Amy Glasmeier is professor of Economic Geography and Regional Planning. She runs LRISA, the lab on Regional Innovation and Spatial Analysis, in DUSP. Glasmeier is also a Founding Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, a journal which publishes multi-disciplinary international research on the spatial dimensions of contemporary socio-economic-political change.
Glasmeier's research focuses economic opportunities for communities and individuals through the investigation of the role of geographic access and the effect of locational accident on human development. She won a 2018 grant from the National Science Foundation for her Collaborative Research on Understanding the benefits and mitigating the risks of interdependence in critical infrastructure systems. Recent awards include the Fellow award from American Association of Geographers (December 2017) and the MIT Office of the Dean for Graduate Education Receipt of the Award from the “Committed to Caring” campaign (2017).
She is writing a textbook on the Geography of the Global Energy Economy. Her other project, "Good Bye American Dream" traces the ideology of opportunity that undergirds America's relationship to the poor. Through analysis of census data, popular media, and personal narratives, Glasmeier is exploring the contradictions in the most sacred of constructs by demonstrating the ephemeral nature of economic opportunity encumbered by locational accident, institutional inertia, and the unintended consequences of public policy. The work builds off of her long running Living Wage Calculator, which analyzes the minimum level of income required for individuals and families to pay for basic living expenses. Recent press includes an interview on MIT Spectrum.
Glasmeier holds a professional Masters and PhD in Regional from UC Berkeley and currently serves as Associate Planning Board Member in the Town of Cohasset.
Amy Glasmeier is professor of Economic Geography and Regional Planning. She runs LRISA, the lab on Regional Innovation and Spatial Analysis, in DUSP. Glasmeier is also a Founding Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, a journal which publishes multi-disciplinary international research on the spatial dimensions of contemporary socio-economic-political change.
Glasmeier's research focuses economic opportunities for communities and individuals through the investigation of the role of geographic access and the effect of locational accident on human development. She won a 2018 grant from the National Science Foundation for her Collaborative Research on Understanding the benefits and mitigating the risks of interdependence in critical infrastructure systems. Recent awards include the Fellow award from American Association of Geographers (December 2017) and the MIT Office of the Dean for Graduate Education Receipt of the Award from the “Committed to Caring” campaign (2017).
She is writing a textbook on the Geography of the Global Energy Economy. Her other project, "Good Bye American Dream" traces the ideology of opportunity that undergirds America's relationship to the poor. Through analysis of census data, popular media, and personal narratives, Glasmeier is exploring the contradictions in the most sacred of constructs by demonstrating the ephemeral nature of economic opportunity encumbered by locational accident, institutional inertia, and the unintended consequences of public policy. The work builds off of her long running Living Wage Calculator, which analyzes the minimum level of income required for individuals and families to pay for basic living expenses. Recent press includes an interview on MIT Spectrum.
Glasmeier holds a professional Masters and PhD in Regional from UC Berkeley and currently serves as Associate Planning Board Member in the Town of Cohasset.
Nan Wilkinson 0:02
Hi, everybody, this is Nan with restaurant radio. Thanks for joining us again, we are here today with my special guest, Dr. Amy Glasmeier. She is a professor at MIT in the Department of Urban Planning. And she's also the CO creator, and administrator of the living wage tool, which is I'm gonna let her explain a little bit about it. Dr. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Dr Amy Glasmeier 0:26
Thanks for having me, I'm looking forward to this. Great.
Unknown Speaker 0:29
So I want to start off because, as you know, I am trying to work with people in the restaurant industry. And so obviously, you've got this amazing thing that you've got going on, you're your doctor, and you're working at MIT. And but I'd like for you to tell people what you told me about one of your first jobs before you got to where you are?
