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Raphael Bostic: Hello everyone. My name is Raphael Bostic. I'm the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and I'd like to welcome you today to the latest installment of our webinar series titled Racism and the Economy. If you were able to join a little earlier, you got to see some clips of the kickoff event of this series. You just got a flavor of how interesting and exciting it was and how provocative it was; it really got us to think about some interesting ideas, and I think it set the stage for what's going to be an excellent webinar series. A lot has happened since then. Perhaps most significantly for this series, Neel Kashkari, who is the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, he and his wife had a baby boy, and they're doing well, but Neel is now on paternity and is not going to be able to join us for this session. I personally want to offer my best wishes to them. I've seen the little guy. He looks great.

I'd also say that we have got some other people and some other organizations in the Federal Reserve System who have agreed to join us here as well. The Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland, San Francisco, and Dallas are now co-presenters and sponsors of this conference, and to me, I think this just reflects what I've been saying all along, which is that the attention and focus on racial equity and racism is not something that's just an Atlanta Fed issue. It's really a Federal Reserve System issue, and the participation that you're going to see through the rest of this series is going to demonstrate that. You're going to hear from president Mary Daly from San Francisco later on, and it's just going to be a wonderful, wonderful day.

Now, just as a reminder, this series is really intended to do two things. First, to place a focus on systemic racism. And as I wrote, systemic racism is a yoke that puts a drag on the U.S. economy, and it prevents us from being all that we can be, and it's really important that we move forward to try to address this so that we get the full potential of the U.S. economy. But to do that, it requires the second thing, which is a focus on sparking change, to address and attack some of the structural challenges that we have in policies and in practices that have driven and sustained the disparities that we see across races moving forward.

Now from a Federal Reserve perspective, this series is certainly one way that we're doing this, but I would just encourage you to keep tabs on us through Twitter and chat and other things, because we're doing and focusing on this in a lot of different ways, and there'll be a number of upcoming events that you can join us for, because we want this conversation to not just be a couple of discrete events, but something that's much more continuous and allows us to move forward. Now before I turn the stage over to our speakers in the main program, there are really three things that I want to do, and it's always dangerous to give a professor some opening time on a camera, so I'm going to take it, but I'm going to try not to abuse it too much.

First, I wanted to just remind you all why the Federal Reserve is even talking about this. Why is racial inequity an issue that is a source of concern? Second, I want to give you a picture and a framing for the things that we're going to talk about today when we talk about issues around racial inequities in employment and in labor markets. And then third, I thought it would be useful to give you my perspective on narratives around disparities when we talk about employment, and give you my view that some of the narratives that we hear too often are actually misplaced and should be put aside for a deeper, I think, a more realistic assessment of what is really going on.

So first, why is the Federal Reserve tackling racial inequity? To me, I think this is really about two things. First, our mandate. So one is the Federal Reserve has two mandates. We have what we call the dual mandate. One is stable prices, and the focus there is to make sure that we don't let inflation evolve in ways that are surprising, so that businesses and families can make investments in the future and have some confidence about what prices are going to be when those come due. But then the second mandate is full employment, maximum employment, and that's really where issues around racial inequity come into play. To couch this, when you looked at unemployment rates pre-COVID, Black and Latino workers had far higher unemployment rates than what we saw for the general economy and for white Americans.

And this was true right before the virus hit us, which was after one of the longest periods of economic growth in the history of this country. So what we see as these disparities, they're persisting in hard times and in good times. So it's not that there's an economic engine that is going to create some differential impacts on that gap. We see that gap persist over time. And what this tells me is that what we have is really a structural, systemic limitation on what Black and Hispanic and other minority workers can do, which in turn means that we have a limitation on how much employment we're going to have, which in turn then means that we have a limitation on the economic prospects of businesses, of regional economies, and national economies in terms of what they can do in terms of growth, innovation, and resilience. So this runs to the heart of what is important for us in the Federal Reserve because it speaks exactly to that full employment mandate.

Now I would also know that these limitations for workers can translate to limitations for families, because if there's insecurity in the workforce, in the workplace, that there are limitations on what people can achieve, that has implications for things like household wealth, for home ownership, for access to healthcare, and even for life expectancy, and we've seen a disparity of the life expectancy across these groups for many, many years. Now, these problems are old, and they've been with us for a long, long time. Some would argue even before the beginning of this nation. So they're not going to be fixed or solved very easily, but I don't think that that's a reason to give up or throw up our hands. I actually think this is a reason that we have to redouble our efforts and be even more committed to taking these things on, and that's really what we're intending to do through this webinar series to really start that discussion and hopefully get some action that leads to lasting change.

And that takes us to today. And as I said, we're going to be talking about employment as our focus for the day and the program is rich, but I have to tell you, there was a real struggle in trying to figure out exactly how are we going to do that, because there are so many different aspects to employment discrimination and disparities in employment, and we kind of had to whittle it down to pick a couple items to talk about in this two-hour webinar. There are college courses and semesters that are taught that cover this sort of stuff. So what we did is we reached out to professionals and practitioners who are doing this on the ground in real time, trying to make sure that people have economic and employment opportunities and access to training and skills, and those conversations led us to decide that what we would do today is focus on three things: occupational segregation, employment discrimination, and then the role of quality jobs.

Now, these are all related, to be sure, but they are distinct, and I think that what you're going to hear today are some approaches to policy that can help make progress in them individually and really start to unlock some doors for some people. I thought it might be useful to give some sense of how this all plays out, and I thought I would use occupational segregation as an example of this. Now when we talk about occupational segregation, what we're really talking about is the reality that workers of color in particular are disproportionately represented in certain sorts of occupations. And historically in the United States, these have been low-wage jobs. Jobs such as food preparation, cleaning, health service support, those sorts of jobs that are very entry level.

And the thing that's important about this is that they often offer few benefits, and they offer minimal opportunities for advancing. So once you get locked into those sorts of jobs, your prospects are much worse for moving to greater self-sufficiency and resilience and all those sorts of things. Now, what we know is that prior to the pandemic, the share of Blacks and Hispanics that were in these low-wage jobs was about double the share of white workers that were in those jobs, which already created a problem. But what's happened is the pandemic has made this worse, and if you've heard me talk about this, you've heard me say in many instances the pandemic has actually exacerbated racial disparities, and that's because the pandemic has disproportionately hit these sorts of jobs, which require people to be... They serve sectors where people are all coming together, and those sectors have been hit harder.

And what we've seen, unfortunately, is in many of these instances the temporary job losses at the beginning of the pandemic are now starting to turn permanent, and that has real challenges. And we see this in the numbers. In the early months of the pandemic, the unemployment rate for Black workers doubled, and it moved to 17 percent. The unemployment rate for Hispanic workers quadrupled, and it went to 19 percent. And in both of these cases, occupational segregation played a huge role. Now, if we turn to the recovery, things are looking quite similar. The recovery has actually been the weakest for Black workers. Only about half of the jobs that Black workers lost have returned, compared to two-thirds of jobs for white workers.

And importantly, and it's a bit sobering when I read this, in October, the level of Black employment was worse than it was at any point during the Great Recession. I want you to think about that and think about what the Black community is going through from a labor force perspective, from an employment perspective. It makes me step back and really have to think hard. We have to do more. This is not something that we can afford to ignore. So that turns to what can we do? And if you saw the opening clips on this, what you will find is that Angela Glover Blackwell [founder of PolicyLink], I think set it up nicely when she said we've got to tap into our radical imagination. And why is this? Because we've got to do more. We have not been doing enough, and this is important. We can't afford to leave people behind. And if we can be successful, we can have a more representative and, importantly, more productive workforce.

And I can tell similar stories when we think about employment discrimination as well as job quality. In all of these cases, a radical imagination is going to be required for us to move forward. I'll just say one quick word about the narratives before I move this on, particularly the narrative about why we see these disparities. I go around and I talk to business leaders; everyone tells me we have a skills gap, where I find there aren't enough workers who have the skills we need, or they have the wrong skills that need to be retrained. Too often the narrative then turns to, "It's the worker's problem. They're unwilling to work. They don't want to go to the training. They don't want to do these sorts of things."

I think that's a little misleading. And what I have seen as I've gone around the district is that if you give people a real chance to realize this opportunity, they will rise to the occasion, and we will find that they have far more skills than anyone might have expected. I think we need to acknowledge this and turn away from trying to maybe blame those that don't have the skills or have the wrong skills and move to a place where we look at the underlying root causes more directly and examine the extent to which workers have connections to good job training and workforce development opportunities. To the extent that they have connections and linkages to networks of employers, access to high skill work so they can see a job trajectory moving forward. And then also whether they have access to real quality education from the very beginning of their lives, because that, in some ways, sets the table for what can happen in the years coming forward.

So all of this, I think we can learn from how people have lived in their lived experiences, and I'm looking forward to moving forward. So let me just stop there, because I've talked for too long. I'm getting notes from the rest of the team that I got to shut up. So I will do that and quickly get us to move to what I'm calling the radical imagination space. To that end, we've invited a number of thought and practice leaders from across the nation to propose some ideas and strategies that can promote more equitable workforce outcomes. And to kick us off, I'm really excited to say that we have Dr. Valerie Wilson with us today. She's the director of the Economic Policy Institute's program on race, ethnicity, and the economy. And she's a nationally recognized expert on the economic condition of America's people of color. I'm not going to go through her whole bio. It's impressive. We've put it out there in the chat, a link to that in the chat, so you can go look at that. But Dr. Wilson, I'm turning this over to you. The floor is yours.

Valerie Wilson: Thank you, Raphael. This is such an honor for me to be here today. I want to commend you and your colleagues, presidents Kashkari and Rosengren for convening this important series on racism and the economy. And thanks to everyone who had a hand in pulling this together. According to the Center for Assessment and Policy Development, racial equity is the condition that would be achieved if one's racial identity no longer predicted, in a statistical sense, how one fares. In reality, statistical analysis often reveals that racial identity is a measurable, significant, and persistent predictor of labor market outcomes. Now let's pause and think about that for a moment. Why should racial identity, something as arbitrary and superficial as physical appearance or skin color, be statistically correlated with one's likelihood of being employed or how much one is paid for their labor? As silly as that sounds, when we consider the origins of race as a social construct, the racial disparities we observe across any number of economic outcomes really should come as no surprise.

Since this nation's inception, race has been used to systematically exclude, marginalize, exploit, and generate unequal economic outcomes, while also being used to justify and normalize those unequal outcomes. I'm going to start today with a few graphical examples of what this looks like in the specific context of Black-white inequality, so if we could go ahead and get those slides up. These images and statistics are probably familiar to many of you, so I'm going to run through them quickly in order to highlight a few key points. Then I want to spend most of my time talking about the historical context, policy relevance, and contradictory interpretations of racial disparity. Finally, I'll share what role I think the Federal Reserve and others play in addressing racial disparities in employment and wages.

So in this first slide, the point I want to make here, and you've already heard it, Black workers are far more likely to be unemployed than white workers, typically twice as likely, and even at the historically low rates of unemployment reached in 2019, this was the case overall, and at nearly every level of education. In practical terms, this means that Black workers are not just twice as likely to be unemployed as similarly educated white workers or to often more likely to be unemployed than less educated white workers. Next slide, please.

Among the employed, Black workers face large pay disparities relative to white workers. These Black-white wage gaps have grown over the last 40 years and are largely unexplained by factors associated with individual productivity. In 2019, the average hourly wage of Black workers was 26.5 percent less than that of white workers, and that's indicated by that dark blue line. Relative to white workers with the same education, of the same age and gender, and living in the same geographic division, the gap was 14.9 percent as shown in the light blue line. In other words, less than half of the observed Black-white difference in average hourly wage is explained by the main factors presumed to determine pay. Next slide, please.

The third point I want to make is that the intersection of race and gender imposes a dual penalty on Black women. In 2019, Black women, the dark blue line, were paid 33.7 percent less than their white male counterparts. And this gap was a much larger gap in that space by either white women, at 25.7 percent, or Black men at 22.2 percent. And this is even after the sharp downward trend in the gender wage cap that occurred throughout the 1980s and essentially stopped in the mid-1990s. My fourth slide, I want to make the point that there has been insufficient vigilance in fighting unemployment since the late 1970s, the same period of time that we have observed growing wage inequality overall and widening wage gaps between Black and white workers.

This graph shows the actual rate of unemployment in the dark blue and estimates of the natural rate of unemployment, which is also commonly referred to as the NAIRU, or nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment. Between 1979 and 2019, the actual unemployment rate exceeded estimates of the NAIRU by an average of roughly 0.8 percentage points each year. I'm going to argue that the Fed's monetary policy has been too contractionary in most of the decades since 1979, and this has had an adverse effect on closing the Black-white wage gap. I'll say more about this particular point later, in the slides now.

By now, nearly all of us have heard about the talk that Black parents have with their children concerning how to conduct themselves during interactions with law enforcement. This talk is based on the painful reality that being Black means they are more likely to be judged as dangerous, suspicious, or guilty, placing them at greater risk of suffering violence at the hands of police officers. There's another talk that Black parents have with their children, and that talk goes something like this. It may sound familiar to some of you. You're going to have to work twice as hard and be twice as good just to get the same recognition and opportunities available to your white colleagues.

This talk is informed by a lot of painful firsthand experience with many of the outcomes that I showed you in the slides. The fact is, the persistent racial disparities we observe in unemployment and wages arguably provide the most compelling evidence of structural racism in the labor market. One of the most defining features of the U.S. labor market is the large and persistent disparity in unemployment that exists between Black and white workers. This disparity is well-documented in decades of official estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics dating back to 1972 when the agency first began reporting unemployment rates by race.

Now more than 45 years' worth of data can be summed up in one simple ratio. Two to one. It means Black job seekers are about half as likely to secure employment during a consecutive four-week period as are white job seekers. This has been true across multiple periods of economic expansion and recession, and is observed for all age cohorts, at every level of education, and for men and women alike. Over the last four and a half decades, only the most highly educated and most experienced Black workers have approached anything near unemployment rate parity with their white counterparts, and only during periods of exceptionally low rates of unemployment. These empirical data are consistent with multiple field experiments, revealing that Black job applicants with equivalent and sometimes superior credentials to white applicants are less likely to receive job callbacks.

Another defining feature of racial inequality in the labor market are the large disparities in pay between Black and white workers. And I'll remind you that racial pay gaps persist even after accounting for factors commonly associated with individual productivity, things like education or skills, for example, and have in fact gotten worse over the last four years. One of the most troubling aspects of growing Black-white wage gaps is the fact that they have grown most among college-educated workers, the group who is presumed to have done all the right things yet still receive lower returns on their investment in higher education than their white counterparts. In 1979, Black bachelor's degree holders were paid an average hourly wage that was 86.4 percent of what white bachelor's degree holders were paid. The ratio between Black and white advanced degree holders was about 90 percent. Now fast forward to 2019, and the ratio between Black and white bachelor's degree holders was down 8.9 percentage points to 77.7... I'm sorry, 77.5 percent, and the ratio for those with advanced degrees was down 7.5 percentage points to 82.4 percent.

These patterns are consistent with the fact that relative to their white counterparts, college-educated Black workers are less likely to be employed in positions and industries that have seen the most wage growth in recent decades. Only 3 percent of all chief executives are African-American, and a disproportionate number of them are employed in the public or private nonprofit sectors where salaries are lower and more likely to be capped than they are in the private or for-profit sector where CEO pay has soared in recent decades. Moreover, in 2019, Black workers with a college or advanced degree were more likely than their white counterparts to be underemployed based on their skill level. Almost 40 percent were in jobs that typically don't require a college degree, compared with 31 percent of white college graduates.

Now, unlike unemployment rates that are characterized by a nearly constant two-to-one ratio, there have been four distinct periods of change in Black-white wage inequality. These periods of change have often been consistent with distinctive shifts in policy. For example, the narrowing of the gap from the late 1960s through the 1970s can be traced to the passage of important civil rights legislation and active enforcement of antidiscrimination and affirmative action policy, which also contributed to narrowing the educational attainment gap between Blacks and whites. On the other hand, the widening of the gap since the 1980s is associated with retrenchment on antidiscrimination policy in combination with policies and practices that fueled growing wage inequality, including failure to increase the minimum wage as the cost of living rose, a decline in union representation, and weaker macroeconomic conditions.

Since the 1980s, there has only been one very brief period of when the gap narrowed, and that occurred during the last five years of the 1990s economic boom. Notably, the unemployment rate was consistently lower than the natural rate of unemployment for almost four years during that time, and without runaway inflation. Since 2000, the Black-white wage gap has widened amid sluggish economic growth, two jobless recoveries, the Great Recession and subsequent recovery that was needlessly hampered by premature fiscal austerity. And I will add that fiscal austerity has been especially harmful to Black workers who are a disproportionate share of those employed in the public sector, where they have historically been drawn to that sector by better job opportunities and greater pay equity.

I want to take a moment here, while we're talking about policy, to connect Black-white wage inequality with the Fed mandate to maximize employment. Between 1979 and 2019, the ratio of Black to white median wages fell by about eight percentage points. And recall in the last slide that I showed you, the actual unemployment rate exceeded estimates of the NAIRU by an average of 0.8 percentage points each year during that same time. In forthcoming work, a colleague and I estimate, using the Phillips wage curve to estimate the relationship between wage growth and the level of unemployment, and find that the coefficient for median Black wages is roughly 0.3 percentage points larger than for median white wages.

What this indicates is that relative wage growth for Black workers would have been roughly a quarter percent higher each year over that time, if on average the actual unemployment rate had been equal to the NAIRU or really close to it instead of above it. In other words, tighter labor markets could have stopped the deterioration of the Black-white median wage gap. If estimates of the NAIRU are actually too conservative, as many would argue they have been, and unemployment could have averaged one to two percentage points lower, then the Black-white median wage ratio could have actually gone up over that time, extending the progress made and narrowing the gap during the 1960s and 1970s.

We are now on the heels of the longest period of economic expansion in history. Yet the ever-present legacy of racism and economic inequality continue to impose a needlessly heavy burden on the backs of Black workers during the COVID-19 crisis. As you've heard, one of the structures contributing to such racially disparate impacts is occupational segregation characterized by overrepresentation of Black workers, and especially Black women workers, in low-wage occupations and underrepresentation in  higher-wage occupations.

The COVID-19 crisis has popularized the term "essential worker," drawing attention to the fact that Black workers occupy a disproportionate share of lower wage jobs in major frontline industries often with unpredictable work hours, and thus unpredictable pay, and without paid leave or employer provided health coverage. Now in my view, these patterns of persistent racial inequality in the labor market are analogous to horrific videos capturing blatant disregard for Black lives. Now let me be clear. I don't want to be too dramatic about this. While losing a job comes nowhere close to losing a life, both are symptoms of the kind of racial injustice that sparked national and international protests this past summer. Unfortunately, what should be overwhelming evidence of racial injustice gets filtered through our own experiences, perceptions, and biases. In other words, it is our interpretation of the evidence that determines if and how we choose to respond. Do we recognize these patterns as racial discrimination and seek to dismantle the structures that assign a relative advantage to being born white and a relative penalty to being born Black, or do we seek some other explanation that points to failure on the part of the individual with unfavorable outcomes? I started with a definition of racial equity being the condition that would be achieved if one's racial identity no longer predicted employment outcomes. So I want to end with this definition of racial justice. According to the Applied Research Center, racial justice is the proactive advancement and reinforcement of policies, practices, attitudes, and action that produce equitable power, access, opportunities, treatment, impacts, and outcomes for all.

