PUSHBACK Talks

How the World Ran Out of Everything, with Peter S. Goodman

• Peter S. Goodman • Season 8 • Episode 1

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It's the Season 8 premiere of Pushback Talks! Filmmaker Fredrik Gertten and Advocate Leilani Farha welcome back New York Times correspondent Peter S. Goodman to discuss his provocative new book, "How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain." 

Goodman, Gertten, and Farha explore the often-overlooked human consequences of our interconnected economy. The three dissect the language used to describe global experiences, examine the power dynamics of international trade, and analyze past policy decisions that prioritized profits over people.

Check out How the World Ran Out of Everything and stay updated on Peter's work with the New York Times.

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Kirsten McRae:

Hey out there, Pushback Talks listeners, your favorite humble little podcast is back for its eighth season. At the top of last season, we asked the question, what does it really mean to push back? In the 12 episodes that followed, we spoke to guests from 10 countries on subjects spanning the globe to learn some of the many forms that pushing back can take. But whether it's mass protests alongside people of every race and religion, having important conversations with your loved ones, or creating art that envisions a better future, pushing back isn't something that happens just once. It's a choice and a commitment we make again and again to use the resources available to us to try to create the world we want to live in. For our season eight premiere Fredrik and Leilani welcome back New York Times correspondent and author Peter S Goodman. You might remember when Peter was last on the show to discuss his book, Davos man, that was all about how billionaires devoured the world. Well, like Fredrik, Leilani and so many members of our podcast community, Peter is still pushing back. His newest book, How the World Ran Out of Everything - Inside the Global Supply Chain, looks closer at a global system that impacts the lives of everyone on earth. For a system that's so important it's also incredibly precarious, relying greatly on grueling and underpaid work across the world. As Peter points out in his book, we're asking a lot from the people who keep the supply chain moving. Listen in as Peter talks to Fredrik and Leilani about our modern day welfare state for billionaires, how the long journey of pushing back can take unexpected forms, and how the world ran out of everything.

Fredrik Gertten:

I'm Fredrik Gertten and I'm the filmmaker,

Leilani Farha:

and I'm Leilani Farha, and I'm the advocate.

Fredrik Gertten:

And this is Pushback Talks, and we are pushing back again, and we're back, we're back, we are back. And I haven't seen you for a while because we've had a summer series out, so it's been a little bit lonely without you, but now you're here. It's nice. I actually tried to get hold of you to chat with you, but you've been so busy. I know it's Gaza. I know Gaza and the West Bank is it's even if it's not your real job, you it takes all your energy.

Leilani Farha:

It's part of part of it's part of my real job, and part of it is just being a human being on the planet at this point in time. And how does one not focus on Gaza? I had a realization yesterday that there's a language lag. People keep saying no words I've got, you know, as one more atrocity, another atrocity, another atrocity happens in Gaza. I keep seeing people writing no words. There's a language lag. We there's there's no language right now to describe, at least not in English, which is my dominant language. There's no language that we have to adequately capture how we're feeling and what Palestinians are experiencing right now.

Fredrik Gertten:

And I, you know, Malmo has a huge Palestinian population, and I meet many of them, and they are people are so sad, and they feel also a little bit isolated when they meet people who don't really care that much. So they are also kind of isolating themselves, almost some of them, you know, because it's so painful. It's so painful to be with people who are who don't really care. Yeah, so, but you care, and we care, and we think it will change, but it's not happening as quick as we want.

Leilani Farha:

That's right, that's right. But Fredrik, you haven't noticed something? We're on video here, and you should have noticed,

Fredrik Gertten:

oh, you left the bunker, Leilani. This is like, for our listeners, foror a long time, I always mentioned that Leilani is sitting in a bunker in Canada, in Ottawa, Canada, and and it's been her basement. But now you moved up.

Leilani Farha:

I moved up in the world, folks, I moved up.

Fredrik Gertten:

You kicked down your husband then, of course, but it's always

Leilani Farha:

it did require some displacement, which is contrary to my human rights framework. But he's a white guy, so I kicked him to the basement, and here I am moving up in the world.

Fredrik Gertten:

That's good. I'm happy for you. I'm just off a plane from Malaysia because my last film breaking social has is showing around in Malaysia, in in eight states, and I've been to to a festival called Freedom Film Fest in so it's showing around the country. But I was in in Kuala Lumpur, and I gave a master class, and I met you young filmmakers, and been really cool. And then I was to one of the states, it's called Penang, where I also showed the film, and it's been amazing debates about, you know, corruption and, you know, the society, but also because the same festival also showed push, and it's so when you come to Southeast Asia, they. Thing we talked about in push is so obvious. You see the dark towers in the evenings, you know, you can see that there are maybe 10% people living in the buildings or less. So it's, it's, it's, it's weird, the development in Southeast Asia, it's, it's extreme. That is the speculators, the investors, have so much to say, and the people so little interesting. But this kind of brings us into today's show, because we have a very special guest who actually also was working in South Asia, and he was the China correspondent, Peter S Goodman, who we had in our show with his last his book, Davos man, how the billionaires devour the world. And now you're back, Peter, because you written a new book. Welcome to push back talks.

Peter S Goodman:

Great to be back. Great to see you both,

Fredrik Gertten:

isn't it? Yeah. I mean, we are, we are happy to see you. Leilani and I, we got this copy sent. It's a beautiful book, how the world ran out of everything and Peter, I envy his energy as a journalist, but this the thing to just follow one detail in in our society, because it's inside the global supply chain. You know, why are we suddenly? Can't we ship things? Why are we? Don't we have containers anymore? You start off from a very simple question, where are where are all the containers gone? It sounds like a Simon and Garth song, almost Peter, what happened to the containers?

Peter S Goodman:

Well, they got sent around the world to places where they don't often stack up. This is the first wave of the pandemic. When it turns out a lot of people don't realize this, they suddenly realize that we're dependent on a single country, China for lots of critical things. I mean, I think most of us know that a lot of clothing, furniture, electronics comes out of China. Well, middle of the pandemic, we discover that we don't have basic medicines. We don't have things like ventilators and medical devices and parts to make those things. We don't have personal protective gear. So we've got doctors around the world, even in the wealthiest countries, going in to attend to covid patients without masks, without gowns, we've got warehouse workers who are laboring, slaughterhouse workers, lots of people in harm's way to keep the economy going. For the rest of us who don't have protective gear, and much of this stuff is produced China. As the world plays catch up, containers get shipped off to places that don't necessarily have much product to send back to China. I mean, the shipping container is like this basic workhorse of the global economy, these steel boxes that carry factory goods and parts and components around the globe. So they start stacking up places like West Africa, Latin America, uncollected. And then the world wakes up from the first wave of the pandemic. And it turns out, the people running the global economy have made this massive miscalculation. There's been this assumption that we've got a traditional economic recession. We got a lot of people can't go to work. People have lost their jobs. Unemployment is going up, and so the people running the economy assume we're just going to need less stuff. Fewer paychecks means less money to spend. People running ocean shipping carriers actually idle ships in warm waters, assuming that they won't have as much need to move products around the globe. Well, in lockdown, we may not be going to the office, but now our bedrooms are offices, and we're buying computer monitors and furniture. Our kids aren't going to school, but we still have to feed them and look after their distance learning. We got to buy them gadgets and suddenly cook 27 meals a day for people cooped up in quarantine. We're buying barbecues to entertain our families, since they can't go to restaurants. And a lot of this stuff's made in China. There's this surge of a production in China, and as the factories go looking for containers to put these products in to send them on their way. A lot of this stuff is going across the Pacific to the West Coast of the United States. They exceed the supply and shipping prices soar. Ports are overrun once the ships come in with this remarkable overwhelming surge of product and the whole system breaks down, which is the subject of my book, yeah.

Fredrik Gertten:

So from this, let's call it detail, where have all the containers gone use you, you really go out on a journey to look for what happened. I mean, you travel, be with tracks all over the US. You go to a lot of different places to understand. What is happening. And it's, I think, Leilani, because it's also has a relation to Peter's previous book, Davos man, yeah, for

Peter S Goodman:

a while I was calling it Davos man on the sea,

Fredrik Gertten:

because it has this kind of you dive into the state of capitalism today, and it's you come out again, as I asked you when I interviewed you for breaking social. Why are you so angry? Peter, you know, New York Times, global economic correspondence, should be not so angry, but that would but what you see makes you upset. Obviously,

Peter S Goodman:

I think if you're not upset by the state of world, and especially the state of reality for ordinary people, working people, you're not you're not paying sufficient attention. I mean, the supply chain, which is a huge part of the economy, is a realm that we're invited to not think about. You know, most of us just take it for granted that we've got this amazing convenience. And by the way, it is a modern miracle. It's incredible that we can make all this stuff around the world. We can ship it. Consumer prices are really cheap. We've got blueberries on the shelves of countries that are stuck in the middle of winter, we've got more consumer choice than ever. Like all this stuff is miraculous, but we're invited to not think about the army of people, people driving trucks, people working in slaughterhouses, people maintaining rail systems, people stuck on ships that themselves are stuck in floating traffic jams for weeks at a time because there's no room for them to dock and until the system breaks down. Sort of like, I mean, the metaphor I like to go to is it's like the electrical supply you flip on the switch, you don't think about the electrical grid. You don't think about the emissions that go into you know, however the the energy is being produced, you just, you just do whatever it is you're doing. Well, if the lights don't go on, and especially in the middle of something like the worst public health catastrophe in a century, well then it is worth giving a thought to what's going on behind the scenes. And that's where we are with the supply chain. I mean, when, when the richest countries on earth cannot outfit their frontline medical workers in the middle of a pandemic, when we can't build enough ventilators for people who can't breathe, it's time to ask what's going on, who's in charge, and how could this be better? And that's what my book's trying to wrestle with.

Fredrik Gertten:

Leilani, well,

Leilani Farha:

there's lots to say with that as an opening, that's for sure. First of all, I need to just commend you, because you took you took supply chain. I tell you, Peter, if someone told me a year ago, I'd be reading a book about the supply chain and be interested in it, I would have said no effing way if

Peter S Goodman:

someone told me I'd be writing a book about the supply

Leilani Farha:

chain. Exactly. I mean, Fredrik and I joke, but there's nothing more boring in the world than housing. Well, maybe supply chains from a from a zoomed out distance may be more boring, but you made it incredibly interesting. Your book is actually like a page turner, and you know, with chapters called things like the Lean Taliban, crazy and dangerous. And is it worth even getting up in the morning that gives our listeners a bit of a flavor of your flair. You do have an incredible talent at making Well, thank

Peter S Goodman:

you so much.

Leilani Farha:

I mean, it's a it's complicated, right? There's no doubt that the supply chain, the way it works, is, it's so ad hoc in a way, it's so I could, there's no master plan, right? There's, there's no master plan and so, but you do make it comprehensible to the reader, which is, which is appreciated for someone like me, I, one of the things I came away with and, and I think you've touched on it, is that the book is as much about supply chains, and this is obvious, but as It is about consumerism, sure, and what we expect as consumers, and this, as you say, taking for granted what is in you know, I want an eye mask tomorrow. I get an eye mask tomorrow, right? I need a TR I need, in quotes, a trampoline for my kid, because covid is making life boring, I get a trampoline in a week, right? And that expectation that that that's normal. And I mean, your book uses what's his name, Hagan Walker, Hagen Walker, right? Yeah, as the kind of. For a narrative arc, and what's he manufacturing, right? Elmo. Like light up. Elmo.

Peter S Goodman:

Elmo theme, bath toys, right? Bath toys.

Leilani Farha:

I mean, right, like, who? Why should these be? Why should these be in demand? Why should we care about that? But it's the link between that and masks to prevent covid, a deadly disease. And PPE, right? That's the link you're making. I think,

Peter S Goodman:

in defense of Hagen Walker, those bath toys are the product of this novelty cube idea that we could certainly live without. You know, these light up cubes that bartenders could drop into cocktails, and they could immediately look down the bar and see if you needed a refill, because the light would go off. But then they heard from somebody who had an autistic child who was really soothed by dropping these bath toys into the bath bath time, it turns out as a nightmare for a lot of kids who have autism, the sound of rushing water is really just so there is. But you know, I guess the part of the book that hit me hard, I write about almond farmers being victims of the shipping crisis, and they were, they couldn't export their products. They were sitting on the previous year's crop when I visited them in central California in the spring of 2022 because the shipping companies were making so much money moving finished goods from factory towns in China to the West Coast of the US. I mean, the cost of that journey had gone up from like 2000 bucks before the pandemic to close to $30,000 in half a year. So they didn't want to bother unloading, you know, furniture and electronics and such, and then make these containers available to almond farmers who needed to send their products to Japan, to Dubai. They said, No, forget that. We're just going to slap the empties back on the ships to send them back to China to get the next load. So we're burning diesel fuel to move air across the Pacific. But the punch line to this is that while the almond farmers were indeed the victims of the shipping crisis, let's parse that the almond harvest in central California, which is 80% of the global supply, uses twice as much water as the city of Los Angeles, the second largest city the United States, and a city that, not incidentally, has a lot of problems with drought. And the history of Southern California is the history of people battling over water. So we're basically using Container ships burning diesel fuel to export water from California to Dubai. That's basically what we've built with this ad hoc supply chain that is bananas. Bananas that

Fredrik Gertten:

is, yeah, also bananas goes that way, but they and then they have their own ships that they are smarter than the banana companies. But I think what you mentioned now is that the crisis has made the big guys stronger and the small guys weaker, right? Allman found farmers are not big enough, that's right, and your your friend, is not big enough to have a chance in this game. So we knew that, that the pandemic made a super rich even richer. They double their income over a year, or their wealth in a year. And the container crisis goes the same way. Yeah.

Peter S Goodman:

This is the connective tissue, by the way, to Davos man, a book that includes Leilani, by the way, as a key character, yeah.

Fredrik Gertten:

So the divide, the divide is growing every day well,

Peter S Goodman:

so just to, just to underscore that, so you know, Davos man looks in detail at Jeff Bezos as one of the five billionaires I deal with. And in Davos man, we've got the specter of, you know, his warehouse workers not having PPE, and Bezos saying, Oh, of course, we're doing everything we can to find PPE while you're working in the warehouses, which is really interesting to the warehouse workers, because they're actually loading PPE into boxes for people who are willing to pay for it. And then, of course, Bezos thanks them for their tremendous, heroic, selfless effort as he blasts himself off into space for 11 seconds to the tune of five and a half billion dollars. Well, Amazon, during this supply chain crisis that I'm writing about, is able to charter its own container ships to bypass these floating queues. And Amazon is actually told by its consultants, yeah, it's really a unfortunate that you have to pay five times as much to ship your your cargo, as you did before the pandemic. But you know what? This is a great opportunity, because your competitor is drowning. You can afford to pay whatever it costs to move your cargo across the Pacific. Your competitor is going bankrupt, and at the end of this, you'll have greater market share that is the function of having a supply chain that has been. Optimized for big box retail, and the rest of us are paying the costs. Yeah,

Fredrik Gertten:

that's that. When I try to resume your book for friends, that's the story I tell also. So I think that's, this is, for me, an eye opener, a real eye opener. Let's go back because, because you, you, you go back in history, like you did also in Davos man to understand how big companies in the US, you talk mostly about us, but it could also be Europe, where you move out to production, to China, and it's not the Chinese who are taking over. It's it's the American companies who don't want to pay their they want cheaper labor. That's right, that's right. And this has been ongoing for such a long time, and that's a part of the also the political crisis we're living in, because a lot of people have lost their jobs and are really frustrated that the Chinese are doing the jobs. And so this is like how it all started, but there is Leilani, and you and I talked before the show about this, because there is this firm who advises big companies how they should think, and they call McKinsey. Can we tell about that, that business model that they want us to they want a big company to follow,

Peter S Goodman:

sure. So McKinsey is a company that is all about employing data, the sort of feel of science to any narrative that makes share prices go up. You know, it's a creature of the financialized modern reality that we're all marinated in, and it's hired as advisors to companies that are interested in making share prices go up, because the ultimate boss is the investor class. And McKinsey takes this very sensible idea just in time, or lean manufacturing, as it's known, which is this concept pioneered by Toyota at the end of the Second World War. And they say they study Ford and mass assembly in the United States. And I also tell the story of Ford in the book, and they say, well, that's great for the United States, where they have virtually unlimited land and resources. That's not for us. We can't just make as many cars as we possibly can and figure out how to sell them later. Japan's been devastated by the war. Capital is constrained. Japan is very mountainous country, which with not that much developable land. So we're going to look to eliminate waste. We're going to make just as many cars as we need to replenish the supply, and we're going to have our suppliers and parts and components deliver products to the assembly line in real time, just as they're needed. And the metaphor that Toyota uses is, think about your local grocer and milk. You want as much milk on the shelves so that nobody leaves for lack of milk, but you don't want to have to spill a lot of milk that's gone bad. You want just as much as you need to satisfy customer demand. And this works very well for Toyota. Toyota becomes, by many measures, the world's most successful auto company. Well, McKinsey enters in the 1980s when this whole scientific veneer is put on this share price maximization obsession, and they say to corporate executives, yes, go just in time which they turn into this crude imperative to just slash inventory instead of packing parts and components and warehouses as a hedge against trouble. I mean, crisis is just part of life. We don't know when the next crisis will come, but we know it will come instead of doing that and having a backup plan just, you know, liquidate inventory and give the money to yourself executive for as a reward for being smart enough to hire McKinsey, give it to your shareholders in the form of dividends. They'll love it. Share prices will go up, and that works great, so long as nothing bad happens. But life is unfortunately, an enterprise where bad things sometimes happen, and so every time there's a shock we run out of stuff, and in industries where there's monopoly power at play, that's actually a bonanza for companies, because if competitors can't step in to make more of the thing that's in short supply, that means the price goes up, and that's essentially what we've been living in is the result of this excessive embrace of just in time, and that played a critical role in the shortages during the pandemic.

Fredrik Gertten:

And Leilani here, you say, Wow, this is exactly what happens in the housing world.

Leilani Farha:

Well, there's lots of similarities. One thing I want. To add, which I picked up from your book, which I didn't know. And I hope I get this right, but it's quite sinister what McKinsey does because, of course, they're exporting this business model, you know, globally, but they their earnings are also based on the efficiencies that they procure for different businesses, it's normally built into the contract that they have, so they stand to profit as a business themselves by slashing and slashing inventory, slashing workers, and getting into this lean and I would call mean business model. So just, I just thought that was like, astounding, yeah. I think that's really important, yeah. And I mean, there are lots of similarities between the from what I understand, between the business model around supply chain and just in time, and the way in which the big investors and corporate landlords work with housing, right? It's, it's, it's a leanness in terms of, I mean, they will cut every service. They will abandon janitors, fire janitors. They will attach fees to everything, your fob key to get in. If you replace your fob key, it's super expensive, etc, etc. And it's a, it's a similar race to the bottom, a race to the bottom in terms of what you provide to people, and Race to the Top for profitability and for benefiting corporations. I mean, the parallels are definitely there. I was actually quite surprised again thinking, Oh, supply chain. I mean, there's a direct relationship to housing, and I think you touch on it in the book, you've touched on it in some of the interviews I've listened to with you, where people are saying, well, we can't build more housing because it's just simply too expensive. Supply chain issues, too costly to get the goods over here.

Fredrik Gertten:

And I also see, yeah, sorry, Peter, yeah, no, go ahead. No. And I was thinking, because in the housing we talked about tenants, we talked about people who need a home, home to stay. But in your book, now you you can see the other say, let's say called victims of this system. And that's the workers, right? And you see that from you back in history, how union busting has been something really important to be able to implement this model. I mean, we know that the success of the of the countries in Southeast Asia was also based on union busting, but, but also now in America is obviously, that's it's a part of to for them to be so strong as they are now they can't have unions, because that's that's bad for business.

Peter S Goodman:

I think, I think the the frame is, it's a McKinsey comes in and they want to shift the risk from the company, which is their customer, their client to working people they want, which means taking away security from working people. And this is similar to housing, right? I mean, it's, it's about who's on the hook when something goes wrong, who's ultimately going to going to suffer and and the the genius, and I'm putting that in air quotes, because it's, it is quite sinister is that McKinsey comes to view people as a form of inventory. So it's really, if your frame is lowering costs is good, that's efficiency. We're going to have various metrics that are going to demonstrate our success in lowering costs. Then anything you do that improves that metric is good. And they approach people as just another line item on the corporate budget that costs money. And how do you reduce that? Well, you need people to be flexible. That's a term that the consulting class loves. You know, there's flexibility, like lean efficiency just in time, but what that really means for human beings is you're basically on call all the time, but you're not getting paid for your time, so you're working in a pharmaceutical warehouse. Well, the ebb and flow of the demand for your labor, you're no longer going to be compensated for not being available to your children, to your partner, to do whatever the hell you might like to do when you're not at work, that time is no longer yours, but you're only going to get a paycheck for the time that you're actually in the warehouse, doing your your job. And we see this sort of dynamic throughout the supply chain, in trucking, you know, where the just in time mentality, as I describe in the book, essentially treats truck drivers like people who have unlimited time and time that's basically valueless. The time that matters is the time as measured by the company, you know, per revenue, like they always want to show we're generating more revenue for whatever effort. Putting it, but behind the scenes is this army of people basically not compensated, their lifestyles, downgraded their security, taken away. That's the McKinsey and really the investor class approach.

Fredrik Gertten:

And in your book, you talk about this. You travel with a truck driver all over the big United States of America, but you also meet railroad workers. And, I mean, it's the same story coming out everywhere, that people aren't are under more stress and and they don't see their families and and at the time where the companies are making more profits than ever. So it's they don't, right? They don't really share their success with our workers in some way.

Peter S Goodman:

Oh, I mean, it's actually work. I mean, it's the reverse of that, right? So a lot of these jobs Take, take truck driving. That's always been a tough job. It's always involved being on the road, worrying about, you know, caffeinating enough that you don't fall asleep at the wheel, but not so much that you're always having to pull over to use the restroom. It's hard to find a place to park a tractor trailer pulling a 53 foot trailer behind it, and it's always been a tough job. But in the States, until deregulation in the late 70s, the teamsters were in charge. The teamsters are a somewhat notorious Union, but they represent the value of having a union, and it was a very well paid job. You were middle class to upper middle class if you were on the road and your family lived well, even though you didn't get to see enough of them. Well. Now we're running out of truck drivers in the United States. Air quotes there again, because we have run out of people willing to sign off on the miserable life of driving a truck at now working poor wages. Yeah,

Kirsten McRae:

You are listening to Pushback Talks. Have an idea for the show. Send us a message. You can reach us at info@maketheshift.com, or film@wgfilm.com now back to the show,

Leilani Farha:

and you make a point. I think it's at the end of the book, actually, where in Ford's days, because you, you do spend some time, which I valued, talking about the Ford business model in yesteryear. And you say, in Ford's days when, when he was facing, you know, the retention problem, retaining employees. What he chose to do was double their wages, right? And what we're choosing to do now is a go around. How can we get rid of people entirely? How can you automate this and do this without people? Because people are messy and people have lives that businesses don't want to deal with, it's pretty phenomenal. And a sad, it's kind of a sad state where we've landed. And, I mean, you, you have more optimism at the end of the book, but we'll get we'll get there. We're not not yet. I have more questions.

Fredrik Gertten:

I mean, we shouldn't we? I mean, you know, breaking social in the end, I was trying to make a film about that change is possible and that we need to stay hopeful, that to be hopeful is is also a way of resisting. So we also this podcast has to end with some light. Peter, we just put a note, put a note. But Leilani, now,

Leilani Farha:

yeah, before we get there, before we get there, what we haven't really talked about is China, China itself, and that's a very big part of your book. I came away thinking of China as frenemy as a result of your book, right? I mean, many people will say China is the enemy in the US and the enemy in not just politically because of its communism, but also economically because it's taken jobs away from America, et cetera. And I'd like you to describe that it's a much more complicated relationship with China, dating back to Clinton and the World Trade Organization, etc. Maybe you could describe that for us.

Peter S Goodman:

Yeah, I appreciate that, because I think it's really important. I mean, one of the few things that both major political parties here in the United States agree on right now is that China's our enemy. It's this job stealing juggernaut we blame China for, you know, depressing middle class livelihood, standards of living. Well, the truth is, the Chinese labor has been the go to move for the American investor class, going all the way back to the construction of the railroads in the middle of the 19th century. I mean, we had mostly Irish laborers who chafed at low wages and having to sleep in miserable encampments out in the middle of nowhere, getting scurvy, losing limbs to frostbite. This was tough and dangerous work. They weren't paid enough, and they mobilized, and they started to withhold their labor so the robber barons of that. Era, literally sent recruitment companies off to China to go persuade Chinese laborers to come to the United States and build the railroads. And in the worst cases, the bones of laborers were sent back across the Pacific to home villages. And you can really draw a straight line from that to American retailers, American manufacturers lobbying the Clinton administration to let China into the World Trade Organization, which happens in 2001 because, you know why? To companies like Walmart. Why are they so eager to crack China? Well, in part, China, at that point is 1.2 going on, 1.3 billion people. It looks like the world's largest consumer market in terms of potential for just about everything, but it is a land where labor unions are banned, where workplace safety and environmental standards can be bypassed if you cut in a local Chinese Communist Party official. So you get this really ironic joint venture that between Walmart, the world's largest retailer, and the People's Republic of China. This, this institution derived from peasant led a rebellion in the name Marxism, and Clinton is at the center of that story. I tell the story in the book about your Clinton comes into office having criticized his predecessor, George H W Bush for coddling the butchers of Beijing. This is, you know, after the brutal crackdown of the pro democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 by the People's Liberation Army. Well, Clinton says it's going to be different in my administration, I'm going to focus on human rights. Not even a decade later, he's at the Great Hall of the People at a banquet hosted by then President Jiang Zemin, with Hillary Jiang Zemin wife as well. He's lifting a glass and saluting the progress of China in developing as he's pushing for this deal to get China into the World Trade Organization. And you know, this is one of those ironies that an author just cannot resist. Literally walks to the back of the banquet hall. This is at the Great Hall. The people across the street from Tiananmen Square itself, picks up the baton and conducts the People's Liberation Army orchestra in a rousing rendition of John Phillips house of marsh. Now, you know that is a metaphor that is rich, but if you parse this, you know this tells you the story of what's really driving American engagement, Western engagement, in general, with China. It's about getting a crack at low wage labor. And American retailers pushed hard to get China into the World Trade Organization, and they got what they wanted. Part of the problem, I mean, there are multiple problems with what happened later. We've discussed this on your last podcast, in terms of Davos man, is that trade with China has actually been enormously beneficial to the investor class. It's been great for consumers. We've gotten really cheap goods. It's been a nightmare for a couple of million people who lost their jobs in American factory towns. And the sin is not that China stole jobs. It's that we, in the wealthiest country on Earth, abandoned those people. We don't have national health care. We don't have help with housing, especially if your entire town is suddenly full of people who can't pay their mortgages anymore and home and they can't sell their houses because they're below the value of what they owe the banks. We don't have programs for that. We have minimal unemployment insurance. We have very poor job training. We actually have something called the trade trade adjustment assistance, which is supposed to step in when people lose their jobs in the face of trade deals. And it's woefully underfunded. But this is not something that's happened to us. The deindustrialization of American communities because of Beijing. It's because of decisions made in boardrooms in New York and Seattle, in the halls of Congress. And the other problem is that Clinton and the retailers who pushed for a crack at China weren't, you know, okay with a narrative that said, we're just crudely going to go and pursue profits in a place where there's no democracy. They sold this as it's not just about the money. This is about liberating China from its authoritarian strictures. This is pro democracy. Trade is going to be great for the Chinese middle class. Once people get a taste of Kentucky Fried Chicken, they're going to demand the ballot box. And you know, how's that worked out? Well, lot of people in China have been pulled out of poverty. That part's really good. A lot of consumers around the world have gotten a crack at low priced products, and the Chinese Communist Party has taken the gains and has doubled down on a very authoritarian police state, and that has been. Uh, inconvenient, to say the least, for people like Bill Clinton, who and successive administrations after who promised that, you know, trade would not only be great for working people and consumers, would be great for China as well. The only part of the story that's panned out is the people who actually wanted a crack at China have gotten a lot wealthier,

Leilani Farha:

exactly, exactly. But I like what you said there, Peter about when you implied, and it's certainly in your book about capitalism, and in push the film, I'm asked, you know, is capitalism the problem? And I end up kind of defending capitalism. And I say, Well, I think the problem is capitalism run amok, not capitalism per se. And what you just said kind of gets to that. I mean, you can have capitalism and still have social supports in place, things like health care, things like retraining for people who whose jobs have changed or are no longer in existence. You can have a good education system. You can have supports for people who need them in housing, whether it's a rent supplement or something, right? And it's the loss of all of that while capitalism is just running forward for and working for very few people and fewer all the time that becomes the problem. At least for me, that's

Fredrik Gertten:

a podcast we should do. Leilani, it's like, can we have capitalism that respects the planet and respects human rights? You know exactly. See if somebody can come up with, what do you say, Peter, can we have a capitalism that respects the planet and human rights?

Peter S Goodman:

Yeah. I mean, I think, look, I'm unabashedly a capitalist, and now we're bleeding back into the previous book, Davos man, how the billionaires devour the world. I just push but I don't think it's capitalism running. I don't think it's capitalism at all. I think what we've got is a kind of welfare state for the billionaire class that's able to use its money to purchase political power and then use that political power to write rules in its favor, often directly against the wishes and the interests of of the public. And you know, capitalism is not about no regulation and monopolists just getting to do whatever they want. There are the people who get to do whatever they want. Would like us to believe it's capitalism, and they'd like us to believe that we can either have the miracles of the supply chain and container ships and the Internet and central air conditioning and vaccines and all this good stuff, or we can monkey around with the magic formula and then, you know, we're we might as well be living in Venezuela, but that's just nonsense, and we know that. I mean, Fredrik, you're sitting in a country that you know has a social welfare. State. Is very trade focused, has a lot of innovation, has seen economic growth, has a thriving middle class. There are a lot of very rich people there. My last book was actually pretty critical of Sweden in terms of how it's actually diminished some of that social welfare state. But, you know, let's get real. I mean, I don't want to jump ahead, but you already touched on this question of automation and how. You know, faced with the crisis of running out of workers, a lot of companies have doubled down on, let's just get rid of workers altogether. Robots don't get pregnant, they don't get sick, they don't have kids to take care of, they don't need a break, they don't need to use the restroom. Well, okay, but I'm not against automation either. I'm not against AI. I'm not against robotics, but I want to know who's in control of it, and for whose benefit. And I'd constantly come back to a conversation I had when I visited a mine in Sweden, back, I think, in 2017 or 2018 where they were testing out self driving vehicles. And as an American, I was predisposed to assume that the workers there would just be aghast at this. And everybody I talked to it, that mindset, we're fine with it, because it'll make our company more profitable and the companies more profitable, we'll get higher wages, and if our jobs are not needed, they'll train us for something else. And that wasn't some utopian faith. That was a reflection of lived experience in Sweden, where labor unions are strong, where employers Council sit across the table from from unions to hash out wages that everyone understands must reflect productivity growth. And in contrast to my own country, there is well funded and successful job training. So those workers were right to and they have national health care, and university is is cheap, and there's help with with housing. So those workers were correct to assume, yeah, they don't need me and doing what I'm doing now, I'll be okay. My cup, my my my family won't be sleeping under a bridge, and my health care won't, won't be in the line, and they'll train just for. Something else. So that's an that's a clear illustration of how you can have capitalism, dynamism competition. You can have businesses failing and people losing jobs, and still have something that I think we could just view as decent and good for society?

Leilani Farha:

Yeah, I really like that divide, that that some of what's happening is not, in fact, capitalism and and I will say, I come from a family of manufacturers. My mother started a manufacturing business, believe it or not, manufacturing, shoulder rests for violins. It's actually an international business. My sister now runs it, and they run it old school. Everything's made in Canada and Italy. You know, the workers are paid living wages above women living wage. In fact, it's a it's a kind and gentle kind of capitalist enterprise that we, the whole family, has benefited from that. Being said, their boxes, the only thing manufactured in China. The boxes got held up because of the Yemeni port issue, most recently, because of Gaza. But I mean just to say I do believe that there is a different that there is a thing called capitalism that can work, and it doesn't look like what's happening out there reflected in your it has worked. I mean, we've lived it exactly. So

Fredrik Gertten:

to all of our listeners out there who are really angry with capitalism, please write to us and tell us what you think, because I know that there are, there are people who are really pissed off with capitalism, because it's we see our planet getting destroyed and we see human rights abused all the time.

Peter S Goodman:

Do we have time to jump back to Ford very briefly?

Fredrik Gertten:

Yeah, let's do that.

Peter S Goodman:

You are go, I think, very appropriately, taking us back to 1914 when Henry Ford doubles wages for his assembly workers, and people call him a communist, they say, you're going to destroy the economics for all industry in America. And he says, I'm a capitalist, and I just want to make my products at scale and reliably. And I understand that if I want the best labor, I'm going to have to pay for it if I want people showing up who are not worried about paying their bills and who are not just looking for the next job, even after I've trained them, I'm going to have to pay and now the crucial difference between Ford of then and Ford now is that today at Ford, the boss is Wall Street, because it's a publicly traded company, Henry Ford had the luxury of not just having to manage to meet the next quarterly earnings expectations. And a lot of what we're talking about is a function not of capitalism. It's our unique kind of capitalism, where we've depended upon these very long supply chains that span oceans, and all of it, or much of it, is influenced by publicly traded companies that can't do much unless it leads to making their numbers look better the next quarter. That's the source of a lot of our problems.

Fredrik Gertten:

Peter, so how do we change this? How do we push back? We

Peter S Goodman:

embrace labor mobilization. It's healthy for workers to get a greater piece of the action that will make their jobs more tenable. They'll be less likely to want to leave them, which for those of us who are just thinking about how to get packages delivered to our door is a good thing. We should embrace antitrust enforcement. This is especially true in the United States, where my book spends a lot of time. We got a lot of monopoly power, a lot of engineered scarcity in this system. And we need to go after monopolies so that we have real capitalism, which involves competition, and that creates a lot of dynamism and innovation and growth, and then we've got to think about sense of place. I mean, I don't put a lot of stock into the idea that consumers are going to save us from the vulnerabilities in our supply chain, because most of us are busy doing our jobs, tending to our kids, looking after relatives, whatever. We're not all going to become supply chain geeks, but to the extent we are thinking about, how do I distribute my money in my community to companies that are doing right by their workers, that aren't just answerable to far away shareholders, that's a good thing in the same way that it's healthy that even huge companies are no longer able to just pretend that, you know, a factory in southern Ohio is the equivalent of a factory in southern China, as long as there are container ships in the internet, there are differences, there are risks, there are problems associated. I'm not anti globalization. I don't think we need to. Get obsessed with making everything right in our home countries, I think that would be a prescription for chaos and downgraded living standards, because our manufacturing is dependent upon a global supply chain. But we need to recalibrate, and we certainly need to think about diminishing our dependence upon this unregulated international shipping cartel, great,

Fredrik Gertten:

regulate, recalculate, recalibrate, recalibrate, unionize and push back. And that's why we have this podcast, isn't it? Leilani,

Leilani Farha:

it certainly is. What a great I love those recommendations. Peter, I think that's excellent, and I do think your book certainly made me look at every manufactured product in my household completely differently, completely differently. And that's that's part of the point right to just say, like local is going to be better than multinational in some senses,

Fredrik Gertten:

I have this beautiful book here Peter Easter way to buy it without going to Amazon.

Peter S Goodman:

Go to your independent bookseller. Yeah, you'll find it there. You can find it well, I guess Audible is essentially Amazon, but yes, your independent bookseller should be supported. There's a great site indie books that can direct you to a local bookseller you can order from the publisher if you like. That's HarperCollins, but I appreciate you all checking it

Fredrik Gertten:

up. Yeah. Thank you for your great work, Peter and thank you for spending some time with me and Leilani, because we like to meet smart people and we we learn by meeting

Peter S Goodman:

you guys are an inspiration. Thanks for your work, and thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Fredrik Gertten:

Thank you very much. Thank you and Leilani, we're rolling again. That's nice, isn't it? Season

Leilani Farha:

Eight?

Fredrik Gertten:

Is it season eight? Oh my god.

Leilani Farha:

Whoa

Fredrik Gertten:

we are seasoned podcasters now. Episodes. Yeah, so Leilani, this was again, amazing to we learned so much we're doing by doing this podcast, and what I learned from our amazing team is that we need to tell you listeners, that you need to subscribe to this podcast and you need you should kind of go in and rate us and make reviews, because that kind of helps us. And of course, you should tell your friends. Maybe you should even tweet or send links of the podcast to your friends, because, as we don't have any money, we need your help to spread the word about the podcast, we put a little some work into this and some passion. So it's good if we have even more listeners, but you who are now listening, you're welcome. You're our friend. Leilani,

Leilani Farha:

Well, there's one more thing, listeners out there, if you want to actually support us with a few euros or dollars. You can become a patron. Go to patreon.com, look for pushback talks and send us some money. Love.

Fredrik Gertten:

That's nice. It's actually nice, even if it's not paying for the full work. But it's there is a lot of work put into a podcast like this, so it's good if we can pay salaries. So good talk soon. We have more episodes coming up. We do so we should get to work.

Leilani Farha:

Gotta keep reading.

Fredrik Gertten:

Yes. Thank you.

Kirsten McRae:

Pushback talks is produced by WG film. To support the podcast, become a patron by going to patreon.com/pushback talks. Follow us on social media at make underscore the shift and push underscore the film, or check out our websites. maketheshift.org. pushthefilm.com, or breakingsocialfilm.com