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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. If you've gone shopping recently you may have noticed unbearably long lines and fewer workers in stores than before the pandemic, not so much grocery stores but other kinds of shopping. While most of us would attribute the disruptions to social distance requirements causing the lines and other COVID safety precautions, according to shocking new statistics, a record number of workers in retail are actually fleeing the retail sector for, well, just about anything else.

Our next guest alleges that this is actually a good thing. Joining us now to break down this trend is Anna North senior correspondent at Vox and author of the best-selling book Outlawed which was released earlier this year. Her newest article is called The Big Job Exodus Might Not Be All It's Cracked Up To Be. Hi Anna, thanks for coming on and joining us today.

Anna North: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, help us report this story. Are you a retail worker who quit your job recently? Let us know why and what you're going to do. Give us a call 646-435-7280. Maybe you didn't even work in retail but had another forward facing, public facing job that you walked away from. What are you doing now? How is the comparison to your old job? 646-435-7280 or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Anna, according to The Washington Post, nearly 650,000 workers in the retail sector quit their jobs in April alone, the biggest number in over 20 years. Why do you think that is?

Anna North: We've got a lot of factors at play here. I mean one thing we should start out with is that even before the pandemic retail jobs often were not super good jobs. These were jobs that had very low pay, typically $13 an hour or less, sometimes minimum wage even lower than that in some states.

There are also jobs that required a lot of wrangling with difficult customers. Something that's gotten more difficult over the years as more customers have been packed into stores and the whole experience has been streamlined. Then we take the pandemic where suddenly these jobs in addition to being low paid potentially, annoying and difficult also became suddenly super dangerous in a way that retail workers never could have predicted when they first got these jobs.

I think at this point in the pandemic, 15 months in we may have a lot of folks saying and indeed I've talked to folks who said like, "This wasn't worth it to me. I'm not going to risk myself, risk my life for what amounts to a minimum wage."

Brian Lehrer: If so many quit their jobs in April that was just as the pandemic was really starting to ease around the country because of all the vaccination taking place. Why would this be happening now?

Anna North: I think what some folks are saying is that there's also starting to be a greater sense among workers that they have some choices. Folks are looking around, they're seeing places are hiring again. A lot of places are starting to offer signing bonuses. Amazon made big news saying it's going to offer some people $1,000 to sign up with Amazon. There's this sense that employers really want people.

I talked to some experts too who said that the pandemic was like the shakeup for a lot of workers where in some cases maybe they got laid off and then they get called back by their original employer but do they want to go back to that job that was really hard, where the pay wasn't good, where they were getting hassled by customers or do they want to find something different maybe in a different industry?

Brian Lehrer: Maybe based on that big New York Times article about Amazon recently, there'll be offering people $1,000 to sign on and then six months later $1,000 to leave so they don't ask for a raise or a promotion but I guess that's another story. Francine in West Hempstead, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in, Francine.

Francine: Hi. How are you? Are you there? Hi.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we're here. You've got a story for us about your job, right?

Francine: Yes. Before the pandemic I was working in a women's clothing store, retail store. We got shut down like everyone and then I was brought back I think around July when everything started to open. I worked there for a little while but I was also doing another part-time job in community habilitation. I decided that that was better for me and I left that retail job and now I work in community habilitation with special needs individuals and it's so much better than retail.

Brian Lehrer: Is it better because it's satisfying in the way that you're doing good for the world helping people who really need help or is it something other than that?

Francine: No, that's it. I was doing both and I teach sewing and so I started working teaching sewing to special needs, people who want to learn how to sew or who know how to sew but just need assistance. It's so fulfilling and being in retail, when the shutdown ended, people were still wearing masks but a lot of people were coming into the stores and going and sitting rooms[unintelligible 00:05:44] and not wearing their masks. I was feeling unsafe and it's just customers are not the same as people who need you to help them so for me it was a great change. It was a great pivot.

Brian Lehrer: Francine, thank you and good luck with that. I'm glad that's making you happy. It sounds like it's good for the world too. Anna North from Vox, do you hear that kind of story very much? People changing careers after the pandemic from, I guess, in particular for this segment retail to things that might be more personally fulfilling or that they see as even more cause oriented?

Anna North: I think when I was listening to Francine, what it made me think about is something I heard from a retail expert, an economist which is that the experience of being a retail worker has changed a lot over the years even before the pandemic.

There was a time when, for example, working in clothing sales involved a lot of maybe positive interactions with customers. You're learning a lot about their clothes, you're telling them helpful information, you're helping them, like you get a real sense of ownership with your work but increasingly more and more retail outlets have de-skilled that work and made it where your interactions with customers are going to be more brief. If anything they're like keeping you from meeting your quotas, you have all these aggressive quotas.

Suddenly now you're not having this like fun cool personal interaction. You're just going down a line of people and maybe they're mad at you or maybe they're mean to you especially in the pandemic, maybe they're yelling about a mask. I think we've seen this shift from retail maybe being a more fulfilling option for people to a place where people might be leaving to get more fulfilling work while they're really having that personal connection.

Brian Lehrer: For your article, you spoke to a person from Texas named Krista. Can you tell us what conditions they were forced to work under as a "safety precaution"?

Anna North: Krista worked at PetSmart in the winter of 2020 to 2021 which if you'll remember was a really terrible time around the country for COVID risks and worked as a dog bather. In a grooming salon in the back of a PetSmart store and the way Krista described it is like a steel tube basically. This room was really sealed off to keep the dog hair out, to keep the noise out. Of course, that's one of the worst environments for COVID.

They described being stuck in there. The doors are shut all the time. Some of their coworkers are not wearing masks, just feeling really unsafe and they ended up quitting for those reasons. Now I should say we asked PetSmart about this, they didn't respond specifically to our questions about grooming salons but they said they take worker safety seriously. I think for Krista they just felt, "This job is not worth it. I just truly don't feel safe here."

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call with their story. Carmen in Metuchen, you're on WNYC. Hello, Carmen.

Carmen: Hi. Good. Can you hear me? I hope so.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we got you.

Carmen: Okay, great. Thank you. I'm a really big fan of your show and a support of WNYC, so happy to speak with you. I was a professional worker working in fund development and I still do some of that work but I was also working as a cashier at a larger grocery chain here in New Jersey. I've actually done some career switching. I'm still in the midst of switching. What I've been doing right now is I've actually got several places where I work and what I've appreciated about my shakeup is that I've been enjoying flexibility. I like having a more flexible schedule.

I did a lot of work from home working on my computer and I got to spend more time in my home than I've ever been able to spend in my entire work life and really got to do a lot of things. I really enjoy that and so for me, the shakeup has given me a stronger sense of autonomy, a stronger sense of what I bring to the table, a better sense of negotiation about what it is I'm looking for. I've appreciated that.

The other thing that I wanted to mention though, is that I was still concerned about the power dynamics between employers and employees, even in the midst of the shakeup because, I think you guys just talked about PetSmart, but places still, with their low wages and environments, there are still a lot of ways in which a lot of workers are abused and I experienced that when I was at the grocery store.

The other thing that I experienced and I'll just wrap up with this is that, while I was working at the grocery store I knew many more people and I was doing this during COVID, many more people were making much more money who were not working as I was working during COVID. I also had a challenge with how the support money that was available for people during that time, it wasn't available for people who had low paid wages. We got the stimulus for one check, but in terms of unemployment, I would've made much better money being unemployed than I was working at a low wage job.

Brian Lehrer: Did you resent some people who you may have known who were taking the unemployment option while you were still going to your grocery store job?

Carmen: I didn't resent them because it wasn't their fault. What I resented was our government and how we do things. I resented the fact that I didn't think it was clearly thought through. I thought that during that time, even though we were working during COVID, I thought we should have gotten a little bit of stimulus money, maybe not $600 a week, but we should have received something rather than just the one check.

On $11 minimum wage, I received $2. I was getting $13 an hour. Well, that did not compare to $600 a week where I forgot how many weeks that was, that was very paltry comparatively. I thought the beginning of the stimulus, how it was handled was very shoddy and unorganized and not thought out at all.

Brian Lehrer: Carmen, thank you so much for your call and that story that's very illuminating. Anna North from Vox, this goes to a part of your article because you wrote, "To make retail jobs better in the long run, the country needs to make big changes and it starts with a higher minimum wage." Does that relate to the story that we just heard from Carmen?

Anna North: Yes, absolutely. I think Carmen story shows how low wages really are in a lot of places at a lot of these big companies. Including, even some places did offer hazard pay during the height of the pandemic. Maybe giving a $2 an hour, $3 an hour bump, but if you're starting from really low, that's still kind of low and a lot of times they rolled them back.

Something else that you brought up was the idea that maybe Amazon can offer this kind of signing bonus now, but go back to lower wages later. I think that's a real concern, frankly, that we're seeing is that a lot of places are offering signing bonuses and they might be able to get folks to switch jobs and that one-time bonus means a lot for someone that is not making very much money, but then it's gone. You don't make a higher hourly wage. You're not set up for raises down the line. You don't have the confidence of knowing, "Okay, for the months or years that I'm at this job, I'm going to make X dollars an hour."

I think what's concerning is that even though we've seen workers taking back their power to a degree feeling like, "Maybe I have choices, maybe I can quit my job." We're not seeing big wage growth so we're not necessarily seeing workers getting a job that pays them a lot more. I think in order to really see that what a lot of folks are telling me is we need these protections. We need number one, a higher minimum wage.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe I made a mistake at the beginning of the segment when I said this rush to quit retail jobs wasn't necessarily so much about the stores you go food shopping in, but other kinds of retail, like we heard the caller who worked in a pet store. We heard the caller who worked in a clothing store, but maybe it was also grocery, you tell me.

Anna North: Yes, I do think we've seen quits in grocery. I mean grocery is interesting because it's one of the most highly unionized parts of retail. It's not all by any means, but there's a lot of grocery store workers that are covered by unions and that gives them a little bit of bargaining power, that gives them a little bit more control over their wages and their conditions. That doesn't mean their wages and their conditions are great but they're able to put more pressure on their employers. We've still seen a lot of folks leaving that sector and leaving grocery for other things, or even just switching between grocery chains.

Brian Lehrer: As we continue to talk about the shakeout in retail as the pandemic eases with 650,000 workers in the retail sector quitting their jobs in April alone, according to stats published in The Washington Post. My guest is Anna North senior correspondent at Vox who wrote an article called The Big Job Exodus Might Not Be All It's Cracked Up To Be. Derek in Dumont, New Jersey or on WNYC. Derek, thank you for calling in.

Derek: Oh, hi. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We got you.

Derek: Oh great. Long time listener, first time caller. I was working in a restaurant as a manager, which is what I basically been doing for the last number of years. I wasn't really too happy there because the employer's business practices, especially when the pandemic started highlighted this in terms of making workers pay for a sanitizer and gloves and masks, things like that. Not so much gloves, but other items which, he could have easily paid for.

I actually left that job also because daycare had closed. I was currently working full time and also watching my two and a half year old for about four or five months. Daycare was closed, which was becoming too difficult after that [unintelligible 00:15:49] luckily my wife had a job, works from home, so we basically stayed in and did what everybody else did and actually had another child, two.

Brian Lehrer: Congratulations. You bucked the trend because the statisticians expected a pandemic baby boom, but apparently the opposite happened, but you had yours so congratulations. Obviously, your story is representative of so many people who were forced out of the workplace by the fact that childcare closed, schools closed.

Derek: Something [unintelligible 00:16:25] me about my particular employment was that my employer was making more money, ironically, because so many restaurants had shut down in the area and he just went to take out and delivery only. I'm the only person who really saw the numbers besides the owner. I knew what he was making and he had less employees. It was very frustrating for me to see what he was doing in terms of not paying employees enough who deserved it and who were staying there and not paying for basic PPE for employees.

Brian Lehrer: How for yourself do you hope to reenter the workforce differently at some point?

Derek: Well, I actually was lightly looking for employment and found someplace that wanted to employ me, but I wasn't quite ready actually. They're waiting in the wings. I was looking here and there to see something that I could find, that didn't have to start right away just in case I could find something and I did luckily, but it's not 100% bet, but I was trying to find stuff just in case if that's what you were asking am not sure.

Brian Lehrer: Derek, good luck with it. Thank you for checking in. Please call us again. Anna, you also quote Krista, the former retail worker in Texas who said the country also needs to make a cultural shift away from the idea that the customer is always right. What did Krista mean by that?

Anna North: Yes, I thought that was really fascinating because, I think there are these policy changes that are so important. We talked about the minimum wage, we can talk more about supporting unions, but I thought it was really important to bring up this cultural norm, the idea that, when they talked more about it, they said like, "It's basically my job, someone comes in and screams at me. I'm almost supposed to apologize for getting yelled at. I'm supposed to act like it's my fault if someone's basically being abusive," and that's a terrible thing, it shouldn't be that way.

Of course, people are starting to push back on that and say like, "Well, if you're going to pay me so little to essentially take this kind of treatment, I'm going to walk." I think, part of the path to making these good jobs again is to really look at that and say, 'What can employers do to make sure that employees aren't having to stand there taking abuse day after day."

Brian Lehrer: The headline of your piece, The Big Job Exodus Might Not Be All It's Cracked Up To Be. So far I think we've been talking about ways that it is what it's cracked up to be. A lot of people being fed up with bad conditions in retail, behaviorally bad conditions in retail in terms of low wages in a low wage country that needs policy reform, things like that. In what ways is it not all it's cracked up to be?

