David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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Valuing Nature in Ways the World Can Understand

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Nature has a big problem. 
 
Too few of us believe that climate change will happen here or will affect us personally if it does. But these misperceptions are only one aspect of the problem.
 
Too many decision makers–and too many workers caught in the cross-hairs of the debate–still believe that the costs of changing how we consume, digest and expel the world’s resources are too high for the benefits that might be realized once we start paying for them. They don’t see “the benefit of the bargain” I see (and maybe you see) so clearly, only their share of an unacceptable price tag.
 
And indeed, the high costs of changing how we do things today tend to crop up everywhere in the climate change debate.
 
If we want to stop over-fishing, there are the costs to the livelihoods of the fishermen. If we want to reduce our reliance on carbon-based energy, there are the impacts on those who build and maintain today’s energy infrastructure, and on the communities that depend on those workers and suppliers. It’s dismantling one economy—the lost jobs and abandoned investments—for a new one whose economic upsides often seem to be worth less than the high costs of changing how we do things now.
 
In market-based economies, the challenge is proving that these transition costs will be justified by the long-term economic gains. A rough apples-to-apples type exchange between likely benefits and likely costs needs to be argued, presented and accepted by enough stakeholders for “the human family” to “voluntarily” undertake the expensive steps that are necessary to confront climate change.
 
Put another way: will the “value” of a healthier planet tomorrow cover the “costs” of ensuring it today?  Perhaps the biggest challenge facing those of us who are alarmed by climate change is filling in the “quotation marks” in this cart-before-the-horse equation so we can convince the many hold-outs who still need convincing. But until now, we’ve mostly failed to do so.
 
Only quite recently have the number crunchers begun to calculate the cost benefits of a healthier planet that will, over time, offset the costs of ensuring it today.  It’s the dollar-spent for dollar-earned scenario that is essential if we’re to turn climate change advocacy into meaningful action.

In the places where we work, most supporters that we’ll need to realize our visions start out skeptical if not flat-out opposed to the better worlds we can often “see” so clearly, so we need to translate our versions of both the problems and solutions into stories they can understand.  Like it or not, that’s usually the economic story where we trade tangible costs for tangible benefits as we undertake the often painful changes that will be needed along the way. It works almost every single time, but until now that story has not been properly told in the struggle to confront climate change.

Well the time to start telling it is now.

The Economic Benefits of Whales Versus the Lobstermens’ Costs to Protect Them 

According to a recent story, there’s been an on-going showdown between lobstermen and environmentalists off the coast of Maine. The point of controversy is right whales that environmentalists argue are dying when they get caught in the lines that secure local lobster pots. The whales are threatened with extinction. The lobster industry, which is already undermined by warming waters, will be further crippled by putting down fewer pots or otherwise reducing the number of lines that secure them.
 
Is there a way that the value of having more whales in this ecosystem might cover the high costs that lobstermen, their families and their coastal communities will have to incur to protect them? 
 
Until quite recently, I would have said “no.”  But before finding a better answer, it might help to have some additional background about the Gulf of Maine controversy.
 
The right whales got their name because they were the “right” whales to push towards extinction with our commercial activities, first with the harpoons of whaling boats and more recently by accidentally slaughtering them with boat propellers, fishing nets and lobster pot lines. These bus-sized mammals are slow moving and “built by evolution to be oblivious forage feeders,” according to a NOAA Fisheries’ official. It makes these whales unusually susceptible to getting ensnared and killed.
 
NOAA estimates that today’s population of right whales is only about 400, with fewer than 95 breeding females remaining, which means that the entire population is jeopardized by a single death each year. But more than 30 of these whales have been found dead since 2017. While the reason for these fatalities isn’t always clear, it does not appear that they are dying from natural causes according to investigators.
 
To address the problem, NOAA has proposed new regulations to clear fishing lines from the whales’ path. While the regs will cover all New England waters, Maine lobstermen, who “dangle more than 800,000 lines from buoys to ocean-floor traps in their busiest months,” clearly have the most at stake. To satisfy the proposed standards, they will need to remove at least half of those lines from the water. Says one lobsterman in blunt response: “We don’t want to go extinct either.” In addition to 4,800 harvesters working these waters, the lobster industry supports thousands more jobs on shore while contributing $1.5 billion a year to the state’s economy. 
 
During the rule making period that we’re in today, scientists will be arguing about whether the proposed regulation goes far enough to protect the whales while those alarmed by its likely impacts will be making their case for reasonable accommodations or to reject the new restrictions altogether.  
 
As tensions escalate, and opponents refine the dollar amounts that are likely to be lost if NOAA’s regulation goes into effect, it seems a useful time to ask whether anyone in that debate is calculating the economic benefit that is provided to Maine (and indeed to all of us) by the survival of these whales. 
 
Is anyone enabling an apples-to-apples comparison of costs and benefits so that both sides in this controversy are (more or less) in the same ballpark, with the opportunities for tradeoffs and compromises that “speaking the same economic language” might allow?  
 
And beyond that, is there a way that the “value” of preserving these whales can cover the costs that will have to be borne by these communities if they can ever come together to protect them?

The Startlingly High Value of a Whale

In the past week or so, I came upon another whale story. This one involved a team of visionaries at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

As is often the case, I overheard bits of the story in a Morning Edition segment on NPR, which took me to a story that had been published that day in National Geographic, and eventually to a much deeper analysis in an IMF publication. It was worth getting to the bottom of the story. 

As far as I can tell, what the IMF team discovered about whales and ended up proposing for the sake of both nature and industry was not in response to the Gulf of Maine controversy, but it could certainly help to resolve it.

The IMF’s approach considered all the whales in the world’s oceans. Because of its boldness and breadth, it could make a significant enough dent in species degradation, at a rapid enough pace, to reduce the number of ocean-based harms that we can no longer repair.  At the same time, its approach would utilize the whales’ enormous environmental “value” to help compensate the global fishing and transportation industries for the costs of adopting “whale saving” practices. Here in a nutshell is their argument (although I urge you to read the entire IMF article and to enjoy the visualizations they’ve included in it).

Essentially, the IMF team realized that a whale’s economic value comes from its extraordinary ability to capture and then sequester carbon. “When it comes to saving the planet,” they write, “one whale is worth thousands of trees.”

In building their economic analysis, the team relied on 2014 research about how whales remove (and help others to remove) carbon from the environment as well as upon international programs that have developed mechanisms to fund the preservation of carbon capturing eco-systems. The team’s signature innovation may be focusing on a particularly helpful as well as beloved animal to support this kind of cost-benefit analysis on a truly global scale.

According to prior research, a whale sequesters as much as 33 tons of carbon dioxide per year on average compared to only 48 pounds per land-based tree. Whales eat phytoplankton, which not only contribute at least 50 percent of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere but in doing so also capture 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide or 40 percent of the entire amount that is produced globally each year.

