If you enjoy the small talk you have with your barista or grocery clerk —A.I. could soon make them a thing of the past. Allison Pugh, professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what we lose when we swap out human workers for robots and artificial intelligence – and the very real benefits of human connection to help us feel seen. Her book is “The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected.”
- +
Transcript
Krys Boyd:
The other day I had to drop off a return at The UPS Store in my neighborhood. I like going there because the people who run the place are unfailingly friendly, never too busy to chat for a moment while they’re scanning your item and printing out a receipt. Technically, of course, their real job is getting packages where they need to go in a reasonable amount of time, and I suppose this could be accomplished with a self-serve kiosk of some kind. But every time I leave there after one of those brief exchanges, I feel seen my mood is boosted just a bit for the rest of the day from K ERA in Dallas. This is Think I’m Krys Boyd.
Of course, UPS defines itself as a package delivery and global supply chain management company. They might struggle to even measure their franchisees success in connecting with customers as human beings. But just because something can’t be quantified easily doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. Allison Pugh is professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her book is titled The Last Human Job, the work of Connecting in a disconnected world. Allison, welcome to think.
Allison Pugh:
Thank you so much.
Krys Boyd:
Define what you call connective labor. What does it require of the people who do it?
Allison Pugh:
Connective labor is when people see the other and the other person feels seen, so it’s an interactive experience and it involves, you know, reflecting the other person and also actually a bit of emotion management because you can’t kind of. Necessarily let how you feel completely. Get out there if you’re you know you can control how you’re feeling so. But it’s also about being seen, so it’s it’s it’s two way you’re doing something, and the other person is receiving that vision of. However, whatever you’re reflecting to them.
Krys Boyd:
So it’s a combination of recognition and and what is often called emotional labor.
Allison Pugh:
Exactly. Exactly right.
Krys Boyd:
How does this benefit the clients of people who perform this connective labor? Like why do we need to be seen by, say, the UPS?
Allison Pugh:
That’s a great question this. This hard evidence actually of the benefits of being seen, and there’s a lot of kind of robust research that shows that it matters in doctor patient relationships in teacher student relationships, there’s even research that shows that. If you, you know, just like with your UPS delivery person in the franchise. There’s research that shows that people who stop and interact with their baristas actually show better well-being outcomes than those that kind of breeze right by. And the researchers, the UK researchers who did this research called the. Called their article is efficiency overrated? So there’s a lot of evidence that that shows that it contributes to the outcomes that we value, you know, healing, you know, learning etcetera. It’s it’s even in doctor patient relationships. It’s been shown to have even a greater impact than a daily aspirin to ward off heart attacks.
Krys Boyd:
Here’s the real surprise research also demonstrates that being empowered to do this kind of work has benefits to the person providing that connective labor. The person doing the seeing and the emotional labor. How does that happen?
Allison Pugh:
I would say it’s a little bit mysterious about how that happens and that was why I wrote this book, why I took on this research project, because I really wanted to delve into. Kind of the, you know, kind of crack the code, get behind the magic that happens between two people in this. Kind of ephemeral, idiosyncratic emotional exchange of recognition. You know, how does it work, and what does it do for people? That was one of my central questions, and I found really people I talked to, you know, schoolers of people who do this work from doctors to. Therapists to teachers to, you know, massage therapists or sex workers or all kinds of people. And what they had to say was that, you know, when they do this work, they do this work and they say, OK, this work is you know it enables the other person to have dignity, right. It’s it. It gives the other person dignity to be seen, but then they find. That it helps to create or helps them generate their own sense of humanity. They, you know, the even engineers know that, you know, human beings give other people motivation. So, people you know, this work permits the other person motivated, but also for the practitioners themselves. They say it gives me an enormous sense of purpose. So, every time I found something, it happened. The effects happened both.
Krys Boyd:
So, you’ve described this beautifully. I think everybody listening can recognize instances where this has happened in their lives. Why then is this work essentially invisible according to a lot of the methods we have of measuring how well people do their jobs?