Unknown Speaker 0:50
Well, that that must be my job as a waitress. There you go. And my boss who was a rather inflammatory character, but you know, it's one of the jobs anybody working their way through college is likely to take. And you can see from the very beginning how, how, in some ways, almost, it's very dramatic. You know, there's a lot of drama in the production of food. And there's a lot of things that happen that that really are not easily anticipated. And so you can see why the the industry may itself find it's difficult to be productive, because it's, you know, the food doesn't show up in the back. And so what do you do, you have to change the menu. And with all of that said, it is one of the most important formative industries for Americans. I mean, this is where lots of kids start their jobs. And it's where a lot of women actually are capable of taking care of their family, especially single moms with kids, because it's got a level of flexibility that other industries simply don't have. So like a lot of women, I had my job as a as a food purveyor, and I learned a lot. That's,
Unknown Speaker 2:09
I love it. So I'm glad to hear that you've been in the industry too. So you know, from where we come where we speak. So, you know, I'm one of the reasons I'm so excited to have you on today is because I feel like there's a movement, probably across many industries, but for sure, the restaurant industry, I think for so long, so many people have paid a minimum wage for and even less than a minimum wage for waitstaff in the restaurant industry. And there are a lot of entry level positions. And I understand that people think, oh, entry level, let's pay minimum wage. But I think that there has become a shift, I guess, because of the pandemic, and people started looking at what they're willing to put up with. And the fact that it's really an employee's market right now, that wages have increased a lot real recently. And I guess that's, I mean, not a guess. But that's great for the employees. It's a struggle for the businesses, I believe. But the interesting thing I find is, is when we talk about minimum wage, and current wages, and then the living wage that you've created, there's still a very, very big disparity in that number. And so, we'd love for you to talk a little bit about a living wage, because I know that that's definitely something that people look to, as you know, a place where you want to hit. And there are people that say, Oh, I provide a living wage. And I know that varies in every region. But um, if you talk a little bit about how this came about, and where the numbers come from,
Unknown Speaker 3:40
all right, well, so it just so happens that right now, I'm in the process of working on a book. And so I've gone back into history to see where the origin of the term living wage came from. And it's a very interesting history, because Americans when they first were, you know, in the early early days of the country, the way people saw themselves as being successful was as a proprietor, somebody who had control over their time, and therefore, some control over how much money they made. And, and there was this very deep attachment to this idea of rather than being a wage slave, you would actually be somebody who controlled their time and also their for control their wealth. Well, that didn't last very long. And the reason that didn't last very long is because industrialization you know, took on a, you know, a presence very early, and it was the case that some people had more money than others, and they were able to invest it in capital, and then we were able to produce
Unknown Speaker 4:41
material outputs that they needed to hire people to make. So that's really the story of where this idea comes from. Because when it was the case that people were moving from proprietorships to more of as they call themselves in the in the early days a wage slave they We're saying, you know, we're we're not making what the value of our output reflects. And as a result of that, we we need to make a living wage. And that's kind of where the idea came from. So now fast forward 300 years. And where we are, is the living wage in modern times, has been discussed from the beginning of the 20th century, really in the same idea that, hey, wait a minute, we're making somebody a whole lot of money, but we're actually getting period very poorly, that leads to unionization that leads to federal regulations. And we end up with something called the minimum wage, while the minimum wage was set in in the Depression, because people were getting bid down to the fact that they're making five cents an hour, so they couldn't live on that. But over the long run, we created national legislation for through the Fair Labor, Fair Labor Act under Roosevelt. And what we saw in that experience was, there was a wage that was set one level in the northeast, one level in the South. Ultimately, in order to pass it through Congress, it ended up being the south wage, which was 25 cents an hour. So we keep going forward, up until 1968, we increase the minimum wage, so that people were essentially matched with the productivity that they were producing. And so in that instance, the minimum wage was a good way to determine what a person's value was. But after 1968, the line started to diverge. And that really, there's a whole story behind that in terms of why that happened. And it's happened around the world. But in the United States, it's been extreme. So in the early 2000s, I was working on a project. I'm a world expert among a number of other things. And I was working on a project, looking at the collapse of looking at two things. One was a history of the American poverty alleviation movement. And the second was the collapse of manufacturing in rural areas. And what we were finding is, is that communities were just having this sort of Cliff and