Whales have what the IMF team call “a multiplier effect” on the phytoplankton when they eat them and produce waste products (primarily iron and nitrogen) because these waste products are precisely what is needed for more plankton to grow. As they dive and rise again to the surface, whales “pump” these minerals to the surface across their vast migration patterns, increasing both the amount of plankton and the whale populations that feed on them as long as the whales can do so in relative safety.  Moreover, when whales die, the carbon they have sequestered in their enormous bodies from eating plankton in the first place descends to the ocean floor and (according to the National Geographic’s coverage of the IMF plan) “is taken out of the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years, a literal carbon sink.”

Of course, whale populations would need to recover significantly to produce the greatest benefits. Continuing their “if-then” analysis, the IMF team notes:

If whales were allowed to return to their pre-whaling number of 4 to 5 million—from slightly more than 1.3 million today—it could add significantly to the amount of phytoplankton in the oceans and to the carbon they capture every year. At a minimum, even a 1 percent increase in phytoplankton productivity thanks to whale [pumping] activity would capture hundreds of millions of tons of additional C02 a year, equivalent to the sudden appearance of 2 billion mature trees. Imagine the impact over the average lifespan of a whale, more than 60 years.

(To put these benefits in a slightly different context, National Geographic cites economists’ calculations showing that these great whales alone could either capture or help more plankton to capture 1.7 tons of C02 per year, which is more than the annual carbon emissions of Brazil today.)
 
The question, then, is how to restore whale populations to pre-whaling levels. Those causing the current threat include nations that still allow whale hunting, industries (like fishing and ocean going transport of people and goods) that jeopardize migrating whales, as well as the actions of individual fishermen. Without covering the very real costs of changing these practices, it is nearly impossible to imagine that the necessary changes will be undertaken voluntarily. 
 
With the aim of meeting these costs, the IMF team made “conservative estimates” of each whale’s value. For the largest so-called “great whales,” they used science-based estimates of how much CO2 each one sequesters directly or indirectly in its lifetime along with CO2’s market price. To this base number, they added value for a whale’s other economic contributions, including fishery enhancement and ecotourism. The IMF team concluded that the value of the average great whale is more than $2 million and that the current value of the global stock of great whales alone “is easily over $1 trillion.”  
 
By using this “value” essentially as collateral for raising the necessary funds, monies would become available (from environmentally oriented companies, non-profits, consumers and even countries) to compensate those who are likely to suffer economic losses by changing their current business practices to protect the whales. “For example,” the team notes, “shipping companies could be compensated for the cost of altered shipping routes to reduce the risk of [whale] collisions.” 
 
What is perhaps most noteworthy about the IMF team’s “good work” is the change in mindset that their cost-benefit analysis invites to help resolve one of our most challenging global problems: the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between nature and industry until now. The team recognized that the necessary changes will never be made unless those incurring those costs can be paid and the world can unite around sufficient compensation mechanisms to ensure that they are. Finding new ways to “value” and “leverage” nature (or “earth-tech,” as they call it) is the key they have identified.

+ + + 

What the IMF team proposes doesn’t fit into a tidy package as yet, and a myriad of details still has to be worked out. In other words, the economic benefits from nature and the costs to industry of protecting it are not quite apples-to-apples yet. But this proposal boldly offers a new approach to balance the needs of both nature and industry on a global scale.
 
While it’s a financing mechanism that’s aimed only at whales, it introduces a framework for thinking about other carbon-rich ecosystems like sea grass beds or the forest elephants of the Congo River basin.
 
Proposing an earth-tech solution instead of an artificial, man-made one is inspired for another reason. When I worked in the energy industry, I studied carbon sequestration plants that were being developed at the time and know first-hand about both the technology challenges and the prohibitive expense of these man-made solutions. By contrast, nature can perform much of the same work “naturally,” if only we’d let it.
 
And for the on-going battle between the right whales and the lobster industry in the Gulf of Maine, there is now a rudimentary framework that, with imagination and a sense of urgency, may actually be able to serve both of them. 
 
Good work often achieves its loftiest objectives by finding new ways to confront the dollars-and-cents obstacles that are right in front of it.

This post was adapted from my October 13, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Next Crisis Will Be a Terrible Thing to Waste

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(photo by Markus Spiske temporausch.com @pixels)

We are moving into less settled times both here and in the rest of the world. Several different storms are gathering along the waterfront today:
 
– in politics, with gridlock both breaking down and intensifying over impeachment and the future course for America, in the UK over its relationship with the rest of Europe and what it wants for itself, in the battles between populists and traditionalists elsewhere;
 
– in economics, with weakening global prosperity and the likelihood of a financial pullback that will affect almost all of us as the fundamentals weaken;
 
– in the environment, with increasing alarm over the current effects of global warming, the longer-term outlook for the health of the planet, and state actors’ halting efforts to respond to the challenge; 
 
– in the world order, with a rising China, a demoralized and divided West, and a handful of nations around the edges that are both willing and able to take advantage of the uncertainty; and
 
 – in the prevailing spirit, perhaps the most impressionistic of these storms but potentially the most powerful, as pessimism, alarm, hysteria, backlash and hostility get reduced into urgency in their boiling cauldron—a drive to do something, anything to move off the dime.
 
The silver lining is that chaos, confusion and uncertainty also provide opportunities. When you’re clear about the priorities behind your work, your chances to advance them are always greatest when the storms finally break as long as you’re ready to rebuild the storm-tossed world in the ways that you want. Now is the time for getting ready, because the chances to address our most pressing problems–and the rewards for us and others that can flow from that–may never be greater.
 
When the work we do helps us realize our priorities, it becomes more purposeful and satisfying.  As I argued here last week, in many of our jobs it is both possible and desirable to align our priorities with that job’s broader objectives. Improved health. Greater fairness. A more sustainable way to live. 
 
In other words, it’s tying what you want yourself to almost every job’s higher purposes. Not only does the alignment reduce friction between you and those impacted by your work, it can also produce an esprit de corps with your bosses, co-workers, customers, suppliers and members of the broader community as they support your efforts. You’re experiencing the shared benefits of a productive community while taking home both the pride and satisfaction that comes with it. 
 
Of course, another essential of “good work” is its future focus: anticipating circumstances that might enable you to take bigger-than-usual strides towards realizing common priorities. It is being aware of the obstacles and opportunities today so you are ready to act when the storms break and the lay-of-the-land shifts, weakening those obstacles and providing those with a vision of the future a path for realizing it. That’s because everyone who has weathered the storm wants to put the pieces back together and is unusually receptive to putting it all back together in some better way.
 
