The bottom dropped out of the labor market for low and middle income workers a long time ago.

It's just that the pandemic made it even clearer.

So you can't go to your employer and say,

hey, if you don't give me a raise, I'm going to quit

because the employer knows that there's no place for you to go.

So it's that sense of having no other options but to work that you were forced labor?

From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics with

Nick Hanauer, where we explore everything they forgot to teach you in Econ 101.

I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

I'm David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.

So Nick, I think there's been kind of a theme, an inadvertent theme to our podcast the past few weeks.

Yeah, the demise of worker power and the massive accumulation of both it's a legal political and economic power at the top that defines American life today

And we're sick into that theme on this this week's podcast too.

Yeah, we get to talk to this really incredibly talented young economist

Soresh Naidu out of Columbia University,

who's one of the sort of bright lights in that field and he's been writing about

labor markets for a long time and thinking about them he has a bunch of cool new writing in particular

around what he calls forced labor, the forced labor of so-called

essential workers. Right, which came to the forefront during this pandemic

where it turns out that these essential workers are largely

low-wage workers, so workers in the bottom half of the distribution, and these people were not seeing hazard pay in this economy.

No, and what's even darker than that is it not only weren't these folks being compensated for the extra risk they were taking by going to work during a deadly pandemic,

...