YouSaid · the spoken record

Louis Hyman

lines on the record: 85
first: 2018-08-29
most recent: 2018-08-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It sucks to be a working person in America if you're in this. I mean, I think that's the point: that the problem isn't Uber. The problem is working in this kind of capitalism.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it absolutely is. So JP Morgan did this really amazing study a few years ago and found that it becomes a direct, these kinds of on-demand jobs is a direct substitute for debt. So when people have access to them, they borrow less. Full stop. And so, yeah, for some people, it's a great way to fill out their time card, but it's not as good as a real job.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. And the just in time manufacturing came to America right across the street from that very first Macintosh plant at the Numi plant, now Tesla, where Toyota had invented this as a way to minimize their inventory stocks. And it makes a lot of sense. And you do the math, and it's perfect. It's good to go. Totally. And this just-in-time workforce then becomes a model for a way to think about supply, whether that's labor supply or components. And so this is what these algorithms are all about. And it's a very one-sided algorithm that works for the employer and not for the employee. And so working Americans are left scrambling to fill out their time.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So, I mean, if you ask where technology really intervenes in the workplace, it's not the iPhone, it's the Kronos system that manages time cards for most major chain restaurants that minimizes the number of hours people work from week to week to make sure that they don't go over the minimums that kick them from part-time to full-time. They have to start earning the benefits.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly working in the gig. It really depends on who you are and when you ask. And to say that it has to be done every two weeks for its account is ludicrous. Right, especially when your hours shift, right? This is why it's very hard for people who have salaries to understand the constraints of working people so that the third of Americans that only have shift work, right, and may not get the hours of need from week to week, they need to make that up.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so they want to have sort of time series data. They want to make sure that the data lines up over time and they're fully aware that it doesn't. And this is a real tricky thing because if you ask somebody if they worked in these kinds of gig economy data, no matter how clearly you ask it, if you ask in the last two weeks, a lot of people say no. If you ask, you know, it's 10%, if it's in the last few weeks, then that's what they say. 10% of the people are working in this gig economy or contingent work economy. If you ask over the last 12 months if they've done this, it's about 40%. And certainly for young people, it's about half.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's really easy to find out if somebody has a normal job. I say, did you work last week? You say, yes. Are you employed? And you say yes. And if you ask somebody if from who drives for Uber, you know they drive for Uber. Are you full-time? Are you part-time? Are you unemployed? Are you temporary? They answer, different people answer yes to all those questions. So, the way we even conceptualize work itself doesn't fit neatly into our surveys, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics is fully aware of, and they're trying to figure out how to ask these questions.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The gig economy, the easiest way to think about it is this very dissatisfying negative definition of it's all the work that doesn't look like what you expected. So it's not nine to five, it's not secure, it's ad hoc. And it's what economists and sociologists call alternative work arrangements. And so it can encompass a wide variety of things. In the book, I call them all temp jobs, you know, and there's a sort of lumps together independent contractors and actual people working for temp agencies, as well as freelancers and gig workers. And the gig economy certainly has this exciting overtone of futurism and technology and being mediated through apps. Less than 1% of the workforce works through these kinds of apps. Most freelancers are just working, finding jobs ground.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back with Lewis Hyman. He's a professor at Cornall University and the author of a new book called Temp. And it's about how the American workforce has changed. We're also here with Reco's data editor Ronnie. You'd write a lot about data and you use a lot of work data and stuff like that. Right. And so we tend to focus on the idea that this phenomena is new, which you have been talking about. It's not. Let's talk about how it morphed. Because the Sylvania company. That then has morphed into something else.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And how Hewlett Packer goes from being this shining example of commitment to workers to sort of falling apart and sort of laying people off and losing its taste for innovation. And that story takes place in the 80s and 90s as they move away from focusing on innovation towards focusing on short-term finance and profits. And the story of that is deeply embedded with McKinsey's reorganization beginning in the early 1980s. So these consultants selling a certain vision of how the corporation ought to be run.