Allison Pugh:
Exactly. We’re not paying attention to it. I mean, there’s probably a number of reasons for that. The 1st is first and foremost is that it’s something we kind of assume that it’s part of. Like what women do and we ignore it when men do. That we, you know, men have to do this kind of reflective witnessing work, say in jobs that are largely held by men, you know, high end managers or sales or law or, you know, there’s a wide range of professions, but we kind of ignore it. It’s the kind of soft skills that. We don’t have a good name for. I mean, there are some names that exist now, like for instance, many business writers will talk about emotional intelligence. But for me, that always was too wrapped up in one person and didn’t really get at the interactivity that was so clearly part of the package here.
Krys Boyd:
The idea that this isn’t noticed because it’s often expected of people and professions dominated by women traditionally is that the idea that this doesn’t really entail any real effort, that it is when women do it, is just part of our nature to connect.
Allison Pugh:
Exactly. I actually think it’s both kind of presumed to be part of women’s nature, but also it’s kind of hard to hard to quantify, hard to collect. So even if you even if you know administrators or engineers or you know business consultants wanted to keep track of it, it’s it’s not easy to do so. Because of its kind of, you know, quality of of something that happens between people. But it is true that actually, neuroscientists, it’s not just us, you know, soft social scientists. You know that are interested in this, and neuroscientists are starting to be curious about what happens between two people. They they criticize their own field for focusing too much on the individual. And, you know, the MRI to focus on what’s happening in someone’s individual brain. And so there’s a whole field. Of neuroscience called second person Neuroscience, which is about tracking down and trying to measure what happens between two people. But it’s very it’s elusive. It’s very difficult.
Krys Boyd:
These days, a lot of job postings will mention interactive tasks in ways they might not have decades ago. So for instance, managers are expected to be able to do more than just give orders and. Meet production goals. Do you think that indicates that employers do recognize some value in these abilities, but they don’t want to have to pay extra for them?
Allison Pugh:
You said it. I I do think that’s right. I mean, it’s interesting. There’s been economists who have actually documented that the US they’ve, they’ve say that the US is moving from a thinking economy to a feeling economy. And there’s a lot. Of work by economists trying to figure out is that because we have brand new jobs that involve feeling or is it because old jobs have more feeling in them and the answer is both that it’s not just one or the other, it’s actually both. And so management might have been seen as not a deeply feeling job before, but now it has this kind of witnessing reflective element that will serve to motivate your employees to do you know, their.
Krys Boyd:
You interviewed more than 100 people for this book. What professions did you focus on?
Allison Pugh:
Well, I had. Three primary professions. They were teachers, therapists, and primary care physicians. And then I had a whole set of people that I interviewed who didn’t have college degrees because this. Not the, you know, the people who are the more advantage. Workers don’t own this labor. It actually happens up and down the class ladder.
Krys Boyd:
Had most of your interview subjects experienced the value of this kind of connective labor in the ways that it can be diminished by time and profit pressures, without maybe necessarily having articulated it or fully understood it for themselves before you gave it a name for them?
Allison Pugh:
Yeah. I mean, that’s really why I wrote this book was to give this process a name and to highlight they give this labor give this work a name and then to highlight, you know, the how it’s under. Or siege by, you know, data analytics and efficiency campaigns. And then under threat by AI and automation. And yeah, I’ve I often found people, you know, kind of struggling to to, you know, get to do their work. The best of their ability. And to do that work, they often took the relationship part very seriously, but found themselves having to kind of cram it in on the sides on the sides. This was particularly true of, say, primary care physicians, who I wasn’t even going to include them in my initial group of people. I was talking to, partly because. There’s so many different kinds of doctors and you know, it was clear that, you know, I I could have been talking to many different. Teams of people and getting different stories. I wanted to kind of more clarity of vision. Like when you talk to therapists, they’re even, you know, they’re all talking about the relationship and how important this reflective work is. But the doctors I was actually in California at the time for a year and they essentially dragged me in. Like they were like, we have to be in your work. You know, I would see a bunch of doctors for lunch and at the place where I was doing where I was a fellow and they they were Gale me with stories about how oppressive they found. And these efficiency campaigns, these, you know, the pressures of the electronic health record, etcetera. So doctors essentially kind of forced their way into the research project. But what they were saying. Was shared widely across many professions.