I think government, institutions and individuals each have a role to play in facilitating racial justice. So what are those roles? The Federal Reserve can create a stronger, more stable labor market through consistent full employment. Institutions like labor unions can help workers to have a stronger collective voice with which to advocate for higher pay, better benefits, training and promotional opportunities, as well as protections against discrimination and harassment. Lawmakers can pass a robust set of labor standards that supports those objectives and advance fiscal policy that centers racial equity in employment. Businesses can work in partnership with the EEOC to provide greater transparency in hiring, promotion, and pay decisions and to proactively comply with antidiscrimination law.

In closing, if I could leave you with a simple takeaway it would be this: Racial justice demands action, racial equity is the goal, and passivity is not an option. I thank you. And at this point, I want to welcome the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Dr. Mary Daly.

Mary Daly: Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Wilson. Thank you for those remarks. So for the next 10 minutes, I'm going to just ask some follow up questions that try to pull off some themes away from your really amazing remarks. I want to just say that from as a Federal Reserve policy maker, in addition to what President Bostic said in his opening address, we really are committed to these things. And if you all take a look at our new long-run framework, we are focused on having employment, full employment, be a broad and inclusive goal. So here, here to the things you called for, and now it'll be our job to assure that we achieve those. So let me shift though, to the questions.

I have three questions I want to ask you. So when I heard your remarks, it was really consistent with, as a labor economist, everything I've learned, everything I've studied and contributed to in my life. But most importantly, I think any one of us who walks in the streets of our community or participates in the workplace, sees these things day in and day out, these gaps that you've put forth that are so persistent. And so clearly not about individuals. So my question for you right first out of the gate is, if I gave you a magic wand or I made you policymaker for the day, what would you do to ensure that those gaps aren't with us five, 10, 15 years from now, your children don't have to live through those gaps?

Wilson:  So, first thing, I think it's important to understand that these inequities were not created by a single policy and so they won't be repaired by just a single policy either. I think there are a series or a slate of things that we have to do. One, I think consistent, full employment is a foundation. We know that workers of color disproportionately bear the brunt of economic volatility, so reducing that volatility will go a long way to promoting better employment outcomes and wage growth in these communities. The second point I will make is that once we address that issue, once we bring unemployment down, and again, I do appreciate the Fed's new framework and really acknowledging the role that the Fed can play in addressing racial disparities through its monetary policy decisions. Once we get down to a lower rate of unemployment, then I think it becomes easier to develop targeted policies that address the remaining gap, whether that be due to structural issues in areas that have chronically high rates of unemployment and need some targeted investments and job creation, whether that be policies to address some of the barriers faced by those who have been justice affected who are also disproportionately people of color.

And then the third point would be, and I mentioned this as well, robust enforcement of anti-discrimination laws that have been on the books for decades. In this light of things, I think transparency is really important. I think requiring employers to report detailed pay data, for example, to the EEOC, one, it helps to force companies to pay more attention to any discriminatory patterns that may exist. And then they can either fix them or explain why they are there, but it also empowers underpaid workers with the evidence they need to pursue any claims that they may have a right to.

Daly: I think that's a really excellent point. I just want to underscore that if people don't have the evidence that they need, that it's hard to use their voice. You need the evidence and so having transparency and full disclosure just helps people assemble the data, find patterns, and if patterns exist, remove them. So I want to pivot slightly from the policy levers. Although I want to reference your policy levers, the policy levers you thought of pulling, the ones you think we should invest in are aggregate policy levers, but as a labor economist, as economists, you know from our training, we really learn that you run a simple regression and you put a Black worker and a white worker together, and then you figure out if we could give the Black worker the same attributes as the white worker, we would then solve the problems. To me, that's a deficiency mindset or a deficit mindset of an individual, as opposed to the structural mindset that we're trying to think about today. So I'd like you to elaborate a little bit on that and talk about what have policymakers, economists, what have we gotten wrong for so many years? Why is it so important that we shift our lens if we're going to make change?

Wilson: Well, first I would say that racial inequality is so pervasive that it's become normalized. So I'd like to see more people willing to challenge and really interrogate what economic models tell us. If we have a statistically significant coefficient on race, for example, that is capturing some unobserved or admitted or omitted variables, what are they and why are they so strongly correlated with race? I also think that by really asking these questions—disparity also is actually driven by structural factors and not just individual factors, as we mentioned. So asking those kinds of questions helps to shine light on the fact that it's not just a single individual deficiency. But I also think the interpretation of disparity could be expanded; it's double edged. These disparities are not just about disadvantage for one group; they actually also capture advantage for other groups. So I think we need to tell that entire picture, and that helps to inform what kinds of structural changes we need to make.

Daly: That's a terrific point. It reminds me—I'm going to add a question in here, but I think you'll be fine from your remarks on this—one of my employees sent me a video and it was really about it's called, The Race For Life, and it really talks about how people start in different positions and then over time they have to catch up. If you're an African-American, you start behind your white counterparts and then you're catching up. But one of the most troubling things in the work that I've done, and you shared a little bit of the work you've done is that a college-educated Black man starts behind in wages a college-educated white man. And then over his career, that gap grows. So when you think about that gap growing, can you talk a little bit about why you think that is and what policy levers we might use systemically that would try to treat that because that's a disturbing outcome. You did everything right. And not only did you start with the gap, but that gap grew over your career. That seems completely at odds with what the American dream or the American promise promises.

Wilson: Yeah, it is troubling. And it actually comes as a surprise to a lot of people who don't study the data closely and don't know that. I think one thing that we can point to in that relationship is going back to unemployment, the persistent two to one that we see, even for college graduates. If you're more likely to experience a spell of unemployment over the course of your career, that's going to come with some setbacks. But then also this issue of occupational segregation that we've already talked about so far in the series today. Black workers are less likely to be hired in those higher-paying positions and less likely to have as many opportunities for promotion. So again, when we look over the trajectory of an entire career, all of those disadvantages, all of those setbacks add up and they amount to a real measurable difference in terms of annual or lifetime earnings.

Daly: If I may just put a fine point on what you just said before I turn to my final question. If you think about all of these things adding up, then we can each and every one of us listening to this webinar, do something. We can take a second look at people who we might say, well, it's all going to be fine. You know, I'm only one of many, I can't really move the needle. You're saying these things add up over a career, we can move the needle. So let me turn to my final, I'm sorry. My final question to you. And I want to take the liberty of rereading aloud, something you said in your opening remarks, because I really want the listeners to hear this. And then I want to ask you a question about it.

So in your opening remarks, you said, "When we consider the origins of race as a social construct, the racial disparities we observe across any number of economic outcomes should come as no surprise. Since this nation's inception, race has been used systematically to exclude, marginalize, exploit, and generate unequal economic outcomes while simultaneously being used as a justification for those unequal outcomes." And so with that paragraph, which I've read countless times because it's so striking, the question I have for you is why do you still have hope for change, because clearly I see it in your eyes. You have hope for change, but why is that?

Wilson: So for me, I will say, I said this at the end of my remarks, there's really no other option as far as I'm concerned. I've been doing this work for about 20 years, and in that time, I have observed that the audience of people willing to listen, acknowledge structural racism, and consider change has actually grown. I think we've seen some of that in the last year in terms of the Black Lives Matter protests across the country and, quite frankly, around the world, and not to miss the fact that we're here at a Fed conference on racism and the economy. So I think that the audience of people willing to hear and consider and acknowledge how we make this a better country is expanding. But I also know that making change is a struggle. I started my career in the civil rights community at the National Urban League.

And I think one of the benefits, and one of the things that I learned from that is looking at the big picture, the long-term process, the periods of advancement and retrenchment that happened in the meantime and so we can observe these large differences over time. And so, I'm here for the fight and there are many others who are willing to continue to be at it. I wouldn't be doing this work if I didn't think it would ultimately matter or change something. And as you mentioned, my hope, ultimately, really is that my sons don't have to have the talk either about law enforcement or their opportunities in the job market with their children.

Daly: That's a terrific note to end on for your remarks. Thank you so much for your time and your just terrific remarks and terrific discussion. I now have to turn us to the next panel to talk really about—hope has to be followed with intentionality and policy changes. And so the next panel will talk about those so that I'm going to turn it over to Kimberly Adams from Marketplace. If you all haven't had an opportunity to see Kimberly in action, she actually interviewed me at the National Press Club in the summer, and she's really terrific at soliciting the best from people who are speaking. So with that, I turn it over to Kimberly Adams to continue our webinar.

Kimberly Adams: Well, thank you so much, President Daly, and it's such an honor to be here and to be a part of this really crucial conversation that we're having in the country right now. And as Dr. Wilson pointed out, in the Federal Reserve System. Now we're going to turn to solutions, and we have several panelists who are going to be bringing proposals, ideas for how we can address racism and the economy as it relates to employment. There's a vibrant discussion happening online, so you can submit questions either online with the hashtag racism and the economy on Twitter. You can also submit questions on slido.com using the same hashtag, racism and the economy. Let's get right to these proposals. We are going to hear proposals from Josh Bolton at Business Roundtable, Rebecca Dickson at the National Employment Law Project, William Rogers at Rutgers. And let's start with Josh Bolton at the Business Roundtable. Welcome.

Josh Bolton: Thanks for the opportunity to participate. I'm particularly pleased to be here with all of the group, many of whom I know and have dealt with on a number of occasions. I'm particularly pleased to have a chance to appear with Business Roundtable member, Ed Bastian. Ed has undertaken important steps to create more opportunities at Delta Air Lines for underrepresented populations, including through the Business Roundtable's Multiple Pathways Initiative, about which I'm going to be talking in just a moment.

On June 4, the week after George Floyd was killed, Business Roundtable chairman, Doug McMillan of Wal-Mart, established a special committee of the board to identify specific public policies and corporate initiatives through which the Roundtable could take a stand against racial injustice and tangibly contribute to systemic change. Our CEOs believe that they couldn't stand on the sidelines, their employees, customers, and communities were looking to them to play a leadership role. And so as a first step, our members called on Congress urgently to adopt higher federal standards for policing. But we also wanted to look at some of the other systems that contribute to large and growing disparities, particularly around economic opportunity and what we as business leaders could do to address them.

We started by looking at what we could do to make sure Black and African-American workers have access to good jobs, to put the point that Dr. Wilson just mentioned. We're expanding our work with HBCUs, which produce a quarter of all Black or African-American college graduates. We've also launched a partnership with a group that works to ease the burden of student debt for HBCU graduates. Additionally, we're calling on companies to report annually on their progress toward increased diversity in their workforce, including senior management and their boards, a step toward the transparency that Dr. Wilson and President Daly were talking about just a minute ago. BRT team members are also wanting to find ways to be more supportive of Black-owned small businesses and entrepreneurs. So BRT companies committed to expand their support for community lending institutions, which provide funds for Black and African-American households and small businesses. We've set a BRT-wide goal of $1 billion in support by 2025, and we're using Business Roundtable's voice to press Congress to address one of the core drivers of racial disparities—that's educational outcomes for many young Black and African-American students. We think it's time for Congress to provide more federal funding for early literacy programs and pre-K, to give states funds to safely reopened schools, and to pass legislation to close the digital divide.

Today, though, what I want to focus on is an initiative called Multiple Pathways, which Business Roundtable CEOs believe will have measurable impacts on racial inequities in the economy. Multiple Pathways is one of our efforts to help boost recruitment, hiring, and advancement opportunities for underrepresented populations. Multiple Pathways is about recognizing that there are more ways to get skills than the traditional four-year college degree. And it's about recognizing that people of color often choose nontraditional pathways. We believe this initiative will help address racial inequities in employment by emphasizing and rewarding the value of worker skills, no matter where they get them, during the recruitment process and in advancement opportunities. It may also help eliminate unintentional biases that inhibit hiring and advancement.

Employers recognize that demonstrated skills are often a better predictor of on-the-job success than traditional resume listings. In fact, employers are increasingly turning to new recruitment and hiring practices that identify and match an applicant's skills to job needs, whether those skills were acquired through high school, on the job experience, college, professional certifications, credentials, or other pathways. So here's what companies engaged in Multiple Pathways will do. They'll implement new recruitment and assessment strategies to better recognize and evaluate skills of all job seekers. They'll consider upward career paths for employees who acquire new and/or different skills along their career journey. And they'll explore updated training programs to help employees gain the skills they need to advance, including helping employees pay for additional training and education or sponsoring the training itself.

Regarding recruitment and hiring processes, some of the actions Business Roundtable companies will take include: first, rewriting job descriptions to focus on the skills needed to succeed in the job to eliminate unintentional recruitment biases. Second, reevaluating candidate screening algorithms that may contain inherent biases. And third, updating assessment tools to more standardized skills-based interview questions, assessments, and demonstrations. To ensure that current employees have multiple paths for career advancement, our participating members are also considering several actions, including—first, developing and publishing transparent job advancement pathways for their current workforce that can be navigated by meeting specific training milestones and skill acquisitions. And second, creating and using training modules that teach employees the new skills needed to meet job advancement milestones.

An example of the Multiple Pathways approach is IBM's New Collar initiative that assesses and develops applicant skills and matches them to in-demand job opportunities. What will this project achieve? So far, 85 Business Roundtable CEOs have committed to join Multiple Pathways. To bring this initiative to scale, we'll also be encouraging our members to enlist their suppliers in the effort. For our part, Business Roundtable will convene chief human resource officers and other stakeholders from our membership to establish metrics to show how Multiple Pathways has had an impact on workers and on systemic hiring, promotion, and training practices.

Multiple Pathways is only one of many initiatives that Business Roundtable companies are undertaking to create more employment opportunities for individuals from diverse backgrounds. We look forward to exploring ways that we might partner with the Federal Reserve and other organizations represented here today on these important efforts to end racial inequities in our society. Many thanks for your time and attention.

Adams: Thank you so much, Mr. Bolton. That is a good way to get us going. Now we're going to turn to a proposal from Rebecca Dickson at the National Employment Law Project.

Rebecca Dixon: Thank you, Kimberly. I'm excited to join you to discuss this important topic. National Employment Law Project is a nonprofit research policy and capacity building organization that for more than 50 years has sought to strengthen protections and build power for workers in the United States, including people who are unemployed. We work to build a just and inclusive economy where every single job is a good job. And everyone who wants one, can get one. Adjusted inclusive economy is only achievable by centering racial equity. The fact that a disproportionate share of people in underpaid, insecure, and unsafe jobs are Black and brown is not inevitable, nor is it accidental. Opportunity is segregated in the United States. Separate and unequal applies not just to schools and neighborhoods, but after controlling for education, 87 percent of occupations in the United States can be classified as racially segregated, contributing to generational wage and wealth gaps and the exclusion of the benefits, rights, and protections that we all deserve.

The pandemic, as both a health and economic crisis, has made this inequality even more visible. So let's talk about why we should focus on occupational segregation. Occupational segregation is the preservation of glass and concrete ceilings and the shunting of women and people of color into lower-paying occupations. It accounts for a large portion of the gender and racial wealth gaps. The blacker an occupation is or becomes, the lower the wages. The more female-dominated an occupation is or becomes, the more undervalued that work is, especially if it's care work. A recent meta-analysis of hiring discrimination field experiments found that hiring discrimination against African-Americans has not decreased in the past 25 years. Using resumes and match pair testing, researchers found that on average, white job applicants receive 36 percent more callbacks than African-Americans. Their results were durable even when accounting for education, gender, study method, and local labor market conditions. Black and brown workers are crowded into industries with poor working conditions and little job security.

These workers, including immigrants, have historically worked in the highest injury jobs and suffered higher fatalities than other workers even before COVID-19. In the first half of the 20th century, dirty and dangerous jobs were actually known as Negro work. Black tunnel builders in the 1930s were heavily exposed to silica dust and suffered 60 percent mortality within five years. And in another case later in the ‘60s, an uptick in lung cancer rates among steelworkers was entirely attributable to an 11-fold increase in lung cancer mortality among Black men. Similar conditions continue into the present day, with COVID-related sickness and death in the workforce, particularly in food and meat processing, supermarkets, warehouses, nursing homes, and it falls most heavily on Black and Latinx immigrant workers who are deemed essential, but then treated as disposable. These same workers are overrepresented and underpaid, insecure work in the gig economy. They are often classified wrongly as independent contractors rather than employees, even though they're mostly not in business for themselves and this excludes them from nearly all workplace protections and benefits.

And lastly in this section, the same workers are overrepresented in temp and staffing jobs. For example, Black workers are 12.1 percent of the overall workforce and 25.9 percent of temps. Temps often earned 40 percent less working side-by-side with permanent employees doing the exact same job. In addition to uncertainty around job duration, some workers have become permanent temps, never being hired into a standard work arrangement even after seven or eight years in the same company. So what does history tell us about occupational segregation? It tells us that it is deeply entrenched, but progress is possible. Occupational segregation is durable over time, having been baked into some of our foundational policies. For example, labor market stratification curtailed the New Deal and led to the exclusion of half of all Black men, Mexican-American men, Native American men and women plus a significant number of Asian-American workers. They were all excluded from social security, unemployment insurance, and the right to organize. This exclusion fell most heavily on Black women, excluding a full 90 percent of them because of their concentration in agriculture and domestic work. Although advances in technology and the great migration improved opportunity, substantial progress came from new civil rights protections and federal enforcement of affirmative action. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which created the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, or EEOC, was key. Subsequently, the EEOC's monitoring and enforcement has declined, and the courts have made it harder for discrimination plaintiffs to prevail. Without action, there will be no new progress. So let's turn to solutions. Solutions to improve working conditions for workers who are currently crowded into insecure jobs, underpaid and dangerous work, and those who are unable to find work or advance at work because of employment discrimination. I'll quickly highlight three strategies to increase labor market equity.

First, enforcing equal opportunity regardless of geography. Location has long mattered for labor market equity. When the Civil Rights Act was passed, almost half the states had equal opportunity laws covering one in four Black workers or nearly all Black workers who were not in the south. This points to a need for federal enforcement, especially in states that don't have their own laws. It's important to note that though the EEOC is an independent regulatory agency, its policies and enforcement philosophy are politically mediated. Its top administrators are presidential appointees, and Congress determines its budget and staffing levels, which influences how much it can investigate cases. Why has occupational integration slowed and stalled rather than step forcefully into its role? The EEOC's funding has remained flat since the 1980s, even though the labor force has increased by 50 percent. Its staff of 570 investigators is about 150, less than a decade ago and this has led to case  backlogs and cases being closed with little or no follow-up investigation. For example, of 27,000 low priority cases, less than half of a percent were resolved. When we talk about higher priority cases, which include sexual harassment and disability cases in addition to discrimination, only 13 percent of those cases were closed and ended in a settlement.

