Ai-jen Poo: the future of work isn’t robots. It’s caring humans.

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2017

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When we talk about the future of work, we usually focus on artificial intelligence, robotics, driverless cars. The future of work, we’re told, is a future where humans cease to be necessary. Ai-jen Poo wants to refocus that conversation. When we think about the future of work, she says, we need to think about care workers. Home care work — caring for the elderly and for children — is the fastest-growing occupation in the entire workforce, expanding at five times the rate of any other job. By the year 2030, child care and elder care jobs will be our economy's single largest occupation. If you’re talking about the future of work and you’re not talking about care work, you’re doing it wrong. Poo is a MacArthur "genius" grant-winning activist and organizer. She began her career in New York City, organizing domestic workers, and eventually lobbied New York state to pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Thanks to her efforts, seven other states have now passed similar legislation. Today, Poo is the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the co-director of Caring Across Generations, and the author of The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America. In this episode, we talk about how she managed to organize a population of workers that spend most of their lives behind closed doors, why she calls herself a "futurist," and the central paradox of care work in America — that the folks who care for those we love are often the most undervalued and least protected. Books: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande Year of Yes by Shonda Rimes, My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	We're about to have the largest older population we've ever had, and really nothing in place
0:05.8	to support people to live well as they live longer.
0:22.0	Hello and welcome to the ESR Clanchon on the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is an episode
0:26.3	about the Future of Work, which is a very overused phrase that I would like to reframe and get
0:32.6	people thinking about something else when they hear it. When you hear the future of work, you
0:36.6	probably think about robots and AI and driverless cars. I've been to a lot of these panels.
0:42.9	The future of work is always this idea of a world without workers. The future of work, if you look
0:48.0	at what the projections of the Bureau of Labor Statistics are, if you look at what's happening
0:52.4	in the demographics of this country, a lot of the future of work is actually not going to go to robots.
0:56.4	It's going to go to care workers. It is people who are going to care for the elderly in this country,
1:01.6	to huge, huge, huge and growing group, people who are going to care for the young in this country,
1:06.4	which is also a huge group. Practicalism millennials are our beginning to have children.
1:10.3	You have this huge generation retiring or retired. This huge generation coming into child-bearing years,
1:16.5	or in child-bearing years, and a country where we have no real idea what we're going to do about it.
1:23.6	These aren't just important questions of economics and how do you finance it and how do you make
1:27.9	these jobs decent jobs, which they are currently often not. These are the most important questions
1:34.2	of what do our final years on Earth look like? Are we at home or in a nursing home? Do we have
1:39.7	dignity here? Do we not? Are we individuals? Are we not treated as individuals? Are the most
1:44.8	important questions for children, almost all of whom grow up now in two-erner households or
1:51.1	households with a single parent who's also the sole-erner? This is important stuff, and it's much
1:57.9	more salient and real and tangible, and we are certain that it's coming than a lot of what you
2:03.7	hear in future of work, punditry. The person I want to talk to about it was Aijin Poo. She is the
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