Quality Jobs for Gig Workers

TRANSCRIPT
Horizons podcast - Season 3, Episode 1 Adrian Haro 

Maria Flynn

When there's less gatekeeping and more focus on skills and potential, deserving candidates get quality jobs. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

That was Jobs for the Future (JFF) President and CEO, Maria Flynn. Today we're talking about investing in human potential. This focus is at the center of JFF's North Star, a bold new initiative to get millions of people facing systemic barriers to work in quality jobs in just 10 years. How can we do it and why should we do it now? Welcome to the third season of the Horizons Podcast, where we take the inspiring discussions from the stage at JFF's annual Horizon summit and invite a special guest to help us move that conversation forward. I'm your host, Tameshia Bridges Mansfield. 

Today, we will be joined in our studio by special guest Adrian Haro, CEO of The Workers Lab. Through its innovation fund, The Workers Lab has supported dozens of innovators and entrepreneurs with more than five and a half million dollars in investments over the past 10 years. The Workers Lab fuels worker-centered solutions through research that informs the leaders who shape workforce systems nationwide. Adrian will help us launch our new season as we think about the most recent Horizon's theme, Without Limits, and what that means for the American worker. But before we sit down with Adrian, let's look at the challenges in front of us. Here once again is JFF President and CEO Maria Flynn as she spoke to the audience at the opening of Horizons. 

 

Maria Flynn

This is really your chance to think big without limits. And as a field, we're making progress against some big problems. The U.S. continues to have a very low unemployment rate, just 3.7%, and over 10 million jobs available across the country. But these hopeful numbers are masking many troubling realities, and I'll give you three examples. One example is youth unemployment. While the national unemployment rate for young people is actually the lowest it's been in 60 years, in New York City, for example, [the] rate was recently 18%. And the rate for young adult Asians in New York City was as high as 23%. 

Another troubling reality is that racial disparities persist. Black household wealth is still 70% below that of non-Black households, 70% lower. And Black individuals earn one-third less than white individuals over the course of their lifetime. And here's the third, which is low pay. 21 million U.S. workers make less than $15 an hour. So, while it's true that unemployment is down and there's more U.S. workers and jobs, there's also a big problem, and that's too many of these jobs are not quality jobs. And the people who are shut out of quality jobs are too often people of color and other workers who face systemic barriers to advancement. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

Welcome back to our studio. JFF President and CEO Maria Flynn sets the stage for systemic change in research, reporting, and action to address employment and wage disparities for too many U.S. workers. I'm joined today by our special guest, Adrian Haro, CEO of The Workers Lab, an organization that's working to make the change Maria is calling for. Adrian, welcome to the Horizons podcast. 

 

Adrian Haro

Thanks, Tameshia. It's great to be here. How are you, girlfriend? 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

I'm doing great, and I'm looking forward to diving into the conversation. But before we dive in and reflect on Maria's comments, can you tell us a bit about The Workers Lab and all of the work that you are doing? 

 

Adrian Haro

Happy to be here and share our purpose at The Workers Lab, which is to give new ideas very specifically for and with workers a chance to succeed. We do that primarily as an investor in a number of new ideas, given life to mostly by people of color, women, queer people, about how to make the things in this country that are supposed to serve workers more modern and more inclusive. Because by and large, we believe that most of the things that are supposed to serve workers in this country, in most cases, are old and exclusive. So, we want to seed innovation and seed new ideas that flip that on its head and hopefully make the things and the ways that we serve workers in this country more modern and more inclusive for every kind of worker out there. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

That is amazing, and that is why we were looking forward to having this conversation. Thank you for that introduction to the important mission of The Workers Lab. And to that point, as Maria pointed out earlier, there are glaring disparities between U.S. employment statistics and what workers are experiencing day-to-day, so we want to dig a little bit more into why these numbers are so skewed. We know that unemployment levels remain at historically low levels, yet a lot of workers are still struggling. I want to hear a little little bit about what you think about how we can get to the truth of why that is and what we can do to really act on that and changing that. 

 

Adrian Haro

Yeah, it is confusing, right? I think the best shot we've got at getting to the truth is to talk to workers themselves a lot and regularly, which is sort of a calling card of The Workers Lab, if you will, since our founding. Workers are a part of the innovation process for us, start, throughout, and to finish, which is, God, something is still today where workers are left out mostly, is in the doing. But in fact, that's where the truth is, and frankly, the magic is about what they're going through, what's bad about it, what's good about it. They have honestly, the most innovative ideas about how to make things better for them and their families. And so, we have found that the best way to get to the truth, be it good, bad, whatever, is to go to workers, not only because they're smart and they have good ideas, but because workers lay it on the line and so there's no funny business. They'll tell you what's up. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

Yeah. And I think what's amazing about that and why The Workers Lab resonates so much is that it really kind of takes the numbers that Maria laid out and really brings them to life, and doesn't just focus on and improvise the stories and the why behind the numbers, but really do get at what those solutions are. And so, what do you find from the solution side, from an action point of view, that workers are wanting to see and the ideas that they're bringing to the table? 

 

Adrian Haro

Well, one theme we see across the new ideas is this real yearning for flexibility. Flexibility is something that I think we all know is being talked about right now in mainstream media, largely in the C-suite, remote work, people working from home, etc. It also very, very much applies to workers who aren't in the C-suite and gig economy, in farm fields, in domestic work, whatever. And I think as we learn more about gig work and workers directly from them loud and clear, there is a yearning from them to folks like us who have positions of power, to take that seriously. Because they hold flexibility, it's like a sacred thing we're learning. And so, it's our job as servants of the public, I think, to respond to that and to craft solutions that embrace flexibility without sacrificing quality in the way of money, benefits, you name it. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

Yep, that's great. And to your point about us being servants of the people and what we do with that, I think is really, really important. One of the things we do is look at data and analysis and connect that. So, according to analysis that we've done at JFF, out of the 130 million people that are working in the United States, who are facing those very real barriers to quality jobs, what we know about the data that you see in your conversations with workers is that just 38 million people have the work that they need to support themselves and their families. 

That leaves about 92 million Americans who are currently shut out of quality jobs across the country. And what we're doing at JFF is working hard and working toward a bold goal with those workers in mind. So again, we're going to turn to Maria Flynn and hear more about what she had to say about this at the Horizon summit. 

 

Maria Flynn

We see this as our collective opportunity to help more of these 92 million workers secure quality jobs, so this is our new North Star. I'm going to say it again, in 10 years, 75 million people facing systemic barriers to advancement will work in quality jobs. I know that this is a really bold goal. It's going to take bold thinking and big swings, and that none of us can get there alone. We need to work together to transform our nation's systems so that every individual, regardless of background, can advance economically. Despite the efforts of so many dedicated professionals like each and every one of us in this room, our current systems are inequitable. They're disconnected, and they're really hard to navigate, and this isn't a new issue. 40 years ago, JFF was founded to address the urgent needs for our nation's education and workforce systems to keep pace with labor market trends. 

But in many ways, those systems that were already running on tracks that were becoming outdated in 1983 are still running on those same outdated tracks now in 2023. Our education and workforce systems are broken and incremental change just isn't enough. An incremental change might be what's politically plausible most of the time and I certainly understand that, but it isn't going to lead to the type of impact that we all believe is needed and that we all want to see. So, I'm committing my organization to this bold goal and I hope that all of you will join us. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

Welcome back to our studio. Once again, I'm joined by Adrian Haro, CEO of The Workers Lab. Adrian, let's talk a little bit, and we started on it before, but let's talk a bit about these outdated tracks where systems need to really pivot to be responsive to what workers need and want today. The Workers Lab has done quite a bit over the years as it relates to the gig economy and has really shifted, I think, our thinking and our definition about who these workers are. And so, with your new gig worker learning project, what do we need to know today about those workers and that part of the economy and why workers are drawn to work into that space? 

 

Adrian Haro

Listen, I think the only thing we can say with 100% certainty about what we know about the gig economy is that we, and by we, I mean interested parties of power, actually don't know a whole lot yet. Maria is absolutely right to point out the sort of obsolete nature of a lot of the things around data, particularly for this group of workers. We do not have at least collective answers in the data on some of the most basic stuff that we have about workers outside of the gig economy. How many people are doing this work? How much do they make? Who are they? In aggregate, that data still does not exist and it's largely because, like Maria pointed out, even the systems of data collection in the federal government are designed around traditional 9:00 to 5:00 work. 

So, we are missing out on speaking to and learning from millions and millions of workers who've existed outside of that traditional paradigm for as long as the Fair Labor Standards Act has been around. What we're learning, what are the solutions, what's bringing people to this work is a fantastic question. It's the flexibility. It is like a high priority for them. As things get more expensive, as gas gets more expensive, they want to be part of the gig economy either because they have to for those reasons or because they want to. The reason doesn't matter much to us, but the fact that they are means that we have to pay attention and design solutions for them and with them in that part of the economy. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

No, I think that's true, and I think one of the things that I found really interesting about the work in your data and that kind of evolution of gig work, is that I think we're used to thinking of gig work as simply being workers who work attached to a platform. But can you talk a little bit more about that gig work is actually more than workers who are working through a platform? That it's more than that, it's more than just those workers. Can you speak a little bit to that? 

 

Adrian Haro

Yes, it's such an important point to remind folks that, like I said, gig work has been around as long as work has been around, really. I think the gig economy is a product of, again, an old and exclusive law that, at least when it was created, excluded very specifically, domestic workers and farm workers. And we all know who those workers are, who they still are. Gig work has been around for a generation, at least. I think what has happened is the intervention of tech platforms, as you mentioned, really brought the term into the mainstream. 

But for us, if we're going to take a broad lens and learn as much as we can from these workers, we have to take a broad view of the definition. And for us, that means any person generating income outside of the traditional 9:00 to 5:00 structure. That could be everything from an Uber driver to a farm worker, heck, to a small business owner. Anybody who is excluded from the traditional rights, benefits, protections that are afforded to workers in a more traditional setting, we want to hear from all of them. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

That's great. And to your point, one of the things we talk about at JFF is we do talk about quality jobs and flexibility is something that we think about as we define what we mean by a quality job. When we talk about quality jobs at JFF as it's a part of our North Star, we think about four things. We think about the compensation that allows workers to be able to support themselves. We think about structure, so that foundation that allows for safety, and health, and stability. We think about advancement and the ways of the policies and the practices, that all workers can be able to grow their skills. 

And then we think about agency, and that, I think, is where flexibility comes in, and that's the way in which workers are really encouraged to use their voice to drive change within the organizations that they work with. We take this real big picture view of job quality. And so, one of the things I'm curious about is what is it that we need to make our systems work better for gig workers and to make sure that even though they exist outside of that 9:00 to 5:00 traditional framework, how do we still make sure that workers that are a part of the gig economy also have quality jobs? 

 

Adrian Haro

That's a great question. I think for us, flexibility should be embedded into any job quality framework out there explicitly, not because The Workers Lab says, but because workers say. And so, the workers should have the flexibility to choose what jobs they take on, for whom, where, and for how much, where gig work or quality work can be good work. I think this is the big sort of a great place for a worker's lab to get people to imagine a world and to demonstrate through innovation, through real gritty experiments that gig work isn't inherently a bad thing. People over the course of our history with power have chosen to make it not good. 

We can make a different choice to make it good. And actually, right now, we are doing that by taking the technology that makes gig work possible in the private sector, taking a version of that, and putting it inside the public sector at the local level. And if you can imagine a world where the same technology or a similar technology that gets you a ride to the airport from Uber can do almost similar things, except it's a public version of the platform where local government is actually giving life to gig work that is good for those in their constituencies that either want or need it. We can do that. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

Well, cool. We're going to talk a little bit more about what does tech mean and how is that going to impact workers? But first, we're going to head back to Maria one last time, as we look at how gig work and others are really going to be impacted by tech, by AI, and by innovation in general. 

