor and capital equally. 01:08:22.850 --> 01:08:25.409 So it's like this amazing compromise position. 01:08:25.649 --> 01:08:30.689 You just are not going to have that in a service economy because productivity is not going to increase that way, right? 01:08:30.769 --> 01:08:37.890 And so you can't yoke your claims to wage the need for wage gains or your demands around wages to productivity. 01:08:38.130 --> 01:08:50.930 And so one of the things that I'm noting is that instead you have increasingly labor organizations as well as sort of more informal worker organizations thinking about making demands around cost of living, right? 01:08:51.090 --> 01:09:04.210 Making demands around housing costs in particular, forming alliances, like SEIU is doing all this amazing work working with tenants unions on the East Coast, that just the existence of tenants unions in and of itself is, I think, a really interesting phenomenon. 01:09:04.369 --> 01:09:15.250 But the way that now labor unions and tenants unions are working together, as well as all of these service sector union and worker campaigns developing these kinds of like, again, like bargaining for the common good type demands. 01:09:15.409 --> 01:09:34.529 So not just talking about wages, but talking about, you know, immigrant rights to transportation or rights to trans for trans workers, or, you know, often in in in public sector unions, like, you know, opposition to ICE or to police on campuses or in federal and state institutions. 01:09:34.689 --> 01:09:51.889 So all of these ways that like worker organizations and unions are coming up with a set of demands around reproduction, around the common good, that are very distinct from that industrial worker tradition that's going to just think about it in terms of like fair wages or like a right to the products of your labor, right? 01:09:51.969 --> 01:09:57.090 I think service worker unions and and organizations are having to think very differently about that question. 01:09:59.009 --> 01:10:02.449 I think that's that's a great point to kind of ask the final question. 01:10:02.529 --> 01:10:05.009 And it's something that we kind of started off with. 01:10:05.250 --> 01:10:10.849 But uh, you mentioned coordination between tennis unions and traditional labor unions. 01:10:11.009 --> 01:10:15.250 I have also been studying lately

the structures of these unions. 01:10:15.329 --> 01:10:18.609 I'm a union rep at the teachers' union, so I think a lot about this. 01:10:18.929 --> 01:10:31.489 But I've been thinking about tennis unions, which are great because they have a low barred entry, but they're difficult to get wins for because property owners can often actually forgo rents, they still have ways to valorize their value. 01:10:31.569 --> 01:10:35.009 But if you have enough pressure, you can actually do something about that. 01:10:35.170 --> 01:10:37.489 But the pressure thresholds are actually quite high. 01:10:37.809 --> 01:10:43.489 But if you coordinate with more traditional unions, you do have a lot of power. 01:10:43.729 --> 01:10:46.529 There are, of course, some legal restrictions to that. 01:10:46.609 --> 01:10:47.889 Thank you, Teff Hartley. 01:10:48.609 --> 01:11:06.049 But I think we're gonna have to be thinking about these in more coordinated ways because I don't think the Marxist assumption that uh work centralization on an industrial level uh would go forever. 01:11:06.769 --> 01:11:21.809 And I actually will say I think Marx actually concentrates himself on this too, because there's stuff in Capitol Volume 2 and 3 indicate that it won't, but when you hear them talk, they talk like it's gonna, you know, we're gonna have infinite skilling because the increased centralization of labor and blah blah blah blah blah. 01:11:22.289 --> 01:11:30.049 That we really kind of have to just look at the reality is like, no, they figured out how to automate enough stuff that they don't need the centralized locations in the same way. 01:11:31.409 --> 01:11:42.210 And you're gonna have a lot more service labor, and there's gonna be a lot more pressures on that service labor because it's harder to squeeze productivity out of it by just you know injecting fixed capital in. 01:11:42.689 --> 01:11:44.049 You gotta be mean. 01:11:44.289 --> 01:11:47.409 I yeah, like seriously, there's really no other way to do it. 01:11:48.609 --> 01:12:06.529 And that has immense costs too, immense costs for surveillance, immense costs for the I mean, like if we look at like if we think about how much of the AI sector is actually about surveilling and particularly surveilling workers, the costs of this are astronomical, they're just hidden. 01:12:08.609 --> 01:12:24.369 So uh do you think these this actually creates fracture points for organizing that we could actually use because there are high costs of this and and it requires a more and more invasive state, which nobody really likes. 01:12:24.609 --> 01:12:24.929 Yeah. 01:12:25.489 --> 01:12:25.969 Yeah. 01:12:26.210 --> 01:12:27.090 Yeah, absolutely. 01:12:27.170 --> 01:12:40.369 No, I mean I think the surveillance point is really important because I do think, I mean, you can you can even see that like in you know debates that are not directly related to labor questions at all, like like state surveillance as part of like the you know, war on