A substantial investment in the EEOC is warranted if it is to be effective in reducing and preventing discrimination. Moreover, its leadership must be supported by the political will to challenge labor market inequities. The second piece of solutions is related to this insecure work, transforming insecure work. We know that three million workers and growing are working in the temp and staffing sector. We can combat labor market inequities by ensuring that all workers have access to higher wages, traditional employment rights, and bedrock benefits, and also by ensuring that workers are universally included in new standards like paid sick leave, paid family leave, and just cause dismissal, and that they can exercise collective power.

In July, the Restoring Worker Power Act of 2020, which is also known as the Temp Worker Bill Of Rights, was introduced, and it goes a long way toward eliminating temp workers' second-tier status, demanding transparency, accountability, equal pay for equal work, and access to health and safety training from the temp agencies and the corporations that rely on temp labor.

Lastly, enacting health and safety protections. Besides the employers themselves, the responsibility to protect workers' health and safety lies with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. So far, OSHA has declined to issue an enforceable safety standard to protect workers from exposure to COVID-19. Workers and their advocates are calling for OSHA to do its job, but in the meantime, states and cities can step in to protect workers. As the federal government abdicates responsibility, states and cities must exercise their authority to protect the health and safety of workers. Thus far, 14 states have enacted comprehensive worker safety protections. Thank you.

Adams: Thank you very much, Ms. Dixon. And I should say that most of these resources are going to be available for people to look at online later on. The papers are really fascinating. Now we'll turn to a proposal from William Rodgers at the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Thank you so much.

William Rodgers: Kimberly, thank you. Thank you for leading this conversation. I want to thank President Bostic and his colleagues for convening this very, very important conversation today, but not only their first event, and I'm also looking forward to these future events over the next few months. It's going to be fun for me too, because I started as a visiting scholar with the Atlanta Fed. So I'm greatly appreciative of having that opportunity.

My time is short, and I will take advantage if something's unclear, we do have discussions. So hopefully they'll sort of elucidate on anything that I've went past on or went quickly on, but I'm going to flip my presentation around. Usually I give the punchline last, but I'm going to give the punchlines first and proposals are the following. One, implement a Second Step Act. Two, increase the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's funding, and then three, pass the Federal Reserve Racial and Economic Activity Act.

I'm going to only focus on the first two, but I do want to say that these three proposals are part of a bigger set of proposals that I've developed in the Russell Sage Foundation volume. It was published last fall in 2019. Basically, these proposals come from a scaffolding, a four-legged scaffolding where it's building human capital, social capital, improving opportunities, fighting discrimination, and lessening inequality. So those are the big four, but today I'm just going to talk about implementing a Second Step Act to increasing the funding for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I'll in passing talk about the Federal Reserve Racial and Economic Activity Act. It's been presented by a number of key members of Congress.

So let's focus on implementing a Second Step Act. What do I mean by that? Well, many of you are aware that the First Step Act was passed, and this was the most recent major criminal justice reform that had been passed in a long time. Although that's good, it's still the first step. And so we need a second step, and what do we need in the second step? One, we need to assist ex-offenders, especially nonviolent drug offenders, with returning to school, and at the start of their incarceration in obtaining post-release employment and training, driver's licenses and the ability to vote.

Two within this proposal, we need to reduce the number of offenders sent to prison by examining sentence length and mandatory minimums. Apply the First Step Act's reforms to state facilities where 87 percent of the nation's prisons are housed. Because when I actually was working on this, I was surprised and reminded that the First Step Act was focused on federal facilities. Third, we allow   undocumented immigrants to cash in their time credits for early release. This will help to reduce the length of time and get these people back in and contributing to society. Fourth, adjust the algorithm that determines who can cash in on earned time credits because it could perpetuate racial and class discrimination. The First Step Act's algorithm, what it does is it prohibits offenders from earning credits due to their past criminal history. Their past criminal history. As a result, it may pass over Black Americans and poor offenders who are more likely to be incarcerated for crimes even though they are not more likely to actually commit those crimes.

That's number one. Number two, and it's picking up on what Rebecca Dixon was just talking about—in a way I'm plus one-ing her in what her suggestion is—but we need to increase the EEOC funding for all the reasons she mentioned, particularly increasing the funds for enforcement will send a message to employers that they must create and maintain safe and fair workplaces for all workers. My work that I've done with Bill Williams [inaudible] and the AFL-CIO at Howard University, we have shown that if you look at what happens in the office of federal contract compliance program in the Department of Labor, that companies who have contracts who have to report, there's does seem to be a ripple effect on others who may not have a contract. So there are these ripple effects, that the law just doesn't affect the company that is under review or is under the enforcement rules.

Second, increasing the agency's resources can reduce the large backlogs as my colleagues have said, and the number of days for an EEOC claim to get resolved. Doing so will then enable the EEOC to initiate investigations for all areas of discrimination under its umbrellas. Then third, a really big, important one and it's something I had worked on as it was a pilot when I was the chief economist at the U.S. Labor Department, and that is requiring equal pay data collection. Requiring pay collection, and this pay collection would prod companies to identify and then pay the disparities. Because the evidence we accumulated is that if we're going to address racism and end racism, that transparency is number one. Transparency, number one, especially around pay. Then also, also having transparency is very important. Then having the rules of the road being very well defined.

So this data will allow the EEOC to more effectively and efficiently identify and address pay discrimination. Then the third that I just glossed over, actually, we'll talk about that hopefully in the conversation, but why this approach? Well, one is there's no single root cause for the nation's large and persistent inequality, as we said. There's no single Black community, single Black experience. And so thus there's no silver bullet policy that will eradicate or substantially reduce it. As Rebecca Dixon has talked about and others talked about, we need to coordinate a comprehensive set of approaches—labor demand, labor supply, and institutional policies that are knitted together. That's the scaffolding that I talked about, building human and social capital and that's the BRT round, roundtable of proposal, improving opportunity, that's the Second Step Cct, lessening inequality, and then fighting discrimination.

Now what's interesting is a lot of these proposals can be parsed into two groups. Either they're race neutral or race specific, and what do we mean by race neutral? Race neutral are policies such as the BRT's work, or such as addressing occupation segregation for all workers. These are policies that have a positive impact on minorities because they are more effective. They're in those populations that are being targeted. Then the race-specific policies are things like the EEOC. And now, why needed, why needed? Well, as has been talked about, the two-to-one unemployment ratio. But I want to hit even harder on what my coauthor Valerie Wilson's talked about … that earnings today, relative earnings today for Blacks are what they were in 1979. OK. That's earnings. But now if you add in the mass incarceration and the dropout labor force, then you are back to the relative earnings and relative status of Black Americans is what it was in 1950.

That's why this conversation and what comes out of it is so important. So the proposals that I'm talking about and others are talking about, they'll have several things. They'll do several things. One is, they're going to raise labor force participation. They're going to increase employment population, and hence lower the unemployment rate. They're going to lower worker idleness. They're going to lower crime and incarceration rates and lower recidivism rates and also will put upward pressure on earnings, which will help to narrow racial differences in unemployment and earnings. The most important thing, too, is they're going to also create safe and fair workplaces. As President Bostic talked about at the beginning—he kind of stole my thunder—but these proposals that we're talking about will help to raise and improve productivity, help to raise productivity, which will then lead to faster economic growth, which allows us to be more competitive in our local communities, our state communities, our international communities, and on the global stage. So thank you.

Adams: Thank you so much, Dr. Rodgers. And as he mentioned, we are going to have a discussion later on between not only the people who are proposing these ideas, but also our new panel who are going to be responding to these ideas. We have on this next panel, Byron Auguste with Opportunity@Work, Ed Bastian of Delta Air Lines and Ashleigh Gardere at PolicyLink, and Ai-Jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. We are short on time and I do want to leave a window for us to have that discussion. So we are going to start with Byron Auguste, if you could respond to Josh Bolton's proposal at the Business Roundtable first.

Byron Auguste: Thank you, Kimberly. Yes, Opportunity@Work aims to rewire the U.S. labor market to open up more pathways to upward mobility and economic opportunity. So I'm really delighted to be asked to respond to Josh Bolton's presentation of the Business Roundtable's Multiple Pathways Initiative. I see three promising strengths to this proposal, which really point to its potential. First, it focuses on indicators of skill and performance over degree and pedigree. Businesses' pedigree first approach, particularly over the last 15 years, has really meant an escalation of degree requirements, which have excluded tens of millions of skilled U.S. workers from the opportunity for upwardly mobile employment.

Secondly, it recognizes explicitly that pedigree-based hiring is very damaging to racial equity. The practice of screening out any job candidate lacking a four-year degree prior to any skills assessment has a very exclusionary impact racially. It is a cause, one of the causes of the occupational segregation that President Bostic and others have cited.

Third and perhaps most importantly, the proposal recognizes that employers must take the lead in reshaping labor market structure and outcomes. We've seen at Opportunity@Work that the skills gap that businesses sometimes perceive is more the result of an opportunity gap, including through hiring practices. Still, employers must intentionally seek to hire, develop and advance their talent differently. I would agree with Josh that IBM's New Collar jobs initiative is a good example, and that the inclusion of supply chain partners beyond the 85 companies is essential to reaching that scale.