Anna North: I think we touched on this a little bit, but my big concern and I think the concern of some economists and other experts I talked to is, what are the jobs that folks are going into. We know people are quitting and that's real. That's very important. One economist told me like, "If you're a non-union employee, your power to quit your job is like one of the only powers you have, vis-a-vis your employer." You could say, "I'm going to walk out of here," so it's real.

When they go back to work, are they going back to a job that pays them better? Are they going back to a job where they have more control over their conditions? Are they going back to a job where they have benefits? Or is it just that they're going to a different job, but one that's going to still be frustrating and still potentially low paid and difficult and all these ways.

I think the concern that I and others have is that we haven't yet put in place what we need to put in place to make sure that the jobs that people are going into are actually these good jobs versus just shifting around, doing musical chairs from, "I'm going to leave this one job and go into this job, but there's nothing to make sure that I'm safer from all these kinds of pressures that I was feeling in my old one."

Brian Lehrer: You know what, we touched a nerve here with Jude in Brooklyn, who's calling in and wants to react to this, "Customer is always right" idea. Jude, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling.

Jude: Good morning, Brian. Thanks for having me on the show. I just want to say that I agree with the person in the studio. I heard her say something like, "Why should she apologize for being yelled at?" I was saying that I'm a cab driver, there have been instances where people spat on my face, spilled coffee on my face because the price they want to pay is different from what is on the app. They will tell me, some of them will insult me. I've been punched, I've been harassed in a different way.

I think the customer that is right is the one that abides by the rule. I think we should abolish that thinking that the customer is always right. That's what I think.

Brian Lehrer: The customer is right, who abides by the rules. We can maybe get that to catch on around the country. I always have a lot of sympathy and I think a lot of our cab driver ride-hail car driver listeners, know we have a lot of sympathy here for people who drive others for a living. Do you find that the treatment that you got, got worse during the pandemic than it was even before?

Jude: Yes, sir. It was worse during pandemic, I had more people spat on me during the pandemic. During the pandemic, I was harassed, I was punched by some very little three young boys that if not for the law of the country, I could pick them up myself, but I just had to become, I reported it to the police and all that.

A lot of people got frustrated during the pandemic and they don't understand the fact that, we that we're taking them was also risking our lives. Like some people will have their masks lowered, and you try to tell them, and they're talking and saliva is jumping out from their mouth. They tell you, "You can't force me to wear the mask. Okay?"

Especially people that believed the right-wing ideology, they would tell you, "Somebody will try to brainwash you, there is nothing like Coronavirus. They just want to get people killed, is just a lie." "Either is the lie or not, just have your mask on while you're in the car, please." That's what I'd just tell them. Some wouldn't want to agree.

Brian Lehrer: Another pandemic on the job horror story. Jude, thank you so much for calling in, stay safe out there and call us again, okay?

[crosstalk]

Jude: Thank you. I appreciate you. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. As we begin to wrap this up, Anna, do you think workers overall have more of a voice to demand change after the pandemic?

Anna North: I think what we're seeing is greater awareness and greater visibility around a lot of the issues that in particular, low-wage workers and some frontline workers are facing. People are listening in a way that maybe they weren't before, especially folks who aren't frontline workers. I think it was a big deal when grocery store workers were categorized as essential workers, and even though they didn't necessarily get paid like essential workers, there was this time when people really woke up to how important those jobs are. Obviously, people that worked in those jobs already knew, but people that did, and I think there was a sense of waking up.

I think in a way, it's a hopeful time where there's a possibility for solidarity across sectors and for people to really push for the rights of these workers and for workers to advocate for themselves, but I think what I've been hearing from everyone is that we're going to have to make some big systemic changes for this time to really stick and it's going to take a lot of political will to make those changes.

Brian Lehrer: Anna North is the senior correspondent at Vox. Her article is called The Big Job Exodus Might Not Be All It's Cracked Up To Be. She's also the author of the best-selling book Outlawed, which, why don't you plug your book on the way out the door since we didn't talk. That's actually a novel about the pandemic from 100 years ago, isn't it?

Anna North: Yes, it's pretty different from what we're talking about, although it does involve a pandemic. I'm a novelist, in addition to a journalist, and it's a novel about the fictional aftermath of a terrible flu pandemic in 1830, and how it remakes the American West.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, the one from 200 years ago. All right, well, good luck. I hope that book continues to sell really well for you and thanks for doing such a great job talking through the issues in your Vox piece.

Anna North: Thanks so much.

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