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kwanset Huts also filled with men, just men who didn't speak English, were dipping those different kinds of chips into big boiling vats of material and without which the rest of Silicon Valley couldn't happen. So it's important to realize that Those men at the top matter certainly in terms of their ideas. And often they had the best impulses. So I read a lot about the history of Hewlett Packard.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, the garage counts as a place of innovation, and certainly there are ideas that are important shockly and all those other guys sort of inventing new technologies. Of course, those technologies were reliant on government funds in a lot of ways that are now written out of that story. But they're also reliant not just on quanset huts, which aren't as much a part of the story. The way in which”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's go back to that idea that here we have the company in Silicon Valley growing up in a way people had this image of the garage, the garage company of a group, a team of small, usually men together making one thing or making one idea.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just like we don't really care about the cars that people drive for to deliver our pizzas. No one ever is after dominoes for the depreciation on their cars because we imagine incorrectly that they're all teenagers. And so this question of who counts is so important to understanding why the rules are set the way they are.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, I think the fundamental question is who counts? And in the post-war period, who counted were white men and everybody else didn't. So if you're a woman, if you were a person of color, if you were living here but not in American citizen, your rights didn't matter as much to the people who wrote the rules and ran the companies. And that's certainly true today as well. And I think that this is how we get upset about Uber because men were taxi drivers, right? And women were not taxi drivers. And so it's okay for Etsy.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or these other kinds You make this really interesting point about how people right now perceive of Uber, and you compare it to Etsy, they both are similar things. They're platforms that are selling other people's work that aren't necessarily indebted to the people who are working for them, but everyone gets mad at Uber and not so much for Etsy. And you said the reason for it is because we don't value women's labor.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then they moved them overseas. In fact, they train their own replacements. So in the book, I write about the first Macintosh factory. Where was it? It was right across the street from the Numi plant where Toyota first built cars. And of course, where today Tesla has its own operations. And it was in this, and so I traced the history, the histories of Silicon Valley, as you know, are largely about Steve Jobs or the WAS or these other kinds, the garage men and sort of their innovations. But they're reliant on hundreds of thousands mostly immigrant women, right? So every time somebody says robot and silicon valley, they usually mean woman, generally woman of color. And in the book, I trace how this idea of automation is used to justify this idea of progress is used to justify treating people miserably, workers miserably.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Create the chips, and they were born subcontracted in a way that really portends the way that corporations are organized today. It was the rehearsal for what was to come.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Silicon Valley is never unionized the way that Detroit is unionized. Silicon Valley never provides good pay for its frontline manufacturing workers. And Silicon Valley actually was reliant on hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants who are outside of those new laws that emerged in the early 70s called OSHA. All the environmental standards, all the labor standards.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before the first Silicon Valley sort of semiconductor and manufactured boom, and it is really, really reliant on a very different kind of manufacturing.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the history of Silicon Valley is really important. I write a lot about Silicon Valley in this book because Silicon Valley emerges as the leading sector of the economy in the 1970s. By 1980, it's the most profitable part of the economy.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How could you run them? And this engulfs about 90% of the Fortune 500. They all fall apart. And then people begin to cast about for alternative models. They blame the corporation, the post-war corporation, the post-war world of work for this. And into that intellectual void come consultants and business gurus who sell a new idea of how to run the corporation leanly with only limited commitment to their workers and employees. And Eve Voila, you have the origins of today's firms. And so to understand the history of today, it's not just about technology. The real technology that changes is not the phone, it's the corporation, how we organize people.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Golf and Western, you know, Lytton technology, Lytton industries, LTV, so a small electrician buys his way to being the 25th largest company in America. And it turns out... They were all terribly run. And they”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scaling scale scale, but because of anti monopoly laws, they were buying these unrelated companies that didn't create any more profits.