Future of Work

DIEGO GERENA-QUIONES: Being a bike person is really just, that's who I am.

I started messenger work in 2012 as an employee at a messenger service.

Demand was good, and the supply of couriers was low, and you could make a lot of money back then.

NARRATOR: America is in the midst of a workplace revolution.

Gig work.

Globalization.

Robots.

Cobots.

Artificial intelligence.

Are workers in danger of becoming obsolete in this disrupted landscape?

How will they stay relevant?

GERENA-QUIONES: These companies move rapidly towards automation.

Now you don't even deal with people.

If you have questions, there's nowhere you can go.

There's no phone numbers.

You send an email, maybe you get a response, maybe you don't, and so there's just... no love.

(soft chuckle) Now, you got guys out there working ten-hour days, maybe scraping by $150.

They're scrambling during lunch and dinner to get that money.

They're doing 20, 30 deliveries, riding 20, 30 miles, maybe more.

I was, like, "I don't want to do that."

MAN: The American dream is very much at risk.

WOMAN: Americans can't work any harder.

MAN: Robots are coming to take my job.

MAN: It's not even the future-- it's the now.

NARRATOR: When the pandemic struck, it accelerated America's work revolution.

The future was here.

And for some, the future was unsparing.

CARLOS GUTIERREZ: During the pandemic, a lot of us stayed at home and didn't have to commute.

We were all safe.

But a lot of people had to go out and work every day, and take the Metro, and get near people, and get near people without masks.

I'm sitting in a space that's open-office and it's completely empty.

What I think it has exposed is how dependent the professional class is on the service workers.

(indistinct radio chatter) HYMAN: And the service workers, some of them are considered essential, like nurses and firefighters.

But not checkout people or delivery people.

MICHELLE WEISE: What the pandemic really did is, it lay bare these more foundational and fundamental cracks in the system.

Even before the pandemic hit, we had close to 41 million Americans who were just not earning a living wage.

They were just struggling to navigate the workforce.

HYMAN: Secure jobs are what about the top 30% of Americans experience.

And insecurity is what the rest of America experiences.

They're not certain how much is going to be in that paycheck because they may not have gotten enough hours that week or enough jobs that week.

They don't have enough money in case of an emergency.

They don't have enough money to always pay their bills.

GERENA-QUIONES: People like me have two and three different jobs.

Over the years, it got a little bit harder to make, you know, decent money.

I just want a dignified experience where I feel like I matter to the whole operation.

I get asked a lot about the future of work.

The one survey that I read that really said something different to me simply asked existing workers, what did they want?

What was the future of work that they were hoping for?

What they wanted was to know the rules.

"Do I need to get a high school degree, a college degree?

"Just tell me and I'll do it.

"And if I do it, I want a guaranteed job "for the rest of my life, "I want my weekends and evenings free, so that I can buy a house and raise a family."

(laughing) The deal has changed.

The old deal was, "I went to school for 12 years.

"I acquired a set of skills.

"Those skills took me through a 30-year working life, "and then I got to retire at 65 with a nice, defined benefit plan."

Well, the new deal is, now, there are no guarantees-- there's no certainty.

I think at the heart of this is the shift in the deal from "I learn, I do, I retire" to "I learn, I do, I learn, I do, "and I come back and learn a whole bunch, and then I keep doing."

- No hands.

JESUTHASAN: It is completely at odds with everything that we have told the American worker about what it takes to stay relevant in this world of work.

OREN CASS: But the reality is that things can only change as fast as workers can learn to do the new things.

There's no giant pool of reserve workers who already know how to do the new things that are waiting in the wings to come charging in.

NARRATOR: A technology is considered futureproof when it's unlikely to become obsolete.

But in this era of profound disruption, can workers themselves be futureproofed?

JUAN LOPEZ: I was a telemarketer.

I was a telemarketer.

And what service would you like to sign up for today?

LOPEZ: I hated that job.

Oh, my God.

I'm, like, "Man, this is not the job for me."

And then I joined the military and... Getting out, I was trying to figure out what was the biggest, baddest thing happening in Texas.

The oil field was booming during the time and...

I moved to San Angelo during the time when I was working in the oil field and bought a house out there.

And then exactly almost a year after we bought the house, like, I got laid off.

I was laid off, and then for a while, I was lost.

(humorless chuckle): I was lost.

And I just saw wind turbines and was, like, "Well, what about that thing?"

NARRATOR: Juan Lopez stepped into one of the fastest-growing energy sectors.

In Texas, wind power has created thousands of jobs.

(machinery humming) BILLIE JONES: The companies that come here and hire, everyone's needing 50 to 150 to 200 new employees, just right now.

INSTRUCTOR: How did you, how did you adjust it?

With that...

Mechanically, what is that valve doing?

- It's opening up.

So we are having a hard time keeping up with their demand.

Knowing that I'm going to a broken tower and... JONES: Juan was probably one of the best students we've had.

You know, you, you fix that tower.

JONES: Someone who's focused... LOPEZ: We did a lot of troubleshooting... JONES: ...detail-oriented, and has a drive.

Understanding what it takes that makes these wind turbines function, you know, you're already writing yourself a check just by sitting in those seats.

Try to soak up as much as you can in school.

So, we're going to help you, give you that little extra pay raise, right?

INSTRUCTOR: Harness inspection.

JONES: There are quite a few people that are transitioning from oil to wind.

INSTRUCTOR: And remember to check your leg straps.

Check your buckles.

Make sure your latches are good.

JONES: These guys that have worked derricks, if you work a derrick, you've got to be able to climb that ladder.

You got to know how to put a harness on.

INSTRUCTOR: Disconnect your lanyards.

Over your shoulders... JONES: You got to know how to be safe at height.

We're still working with a lot of our tools.

So there are quite a few transferable skills.

There are these kind of constant infusions of new skills that we're going to have to somehow attain-- different sorts of skills that translate into deeply needed skills in other domains.

LOPEZ: In the military, I started off my first five years as a jet engine mechanic.

I gained mechanical skills, electronics.

Oil field, I learned hydraulic systems, hydraulic fracturing, and I carried that into school to study wind turbines.

JONES: What can I take with me?

What can I port over from this industry into another?

I like working with my hands.

So I figured climbing wind towers for a living and watching them go from not spinning to spinning, it's a pretty big achievement.

JONES: This can be a very dangerous industry.

I take students out to the turbine so that, number one, I can see if they're capable of climbing the turbine safely.

And two, it tells them if this is something they're going to want to do for a career.

MAN: Keep all your stuff in your bag.

You know, like, if you drop something and it goes down tower, you know, it can be dangerous.

If you drop anything, you fail your climb test.

It starts to hurt your forearms.

You know, you don't got to be the tough guy.

If you can't climb fast, it's okay.

I'm not going to be climbing fast, you know, so... Find a pace that you're comfortable with.

So it's roughly a 300-foot climb up the ladder.

I always have the, you know, your-kid-on-their-first-bike- ride nervousness.

'Cause these, I mean, these are my students, so I'm always worried that...

I don't want anyone to get hurt.

It's my first time, so it's going to be definitely a first-time experience.

- Who's going first?

WEISE: Moving from the military to oil and gas, and then into wind turbines, that's a really exciting way to move successfully and navigate across industry domains.

But it's not necessarily the easiest pathway.

It's not easily navigable.

LOPEZ: I feel that this industry is more stable.

I'm able to benefit a lot more from it.

If I do everything right, if I'm safe about everything, I'll have a job tomorrow.

NARRATOR: But will he?

Or is Juan in danger of becoming obsolete?

JONES: Don't climb with one leg on the top, because you're gonna burn out.

There you go.

MING: Is your job truly futureproof?

"Jobs are at risk.

"A.I.

's going to take them over, except not mine.

Mine can only be done by a human."

"How could you possibly automate that?"

But in fact, that's the big question.

How can I automate that?

Because I guarantee someone is tackling that question right now.

So, uh, we'll go up in here, we'll open that hatch, where you guys can look out for a minute, and then we'll head back down.

Now you can look out.

MING: For many people, futureproofing means, teach your kids how to program.

But if you think that that will magically proof your child against the future, you are very, very wrong.

And, to be fair, you're not alone.

Wow!

Yoo-hoo!

MICHAEL J. SORRELL: Futureproofing, it's a little more challenging now, because the information age, the digital age, has introduced a pace of change that frankly, people are struggling to keep up with.

JONES: Everybody's safe.

Everybody feels good.

JESUTHASAN: As technology accelerates, the skills that we've counted on for decades, if not centuries, are perhaps going to be rendered obsolete.

SORRELL: We should place a premium on getting people to function in an interdisciplinary way that is incredibly versatile, because that's what the workforce is going to demand.

NARRATOR: As new technology disrupts the workplace, staying relevant will require new skills.

But what kinds of skills?

JESUTHASAN: Lots of companies are experimenting with agile ways of working.

If you go to an airport in this country, you'll see the person who checked you in actually also being the gate agent, maybe even also ducking down to help the baggage handlers with loading baggage.

Minimal staffing is this approach to getting work done where people are taking on many different types of work and they are cross-trained.

And the idea is that there is a significant value to the organization from that flexibility.

JOHN ZUZICH: A littoral combat ship, or an LCS, is a small surface combatant.

They have much higher speed and they can get into shallower waters.

The Navy put new technologies onboard the ship, where those systems could do portions of the work that the sailors had traditionally done.

(indistinct radio chatter) ALYSON PIERCE: The littoral combat ship is designed for an optimal manned crew, which means we have less people to do the same amount of work.

On a legacy ship, there may be seven bridge watch standers at a time.

We have two bridge watch standers.

So the officer of the deck is not only overseeing everything that's going on, but they're also now the ones driving.

This technology on board is absolutely a fundamental part of how this ship operates and how it's designed to operate.

MITCHELL LARIOS: Fishing Vessel Andrews, this is Warship 1.

We received your distress call...

I'm the electronic materials officer, I'm the ship's electronic readiness team lead, fall protection program manager, aloft program manager, watch stander, underway watches, surface warfare officer.

One of the most important aspects of my job, if not the most important aspect, is driving the ship.

(indistinct radio chatter) ZUZICH: In the training facility, we're replicating the actual shipboard environment.

The older sailors, or the non-gamers, typically don't like the virtual environments, and we have to play with the system.

We have to slow frame rates down so that they don't get sick.

The younger students, they're used to first-person gaming, and they excel at the controls and the movement through that gaming environment.

LARIOS: A lot of us grew up playing video games.

And that hand-eye coordination is kind of already built-in.

We know what our hand is doing on the combinator because it's similar to, like, a joystick.

There's a certain level of comfortability you get with using your hands without looking at what your hands are doing.

My dad was in the Navy, but he never really talked about it.

It just never really came up in conversation.

But it wasn't really, like, kind of, like, in the back of my mind up until my junior year of high school.

The Naval Academy felt right.

It felt like that was the thing I should do.

Your ability to deal with whatever situation is arising and being able to prioritize, I think that translates really well into pretty much any other field.

CASS: Whether you're on a Navy ship, whether you're in a manufacturing plant, whether you're cutting people's hair, getting more done with fewer people is the way that we make progress.

(bell clanging) NARRATOR: But what's driving companies to use fewer workers?

Is it progress?

Or is it profits?

DAVID SIEGEL: I think over the last couple of decades, business leadership has become very excited about reducing the need for humans to be involved with work.

Automation has been really turbocharged by A.I., and robotics, and other advanced computer technologies.

Tax policy over the years in America has implicitly favored capital equipment-- robots and other machinery-- over labor.

BYRON AUGUSTE: So, in other words, if you have a business problem, and you solve that same problem with machines and software, your company will look more profitable than if you solve exactly the same business problem with people and training.

Your stock price will be higher.

Your executives will be making millions of dollars more.

NARRATOR: Not everyone agrees.

Many companies do strategize to balance progress and profits.

But what does this mean for the jobs of tomorrow?

My belief is, in the next ten to 15 years, there's likely to be a net loss of jobs.

That is because the speed at which routine jobs are being displaced will be faster than the speed at which new jobs will be created.

Tasks that are repetitive in nature, that don't require deep thoughts, strategic creative thinking-- those are the jobs that are most in danger.

And on the other hand, if we look at a longer term-- maybe 20 to 30 years-- that doesn't account for the many jobs that will be invented and created.

But it's unfortunate that we can't quite predict what those jobs are.

Just like, if we went back to 1995 and asked me what jobs would be created by the internet, there's no way I would have listed Uber driver.

NARRATOR: So how do workers futureproof themselves for jobs that don't yet exist?

CASS: We don't know what the specific new jobs are going to be, but I think we do know the kinds of skills that people are going to need.

And some of those are soft skills, in terms of knowing how to work with other people, in terms of knowing how to learn to do new things.