terror, right? 01:12:40.449 --> 01:12:46.449 Like that's actually like there's actually like far less political agreement across the spectrum on that than like we might think, right? 01:12:46.529 --> 01:12:49.170 Because people have a sort of gut reaction against it. 01:12:49.409 --> 01:12:56.369 But I also think like the point about like, I mean, for me, one of the ways I try to think about this is about thinking about like quality. 01:12:56.609 --> 01:13:13.409 And again, like, you know, often when people talk about how like service work can't be automated or it can't be productivity can't be increased, what they really mean is that it can't be automated or it can't have its productivity increased without the thing that you're producing or the service that you're providing getting really shitty, right? 01:13:13.569 --> 01:13:20.529 Like it's not that you can't, like theoretically, one person could watch 100 children or even a thousand children. 01:13:20.609 --> 01:13:24.769 It's just that like probably some of those children will like, you know, fall off a cliff and die or whatever. 01:13:25.489 --> 01:13:29.329 We're just gonna have to have a certain marginal loss of kids, like exactly, exactly. 01:13:29.489 --> 01:13:34.289 So it's like once you accept that, then actually you can increase the productivity of something like childcare, right? 01:13:34.449 --> 01:13:43.809 And so I think like what that means is that as workers in the service sector, we're gonna have to make arguments that do have to do with this question of quality. 01:13:44.049 --> 01:13:49.569 And I think you can see that, like you can see nurses unions do that, you can certainly see teachers' unions do that. 01:13:49.729 --> 01:14:09.569 And it's one of the arguments that I'm sort of trying to make at the end of the book in my own sector, higher ed, around like online education and the turn to more remote instruction in the sort of wake of the COVID pandemic, which is like this immense labor saving and sort of infrastructure cost, fixed capital cost saving thing that universities have discovered that they can do. 01:14:09.729 --> 01:14:15.809 It allows you to increase the number of students like exponentially, like far higher than would have seemed possible before. 01:14:15.889 --> 01:14:17.969 You don't even have to build a room to house them, right? 01:14:18.049 --> 01:14:18.929 You're doing it all online. 01:14:19.250 --> 01:14:21.009 Fire no longer matter. 01:14:21.569 --> 01:14:22.609 Exactly, exactly. 01:14:22.769 --> 01:14:29.649 You can you can have a faculty member record their lectures and then you can have most of the class run by like an underpaid adjunct or graduate student, right? 01:14:29.729 --> 01:14:30.449 It's very cheap. 01:14:30.609 --> 01:14:42.609 And so part of what the argument that that that faculty or that teachers and other uh other parts of the education sector are gonna have to make is that like it's not that's not simply a labor issue, it's also

a quality issue. 01:14:42.769 --> 01:14:54.369 And so we're gonna have to make arguments about the quality of the services that we're providing if we want to bring in some degree of like public support for the labor movements that we're that we're that we're creating, right? 01:14:54.529 --> 01:14:57.329 So in ways that like, yeah, they're gonna look different. 01:14:57.409 --> 01:15:06.769 Like you can, in fact, make like you can probably make uh you you know, you automate the the manufacturing of cars, the cars don't get worse, they actually get better, right? 01:15:06.929 --> 01:15:08.769 But that's not the case with the service sector. 01:15:08.929 --> 01:15:21.409 And so we're gonna have to make an argument that has to do with like the importance of these as aspects of social reproduction that everybody should care about, rather than just an argument that has to do with the labor conditions of people who work in that sector. 