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's not supplement if you needed to pay for your kids' braces or food or rent. So I think when we talk about the gig economy, you know, it's very easy to say this is awful and people point to it, but really those kinds of awful problems are already present, have been since the 1970s. The working Americans have faced increasing income volatility, income inequality, and this is just reified in the so-called app-based digital gig economy.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, very good. They're awful. So why Uber is the waste product is that it relies on a bunch of people who don't have an alternative. And this is the thing you have to realize that the alternative between driving for Uber is not like a good job in a factory with a union wage or working in a stable office job. It's slinging coffee at a Starbucks where you may or may not get the hours you need. And that is what people are shoring up. They're shoring up getting enough hours trying to make ends meet. So oftentimes people talk about the gig economy as quote unquote supplementary income. It's only a supplement. It's not like you're”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So iPhones and Uber didn't create the gig economy. This is something that had social underpinnings, economic underpinnings. Time now. Do you want to talk a little bit about Silicon Valley's history of temporary work? Because that didn't, you know, that didn't start 10 years ago.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So, one of the things I write about, it's important to realize is that people have always worked in a sort of a gig way. You could always, there would always be work to sell, if you had a man with a strong back could always sell it. Right. You know, find something to do. But what's different after World War II is that it gets mediated through agencies, whether those agencies are temp agencies like that at Manpower Incorporated or consultancies like McKinsey& Company. These are new ways of sort of selling people for the short term. And this emerges in the midst of an economy based around long-term investment and secure work. So there's a little bit of an irony there in how it comes about. Is that what you want me to talk about”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the long run, as Kane said, we're all dead. So I think, yeah, so we moved, the mechanical thresher is the best analogy to this in the sense that it put millions of out of work. And so when I talk about AI, I often talk about mechanical thresholders. Now, that didn't naturally mean we ended up in a straight line from the mechanical thresher to the nice suburban house with two kids in the garage. It took 100 years of bloody warfare near insurrection.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly. And I was like, there's some issues that go along with it. And my feeling was that the work changes happening now is really severe and fast and stuff like that. That's why I wanted people revolution incredibly painful, also mechanized farming, super painful, you know, like, yes, we all ended up with jobs, however many years later, but how?”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they're difficult changes, by the way. I was arguing this with Mark Injuries, and he was saying what's happening now in the new job economy was that it's like farm to manufacturing. I'm like, well, that took 70 years and was super socially problematic that you aren't remembering because you're not a student of history because people in Silicon Valley remember nothing.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Answer my questions. Yeah, so I think the big thing to realize is that nearly everybody worked in the agricultural business in the 19th century, free or enslaved. And this was the way our economy functioned. And so we were an export-based economy. We made cotton a little over half of our GDP before the Civil War was either the products made by enslaved people or related to that, like textiles. And what's kind of interesting to me is how that changes. So we think of capitalism and corporations as these very static things. But after the end of slavery, we reinvent our capitalism to be on the basis of free labor and oil and all these other things. So we see in the history of capitalism its constant reinvention. And this happens again after.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, so I read about in the book is sort of how there was this creation after World War II of secure work, secure investment, big corporations, stable jobs, and how that all fell apart starting around 1970. And to understand not just the fall of that older model of the workplace, but also the rise of what came new, so consultants and temp workers and undocumented migrants and how those were all pretty central to the remaking of capitalism since 1970.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, my first two books were about an equally happy topics, the history of personal debt in America. And as I was writing those books, I noticed that really the story of finance in America is also the story of work. And so I decided for my next project, I wanted to write about the history of how not just our finances became insecure, but also our work became insecure.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as someone who's just doing this podcast to pay the bills until I can pursue my real dream, driving for Uber. But in my spare time, I talk tech and you're listening to Rico Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today I'm in New York and I'm here in the studio with Lewis Hyman. He's the writer and economic historian and professor at Fancy at Cornell University. His new book is called Temp, How America Works, Business, and American Dream Became Temporary Lewis, welcome to Rico Decode.”
2018-08-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Temp' author Louis Hyman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT