- Support for civic affairs programming on Kansas City PBS is made possible in part by AARP Kansas City.

- Hi, I'm D, Rashaan Gilmore.

Welcome to "Flatland".

Every month we dig into one issue that's raising questions, causing tensions, or quite frankly, has gone curiously unexplored in our area.

For the first episode, The Future of Work.

(upbeat music) Many of our area's biggest companies set September as the date to bring workers back to the office after an unprecedented pandemic lockdown, but will work return to the way it was?

Do we want it to?

And what about those essential workers who have been working this entire time?

From companies trying to navigate what they can ask of their workforce, to workers redefining what they can demand of their employers.

Let's hear about many concerns some are feeling about the future of work.

(gentle music) - As America reopens, many businesses now face a new challenge, bringing back workers and doing it quickly.

- We do have a labor shortage right now.

- Labor shortages are acute.

- Labor shortages has been so difficult for you guys have had to close stores?

- The economic recovery from the worst of the pandemic continue.

I'm sure there are some labor shortages.

However, I think that people's expectations about work are changing.

I think most people go into the labor market saying that I want to work to live, but many employers, too many employers, actually are saying you need to live to work.

And the overwork, of particularly the so-called essential workers has been a tremendous, not just through the pandemic, but way before the pandemic too.

There's just so much preoccupation with the workers who work from home and how work is changing for them.

Not many people ask about, you know, the frontline workers, the essential workers, the people who can't work from home.

- Frontline workers have lost their lives.

This is serious.

Like, folks have died going to work during this pandemic, and these corporations have continued to make billions in profit off of workers literally giving their lives.

It's been nearly 20 years since I've seen a doctor.

I don't know what a vacation is.

No health care.

No benefits whatsoever.

Working for, you know, McDonald's, one of the most profitable companies on the planet.

My fiance who's a home health care worker makes 15.25 and still yet we're homeless right now, with our three girls.

We live in a hotel.

My daughter was sent home from school sick.

My fiance had to take time off of work to be home with her.

Right when she was being sent home because she was sick at school, the next day they closed their schools.

Now she had to stay home for childcare.

- Over 40% of the childcare locations in Kansas City have closed during the pandemic.

So it was bad before.

And now it's almost at crisis levels.

Not only do we have a lack of daycare, but daycare into the evening hours is almost non-existent in Kansas City.

And if you know, you're a server at a nice restaurant, that's the peak time for you to be an earner.

If you don't have a safe place for your child, that's available to you and you can afford, it's pretty hard to reenter into the workforce.

- There's always been a category of worker that's had lots of leverage because they have the skills and they have the training and the education.

Now you're running into a circumstance where the workforce is dividing into two categories, those that have leverage and those that don't.

And the ones that don't have leverage are the ones that don't have the skills and the background and the education.

And they're suddenly in a real dilemma.

- You know, we're seeing more strikes, we're seeing more workers organized because I think workers are more conscious of the fact that they deserve more.

(horns honking) - We need fifteen in a union and we need it now.

- Fifteen's never been the ceiling.

It's always been the floor, you know.

The bare minimum we ask for.

So it's never been like, in my mind, a labor shortage, it's been a shortage of pay and respect and benefits on these jobs.

- Over the last 40 years, American workers' standard of living has slipped.

Whatever productivity increases American workers made, which is tremendous, the value of that has gone into the pockets of corporations.

American workers got nothing from that.

We use the excuse of small businesses in order not to pass laws, which affect big businesses.

What about McDonald's franchises who are small businesses?

Why can't they pay a living wage?

Why can't they give people time off?

If you're going to run a business and you're not going to treat your workers right, you shouldn't be in business.

- We're all two things, we're workers and consumers.

If you reduce the number of consumers, you have a problem.

If you take a whole section of your economy and you basically pull them out of the economy because they don't have enough money to spend, well retailers suffer.

And if you're trying to rent apartments, you're going to suffer.

And anything that requires a consumer is going to suffer.

And we're in the process of kind of pushing some of those people out of the economy.