And some of them are harder skills, whether that's in a particular industry with a particular technology.

(buttons beeping, machinery whirring) JOHN RUSSO: What's gonna happen when we have even more technology, and when the new technology displaces even more people?

There are these narratives out there.

"If I just get a little bit more education, I'm going to do better."

And that's been the mantra for people all the way along.

"If you just get a little bit more education."

There's a lot of people that have master's degrees that are now working in fulfillment centers and working in part-time jobs.

SORRELL: Futureproofing is really what education was always supposed to be.

Right?

It was supposed to provide you with the ability to be flexible.

In essence, being employable.

WEISE: The number-one reason consistently for enrolling in post-secondary education is to get a good job.

But when you actually talk to college graduates, they are consistently telling us that they don't actually feel prepared for the, for the labor market.

So people are starting to wonder: is college worth it?

AMIR NOORMOHAMMAD: I am going for a degree in chemical engineering.

Since I'm the oldest and the first of my family to actually go into a college, I'm the one who has to kind of figure that out.

My parents are immigrants.

They came from Pakistan ages ago, and they're not too familiar with how a college system works here.

Currently, I'm part of the alternative high school program at Truman College.

So the general idea is that I can take as many credits as I can here and while still making some progress towards graduating high school.

I can continue here for two years and then transfer to a four-year university.

And that would make it more affordable, because I'm not paying for the full four years.

I'm only paying for the last two.

But since my parents didn't have, like, a college fund, like some families have, I needed to find a way to pay for that in a way that reduces the amount of debt and burden either on my parents or myself.

Because who wants to be in debt?

NARRATOR: Today, student loan debt in the U.S. is over one-and-a-half trillion dollars.

That's more than the GDP of Switzerland, Costa Rica, and Belgium combined.

American students, on average, carry about $37,000 in school loans.

But a college degree can more than double lifelong earnings.

AUGUSTE: We have a system in the United States that's very much dominated by college degrees as a pathway to work.

NARRATOR: So when did a college degree become the gold standard?

WEISE: We used to actually be able to acquire great jobs with only a high school degree.

NARRATOR: In the 1940s, a high school diploma was enough for a middle-class life.

But in 1944, the G.I.

Bill put higher education within reach for many more Americans.

Eventually, college degrees would replace high school diplomas as a standard for employability.

WEISE: So with the G.I.

Bill, that's actually when we see this huge and vast proliferation of universities in the United States.

NARRATOR: Still, by 1960, only about 45% of high school grads went on to college.

CASS: And then in the 1970s, a real shift happened in this country, from a model that had what we called tracking-- where, in junior high or high school, students would be placed on different pathways-- to one that said, "No, we're, we're going to have "a single pathway for everyone, and it's going to be college-focused."

WEISE: Slowly over the next few decades, you see our high school graduates just knowing that the next step is college.

NARRATOR: As more companies require college degrees for jobs, two-thirds of high school grads are heading straight to college.

Even so, equal access is the big challenge.

The people who go to the top colleges and universities, we really channel more white, affluent students into those.

And then for the more public, open-enrollment universities, that's where we see a lot of Black and brown people going.

It never fails that the people who say that college isn't for everyone are people who have been college-educated, whose families have been college-educated.

So what they're saying is, "College isn't for people like you, but it definitely is for people like me."

NARRATOR: And what about those who don't go to college?

What's the economic fallout?

The data shows us that if you don't have any education beyond a high school degree, you are about 50% more likely to live in poverty than someone who has just a little bit beyond that high school degree.

So it is deeply and hugely impactful to pursue some sort of education beyond high school.

AUGUSTE: So, if a young person is very interested in an occupational field that didn't require a bachelor's degree, typically, and they said, "Should I still get a college degree?

", I would say, "Yes, you should still get a college degree."

Why?

Because that's the system as it exists today.

(piano playing) NOORMOHAMMAD: Since the last time we filmed, it was only a few months before the pandemic forced us into lockdown.

I finally graduated high school, so that's taken care of, finally.

I've been going to community college.

What I'm hoping for in the next six months is to be living on my own and trying to resume my career plans and the path I had for myself for college.

So... we'll see how that goes.

(piece concludes) NARRATOR: But is a four-year degree really the best measure of employability?

What if it's not?

JESUTHASAN: The traditional lens that companies bring to identifying the people with the right skills is flawed.