Realizing your particular work ethic in times of crisis has almost nothing to do with luck but everything to do with your mindset and plans. It’s having a vision of the better future that you want, keeping your eye on that goal line as the game degenerates into chaos, and, when everyone is finally able to listen, inviting your fellow survivors to help in rebuilding something that you’re convinced will be more durable and sustainable than all of you had before. At such times, aligning your personal priorities with a higher, common purpose will not only be satisfying for you, it can also make changes that seem impossible today, possible tomorrow.
 
My priorities (in search of this broader resonance) would include the following:
 
Thriving workers, families and communities.  Most of us have jobs as citizens of democratic countries with capitalist economies. We regularly make our preferences known by choosing leaders who share our priorities. As citizens during unsettled times, what kinds of change would we support and priorities would we pursue?
 
In large part because “thriving workers” are the foundation for other kinds of positive change (such as reducing income inequality, gaining affordable health-care and safeguarding the environment in our communities), I’ll be looking for leaders with the courage to say they are foregoing other “hot button” reforms to invest in retraining today’s workforce for a more automated world; to support trade buffers so that workers here don’t lose their jobs to cheap foreign labor when they’re compensated more fairly or work under safer conditions; and to support new public policies like bolstering the economic security of low-wage workers by supplementing their incomes through payroll deposits, thereby encouraging their continued work and improving their chances to start building wealth for their families and communities.
 
We don’t hear politicians making hard choices between costly alternatives.  Or willing to make the engines of capitalism more democratically-driven by ensuring that working men and women have a larger seat at the table with business owners. In the wake of the economic storm that’s coming, there will be many citizen-driven opportunities to support leaders who are eager to rebuild the future on the backs of thriving workers, while admitting that to realize that goal means putting many other goals on a back burner. It should also be a bi-partisan issue. As citizens, our focus and support can help them to accomplish this one important thing as the political process bottoms out and it struggles to identify new, common goals.
 
Environmental stewardship. As Alain de Botton argues persuasively (and often amusingly) in The Pleasures & Sorrows of Work it can be difficult to understand the wide-ranging impacts of your paying job given the global supply chains that feed it and the distribution networks that bring your “goods or services” to consumers. Difficult yes, but hardly impossible.  Among many other things, De Botton invites us to learn more about the consequences of our work, both for better and for worse. I’d argue that when we do, we’ll be able to see “how we can work better in the future” in a common light that includes “greater environmental stewardship.”
 
Is the product I’m selling or helping to sell, is the service I’m providing and the ways I’m providing it, improving the health of the planet or reducing it? Raising consciousness in the workplace about an issue like environmental stewardship provides opportunities for alignment with others–including  bosses and even owners—who may share your concerns. The accelerating storm of today’s climate debate and the quest to find our way out of it will likely present many opportunities to change business practices (and even nudge them in groundbreaking directions) where we work. 
 
Righting the balance between people and profits. Connecting your paid work to its wider-world impacts is not just limited to environmental stewardship. As global economies get roiled and we begin to look beyond these upheavals, we can be thinking now about how our jobs can provide greater benefits to us and our communities and not simply about how we can assist business owners in becoming profitable again. To ensure that you and I are not merely helping to restore the profit-dominated status quo after the next recession, we could be learning now how to connect our labor to “more of its fruits” than higher corporate dividends. 
 
As I argued last March, administrators of a global education test are using that test to assess independent thinking, collaborative problem-solving and building better communities. On the theory that we “treasure what we measure,” students globally are now building these aptitudes in their classrooms because they will ultimately be tested on them.

By the same token, employers could assess (and reward) their employees–and be assessed themselves–for “aptitudes” beyond profit-making, including their success at tying company productivity to greater community benefits. For example, workers could push their companies to retain them (even with reduced hours) instead of firing them during economic downturns because policies like this maintain stable communities, or to take less profit from a product or service if it will keep a job here instead of losing it to a foreign worker. Moreover, employees who can demonstrate that they have strengthened the company-community bond would be rewarded for doing so. 
 
The groundswell for this broader focus needs to come from forward-looking employees as well as executives and owners, and the time to be thinking about more community-oriented work assessments and broader exercises of corporate responsibility is now.
 
After we’ve weathered the next downturn, are looking for better ways forward and desiring greater corporate accountability for common problems—that’s when you can stand up with your new way to determine economic success.

That’s when you can argue that what’s good for the company needs to be good for the community too, and that the economic fallout might be reduced next time if the broader community were part of the equation from the start.  

That’s when you can gain even more pride and satisfaction than is usually available when you help to solve common, work-related problems, because now you’re helping to humanize the foundations of democratic capitialism itself.

+ + +

We are far enough today from the economic recession that began in 2008 to gain at least a measure of historical perspective.  Two new books are arguing that Barrack Obama was so eager to restore economic stability and the health of the American banking industry that he failed to “use” this crisis (as FDR had used the Depression) to seek fundamental—and to these authors—necessary changes to the country’s economic policies. 
 
For example, in the course of re-building America’s way out of the last recession, they observe that Obama (like Clinton before him) never challenged the economic imbalance between the corporations and ordinary working people that had been a hallmark of the Democratic Party from the 1930s through the 1980s. When it came to punishing wrongdoing, Obama refused to insist that the bankers who had profited from the bubble they had created in the housing market be held accountable. When it came to economic initiatives like the Affordable Care Act, he favored market solutions over government policies and direct interventions (unlike the alphabet soup of initiatives during the Thirties or The Great Society programs of the Sixties).
 
According to Reed Hundt’s Crisis Wasted (out last April) and Matt Stoller’s Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (coming in mid-October), Obama sought to preserve the pro-business status quo rather than rectify the economic imbalance that disadvantaged workers, families and communities while benefiting the American business owners who held (and continue to hold) a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth.
 
I agree with them that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and that the last one was a string of opportunities neither taken nor pursued. None of us should be willing to waste the next one.

+ + +

I’m defining a “crisis” here as a ground-deep unsettling of prior certainties. A political/economic/environmental/moral crisis tends to prove that “the ways we used to do it” are no longer working and, for a brief window of attention and opportunity, regular people are willing to explore (and even support) both different and better ways forward. It’s why from the perspective of our work, we need to be ready with arguments, data, plans, hope and visions for the better world that each of us wants when that window finally opens.
 
We don’t need to agree on the changes. (The bold-faced objectives above just happen to be some of mine). But I’d argue that all of us need to be active parts of the conversation, even when it’s full of anxiety and has a fevered pitch. Because it’s when your work really can “change the world” and when the personal satisfactions and sense of purpose that come with it can be similarly transformative.  
 
In 2016, a group of forward thinkers who were clustered around the University of Sussex in the UK created educational materials for anyone who is interested in seizing the opportunities of a world in flux. Those materials begin with powerful examples from history where:
 
– radical changes occurred in disruptive times that would not have been possible otherwise;
 
– to nearly everyone’s surprise, immediate changes were accepted by the public fairly rapidly; and 
 
– longer-term improvements followed, with some expected and others exceeding expectations.
 
