E-mail a friendMichael D. Yates
airdate May 22, 2007
Michael Yates is an economist, a longtime labor educator and a former University of Pittsburgh economics professor. He's the author of numerous books, including Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy and Why Unions Matter. He's also the associate editor of Monthly Review. After becoming disillusioned with academic life, he took early retirement in '01 and, with his wife, has traveled the country. His new book, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate examines life in contemporary America.
Michael D. Yates
Tavis: Michael D. Yates is a former distinguished professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh whose previous books include "Why Unions Matter." He is also the editor of a forthcoming book on class and equality in America called "More, Unequal." His new book is a unique look at life on the road in America called "Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist's Travelogue." Professor Yates, nice to have you back on the program.
Michael D. Yates: Good to be here.
Tavis: I started a moment ago suggesting that you were a former professor because you have since retired and literally taken to the road.
Yates: Yeah, that's what we did. I taught for 32 years at the University of Pittsburgh in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and I found my job, although better than a lot of the ones I catalogue in the book, was getting depressing - a lot like a lot of other jobs. Alienating and being deskilled, and with the students not very interested. So I thought that if I could retire, I would.
And when the stock market boomed in the late 1990s my pension doubled in about five years. And when I turned 55 it looked like I could make enough money, if we lived frugally, to retire. So we decided to make a radical change in our lives. We gave away almost everything we owned - our kids to charities. I gave all my books to the libraries at school. And we packed everything that was left in our Plymouth van and we hit the road and we've been on it ever since, and that was in 2001.
Tavis: Wow. I'm going to come back to that in just a second. First, though, let me go back to your feeling that it was time to move from the position that you were in because it was not rewarding anymore. Tell me a little bit more about that decision.
Yates: Well, I think what it was was that the schools started to become a lot more like corporations, it seemed to me. Instead of deans you'd have - there'd be assistant president. They'd have, like, corporate titles. They wouldn't be called deans or presidents. A lot of the administrators came out of corporations, and more and more the students started to think of schools as something that they purchased and I was part of the purchase price.
And if things didn't go right for the students, if they didn't do well, then it wasn't ever their fault; it was the product was defective. I was defective. And that was pretty alienating. I just - when I first started to teach, most of my students were first-time college students, Vietnam veterans and so on. They were kids like me. It was a mill town, Johnstown, PA, and I came from a mill town.
And as the students changed, as the administration changed, as the colleges became more corporate-like, the work got more alienating. And I just didn't like it anymore; I could hardly make it up the steps to class some days for my night classes. And so I thought if I didn't enjoy that work anymore, if I was going to come to really not like the students, you can't be a teacher and not like your students. And I thought I've got to quit. I can't do this anymore. And so when circumstances arose, I decided to do it and take that opportunity.
Tavis: So tell me about your travels, then, for these last five or six years now.
Yates: Well originally we'd planned to go to Manhattan, but that didn't pan out right away. So we'd met couples that -
Tavis: Manhattan as in New York?
Yates: Yeah.
Tavis: Wait, wait, wait, wait. So you - (laughs) I'm laughing now, 'cause you took everything you had, your pension doubles in five years, you take everything that you have and you really think you can make a living in Manhattan?
Yates: Well -
Tavis: Not in Madison, Wisconsin. You're going to Manhattan.
Yates: Well, we did make it to Manhattan eventually. It didn't pan out at first so we'd met some couples that had worked in the national parks and so we went to Yellowstone National Park and we worked there. We worked at the Lake Hotel. I was a desk clerk at the hotel.
Tavis: So you go from being a professor to being a desk clerk.
Yates: Yes, and that was pretty interesting because you got to see how the - I learned a lot there. I learned to - one of my fields of study, one of the things I taught about, was work. And I knew the kind of work that people did; I knew that a quarter of the jobs in the country pay less than the poverty level of income for a family of four if you work full time.
I knew all those things. But I hadn't done that kind of work, and so then when you do that kind of work and you're a clerk at a hotel and the guests - if I thought I was being treated as an object by my students, can you imagine working as a clerk at a hotel? People don't even see you. You're really part of the entertainment package at Yellowstone National Park.
And I learned a lot. I learned how tiring that kind of work is. My legs were sore every night, and my mind was spinning from the computer codes. And the guests were often rude, and I just learned how a lot of people must feel that do service work for low pay. But then the thing in New York did pan out and we did move to Manhattan.
We rented an apartment in the East Village; I worked for "Monthly Review" magazine as associate editor. I got a little bit of money, and the money that I'd set aside and the money from the pension, well, we lasted a year in New York, and then we moved to Portland, Miami Beach, Estes Park, Colorado, Tucson. In between, we just stayed on the road and lived in cheap motels and cooked on our hot plate.
Tavis: Wow. So you're still in this process of moving around from place to place?
Yates: Yeah, well, we just left Tucson. We were there for about three months, and now we're on about a 90-day book tour. And I'm going to end up in Amherst, Massachusetts where I got a visiting job to teach a couple of classes, actually. University of Massachusetts in Amherst. And then after that we have to rethink and figure out where we're going to go next.
Tavis: Tell me how you juxtaposed, when you were behind that desk as a clerk at Yellowstone, how you juxtaposed, how you compared and contrasted being behind the desk there and being in front of the classroom in Pittsburgh. Did you ever regret leaving the university to do the desk work, or did you find rewards in both?
Yates: Well, I thought it's a lot different in the sense that you get automatic respect as a professor. People in town - it's a small town, Johnstown - they know you, and the newspapers will call you up and ask you for advice. You're a big fish in a little pond and at Yellowstone, you're not like that. It's not that kind of work so you don't get that automatic respect. I think when customers would see me, a middle-aged, grey-haired man, they might feel a little pity wondering how did he manage to get here.
Tavis: Not knowing they're talking to an economics professor.
Yates: Right. If I talked to somebody - I told a Japanese guy once, a Japanese tourist, did he remember the Japanese minister of finance, Sakakibara, who happened to go to college with a friend of mine. And he was, like, flabbergasted. He couldn't believe that a desk clerk would know something like that. But I found rewards at being a desk clerk.
I really bonded with the other clerks, 'cause you're in this tense situation. You're behind a small desk, there's four or five people. It's a madhouse every day, the place is packed with guests. They're unhappy about things, and you really bond with those clerks. And it's interesting that I've stayed in touch with a number of those clerks over these years, and there's only a couple of my old professor friends that stay in touch with me. It was kind of interesting, in a way.
Tavis: So what did we learn - what have you learned, then, as you've traveled about American workers, the kind of work that we do, what we love, what we hate. Tell me what you've learned from American workers.
Yates: Well I thought - I think there's three basic themes in the book, I think, the things we learn. One thing that there's, like, almost a palpable inequality in the country and it's growing by leaps and bounds. And you can see it in - it's the first thing you notice in a place is housing. You notice, like, in Jackson, Wyoming they have these - they call them 22Aers, two people stay two weeks in an 8,000 square foot place.
Whereas all the motel workers are living out of town or they're living at the motel or they're living in trailers at the motel. One resort in Aspen urges workers to go live in the woods, and some of them did. So you see that tremendous housing divide, and that's the first kind of thing you notice about the divide. And somebody asked me, "Was there anyplace in the country where you didn't see that?"
And with the exception of maybe a tiny little town like Thermopolis, Wyoming or a couple of the Mormon towns in Utah, maybe, you see that divide everywhere. You just see it in the shops that people go to. The poor people go to certain grocery stores; the rich people go to other grocery stores. They live in different places. There's gated communities everywhere.
And then with respect to work, well, we stayed in cheap motels so I made friends with an awful lot of motel cleaning people and clerks, and the cleaning women are bringing their kids to work with them and the kids are crawling around on the balconies, they're in their cleaning - the things that they carry all their equipment in, the cleaning baskets.
Like, kids are playing in there, the kids are coming in the rooms with them, and you can just see the - it's like this isn't satisfying work. Grocery store clerks in Estes Park, Colorado, which is a tourist town. They're exhausted by the end of the year, you can see it in their faces. So I knew that a lot of people weren't making much money, or they were working more than one job, and that's the kind of people that we met. It's a service economy when somebody makes $1.7 billion in one year in income running one of those big hedge funds.
That's $1.7 billion in income in a year. Well, when you have that many - a small number of people that have that much money, they require a whole crew of service people to serve them. To watch their children as nannies, to wait on them in hotels, to serve them as clerks, to be their personal trainers, and what have you.
And that's what we saw. That's what we saw across the country, a lot of alienated kind of labor - people struggling to get by. It sort of belies the fact that the stock market is rising and the good news you hear sometimes on TV. When you talk to ordinary people you don't get that sense that people are satisfied with their jobs, or.
Tavis: Fair to say, then, that most Americans are dissatisfied with the jobs they have?
Yates: Well, when you see polls, they often say they're not. But then I always think that well, what are you going to say? Are you going to say you're not happy with a job you know you're going to have to keep doing? I think that they are, there is a lot - if you get somebody talking about their jobs - we have twin sons and they were in Portland with us.
And one of them was a chef, and he took a huge pay cut to go to Portland from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But then one of his supervisors stole hours from him. Went onto the computer and took hours away from him. And he's working hard, working long hours. In this one place he was working at in Portland, they started smelling something during the shift - liquid started to drip out the ceiling.
It was beneath a sort of crummy old hotel. The police came, found a dead body upstairs. It was decomposing. So their boss told them to put wood chips on the fire, get rid of the smell. It's that kind of stuff, you see people doing that kind of work. Or you go into a town and you see these big houses. And the people that are taking care of their garden are always Mexicans or brown-skinned people. They're invisible.
You don't get to see them very often, you don't get to talk to them very often, but they're there, doing the labor that keeps everything moving. Farm workers in California, for example. That's the kind of thing I observed.
Tavis: So how long can our economy sustain this kind of economic division? This kind of have-got, have-not?
Yates: Well, my feeling is is that - I used to think not for long. But one of the things that happens is that people get pretty demoralized about things and there's not any kind of movement going that makes people think about things very much, if you know what I mean. It's like there's no strong labor movement, for example, that would keep people thinking or give them an alternative way to look at things.
And so people aren't very informed about a lot of things. And so I think this divide can go on for a good while. People might get demoralized or they might even move to the right. For example, when we lived in Colorado, the talk show hosts - we liked to listen to talk shows. And a lot of times, the talk show hosts are pretty right wing and they just go on and on and on about immigrants coming into the country.
And these poor immigrants, we were down in Tucson and every day when it gets over 100 degrees, they die as they cross the border. Or they get sick and have to be rushed to the hospital. So you'd have ordinary working people instead of saying, "Well, I don't think that's right that somebody makes $1.7 billion in a year."
They're saying, "I don't think it's right that these immigrants are coming across the border." So instead of making solidarity with the people that are poor, they identify with the people up above.
Tavis: But how could anybody in their right mind - you'd have to be pretty much stuck on stupid, I think, to make that argument - it's as if the jobs that these immigrants are taking is stuff you'd want to do anyway.
Yates: No, I agree. I agree, but I don't think people think about it very much. I think that they - it's a good propaganda thing. And people will talk about, well, everything's going to China. As if it's the Chinese workers' fault. When there's no alternative way to look at things, people will often look at - poorer people will often look at people on the right that seem to have convictions and say, "At least they stand for something."
So people need to have alternative ways to think about things, and those have to be put out there for people all the time. And that's what's missing. That's what you never see. We were on the streets in Estes Park, Colorado, and we heard a guy saying something that sounded pretty progressive. And I was listening because oftentimes you don't hear people talking on the street like that.
And then all of a sudden he started to talk real negatively about immigrants. Or we hear just so many racist remarks that people would make. Common, just everyday conversations. You'd be in a gym and somebody would say - you talk about sports and they'd say, "I used to like the Boston Celtics 'cause they had so many good White players."
And you think, what are you talking about? They would make a comment without knowing who I was or what I thought about things and so I think a lot of people are pretty uninformed about things. Or they live their daily lives and don't think too much about it.
Tavis: Let me ask, before I let you go, if, in fact, there is a solution or solutions to the problems that workers face today. Give me two or three quick solutions. The last time you were on this program, we were talking about the fact that unions matter. And you mentioned earlier in this conversation that there is not a real driving force to respect labor in the country today. If we were going to turn this situation around where so many American workers are unhappy with the work that they are forced to do, where would we start?
Yates: Well, first I want to say that one of the other themes of the book is the tremendous ecological damage. And that has to be brought into this whole equation somewhere, 'cause we're living in places where we can't breathe the air, where there's poisons all over the place. And working people suffer from that, so that has to be thought about very, very clearly.
This is a beautiful country, but - it has a lot of potential, but that potential has to be realized. I always like to start out with saying what the great labor organizer, Mother Jones, said. She said, "Educate yourself for the coming struggles." That's the first step. If people don't educate themselves, if people like me don't try to educate people - ordinary people.
Don't just talk to other people that think like you do; talk to average people, ordinary people. That's always what I tried to do when I was a teacher. That's your first starting point, to become aware of what's going on. And then at whatever level you're at, there are some people who are going to speak out and then other people have to track themselves to them.
Naturally, I hope that the labor movement and other organizations like that would start to take strong stands on things. That they would start to bring out the facts that I bring out in my book, and organize around them. But I think what Mother Jones said is correct, that's your first starting point.
Tavis: The new book by Michael D. Yates is "Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate." Professor Yates, nice to have you on the program again.
Yates: Thank you. Great to be here.
Tavis: Good to see you. My pleasure.
Back to May 22, 2007