you'd have one employer, everybody would lose their job. And pretty soon people were losing their houses. People were ending up in the hospital, it was a very, very grim time. And I happen to be working on a project reexamining poverty policy for the Ford Foundation, and my colleague, Tracy Farragut, who's an economist at the Economic Research Service of USDA, she and I decided to build a living wage calculator to inform policymakers of just exactly how problematic that moment in economic history was for people because they were losing their jobs. And but wages don't fall, you know, like, the way you might think in the economy is that, you know, if the job disappears and wages would fall, then people would get reemployed. That's not what happens. Wages are sticky. And so people ended up without jobs, no new jobs came. And so we wanted to show employers, how much and particularly policymakers how difficult people's lives were becoming and what they needed to do to respond to it. And we built a bunch of programs and talked about them. During that time. Then over time, the tool began to be used by people that were just doing a you know, kind of a gut check, like, gosh, I'm not making enough money to cover my bills. Am I just a, you know, a slob? Or is it because I'm actually not making enough money. And so that was the first probably eight years of the tools life I spent a lot of time being an landers to people who were trying to figure out where their life was going. Ultimately, we fast forward to today, the tool is now being used. But I do more work with corporations and employers today than I do with anybody else. I do provide advice to things like the national legal services organizations, the YWCA, big organizations that have people working for them, that are probably in many cases not paying living wages, or if they're paying living wages or not getting benefits. So what's the tool the tool is basically a cost calculator. We go around to every county in the country, we grab data that is reflective of the cost of various inputs to a person's life. We roll them all together and we come up with what's called a living wage. So it includes housing, childcare, food, miscellaneous, transportation, cell phones,
Unknown Speaker 9:40
and also something called a civic engagement variable where you bundle education and outdoor activities underneath. And it adds up to you know, a value at least in 2020 21, the the the average living wage, if we added it all up at the net National level would be about $16.44. Now why I say we add it all up. And I make a point of saying this to anybody who uses the tool, the living wage is a geographic fact. And so you need to use the right geography. Otherwise, you could either be way out of line from what it is in one way or the other. And a lot of the time, when it gets reported in the press, people roll it up to a state level, that's not a living wage, what you see in California as an average, is everything from the Central Valley to San Francisco. And so you're going to be wrong. So we try to get the data as detailed as possible. We're coming out with 2022 data in the very near future. Well, it's
Unknown Speaker 10:41
interesting, I, I actually, you know, looked at this, it's on my website, because I think it's a fantastic tool that new businesses can't actually pay a living wage, they can start to work towards that, or at least understand what that is. But it's interesting, I started to look at, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but in Washington State, I believe they've got the highest minimum wage, yes. And even in their state, which I lived in there for for many years, they still are below the living wage. So I just kind of I was just kind of comparing things. And so that was interesting to me, even though they've got the highest, they're still have not hit what you consider the the living wage amount. And, you know, what I think so interesting about what we've got going on in our industry right now is, you know, when we look at why people leave businesses, and there's a lot of different things, and there's a lot of issues with the restaurant industry, so we won't go down that road with you. But specifically with the payment piece. I guess, in my mind, I used to be a business owner, and I understand how scary it is to, you know, pay out lots and lots of money. And you, you can't necessarily pay someone to be a better employee. But I think the better you pay, the more chances you are going to getting a better person. But anyway, that aside, I think for business owners to not realize that if they're not paying someone enough to live on, whether it's what you consider the living wage or not, is sort of a little silly to think that why would people stay with you? What else are you giving them? And then I mean, maybe there are other things, maybe then you don't need health insurance, or you don't need 40 hours a week or whatever. But we have to look at this whole piece and see that, you know, that's a lot of why people are moving jobs and jumping back and forth. Because of you if you've got to get multiple jobs, to just make ends meet. People, I mean, people can't do that. I mean, it's just become too stressful. It's not an easy industry, like you said, anyway. And I just think looking at the monetary piece of it is, is critical. So speaking of that, so businesses, when I even mentioned living wage, that people aren't even close to that they just go, oh, there's just no way that I can do that. I mean, what would your advice be to people who want to at least understand how they might be able to work towards that living wage amount, or at least start to get close? I mean, you know, people are even upset that they're talking about raising minimum wages. And again, it's it's not even what you're living wages. Well, what advice or suggestions would you give to people?
Unknown Speaker 13:29
Well, the first thing I'd say is that it and this is going to be a kind of MIA culpa first, and then I'm going to say what I think is that far be it from me to tell somebody that's working 60 hours a week, in an industry that is a very stressful, it's also physically very demanding. And you put up with a lot of people who are not very nice, right? I mean, you got to deal with everything. You have people that have heart attacks, you have people that are choking, right, you got all these things going on. So it's not like you're in the privacy of your own office, and you don't have to deal with the world. You're dealing with the world constantly. And so that really appreciate the fact that that, you know, people are as accommodating as they are in the industry. With that said, we do know that in places where wages have been raised that companies have figured out in the food service industry, how to pay that rate wage increase for it. So for example, you know, the minimum wage in Massachusetts has risen four times and I supervised a thesis on what did it mean for the wage to rise in the restaurants in Boston? And basically what organizations did was they reorganized what they were doing, they sat down and they said, Okay, what do we need? What don't we need? What can we economize on what can we simply eliminate? That is a More more costs than it's worth for the return on the investment of time and resources. And how do we reorganize our workforce. So rather than having people be part time, be full time, build some level of dedication, so a whole lot of things organizations have already attempted to do. So my view is that
Unknown Speaker 15:23
I believe that the worker actually knows a lot more than we pay them for. So I just say that straight up, you know, it's everything from somebody that knows not to mix bleach and ammonia, to somebody who actually can help you when your fire alarm is going off, right. And those are skills and experiences that you didn't pay for, it just comes with the human that comes in that door. And so really thinking in terms of what people can do, I think is a point that we need to start at. The second thing is to say that, you know, workers, you know, why would you know what workers feel about crummy jobs, they feel that if they're given the ability to do make a crummy job as good as they possibly could, as that is my feeling, at the end of each day that they are proud of the work they did, that goes a long way and helping people have the durability to stay in a job, which is really very difficult. And so you can see that in places like very well run hospitals, where the employees are given the freedom to literally talk to the patients, when they're delivering food and talking to them about you know, how they're doing and talking about themselves. So it's like this experience of not, you know, being in shrouded and don't talk to the person, it's really something that is more of an emotional engagement experience. Another thing to say is that, that really sitting everybody down and saying, Hey, look, you know, the shop could close. And I know, I don't know everything. So I know you're watching all the time, because that's what you have to do. So you don't slip on the floor, and you don't have somebody steal something. So why don't we sit down and figure it out together. And I know, that's really a scary thought. And the reason it's a scary thought Is it means whoever is the proprietor has to yield some level of control over the situation, in order to evolve. And that is a very big deal. I mean, you know, I, during COVID, as a professor, we have classes set at the beginning of class. And what happened when COVID hit was in the middle of a semester, all of a sudden, everything changed, you went online, and you basically either figured out how to run your class, or you didn't, and it showed up in your reviews. And the thing that I learned was to turn to the students and say, Okay, guys, this is what we have to do. Now, how should we do this? What's the best way for you to learn? How can I help you, and here's what I'm afraid of, and I just put it out there, you know, I, I was afraid of everything, I was afraid of the technology failing, I was afraid of being boring, all these various things. But I had no choice. Because if I didn't include the students in the process, I would have been a rigid, unforgiving person who would have probably gotten a score of one on a score of five for being a bad teacher, right. And that's like the worst thing that could ever happen to somebody like me. So that's, that's sort of how I look at it philosophically, because that's what I've seen, I have been in lots of factories, I've been all over the world. And I can tell the difference between a happy workforce and an unhappy workforce, I can tell the difference between somebody who is given the authority to do their job without somebody chasing after them all the time, and somebody who is really worried about saying a single word that could be wrong. And I just feel pretty clearly that we don't give humans, our colleagues, our neighbors, our employees, we don't give them enough credit for what they know. And so we got to start with, what do you know? How do you know it? Where did you learn that? What does that mean? So that you're able to really utilize their best talents, and they all feel good about that. They always do. Sorry, that's a long winded explanation. But
Unknown Speaker 19:19
I know I love it. I actually did a podcast with another gentleman who, who was a chef, and he's, he works with various restaurants as well. And he was talking about he calls it training for performance. But basically, it's like you're saying, I mean, the people that are like boots on the on the ground. They're the ones seeing things, so why not ask them questions, but you're exactly right. Like, I think people are afraid to do that. They're afraid of losing that control. And I you know, I admire you for saying, yeah, it's scary. But here's where I feel like we are in this industry. I feel like we are at a place where it's already scary. It's weird. It's already scary that we don't have enough people and and There's a lot of talk about it, but haven't seen a lot of action. And what I mean by that is, you can't expect for things to change if you keep doing the same things you've been doing. And if you don't start sitting down with your employees, or making the employees a focus of your business, just like your menu, or your you know, or your culture out front, if you don't look at your employees, as the critical piece that they are, and if you don't know it by now, you never will, then you're missing the boat, I mean, we have to go, Okay, we have to understand what we're not doing right here. Because, again, if you can't meet, if you can't get to this living wage, which is still the thing you need to try to do, there, at least at least have to create a place where people can enjoy being while you're doing that. And I do believe that if you can do that, the employees will produce better and more, the business will succeed more, and that rising tide will just lift all the boats and businesses around, we'll see that that's the case. And it'll, it'll be sort of that snowball effect. But if we just keep complaining that we don't have enough people, that's all you get.
Unknown Speaker 21:18
So I conducted an experiment about five years ago with the New England sustainable construction industry. And I had a roomful of 35 people, I broke them broke them into groups into their sort of logical groups, because they came as members of companies. And I set up a scenario for them, to see if we could have them think about what it means to pay a living wage. And these were everything from a two person shop to a 10 person shop. And the scenario was a very wealthy lawyer is going to have a big renovation done on his house, and he wants you to pay a living wage, that's the required contractual minimum. And that you it was going to be a quarter of a million bucks. And and what you needed to do was pay living wages, but you could set anything else, you had everything else under control. And so the different groups met together and talked about how they functioned, and what was valuable and who was valuable. And one of the things that was really interesting in the results of the project is since they could pick their own profit rate, right, so they could pick to 1025, whatever they wanted. But they had to come up with a budget that carried out the project with a $250,000 limit to it. And what was really amazing was what people did. So first off, everybody had different profit rates they wanted to make from, you know, the cooperative that four was fine to the two person custom that wanted at least 10%. And so they all set their own things. And they, they were sort of surprised that they had so much variation, but they also realized that they had very different attitudes toward what they were doing. Second thing was is that that, that they had to sit down and figure out, literally, they had to put the budget together because somebody was going to win a prize, which was a pie made, and lay. So they had to actually figure out exactly how they were going to count this out how much for materials, how much for labor, how much for benefits, how much for taxes. And so everybody basically accomplished the job. That is they got the profit rate they wanted, and they worked out the budget. And what they did when they were working out the budget, because these are small operations, right, there's five, six people on it. Everybody is potentially a worker, and or they bring people on when they don't have enough workers for, you know, sub jobs and things like that. So what they did is they looked at their individual employees, and they would say things like, Well, I have this person, and that person has been working with me for a really long time. But you know, I have them doing something that they're not really all that good at, I'd be better to put them over here and get somebody else to do that job. And I could make more money on that person who has much higher skills, and I do this other person. Or they would say that, you know, this is a this is a single mom, she really needs this job. And so I need to figure out how I'm going to keep this person in, in the process. So they basically re engineered their operations. And each of them got what they wanted. And so that taught me a really good lesson, which is well first off I come from business family, so I'm you know, I kind of understand how people work. And the bottom line is, is that we often don't think strategically about what we're doing. We're doing what we do, or we do what we see is being done, but we often don't ask the question, is there a way to do this better? Could I just take like a week and figure it out and figure out the best way to do it, and then have somebody else, you know, sort of test it, you know, give me a logic analysis of whether I'm crazy. Because most of the time, what you're trying to do is get the stuff out the door at the end of the day. And that's true for all small businesses. And so you might make decisions, which are not, in the end the best decision, and that's because you feel like you don't have enough time to figure out what the best decision is. So it's by stepping back, and really saying, Okay, what do I want, I want happy people, I want to be able to continue to pay my rent on my house, my vacation home my car, and want to put money away for my kids, what does that look like? How much do I have to make? Okay, how many people how much and, and you know, you and, and you just sort of start to do the calculation. But you also don't leave yourself just thinking about how your brain works. I think it's always good to take the risk of letting somebody else see what your logic model is, is there something that's a problem in the way I'm thinking about how I could reorganize myself, because often other people have really good ideas. And so that, you know, it is possible now in the thing about the food industry is, is that you are stuck with one of the most problematic issues, and that is food, food has is a global enterprise, right? It's not something that you control locally. And the price of food goes up with the price of oil goes up with international problems goes up when there's weather, all of those things, and it means you have to spin on a dime. And so the question is, is how do you live with spinning on a dime? And again, I think that there are, you know, you just, it's like saying to yourself, I deserve the right, to try to figure out how to do this better. And if that is going to take the time necessary to do it, and I'm going to bring my people in to help me do it. I deserve that. You deserve that. Because otherwise, you're you're just like I was in the classroom going, Oh, my God, I'm afraid that computers not going to work. I you know, what are we gonna do? We have to wear masks, they're not gonna be able to, you know, yeah.
Unknown Speaker 27:21
You're You're absolutely right. I was speaking with a gentleman yesterday. And one of the things he said, he said, you know, we're talking about how a grocery store, they buy a product and the price goes up, they just charge a different price, you know, so it's, it's easy for them to sort of move in and jive like that. But restaurants is harder. Yeah, you can't print menus every day, or every week or every whatever. And I sort of beg to differ with that. I mean, you you actually could, and right now, you probably should. But I think that again, back to your point, is it? You, you have to actually do the hard work and put things down on paper and see what you need and what you don't need, and what you can live with and what you can't. And I think a lot of times people think, oh, you know, I've got to, let's just say I decide to increase everybody by $3 an hour if I have, you know, 1000 hours a week of labor, not $3,000? Well, that's just that it doesn't have to exactly be like that, you know, I think that you have to actually look at the whole business. And like you were saying, at each employee, like, could this person be better served here or here? And it takes a little more work than just kind of putting a bandaid on it. I mean, I think you have to really invest time in your business and looking at all these different things. One of the other things, though, that someone sort of brought up is that if the minimum wage goes up, or if you decide to pay people more money, and you've already been paying people who've been with you a while that amount. Do they have to go up that exponential amount? I have my thought on that. What's your take on that? I mean,
Unknown Speaker 29:02
well, so when. So if you have somebody you're talking about bumping into the wage ceiling, and and so you know, you bring on somebody, you're already paying $15, and now you bring somebody on, you're going to pay them $15, that person who's been there for five years, it's going to look like you've lost your mind. Right? So one of the questions is, is what about trying to figure out what would be a better use of that more expensive employee because they're expensive because they know everything, right? What would be a better way to be able to compensate them. You're not going to if it's a $3 jump, you're not going to be able to do that in lockstep, right, but you're going to be able to do something. And I think that there's a lot of jobs that we take on ourselves, right? You figure out the menu, you do the ordering, you do all these various things. What happens if you train your very best person to be the person goes through and keeps the shelves, right and get you, you know, the where you're, you're in problems of losing things, you know where waste occurs. And, and, and, you know, try try to think about how they can do more than what they're doing. Because you've just brought somebody on. And you you've added your, when you bring a new person on, let's assume they're trained, you're always going to get more than just a one person addition, you are because that person is already trained, you're not losing money for that. And so it's really about trying to think strategically that I think's important. Another thing is, and this is always amazed me is, here we are, let's, let's just do a little scenario, we have a street, there's five restaurants, they are from the the hamburger joint, and the hotdog vendor, all the way up to the, you know, $50 place setting meal, all those people have different purveyors for the things that they buy. Well, you know, what, what happens if you all got together and took the basic things that everybody uses and buy it from one, you then are buying a large volume relative to what you're doing in your own operation, and you just find a vendor who's going to give it to you at a price that you think is reasonable. And I don't know why that doesn't just happen all the time. It certainly happens in Europe. And and so it's not an unusual idea. And it works. It does also work in certain kinds of, like the carpet industry, for example, right? Because it's, it's a standardized product, everybody needs the materials. And, but some guys are always on the outside, right? There's never you know, they're not want to join, but but just thinking in terms of both inside and outside, what can I do?