The Sussex materials also describe how, in a host of practical ways, change-agents can capitalize on the opportunities crisis presents and maintain forward momentum. 
 
There is a broader discussion of their approach and a link to additional materials here.  If you’re interested in readying yourself to take full advantage of the opportunities after our gathering storms break and the re-building begins, I think you’ll find their approach empowering. 
 
Our work can always be aligned with deep motivations and high purposes, but the rewards are never more satisfying than when you’re helping to build a better world out of one that may be ending.

This post was adapted from my September 29, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Making Our Jobs as Big (or as Small) as Possible

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We bring our priorities into our work–making it more purposeful and satisfying–by using our capabilities more deliberately and by demonstrating our values when we do our jobs.

Our basic “capabilities” include our personal autonomy (or the drive to realize our gifts) and our generosity (or encouraging the autonomy of others who are touched by our work, from co-workers to bosses, customers, suppliers and the broader community that supports our efforts). 

Our “values” are moral intuitions (or feelings) that frame our experiences and help us decide how we should respond to them. Examples include freedom, fairness, equality, personal security, an ordered life or the sanctity of living things. For each one of us, some values more than others provide quick, intuitive signals that guide us as we try to figure out how to interact with the world around us. 

Work is more satisfying when it engages our capabilities and serves our values, because they are among our most basic priorities. 

When talking about these ideas, people often ask me: “On a practical level, how do I align my priorities with the work that I do everyday?”  It’s often followed by a second question: “What if my employer’s priorities are different from mine—won’t this put us at odds with one another?”  My quick answers are as follows. 

Alignment of personal priorities with job priorities usually comes down to your mindset: how you see yourself in that job. Is it doing the bare minimum, “staying within your lines” and keeping your eye on the clock so you can leave for home after you’ve put in your time OR do you pour yourself into that job, finding opportunities for your priorities either within or right along side the priorities of whomever you’re working for? In other words, how hard are you trying to find more satisfaction in every job that you do?

Sometimes these alignments are nearly impossible, as in my recent post about gig-economy workers at Uber and Amazon. At each of these companies, the capabilities of their ride-hailing and delivery drivers are being exploited instead of respected. Uber’s and similar companies’ business models depend on offloading as much risk and cost onto their workers as possible. These workers’ recourse? They have to look to governments (like California’s) to safeguard their basic priorities on the job, leave those jobs altogether, or tamp down these basic drives because their economic necessities override the personal costs. 

On the other hand, in many jobs it is both possible and desirable to align your priorities with those of your employers and others who benefit from your work. It is what organizational psychologists have called “job-crafting.”  When you bring a suitable mindset to your job—when you ask, “how much instead of how little can I make out of it?”—many jobs become opportunities to build more satisfaction, and even fulfillment, into your hours spent working.

After elaborating on job-crafting and my own take on it, I’ll share some fateful testimony from two practitioners of “this highly practical art” from an interview I overheard while on the road earlier this week.

The Opportunity to Job-Craft More Rewards Into Your Work

Amy Wrzesniewski, a psychologist at Yale’s School of Management was talking about job crafting on a terrific podcast called Hidden Brain this week. I hadn’t heard this episode, but a regular reader wrote me about it (thanks Joe!) and listening reminded me of how long so-called industrial psychologists (who study our behaviors and expectations around work) have been tinkering with the boundaries of our jobs and the perceptions we bring into them.
 
Take (as Wrzesniewski did) a janitorial job cleaning a hospital. Let’s also assume two different men filling that job:  I’ll call them J and B. Both were hired to show up at regular times and keep the floors and available surfaces in their parts of the hospital clean. With the tools and working hours available, they can clean everything they’re responsible for in their 5-day workweeks. The following Monday, J and B each start the same circuit over again.
 
Let’s assume that J always does what’s expected of him without complaint, but rarely does more than is required. Viewing his job as a paycheck, he’s hardly fulfilled by it. Instead of satisfaction at the end of a workday, he’s more likely to feel a tinge of resentment, that it’s beneath him to clean up after other people, but he needs the income so he puts up with the indignity and has done so for twenty years. J rarely interacts with the hospital staff or patients, although he understands that keeping the place clean contributes to the overall mission of the hospital, which is to help people to stay alive and hopefully get well.
 
B couldn’t see his job more differently. Feeling that he’s part of a team improving patient outcomes, B regularly makes a point to give a cheerful word to patients he’s noticed have few visitors, will go the extra mile to clean parts of his area that no one else seems to be getting to, and gives staff members he’s known for much of his working life words of encouragement when he senses that they’re feeling down. Unlike J, B connects his job to something bigger than himself—promoting the health of everyone who is around him everyday—and goes home with both satisfaction and pride that he’s contributed to the hospital’s mission along with a paycheck from it. 
 
B accomplished this by “job-crafting” the way he sees his work and the importance of it in the broader scheme of things. From my perspective on work, he has also engaged both his capabilities and his values when it comes to service and community in order to gain additional rewards from it. As podcast host Shankar Vedantum put it, there are people who quit their jobs when they win the lottery and others who still want to work. B might keep working because the rewards he brings home aren’t just monetary ones. 
 
After 25 years of studies in the psychology journals—from scholars like Arnold Bakker, Maria Tims and Justin Berg as well as Wrzesniewski—there seem to be three different approaches that workers take when “crafting their jobs.” Sometimes they rearrange how they characterize their job responsibilities, emphasizing certain aspects over others. Is a chef simply cooking a meal that her customers will keep paying for or is it far more important to her that she’s creating plates that are pleasing to the eye and producing delightful experiences for friends who keep coming back? One is a successful economic exchange while the others are more than just that.
 
A second approach focuses not on the end product but the interactions that help to produce it along the way. Instead of B deriving meaning from making the floors shine, he finds it in those interactions with patients, visitors and staff along the way.
 
The last approach is how you see yourself on the job. J would say, “I am a janitor” or define himself apart from this job altogether if asked “what do you do?” B on the other hand might say proudly, “I am an ambassador for the university health system, creating an environment that promotes the healing process,” and really mean it.
 
In a post from last February, I made an argument that uses terminology from economics and ethics instead of psychology to try and prove a similar point. When you take responsibility for your job satisfaction and don’t expect somebody else to provide it, you act like a stakeholder instead of an employee.  Because job satisfaction is important to you, you collaborate to solve work-related problems that involve everyone (co-workers, suppliers etc.) and everything (like the communities and environments) that your work impacts. The compensations that follow are always more than the paycheck attached to your job description, because you’re consistently investing your effort into yielding a more satisfying job experience by addressing what’s important to you and to others.