So you need that kind of systematic change in employer talent management practices as a compliment to some of the public policy changes that are being discussed today. My three suggestions would relate to how this multiple pathways proposal can be developed to have a more systematic, positive impact to expand opportunity, to reduce occupational segregation, and really to tap into all of our country's talents, which we are going to need for the work ahead and the innovation we need.

First of all, my first suggestion is to really define the overlooked talent pool that this initiative seeks to include. I would propose 71 million workers who lack bachelor's degrees but who are skilled through alternative routes (STARs), skilled through alternative routes. Along with professors Peter Blair and Erica Groshen, a number of us published an NBER working paper that was presented at the [inaudible] conference recently, showing that you have among these 71 million STARs 30 million that today have the skills for jobs that pay at least 50 percent more than their current jobs. It won't surprise anyone to learn that disproportionately those that are blocked from opportunity, not because of their skills but because they're not able to make these transitions to higher-paid jobs, are disproportionately people of color.

Second, and one reason that's so critical, is because if you have a clear sense of the target population, then you can measure the impact in a number of different ways. You can allow businesses actually to contribute to the initiative in ways that reflect their distinctive model. So we've done a lot of work, we've looked at 130 million job transitions over time. If you think about origin jobs that are low-wage, gateway jobs, really transitional jobs, and then destination jobs which are higher-wage, we see that there are a limited number of gateway jobs, a couple dozen that actually turn out to be tremendously important for people making job transitions. Businesses that have a lot of people in low-wage jobs can actually help them to get to other destination jobs. So I think you can make the whole larger than the sum of the parts.

Then my third suggestion very specifically is to think about African-American STARs, Black workers who don't have bachelor's degrees but have skills that are attached to the labor market, as really one focus of this initiative. It's a bit in the spirit of targeted universalism. This is not meant to be a race-specific initiative, but we've seen that not only do degree requirements disproportionately exclude Black workers, but we've actually seen that of the 30 million workers that have the skills for jobs that pay much more today, 20 percent of them are Black workers. So actually, Black workers are more likely than others to be held back just not by their skills, because they have the skills required, but because they're not able to make that transition. Because of some of the occupational segregation trends that were mentioned, you can actually start to focus on where some of these Black STARs are today. For example, 600,000 of them are in the customer service pathway, 700,000 of them are in healthcare professions. There are tremendous opportunities for businesses to systematically move. If you could create a system in which through this multiple pathway, in which Black STARs, African-American STARs can advance, this is going to have to be a very equitable system. It's going to have to be a system that really can reflect in multiple ways someone's potential. Therefore, it's going to be a system that's going to work for all STARs and really to tap into more talent.

So we think there's a tremendous opportunity there, and there's increasingly a lot of data to support it. I'll just close with I think an implication of this initiative for some of the Fed's research and policy agenda. The Federal Reserve has a terrific initiative around opportunity occupations, understanding jobs that pay above median wage that don't require a bachelor's degree. I think it's really important to recognize in this Business Roundtable initiative you see that which jobs don't require a bachelor's degree is a choice of businesses. It's not driven by physics or technology or anything else. So, it's not a law of nature. So really thinking about how to change these institutional demand-side characteristics. Finally, to recognize that this is not a problem of labor programs or training programs. This is a labor market problem. While there's a lot you might want to do on the supply side, you have to fix the demand side of the labor market in order to get it working. And I commend the BRT on aiming to make a contribution here.

Adams: Thank you so much for that. Looking forward to the discussion of that proposal. Moving on to Rebecca Dixon's proposal from the National Employment Law Project. I'm happy to welcome Ai-jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Thank you.

Ai-jen Poo: Thank you so much for having me Kimberly, and it's really an honor to be in this conversation with all of you. Listen, I think that Rebecca Dixon is one of the foremost thinkers in the country on this issue and couldn't agree more with her proposal and her emphasis on addressing occupational segregation. Where I come from, and as I read the paper, is from working with for the last 22 years a part of our workforce that has been systematically segregated and devalued, and that is domestic workers. We represent the workforce who work in our homes, providing caregiving and cleaning services. More than two and a half million workers. This work has always been associated with work that women do, and as a profession has always been associated with Black and other women of color and has culturally been devalued. It's if you think about it not even referred to as a real profession; we often call it help, right? Then at the same time, it has been systematically excluded from equal rights and protection in the labor law dating back to the New Deal as Rebecca referred to.

What that's meant is that this workforce, which has always been majority women of color, has been subject to high degrees of insecurity, high degrees of vulnerability, lack of job security, lack of access to a safety net, no access to benefits. So that this workforce entered into the pandemic with 82 percent not having access to a single paid sick day. So what it shows us is that there are millions upon millions of workers of color working in incredibly insecure conditions. If you look at the nature of insecure jobs in America, you will see the more insecure the work is, the more Black and other workers of color there are—especially women—and the more secure and valued the jobs are, the more white workers and white men in particular that you'll find. That is nowhere more apparent than in the domestic work setting.

Now, what I do believe in terms of all the solutions that Rebecca put on the table, and I'll put a few more on as well, is that we—coming out of this pandemic–have the single greatest opportunity in generations to transform this dynamic and recover into a more racially equitable economy. There's two reasons why I believe that. One is the new frame of essential work. The fact that there are millions upon millions of workers, mostly, disproportionately workers of color and women of color workers who were working incredibly hard in invisible, undervalued jobs in our low-wage service economy, are now actually seen as essential, right? Before there was a pandemic, there was an epidemic of low-wage work in America that disproportionately affected Black and other workers of color, especially Black women and other women of color workers. We now, as a country, see those workers as essential. We are asking ourselves the question, could it be that all work in America is actually essential, deserves protections, and economic security and mobility? That is a new conversation and a huge opportunity to transform policy, to transform culture, to transform our systems.

The other piece is around the care economy, and the fact that all of us are buckling under the incredible pressures of caring for our children, caring for aging parents in the context of a pandemic, and we've suddenly realized just how dangerous it is to not have a secure care infrastructure for America's labor force. It turns out that the only infrastructure we have is a whole bunch of Black and brown women who work in the care economy, and we have not invested in them. In fact, the average annual income of a home-care worker is $17,000 per year.

We could recover into an economy that makes every job in the care economy a good job, a living wage job with benefits and real economic security. That would not only disproportionately benefit the Black and brown women who do that work and their families, but these are job-enabling jobs, jobs that make it possible for all of us to go out and do what we do in the world every single day. So here's what I would say, is actually thinking about economic recovery from a racial and gender equity lens opens up incredible opportunity to address occupational segregation, the quality of work in America, and really finally get at the epidemic of low-wage work that has plagued us and reinforced racial inequity in the labor market. So all of the solutions that Rebecca proposed can actually be possible through that lens. And we should take this moment of opportunity and leap through it, using the radical imagination that we were called upon to draw.

Adams: Thank you so much. We're actually going to have two people respond to Dr. Rodgers' proposal. First, we have Ashleigh Gardere at PolicyLink.

Ashleigh Gardere: Good afternoon, everybody. I'm honored to be here with you all this afternoon. First, I want to just thank Dr. Rodgers for his contribution to the conversation. If folks have an opportunity, I want to encourage you to really seek out the paper that he wrote that drives these recommendations. One of the things that he first illuminates in the paper, as well as in comments today, was really the stubbornness of structural racism, right? So over the past 50 years, every time that we saw these small gains for Black folks and people of color, we then retrenched really in the cycle of the economy.

So the first thing I want to say, which is less about employment and the labor markets, but I think it's really important given the audience, is that we've got to realize the promise of democracy in America so that every person can vote and would have representation that reflects our interests, our hopes, and our aspirations, because I believe that a true democracy really creates the necessary demand for government to create the kinds of laws that we've been talking about here today. Laws that would expand access to employment, deliver family sustaining wages, and so I just want to center that critical element of our collective work.

We also would see the removal of policies that intentionally harm Black people and people of color. Dr. Rodgers talked about formerly incarcerated folks and the criminal and legal system. I think if we saw a democracy realized where everybody is participating in our democracy, we could accelerate some of the policies, the equitable policies that we know that we need to expand the workforce, and at least stop limiting our workforce by criminalizing and jailing folks. Regarding the EEOC recommendation, I want to first lean on something that Dr. Rodgers said, that we really changed the laws we saw in the 1960s, really 1964 Civil Rights Act, that there was this huge impact on the workforce. You saw Black folks and people of color really being able to enter the labor market.

The challenge is we never changed the nature of government. We never changed the structure of government to become antiracist. So our work at PolicyLink now is really now focused on no longer tinkering around the edges, as we say, with policy reform, but really thinking about what is required to deliver an antiracist government. So I really receive Dr. Rodgers' recommendation as an invitation to re-imagine not only the EEOC, but what's possible for our broader government. So we're advancing this racial equity governing agenda at the federal level. Ultimately, we're asking the question about who benefits and who pays, who decides in the policymaking process. That means that we need new standards that really do prioritize racial equity. So some of what we're doing is talking about really practical pieces of the work, like representation in government, some of which we saw as a response to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But when we think about this new federal administration and those federal nominations and appointments, we're really recognizing the role that government position plays in the labor market, as well as the equity movement.

We also, when we think about this new role of centering racial equity beyond really the EEOC, we want to scale the work that's happening in local communities around conducting racial equity audits of local government departments. What would it look like for us to conduct racial equity audits across all of our federal agencies? Really understanding the impact of agency statutes, of the regulations that they set, and the laws that they govern, and disaggregate the outcomes of those rules by race. So I want to push us on that, that we could do even more, really not limit the work to a single federal agency, but really have a racial equity governing agenda.

Then the last thing I would say is that we can't really forget the role of community power in driving this racial equity agenda. So part of our work at PolicyLink is thinking about how we build a mechanism that scores federal legislation based on racial equity outcomes. Could you imagine a CBO, a congressional budget office, like a school that scores policies based on the racial equity outcomes that it will achieve? So we're really advancing our work in that regard. And then similarly, how do we activate the community power that we've seen this year to start to score electives again, based on the policies that they've passed and whether or not we're really seeing movement around racial equity in the outcomes that we seek. And then the last piece, no matter who at the federal level owns this work, whether it's the EEOC or we've seen folks advocating for a new federal office of racial equity. We also want to think about how federal agencies incentivize racial equity and equitable governance in local and state government as well. And so in line with Angela's push to really step into our radical imaginations and our radical aspirations, I invite us to really think about how we extend beyond what we've traditionally thought about the role of the EEOC, and really lean into a much broader governing agenda that prioritizes racial equity.

Adams: Thank you. And I'll bring in Ed Bastian of Delta Air Lines on the same proposal. What did you think?

Ed Bastian: Well, thank you for including me. I'd like to thank Raphael for including me in this panel. And I'm not a member of policymaker, government, or a member of academia, so I'll just can provide my own CEO's hat and from hopefully a pragmatic perspective as someone out there trying to take all the good work and all the insights that we've been sharing over the last hour and putting them into practice. I thought it was a great proposal by Dr. Rodgers, the implementation of a Second Step Act is clearly needed. I think this year has been one in which we have had such a, speaking for myself and our company and I think a lot of corporate CEOs, feel a real reckoning with why we're having the issues we've historically had on this topic, of social equity and systemic racism.

And I think it's been hard for a corporate CEO historically to acknowledge that systemic racism exists within our companies. We've focused on diversity and inclusion for many, many years. I think many of us have a very good story around that, but when you disaggregate the data and you look particularly at our Black colleagues in our Black humidity, you can see the evidence of what systemic racism creates. At Delta, we have 22 percent of our employees are Black, yet only 7 percent of the top 100 officers of the company are Black. That's not equitable, and there's reasons why members of our team haven't had the same level of opportunity and advancement and development that we need to focus on. So I'd say the first thing that we need to do is make certain that we are very focused on transparency, on awareness, on accountability and not rely on our government to solve the issues. We've got to go out and create the opportunities with our own companies first and foremost.

I'd also say that there's been a lot of discussion, and I know we're running short on time and I'll wrap up here, a lot of discussion on, is this the right thing to do? And obviously this is the right thing to do, but more which businesses can look at it also as the smart thing to do is going to be critical. It's what our customers demand. It means looking into groups of the labor force that historically have not had an opportunity to have voice and be included and participate. We're going to open ourselves up to a lot more diversity, for a lot greater interest from members of some of our underrepresented community are just as passionate about what they do and have just as many challenges and opportunities to bring new skills to the table. We just need to give them that pathway, as Joshua was saying. So I think this has been a great session.

I've learned a lot personally by participating in it, and I encourage you all to lean hard on the accountability that CEOs have to take these recommendations and start to gain greater awareness and transparency and put them into action.

Adams: Thank you so much. And I hope the audience will forgive the leaf blower that is directly outside of my window. As we welcome back all of our panelists that have proposed ideas and have responded to them. So many ideas here, I encourage everybody to go and read those papers and get a good sense of it. But there seem to be a couple of overriding themes here. The idea of how do you address the skills gap? Is it better for businesses to on the front-end work on training and these new initiatives, or do we need to put more emphasis on the back end and enforcement policies like expanding the role of the EEOC? And so I just want to bring in first Ed Bastian and Josh Bolton, again, the two of you to talk more about the role of companies, because this is definitely about what the Fed can do and what policymakers can do, but in terms of the speed of implementation, shall we say, I think we're going to see some of these things at companies first. So Ed, do you want to start and then we'll go to Joshua?

Bastian: Certainly. I'm a free market guy, and I firmly believe that companies that take these recommendations and put them into action will be rewarded in the marketplace. They'll be rewarded by their customers, by their community, by their own labor force; they'll be stronger, they will have a greater and more diverse group of thought. And as a result, we'll see around corners that historically companies have not been able to see as well. I think it's, as I said earlier, I think it's not just the right thing to do; I think it's the smart thing to do. Though I do understand the need for government. And you see it happening in different parts of the world where governments are coming in and requiring diversity in leadership, whether it be on boards or in management positions. Hopefully, we don't have to come to that in our country, that our people will speak louder than the governments can enforce.

Adams: Josh Bolton, one of the things I noticed in your proposal and in a lot of the other writings around this today is that there's not much emphasis on companies spending more on diversity training.

Bolton: Companies are spending more on diversity training and they're interested in it. Maybe it's taken as a given, and that's why you're not seeing it in the papers, but I can tell you from the standpoint of all of the Business Roundtable members, diversity and inclusion training has become increasingly important. And all of our CEOs have made commitments to double down on it. And by the way, our CEOs put their collective voice in opposition to the recent proposal from the executive order from the Trump administration to try to restrict the balance of diversity and inclusion training. I think in a way that was intended to chill the training, and the CEOs are not backing off of that. But the point I want to add to Ed's point is that Ed is a leader in this area. I mean, he's a leader among CEOs, he's a leader on diversity and inclusion, but he's not unique.

And the point I want everybody who's involved in racial equity movements to appreciate is that particularly over the course of this past year, you're pushing on an open door. And so an answer to your question, Kimberly, while I think the answer has to be, yes, both companies have to have initiatives and government needs to do its job. I'm convinced that we're at a moment in our society where a lot of progress can be made in the private sector, doing the things it wants to do, but has, as Ed said, has found hard to do. We're not going to litigate our way to racial equity in this country, that is just playing—we're only going to do it if it's a broad-based societal commitment. You're seeing that from a lot of CEOs now who are taking the advice that Byron Auguste and others have been giving for many years. And I think there's the opportunity for a lot of progress in the months ahead.

Adams: I'd like to turn to Byron, because I think you've got something to add here. But the reason I brought that up in particular is because this is where companies have been spending their money in the attempts to close this gap. And these proposals seem to be a bit of a departure and potentially an acknowledgement that that hasn't been effective thus far. Byron?

Auguste: Well, I wanted to add that I really agree with Ed that if you actually do this right, you're tapping into all the talents that we've got. And that is there's tremendous upside in that, Ai-jen rightly called out and Valerie also essential workers, two-thirds of whom are STARs or disproportionately people of color. And I would say besides the heroism and the essential nature of the work, I think it's really striking the skill and the resourcefulness and the flexibility and reconfiguring supply chain diversity. There is a tremendous amount of skill and capability and potential net workforce. I agree that there's an upside there. But I do want to challenge a little bit in this domain, thinking about regulation as one thing and free markets as another, think about it from the perspective of someone looking for a job, someone who's working and trying to get ahead. Really, for them, regulation is, what are the default settings on the applicant tracking systems of companies, right? They are actually much less affected by government regulation and more affected by what you might call company regulation. And Josh referred to this in the proposal.

So in other words, if you say before, you've assessed someone's skills that if you don't have a bachelor's degree, you need not apply for that job. Well, that is a very extreme regulation and it's not imposed by the government, it's imposed by companies. And when you put that rule on, you exclude 75 percent of African-Americans from the get-go, you exclude over 80 percent of Latinx workers, you exclude over 80 percent of rural Americans of all races. And so it's very important to understand that so many of the constraints to a world in which if you can do the job, you can get the job, aren't really government constraints. And they aren't exactly marketing constraints; they're decisions that are made and many of them are made by employers. And those are decisions that can really be changed. And I've just heard from so many people of all colors in all parts of the country, rural, urban, etcetera. I know what I can do, but no one will give me a chance. And that is a deeply frustrating thing.

And that is every once in a while that's the result of some mistake in government policy, but honestly, in this domain, it is mainly the result of decisions that businesses have made and that businesses can make, very different decisions, and I think that's the critical compliment to any policy change.

Adams: Ai-jen, I see you nodding there. This idea of the primacy and the awareness for many people for the first time of essential workers and the crucial role that they play in the economy. I think occupational segregation is going to be a new concept for a lot of people.

Poo: That may be true, but I think there's just huge opportunities with the frame of essential work. Senator Warren and Representative Ro Khanna introduced a framework at the federal level called the Essential Workers Bill of Rights. That is about a comprehensive suite of protections to ensure that essential workers have the ability to work safely and with dignity as they help us keep us all safe through the pandemic. And I do think that state and local governments also have the opportunity to advance policies that take up aspects of the Essential Workers Bill of Rights, that they can take up at the state and local level. It's a huge opportunity to address conditions across many of the low-wage industries that have been devalued and that disproportionately are held by workers of color and especially women of color. So, huge opportunities there.

One little piece about the EEOC that I did want to say, I fully support expanding resources for EEOC enforcement, but there is a way in which the EEOC is only allowed to enforce workplaces of 15 employees or more. And there are many, many workplaces that workers of color, Black workers, and other workers of color are working that do not have 15 employees, and domestic work is one. And increasingly more firms are small in nature, especially if you think about the low-wage service economy. And so, how do we also ensure protections from discrimination and harassment for workplaces with less than 15 employees, I think, is a really important new question to add in addition.

Adams: Dr. Rodgers.

Rodgers: Yeah. I just want to actually add on to what Ai-jen Poo just said in terms of small employees. We also have seen a growing number of workers in the millions who are free-lancers or gig workers, and they're hired by some third-party intermediary. I haven't even begun to think about how they might manage the issues of being treated unfairly in the workplace, what are their [inaudible]. I want to go back to, I think your question to Ed and to Joshua, that and it's great and refreshing. And I know other CEOs like Ed, who get the calculus, who get that by having diverse workplace that actually helps the bottom line. But I think what we also have to do is we've got to help those other private organizations build that story. Public stores, I worked with J&J and also the College of William & Mary, a number of years ago to help them raise their wages for their lowest-paid workers, their head landscapers and housekeepers, who were largely Black men and Black women. But it took a leader who was open to the possibilities, open to reimagining the economy, open to seeing and wanting to hear arguments that, hey, yeah, if you actually raise your wages, you end up improving effort; you end up improving effort, and you also end up improving productivity, which then ends up helping the bottom line. So it can be done. It's just a matter of, I think we found the right moment where I think back to the question was asked to Valerie … by President Daly, that what gives me hope is the unfortunate, it was very sad that Mr. Floyd was killed, but there seems to be a different energy out there, particularly among our young people.

Adams: Rebecca Dixon, if I could get you to follow up on a point that Joshua Bolton made about not being able to litigate your way out of racism in the labor market. And Ashleigh was talking earlier about the stubbornness of racism. And I wonder what you think the role for policy versus sort of this—I know it needs to be both—but what role do you think litigation needs to play in all of this versus actual policy changes?

Dixon: Sure. Kimberly, so in digging deep for this panel, what I discovered is that when we had the better enforcement and better integration of workers of color, it was not necessarily due to the fact that the EEOC was so big and out there; it was that we had a new law and companies wanted certainty and they wanted to be able to change things and be able to fit into this without having to constantly go back to it. And so, I think when we have the balance of litigation, which creates that pressure to have consistent ways in which you treat workers of color, that helps; but absolutely it's true that policy doesn't exist in a vacuum. And I think we are seeing a huge transition in terms of the racial uprising and racial awareness in America, which if you compare the civil rights movement, that was the last time we gained big policy change was when there was awareness in the atmosphere as well.

Adams: So then Ashleigh, I'll turn to you to wrap up, because we're just about out of time, looking ahead, as you consider the role of the Fed, the new administration coming in, where do you think we're going to see rapid movement on addressing this issue, and where do you think there's still a lot of barriers in place?

Gardere: Before I answer that question, I want to just say a couple of things about the role of the private sector. One I'm putting on my old hat, managing workforce development for New Orleans. It's important inside the company to recognize the shift, not just the training that's required for new workers, but also the shift in the environment of the institution. How do you prepare the HR team, supervisors, etcetera, to receive and welcome new workers? And then the last piece is around other roles for the private sector. Josh mentioned around the educational pathways and really supporting policies in that regard, I would say we also welcome corporate lobbying around the criminal justice system because it will add to the supply of workers available. In the near term, I think, first of all, I want to just acknowledge the incoming federal administration has already started to signal this commitment to a diverse representation in the government. And I think that we'll see how that impacts who's making laws, who's governing over the regulations that we see in the near term; I'm hopeful for sure about that.

The other thing that we're advocating for is around, we believe that the Fed has a really important role to play, even as we think about the CRA Community Reinvestment Act. How do we think about activating the Fed as an accountability structure that helps to deliver racial equity? And so we're starting, we can't wait to work and talk with you guys about how we think about using your infrastructure to really track racial equity across not just in workforce, but also our economic development leaders in the business community.

Adams: Thank you so much. And thank you to all of the panelists, both of the people proposing and those respondents. We could talk about this all day, but for now I'm going to turn it back over to President Bostic.

Bostic: Well, thank you, Kimberly. You gave thanks to the panel. I'm just going to give thanks to you. That was a very great conversation. You managed to work everyone through their comments, and then also reactions. It was really interesting. And you touched on an issue that I've come against throughout my whole career, which this enforcement versus having carrots out there to get people to move. And I thought Joshua's comment that we may be pushing on an open door, that's an interesting perspective on thinking about what the possible looks like as we try to make progress here. Now, there was supposed to be a panel to close out this last segment, but if you look at your clock, you will see we are right up against three o'clock. So we're going to just cut that and move right to a closing. So I want to just say thank you to everyone. This has been another very interesting panel and very interesting discussion. It's just such a privilege to be a part of this series. And let me turn it over to Eric for some closing comments.

Eric Rosengren: Thank you very much, Raphael, and thank you to everybody who participated in all the panels. I thought it was a very rich discussion. When we talk about the economy, the usual focus is on the number of jobs as a marker of how healthy the economy is, clearly that's important, but the quality of these jobs make a great deal of difference, too. The pandemic has shown that access to childcare, a safe workplace, safe transportation, adequate healthcare and livable wages have never been more important for workers, but the challenges within each of these issues are having a disproportionate impact on people of color. I'd like to share three quick anecdotes. The first is having to do with requiring people to return to in-person work prematurely; and might that have a disparate impact. To a discussion I had with a banker a few weeks ago, he highlighted he was having a lot of pressure from his management team to bring everybody back into the office, but he was aware that bringing everybody back into the office meant that single parents with children at home and no schools open would result in those people having to quit their jobs.

And he realized that many years from now, he'd be asking, where are all the women? Where are all the minorities in my company? And the decision that seems to be about getting back to work actually has a disproportionate impact on many minorities. So I think we need to keep in mind as we're thinking about some of the pandemic issues, how we make sure that we don't have a disparate impact when we take those measures. The second that I want to talk about is employers providing health insurance from stirring a pandemic and might that have a disparate impact. I've talked to a number of CEOs at retailers and doing seasonal work for the holidays. They've said it's difficult to hire. Well, that's not very surprising. Many employees in the sector are part-time workers who often do not get health benefits. In a pandemic when some customers feel it is their right to not wear a mask indoors, it is unfortunately women and minorities who are likely to take a dangerous job, at low pay, simply because they have no choice.

Third anecdote I'd like to relate has to do with the effects of the pandemic on state and local governments and the cost-cutting measures they've been forced to take. If mass transit service is cut, does it have a disparate impact? Many low-income workers, a disproportionate number of people of color live in urban areas where mass transit is heavily relied upon to get people to and from work. Cars are expensive to maintain, and in cities like Boston, a parking space can sell for the price of a small apartment in other parts of the country. Cutting back service as is currently on table here in Massachusetts will mean that many low-income workers may not have service early in the day or late at night, which could curtail their ability to get to or from work. Cutbacks in service are likely to make it even more difficult to remain in the workplace for people of color. These are just a few examples of how great many challenges we're facing as a result of the pandemic. And it may not be appropriate to not be thinking about what the racial impact is of some of these decisions. It disproportionately affects people of color, and many of them are finding it difficult to work because of these kinds of conditions. The participation rate in the labor force has fallen more for African-American and Latino workers. The unemployment rate is more elevated for African-American and Latino workers. Job quality may be one reason; many people of color need to leave jobs. Benefits enjoyed by other workers that provide flexibility and are often able to work at home are less likely to be offered in jobs they work in. As we're approaching Thanksgiving, we're reminded of the need for quality of jobs more than ever. Next week, many of us will not travel or gather with family or friends as we are normally doing around the holiday. People everywhere are tired of contending with the virus. I find myself complaining about spending long hours in virtual meetings, but then I'm reminded that I do not encounter a dangerous work environment each day, that I have money to feed my family and many others don't.

And I am not faced with the decision of leaving my children alone in an empty house in order to keep my job or wondering what will happen to me and my family if I get sick and have no sick days to use. The quality of jobs influences the quantity of jobs for many people of color; more needs to be done. With that I'll turn it over to Mary.

Daly: Thank you, Eric. And thank you to all the speakers, the event organizers and the participants at this webinar. It's really been a terrific conversation. As Raphael opened with, he said that these dialogues are incredibly important to how we do our work and how we think about doing better work, I'm paraphrasing. But that is really essential and so these dialogues of authenticity are important. I want to just say a few words about what I learned. I actually rewrote three times what I intended to say at the end, because I found the dialogue so robust. But here's a key takeaway or a key set of takeaways that I have. An inclusive economy is a productive economy. That it's not just a fairness issue, a moral imperative; it's also about our economic health and our economic future. If we are all determined to give our children the next generation, a better future than the one we inherited, we have to have an inclusive economy. And right now, there are systemic barriers to making that happen. This is not an individual issue; this is a societal issue.

And I'm reminded that economics is ultimately about people. Societies are about people, and the institutions that surround us, these are the ones we've built. And that gives me hope because it means we can reconstruct them. We can tear them down to the ground and rebuild them, or we can modify them to be the institutions that support us all. That's the imperative. And so what I take away from this is that we need to be fiercely impatient about getting this done. We need to be like the private sector entrepreneurs who say that my shareholder value depends on whether I can deliver something in five years. If we have a five-year plan, we will get something done. We might not get everything done in five years, but if we have a 10-year plan, we're surely not going to get it done in five years. So let's make a five-year plan, let's be fiercely impatient. And then we have to be like monk-like patient as well. And this is what I took away from Dr. Wilson's remarks. We have to have the long view, but we have to build it brick by brick. And you've heard so many great policy proposals here that are bricks in that process. And it will take the bricks of the private sector and the bricks of the public sector, the bricks of the community sector, and ultimately the bricks that each individual one of us brings. So with that, I want to say that this conversation is ongoing, this is really a journey. The time is now to have these discussions. And the next discussion in the Racism and the Economy series will be on education. Ultimately, education is highly uneven as well. The disparities that we talked about today in employment exist in education, too. We are going to be delighted to have a guest already confirmed, Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone, who will be one of the guest speakers—the keynote, I think—and that panel will be on January 12, 11 a.m. Eastern Time. We look forward to having you there and thank you so much for your participation.