Funding for To the Contrary provided by E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation This week on To the Contrary, how the pandemic has reshaped the world of work, and how changes have hit women harder than men.

Then how to reform juvenile justice systems.

♪♪ Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe' Welcome to To the Contrary, a discussion of news and social trends for diverse perspectives.

Up first, women work and the post-pandemic work world As back to work parents join back to school children.

Parents are facing a whole new work world, markedly jumbled and dissimilar from the one they knew pre-pandemic.

This fall, some major firms are requiring workers to return full time to the office.

Others offer hybrid work, a combination of office and at home work.

Pandemic era parents who became very used to working from home are resisting a return to daily commutes, fighting rush hour jams and seeing a lot less of their kids.

According to the National Women's Law Center, quote, Among full time year round workers in 2020, mothers were typically paid $0.74 for every dollar paid to fathers.

This means that during the pandemic, the pay gap costs mothers $17,000 per year.

Then there's the torturous experience of many mothers who lost jobs due to the pandemic or went part time as schools went remote and childcare dried up.

Mothers who worked full time in 2020 typically made just $0.58 for each dollar earned by fathers.

The pandemic forced half a million more working women out of the labor force than men.

Women are still down a net 98,000 jobs since before the pandemic.

Even as men have recovered all their losses and then some.

The Washington Post reports Americans want more fulfilling lives and no longer assume a career in a traditional job gets them there.

White collar workers have started a viral online discussion of so-called quiet quitting.

That's when they don't quit, but they do scale back from 60 to 40 hour weeks.

Meanwhile, Forbes reports working from home has some serious downsides for women who receive less exposure and are excluded from important interactions, even in hybrid working environments.

Those factors hold women back.

Perhaps all these changes help explain a resurgence in union organizing since 2020, 4000 people, or 90% of those who work in Google's cafeterias have joined unions.

The website PayScale.com reports 96% of cafeteria workers are women.

Joining me today are DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Republican political strategist Rina Shah, co-founder of Reproaction Erin Matson and Republican consultant Ann Stone.

So starting with you, Rina Shah, is it too late to push workers full time back to the office?

Is that gone forever, do you think?

I certainly.

Don't think.

It's too late for people to get a push from their bosses to be back in the office.

There are some good benefits to being in a workplace surrounded by others after we've had so much time of isolation.

But it also very much depends on the industry you're in.

So I think that I am encouraged to see these calls, to have people return to some degree of normalcy.

But I want people to understand that there should be caution if you're at the top of a food chain.

There are employees that need there, that need their needs met as well.

Of course, we're not talking about low income women here.

We will get to that because most office workers are going to be higher paid.

They're working online, etc., seeing this rush in organization of cafeteria workers who on average nationwide, that's 90, 96% of them are women.

Is that due to seeing them more transparency, Erin?

Seeing them, they see what what other workers at Google are getting, And they want the same benefits.

Google, cafeteria workers, Starbucks, Amazon.

I mean, we're seeing record interest in unions right now.

And it's really exciting to see this surge of workers rising together and demanding better protections.

I think it's a great thing.

Bonnie, the nature of work has shifted since the pandemic, and it is incumbent on leaders of organizations to figure it out or they are going to lose their talent.

You know, I listen to people who say that I and to media reports that talk about, you know, never going back.

But what about the next recession?

I mean, the job market is strong right now.

There aren't enough employees.

What about when the Fed cranks up interest rates so high that even that goes into recession?

Are people still going to turn down good jobs that require full time in-office appearances?

No.

What when you , when you We have good times now.

So there's every reason for workers to use their leverage.

You get into a recession, you're in a whole different ball game.

Then the ball is in the hands of the employer.

We're in good times and workers are taking advantage of it.

Will high income, higher wage earner Goldman Sachs, who's being whose workers are being required to return to the office full time?

Will they be able to find other work that pays them that much?

They may not be able to, but you know what?

If somebody is a competent business owner, they understand their number one asset are their workers and even the lower income workers.

It doesn't matter.

Once you get them trained, you've invested that money to drive them out by being unreasonable is insane.

If Business Insanity.

Rina, As an anti-Trump Republican, the Obama administration started the law to require employers to fill out how many people of each gender or or non-binary and of each race work for them.

And in what capacities to add salaries to that?

And the Trump administration threw that part of the rule out the National Women's Law Center took the Trump administration to court and just recently got that rule reinstated.

So in a couple of years, I don't know how many, but we will be getting that information.

Once women know their bosses what their you know, their male office compatriots are are making and finding out that for the same job, they're they're being paid less.

Women of color, even more so.

What's that going to do?

Well, I welcome any amount of transparency we can get from any degree of government.

You know, when we push for that, we encourage society to be more open and accepting it in the end, inclusive.

And that's the name of the game for so many people who are at the federal level serving now.

But it seems that there is one political party that once again put inclusivity in a certain way versus another.

I think it's a little bit deeper than that.

I think it's about how we spend our dollars on obtaining certain type of data.

Of course, there are any any job that is funded by any amount of taxpayer dollars.

I think we definitely need that sunlight on those figures.

But in the private sector, it's encouraging and helpful and I think corporations will be more willing to submit that data and push it out into the public sphere, too, because it it definitely helps make society work better.

Do you really believe, for example, that finding out what a CEO earns who earns something like 50 times what the average employee in the company that he mainly he sometimes she runs?

Is that going to make things better?

I really appreciate transparency.

And you know Bonnie and publicly traded companies that information about what the CEOs are being paid is available publicly and so that it's something, you know, executive pay has ballooned .

While , well, it has not caught up for workers.

And I think it's incumbent in this economy in this moment where work is being redefined for is to listen to people at all levels in their organization raise salary bans, have transparency just at hiring in terms of what salary ranges are for a given position and really institute those flexible schedules that people are demanding.

So I think that's one piece of a broader puzzle.

But yes, information is power.

Transparency ultimately is good.

And I know that a lot of people fear it that are in executive positions because they know they probably are making more than they should for what they're contributing.

I don't think, you know, lower level employees think they should be making what the chief executive is.

But I think it puts pressure as well as if it's publicly traded, having shareholders spotlight on it as well to try to make sure those CEO compensation is in line with what they're actually contributing.

All right.

That's it for this discussion.

Please follow me on Twitter at Bonnie Erbe' Behind the headlines, juvenile justice, poverty, lack of opportunities and youth incarceration is a problem facing many American cities in the state known as the world's incarceration capital residents work toward sustainable solutions.

I was supposed to go to the Florida Gators to play football and it ended up in prison.

In 1994, a young man from New Orleans, Kiana Calloway, was arrested an charged with first degree murder fetacide and home robbery.

He was convicted and sentenced to life.

At 16, 17 years old, my life was deliberated and deadlocked, all for a crime that I did not commit.

His first appeal ended in a mistrial and a third trial.

Calloway was convicted of a lesser charge, second degree manslaughter.

His sentence, 34 years, 17 in prison and 17 on parole.

My first day home, I vowed that as long as I'm alive, I will do everything in my power to make sure that another Kianna doesn't have to endure the pain and the hardships and the trauma that was forced upon my life.

With six more years on parole.

Calloway continues to fight for exoneration, all while keeping his word to give back.

He founded Project Detour, a mentoring program, and as executive director of Roots and Renewal, Calloway helps formerly incarcerated men reenter society.

Roots of Renewal, teaches life strategies and construction skills with on the job training.

The program is actually my life's work after Katrina.

There's over tens of thousands of blighted houses in our city, and our community has just been sitting there for the past 16, 17 years.

So what we've done is we we have a relative partnership that actually go out and identify these properties that we can actually revamp.

Rehabilitate, revitalize and actually put back on the market for little or low income families.

Calloway also connects police and lawmakers with young people to promote understanding and better relationships.

It's a big job, but the people of New Orleans working for a better tomorrow say they learned an important lesson in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

We can never do this work alone.

We have to we have to do it collectively.

And we are by being in the coalition, working with the Louisiana Center for Children's Rights.

We are all of a part of a coalition.

The Louisiana Center for Children's Rights, or LCCR plays a big role in that coalition.

Would never see in a year where the population of arrested children was ready to go to less than 95% black children.

We have gone two years with only locking up black children in our jail here in New Orleans.

LCCR, our serves as public attorney for 90% of juveniles arrested.

Executive Director Aaron Clark Rizzio says this work is not only crucial to the individuals they represent, but also to the community.

We use what we learned through this representation to guide our policy advocacy work, where we are largely trying to shrink the harmful systems right now in the juvenile justice system and the criminal legal system.

I advocate to change the laws that affect our clients and.

The work that we do in the courtroom.

Rachel Gassert A policy director for LCCR, works with like minded organizations.

We all come together every week to to have a strategy call.

We're up there.

In committee hearings together.

And just commiserating on text threads.

But we try to.

Support each other's legislative priorities.

One legislative victory was the passage of the Raise the age law.

17 year olds in Louisiana are no longer automatically charged as adults, although judges still have discretion in violent crimes.

Limiting solitary confinement is also an objective.

When a problem is so acute, like the current use of solitary confinement in our prisons here in Louisiana for with children, we are compelled to act.

We need to stop that sort of state violence as quickly as we can.

But overall, we use it to call attention to why locking up children is ineffective and that youth jail youth prisons are ineffective.

And they focus on solutions.

Increasingly, we're also trying to propose alternatives to the system, such as the use of restorative justice, and also just investing in the health and wellness of communities as a true crime fighting strategy.

There are holistic approach includes youth advocates and social workers.

As a.

Social worker, help.

guide the family and the children throughout the stages.

Of the court proceedings.

They also assist young people's needs in education, housing, jobs and family reunification.

They listen carefully and respectfully to community concerns.

It's important for the community members to come together for those who are partnering to make sure that that child is connected to what they need.

And the reason being is that when we have more support the better outcome the child would have.

General pushback is that juvenile justice reform doesn't work.

There's absolutely no evidence for that.

We have a plethora of evidence that putting kids in youth prisons and detention centers.

And certainly adult prisons only increases the likelihood that they're going to re-offend.

Another partner in the juvenile justice mission is Covenant House.

They're the only youth shelter in the city.

For years we had a drop in legal clinic there, as we often are serving the same young people.

And we recently just had a meeting specifically to talk about a couple of clients that we we serve, that we both serve and just working through some, some challenges, trying to identify the best way that we collectively can support those individuals.

Rheneisha Robertson is executive director of Covenant House, providing housing for the homeless aged 16 to 22.

Most of our kids have had some encounter with the juvenile justice system.

We have had conversations with some of our juvenile judges.

It is important that we build relationships that they are aware of the services that are available.

Robertson also looks back to the lessons of Katrina.

My first experience was in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, working together, leveraging our individual resources, our individual networks, funding we had to work together.

It was our lifeline.

We had to rebuild a community, rebuild systems.

You couldn't do it without the support of your community, other community partners.

So that was, I think that carried over.

That's truly has been a model, I think, in the New Orleans landscape.

Eleanor, how important is juvenile justice reform?

Well, this is certainly the time to do it.

And so you have the country looking at how we treat juveniles and making reforms for the first time in many years.

This may have been brought on by COVID, making people look at reforms in many areas, but we have not made reforms in juvenile justice for as long as I can remember.

So this is a very important moment for juvenile justice.

Well, but we have made reforms years ago, reforms in the sense that we're trying to give people who are incarcerated some education so they get out with something behind.

Having spent 20 years being locked up and not gaining any skills.

What do you think, Erin, are the best ways to help young people and particularly young people of color gain reading skills, writing skills, marketable skills.

So when they get out, they don't have to return to crime to earn a living.

In particular, I mean, we need to look at this systemically.

And it is.

Young people of color are over targeted by police, over incarcerated compared to their white peers.

And so that's part of the system as well.

And then, of course, underinvestment in education and resources.

And we see even the struggle for clean drinking water.

I mean, imagine what is happening right now in Jackson, Mississippi.

When we talk about young people who are currently in the system, 1- I would strongly advocate looking at people who are currently in the system and seeing who can be let go immediately.

There are a number of young people who are serving time for nonviolent offenses where there there must be some better way to go about this.

2- providing education inside and providing opportunities and ways to get out.