I’m Bringing You More Than Tomorrow’s Weather

In a week that was dominated by students demanding that older generations take bolder steps to ensure that they have a livable planet in their future, it’s worth noting that most people still fail to recognize that rapid global warming is one of the most important problems confronting them. Until a proper majority engages with this problem politically, policy makers will simply avoid taking the necessary actions. Perhaps no American workers see the need to engage more of the public—while also having the ability to engage people effectively–than the men and women who bring tomorrow’s weather to millions of people who have little scientific background or knowledge in their communities.
 
When I overheard on the radio a conversation with two meteorologists a couple of days ago, it was clear that these weather reporters (along with increasing numbers of their colleagues) are engaging the public on the imperatives of climate change by grounding their daily reports or 5-day forecasts in statistical evidence that goes back (or extends forward) 20 or even 100 years where they and their viewers live. 
 
They might ask: how many unusually hot days did we use to have in July or unusually destructive storms in September, and how many are we having now–before providing the relevant numbers. These men and women are accustomed to explaining climate-related information to non-scientists—so they’ve already developed more skills and gained more trust than perhaps anyone, in any other line of work, when it comes to placing the recent developments involving weather and climate in a meaningful, scientific context. Moreover, by sticking to hard data and avoiding political “calls to arms,” they are building audience knowledge and engagement while maintaining their impartiality.
 
When these meteorologists make the deliberate effort to locate today’s weather in a much larger story (instead of just sticking with whether their listeners need to bring umbrellas to work tomorrow), they are “job crafting” or “taking responsibility for common, work-related problems” far beyond the media contracts that they’ve negotiated. In other words, they could easily “get by with less” but refuse to do so. Both interviewees made clear how much providing a broader context for their weather reports was enhancing their job satisfaction. It was also clear how much of an impact they and a growing number of their colleagues are having when they engage the public with a problem that has long been too difficult for most non-scientists to understand.
 
Mike Nelson, the chief meteorologist at ABC 7 in Denver, and Amber Sullins, in the same role at ABC 15 in Phoenix, both see themselves as providing this bridge. Each realized that they needed to locate their weather reports in a climate-change context when they were confronted with new generations (Sullins having a daughter and Nelson a grand child). Nelson explained that even with only a few minutes on air, telling a broader or deeper story than tomorrow’s weather “is not as difficult as you might think.” If he knows in advance that his producer has a story about the fire season or current drought, he can work in an “explainer” about the 2-degree increase in temperatures in Rocky Mountain National Park over the past century or how ,at this rate of increase, the “climate in Denver in the next 50 to 70 years will be more like Albuquerque, New Mexico.” Sullin does much the same for her viewers when she explains the 115 degree day today by noting that prior to 1960, there were only 7 days this hot every 20 years, while in the current 20-year period, there have been 42 of them. They’re providing viewers with some relevant facts and leaving it to them to figure out what to do about the picture they paint.
 
Nelson says there is occasional blowback even though he sticks “to physical science instead of political science.” But he adds that for every complaint or attempt “to bully him,” there are 20 audience members expressing their gratitude. Since people are inviting him into their living rooms, he feels it’s “his responsibility” to tell them the whole story. Sullins also feels she is building an additional level of trust with her audience, explaining how the positive feedback she gets from emails and Facebook posts are continuing and broadening the conversation. As viewer’s grapple with the issues, she sees “more wheels spinning in their heads” and their pursuit of even more information. Both Nelson and Sullins are actively working with new meteorologists too so they can learn how to provide this broader context in their weather reports and avoid having their new careers derailed by a political backlash. More than “weather reporters,” Nelson and Sullin see themselves as “educators” of both their audiences and their younger colleagues.

+  +  + 

 In a post of mine last May called “How to Engage Hearts and Change Minds in the Global Warming Debate,” much of the answer seemed to depend on how much those hearts and minds trusted the messenger who brought them the information.  According to one poll I cited, that need for trust comes from the fact that only 60% of Americans think that global warming will affect the US, only 40% believe that it will affect them personally and 2/3rds never talk with anyone else about what lies ahead. Addressing climate change is still not on most people’s list of priorities, but letting trusted people “in their living rooms” to talk about it could change that.

As long as a group trusts you enough to ‘give you the floor and listen to what you have to say,’ you’ll likely engage them in your argument when it’s grounded in your values, demonstrates your care about where the group is headed, and provides a glimpse of a better future for all of you if you succeed in persuading them.

Meteorologists are “job crafting” their weather reporting and “taking responsibility” for educating their viewers who have found “what’s at stake” and “what can be done about it” difficult to understand until now. They are bringing their already trusted voices to a broader definition of their current jobs because it’s filling them with pride and they know that by doing so they could be making all the difference in the world. 

+ + +

Notes:  I just started publishing some of my weekly posts on Medium, an on-line opinion network, and my recent post on Uber drivers and Amazon packages was featured by its Business and Economy editors this week. Stories on Medium are usually available behind a paywall, but it you want to see my post or check out the site, here is a link that will get you there for free. (Of course, it would be much appreciated if you give it a quick read and check out the new pictures when you visit!)

This post was adapted from my September 22, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

We Find Where We Stand in the Space Between Differing Perspectives

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When you hear an argument on Tuesday and its opposing argument on Thursday, it’s always a challenge to arrange a further date where you can line them up at opposite sides of the room while you sit in the middle to figure out what you think and feel about the issue. Rescheduling your attention like this always seems to get lost in the shuffle.
 
On the other hand, the opportunity to listen, process and react almost immediately to opposing points of view is what can make live debate and virtual encounters with discordant perspectives both clarifying and satisfying.  
 
They may also be ways to move beyond the polarizing shouting matches that characterize much of American democracy today.
 
When an issue “gets joined” you can figure out where you stand either on the spot or while continuing the conversation with yourself and others immediately thereafter. All you have to do is build this new information and its subtleties into your own perspective once you’ve had the chance to sleep on it. 
 
When it comes to processlng opposing views, time compression seems critical. Being part of a live audience interacting with live “actors” or encountering real people in a virtual world is too. Another factor is your decision “to make yourself available to their persuasion” by the physical act of showing up, something you rarely do when you’re watching people testify on the other side of a screen. On each of these “live” or “almost alive” occasions, you’ve chosen to immerse yourself in a world of different perspectives where you’re open to changing your mind. 
 
A final factor is also critical. Theater that is built on counterpoint stories and virtual worlds that make us confront our own preconceptions are jarring experiences. Both demand that your thoughts and feelings connect across a broader waterfront than you recognized before. They challenge moral certainties and provide building blocks you can use immediately to construct a more nuanced point of view. Their wake-up calls can often make you behave differently too—impacting the jobs you do as community members or citizens. They offer highy engaging ways to figure out where you stand and what to do next.
 
All of these dynamics were apparent in a recent theater production in Portland Oregon, where actors playing members of the community and its local police force held the stage in front of an audience from that same community, told their distinctive stories and changed some minds.
 
Similar changes in perception became evident when people put on the virtual reality (VR) headsets that were recently developed by a California company. VR technology can take you places and put you among people you may think you know about until you are literally walking among them at Rikers Island prison, on the US-Mexico border, or in a Syrian refugee camp. 
 
What used to seem black and white and came cloaked in moral certainties can be shaken into reconsideration by these “live” or “virtually alive” experiences. Abstraction and over-simplification are no longer quite as possible when issues that we thought we understood have faces. Once we’ve learned more and have the experience to know better, we may no longer wish to view ourselves (or be viewed by others) as being so cold in our certainties or so removed from the blood, sweat and tears of most people’s lives.
 
Do these kinds of experiences offer a way to move past the knee-jerk polarities that undermine our collective purpose? 
 
Are they vehicles for helping at least some of the undecided and disengaged in this country to make up their minds and help build a future that they want instead of leaving their prospects to others?

Finding Shared Human Perspectives While Looking At and Listening To One Another

The chasms between diverse communities and the police who are charged with protecting them yawn widely across America. In Portland, some creatives in the performing arts and forward-thinkers in law enforcement came together to try and reduce them. Their approach: a stage adaptation of the dueling perspectives, only this time with several rarely heard points of view along the stark divide—including the witness provided by minority police officers who, in more ways than one, have come to embody it.
 
Much of this story about perspective building in the community, and all but one of the quotes here, come from a PBS NewsHour segment that ran on the same day in August that New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo was fired for his involvement in subduing Eric Garner, an arrest that ended in Garner’s death.
 
Kevin Jones and Lesli Mones founded the August Wilson Red Door Project, a theater company, to provide a platform for addressing issues of importance to the City’s African American residents. The other driving force in this story is Robert Day, the former deputy chief of the Portland Police Bureau. Jones and Mones asked him to gather perspectives from policemen who serve in minority neighborhoods like theirs and he pursued their invitation with relish. 
 
What ultimately came together in one performance were a series of monologues from two different plays. “Hands Up” was written by African Americans about their experiences being racially profiled by police. “Cop Out” tells the stories of individual police officers when they are wearing their uniforms as well as the lingering effects after they take them off. 
 
Jones and Mones each described the intent behind bringing witnesses from both perspectives onto a single stage. Said Jones:

We’re not dividing the story into two sides, right, the good guys and bad guys. On both sides, we have a group of people who feel that their stories are not being told, that they’re being vilified, that they’re being shunned, that — and nobody wants to really hear their story.

For her part, Mones addressed early criticism she’d heard from the African-American community in an earlier interview with the Portland Mercury:

From a social power perspective, you can’t compare the experiences of the two groups of people. But from a shared human perspective, the feeling of being unseen, depersonalized, and stereotyped is something both groups can relate to. It’s in the DNA of Red Door to honor a multiplicity of viewpoints, because we know it’s imperative in producing a healthy racial ecology for the community.

Four excerpts from the monologues suggest the power of this “shared” and “deeply human” approach.

– Community member:  ‘They slammed me to the ground. One of the officers had his foot on the back of my neck. Another officer pointed a gun to the back of my head and said, ‘Move one inch and I will blow your head off.’ Oh, I went into survival mode. I tried to convince them I was one of the good ones.’
 
` Policeman: ‘I used to think nothing about being a cop would shake me up. But when you arrive on scene and watch your partner pull an infant out of a microwave because his meth head father couldn’t stop the kid from crying, your lens gets colored.’
 
– [A community member asks everyone in the audience to raise their arms in the air]:
 
A voice representing the police: ‘Hands up.’
 
Members of the community: ‘Don’t shoot.’
 
A voice representing the police: ‘Hands up.’
 
Members of the community: ‘Don’t shoot.’
 
-Policewoman: ‘The only reason I carry a gun if for protection, primarily mine, sometimes yours, sometimes, in highly specific circumstances, like an active shooter, or –no, that’s about it.’

The theater company is hoping to take performances of these combined monologues across the country, starting later this year. However, the fundraising and logistical hurdles that need to be surmounted before the show can hit the road are daunting. But no one provides a better reason for persevering than former deputy police chief Day:

We’re touching on sort of the third rail conversations of race and policing. And I think they are conversations that are happening in African-American families in homes and communities, and I know they’re happening in police communities, because I have heard them, been a part of them, I have seen them.
 
But they’re not happening publicly, and they’re not happening generally across from each other, because of the sort of high-voltage nature of them. So, the theater allows us to put it all out there. We can speak what has been left unsaid.

Only when “it’s all out there” and being processed by the folks in the audience who are most impacted by it can there be any hope of actually “seeing the other,” identifying shared objectives, and pursing them together.

The Issues Are No Longer Vague. They Feel Like Lived Experiences

With VR or virtual reality, the divides aren’t personified on a stage and the processing doesn’t begin when you’re seated in front of it. Everything you need for your views to be jarred into a broader perspective is brought into the perceptual space “between your ears” by this advanced technology. 

Emblematic is a VR studio that was founded by Nonny de la Pena and is based in Santa Monica. De la Pena was profiled as one of 2018’s top innovators by the Wall Street Journal, both for developing groundbreaking VR technology that enables you to feel like you’re moving through a real space (instead of just standing in it) and for the rationale behind her inventiveness.

The author of the profile explained her intentions this way:

The idea is to put people in places they wouldn’t normally find themselves, experiencing situations they would not normally experience. Often, these are related to urgent issues, issues that are, in their sprawling complexity, seemingly difficult to grasp or even care about. But suddenly, there you are, standing in a cell in solitary confinement, or at the foot of a melting glacier, or before a protest line outside an abortion clinic. When you are in these places—hearing the anguish of a prisoner, the calving of a glacier, the vitriol of the protesters—the issues no longer seem like issues, with vague names attached, like prison reform or global warming or women’s health. Rather, they seem like lived experience, like people you’ve met and places you’ve been—like memory.

Within Emblematic’s VR headsets, the perspective you’ve brought with you is jarred by the unfamiliar in “real” time and you’re invited to start responding immediately to the flood of new information that’s washing over you. Particularly when you enter environments with other people in them, it feels like you are entering a reality as it’s being lived by someone else, providing unprecedented opportunities for connection and empathy.  
 
Before you put the headset on, you also know where you’re going and have made yourself available to broaden and deepen your point of view. You find a new place to stand in the neurological mindspace between your thoughts and feelings about this issue before and the virtual experience that you’re having now. As long as it’s programmed as an exercise of free will, this technology can help you to make up your mind or intensify your most important commitments.
 
Unlike the challenges of putting the “Hands Up/Cop Out” show on the road, the financial and logistical challenges for de la Pena and Emblematic are likely making their technology cheap enough and portable enough that it can someday travel on its own to wherever people are undecided or simply want to know more. They (and other monitors) will also need to mind the gap between its use for illuminating an increasingly complex world and simply manipulating our reactions to it.
 
Sometimes, groundbreaking innovations like de la Pena’s have their roots in childhood, and so it is with the story of how she first learned the value of differing perspectives–even when one of them is hers. The Journal’s profile of her actually begins with it:

When Nonny de la Peña was in junior high, in West Los Angeles, her math teacher wrote a note home to her parents. ‘It was about something I’d rebelliously done,’ she says. ‘It was something minor, like speaking up, or speaking too loudly.’ Her father read the note, then turned the paper over and looked at her. ‘This is what she says you do, he said to me,’ de la Peña recalls. ‘Tell me about her. What does she do?’  De la Peña listed some of her own unflattering observations about the teacher, and her father wrote them down on the back of the note, so that now the piece of paper contained two notes, two different perspectives. Then her father signed it. ‘So what does that make you do? Of course [says de la Pena], it makes you think about the structure of things…. Of how situations are multidimensional.’

Her father knew, and early on it seems that she came to know too, that the truth can usually be found somewhere in the space between perspectives.

+ + +

I’ve written before about the space “where we can make up our reasonable minds” because I’m concerned (and sometimes alarmed) about how our demonizing of those we disagree with has disabled us from building anything of consequence in America today. It also comes from how others’ “not caring enough to have points of view” further undermines “what those who do care enough” hold in common. These sentiments were behind my post on the remarkable public exchange between two academic friends, the left-leaning Cornel West and the right-leaning Robert George, and what we all gain (but seldom enjoy today) from politically charged conversations, as well as another about the clarifying nature of dissent.
 
These arguments (and the one today) feel personal to me.

When I abandon my reasoned points of view, or don’t bother to come up with them anymore, I cede control of my future and my family’s future to somebody who may know less and care less. As long as I hold this right and it has not been taken away from me by those who want to control my mind, I’d be a fool not to exercise it.

Where I decide to stand and what I decide to do about it in the work I do and the way I live are among the most valuable contributions that I can make to myself and others. As long as it’s mine, I’ll continue to find the space for evolving my perspectives because it’s part of feeling alive.
 
This post was adapted from my September 15, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Maybe Uber Drivers Can Handle Amazon Deliveries Too

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These days it seems like companies are pawning off as many risks, costs and responsibilities on workers as they can get away with. It’s particularly apparent among new gig-economy workers like Uber and Amazon drivers. The on-going transfer of economic burdens from companies to workers is a principal reason why many (and maybe most) Americans feel economically vulnerable today. 

At its heart, this is an ethical problem. Where do flourishing workers (families and communities) fall on our list of national and local priorities? Until very recently, the answer was “pretty low,” which is a key reason why there was such widespread discontent around the 2016 election and why it continues to unsettle our next one. Too many Americans feel that the economic security they have painstakingly built for themselves is being assaulted from all sides.

Since the 1980’s, government policies have massively favored businesses over workers, families and communities. This is simply a fact.

That preferential treatment includes policies that dictate who (between companies and individuals) pays and does not pay taxes, and how much each one of them pays. It includes lax enforcement policies that have enabled our most innovative companies (like Google, Facebook and Amazon) to achieve marketplace dominance by eliminating their competition and, in effect, operate however they want. It is also explained by the declining counterweight of organized labor and (until this year) by open trade policies that found the cost of an American worker directly competing with the cost a similar worker in China, Vietnam or Bangladesh. 

The net of these (and similar) forces over the past 50 years is that each American worker has been progressively owning a smaller and smaller share of the nation’s wealth given how little she’s compensated for her labor, while also being asked to pay more than she should for many “goods and services” in our consumer-driven economy. In other words, she’s being squeezed at both ends.

It’s hardly a recipe for flourishing workers, or for the families and communities across America that depend on them to thrive. 

Given the on-going, anti-workforce trend, I’m not being entirely facetious when I suggest that Uber drivers could be asked tomorrow to handle Amazon deliveries too. When all that we seem to care about is maximizing an Uber’s or an Amazon’s profits, an additional demand like this on gig-economy workers hardly seems out of the question. Why not pile even more onto them?

No wonder the social fabric feels like it is unraveling on the backs of the individuals (like you and me) whose strength it depends on at least as much as the companies that have organized and rallied us in profit-making directions.

         The Shift of Risks, Costs and Responsibilities to Workers Continues

Recent stories about workers at Amazon and Uber illustrate the exploitation and vulnerability that are all-too-familiar by-products of working in America today. Not only is there little-to-no safety net around these and other gig-economy workers; but more and more economic risk is continuously shoved onto them by companies that champion profits over paying their workers enough to provide the bare necessities for their families.

If you drive for Uber (or for one of the other car service companies) you’re probably no longer surprised when your passenger wants you to take him to the hospital with a medical emergency. According to a recent University of Kansas study and several recent podcasts picking up on it, Uber cars are commonly used as ambulances because in many parts of the country, taking an ambulance to the ER is not covered by health insurance and can run into the thousands of dollars. As a result, Uber drivers are being called upon to shoulder the financial responsibility (as well as the stress) of ferrying people who are often in extremis to emergency rooms across America. Of course, they never come close to recouping these psychological and risk-laden “costs” in their ride-hailing fees.

A mid-August op-ed in the Wall Street Journal describes another way that Uber drivers end up paying in ways they never contemplated. Few of these drivers appreciate that they are failing to recoup anything that even approximates the depreciation in value that comes from using their private cars—an amount the authors calculate at $11 billion a year, and another burden that Uber is off-loading onto its workers.

Once drivers understand that they are liquidating the value of their vehicles, in effect receiving pay-day loans with their cars as collateral, the effects may be significant. Companies like Uber, Lyft, Grubhub and Door-Dash may find it more difficult to recruit and retain drivers unless they raise prices and pay drivers more.

Another recent article decried how Amazon has exempted itself from any financial responsibility for its drivers who get in car accidents while they are making deliveries to Amazon’s customers. It is the delivery-driver’s car insurance (and his rising premiums) not Amazon’s that bear this expense. Under a clause in the driver’s contract, company profits are shielded from liability for personal injuries and property damage during the company’s delivery-related accidents. Of course many if not most drivers fail to realize that they have “accepted” this responsibility until it’s too late.
 
This summer, journalists at the New York Times also focused  on the working conditions at Amazon’s cavernous regional warehouses, where its employees toil side-by-side with increasingly nimble robots to ensure that the book or toiletry you ordered gets into the right box. One terrifying down-side in this “who’s more efficient, the human or the machine?” type of workspace, is the extent to which live employees are monitored down to the minute in the quest for almost robot-like efficiency throughout their shifts. In addition, because many fear that their jobs will be replaced by their robotic co-workers one day, they strive to meet an automaton’s level of performance to demonstrate their continuing value as employees.

Ironically, these Amazon warehouses are called “fulfillment centers,” but certainly not for the men and women who are becoming stressed out and broken down by working in them. Moreover, when considered in light of “morally acceptable work standards,” it seems fair to ask whether “free” deliveries, “same day” deliveries and customer convenience can be justified when the worker (family and community) costs are this high. 
 
Beyond Uber and Amazon, all of us are either moving from work towards retirement or have already retired. That’s what makes the next story—about home health workers—both heartwarming and chilling. 
 
Mostly women and often minority women, home health workers are the caregivers for millions of people who are still living at home but find themselves burdened by illness, disability or advanced age. These are “whatever-is-required” kinds of jobs, including feeding, bathing, administering medication, providing companionship and ensuring their clients’ personal safety and integrity. Home health workers are literally sustaining people’s lives, yet they struggle as a group to receive “a living wage” in exchange for their long hours and humanitarian service. 
 
As more people live to advanced age but want to avoid long-tern care facilities by staying at home, these health workers will be in even greater demand, but even the groups that are most likely to need their services are not calling for them to receive adequate pay. I, for one, would not want to hope that I’ll receive compassion when my caregiver isn’t being respected enough or paid enough to provide it. But still, according to the reporters in this story, most of these home health workers are, in fact, providing it. That means these women are, in essence, receiving pay-day loans with their human decency as collateral so that the health care companies that employ them can make as much money as possible. It’s one more shameful tradeoff.
 
Many American workers are also parents providing for their children. But according to a New York Times story last week, 67% of the 1000 parents surveyed said they had gone into debt to buy their children necessary items such as food, clothes and food, and 69% of them said that they kept these child-related debts a secret. 
 
Part of the reason that the economic insecurity of many (if not most) Americans has stayed below the radar is that many (if not most) Americans are either too proud to talk about it or too embarrassed to admit that they’ve failed to realize the American Dream. But their anxiety is real. It is manifest in our politics, and the full extent of the problem will (quite literally) “come home to roost” when the nation enters more turbulent economic waters or we find ourselves in the next recession.

It’s time to strengthen the social fabric with sound economic policies

While we have been victimized as “workers” and “families” by 50 years of government policies that have mostly favored business, we have also been victimized as “consumers,” right down to today.
 
This country functions on the proposition that we will bring our paychecks home, pay for our families’ necessities, and spend much of the rest buying what our consumer-oriented companies produce. Well, it turns out that in many instances we are overpaying as consumers too.

Because policy makers have largely failed to ensure healthy competition between companies through strategic application of the anti-trust laws, several companies in rapidly growing sectors of the economy have achieved near total market dominance—and the pricing power that comes with it. In other words, in an uncompetitive marketplace, dominant companies can charge consumers more (and sometimes far more) for their goods and services than they could in a more competitive one. This appears to be the case in the market for cell-phone plans.
 
In recent decades, regulators have allowed the cell phone service market in the US to consolidate. As recently as a few months ago, regulators allowed T-Mobile and Sprint to merge, reducing what little competition there had been even further. Well, a Wall Street Journal column this week highlighted a recent study showing that Americans, on average, pay 27% more than their French counterparts for cell phone service. The difference between the US and France is that the French enjoy a far more competitive market for these kinds of plans. On the other hand, when you allow markets to consolidate and grow un-competitive (as the US has done) higher prices are one of the consequences, but not the one one for individuals. As the study’s author notes:

declining competition has raised profit margins [for companies] and prices [for consumers] while reducing workers’ share of national income in the U.S.  By contrast, the labor share [of France’s and the rest of the EU’s economic prosperity] has remained constant in Europe.

What this means is that our piece of the economic pie as workers has also been reduced by the lack of competition at the very same time that the prices we pay as consumers are higher, and sometimes much higher than if there were more, say, telecommunications companies competing for our business.
 
All of this adds up to economically vulnerable and anxious Americans, whether they are viewed as workers, parents, community members or consumers.

While focusing on gig-economy workers in particular, a recent post here argued for “re-bundling” benefits around them to account for their occasional unemployment or uneven income streams, their loss of traditional health and retirement benefits, and their inability to obtain financing without a traditional 9-to-5 job. To the extent that these “new economy” jobs are likely to become even more plentiful as automation replaces “old economy” jobs, the wide-spread absence of a safety net like this threatens social stability and cohesion. But as the stories above suggest, the anxiety and economic insecurity is hardly limited to gig-ecocomy workers. Instead, it affects nearly all but the very richest Americans. 
 
The good news in this troubling story is that the imbalance may finally have begun to right itself.

A New Political Force for Workers and Consumers?

There are reasons for cautious optimism because of a recent action from within the business community. Last month, the Business Roundtable, comprised of the CEOs of America’s largest companies, issued what it called A Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.

In a sharp break with the past, this Statement expressed a “fundamental commitment” to all of a company’s stakeholders: putting employees, suppliers and communities on a pedestal that once belonged only to the company’s investors (or shareholders). On “investing in employees,” the Statement said:

This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits. It also includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. . . Each of our stakeholders is essential. We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.

If a core group of America’s most prominent business leaders (181 of them, in fact) makes good on this Statement, it will not be for altruistic reasons alone. A comment at the time in Axios which was called “CEO’s Are America’s New Politicians” lists several of the reasons that following through with corrective policies would be in these companies’ best interests too and not just a paternalistic gesture. Among other things:

–  Millennial employees demand their employers stand for something beyond profit;
 
–  It is getting harder to recruit and retain talent, especially tech talent, if profit is the only objective;
 
–  A rising number of consumers make purchasing decisions based on a company’s social purpose;
 
–  The media applies a lot more pressure on CEOs to take positions on political topics, such as race and immigration;
 
–  Every CEO/company is vulnerable to split-second, social media uprisings. Undefined CEOs and companies find it impossible to push back. 

The Roundtable’s corporate leaders are also aware that the desirability of “the capitalist system” that they safeguard is itself being debated in the run up to the next election. And finally, many of them seem to realize that acting on the Statement’s promises is the right thing to do given the imbalances that have grown between their companies and Amerca’s workers/ consumers over the past 50 years.  
 
What advocates for a flourishing workforce (and the families and communities they support) need to do is hold these corporate leaders to their noble sounding but still generalized promises. This business community needs to generate specific policy proposals and then put their considerable lobbying clout and bully pulpits behind them. For our part, we need to hail their efforts in our public statements and at the ballot box, if and when (as I hope they do) those efforts get underway.

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It is hard to escape the conclusion that America’s social fabric is both loosening and fraying. Much of the reason for this breakdown is the growing tide of economic anxiety and insecurity that has resulted from a half century where American business has gained while American workers and consumers have lost. In the political season ahead, each one of us will have many opportunities to support what is important to us. My argument is that we need to begin with thriving workers, families and communities.

This post was adapted from my September 8, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

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