- Okay, I'm ready to go to work, okay, but I gotta get me a car.

I'm ready to go to work, but you know, it's that third shift and childcare is only the first two shifts.

- So daycare access is an issue.

Public transportation, is it connecting workers where they are to where the jobs are?

- To even be able to work in a virtual environment, means the worker has to have a good IT infrastructure around them.

Which means they've gotta be able to afford it.

It means the neighborhood has to have it.

- And then you hear people complaining, "Oh, I can't find people to work in food service."

"I can't find people to work in lawn care."

Well, you know why?

You're not letting them in the country.

Those were never jobs that were taken by the domestic population.

You got needs that you need addressed.

You've got labor shortage throughout almost every industry.

And you've got people that want to work.

There has to be a way to connect those two.

- And we just can't say, "Well, something's wrong with them?"

20% of them are saying we can't come to work because of transportation and 40% say childcare, and we say it's their fault.

Nope, it's our challenge as a community to make sure those things are accessible.

And then we will be able to bounce back during this time.

- Is this job paying enough?

Do they want to take it?

Are their unemployment insurance benefits too high?

Do they have childcare?

All of these questions are very relevant, but ultimately secondary to, is the pandemic contained and are people safe?

And I cannot reiterate enough how important vaccination and eradication are for the ultimate labor market recovery that we are hoping for.

And we can get there piecemeal, but in a way that's less effective and less efficient, the longer the pandemic drags on.

- And you want to think about what the future of work will look like.

You've got to look back at the past and our United States of America.

Any progress that has been made has not been by one individual.

Not Martin Luther King.

Not President John F Kennedy.

No one individual has made a change in this country.

It's all been through movements.

Whether it was civil rights to women's rights to vote.

It's gotta be collective action, organizing.

And that goes for the teachers, home healthcare workers, fast food workers, the people that clean your toilets at your jobs.

Workers have got to have power.

- The major problem now is that people are, they're not necessarily getting a full picture.

As an economist my biggest lament is that people hate the complexity.

And it's like, "Well, I don't know how to explain this to you, but you can't avoid it."

(air whooshing) - And welcome back for the discussion portion of our program.

With us in studio today is Clyde McQueen, President and CEO at The Full Employment Council.

Bridget Hughes, a Burger King employee and organizer with a local labor rights group Stand Up KC.

And Chris Kuehl, Managing Director of Armada Corporate Intelligence.

Bridget, early in the pandemic, we celebrated frontline workers just like you, everybody from nursing home aides, to those who were stocking our grocery store shelves.

But do you feel that they are financially better off today than at the beginning of the pandemic?

- No, I mean, unfortunately not.

We face the whole issue of, we were already struggling to make ends meet prior to the pandemic.

And then when you add on, you know, something as severe as the pandemic that we're facing with COVID-19, it just made a population who was already drowning that much worse.

We're already struggling to make ends meet.

- Can you speak in specific terms, Bridget, about what specifically the pandemic did to exacerbate those problems that were already present that you just described?

- So we're already not making enough money to afford quality childcare and healthcare and you know, basic essentials, food.

So facing the pandemic, it definitely made all of those things harder.

It was a lot harder to go into grocery stores.

You face the risk of being exposed.

Not only being exposed, but with a lot of stores switching to delivery methods, you're coming out of, you know, obviously more money to use those outlets.

But also not having access to affordable childcare prior to the pandemic, and then adding the pandemic onto that you've got children who are out of school, which for a lot of working parents, I know, you know, especially for me, we depend on children being able to go to school in order to work during the day, just to, you know, keep things afloat in the household.

So to no longer have that, and then we don't have daycares or any other alternatives, it just made it that much worse.

So a population that was already struggling is now having to choose between, do I put my family at risk and continue to go to work and not know, you know, what am I going to do to ensure the safety of my children while I'm working?

It's just, it's wrong.

It's inhumane.

- Clyde McQueen, you do a great work in Kansas City with regard to the populations that Bridget just described.

These are essential workers, in many cases.

These are folks who are often entering into work through entry-level positions.