3-Going back and looking at folks who have been charged as adults, no one should be thrown away for the rest of their life when they are a young person.

Bonnie, a lot of this has to do with racism.

I've known of people who were incarcerated and learned how to read the law and started working with their lawyers on their own defenses to try to get out of prison sooner.

Is it possible to do that with kids?

Well, let me tell you, I'm so passionate about this.

I actually did independent study on juvenile justice back when I was in high school.

Talk took off an entire year of high school to do it.

And sadly, a lot of the things that I observed back then, we're talking decades ago, still exist in the system.

It's still a problem.

But three of you have touched on exactly one of the keys, and that's education.

A lot of these kids that end up in there, it's because they can't read and write, don't feel that they can get ahead.

So giving them some hope is important.

But I also will tell you, my family, a lot of law enforcement, my brother, my late brother was a chief of police for 30 years.

And one of the things he was known for was letting kids off on their first offense.

And he would say to them, I'm going to give you a chance.

I see you back here and oh, you're going to get more than the book thrown at you.

Some of the kids that he let off, I would have occasion to meet when I was visiting in his hometown and they would tell me the difference it made in their lives.

And almost to a person it turned their lives around.

So I think more and more we have to do more to keep them out of the system, give them that second chance.

But nowadays there's so many children coming from single parent homes, no other parent involved.

Many children in the first, you know, six, seven kids in the family, no money just from a cop telling them you better do better.

Is that really enough?

- They need resources .

- Not a better do better But I'm going to give you another chance.

And I'll tell you, one of the guys I can remember came from one of those situations.

Single mother, a lot of siblings, really distressed situation.

But he did turn his life around because he thought somebody gave him a chance.

And also putting putting them in contact with better role models, especially male role models for the male juvenile delinquents is a really important thing, but education is central to all of it.

Rina, Do you think those kids are open to change?

If you get into prison when you're 15 and you're you come in with a first grade reading level, can you change?

Well, I mean, kids are kids at the end of the day.

And when you see these juvenile populations and I've had intimate experience with this because in 2007 I was at Georgetown University Law Center and I was through their criminal justice clinic I was doing an investigative internship.

And I got to know so many young people who are unfortunately locked up in DC prison and I visited with them and they were so hungry and starved for attention, for relationship, for some kind of bond.

I kept in touch as a pen pal, a writing pen pal for years with a couple of them, and it was such a pleasure to get their letters.

But at the same time, I was so saddened because so much of their life, hadn't changed and it felt like the world was moving on without them and some would get locked up again.

And it feels like nothing has changed.

There are these schools that are out there that are starved for any type of resource so that their people and their students can do better in general and send out better students into the community.

There are two systems of justice for people of color in this country.

There are these youth who are committing smaller offenses, and yet they're seeing people with connections, with money get off for doing far worse.

So what are we doing here?

I think we need real reform from the state level, but it can happen at the county level too.

It has to be an all of the above approach .

Does it require federal resources?

Do localities have enough money to give these kids the opportunities, the help, the support, the relationships that Rina was talking about, that they crave, the attention, etc..

I mean, you hear about juvenile facilities.

They're all understaffed.

Federal resources are absolutely essential.

Juvenile justice is not where states are putting their money.

In fact, prisons of of any kind and certainly not juvenile justice camps are not where the money is going.

It's going to be up to Congress to program that is to say, target money to these facilities if they want these juveniles to become working, law abiding adults.

You know, there's been this trend across the country in recent years, not just to privatize things like parking meters, but prisons and essentially what these private companies do, some of them oversees companies, is they squeeze all of the profits out of the budget and leave the prisons with fewer resources Well, the last thing you want to do is to privatize these facilities.

You're absolutely right.

There's no incentive to put money into these facilities unless you are a local jurisdiction or a state.

So privatizing would mean starving them.

It's this the last thing you want to do if you want to reform juvenile justice facilities.

All right.

Thanks to you all.

That's it for this edition.

Please follow me on Twitter and visit our website, pbs.org/to the contrary.

And whether you agree or think to the contrary.

See you next week.

♪♪ Funding for To the Contrary provided by E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

The Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation.