YouSaid · the spoken record

Anna Stansbury

lines on the record: 41
first: 2022-08-04
most recent: 2022-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“A meaningful dent in how pay is set in the economy is astronomically high. And that's where I think a lot more of a change really in the organizing environment really underscored by policy is necessary or would be necessary if that was the goal to achieve.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think people seeing that has generated some popular upswell and popular support for a rebalancing of power. So I think there is this is an unusual moment. This is a unique moment. We're also in a moment where the administration is very supportive of unions and strengthening unions. But the reason for pessimism is just that there's such a long way to go. If you believe that worker power is an important ingredient of change, private sector unionization in the US is at 6%. At its peak, it was one in three in the 1950s. And over time, there's a natural attrition anyway of unionization. You have to have a certain amount of union organizing activity just to keep the membership rate constant because, you know, people retire, firms close, you've got to have that rate of organizing just to keep the rate flat at 6%. So the rate of organizing that would be needed successfully to reach the levels of unionization necessary to actually”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is very low paid and has had typically very difficult conditions. So in that sense, I think it feels like there's an inflection point. The ongoing tight labor market creates conditions for that, the high quit rates as people move to find better jobs or jobs that suit them better. And I think it shouldn't be underestimated that we have this groundswell of awareness and I think popular support from the pandemic, which really laid bare how appalling conditions are for many people when it was seen that people who were making incredibly low wages and providing completely essential services to the economy were essentially being asked to risk death for themselves or their families without even the ability to have a certain amount of protective equipment or paid leave.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm both optimistic and pessimistic in the sense that it's always easy to take refuge in there, isn't it? So I'm optimistic in the sense that This does feel like an inflection point. If you compare this year, last year to some extent, the union activity with the union activity in the US in almost all of the last few decades, there's been a lot of energy and there's been a lot of new organizing in places that we don't typically see it, successful organizing, as you mentioned, Amazon and Starbucks being prime examples. We're also seeing upswals of organizing and things like care, the care sector, which is another sector which is a”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to need nominal wage growth that's faster than productivity growth, but you need to make sure that it's coming from an impetus that is about either productivity growth or redistribution and not an impetus that seems driven by this demand cycle.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I agree with you that it feels like a paradox, and I guess the easy but not easy to achieve answer is we need sustained productivity growth and then you can have sustained wage growth, but you get worried if nominal wage growth is systematically outstripping productivity because that's going to mean one of two things. Either it's going to mean that there's this big redistribution happening from capital to labor. That's one way that nominal wage growth can grow faster than productivity, or it's because there's inflation and that's going to generate and stimulate more inflation in prices. And that means that, as you said, you're running to stand still, which maybe that means no one on net is worse off on average, but some groups are going to lose out more than others and inflation was difficult in terms of planning. And there are worries about spirals and getting out of control and all these other sort of second order costs. So, I mean, I would say it creates a problem in that if you want to redistribute.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“built in that makes a wage price spiral that much more likely in a world where private sector union membership is 6% in the US and the tight labour market is present right now but may not last forever as interest rates continue to rise it doesn't seem that likely to me that we're going to get stuck in one of those ratcheting labor to product market spirals. There are other ways inflation could stick but I doubt that would be the one that it sticks as a result of.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we've also had to some degree at least a big demand shock in the US with the pandemic government spending slash fiscal stimulus packages. But I don't think we've seen the kind of massive sustained government spending that we saw in the late 60s particularly with the Vietnam War and the Great Society. And so there's an extent to which the demand impetus might have been smaller that now, or at least less sustained than it was then. And the big question really is, if inflation is coming from a combination of things, right? It's coming from a demand side, a supply side, too much money chasing too few goods, but also then it gets entrenched if expectations get entrenched and if it ratchets. The big question is what's happening now with the ratchet effect and is what's happening now, what was happening at the 70s. And that's where I think as I think you're getting towards this work of power question comes in, which is, is a wage price spiral less likely in a world with less worker power? And I would think almost certainly that answer is yes, just because in a world with union contracts with cost of living clauses plus X percent.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the million dollar question, and I don't know that. Are so many different possibilities that I don't think I would stand by any specific answer I give in the face of fire because I think we really don't know. And when you look across many very, very knowledgeable macroeconomists on these topics, there's a very wide divergence of opinions because we don't know. Having said that, I would say there are aspects that look similar to the late 60s, early 70s. You know, we've had a series of unfortunate supply shocks one after the other, which for us has been COVID happening several times as different supply chains are disrupted in different places. And then the war in Ukraine and in the 60s and 70s were obviously in the early 70s where the oil price shocks.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simply does not renew the contract and gets a different cheaper cleaning services company. So once you are outside the boundaries of the firm and if we're in a world where unions are organized at the level of the firm, which they are, then the ability to exert worker power disappears because the bank is where the profits are, not the cleaning services company, but you can only organize the cleaning services company. So this is also the kind of thing where I think a sectoral, well, really, I think an occupation level bargaining structure would help because you'd say, well, it doesn't matter. The corporate structure should be irrelevant. If we're thinking about setting a minimum wage for cleaners in New England, that minimum wage will be set across corporate structures and whether or not they're employed by the cleaning services company or by the bank.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, this is a hugely important trend and as you say, I think it's a big part of these broader forces that have been happening over the last 50 years. It's very prevalent, as you said, in dining services, in security services, in cleaning services, but it's also increasingly prevalent in warehousing staffing, in transportation and logistics, that the people that are doing the work, usually mostly or entirely working for one company, are not working or are not employees of that company. And it comes out of this drive to focus on core competencies, but it creates a whole lot of problems, including when we're thinking about bargaining. So if you're cleaning worker for a bank, say, and you're keen to unionize, okay, what happens? You unionize your fellow cleaning workers, you're then unionizing the cleaning services company, the bank then...”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not clear to me that this is not that there's not this critical mass of large companies or large umbrella brands in different industries. I mean, look at something like fast food, which is very fragmented in terms of lots of franchisees owning individual stores, but there's a handful of brand organizations that own basically all of the brands. So you could imagine different industries have slightly different corporate structures. In most industries, there are a handful of big players that I think you might be able to get around a table. And they do in the industry bargains in some continental European countries, you have carve-outs for smaller employers, you have ways that startups or that small companies wouldn't necessarily be bound by these agreements or wouldn't be at the table with them. And you would have to strike that kind of a balance.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great question. So on the overall corporate concentration, I think in some ways it reminds me of Gal Braith's work where he was basically, you know, the Galbraithian vision of an economy was one where there were a handful of very big companies and then very strong unions that were bargaining with those companies. And that was what he was talking about in his book American Capitalism. I think, yes, it's certainly going to be easier for that kind of bargaining to work if there are a handful of lead large companies. So even in the US auto industry in the 50s, it was the big three automakers and then the other small auto parts manufacturers and other supply chain players would follow what that agreement with the big three and the UAW said.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Specific jobs. And what some of the early academic studies have seen is that these do seem to reduce gender pay gaps, but it's not clear if they do so by boosting the pay of the women versus lowering the pay of the men. And so if you don't rectify more broadly the balance of power between workers and shareholders, it's not clear that this is giving all workers more power versus just rectifying power imbalances between sort of within the group of workers or between groups.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I doubt that it has huge potential for impact. And part of my reason for saying that is for impact more broadly than that. I think closing gender and racial pay gaps within job types is still a very worthy goal and we should do it. But in terms of rectifying the broader increase in income inequality that we've seen, and I think that's because largely people kind of know how different jobs are paid on the grand scale. Is a software engineer making X or Y? That kind of information will be revealed by this, but a software engineer versus a dishwasher, we all know the difference is astronomical already and transparency isn't going to change that. So it will affect some types of inequality. The other hesitation I have is there have been certain pay transparency reforms introduced at different types of pay transparency reforms in different countries recently. So for example the UK mandated a gender pay gap disclosure for companies which is an average and a median rather than”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is a hot topic, and I think it's an interesting one. Broadly, I think it is likely to go in the direction of making pay more equitable between groups of the same job level, roughly speaking. So, you know, reducing the gender pay gap for the same type of job, reducing racial pay gaps for the same type of job, because it becomes much more, A, it becomes much more obvious and salient if individuals pay is transparent that some people are making less money than others and that's embarrassing for firms and it also provides grounds for workers to lobby for higher pay for themselves if they're on the lower end of that scale. I think that's also true with the New York vacancy pay transparency law in that you can see what other kinds of jobs like yours are being paid and then you can use that as a negotiating tool with your own employer. I think on Net it is likely to be a somewhat positive thing.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is the concept of workplace democracy is something that is not central to most workplaces. But I think a lot of people have become more interested in since the pandemic, which is the concept of if I'm spending 40 hours a week or whatever it is for several years of my life in a given place with a given set of people, why is it run like a dictatorship? In some sense, a workplace is run largely from above with no formal rights for anyone else to disagree, you simply leave if you disagree. And I think another way of organizing workplaces is to have workplace with some democratic elements where people”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People's lives in the world at the moment, given who as union member at the moment is mostly in the public sector, is are police unions or teachers unions preventing society from holding bad police or bad teachers accountable because there are a lot of rules about how and when people can be disciplined and how and when they can be fired. So I think that's another issue where if there are people that have behaved badly, if there are misdemeanors, how do you ensure that the balance of power is such that the right social outcome happens? On the other hand, you've got a lot of situations where in non-union workplaces people are fired or disciplined for things that they really shouldn't be and there's no one to fight their side of the case and that's where the union would come in. It's about figuring out the right balance of power and the right accountability mechanisms. But if you think, and this goes to a broader question than just the economic question,”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“accountability structures and mechanisms in place. So that's one. Then I think the point you raised, Tracy, which is more about within the union, are there free riders? Are some people going to be bouncing off the labor of everyone else essentially? And I think there is a real concern of that as well. And one of the biggest worries that often plays out with unions, I think, in people's...”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think there's a lot of fairness in these critiques and a reinvigorated worker power system would want to be careful about a number of things. I think one thing it would want to be careful about is that concentrations of power tend to breed abuses of power, I think, anywhere in society and a union would be no different than that. And we've seen lots of very good examples in unions in recent years of the famous Jimmy Hoffer and the Teamsters alleged association with organized crime. We've seen corruption cases from certain union bosses, you know, convictions of corruption and mismanagement of money. So obviously there are legitimate reasons to be concerned on that front, right? It's like, is this organization that is ostensibly representing workers really representing me as a member of this big union? And I think the issue there is, as with any concentration of power, there needs to be really serious”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And obviously there are areas in which their interests conflict, which is given that the firm is doing well, how do you split the proceeds? So if you have that kind of a view of the company as a set of different stakeholders who have some aligned interests and some conflicting interests, it becomes a little bit more natural to think about, well, we should actually give all of them a voice because they are all invested in a long-term way, in a very meaningful way in this organization.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly, exactly. And as you said, it goes down to what you think, will this create better or worse incentives? And Milton Friedman would say, well, this is just going to distract from the corporation's most efficient task of maximizing profits, and it's going to let managers off the hook who are inefficient because they'll say, well, I was just trying to meet all of these different competing goals. And so you can never really hold them accountable. There are arguments to think that this adding ever more representatives of different types of stakeholders is going to dilute accountability and is going to dilute incentives and make things work less well. On the other hand, I think if you're going to add any stakeholders into the mix, workers are the obvious one in some ways because they are whole lives and fortunes are so tied up with what happens to the company. So if you're thinking about long-term best interests, obviously the shareholders' interests are for the firm to do well. Obviously the workers' interest in many ways are for the firm to do well.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you've got at the level of the firm in Germany a works council, which is worker representatives who are elected and have different rights over different topics. So they have joint decision-making rights with the firm over things like leave policies, hours, to some extent redundancies. And then they have information and consultative rights on various other things that go a lot deeper than a lot of the rights that unions have in the US. So they have information rights and consultative rights on things like what kinds of technologies the firm is going to implement. So it's a lot more into the managerial decisions. And then the third level is at the very top, which is that 50% of large firms supervisory boards are elected by workers and the other 50% by shareholders. And then the deciding vote is a shareholder elected director. So in practice, it's slightly less than a majority of the board is worker representatives.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course. So just to take, there's a lot of different variations on themes in different continental European countries. So I'll take Germany as one example. So the German system, they call it co-determination, has worker power at essentially three different levels within companies and industries. One level is bargaining over largely pay. And this bargaining is done between the unions and So there'll be a bargain for the whole of the metalworking industry in a certain region in Germany, and that will set a wage floor for the different types of workers in metalworking. So that agreement will look quite like an agreement would look like at the level of a firm in the US, but instead it will apply to the whole sector”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To increase penalties on firms for cracking down on union organizing, there could be ways to make it easier for unions to share information with workers. So a lot of the reforms that were proposed in the Pro Act, for example, were things that were trying to change how and when the firm versus the union can share information with workers about the union or persuade people to vote for or against the union. But in some ways, I think the more exciting portion is and the more promising portion if you want to see a big change is trying to rethink the structure. And I'm very in favor of, or at least interested by changing the structure of worker power so that bargaining is done to a larger extent at a broader level, on a sectoral level like is done in much of continental Europe, which sets a kind of baseline wage floor compensation benefits floor for a whole sector or occupation in a particular region.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that this creates a kind of race to the bottom equilibrium where if you know that all your competitors are not going to be unionized, it becomes very, very difficult for you as a business to be unionized because your costs are higher than everyone else's. And so then you get this race to the bottom dynamic where even if not all businesses want to be hostile towards union organizing and union activity, there becomes a competitive imperative to have to be. That's where I think we've got to right now. In terms of policies to change that, I think there's a lot that could be done. And you could think about it in two buckets. One bucket is within the current conception of what worker power is and what unions look like in the US, what could be done. And what I mean there is unions typically bargain at the level of an establishment, like a plant or a unit or a firm, and they typically bargain over pay and other job-related attributes. And there's a lot of reforms that could be done.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manufacturing sector when there's low wage competition from other countries, for example. But the portion that is unique to the US and maybe the UK and a few other countries, that seems much more likely to be specific and therefore much more likely to be a function of policy and a function of norms. And in the US, you can point to a lot of factors that led to a massive shift in the policy environment and in the public attitude towards unionization. And people always point to the 1981 firing of the striking air traffic controllers by Reagan, for example, as a sort of watershed moment in setting the tone for what's acceptable in terms of corporate behavior towards people who are active in unions. So my view, my view is that a big portion, not all, but a big portion of the decline in unionization in the US has been a result of active hostility from business, many businesses, obviously not all, from many businesses towards union organizing.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way I like to look at this, and a lot of kind of big economic data stories is to just look over time and across countries as the very first pass. And if you do that, I think you can distinguish quite effectively between different stories of union decline straight away. So the big story of union decline across industrialized countries in the last 50 years is basically all countries have seen some decline in union coverage, the share of workers that are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. Basically, all countries have seen some decline in union membership, but the US in particular, the UK, which is where I'm from, to a lesser extent, have been at the extreme end. They've seen much sharper declines than almost anywhere else. So I think at that first pass, then you say, okay, well, some portion of the decline in unionization is common to all countries. And maybe that makes it more likely to be some combination of these globalization and technology explanations. It's harder to maintain a union.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's created by these markets actually optimal, or is there an imbalance of power that needs to be corrected? And that's where this question of worker power for me comes in.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The allocation of economic activity, who's producing by whom, that system is going to be efficient. And you might not think it's going to result in an equitable distribution of income, but then you should redistribute afterwards. This classic separation of let the market do its work and then tax and transfer afterwards. If you think that the underlying market is actually not going to be very close to that perfectly competitive ideal, if you think it's going to be there's actually very difficult to search for a new job and find a new job and these labor market frictions mean that once you're at a job, you're kind of at the mercy of your employer and they're not going to be paying you as much as they could. And if you think that actually the tendency in some markets is towards large companies and consolidation, and so there's not going to be this inherent drive towards the survival of the fittest and a better products and increased competition. If you think that's the sort of natural state of markets, then I think you're much more predisposed to ask about, well, is the allocation of economic activity?”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a world of perfect markets, the government would set the rules of the game, there would be property rights, transactions and contracts would be enforced, transactions could take place, and individual companies and workers would all be competing with each other. And you've got this market working in a very efficient way, and this is the kind of market that you start with in Econ 101. And if that's the world that you think you're in, then a system where ownership of capital is what determines...”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Easy one for an afternoon. Okay, so yes, I mean, I think you're right. That is at the heart of these questions. And I tend to shy away from using the word capitalism just because I think it means such different things to different people. Yeah, to what extent does the current structure of ownership and incentives and the determination of value, including the value of labor, pay, how does that play out and is this playing out in a socially beneficial way? That's what we're asking. And I think what I tend to believe and what I tend to believe based on the research is that whether you think it's working depends a lot on what you think the baseline workings of an economy are. And in particular, how close you think they would be to approximate the economists perfectly competitive ideal. So if you just bear with me for a second on that. So that would be perfectly competitive ideal would be”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To have these big pay differentials within a firm actually does affect people's pay behavior. But more broadly, I think sometimes the norms and the, I guess what one might call ideology, but not in a critical way, just as a way of describing a school of thought around how things should be structured. So the rise of shareholder value maximization ideology was a school of thought that really it is in society's best interest for businesses to maximize shareholder value. That led to not only changes in norms but also changes in the way companies structured themselves, things like fishering of the workplace and outsourcing of employment, things like incentive structures for executives, things like leveraged buyouts, private equity, various capital markets structures that incent that incentivized management to follow shareholders' interests. So I think there was a role in which these more informal, intangible things like norms and ideology also crystallized in”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think it can be a few things, but we know that anyone who's ever talked to HR or been in HR will know that there are lots of factors that determine how pay is set for different people within a company. And some of them are to do with obviously what the person would earn elsewhere, whether they're likely to leave, how much you need to offer to make them stay or to hire them. Of course, market forces matter, but there's often quite a lot of wiggle room within that. And that's where these norms can play a role. And in particular, it can be things like A norm of how much the top executives and the CEO in particular should be paid relative to frontline workers. You've seen the CEO to worker pay ratio absolutely explode in the last 40 to 50 years. And if you look back at, let's say, the 80s, this was actually quite controversial in many circles in a way that it's not now. And I think things like whether or not it is perceived to be fair and okay.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Offshoring and manufacturing, although the magnitude of that, I would put it relatively small. And then I think the big question is how much did institutions and norms and policies play a role? And this is where some of my work comes in to think about the role of the decline in worker power. In my work, including in a paper that I wrote with Larry Summers a couple of years ago, we argued that the role of the decline in worker power was actually quite big in explaining this part of this divergence, that the decline in unions, the decline in informal worker power and norms about fairness within firms, the rise in shareholder value maximization ideology and its sort of attendant capital markets practices and corporate structures, that all of these played a role in eroding worker power in a way that actually does explain a large share of that gap alongside your more impersonal large-scale market forces of technology and globalization.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is one of these questions in economics, which is in some sense overdetermined. If you added up everyone's different explanations, you'd get more than 100% of this gap. So different people will have different views as to what's important. The big three sets of factors that people think about largely fall into the buckets of technology, globalization, institutions and norms. And so technology clearly plays a role in determining an important role in determining labor market outcomes and who's paid what. Part of a big part of this divergence between pay and productivity has been the fact that the incomes of lower and middle income people haven't kept up with the incomes of high income people, right? So there's a question about did the demand for skills change in a way that education didn't keep up with it, the race between education and technology. Almost surely that was a part of it. Almost surely for some workers globalization was a part of it. Increased competition from”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happening since the pandemic, but my sense was that the period probably hadn't been long enough and sustained enough at a very tight level for there to have really taken effect.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in terms of the direct effect on things like wages you did start to see the tilt of wage growth switch. So when labor markets become tighter, typically that's disproportionately affecting lower income individuals who tend to have higher unemployment rates. Typically that's disproportionately affecting people from racial and ethnic minorities. And you did start to see as the tilt of unemployment became less steep, the tilt of wage growth improved to benefit those groups. So you saw that effect directly happening already. The question I think you're asking is, is it also feeding into other secondary factors of labor market power? Something like tight labor markets enable more worker activism and more unions because people are less worried about retaliation or losing their jobs. In the pre-pandemic era, my sense is we didn't see a huge amount of a huge amount of change there. There was there were some waves of organizing in the summer of 2019. We can talk a bit more about what's been”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's important And I was someone that was saying for a long time in the pre-pandemic era as I was. Getting into this profession that, oh, it does look like labor markets aren't tight enough and they should be tighter and they can be tighter. And we saw that by February 2020 they had got tight, the unemployment rate was down to the lowest level in its post-war period. And even then there wasn't much evidence of inflation. So I think we might have been able to go tighter still. So I think it does matter. It does matter a lot. The question as to whether it on its own is a sufficient driver of worker power to reverse some of the trends we've seen in the last 40, 50 years. I'm less a strong believer in that hypothesis.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bargaining and around fairness. It can be things like how managers are incentivized to divide up the pie that the company creates between shareholders and workers. So there are very various different aspects that feed in, but I think that sharing in the profits of the firm above and beyond what would happen without that power is the ultimate indicator.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a bit of an amorphous concept, and I think different people define it different ways. What we do to look at worker power is we say, well, worker power, the result of worker power is the ability of workers to share in the profits of the firm that they work at, above and beyond what would happen in some kind of market where their wages were just determined by the market or their compensation was just determined by the market. So in my work when I'm trying to measure worker power, I'm trying to say, what would a given worker be paid in a kind of market situation without that power? And then how do different factors give that worker the ability to share in the profits of the firm? So one very obvious, very salient driver of worker power is unions, you know, being a member of a union that bargains over your compensation enables you to share to some extent more in the profits of your firm. But there are other less salient, harder to measure ways that worker power can exist. It can be things like norms around pay.”
2022-08-04 · Odd Lots · Anna Stansbury on How to Boost Worker Bargaining Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source