1869, Ep. 111 with Michael Hillard, author of Shredding Paper

Cornell University Press40min

Jonathan Hall

00:10

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Michel Hillard, author of Shredding Paper: Labor and the Rise and Fall of Maine's Mighty Paper Industry, newly published by our ILR Press imprint. Michael Hillard is Professor of Economics at the University of Southern Maine, and has published widely in the fields of labor relations, labor and working class history, and the political cconomy of labor and capitalism. Michael has taught and written about the history of US corporate governance, and especially the pernicious effects of financialization since the 1980s. We spoke to Michael about the many powerful interviews he had with the workers and managers of Maine's paper industry; how his research found that the main culprit for the industry's decline was not offshoring nor automation, but the Wall Street takeover of American manufacturing; and how Maine's "folk political economy" - the lessons that the workers and the managers learned during this time period - can potentially help our country shape, more viable economic models for everyone involved. Hello, Michael, welcome to the podcast.

Michael Hillard

01:24

It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Jonathan Hall

01:27

Well, it's our pleasure as well. And we want to congratulate you on your new book, Shredding Paper: Labor and the Rise and Fall of Maine's Mighty Paper Industry. Tell us the backstory. How did this book come about?

Michael Hillard

01:39

Well, I guess it goes back to my undergraduate graduate school days, where I was just born to be an interdisciplinary person, I had an undergraduate program called Social Thought and Political Economy ranging a bunch of big topics in graduate school, I studied mainstream economics and radical political economy. But all the way through my experience as a student, I had a great labor history mentor, Bruce Laurie, and really like thought that labor history was the leading perspective to make sense out of American society, politics, class, race, gender issues, all of that. So that was my background. And I had a department that was fortunate to let me teach that teach labor history along with with political economy and economics classes, I came to a state that is a very working class state with a very distinct history. And that being the state of being and the labor situation, the paper industry, when I got here, so paper was the biggest industry in the state of Maine, kind of like, as I started the book, you know, like main was to Detroit, a paper just nobody knows that. And it was being roiled by these really drives that turned out badly for the workers. And so I became very engaged in it. And then, you know, I decided, as I was approaching 40, that I wanted to do a really substantial piece of primary research. And my passion was labor history. And, you know, I kind of dug around a little bit and I realized that there was very little literature nationally or locally on labor and the paper industry that the last real good book that are made really maybe the only good academic book before mine, that told us the story of the labor movement, the paper industry is written by a historian Robert Zieker. And that was in 1984. So you know, it's about 20 years ago and then serendipity I there's the oldest paper mill in the country that's still running is four miles from my house and from from my, my office at the university, so I had students who were no who knew that they were going to lose their jobs, or 40 years old, they were coming back to school to make a career transition, because they knew their mill was laying off workers. And so it just started there. And I had a passion for qualitative research. I really think that you know, cultural analysis through interviews is a really robust form of research, that it really good colleague who I think my book name artists camera on, who is a distinguished oral historian who kind of turned me on to the literature of community memory and things like that. And in the end, you know, it's sort of like I think every group of workers that have the unique experience deserve to have their story told, but as I'll probably elaborate a little bit more. This industry that was iconic to the state was in rapid decline, you know, being roiled by strikes and workers being permanently replaced and things like that. And I sort of realized that it wasn't just a labor story, but it was a story of a place. Um, you know, and again, most labor history history texts are very community based studies. It's a kind of classic way of, you know, Lawrence or Pittsburgh or something like that. Think about the paper industry though is that paper industry for reasons I explained in my book very thoroughly, went to a very remote areas because the paper industry needed really With waterfalls, in dense forests, and there were not a lot of places that were ideal for that. But in the, you know, late 19th century, Maine was the place to be. And the thing about that is that because paper mills are enrolled regions far away from cities and universities, I think that had a lot to do with why it was a less studied story. So I knew there was a story to tell that sort of a broadaudience in my state in northern New England would be interested in and then I think, for posterity telling the story of this particular group of workers in in a very unique industry was worthwhile. So that's how I kind of got into it. And the oral history stuff turned out to be fascinating, because it's like being a historical detective. And as soon as you talk to a few people like these things emerge with, you know, in one case, I talked a lot about in my book about this local mill St. Warren, was founded in 1854. It's like, these, I walked in talk to these 70 and 80 year old people who had worked there for their whole lives, and only want to do is tell me about the founder of the company, and all the great things that the companies to do so like, this was like, the community conversation, like spy is this unique, generous employer and, and they had very specific, like rescue stories and things like that. And if it into the community memory piece, and so and then people on the main labor movement are like, Hey, there was this incredible strike 40 years ago, up in the northern part of the state and madawaska, and there was a logger strike. So these stories that kind of emerged from being, you know, ethnography really means that you're doing cultural analysis in an embedded place, and you learn about things a lot of different ways through interaction, because I was connected to the labor movement, the state, on people came forward, all these stories leads talk to this person. And so, so kind of took off from there. And but also, as a political economist, you know, one of the things that has lot to do with the reading and writing I do in teaching is just understanding the historical phases of capitalism and having political economy concepts to understand that big thing that I talked about in my book is how the paper industry came to me right to beginning of what historians consider to be the second industrial revolution. The first one is in Great Britain, initially, and then the United States developed a mass production capacity that advanced it way past England in the mid to late 19th century. And any industry that could mechanize and invest in heavy capital, and figure out a mass production system had a mass market to sell it to. And so there's a very distinct story there. And again, you know, there's there there was historical work done business history done on the paper industry, but again, very, very kind of scant. So, you know, I, it kind of emerged as to what story was I going to try and tell I was going to try and tell a story of these workers. And I've focused in my book, mainly on the period after 1950, but the backstory of how the industry came to mean, what it was about its labor process, the labor relations, which were paternalistic for a very specific set of reasons. It just kind of emerged. So it was, it was a great process, it did take me over 15 years to do it. But it was just as kind of labor of love that unfolded on as I engaged it on, and this thing took shape. And you know, and then the book came out of it.

Jonathan Hall

08:30

So Wow, I love that approach that you've taken that. You mentioned, your qualitative research, you have the stories of the workers, some of them in your own class, but also, you're right in the community. So you have this bottom up history, lived history told by the workers themselves. And then you also have this kind of meta picture, this top down history of the forces acting upon workers tell us about how this approach jelled. And some of the stories that emerged from this

Michael Hillard

08:58

Well, I mean, it partly gelled through my own reading of multiple fields. So like, you know, as I said, I came out of graduate school in the 80s, with the political economy, background and political economists who have a connection to sort of Marxian inflected economic history, the transition to capitalism and so forth globalization. And then, and then in the 90s, before I in the 2000s, about the time I started the book, I started read a lot more deeply in the industrial labor relations field, which at that time, was starting to put out books that talked about specifically how to change in capital. From that mass production era and a certain kind of managerial model, it was called managerialism or corporatism or I used it. Business historian Alfred Chandler is sort of like the anchor for understanding that so there used to be this kind of, you know, generous corporation that took care of its workers and the community and things like that, you know, invested into long term Then how that all went away. And as I was reading a lot of this literature 2025 years ago, you know, globalization is sort of the hook that almost everybody in the public understands about what's changed about American capitalism, like, why is manufacturing been in decline? Oh, well, all the jobs went to China. And that's like an easy answer, but it turns out to be a limited answer. And what I saw in a number of different sources, and also in my political economy field is interested in what's called heterodox macroeconomics. And so this term fight financialization came to describe the rise of sort of what I would call the Wall Street takeover American industry in the 80s and 90s, in the sort of debasement of Employment Relations, and, you know, driving companies into the ground, and all that kind of stuff. And that was a separate process from globalization. Globalization, you know, was a confounding factor also in the decline of a lot of industries. But the financialization, especially 20 years ago, in most contexts was really under recognized, I think, now it's increasingly recognized, I'm continuing to research and write about it after my book, but and then what happened is that, you know, in my interviews, what my informants 150 or so that I talked to over, plus 10 year period, included lots of managers, you know, that's one thing the labor relations field taught me is that if you're looking at labor, you're really looking at labor management, it's you have to understand management. And again, the labor relations field is very good at that. And I found a really interesting story, they interviewed some fantastic managers, you know, and spent their career in the industry and had all kinds of insight about when they got merged with Scott or International Paper, what happened. And then, you know, in the end, they told the stories of essentially the undermining of industrial competence. And in what I was learning was that the industrial competence of paper industry is very, very distinct. One of the things I do stress in my book very much is that while the paper industry in Maine was part of this mass production revolution, wasn't an assembly line revolution, because paper production is so incredibly intricate, it's a chemically based, you have these huge runs of paper that are easy to spoil, they tear and they have spots, they don't have the right characteristics when it gets to a fancy, you know, printer that's making glossy magazines or whatever. And so, you know, the story emerged about how there was this really powerful industrial competence at the heart of the story. Going back to the late 19th century, and how much financialization undermined that the sort of turnover of owners at the top have come in and you know, change their business model without really knowing what they were doing, and not listening to the workers and not honoring the sort of traditional reciprocity between management labor. So so this is very rich story. That would be inadequate, if I just told the labor story, or I just told the business slash capitalist story. And so, you know, my interdisciplinary background gave me those multiple lenses.

Michael Hillard

13:12

And then the material itself again, you know, the many stories that I talked to, I mean, I, I interviewed people who were born around 1910, and started the industry in the 20s and 30s. On, you know, there's nothing more amazing, and I looked back on, you know, 18 years ago, like one summer, I interviewed four or five people in their 90s, who just could tell me the arc of most of the history of the industry. And so, you know, it's just, it was just a wonderfully sort of organic process. But at the heart of it was that, I think the proper way to tell story about labor and capitalism is to understand the experiences of the workers and the nature of their work and the nature of the organizations and the social movements, that they have things of that nature, but you really have to understand the context. In the context is, you know, I quote, that phrase that you mentioned before, from Leon fake was a labor historian, that political economy in short, is the forces acting upon workers. And so there was one set of forces that had to do with that second industrial revolution. The business model that I talked about is sort of a patient long term capital managerial that could accommodate unions. And in the case of paper industry, what was unique is that even before unions became a constant in the industry around 1940, for the 60 years before that, the skill in dedication of workers was so crucial that the employers were already very generous and that's where those origin stories came from, is that they remember the kind of capitalism that existed before where, you know, basically, there was a sense of absolute security but also respect and you know, again, when you interview workers in any you know, I mean, like I teach about labor, you know, I'm reading about Walmart and childcare and eldercare workers who are treated poorly right now. And like people want dignity and respect in their jobs. And there was a version of that where there was very central to the culture, and the technology and the practices of the industry for a long time. And then it all kind of went away pretty quickly in a 20 year period. So people live through that could kind of really paint a vivid picture of something that I was reading about in academic sources, but you know, they told me the sort of live story and so in the end, you know, I think kind of complex to use an academic term complex binaries can turn out to be really interesting. So, you know, the binary of capital and labor like this one has all these paradoxes in it, you know, and the nature of the work had paradoxes in one of the things that I highlight. And if I'd had more time and energy I would have done more with and I have a second book in mind that might explore some of this stuff. But you know, one piece of the industry is that it's a chemical industry, right? It's like you make paper with chemicals with chlorine and 17 other different kinds of very toxic chemicals. And so you know, when paper mill is making pulp which would sometimes run pulp and then maybe not run it on the third shift and then run it again, you can smell it for 10 miles away, this is horrible sulfur smell. And when I first came to Portland, the local St. Warren mill was still making pop up until 1999. And you know, the wind would come from the west on a day they were making pulp and it was just like, incredibly disgusting. And the workers you know, had this phrase widely used, I was able to found lots of citations for it when I looked at looked it up later that they called it the smell of money. As I say in the book, there's sort of a profound but understandable act of denial that workers and managers and people in the community went through, which is that they were working in a bad chemical factory. There's a really

Michael Hillard

17:00

potent narrative in a book that came out the same year as mine Milltown by somebody who grew up in one of these paper mill towns carry all smells the writer and she basically grew up in, you know, a cancer cluster. There was a doctor in her town, it's Rumford, one of the iconic paper mill towns where Oxford paper was created over a century go and curiosity I'll just like chases down the story. She starts with a family history, but then she in the family history is all about how everybody dies of cancer at a premature age and rare cancers. And then turned out there was this town doctor that explored that so you know, people put up with punishing shiftwork on because of how they wanted to distribute kill the skill within a factory, everybody rotated through the three different shifts every month. And so once a month, you were doing midnight to eight o'clock, and then switching out of the day and switching out in the evening. And switching on to the night you did that every month for like 40 years. You didn't you work most Sundays you didn't get to go to church, you didn't get to go see your kids, you know, marching High School Marching Band or things like that. I mean, they all talk about how much they gave up for that. And so, you know, one of the things that was really remarkable about is just how this industry which was so generous to them, and gave them a higher standard of living and more, especially more economic security, and a fair amount of voice in their job compared to any other blue collar job in Maine. On the one hand, on the other hand, they had to put up with all of this stuff. And you know, people get into their middle ages 50s and 60s and get really pretty horrible diseases and die young. And that was all kind of accepted as part of it. So to me, it's like the story. The main paper industry is a really good example of all the contradictions of capitalism that many good and brilliant things go on. I put the term mighty paper industry into the title of my book, because I was trying to figure out a way to capture like, how remarkable this industry was that nobody really understood. And when you dig into what it's sort of like, Oh my god, you had no real No, no, no sense that there was that much technology in the 19th century that there were hiring MIT chemists in the 1890s to come to me and help figure out their chemical processes on how they made the best paper and that's one of the things that I highlight my book is that you know papers one of those things that's just in the background like everybody knows it's there. You take it for granted, you don't think about it, like toilet paper, but you have like, you pick up a glossy magazine and that's starting to go by the wayside with you know, digital production and the internet but up until fairly recently, everybody had coffee table books and corporate annual reports and stuff like that. cardboard boxes and so like the number of products in the industry is really remarkable and You know, the skill that it would take from the research and development department to the engineers and firsthand on the shop floor to the people who packaged it was really just remarkable. And so, you know, to me, it's like this was one of the great manufacturing legacies in the country, and kind of taken for granted, not very well understood. So it was really, in many ways, just such a great experience to learn that remarkable story, and then learn the workers experience and you know, how the great things and the warts and horrors all fit together. So that's kind of like the way so that sort of two sided story and a whole bunch of different ways is really what kind of emerged for me.

Jonathan Hall

20:46

It is an incredible story and the interviews that you have, particularly with managers that there was one phrase that came through in the book where one of the managers said that they felt that the Wall Street takeover was almost like a like an invading army. And, and that is so visceral, it's, it's, it's so frustrating for me to hear these stories where you have this industry at the top of its game, making the best paper in the world, and then completely undermined from within by these financial forces. It's, it's mind boggling. And I know it's not just the paper industry, this is like manufacturing as a whole all around the United States. It's just incomprehensible that we could take this thing that yes, warts and all in from an environmental perspective and health perspective and but just the pride that people had, and the the amount of knowledge that was passed on worker to worker manager to manager to how to make things, right. And then that have that come in and deliberately sabotaged by wall street. It's it gets so angry with reading these things. And so so but but you do have this idea that that that is that lesson has been remembered in what you call mains folk political economy. And tell us a little bit about that. And what you think that this whole political economy, both in Maine and at large, because this is an in many areas in the country that we're manufacturing is left? What can it teach us? What what's the net worth? Where do we go from here?

Michael Hillard

22:20

Sure, sure. And as I mentioned, before we started the interview, I'm continuing to research on this topic. So Well, let me put it this way. So I had this perspective on financialization from a lot of academic literature that I, you know, read and taught about. And then I encountered it in the stories and the research, because I did a lot of, you know, newspaper and archival research as well, about this. But you know, the thing that happened in in the country in the United States was just this sort of ideological and institutional shift that I described in the book, a lot of scholars in the industrial labor relations field write about this. That, you know, what took off around 1980 was the rise of this institutional investor, which are Wall Street companies like BlackRock that manage pension funds, and, you know, large stock index funds and things of that nature. And, you know, the ironic thing is, is that all this capital represents the savings of working in middle class people around the country, but they don't control how to use Wall Street does. And there was this rise of this concept of shareholder primacy, a very important book that I teach, and then I talk a lot about, that came out about six, seven years ago as David Wiles. The fissured workplace where he really does version of what I do in my book, I mean, it's a much more comprehensive story than mine, where he examines how Wall Street specifically put court push corporations in the late 80s and 90s, to adopt this idea of core competency to shrink your employment to only those who are essential to the core competency. So like Apple employs a million people around the planet, but they only have about 70,000 direct employees. So that kind of sub contracting offshoring, all that kind of stuff kind of comes with that. So, you know, I think the largest story of the last 40 years is that the rampant inequality that has become one of the two or three central crises of our country, you know, comes more from financialization than people realize. So in the story of the folk political economy, what I was struck by is that I had these like, people jumping out of their seats to tell me about St. Warren or reading memoirs that talk about humanism founded both International Paper in Oxford Paper Company, two major companies that originated in Maine. But have these communities had these like memories of that? Yeah, I was Okay, it's community memory, what is this about, like, everyone's repeating the same stories or versions of the same stories, and it was often about being rescued. And what they were talking about in these particular narratives about how, you know, just there was, there was a floor under everybody that was managed by these companies, like nobody fell through the floor, if you got injured, you still got paid, you know, if you were an alcoholic, they kept you on the payrolls, even if you had to go, you know, go to rehab three times a year, and there's stories by managers that they had our local hospital own, you know, originally owned by the paper mill that they regularly like sent these World War Two vets with PTSD to, to dry out, but they talked about that. And then they talked about how all of a sudden, the company was owned by people from out of state.

Michael Hillard

25:49

And they ruin the forests, and they ran the mills into the ground, and they, you know, in this this, so, so as I dug into this and found it in different parts of the state, and different versions of it, it became really clear to me that, that people who have lived through the experience of two different phases of American capitalism, understood it that way. And they did it in a folk way. So it was an academic, that's why use the adjective folk. But they understood that, you know, they had this industrial competence. And they had the particular commitment of the employers to the employees and communities, and how that evaporated, and what was it replaced by it was replaced by conflict. And as I mentioned, the beginning the interview in the 80s, these companies started to ask for really draconian cutbacks, it was part of, you know, we want raise your profit rates and your share price. So you have to squeeze labor in this is not any other industry. This is like, you know, this intricate production process intricate set of skills, a lot of independence and respect by managers for the senior workers and all of that. And that was being, you know, pushed aside. And in some cases, in the case, International Paper, this big strike that happened in j in 1987 1988, they purposely pushed the workers into striking so they could permanently replace them with non union workers. So you know, the way that they were able to tell the story about how this all happened, really lined up with an academic perspective on these two phases of American capitalism. And you know, and they were basically, you know, I think one of the things that I say, in a number of places in the book is that one of the things that I think we're talking about nationally in this country right now is the tension between the marketplace in a moral community, in a marketplace idea of capitalism, that it's all about transactions, it's all about individual businesses, consumers and workers, just, you know, making, you know, market exchanges on a daily basis. And, you know, kind of an Adam Smith's story of everybody looks after their sole self interest, and good things come out of that, and then a moral perspective. And I think one of the things that the whole political economy really speaks to, is that if you're the fifth generation worker in a particular community, particular mill with pride in what you do, and a long legacy with a particular institution, that institution is not a bundle of decomposable assets to use the language of some of the economists who support financialization, it's a living thing with people and commitments and traditions in them. And I think that, you know, the debate in the country over the last 30 or 40 years has been, are we a marketplace society? Or we are we a moral society with markets as part of it. And they were siding with that we're a moral community, where with markets as part of it, and so markets should be embedded in moral practices and moral relationships. And if you talk to somebody, I have a friend from college who has been a senior r&d Vice President, Silicon Valley over the last 30 years, and I talked to him, it's all cutthroat. You know, it's all you know, we can't put capital into something that doesn't make make the average rate of profit because your waist, you know, that's going to be destroyed by the marketplace. And the fact that matter is that there are other countries where those financial rules don't exist as five national rules didn't exist before 1980 in the country, and they don't really exist in the same way, the same ruthless way in countries like Japan or Germany, or Sweden, or Denmark. So. So with all of that in mind, I really think that, you know, there's a legitimacy to the place of moral commitments in our economy. That is now the conversation we're having about inequality, you know, which is that if we have a country that has doubled its GDP per capita in the last 30 or 40 years and we have more poor people in a third of the country. Working, you know, starvation or non livable wages. And you just have to pick up good journalism from the New York Times or something to see all this stuff going on. What are we doing? You know, why do people struggle with massive amount of debt that they can never get out from under because they went to college, and they didn't quite finish, but they had 40 or $50,000 in debt. And then they can only get $12 an hour Johnson, they're just screwed for the rest of their life, housing insecurity. So there's just, you know, certainly health, health, healthcare insecurity. So there's all these different things that we see in capitalism. Right now, at the heart of it, we have this financial class, that I mean, if you know much about what they're doing, besides running companies in the ground, and taking good paying employment systems and replace them with, you know, minimum wage, precarious employment systems end spending 100%, or more of their profits on propping up share prices, which is what's going on last 15 years or so, I mean, like, there's there's a looting going on over existing corporations at the top that most people don't understand. And so what I'm really struck by is that when this started to wash over the country, and it came to me, and it hit these particular workers in this industry, they saw something upfront, and they had some really human insight about what was wrong with it. And so I connect what they're saying to what we're facing right now. And the struggle that we see going on in the country, you know, in the halls of Washington and October, September, October 2021. It's sort of like, Are we going to bend some of this wealth towards, you know, creating a moral economic system? Because we don't have it right now. And it's gotten worse over the last couple of decades?

Jonathan Hall

31:51

Yeah. So I think I think that that's we talked about before the interview that your book has taken off, there's a lot that you've written it for general readership, and you're getting and you've written it for the state of Maine, and a lot of Mainers, as well as people from the rest of the country. This is this is information that you said, sometimes you can see this in the New York Times, but not everyone reads the New York Times. And so you've you've brought this accessible story with the narrative from not only the workers, but also the the managerial class as well as the forces from Wall Street. And we are what can we learn from this? And how can we move forward? I think that that's what our country is at the crossroads that a good chunk of the population is saying our country's not moving in the right direction. And that a revisitation of this moral economy, as you describe it sounds good to me. And other countries have successfully done it as well.

Michael Hillard

32:49

Well, that's the thing. That's the thing. I mean, you know, one of the big academic questions, by people who been towards a progressive or left side on think about societal issues, is is compat. Is capitalism compatible with that kind of moral economic system? And there's some some critics who think that it's absolutely not, you can pick up a radical magazine like Jacobin, and get, you know, 20 articles a month, telling you that it's just not possible unless you convert to some other kind of system. And we know that millennials are like, you know, roughly 50-50, at worst, in favoring socialism over capitalism, although what people mean by that is kind of up in the air. But I think, you know, the answer that I have is that on that, I think there were elements of, you know, a moral society in capitalism, I think it was limited. And I tried to be clear about the limits of what you know, was true of the paper industry and talk about some of the consequences for workers and, you know, health problems, things like that in the industry. But that said, you know, there's there's a kind of language in academia of embedded capitalism and capitalism embedded in institutions that humanize the economy, then, yeah, you can have a version of capitalism, but not one, where you have the version of capitalism that we have the United States right now, you know, in related literature is that and it's something that I teach in a lot of classes to undergraduate graduate students is that we have like the meanest business elite in capitalist history. Or one of the means, you know, that they've been very social, Darwinian all along, they saw the business organized in the 40s 50s and 60s to ideologically and politically kill the New Deal, which again, was a humanization of capitalism with social security and legalization of unions and things like that, and they've gone after that pretty successfully with the rise of Reagan and everything like that. And so you know, it's like they're just to be really empirical about it. Like you need to have balance in society. One of the things Main narratives in the labor relations field is that Paul Osterman says this in a book called Securing Prosperity wrote about 20 years ago and a lot of people reference it that, you know, what do we want in the in the labor market? You know, if you're talking about a national labor market, well, you want efficiency, you want the right workers in the right jobs, right. And that's a big issue in 2021, right now with the discombobulation of the pandemic. But then, you know, especially from the point of workers, you want economic security, you want opportunities for upward mobility, you want equity within the firm, and within the economy. And very important, you want worker voice, you want workers to have a meaningful say in the condition in features of their work. And it's possible to make commodities for a profit in privately owned companies and have those characteristics. But it takes a very different set of institutions in class forces, then we've had this country in the last 40 years or so. So I think it's possible, I think, you know, again, we're on the brink here in the fall of 2021 of some significant improvements in some of those areas. One of the concepts that I like to use most in talking about this is the idea of a social wage, which is the part of your standard of living that you get through the government provision as opposed to the market. And, you know, I think what modern capitalism has taught us is that it's hard to have a moral economy, if you don't have an ample in in consistent social wage. And so, you know, we see a lot of troubles with raising children right now in terms of childcare, pre K, and stuff like that. And then dealing with aging population, both cases, the labor model is to pay people who take care of our most cherished loved ones, you know, $12 an hour in insecure employment. So those are things that you can identify, talk about and fix. There's some legislation right now to deal with it, I think over the longer run, changing the model of what's called corporate governance, which is, you know, what version of who controls a corporation? And what purposes do they bring it in, I think financialization has proved to be horrible for society. And there are reform proposals from senators, Elizabeth Warren, but especially senator Baldwin from Wisconsin, you know, that have worked with the academics who are experts on this and said, you know, we should eliminate stock buybacks, and we should put workers on corporate boards of directors. And so you know, I think the models exist. I think experts like myself, and really, when I say experts, like myself, I'm really drawing on all of this collective expertise that I'm just trying to channel. But, you know, the expertise, the policy proposals, and even some of the political will, is there. But we have a long way to go, obviously.

Jonathan Hall

37:47

Definitely, definitely. Well, I'm sure we could talk all day that you're a fascinating person to talk with. And I want to thank you again, for all the hard work you've put into this research. You know, decade and a half, putting this into this, this great book, Shredding Paper: Labor and the Rise and Fall of Maine's Mighty Paper Industry. We're proud to be publishing your book to get it to the largest audience possible. We look forward to your next book potentially. And and thank you for all the work that you've been doing to promote the the, these the book, but also the stories and getting the story out there. So more and more people can hear this.

Michael Hillard

38:24

Can I see a couple brief things before we go? Yes, please. I do want to tell people that they could look this up on the internet that I have two podcasts that are produced with my old history interviews, so you can hear the stories of the workers and managers from their own mouths. One is called Madawaska Rebellion, and the other is called Remembering Mother Warren. So I would urge people to look into that because we now live in the podcast generation, then the second thing I would say is I just really want to thank Fran Benson, and ILR Press for, for publishing my book. Fran was a wonderful editor to work with. ILR press has done a wonderful job telling the stories about workers in capitalism that deserved to be told, so I'm honored to be part of it.

Jonathan Hall

39:06

Well, we're honored as well. Thank you so much. We really appreciate you coming to our podcast, and it was great talking with you. My pleasure. That was Michael Hillard, author of Shredding Paper: Labor and the Rise and Fall of Maine's Mighty Paper Industry. If you'd like to read his new book, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu and use the promo code 09pod to save 30% if you live in the UK, use the discount code csannounce and visit the website combined.academic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast

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