Krys Boyd:
The interesting thing about doctors, Allison, is that I’ll note that, you know, being at the very top of ones class and being a very caring person who’s good at connecting with others, they’re not mutually exclusive. However, if most of us had to choose, if we had a serious health condition. We would think we wanted the Doctor Who had kind of the best record on paper, as opposed to the best, you know, personality, the best connection skills. It turns out patients often do better with a doctor with whom they feel connected than with equally excellent Doctor Who maybe doesn’t have much of what we used to call a bedside manner.
Allison Pugh:
Exactly right. There’s actually terrific research out of Stanford that kind of tries to kind of nail that down like when someone is warm and when someone is competent and and, you know, being seen and all this stuff and it is true that if you don’t, if you’re not connected and if you’re effectively. That doctor patient clinical moment. And then maybe you’re not going to tell the doctor, say, the real truth about whether or not you’re getting exercise every day or or eating your vegetables. And then that Doctor will have to kind of limp along with inferior information about what your. Real situation is and that’s actually true in multiple fields like teachers need to know how well their students understand the material and if there isn’t that core connection. They won’t actually know, and they’re they’re what? Their their instruction. They’re kind of pedagogy, will will suffer as a result. So this is core work, this this connective work is core work to the outcomes that we value.
Krys Boyd:
Allison, can we train people to sort of fake this kind of warmth and connection? Can we give them a checklist of questions about, you know, how was your weekend? How are your children doing? Before we ask about whatever brought you to the podium?
Allison Pugh:
Those are actually. Two different questions. Can you train someone and can a checklist do that work for us? And you know, there is actually a a kind of impetus in among in medicine to use a checklist to to kind of remind doctors about empathy, but. Also, actually, to make that empathy efficient, you know they call it the bathe checklist and you get through like, you know, questions, you know, how’s that going for you? You know, like? And it it reminds doctors of how. To do it, I’m not sure that that works. I think the more scripted it feels, the less the less it’s going to be able to cut through the sense of not being seen. The sense of, you know, oh, this is just a standardized interaction for you. And so I can’t bring my. Real self or my real problems to this exchange. You know, I I’m not sure. Checklists. Are are that promising? Although the research is mixed, you know and some and the doctors who are fans of that are really like how efficient it is because as you know, doctors are completely, you know, pressed by demands for, you know, speed. But can you train people in this? I actually think you can and. That’s it, actually that. Question of can you train people? Was a a foundational was was one of the reasons why I started thinking about this work because? Was I was doing a lot of interviews as part of my work. My second book was about interview with used interviews. My first book used interviews and so I was thinking about these these in-depth interviews that people often finish them and say that felt like therapy, even though it’s not therapy. And I was kind of. I have. I’m in charge, you know, of teaching graduate students and sometimes undergrads how to do this research, interviewing and the way I do research. Interviewing is definitely through this kind of reflective, fairly intensive, attentive. You know work for. You know, it’s a, it’s a moment of attunement to another person and can you teach that and? I think you can. I find that the way I teach it is often the way teachers, therapists, and primary care physicians also teach their. Clinical practice. They use kind of an apprentice model. It’s not something I think you can learn from a book very easily. And so when I teach interviewing, I actually take people into a a nearby clinic where they have one way near. Hours. And then we watch them interview each other, and then we give feedback to that. So it’s actually quite like the A physician doing rounds, you know, with their supervisor watching or a therapist reporting in to a supervisor who will review tapes of their therapy. And that actually was part of my research was I sat in and watched. How people trained each other so I. Watched therapists and their supervisors go over videotapes of therapy sessions and be, like, well over here, you might have said this, and this might have worked better and ohh, did you see him light up when you said this? You know, that kind of thing.
Krys Boyd:
Having read the book, it’s very clear that you care deeply about understanding the experiences of the people you’re interviewing. For purposes of research, however, Allison, you are a PhD holding sociologist. You have a chair position at your university. How much do you have to think? About the sort of power differential between you and someone who is, say, a home healthcare worker who might think of you more as an authority figure than as someone who wants to hear. About their experience.