 

Maria Flynn

The impact of AI is going to be deep, it's going to come fast, and this is just the beginning. Workers, they already understand this. We surveyed more than 2,200 of them. Probably not surprisingly, more than half believe that they'll need to upgrade their skills because of AI in the next five years, 58%. And that percentage was even higher if you just look at the younger generations in the labor force. But really surprising to me was that 88% don't trust their employers to help them understand AI. It's going to be critical to understand how AI impacts work and workers. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

Welcome back to our studio. Adrian, let's get back to the conversation on JFF's North Star. You touched on this before around technology, and so I want to hear a little bit about what you think about how AI, how tech and how innovation in general can help JFF and partners like you achieve this big goal of 75 million quality jobs for people who are facing systemic barriers. 

 

Adrian Haro

Yeah, I think the tech AI thing is big. And by most accounts, we have about three years before it gets too big where we don't understand how to make it work for workers or just for humans. I think we often forget that, and it's not only technology, it's also about the kind of revenue economic activity that these technology platforms generate in the country, and also that consumers are a part of this, and guess what? They like it. Even more reason for us to lean in to making this kind of work better for the worker, but also engage consumers in the enterprise of building power for workers. Because at least our research shows that an Uber rider is actually pretty likely to add on 50 cents or $1 to the ride if it goes to something that's going to help the person that got them to go from A to B. 

Just like corporations and companies have their robots, the labor movement, workers should have their own robots, should be given the freedom, the creative space to be able to create their own robots that do things that are going to improve their lives and the lives of their families. And the labor movement, those worker organizations creating technology and the way that corporations do should also be able to make money off of those things, because we know that those profits are going to go back into the movement and to build power in a different way than I think we think of traditional power. 

Economic power, revenue, corporations, the private sector, fine. They shouldn't be the only ones. Workers should have their own robots, too. And we're working towards, at The Workers Lab, making sure that people, largely people who look like us, Tameshia, have access to the creative space to be able to try and learn and fail, start again, whatever, to create technology, AI that works for them instead of hinders them. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

I appreciate that vision that you're putting forward around how technology can really be in service of workers and movement and advancing in that direction. I want to keep this optimistic note and think about the future as we end this conversation, and would really like to get your sense of where do you want to see the gig workforce, the gig economy, and technology, and solutions? How does all that look in the next 10 years as you really think ahead to the conversations you're having with workers, to the solutions that you're building, and what you want that future to look like? 

 

Adrian Haro

I'm hopeful because we have an infrastructure now from which to speak to workers about what they want that future to look like and be like for them and their children and their families. And I'm going to give it all I've got to make sure that we take everything that we're hearing from workers about things like technology and take it back to folks at JFF, in the government, in philanthropy, everywhere, to do my best to make sure that decisions that are being made about technology, about policy and laws, about programs and services, are designed in ways that workers are telling us they need to be designed. I think in our field, Tameshia, technology has always been kind of the devil, and I don't think that about technology. 

I think technology designed the right way can, in fact, open up the door to making sure that all the policy gains, the laws that were created in the 20th century, more modern and more inclusive of every worker who was left out of them. That's how we define innovation and that's true on public options, that's true on creating technology that can help workers access public benefits more easily, verify their income, help them file wage claims, help the government enforce wage enforcement better. The world for progress and for promise is really ripe and open. And technology is not the answer to all of that, but it is increasingly a means to get to a world where every worker, whether you're working on a W-2, on a 1099, whatever, every worker in this country is safe, healthy, secure and has some level of power. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

Well, thank you so much for that vision, and thank you, Adrian, for kicking off the conversation with me in our first podcast of this season. 

 

Adrian Haro

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. 

 

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield

And thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode of the Horizons podcast. Please let us know what you thought about today's conversation by sharing a comment wherever you find your podcast. And mark your calendar for the next Horizon summit, July 22 and 23 in Washington DC. I look forward to the conversation next time. For now, I'm your host, Tameshia Bridges Mansfield. 

 

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