They're still looking for someone with a four-year degree.

And quite honestly, you don't need that for many of the jobs that you're trying to fill.

In many situations, someone who has the right certifications and skills could just as easily do the work.

- Did you make your bed?

- Mm-hmm.

- Okay.

TIFFANY SPRAGGINS: I was 30 years old when I originally decided to go back to school.

It wasn't comfortable for me.

It wasn't comfortable to go back to school.

Which homework are you doing?

But it's, it's a necessary change.

It's very necessary.

You almost done?

Can I see it?

I've driven rideshare for Uber.

I've cleaned the city of downtown Minneapolis.

I was a dispatcher overnight, working, like, 12-hour shifts.

I didn't feel like there was growth at the jobs that I had.

I've always been interested in, like, the mechanics of things, how the internet works with everything.

Literally, when you go into a search engine and you type something, what happens and how does that information get brought back to you?

When I originally decided to go back to college, I went to the Department of Labor and Statistics website, and traditionally, you would see what degrees are out there and see where that path will take you.

But I did it backwards.

I looked at the salary that I wanted to make, and what type of jobs paid that kind of salary, and then the actual steps to become that person and do that job.

I've lived below the poverty line before.

And I wanted to make a livable wage.

When I was at Wilbur Wright College, somebody actually approached me from leadership at Accenture and told me about the apprenticeship program.

PALLAVI VERMA: Apprenticeships is a very old concept that has been sustained over a long period of time.

It's more just a new concept for what I'd call white-collar jobs.

MING: Most people thinking about apprenticeships, they're probably envisioning something out of the Middle Ages, very crafts-based, learning how to become a blacksmith.

And in some ways, it's not completely different than that.

The idea is, you spend time with a highly skilled professional, supporting them directly as a bit of an assistant, and then slowly moving into doing parts of the job yourself, and then coming all the way to being a full professional.

JIM COLEMAN: There is definitely a war for technology talent.

But for years and years, hiring somebody who didn't have a four-year degree was really not part of the discussion in how we recruited and attracted talent.

MING: Hiring is a very risk-adverse industry.

And the one guaranteed way to not get yelled at is hire a white guy from Harvard, because no one's going to criticize you even if he's a total dud, because how could you have known?

Whereas, you take a risk on a Black woman with no degree from someplace no one's ever heard of before, and she doesn't work out?

You lose your job.

Would it be a C.I.O.

or would it be a cross-Accenture... Because, because, keep in mind, if you're cross-Accenture... SPRAGGINS: I'm a functions tester.

My job is to test the functionalities of the content apps that our company uses.

And then you unselect it, it trumps C.I.O.

INSTRUCTOR: Correct.

SPRAGGINS: When I'm working, typically, it's learning.

Some days, I come in and I know exactly what I'm supposed to do.

And then some days, I'm approached with a work item or a scenario that I've never encountered before.

You could do the same dropdown on C.I.O.?

INSTRUCTOR: Yes.

SPRAGGINS: A four-year degree would be important as far as my next steps, because the position that I'm in does not require a four-year degree, but some other positions do.

MING: People often say, "You need to figure out how to continually learn throughout your whole lifetime."

And obviously, everyone does need to take some responsibility for their career.

But I'll tell you one thing many workers can't do is take two years to go back to school and not get paid.

They couldn't even afford to sign up for a six-week job retraining program.

As if six weeks of job retraining would even prepare them for this future anyways.

It is unclear also who's responsible for upskilling and reskilling.

Right now, it is being placed almost entirely on the heads of workers.

- See you later.

JESUTHASAN: How do we give them the space?

How do I give them the income?

How do I give them the social support?

How do I give them access to the learning...

I'll see you later.

JESUTHASAN: ...without the burden of debt?

NARRATOR: But it's not just about futureproofing skills.

The rules of employment are also changing.

And the consequences are huge.

How can workers protect themselves?

RUSSO: Work is being fragmented in terms of part-time, full-time, independent contractors, gig work, and all those new forms of work that are being developed.

Part of the people are saying, "Well, isn't this great?

People have more freedom."

On the other hand, I'd like to talk to them after five or ten years to see where they are economically when they have no health insurance and no pension.

GERENA-QUIONES: Yeah, I'm definitely a gig worker.

I think it's few and far in between people that are dedicated to one app.

DoorDash, Postmates, Caviar, Uber.

And it's all on one phone, but you're just cycling through the apps and whatever bites first, you take it.

NARRATOR: The gig economy includes 55 million Americans working full- or part-time and classified as independent contractors.

They're considered freelancers, not employees.

MING: This gig economy and contract work now spans out to some of the most sophisticated, highly university-educated people.

HYMAN: But for many people, the gig economy is not liberation.

It's just survival.

It's a way to make ends meet when your regular job has already failed you.

- So you could imagine, like, if you're, if you're doing deliveries for eight hours, the average... NARRATOR: Platform companies have a growing dominance in the gig economy.

GERENA-QUIONES: These companies have been on the scene for less than a decade with very little supervision from city agencies or state government.

SAIBOU SIDIB: We fight for all drivers.

It doesn't matter if you're driving Uber, Lyft, Green, Yellow.

Since 2002, I was driving Yellow.

And then Uber came.

Beginning, it was good.

We guaranteed $1,700 weekly gross income.

But 2016, things start getting really worse.

Maybe you do only ten fares sometime.

Or 15 fare, if you're lucky.

BHAIRAVI DESAI: Driving for a living used to be considered a fairly decent job.

It's part of the low-wage economy, a predominantly immigrant economy, in New York City.

For immigrant workers, it was considered one of the higher-earning jobs.

And then Uber and Lyft entered the market.

And what's been a full-time job has slowly, slowly been turned into a gig where there is no job security.

NARRATOR: In 2015, there were only 7,000 rideshare drivers in New York City.

By early 2020, there were 55,000.

SIDIB: The demand was slow because we have so many cars.

And now everybody was looking for a customer.

This company flood the market.

DESAI: They decide how much you get to make, which hours you're working, how many hours you're working, who you pick up, how much you can charge.

Yet these companies claim that the drivers are not their employees.

So the state says, "You don't have to abide by any labor law as long as you dispatch the work through an app."

The state says, "This worker is now an independent contractor because all the work is now being dictated by an algorithm."

What would stop any other company in the economy from starting to use apps to dispatch their workers?

We think it's just a matter of time before companies like Walmart and Amazon take on that route.

REPORTER: California legislature passes AB5... REPORTER: The so-called Gig Economy bill... REPORTER: ...force companies like Uber and Lyft to reclassify their drivers from independent contractors to employees.

(horns honking) NARRATOR: In 2019, gig workers in California challenged their status as independent contractors.

They demanded the same wages and benefits guaranteed to employees.

(car horn honking, crowd cheering) NARRATOR: In response, the legislature passed a bill called AB5 to protect gig workers from being misclassified.

(speaking indistinctly) DESAI: In New York, we've been fighting for a similar bill that would establish a universal test for how the agencies and courts of our state decide on employee status for all workers.

NARRATOR: In California, Uber, Lyft, and other platforms poured over $200 million into a ballot initiative that would exempt their companies from providing benefits to their drivers.

A year later, they succeeded.

DESAI: The defeat in California, it makes you feel like these companies just can't be beaten, but on the other hand, that motivates workers to fight back.

HYMAN: There are laws in different states that want to deal with this problem of worker misclassification.

(speaking indistinctly) HYMAN: The point is that we should be providing workers' comp and a version of unemployment insurance and health insurance to everyone, regardless of their workplace classification.

CASS: It's a little bit strange, when you think about it, that we get our benefits from our employers.

In a lot of cases, it would make sense to get benefits elsewhere.

NARRATOR: One idea gaining traction among some companies and those who gig for them is "portable benefits."

Might this be a way to futureproof worker security?

CASS: A better solution for the long term is offering people a benefits package that travels with them from employer to employer, or just having some other organization out there that provides your benefits.

A union is a great example.

And a much better model for gig workers would be what's called sectoral bargaining, where you have a single union representing all of the gig workers.

Yeah, do you want me to do labor history?

I'm ready, I'm, I'm...

This is, this is my jam.

So we're all nostalgic now for these factory jobs, but for most of the Industrial Revolution, factories were a great place to go if you wanted to be poor or if you wanted to lose an arm.

And that all changed in the 1930s.

Certainly, after the Great Depression, industrial jobs were fantastic for the people who had them.

And this all happened because of the industrial unions, which organized the previously thought "unorganizable workers" to bring the largest corporations in the world to heel.

And it wasn't done through lawyers.

It was done through union action.

NARRATOR: But by 1947, a union's ability to organize was restricted by law.

Increasing globalization and right-to-work laws further eroded the power of unions.

And there were other challenges.

Manufacturing jobs were in decline.

Service work, harder to organize, was on the rise.

Then unions suffered a near-fatal blow.

In 1981, the Reagan administration fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in a single day.

This show of force would cripple the bargaining power of unions for years to come.

At their peak in the mid-20th century, unions represented one in every three workers.

Today, it's only one in ten.

What role, if any, will unions play in futureproofing benefits and job security?

CASS: One problem is that labor and organizing haven't changed since the 1930s.

The model we have is built around the 9: 00-to-5:00 factory job, and an awful lot of workers today, they might be temps.

They might be in the gig economy.

So gig workers are a great example of a group that are desperately in need of some sort of representation, but that could never fit into a traditional American union.

GERENA-QUIONES: I was anxious, not knowing if I was going to have a great week or a terrible week.

It's really hard to plan your life around those kinds of variations.

So I decided I need to get out of that world because it was making me stressed.

One of these restaurants was having such a nightmarish experience with the same delivery platform that I was working through for them.

We were, like, "Well, we don't need them.

"Let's just work together.

Screw the app."

So I started my own company.

I ended up buying a fleet of these cargo bikes with my savings.

And then I can get guys riding doing cargo bike work.

And it gives them steady, reliable, scheduled work.

We are working with restaurants who want to offload any excess food prepared throughout the day.

And instead of throwing it out, we'll pick it up, and we'll deliver it to different pantries in the city.

This identity of a working cyclist, from here on out, it's just, how do I use that to have a sense of mission beyond just paying the bills?

It took on a much bigger purpose that I had never imagined would be the case.

MING: One of the things that I'm most afraid of with COVID-19 and our response to it is that an entire generation of workers will be radically displaced from an America as we have come to know it.

(bell dinging) NARRATOR: Much of the pandemic's most devastating impact was in the hospitality industry, where workers were already underpaid and insecure.

In New Orleans, over 50,000 restaurant and hospitality workers lost their jobs.

ROBERT LEBLANC: The old restaurant model was untenable.

It just didn't work.

I think that's almost considered a universal truth at this point.

You're on your feet.

You're working with knives and fire.

So you're getting banged up and injured.

People were working too many hours.

It was grueling work, physically and emotionally.

People weren't compensated nearly well enough.

After COVID, you know, we basically had to shut the whole company down.

We didn't have enough cash, with zero revenues coming in.

I felt like a huge failure.

ROCKY DE'VALL: I've been doing this around ten years, since I've been an adult.

And it's really hard to just go into other fields when this is what you know.

RODOLFO ANTONINO: It's really scary for a lot of us, because we've invested ten, 11, 12, some 18 years of our lives developing the skill set that is now part of this industry.

We were told, "Oh, everyone needs to eat.

You'll always have a job cooking."

And now it's, like... (laughing): "Well, will we?"

LEBLANC: So, after COVID hit, we spent two or three weeks truly just licking wounds.

NARRATOR: Then LeBlanc had an inspiration: to bet the future on a new business model.

LEBLANC: I started reading about Toyota production systems.

I learned a lot about one-piece flow, lean manufacturing, or lean processing.

NARRATOR: Like the Navy's minimal staffing, one-piece flow allows LeBlanc to accomplish as much or more with fewer employees.

LEBLANC: The idea of one-piece flow-- not to oversimplify it-- but the idea is, you don't create a batch of a hundred, you create one at a time.

The idea started to germinate, if we can apply this to restaurants, it might, might be an interesting solution.

In restaurants, to apply one-piece flow, when you order a menu item off the food menu, or you order a cocktail, whoever makes that food item or whoever makes that cocktail is the one who actually brings it to your table.

There's not four people handling one dish.

There's one person handling a dish.

We had 150 people in the company prior to COVID, and we have 65 people in the company post-COVID.

And so this model never allows for those jobs to come back.

The upshot to that, though, is that now most of these jobs is truly probably in that middle-class wage.

Less positions, but better-paying positions.

The idea being that everyone is kind of cross-trained and can help each other out.

NARRATOR: Chloe, LeBlanc + Smith's new boutique hotel, adopts the same model.

(drill whirring) LINDSAY OLIVER: We do not have to remake the bed at turn down.

Unless a guest has asked... We're trying to have an all-inclusive labor model.

Everyone does everything.

PRODUCER: What are you normally doing when you're not cleaning rooms?

- Server, mostly.

A little bit of everything, though.

(chuckles) LEBLANC: So the way that we are compensating people right now is, we are paying them $30,000 a year and health insurance.

WOMAN: Try to keep everything as flat as possible.

LEBLANC: And they have paid sick leave.

They have two weeks paid time off.

WOMAN: Then clockwise... LEBLANC: And then we split tips evenly.

WOMAN: Awesome.

Well done.

NARRATOR: Could this approach help futureproof other businesses in the hospitality industry?

- Hello, good afternoon, thank you for calling the Chloe.

LEBLANC: There's no way I would go back.

We burned the boats, you know?

We're not, we're not going back.

This is going to work or I'll go be a teacher and a high school coach someplace, hopefully, if I can get a job.

GERENA-QUIONES: What's up, y'all?

This is Diego checking in here.

Since I last saw you guys, a lot has changed!

(laughs) Man... That just seems like an entire lifetime ago that you guys were here filming what was then a discussion around gig workers and the future of work.

I was in a different place then.

Things really seemed to be on the up-and-up.

There was a lot of new work opportunities that were developing, and I was ready to get more bikes, get a bigger space for them, start recruiting a bigger team.

(doorbell buzzing) SIDIB: How was it with the COVID situation and your job?

GERENA-QUIONES: Back in February, everything was great.

You know?

We were getting more clients, more work.

I was about to buy some more cargo bikes, hire some more riders.

Like, everything was looking really positive in that moment.

Due to COVID and the pandemic, everything shutting down, people working from home, there's no catering industry anymore in New York.

There's no more in-person meetings.

Corporate office buildings are ghost towns.

And then seeing all the, the potential money that I'm normally making just... (blows out) It's, like, holy crap!

You know, there's, there's rent, there's student loans, there's... What if I get sick and what if I need healthcare?

I don't have healthcare, like, and all of this panic, it's really scary.

It's, it's crushing.

MAN: What do you want?

CROWD: Justice!

SIDIB: For us, also, you know, the taxi industry, with the city shutdown, was really terrible for drivers.

We have a lot of drivers who were really exposed to this COVID.

DESAI: You know, we've seen the statistics that so many Americans ended up using the $1,200 stimulus check to pay for groceries and meals.

Gig workers who work with absolutely no safety net, no security, were already on the edge, barely making minimum wage.

Once the pandemic hit, and the jobs were lost, and the incomes dried up, people really truly did not know where the next meal was going to come from.

GERENA-QUIONES: So I've decided to move to Puerto Rico because my father passed away, and my mom is out there, and I just want to be close to her.

I've lived here for my entire life, 35 years, and I'm not convinced that New York is it anymore.

So I want to try my luck in the tropics.

So this might be the right time.

I'm taking some of these bikes with me to Puerto Rico.

I want to be the first person to introduce cargo bikes to the island of Puerto Rico.

I will continue to be involved in the company.

Everything's happening remotely now.

So we're discovering that, you know, via Zoom and conference calls and emails, you can get a lot done.

GUTIERREZ: "Will my job be necessary?"

And I think that's the main concern.

"What's going to happen?"

"Is my job still there?"

"Do I need to go back to school?"

MING: If futureproofing or robotproofing a workforce isn't about teaching them one magical skill, then what is it?

LEE: If I were talking to a young person, I would first say, "Don't listen to your parents.

What has worked for them probably won't work for you."

AUGUSTE: We have choices.

When we talk about all the risks to people in the future of work, we really need to be clear about, what problem are we trying to solve?

If we're trying to solve the problem of how to use as few people as we can, and if we fail to use the new technologies to create new roles for people, that would be catastrophic for society.

MING: The one thing I know for certain is, our best guesses will be wrong.

Invest in people.

They will be ready for this future.

And if it's a future that is terrifying and exhausting because we can't keep these promises of certainty that a job will be there for you, what we truly need from everyone is the ability to explore the unknown.

NARRATOR: In the final episode: as workers and communities wrestle with the unknowns, how are they adapting-- and how are their identities changing-- in this disrupted landscape?

For more about "Future of Work": pbs.org/futureofwork.

To order "Future of Work" on DVD, visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

This series is also available on Amazon Prime Video.