Allison Pugh:
This is such a central issue, I mean, I have an entire chapter devoted to questions about inequality, and it’s not just inequality. With the interviewer having more or you know person who’s doing this connective labor, they’re not always the ones with the most power. Interestingly or oddly, you know, sometimes you have. Yes, very advantage physicians or therapists say, you know, in conversation with clients or patients. That are less advantages or have less education. But sometimes it goes in the other direction, so you have for instance, the home health care aide who’s doing this kind of deeply connective reflective witnessing work with somebody who’s, you know, a, you know, quite affluent elderly person. As I in one of my interviews. I talked to a home healthcare aide who was coming off of work and she was, you know, we were on the Upper East Side of New York City, and she was telling me stories about. For clients, so it doesn’t. The inequality doesn’t always go in One Direction, but whichever direction it goes, it has a very significant impact. I found and when I’ve been giving talks about this work, everyone remembers people really remember. Moments of misrecognition they really it’s this is a very. Powerful thing that humans do with each. Other. And yet, in that power is the power to be enormously and profoundly helpful. You know, the dignity, the purpose, etcetera. But it’s also there’s power of, of harm. And I heard stories about that, and I continue to hear stories about that. When I give talks where people really remember the bad moments, the moments when they felt wounded or misrecognized or, you know, kind of. Pledged in, say, the doctor’s office or the therapy, you know, clinic or whatever. So there is a great capacity for injury and those injuries I think partly come from or certainly they get amplified by inequality between. The you know, people involved. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I think this is actually a central. Question because you know the appeal, or I should say how AI is being sold to us is often as a means of getting around the shame or judgment that can come from a human being. So it’s like, don’t worry, we’ll take the humans out of it. And that will make you feel better, or that will make this less risky for.
Krys Boyd:
Your book made me think about how different the experience is of, say, asking a librarian for help, pulling research materials on some topic. It certainly is faster and more efficient in many cases to do a Google search or check in with the chatbot. So we may never stop to think about what else was wrapped up in our encounter with the librarian who was. Eager to help us find Andre.
Allison Pugh:
Yeah. And I I came to call. I wanted to have another name for that thing that that we are risking. So you know AI or you know, kind of the app, the therapy. App or whatever. Some of those have been shown to have some. Effects, right? Some, you know, achieve some outcomes, you know sometimes. Things you know, you go to a therapy app and they, you know, have uploaded cognitive behavioral therapy, precepts, or tenants, and you follow the lessons or whatever you follow, you go through the sessions and then you end up feeling a little better. You can learn algebra from Khan Academy or, you know, other. Forms you don’t need a human being to hold your hand in all. These. In all these moments, but by automating them. We are risking something and what we are risking in addition to, you know, whatever is not quite as good for the individual client or student. What we’re risking is this social intimacy that happens between two people that, as you noted in your kind of opening vignette kind of can carry can you can carry that along throughout the rest of your day as research. Has. So it’s it’s like a, it’s a, it’s a kind of unseen social thing that we are not right now valuing we don’t normally think ohh the teacher you know I just care whether my student learns algebra. I’m not. I’m not trying to not focusing on whatever this connection. Creates between the student and teacher, and I’m asking us to pay attention to that.
Krys Boyd:
Ironically, you found one impediment to doing connective labor can be the very tools that organizations use to measure workers contributions. What did you learn talking to hospital chaplains who are asked every day to quantify their interactions around like people’s spiritual concerns?
Allison Pugh:
That was actually one of the surprises that I found in doing this research, you know. Happens. I was lucky enough not just to do interviews, but also to be able to shadow people in their work. So you know, I I spent six months at an HIV clinic. I spent, you know, probably nine months with a group of physicians that we’re meeting to talk about their kind of commitment to humanistic. Medicine, etc. I also went in and observed in a school you know, for for young kids that kind of thing. I was lucky enough to follow around some chaplains, hospital chaplains and the work they do is so powerful, you know, they’re with people who can be suffering greatly or relatives of people who you know are sick or or have passed away. And they are there to provide this kind of comfort and the comfort has to come with. You know, some kind of seeing the other because they have to be really sensitive to how much to how far to go, what, what to offer can should I should I just be present etcetera. So it requires a lot of interpersonal sensitivity on their part. So I’m I’m feeling so lucky as I’m walking around with these. Kind of professional feelers who are so good at this. And then I’m watching while they’re entering data. Into. You know three different systems of record keeping, including the epic standard, you know, electronic health record that doctors have to use. And when I had at this point talked to scores of doctors and I was like, you know, who were telling me this is about billing. It’s quite oppressive. It’s making me fill out all this stuff and I really I can’t focus. I can’t have eye contact here. They’re they’re doing a lot of. Training. And so I was like, why are the chaplains having to who, whose build for the chaplains work? Well, the answer is no one is billed for the chaplains work. So it felt like. Data analytics run amok and I watched them. It affected the jobs they did. You know, they chose which floor to go on which unit to visit based on which computers were working that day. You know, they spent time, you know. Clicking and type. Thing when they could have been doing the rest of their job, which I was so amazed by, you know, the singing, the holding hands that you know, it was remarkable and a real shock to me.
Krys Boyd:
So there is no billing code for, you know, helping someone through, say, their anxieties about dying. Why do you think hospitals want to? Collect this data.
Allison Pugh:
So I actually talked to the head of the chaplains. And he was, you know, an advocate. He was really in favor of it, he. Said. You know, the day is coming when the hospital will decide. Are we worthwhile that you know we want to have a part in the future of medicine and to do so? We need to prove that we contribute and if we can do that by, you know, speaking the way, not traditional or, you know, contemporary medicine speaks through this electronic health record, then that’s what we’re gonna do. And the interview was powerful for me, as I’m like, you know, listening to him because. He also had this kind of gentle mockery of the way chaplains worked, and he was himself a chaplain and believed in the work. But he was also, like, you know, chaplains. They just need to get over themselves. We’ve got to learn how to. Count. Something you know, this kind of language that really actually itself just the way he talked about it? Made me see how powerful, how dominant. Is the kind of industrial model the language of metrics and counting.
Krys Boyd:
Yeah, it sounds like he’s used to having his work disrespected because it doesn’t bring in dollars.
Allison Pugh:
Right, and doesn’t lend itself easily to this kind of, you know, performance metrics and audit culture and thinking about counting.
Krys Boyd:
So as you mentioned, there are now a growing number of AI platforms being designed specifically to respond in human like ways. Whether that’s, you know, helping us with some kind of, you know, delivery issue, you know, talking to a company that’s selling us something or providing healthcare information or even rudimentary therapy. How does all this contribute to what you call depersonalization?
Allison Pugh:
Right. We face right now it’s clear a depersonalization crisis. There’s evidence of that all over people are, you know, the surgeon general has diagnosed a kind of loneliness epidemic, and that’s actually even true in other advanced industrialized nations. There’s a lot of evidence of people’s despair, including. What’s been called by some economists deaths of despair, that kind of increased suicide rate among among white working class. Then. There’s, you know, deep concern about the impact of technology on our relationships and our relationship to nature and our relationship to ourselves. So all of these things are kind of out there and I want us to kind of collect. Them and look at them in the face and and understand them for what they are. They are an abiding concern about our connections to each other. And. Unfortunately, the way big Tech has approached this the the solutions they offer is that you’ll be seen by a machine and they call that personalized whatever personalized medicine, personalized education where they use AI. To kind of analyze where you are and reflect that back to you so you know what specific medicines you need or what specific lessons in whatever you need. As a student, you know. But the problem is there’s no person involved and so I’ve I’ve been. I’m on a little campaign for us to rename that customized customized education customized medicine, please.
Krys Boyd:
Hmm.
Allison Pugh:
Can we start calling it that? Because the personalized is like an Orwellian term that reflects, you know, or that kind of tries to, I think, hide what’s actually happening, which is the, you know, kind of offering of more tech to a problem that I believe is caused in part by our reliance on tech.
Krys Boyd:
Alex. And you know, you talked about this loneliness phenomenon that has been widely reported as an epidemic in mode. In life, I think what’s so fascinating is that while most of us assume the problem is with our close relationships, those weak ties that are formed, like with colleagues we greet in the break room or quick chats with the person who gets us our coffee or whatever, those turn out to be far more consequential than they seem.
Allison Pugh:
Exactly. And there’s brand new research that I’ve just come upon pretty recently about what happened in COVID, what happened in the pandemic. People, it turns out, kept their close family, you know, ties to their close family and to their close friends. But what was missing was exactly this layer is kind of, I would call them, you know, everyday acquaintances or, you know. Kind of people that we pass in our daily lives, you know, the mail carrier, the you know, the dry cleaner, the coffee shop, the UPS person, whatever. And those interactions, it turns out actually matter. That’s part of our social fabric. We’re not used to thinking about that. We’re not used to making decisions to preserve. That. But it actually matters and we are, you know, at risk because we’re not used to thinking about those relationships as having an impact. We are at risk of kind of shredding them, of losing them. And that’s part of the social fabric that creates the community. On which we rely. And one could argue that you know it, it’s part of the kind of polarization or fragmentation of the social fabric that people feel increased. This loss of these kind of everyday interactions, it’s the loss of this what I said earlier. Social intimacy, I want us to start paying attention to that because it matters.
Krys Boyd:
Of course, if you run like a grocery store chain, presumably what you want of your counter employees, you know checking people out if they even still exist, because lots of these places have self checkouts. What you want is them to move people through as quickly as possible, so customers are in and out. They buy the maximum amount of things. I wonder, Allison, if it’s possible to optimize jobs for efficiency and for human connections, or if we have to decide that something’s gotta give.
Allison Pugh:
Well, that’s, you know, that’s the Holy Grail. That’s the thing for which everyone’s looking for, you know, the the optimum balance. People have tried different things. It’s really interesting, actually, that you bring up grocery clerks or grocery stores because grocery stores are a cautionary tale or grocery clerks or a cautionary tale that I want people to know about because in like 1920. Lose 3 clerks did collectively. They were men, first of all, and they knew you. You would come in and you’d hand them the list and then they would go and get your products and bring it to you. But in that process, they knew who they were doing that for. You had a big conversation going. They knew your sister and your aunt and your husband and what they liked. And, you know, it was a conversation. It was a. It was deeply interactive. They knew your family. And then in 1920 was invented the essentially what the modern stores look like. You know what the modern store looks like, so you know, shoppers released into the store to have access to their own products and then paying for it up at the up at the front. The cashier became a woman’s job. And highly routinized. So that’s what we have today. We have the, you know, carpal tunnel and the, you know, scripted. Do you want paper or plastic and do you want to give this donation to your favorite charity and and and the scripted Ness. Reflects something about the loss of interaction there. The loss of that relationship, and so the distance to self checkout is not that great. It also sometimes it even feels like a favor. Like why have these people suffering with, you know, repetitive stress injuries etcetera, even though and and they’re widely used? Even though most Americans say they hate self checkout, I think it’s something like 30% of transactions are on self checkout. So as I say in the book, there’s a Dutch company that actually invented or created something that they called the chat checkout. Where you can choose. To go with in a line where the person’s going to have time to talk to you, that’s one future.
Krys Boyd:
That’s a really interesting idea. I’m curious about the sort of person who would select that line like on the one hand, I might like to have a chat, but I don’t want to. To be honest, to be behind three other people who are having their chat. I want to get in and out.
Allison Pugh:
Yeah, I mean, we’re all busy. I totally hear it. We’re choosing these bit by bit, but all those choices, the accumulation of those choices. Creates. The situation that we’re facing, we have to figure out. Why are we giving our time to our employer when we could be giving it to our communities and that happens? In multiple transactions, multiple interactions. Every day. Until now we have this kind of absurd moment. There’s there’s a guy who who automated the discharge nurse at a hospital. He called it these virtual nurses and he gave it was a Hospital in Boston. And the patients told him I like this better. Than the human nurse or the human doctor because she explained, she they’re they’re, you know, kind of gendering the. The bot that is helping them, and they’re like she and Louise, I think is the name he gave the the bot. Louise explains. More essentially, she has more time for me. And it’s there’s. Such an irony. How is it that we are at this moment where computers are the things with time? And humans. Or not.
Krys Boyd:
Well, if depersonalization is harming us and harming our collective social cohesiveness, what does it mean to commit to repersent alization? What does that look like? Besides, you know, unplugging Louise and choosing the chat line?
Allison Pugh:
Right. Well, one chapter that the chapter I had the most fun writing was actually one my husband suggested, which was. Who’s doing it right? Because the answer to your question is not. It’s not only about the individual worker, it’s not I I. It was such a privilege to talk to these people. It it was so amazing to, you know, these people. Are all of. All of the the interviews that I had were with people who do this for a living and they. Are we’re deeply reflective and witnessing it was just amazing to talk to them, right? But even really great. Connectors. Can do it badly if they work for an organization that doesn’t support it. And so I outlined in this one chapter what what organizations that are doing it right, what they have in common. And there was, you know, there were some things that were less more surprising and some things that were less surprising, you know, less surprising. It was, you know, they give ample time. You know, they give resources and space, you know, that kind. Of thing. Yes, it is true. But it is. Also true that organizations that are doing it right make the space or make the make available the kind. Of. Peer networks, it turns out the people who do this work really need to talk about it with other people who are doing this work. And actually, therapists know this, and teachers know this, but not everyone else. Does. Like this is kind of a I would call it specialized craft knowledge for those people that those occupations that. Already understand what this is. So on some level, organizations need to implement some changes to support this work. But in addition, there are some kind of policy recommendations we might make among them, you know, just talking about, you know, kind of the industrial model that would be like being really careful about, you know, preserving staffing ratios in places where this work happens, so nursing homes. For classrooms or, you know, hospitals? But in addition, we might think about AI and really working on the transparency of AI. Make it clear when someone. Is interacting with a human being or not? That’s something that actually is. There’s no regulation about that. Yeah. So we human beings can make can’t even make the choice for to Repersent realize their lives in this fashion, because companies can just hide it.
Krys Boyd:
Allison, to my knowledge, there is no such thing as a union or a labor rights organization that is spelling out. Connective labor as something workers ought to be guaranteed. Are there ways for people who want this to be part of their working lives to advocate for the time and autonomy required to do it right?
Allison Pugh:
I think for sure and there are some, you know, individual professional organizations that are working for that. I think you know, I remember when I was living in the California in in California, the California Nurses Association, a very strong entity had, you know, kind of articulated the value. Of time and you know the the kind of soft skills or the you know way that how important it is for nurses to be able to. That I’m thinking also of like there’s a domestic workers organization that is trying to ally, and I think research shows that the best outcomes come when they ally with their clients. Actually say, for instance, the parents that are hiring childcare, if parents. A lie with the domestic workers, they actually can, you know, kind of create outcomes that, you know, public can can win public support. Part that’s better than when they are fighting each other, and both of those I’ve seen campaigns, I’ve seen campaigns by domestic worker groups that outline the need for time and to connect, etcetera. So I think there are organizations that are making these arguments. You know, I wrote my. Book in part. To be able to just give us a language for talking about this, we’re talking about the the how important the work is, how you know, kind of dire. The threats are that face it and the very high stakes involved that fit that, you know that we all confront.
Krys Boyd:
Can our access to the benefits of connective labor in either direction be another area in which those who already have the most social privilege are most likely to benefit, and? And what do we do? About that. If it’s the case.
Allison Pugh:
Yes, that is. On my bad day, that’s the most likely scenario of the future that’s coming because. We can see it a little bit already. So, I mean, yeah, the, the future that I’m most afraid of is the one where rich people get. You know, human connective labor to serve their needs, and that we see that now among the you know, fastest growing job, job kind of categories in the United States today is personal services to rich people so. Personal trainer or personal chef, personal investment counselor, personal etcetera and. At the same time, I’m afraid that you know kind of the less advantage people who who provide those services will themselves get connective labor. From a bot. And I’m afraid of that kind of I’ve I’ve called that the stratification of human contact, and it feels like a deeply dystopian future.
Krys Boyd:
It’s even visible in, you know if you get on an airplane and you’re back in coach and there’s like one or two flight attendants for 100 people, I might be getting these numbers wrong. But if you’re up in, in first class, there might be one person taking care of 12 people.
Allison Pugh:
Right. I mean, that’s the inequality we all we we all walk through every day. If you’re in the United States, I I do think that the airlines kind of. Really accentuate that. With like the red carpet and the, you know, all the different zones that they call up, it really like is an enactment. A performance of inequality and that we don’t often have to like stare quite in the face quite so that the difference here is that in the future the ideas. Does that mean the? You know, economy class will get a roll. And that’s the difference.
Krys Boyd:
Allison Pugh is professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her book is titled The Last Human Job, the work of Connecting in a disconnected world. Allison, thanks so much for the conversation.
Allison Pugh:
Thank you for having me, I really.
Krys Boyd:
Enjoyed it? You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and subscribe to our podcast at any place you like to get podcast, just search for KERA. Think or go to our website to. Listen, that’s at. Think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