01:15:21.809 --> 01:15:30.849 Yeah, I was actually thinking about this when I was reading your book, and then I'd recently read Corey Doctor's book on acidification, and I was like, I was like, well, Dr. 01:15:31.170 --> 01:15:41.329 O, this is all great and it's all true, but what you're what you're not putting together is this is industrialization, apply the things that it doesn't work for. 01:15:42.210 --> 01:15:56.529 Because yes, tailorism does make better cars than that, like the parts are consistent, and they you you can measure them and you can fix them, and every now and then they'll do something like a pinto and it'll kill a bunch of people, but for the most part, it doesn't do that. 01:15:57.090 --> 01:16:05.809 Whereas when you do that in my job, I've now work in half online program, and we go like I've discovered to make an online program work in a public school system. 01:16:05.889 --> 01:16:08.529 I have to go and meet with kids all the time and do all that stuff. 01:16:08.689 --> 01:16:12.449 But without that component, I don't know they're learning anything. 01:16:13.409 --> 01:16:31.170 And but the the district sees this as a way to be like, oh, we can cut down, we we can deal with our we don't not necessarily even getting rid of teachers, but like we've been understaffed since 2007, like since the Great Recession and the reduction of workforce at that time. 01:16:31.489 --> 01:16:45.489 The teaching field has been perpetually between 15 and 20 percent understaffed, and they've been relying on these technological gains and basically declining birth rates to fix the problem because they weren't gonna fix it any other way. 01:16:46.769 --> 01:16:51.250 Eventually, the cost of social reproduction got so high they actually started having to pay us more. 01:16:51.409 --> 01:16:54.130 But again, as I was pointing out to people, too, like, oh, I'm super grateful. 01:16:54.210 --> 01:16:55.729 It's like a just for inflation. 01:16:56.369 --> 01:16:59.729 Yeah, right, and just vanishes, it vanishes, right? 01:17:00.289 --> 01:17:06.289 It's like we are pacing inflation, like you know, like yay, right? 01:17:07.969 --> 01:17:24.369 And this economy, it might be doing good to pace inflation, but we are pacing inflation, we are not actually making that much more money, and uh yeah, uh my bosses love hate me because they're not used to a teacher who actually understands economics, but dangerous, it's dangerous, yeah. 01:17:24.529 --> 01:17:27.090 It is they particularly won't let me teach it. 01:17:27.489 --> 01:17:46.769 But it's it's one of these things that I I've seen, I've seen a lot about, and your book was like it hit a core because I was like, we really need to talk about this because the debates around this the 19th century debates are somewhat excusable, they're still kind of dumb, but they're somewhat excusable. 01:17:47.329 --> 01:17:51.250 The 20th century debates seemed to me like you're sticking your head in the ground. 01:17:52.210 --> 01:18:12.369 Like one, I don't think it we really want 1950s factories to come back, and if we brought manufacturing back, which everyone's been promising and no one can do because secretly we were still manufacturing a lot anyway, they just don't employ that many people. 01:18:12.929 --> 01:18:18.769 You know, the the shop size has shrunk from like 5,000 to like 250 for the same amount of productivity. 01:18:19.889 --> 01:18:21.009 I don't know what we can do. 01:18:21.489 --> 01:18:42.609 So we have to focus on the service sector because otherwise and I I do think you're right, and I do think I also think that's how you get the back of the public on this, because the one thing the one thing has been hard about organizing and services before is when we strike, we're very effective in some ways because we shut stuff down, but also we hurt more than our bosses. 01:18:43.090 --> 01:18:48.289 Yeah, and so it's easy to have the rest of the of the public get mad at us. 01:18:48.689 --> 01:18:55.889 So, like when we're like, hey, we're doing this so you don't get complete shit, yeah, seems to be an important argument. 01:18:56.289 --> 01:18:58.929 Anyway, yeah, I'm really excited about your book. 01:18:59.090 --> 01:19:03.009 Obviously, it's out from Zone, yeah, Zone. 01:19:03.409 --> 01:19:06.369 And it's been out for I think a couple months now. 01:19:06.769 --> 01:19:07.009 Yeah. 01:19:07.729 --> 01:19:09.729 Definitely a couple months by the time I release this. 01:19:10.289 --> 01:19:11.569 I'd like to thank you for your time. 01:19:11.729 --> 01:19:14.529 Where can people find your work if they're interested in following what you do? 01:19:15.329 --> 01:19:21.329 You can find I have a website, anniejmaclanahan.com, and you can find links to all my work there. 01:19:21.889 --> 01:19:22.210 Sweet. 01:19:22.449 --> 01:19:23.009 Thank you so much. 01:19:23.170 --> 01:19:24.449 I'll put the link in the show notes. 01:19:24.689 --> 01:19:25.969 Have a great rest of your day. 01:19:26.449 --> 01:19:27.090 Thanks. 01:19:27.569 --> 01:19:28.130 Bye bye.