Does what Bridget describe sound familiar to you and how is the Full Employment Council addressing some of those concerns?

- Yes, what Bridget mentioned is exactly what's happening in Kansas City and across the country, particularly in childcare.

In Kansas City and our region, 50% of the entire workforce is female.

And 50% of our workforce is female.

And about 40% of that workforce is also single head of household.

And so childcare, we lost over a third of all the childcare slots that we have not recovered since this pandemic began.

That's number 1.

Number 2 has been the entire issue that surrounds housing.

There has been a huge demand on housing that has thrown the apartment rental issue into a great flux for many working families.

And then third is transportation.

In our region, a lot of people live are not close to where many of the jobs are.

So that must be taken into consideration when thinking about going to work, dropping the child off at the childcare center.

And this is just not 8 to 5 childcare centers, this is 24 hour childcare centers.

So we must really be sure that we understand that the infrastructure that supports workers and their families basically was decimated by this pandemic.

And it has not really recovered yet.

- Chris Kuehl, from the business side of things, how are business owners expected to navigate these challenges that their employees are facing?

They're in it together.

What is the strategy for moving forward?

- Yeah, it's been very difficult because the businesses faced the same issues.

They understand that their workers don't have the same schedule accessibility that they used to have.

They're worried about whether they can keep retaining workers that are facing all these issues at home.

They're worried about training issues.

The business community in general, and this is very general, has been struggling with how do they find the qualified people that they need for the modern job, at the same time that they take care of their existing employees who are in many cases short of that kind of training.

I mean, it's always a very glib response to the training issue to say, "Well, they just need to get training.

You need to get education."

How, I mean, you're a 45, 50 year old worker, you've got a mortgage, you've got a house to take care of.

You've got kids.

When are you going to take two years off to get training?

When are you going to take even a half an afternoon off to get training?

And then they look at the business and say, 'Well, why don't you do the training?"

75% of manufacturers in this country have 25 employees or less.

They don't have the bandwidth to do their own training.

They want a pipeline, which we've not done a very good job of creating.

We don't do enough with trade schools, with community colleges.

We don't even have the workforce development we used to have in high schools.

Too many people are just sort of told, "Hey, go out and find a job.

It's on you, figure it out."

And the employee is coming back saying, "It's not that easy."

As Bridget was pointing out, "I have to find a job that fits my schedule.

That pays me enough that I can actually survive on it."

Many of the assumptions that businesses made over the years is that everybody was in this standard two income earner household when they're not.

I mean, it's the vast majority of people are not in that situation anymore.

They're single family head of household and it's an entirely different environment.

There's not someone home to take care of all those needs that may have been there 20, 30 years ago.

- So this kind of cuts to the heart of the problem though, that we see that entry-level workers and those who are able to, entry-level and essential workers, and those who are able, to almost quite literally, phone it in, that chasm has widened quite a bit.

Clyde McQueen, how are you preparing your clients for this modern workplace?

And are you able to get them access to jobs that don't require the skillset that maybe Chris just talked about or potentially the entry-level positions that allow them to get right in and maybe work from home, but maybe not?

- Well, one of the things that we have to do is to inform the potential employee of where all the childcare centers are.

So we have to work with lot of the childcare facilities to know what their shift times are.

We have to work with the area transit authority to determine the to and from transportation hours, taking people to and from work.

And then we work with the employer to let them know that those two things are very important because if those persons can't figure those things out, they aren't going to show up.

Not to apply and not for job fairs.

Not for those types of things.

And those are the things when persons ask me the question, "Where are these people, you know, they don't want to work."

And I inform them that the reason why they aren't showing up is because the ecosystem has been thrown completely off.

And it takes a system of support to enable a person to show up for work, to enable a person to be able to work there effectively and to enable a person to be retained on a job.

And our challenge is retention.

We don't want the person to show up one day and then have to go out next week because the childcare wasn't available.

- Do you find that that's true?

People don't want to work, and so therefore they're not staying on jobs that they get?

- I completely disagree with that because we've worked with those persons, and the number one thing that we have heard most of these workers who have lost their jobs, who are trying to get a new job, is a concern about their family.

Particularly about their children.

And as was mentioned earlier, you know, they don't want to leave their kids at home by themselves.

They don't want to have to pick their kid up late from a childcare center.

Nor have to pay that late fee because you had to work a couple of hours overtime.

And those things are very critical.

Particularly when our labor force is structured in the way that it is presently.

- Chris Kuehl, same question for you.

What is your take on whether or not employees, or would be employees, just don't want to work?

- No, I think that's a misnomer because when you look at how people actually responded in the last year, while they were getting this government help, the estimates were that almost half of them were working off the books.

They were finding ways to make an income.

I mean, just in my own neighborhood, I observed this.

We had a big wind storm, blew down a lot of trees.

Within about an hour, there were half a dozen guys showing up with pickup trucks and chainsaws.

First question out of their mouth was, "Do you or any of your relatives work for the IRS?"

If the answer to that was no, then it's like, "Do you need some trees cut down?"

Yes, and all of a sudden, you know, the guy talking to him and he said, "For right now, I made 500 bucks today tax-free.

Don't tell anybody, but I'm not real anxious to take that minimum wage job when I can do this.

I realize that at some point, this is not going to be possible.

This is a summertime thing."

So people are creative.

They find ways to make money.

And it is, it is illogical to think that people are living just in the amount of government help that they're receiving.

Cause people fail to live with that money.

That's not much money.

And it's not enough money for people to raise children and take care of the needs of an average household.

They're finding other ways to generate income.

And I think once they get a job that does have some kind of opportunity for advancement and promotion, they stick with it.

The issue is often if they're in a job that doesn't have that, well, what's the incentive to stay?

You end up saying, "Well, I'm never going to get paid anymore or promoted, I'm just going to look for another job."

- I think the issue of low wages is critically important to this entire discussion as is the issue of automation.

Are jobs available?

Well, in fact, I'll take this to you Bridget.

Do you feel like automation or robotics are going to take away positions that people really need?

- No, I mean, honestly, we've seen over the years since they've been implementing, you know, more automation, more machines into the workplace, especially, you know, in the food industry in particular, we've actually seen an increased need of employees, even with those machines.

I mean like the kiosk at McDonald's, for instance.

Yes, it's, easier for you.

You'd think, oh, this is taking a job away from an employee.

When, in fact, we actually have to add three more employees into our kitchen areas just to be able to put out the production that's needed in order to accommodate those machines.

So it's definitely not replacing workers.

I think, if anything, it's increasing the need for these businesses to have even more staffing than what they're already equipped with.

Not only that, but it's creating an environment that's even more stressful for the workers who are already there.

- That is a very interesting take.

And I'm curious, Chris, if you can speak from the business side of things.

Are more businesses moving toward automation?

Are they seeing this as a cost savings and efficiency improvement the way Bridget described?

Or is it maybe something else entirely?

- No, I agree with Bridget that you're seeing a different kind of worker because as the businesses bringing in automation and robotics, it changes what the worker does.

What you've seen in fast food, for example, is more work being given to people in the back preparing the food less counter help because they're using touch screens for the counter.

In manufacturing, you're seeing a lot of use of robotics replacing the old manpower.

You don't have people moving things around the warehouse floor anymore.

It's done by robot and conveyor belt, but it creates jobs at the same time.

People that have to run the machines and operate the machines and program the machines.

25 years ago to be a welder, all you really needed to know how to do was put down a good bead.

Now you better know how to do that and program a robot welding arm.

So that's the issue.

There's a lots of jobs.

The estimate is there's 10 million jobs available right now, but 80% of them require additional training, additional skills, additional education.

And some of it's pretty new.

I mean, it's trying to get people trained to do the most modern thing, and we don't have the capability.

Even schools that are offering these things, where do you find an instructor to teach this?

- Clyde McQueen, what are the trends that you are seeing?

I mean, you occupy a very unique space as sort of liaising between both employers and employees.

What are the trends that you think are shaping the way work looks in Kansas City, both today, as well as into the future?

Because obviously we're still not out of this global pandemic.

- Well, I think it was just referenced earlier.

The good paying jobs do require some level of certification.

And in fact it, and it doesn't mean a four year or two year degree.

It means to be a forklift driver, you have to be able to drive a forklift.

To be able to drive a truck means you gotta have a license.

In each of those instances, those types of certifications create the divide between a higher paying versus a lower paying job.

And one of the things that we have been trying to push is non-debt-based training.

Where people don't have to go into debt to get a certification.

Where the training does occur in a time that's convenient for a family.

Whether it's an evening.

Whether it's a Saturday.

But to make sure that these courses are designed in a way to afford the, what I call the entry level and the line worker, to be able to participate in them because work training doesn't end once you get the job, it must continuously keep up with the market as it continues to grow.

- Well said.

Every month on our website, we answer your provocative questions about life in Kansas City and the issues you care about through our initiative, curiousKC.

Let's hear from our community reporter, Vicky Diaz-Camacho, about our question of the month.

(air whooshing) - This month, our curiousKC question about the future of work comes from Eram.

They asked, "What are lawmakers, business owners and corporations doing to make their workplaces more inclusive and actually worth working for, especially for the most disempowered and marginalized community members?

(air whooshing) - Amongst all of this movement in the workforce, is inclusivity and equitable access taking a back seat?

Clyde, what do you think?

- Any companies appointing diversity officers and persons for equity and inclusion, that's one part of it.

But you wanna also look at your policies.

Is there a childcare policy or provision within your fringe benefit area?

Are are you looking at shift times to accommodate workers?

So it's as much as a staffing concern as it is a system concern.

As I've mentioned earlier, the issue, the three way triangle of childcare, transportation and housing, increasingly it's becoming a challenge for many what I call middle and lower income workers.

- Bridget, so one final question.

I'd love for you to talk to us about what you feel would be the ideal workplace situation for workers like yourself, who are essential frontline workers, but whose voices, up until now, probably have not been heard as loudly and as clearly as they should have.

What is your message to them?

- I mean, from the beginning of the pandemic we were defined as essential workers.

So these fast food workers, these retail workers, these nurses, teachers, like we were considered essential from the get-go, but we weren't treated as if we were essential.

We're not provided healthcare.

We're not provided sick days.

We're not provided a living wage.

The reality is, in order for workers to effectively reenter the workforce and stay in the workforce, we need to make sure that not only employers, but our government is ensuring that policies and things are in place to ensure that workers have a living wage and healthcare and paid sick days.

And more importantly, even unions.

We need to make sure that this is a possibility for all workers and not just a small section of workers.

We need to make sure that there's access to healthcare and childcare and transportation, just like Mr. McQueen was saying.

- Chris, in 30 seconds or less, can you tell us, do you think businesses gotten that message?

Has what Vicky, said that voice of the worker, the essential worker been heard?

- I think it has in a lot of cases, but it hasn't in others.

I mean, it depends a lot on the individual business.

I would say the majority of companies that really count on having a workforce that grows and develops with them over time really gets it.

I mean, the average number of years that people work with a manufacturer, for example, is 25.

They want somebody in there for the long haul.

I don't know that the retail community has gotten the message nor some of the fast food community.

- Well said.

And that's where we wrap up this conversation for this episode of "Flatland".

Thank you Bridget Hughes, from Standup KC.

Clyde McQueen, from the Full Employment Council.

And Chris Kuehl, from Armada Corporate Intelligence for joining us today.

We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Are you now job hunting because your employer has told you that they want you back in the office full-time?

Is your company taking an innovative approach to this new world of work that you'd like to share?

Feel free to share that with us at flatlandshow.org and submit you curiousKC question for our next episode's topic.

If you have questions, we'd love to hear from you.

Engage with us at flatlandshow.org.

I'm D. Rashaan Gilmore.

Until next time, bye-bye.

(air whooshing) (gentle music) - Support for civic affairs programming on Kansas City PBS is made possible in part by AARP Kansas City.