Thanks for joining us for our conversation on essential jobs and hidden toll of inequality in America. My name is Chris Geary and I'm a senior policy analyst at the Center on Education and Labor at New America, and I'm thrilled to moderate our conversation today with Al Press, Dr. David Michaels, and Kathy Reckleshaus. We're here today to discuss Al Press's recent book, Dirty Work, Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, and to see how the themes of this incredibly important work connect to our current policy moment. Over the past two years, there's been a deep appreciation of and an outpouring of public support for essential workers. Despite this support, we've failed to pass policies that can fairly compensate and protect these workers for their vital work, and this needs to change. Given the risks these workers face throughout and even before the pandemic, the necessity of their work for the functioning of the American economy, and the fact that women, black, Latinx, and immigrant workers are disproportionately represented in the essential workforce, it's of vital importance to ensure these workers are adequately protected and fairly compensated. Al Press's book, Dirty Work, for which he was just awarded the prestigious Helman Prize, shines a spotlight on the grim realities facing many workers and essential jobs. By profiling different workers in incredibly important jobs that are underpaid and unprotected, Al highlights how these workers are so often exploited for their labor and how too often we shy away from even thinking about, let alone work to improve these jobs. Today we're joined by the author of this book, Al Press, and two experts that have worked in this space throughout their careers. In addition to writing Dirty Work, Al is a decorated writer, journalist, and contributor to the New Yorker and New York Times. And as a former New America fellow, Al were excited to welcome you back to New America today. Dr. David Michaels is the former Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, or OSHA, and is currently a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and we're delighted to hear his perspective on the need to advance worker protections and workplace health and safety. Kathy Ruckelshaus is the Legal Director and General Counsel of the National Employment Law Project, where she's helped advance the organization's commitment to fight for policies that create good jobs, expand access to work, and strengthen protections and supports for low-wage workers and the unemployed. I'll note that we will have time for questions and answers at the end, so please put your questions in the chat as they arise. And with that, I will turn this over for our first question towards Al. So, Al, can you tell us why you wrote this book? Sure, and thank you, Chris, for that really generous, lovely introduction. It's great to be back at New America. I had great fellowship, great time as a fellow there supporting other work I've done. I'm really honored. I'm also really honored to share this space with David and Kathy, both of whom I admire and have actually consulted for their expertise on journalism that I've done. And so, you know, it's really a treat to be able to be in conversation with such informed analysts about my book. So I thought I'd begin by just explaining to those out there who may not know what I mean by dirty work. This book is titled what is, in fact, a colloquial expression and the colloquial expression dirty work refers to an unpleasant task that is more often not physically dirty, like holding the garbage off the streets, say. In my book, dirty work refers to something different. It refers to morally troubling activity that society depends on and tacitly condones, but doesn't want to hear too much about. So, for example, the dirty work of running America's prison system, the largest prison system in the world, where more than two million of our fellow citizens are confined, often in brutal conditions that I contend in the book dehumanize not just those who are incarcerated, but also the people who work in carceral institutions, the dirty work of carrying out targeted assassinations in America's never ending wars, or the dirty work of manning the kill floors in industrial slaughterhouses, where so much of the food we consume, the meat poultry, beef poultry and chicken we consume, is processed, but which very few of us who eat meat ever go near or see. And that's a kind of key point in this book. One of the common characteristics of dirty work, of all the different forms of dirty work that I look at in this book, is that it is relatively out of sight, it is hidden behind barriers of different kinds. Sometimes those are physical barriers, the walls, the prisons that hide what happens in jails and prisons from the public. Of course, those walls are also there for security reasons, but I think they perform a dual function in also keeping reporters and citizens from scrutinizing what is going on inside. Laws, secrecy laws that prevent us from knowing much about the drone program and what is actually being done in our name as this kind of geographically limitless war has gone on now for more than two decades. And so as a journalist, as a reporter, exposing what is out of sight and what is maybe deliberately obscured from view, that's a very important task. And it's a challenging one, but it certainly is part of the reason I wrote this book to try to simply shed light on the inner workings of these institutions and on the lives of the people on the front lines who are working in them. The second sort of common theme and also a reason that compelled me to write this book is that as I thought about this kind of work and these jobs, the kind of dirty work I just mentioned, it struck me again and again that this work is not randomly distributed. It is not assigned as often to the sons and daughters of senators and CEOs and society's most privileged, educated members and those at the margins of society, but rather disproportionately delegated to those with the fewest choices and opportunities. And part of that is a matter of location. If we think about where, say, prisons or industrial slaughterhouses are located, it tends to be in more depressed rural areas. And that is where these institutions recruit workers from. But beyond that, I think that there is, there's a quote from my book, actually at the start of the book from James Baldwin and Baldwin. The quote is, the powerless must do their own dirty work. The powerful have it done for them. And he was not, I should hasten to add describing dirty work in the sense that I'm describing it, but that very much applies to the worlds and the work worlds and the activities that I look at in this book. And the reason this is important is that I think through dirty work, through a kind of analysis of this whole world of work that is hidden and obscured, we can think about and hopefully start talking about a dimension of inequality that has gone unnoticed. And that is moral inequality, because the work that I describe in this book puts the people who do it under enormous emotional and psychological duress that comes across in story after story. Sometimes it results in, you know, shattered dignity. Sometimes it results in, you know, lower self-esteem. Sometimes it results in substance abuse or symptoms of trauma and moral injury. An idea we'll be discussing at greater length later. But these are, I contend, what the sociologist Richard sent it once called, hidden injuries of class. That is, they are burdens that people bear as they go about their lives, as they do their jobs, that are very hard, I would say impossible to capture in graphs and charts and statistics, but that can be extremely powerful and pernicious in shaping people's lived experiences and shaping how they feel about themselves, the level of their status, their place in the community, all of these sort of aspects of who we are that are really, I think, fundamental. And so I'm not going to read much from the book, but I just wanted to, you know, flesh out a little bit this idea of moral inequality and what I mean by it. And I say early in the book that moral inequality mirrors and reinforces the more familiar economic kind, just as the rich and the poor have come to inhabit starkly different worlds, an equally stark gap separates the people who perform the most thankless, ethically troubling jobs in America, and those who are exempt from these activities, like so much else in a society that has grown more and more unequal, the burden of dirty in one's hands, and the benefit of having a clean conscience are increasingly functions of privilege, of the capacity to distance one's self from the isolated places where dirty work is performed, while leaving the sorted details to others. And I won't go on too long, but I will say that, you know, implicit in what I've just described is that the dirty work that I that I write about is implicates and involves all of us, even those who are distant from it.  It is present in state and government institutions like prisons and military bases, which after all are, you know, under our collective, our extensions of our public policies. So in that sense, you know, the the importance of this work goes beyond just the people who do it, it extends to the rest of us. Thank you, Al. I very much appreciate that response. And just to follow up with a with another question, Al. So there's been a lot of attention during the pandemic about meatpackers and people that work in the meat processing industry. And your book wonderfully lifts up the importance of people working these jobs, as well as the abuses and exploitation they regularly experience. And so Al, what did you learn in reporting on these workers? Yeah, one one section of my book is indeed focuses on workers in poultry slaughterhouses, particularly one particular plant in Texas. And, you know, to echo what I just said about this work, not being randomly distributed, but disproportionately performed by folks who are more marginal and have fewer choices and opportunities, you know, the poultry industry is a stark illustration of this. The workers that I interviewed, most of them were undocumented immigrants. They were people who had very few choices for other things to do, and who took the job, even when people warned them, including people within their own community, you know, don't do this, you'll you'll suffer repetitive strain injuries. It's hard work. It's demeaning work. And in terms of what I took away, I think that what stays with me, and really is a kind of metaphor for for the whole book. When I spoke to these workers about their experiences, they were mostly women, Mexican women. What they talked about was not the low wages, or the material grievances they might have had, you know, wanting better health benefits or more sick days or slightly higher pay, I'm sure they would have wanted those things. And in some cases, we did touch upon them. But that was not what came out sort of initially and really dominated the conversations. What really came out were these hidden injuries, these moral and psychological and emotional burdens that they bore in this particular plant. There, as in so many poultry plants, there was an emphasis on speed, and on the lines being run as fast as possible, so that so as to maximize production. And as a consequence of this, the workers that I interviewed were often denied bathroom breaks, they were unable, there was a break for lunch where they could go to the bathroom. But because everybody wanted to go then, not everybody got to go. And when someone wanted to stop working, because they had to go to the bathroom, at another point during the day, they would get yelled at and reprimanded. And this was literally both described to me and enacted in a kind of skit that some of the workers performed that I described. And when these workers described what it felt like to be yelled at for asking for a bathroom break. They cried.  And this this experience so stayed with them. That just recalling it and trying to share it and describe it, led them to break down in tears. And I think that tells you something about the weight of these hidden injuries. You know, I think it was President Biden who in his speech at the Democratic Convention said that a job he was told by his father, a job is not just a paycheck. It's about a person's dignity. It's about their place in the community. It's about a lot of other things that that I think escape the notice of economists and policymakers. But those other things matter enormously. And they bear on the kind of country we have, and the kind of really moral lines we cross when we subject workers to exploitation of this of this kind. Thank you, Al. And turning now to David. So David, as the former Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, what did you think of this book? Chris, you know, I was riveted reading it. It's an important powerful book. You know, employers every year report more than 3 million workers are injured on the job. You know, the true number of course is far higher. What Al does is he puts human faces on those injured workers demanding the reader care about these workers. You have to remind my students every year that statistics are people with the tears wiped away. Al does that very well. He does it a deep dive into the root causes of those injuries beyond, you know, the superficial, the outrageously hazardous conditions that you read about in typical media exposés of worker injuries. What Al does is he shows why he shows why those hazards are present. He explains the responsible for those injuries is the system itself, the decisions made by people at the top, not just the immediate supervisors, but you really have to look at the system and you have to look at the CEOs and the boards. And finally he shows as you just heard that working injuries are not just physical, but the workers suffer psychological injuries and as he so well calls them moral injuries. And these injuries can be just as devastating to workers as the physical injuries. And they also have incredible repercussions on workers families and on their communities. Thanks, David. And David, I'm hoping you could take us inside the Department of Labor. Could you help us understand why it's so hard to protect workers, particularly those in essential jobs? Oh, boy. You know, there are so many structural reasons. First, OSHA is a tiny agency with enough inspectors to visit every workplace once every 160 years. And that was before COVID. And now inspections are that much harder to do. OSHA's penalties are small, really trivial to large employers. I often compare the size of fines levied against corporations for environmental crimes to those levied by OSHA for killing workers. And those environmental laws carry much heavier penalties. So corporations take them much more seriously. We have a situation where four workers were killed at a DuPont plant in Texas. They were overcome by a chemical leak. OSHA went in there, our initial penalty against DuPont was $99,000. $99,000 after four workers were killed, essentially petty cash for DuPont. For that same event, DuPont agreed to pay $3.1 million for EPA violations. Obviously, those workers didn't cost as much to DuPont. Another reason our standard setting system is broken. It takes many years, sometimes decades for OSHA to issue a standard. The staff is so small can only work on a small number of standards at any one time. So there are many hazards like heat or airborne infections like COVID, or line speed and ergonomic hazards like those crippling the chicken factory workers AL just described for which OSHA either has no standard or one that's hopelessly out of date. And OSHA has never tried to take on those moral injuries they all writes about. And it will be slapped down by a court immediately if it tried. Then stepping back a little bit, you think about the OSHA law that was passed in 1970, when most workers were employed by the firms whose names were on the factory gates or on the door. Now those workplaces are filled with temp workers, contractors, subcontractors, independent contractors, so called independent contractors, which Europe they're called bogus self employment. And so OSHA requiring those employers to actually protect their workers is far more difficult. And then you've got the gig economy, which is essentially an OSHA free zone. And finally, stepping back even further worker injuries, even worker deaths are just not important issues to the public. During my 20 years running OSHA, I often ended my talks talking about the large and growing consumer demand for free range chickens and cage free eggs. That described how a teenager worker in an Ohio chicken plant has leg amputated at the plant which amputations were occurring on a regular basis. In fact, OSHA was in there with these amputations were occurring. And so I plead with the audience to change public opinion. So we care as much about workers as we do about those chickens. You know, we have a long way to go. And as a follow up to that, what do you think about the Biden administration's approach to protecting workers thus far? That's an interesting question. I mean, President Biden has appointed some very good people to run OSHA and they've ramped up enforcement compared to the Trump administration that often didn't do that much enforcement. But the structural problems I just laid out there, they're still there. I've also been disappointed in the failure to use OSHA to better protect workers exposed to COVID on the job. And this is true both of the Trump administration and the Biden administration. And to me, this, this is symptomatic of the failure of the nation's elite, our national leadership to protect those previously invisible low wage workers in essential industries. We've called them heroes. We know that there's focus of a lot of media, but they're still not taken care of. So let me propose a thought experiment. Imagine there were no zoom. All of us who have worked at home either completely or partially for these more than two years, we've been forced to go into our workplaces daily.  I mean, I'm talking to the audience here, what do you think? What would the demand be for safe workplaces? I think it would have been far greater. And the response of the federal government would have been far stronger because these powerful white color, color white workers, you know, would demand better protection. Instead, we had workers in essential industries, especially workers of color. They suffered a workplace environmental justice catastrophe. Too many of them gave their lives, taking care of our sick or long term care patients, making sure food was harvested, processed, delivered so we had food on our table. This didn't have to happen. And it's it's still going on today. Thank you, David. Appreciate that insight. And now turning to Kathy. So Kathy, NELP does a lot of work fighting for labor laws that can protect workers. What does AOL's book bring up to you? And how do the themes of the issues raised in this book relate to your work at NELP? Yeah, thank you, Chris. And thanks for the invitation and for the prompt to read AOL's book. I agree with David. It's very compelling. And the stories that AOL describes are really retain the dignity of the workers and bring their facts to the public, which is what's needed. They are hidden. And what we have seen at NELP, the jobs and the workers profiled in this book touch on most of the issues that NELP works on than that I have as a lawyer for the past 30 years. The book describes jobs that are subcontracted. David Weil also called them fissured, where the workers are often working at the bottom of a multi tiered and complex outsourced labor supply chain. And the companies and individuals that are calling the shots and setting up these arrangements have removed themselves from responsibility. It also profiles and shows that workers who are recruited by these temp and staffing outfits that the companies engage to bring in a steady stream of new recruits because the jobs are so challenging. Sometimes these companies use immigration visa programs and sometimes not. But again, the companies are setting up these recruiting systems that distance themselves from the workers and their responsibility. It's the book describes Jane dangerous and mostly low paying jobs that are invisible to many unless you look for them. The workers profiled in this book joined the ranks of home care workers, janitors, agricultural workers, delivery, including many of the so called gig workers that we that we all rely many of us rely on today and rideshare. And they're working in the labor intensive pieces of businesses and part in part our government, if you count the drone workers that I L has profiled, that again, the businesses have set this up, the government set this up and they describe it to the public. But oftentimes courts and adjudicators and agencies just listen to the business and don't end up applying the accountability and the responsibility to the companies that are setting up and perpetuating the problems. And I just wanted to mention to that adjacent to and sometimes in these jobs that are profiled, there are a host of unpaid workers, mostly workers of color like the ones profiled here that represent a legacy of slavery in our modern economy. And I'm including incarcerated workers who were sent out to do work for private for for profit companies, including some of the poultry and meat packing companies, some prison workers are sent out to fight fires. Immigrant detainees who work in for profit government contractors who work for a dollar a day and who are basically running the federal contracted immigrant detention centers. Some workers in rehab facilities are sent out to clean stadiums for for profit contractors. And then this is not to mention the whole host of so called volunteers and trainees who are disproportionately impacting lower income workers and boxing out and displacing those who can't work for free. So there's a whole other piece of the economy that is worrisome to us and that we're paying attention to. And as I all mentioned, the workers in these jobs are mostly black and brown workers with little bargaining power. They fear retaliation. They too often don't have unions or other worker centers to protect and to problem solve the problems and there's a high turnover. So just a word about NELP. We are working on structural solutions that take on this legacy of slavery, occupational segregation. But we also want to raise standards and help workers retain their dignity and quality of life for everybody. And Kathy, as you think back over the past two years, I'm wondering has the conversation on worker protection shifted? And are you seeing anything or something different, either on the Hill or in the current administration on the need to protect workers? Yeah, several things have happened in the last few years to bring workers jobs and what we want our society to be in the forefront. First, as David and I all have mentioned, covid has elevated the workers that may have been invisible to many of us. That we call them essential, but they've been right in front of us all along service workers, janitors, delivery, ride share, grocery store and retail and poultry and meat packing. These are covid has elevated the importance of the jobs and the workers and that can help us when we're trying to bring light to the problems of the jobs. The other thing that's happened in the last couple years is the Black Lives Matter movement, which has generated more energy and illuminated the legacy of slavery in our country, including the carceral system and criminal acts of that disproportionately impact black and brown communities and its intended unpaid work and society's violence against black and brown people. The experiences of blacks in our country and the structural racism that enables power and capital to be concentrated and has carved out too many of these jobs as not covered by our laws. The other thing that we're seeing and this is a this is a bright spot is that unions and independent worker organizing groups, including worker centers that are led by black and brown organizers have led strikes and walkouts and are taking their organizing campaigns to the streets. During the pandemic, the so called essential workers walked out of hospitals, hotels and retail stores, creating striketober last fall as one example, where John Deere, Nabisco Hospital, home care, McDonald's workers stepped out and demanded better conditions. Biden is the first president in generation to uplift the importance of unions and collective bargaining, and that is really important. Unions created the middle class and they solve problems on the floor or in the workplace, making them, you know, nipping them in the bud before they become a serious problem. And then unionizing at Amazon, despite the vote that we just heard about at the second plant, Amazon's first warehouse was unionized Starbucks, lots of media companies. And this is despite aggressive corporate pushback. So this is important. Workers are stepping up. There's dignity at work and agency and power for workers when they come together. And then I just want to say two more things. First is that the agencies like the Department of Labor where David worked and their state and local counterparts know exactly what's going on. They've been hamstrung by insufficient enforcement resources that David mentions. Sometimes weak laws. OSHA is a good example of that. And now forced arbitration that companies impose on workers that prohibit them from coming forward and being able to air their grievances in public and this lack of transparency keeps the bad conditions under wraps. But I do think we don't want to give up on the agencies. I see incredibly devoted and expert people in the Department of Labor and the state and local counterparts. And if they were able to do they want to do their job. And when they're able to do it, it can have a sea change effect on how we see these jobs and what's occurring in the jobs. And then finally, I won't dwell on this too much, but the Supreme Court and other circuits have been lobbied hard. They either corporate America has either put their people in these courts or the courts have been lobbied and legislators. So they're increasingly permitting companies to carve themselves out and exempt and contract away with private contracts, the long standing protections that we take for granted. So I just think for for policy reasons, we need to lift things up that are happening like Al has done in this book. And then we need to support the states and and the localities that are taking aim at some of these practices and then support the ability of agencies like the Department of Labor to enforce because some of the laws are just fine. We just need to get beyond these phishing contracted structures that companies are erecting to distance themselves from responsibility and and take the agencies and let them do their jobs. Thanks. Thanks, Kathy and Kathy, just one final follow up there. Looking forward, what else do we need to see to make make sure we protect all workers and make all jobs high quality? Yeah, I mean, how much time do I have? I think I think one thing is is we need to see that the economic recovery and economic as we're emerging out of the COVID pandemic, it's a once in a generation opening to reset the promise of work as a force for economic stability and equity for all of us. What we are fighting for and what we need to see is that what a workers race, gender, immigration or justice involves status doesn't determine the fate of the workers. We want all jobs to pay a living wage, have robust benefits. Anyone out of work can sustain themselves while they're finding a job. And that means social safety and that's unemployment insurance and that workers aren't commodities to be traded by employers, but are actually calling the shots and have a voice at work. We now has a long list of policy proposals and prescriptions, but but I think we can leave that for the questions to get into more of the nitty gritty of some of those technical fixes that we want to see. Great, thanks, Kathy. And also circling back and we said at the beginning, we'd get into this question, but your work also raises a lot of moral questions and you refer to this concept of moral injury to workers. And I'll be honest, there are times when reading this book and even thinking about the terms dirty work and moral injury, where it's uncomfortable and upsetting and also eye opening. And for one, it made me think about how workers in higher paid jobs that we don't view as dangerous like jobs in the tech sector can also bring about some form of moral injury. Can you can you speak to why you use these terms? Sure. So moral injury is a concept that is pretty central to my book. And it's one of those hidden injuries of class that I kind of thread throughout the different stories. And it has two meanings, both of which come from conversations and work around military veterans. The first meaning is moral injury as a feeling that a feeling of betrayal that soldiers coming back from Vietnam felt that their leaders had their commanders had betrayed them and that this betrayal violated as Jonathan Shea put it in his book about Vietnam veterans violated their sense of what's right kind of created this moral disorientation, this moral wound that he contends is every bit as central to veterans you know, injuries as PTSD even though we're much more familiar with the latter term. In more recent years, the term moral injury has been refined and a number of military psychologists and VA psychologists have described it as what happens to a person when they witness or participate in acts that violate their own core values in the course of fulfilling their duties. So it's not hard to imagine why someone in what served in Iraq or Afghanistan might have been in a situation where such an injury might have been incurred. But in my book, I try to take this concept and apply it to other things. For example, in America's prisons, there's the book opens with the story of a mental health aide at a prison in Florida who witnesses the mistreatment of the patients in her care in the mental health ward of this prison. I won't go into all the details. Folks can read about it in the book. But but essentially this woman Harriet, who works as this mental health aide, she's horrified by what she's learning and seeing abuses that cross from just degradation into actual torture. And and one of the prisoners at this facility dies as a consequence of this.  She's a low ranking worker at this facility. She needs the job to support her family. Again, this notion of kind of being trapped in this situation, which is common to the workers I write about. And furthermore, she's beholden to the security guards at this prison for her own protection, to do her own work.  So how much does she really want to press this? And she said to me, you know, I felt like someone had to report what was happening. But it couldn't be me. And as a consequence of this, her hair fell out. She fell into a depression. She lost her appetite. These are really extreme symptoms that most people don't get to. But but I think it's an example of of how moral injury can manifest. And it can also manifest and I think does manifest in the lives of the security officers, the guards who work in in the same Florida prison system, one of whom told me, you know, when a good man or a good woman works in a prison, some of that goodness wears off. They become jaded. They become callous. I'm sort of paraphrasing what this very powerful statement was. But that more subtle kind of transformation is another form of moral injury. And I think that, you know, the fact that there's this sort of growing interest in this concept and in this term is a really good thing. I think it's I hope my book is part of that conversation and contributes to it because I think it enables us to ask questions about the moral dimensions of work and the moral dimensions of experiences of workers on the margins. But I think that we also have to be careful in the conversation around moral injury that it doesn't become much the way that the conversation around PTSD has become a conversation about individuals who suffer these injuries and therefore they need therapy or they need some form of individual treatment. My book tries to show that moral injury is related to class. It's related to race. It's related to immigration. It's related to power. Who has power? Who doesn't? Who gets blamed and held responsible when abuses inside prisons are revealed and who doesn't? Who walks away and is able to sleep very well at night because they have more power. They're distant from it and so forth. And I think that so my hope is that this conversation around moral injury continues but is also broadened and deepened and that, you know, policymakers, social scientists, you know, advocates who take an interest in this concept think about it in relationship to the disparities and the inequities in our society because it like dirty work, it is not randomly distributed. It is, I think, concentrated.  So if we can have this conversation in relationship to power and class and race and all these other things, I think, you know, a lot can be learned. Thank you for expanding on that. And now I'm going to turn to our first question from the audience and this is for anyone and everyone on the panel who'd like to respond. So the question is, how do you see climate change exacerbating these already precarious working conditions and subsequent moral injury? So if I can take a stab at it, one chapter of my book is called Dirty Energy and actually when David was speaking, I was reminded of it because he mentioned this Dupont accident that killed four workers and the penalties that the EPA needed out were more severe than the penalties for the deaths of these workers. Well, in the chapter that I look at roused abouts on oil rigs and the particular worker I write about was on the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded and of course caused numerous deaths to the workers there. And this worker who survived went to the hearing in Washington after the explosion. And at that hearing, many of the widows and the family members of the workers who had died were present. And they were there as members of Congress held up pictures of birds to kind of dramatize the awfulness of what had happened. And that was perfectly appropriate because there was enormous ecological damage done by this explosion, but no one held up pictures of the workers. And so it sort of dramatized, I think, the disparity that David talked about. But getting to the question that the audience member asked, I think that climate change in order to be addressed, we need to think about the drilling and fracking that is done in this country. Who does it? Who is able to just ignore the lives and the communities and states that depend on those industries economically and yet pump oil into their SUVs rely on these fossil fuels without at all thinking about the relationship to this kind of industry that is imperiling the planet. And so I think that climate change is hopefully something that will heighten awareness that we are in fact connected to those rigors and to those frackers. And the people who are distant cannot separate themselves from the moral questions that are involved. That it's very easy to look down on and blame people who work in the fossil fuel industry. It's much harder, I think, to take the next step and ask how do our own lives benefit from and sort of depend on the work these folks do and how do we change that? And if I can pile on here and talk about a different aspect of climate change, which is heat and every year dozens of workers are killed by heat and many, many more are made sick. OSHA does not have a heat standard. The Biden administration has actually announced a new initiative to try to move that more quickly that will take years to issue a heat standard with a real requirement that workers are protected. In these initial activities, the Chamber of Commerce and some of the crowd that always says, these are job killing regulations have already said these are job killing regulations and you can't really tell employers to protect workers from heat. Of course, we know from all the studies that OSHA regulations don't kill jobs. They actually stop jobs from killing workers. And we know how to protect workers from heat and actually the deep water horizon is a great example of that. After the explosion, which occurred 40 miles offshore and the oil started coming toward the shores of the five Gulf States, Gulf of Mexico States, we saw what the problem was gonna be. The oil was gonna arrive in May and June. This was 2010. And workers would have to be hired to clean those beaches. And those workers would have to wear tieback suits and card hats and impermeable gloves and boots. And the Labor Department actually told BP that they needed to hire local people because their jobs were being displaced, the Fisher people, the people in the hospitality industry were losing their jobs. And I was down there even before the oil hit the shore explaining this to BP. And actually BP was not cooperative. They understood that they had to do what the Labor Department said because they already were sort of in the public crosshairs. And we saw from the ocean point of view that there would be a huge hazard from heat. If you had thousands of workers and there literally were thousands of workers on the beach wearing these tieback suits and card hats in June and July in Louisiana cleaning up, the heat would be a tremendous risk. And so we said, the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect young physically fit soldiers have worked rest matrices where it says if a certain relative temperature and humidity, you can work 50 minutes, take a 10 minute break, you can work 40 minutes, take a 20 minute break. And during that break, you're in shade and are rehydrating. And we said to BP, you should just follow this US military matrix. And they said, yes, we will. And they built big tents and they provide water and Gatorade, et cetera. And workers would work half an hour on, half an hour off. I took phone calls from congressman, from a governor of one of those states who said to me, I was down at the cleanup site, why aren't you making those workers work hard? What the leadership of those southern states, they were appalled, the workers were getting to rest. And I said, governor, we're trying to make sure none of them are killed by the heat. And no one was killed by the heat among those workers. So we know how to do it, but it's expensive.  And that's going to be very tough in the agriculture industry, the construction industry. But if we don't do that, we're going to see workers getting sick and getting killed by heat. Yeah, and I'll just add briefly, NELC has been having sort of many internal town halls about climate justice and how NELC can get involved. And in addition to the heat standard, which is really important for setting a minimal set of requirements, we know just from interviewing and polling that we've done and surveys of workers that it is agricultural workers. And the agricultural unions have problem solved. A lot of the issues that ag workers face in the fields because they got water, they got toilets, they have problem solved as much as they can. Some of the exacerbations that are going to start happening with climate change, like the tornado that blew off the roof of the warehouse, Amazon wasn't charged with that, even though it told the workers they had to show up for work. Amazon workers have been fighting and complaining about excessive heat in the warehouses for a decade or so. So I think we know what to do. It's whether or not there's a political wills. Some states are starting to pass standards where they can. Flooding is going to be a big problem in a lot of sectors. And David mentioned the so-called gig economy, which is, those workers are called independent contractors. So they're technically not covered by workers' compensation.  You could be at serious risk, but you're not covered by workers' comp unless you happen to carry your own insurance. So there's going to be a lot of work in addition to what we know of, like David mentioned, construction on roofs, agriculture, warehouse, where excessive heat has been a problem. It's going to get worse. And this flooding and the firefighting that I mentioned earlier, there's going to be more forest fires. There already are. When you send incarcerated workers into fight fires without training, without personal protective equipment, we can't talk about a moral hazard. That's a moral question that we're all going to need to address. So I think it's a great question. And again, it's elevating up these jobs that traditionally may have been invisible to too many of us and showing us where we need to pay attention. Thank you for that. And hearing those responses, another question kind of entered my mind here. So coming back to the broader labor movement and relating this to the meatpacking workers that we talked about at the beginning of this event. So meatpacking used to be a heavily unionized industry in the 80s and 90s until those unions got busted, the quality of those jobs declined. And so I'm curious as what you all see as the relationship between being able to secure the health and safety of workers and the labor movement. I mean, I'll just say both David and Kathy can offer far more expertise on this, but in the poultry industry, it was striking to me that there was actually a union at the plant that I described where I heard workers, shedding tears over just how powerless and humiliated they felt and yet there was a union there. But none of the workers I interviewed had joined it or belonged to it or saw it for that matter as a vehicle of empowerment. And why is that? I think it's because there was a decades long transformation within meatpacking that weakened the once very powerful unions that had made that job, I believe, a better paying job than the average factory job for several decades in the 20th century. And the industry adopted a new strategy, a low wage strategy where they relied on often on immigrants, on refugees to take jobs in more remote areas. And where there were unions, they weren't as powerful as they had been in the past. And so, I think that it's a great example of how we can't really understand or talk about dirty work without talking about power and without talking about whose voices matter and whose voices end up being silenced and marginalized. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with everything that Al just said and I'll just note that, again, this outsourcing that the companies have done to temp and staffing agencies, partly it's through immigrant visa programs. Sometimes it's just recruiting undocumented workers in the so-called red states that are right to work states and I'll mention this in his book that the unionization numbers have plummeted in those states and so the poultry industry has fissured and outsourced itself almost to where there aren't any admitted employees on a floor and then they use, they recruit and hire undocumented or immigrant workers who are afraid to come forward, who fear retaliation, not just about losing their job but from immigration because the employers use the threat of calling in ICE to keep the workers from complaining. And then I think even though there are worker centers and unions who are continuing and they're the ones who are bringing these lawsuits to protect the meatpacking workers in the Midwest and in North Carolina, they have established some really important health and safety protections and they fought against the increased line speeds that again, I mentioned in his book, during the Trump administration, the line speed requests from poultry and meatpacking went up and they were almost all granted. And again, that just wreaks havoc on workers' bodies, on amputations and other injuries. So I think the structural issues that companies and some state governments have permitted to happen have made this a very difficult place for unions and worker centers to come back in, but it is happening. And again, COVID is a moment that has elevated these industries because people want their chicken breasts and during the Trump administration, he invoked the Defense Appropriations Act to permit more of the poultry plants to stay open so that people could have their chicken during COVID. And again, these plants were riddled with COVID infections, workers were dying, they were taking in some cases, taking COVID infections home with them into the communities and Trump invoked the Defense Act to require Tyson and Purdue and other companies to keep their slaughterhouses open so that Americans could eat their chicken. Great, well, thank you for sharing that. And we just have a few minutes left before I wanna close this out, but there was just one final thing if anyone has a quick answer to this, a few people from the audience asked about further reading and in particular, if there are academics of color who are also researching these topics. So if anyone has any great ideas, I'd love for that to be shared. And then after that, we'll just close out. You know, it's striking that nothing comes to mind and there have been a number of good books that focused on individual workers and telling their stories, but this general question of what's going on work today, I mean, I think it's not a book particularly about worker safety, but Kathy mentioned David Wilde's book, The Fisher Workplace. I think it's really fundamental to understand what's going on in workplaces today and why workers have so little power and why work has gotten so much worse. So that's my- And I'll just lift up quickly. Michelle Alexander writes on this incredibly deeply with the historical connection to both her book, The New Jim Crow but also her more recent books on tracing the legacy of slavery and free labor and how our country relies on black and brown workers. And then I'll just mention Heather McGee's book called The Sum of Us, which again is a historical look and she's making more of an economic argument about how our policies and structures keep black and brown workers and communities at the bottom of our economic society. And I would highly recommend both of those authors. I'll just throw one other title out there, our work in the section of my book on prisons. I found this fascinating, I think, wonderful book by a sociologist, John Eason, who looks at where the prison boom happened and it happened in what he calls rural ghettos. These areas of the country that had lost their mills and factories that maybe decades earlier would have been resistant to having a jail or prison built locally. And lo and behold, they welcome the idea once those jobs left. It's this really fascinating and stereotype defying study because you think of those rural ghettos and naturally you're thinking, okay, so white people by and large will actually, the communities he's looking at are more people of color in those communities than in other areas joining them. And so there's this way in which, and I think there's similar work on industrial slaughterhouses and where they're located and where not just the jobs are recruited and who's recruited to do them, but the ecological impact of the production, the runoff and all of the dirtiness associated with these industries that ends up being conveniently concentrated in these geographic areas. Well, thanks all for sharing those recommendations and thank you to our panelists for speaking today and for everyone for joining. Hey, all, thank you for writing this book. I found it just so important for our current policy moment and beyond. So thank you all for joining us and hope everyone has a great day.


Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. How are we feeling today? What? Now, come on. How are we feeling? Sorry, I'm not going to do one of those American rave-up things, but I'm a problem. You know, we don't do these sort of things down there. But seriously, how are we today? Good. Okay. Well, thank you very much for finding the time to join me this morning. My presentation, as it says, is the challenge is running a WordPress business when you're not a developer. And that actually makes me feel a little bit insecure in a room like this, because I'm surrounded by WordPress amazing people. So just bear with me, please, and just try and help me on the side.  But I would actually challenge you really just to think for a moment, because I would like to really touch about the challenges of doing anything when you're not an expert in that particular field. So I guess that's a bit of a subtext behind what I wanted to talk to you about today. Can I ask? I'm not going to ask anybody to say in what. But how many people think they're an expert in something? Thank you. Yeah. I dare say many of us like to think we're an expert in something. And a few years ago, I was an expert in something. And the trouble being an expert in something I found is that you get a little bit complacent. You think you're bulletproof.  And of course, in order to be a really good expert, you need to narrow down and narrow down and narrow down. And then you get paid more and more and more for being a specialist in that field. Until one day I woke up and discovered the field I was an expert in didn't really exist anymore. Unfortunately, it probably took me a year or two to actually spot that. I was probably in denial for a little period of time. So I don't want to make this presentation a presentation about challenges, despite the label. I'd actually like to flip the coin on that and talk about what to do about it, the solutions to that. I've only got 10, so I'm just going to count down from 10. And the first one is this. It's to adopt a growth mindset. How many of you here have heard about the concept of growth mindset? A few people. That's good. Well, let me just briefly touch on it. Carol Dweck, who's now a professor at the University of Stanford in the U.S., basically pioneered this field of, I think it's called psychology. One of her original experiments is she went to an inner city school in, I think it was Chicago, and she randomly chose a year group and split the class into two. One class she put in one room, and the other class she put in the other. And in one room, everything in the teaching was about success. It was about ability and success. Everybody was praised for what they achieved. And in the other room, all the motivation was not around success. It was about effort. It was about learning. It was about trying. Which room do you think was the one that over the year actually became more successful? Any views? It was the learning side. I could spend a whole presentation or three on this particular one, but the growth mindset is all about believing that you can actually learn or do anything if you're determined enough, whereas the fixed mindset is all about saying, I'm either good at it or I aren't or I'm not. So I guess for me as an expert in my previous field, I've had to do a bit of a shift from being a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. Okay, so I'd once developed a website. I think it was in the 1990s sometime. And then for the next 20 years, I totally ignored anything digital. So when I found with more time on my hands, I was expecting, I found this thing called WordPress and started playing with it a bit and got rather excited about it because it does all sorts of exciting things. It's a bit like a grown person's Lego in my view. You know, you can do all sorts of exciting things. And I went out trying to sell WordPress to people. And then one day, somebody very kindly said to me, you have a solution looking for a problem, which I actually appreciated somebody telling me because I was so enthusiastic about this enabling technology. I forgot about the fact it has to be applied to something. And little aside, I'm now doing a bit of work with blockchain and I'm seeing the similar sort of trends there. It's another technology that's looking for problems. I think there's plenty of problems out there just as they're after WordPress. So I guess for number nine for me is around nailing a problem. And for me, the problem that I came across was, you know, classic dad with kids sat by the swimming pool one day at the swimming lessons and I was receiving lots of, I think there was some event coming up. So people were giving me pieces of paper with their name on it and a check or maybe a pile of banknotes, which I then had to collate and yada yada yada. And I discovered, well, with WordPress, you can just put a form builder on there. I chose Gravity Forms, which I'm sure many of you have come across, put entries in with a payment gate, but in all of a sudden everybody could enter online and it became a lot easier. The challenge I discovered with Gravity Forms, which is a great form builder, is it doesn't actually tell you very easily who's done what. So I got a guy in Romania to build me a little plug-in that just provided a simple dashboard functionality, you know, a little pie chart that says, this many people have come from there and this many people have come from there and this many people have come from there and a counter that says you've got so many bookings and I quite liked it, so I started using it for me and then one idle weekend I spun up a website and put easy digital downloads on it, a payment gateway from PayPal and offered it for sale. That made me very nervous because by offering something for sale, you sort of assume it needs to work and what happens if it doesn't work, you've got to fix it and what happens if people don't like it, they want their money back. So I decided that I would, number eight, kill my view of perfectionism and I would price it for the price of a good cup of coffee, $4.50 and I said, no guarantees, no refunds, no support and I just left it.  One day I actually didn't delete one and I read it and it wasn't, hey, I'm your business manager coming to tell you about its own sale, it was actually somebody's just paid you some money.  So I thought, oh, this is interesting, maybe there's something in it. And so started the experiment that I'm on now and I'll just show you this slide. I'm sorry it's a bit busy, but this has really been the GF chart journey since then. I think that was 2014. This graph's taken straight out of easy digital downloads. The bottom line is the revenue. The top line is the number of sales. And what I've done here is to illustrate the different things I've done at different times. Now I'll just walk through some of the key things here. Up to here I was charging $4.50, which is obviously next to nothing and it's just a bit of a paid for the odd coffee or two and it was a bit of a conversation piece, but it was basically meaningless. I thought, well $4.50 is not really a reasonable price. If a coder wanted to do what this does, there'd be several hours of time and for those coders that charge $700 an hour, it's worth $700 to the right sort of people. So overnight I moved the price from $4.50 to $45. I was expecting the demand to crash, which it did for a week or two, and then all of a sudden it started to build up again. At the same time I introduced service, which was basically me just trying to cope with anybody that contacted me. And to cut a long story short, the demand has continued to grow, but obviously with much better revenue, because we've got $45, then we introduced a $99 price point, then we introduced a $149 price point, we even introduced a $499 price point a couple of months back and it's a bit busy this graph, but what's basically happened is the revenue started to move away from the unit sales, which for what I think is probably a niche service to me is exactly what we wanted to achieve. So we got to an all the way through this, at this stage when I was getting decent revenue coming in, I hired a professional developer and I decided to go pay full price for a really good quality Gravity Forms developer, a lady called Naomi C. Bush, who's in America, charges in US dollars, who really understands Gravity Forms backwards, and I've employed her ever since part-time to build out features. And those features basically come from a Trello board where people put in requests and we basically look at what the most popular things are and we build the roadmap on that. When we got to this stage, we thought we'd invest in some SEO because SEO is what you're supposed to do to get some more traffic. And I think you can probably see from the numbers here that to start off with, we were sort of trending up upwards. But after a while, we started to trend downwards again. Now, obviously this is sales, this is not traffic, and SEO drives traffic and it depends on search terms and all the other things. But fundamentally, it was actually costing us more because I hired somebody to do this to invest in SEO than we were actually bringing in. It didn't seem to be heading the right way, so we decided to stop that and focus instead on looking after our existing customers. So this is where we are outsourced service. We now outsourced service to an organization called WP SAS, WordPress Service as a Service. And they've been an absolute godsend. They deal with all our level one and level two support now, which means that I as the overall person responsible don't need to get too involved with that except when there's a really hairy issue. And then we introduced renewals earlier this year. That had to be set up 12 months before because people had to sign up to renew after 12 months there, so that was a long time in the coming. And you can see now that our earnings are really going quite strongly, but our sales are not very good. So I'm in a dilemma currently in that I'm making okay money from this, but it's not long-term sustainable because my sales are heading the wrong way. I'm being very honest with you. This is the reality of this sort of thing. And this is a side activity for me, so I'm kind of not too worried. So I do need to put some more effort in. But look, I've spent a bit of time there because I just wanted to show you sort of experimentation on what it does and what it doesn't do. Now, in order to experiment properly, you need to clearly understand your customers. And I found that quite tricky because most are in the U.S. and we don't like talking. You can email and you may get an email back. So what I've tried doing is to get up very early in the morning and then get the URL of some of my customers and do a Google search and then phone them up. People have blown away when somebody phones on the other side of the world and wants to chat to them about a particular plug-in. So I've got a bit of information that way. I've got some information from people that put in requests. The support desk is quite a dangerous place to get information from because you only see the exceptions there, you only see the problems. So I can't say I've got the magic solution, but certainly I'm trying to understand customers. The other thing I've discovered, I mean, all of this I think is obvious, but somehow you need to do it to realize it that the action beats planning. Planning is very important, but at the end of the day, planning is only telling a story to yourself about what the future will be or could be.  Hence that slide on experimentation, really, just to show what happens. Another point for me has been what I call unleashing energizers. For me personally, when you've got a whole bunch of stuff happening, this doesn't take much time, there's a lot of other stuff happening in my life, it's easy not to do something. So I'm trying to tune into those things that energize me versus those things that don't. And one thing I did discover is that support is not very energizing, and certainly since I've outsourced support, that's really helped me not drag the down by that, you're cooking dinner for the family and thinking after dinner I've got to go and log on and deal with so and so and such and such. So that's worked really well, for example. The other thing is what I call used quality ingredients. There's a big temptation I find in internet land to outsource to cheap markets or to buy cheap product here or to get cheap hosting there. It might be right, but for me I've discovered not. We try to use quality components because quality components mean that you trust them generally and it reduces support and it just gives you an easier life. For example, we use WP Engine, which is a high quality host. We use easy digital downloads with their suite of services like Stripe and PayPal. We use Helpdesk. I pay a developer in the US to buy cheap market to develop. We have very, very few bugs which really helps. We use WP SAS, which is also in the US, but that seems to be really helping on our support side and we're getting good reviews from there. So I found that using quality ingredients is a very good thing, at least for us to do. You've seen what our revenue numbers look like. We could put a lot of effort and reduce the cost, but the opportunity from increasing revenue is far more significant than reducing cost. I guess the other point for me is to make myself redundant and I don't want to sit on a beach, but it's not about giving myself a job. It's about allowing the project, the plug-in to grow in a commercially sustainable way with sort of minimal intervention from me. So I'm trying to adopt a bit of a product manager type mentality. I think Stephanie had a talk yesterday which I couldn't attend, unfortunately, but I'm sure her message was about outsourced whoever possible or get other people involved to do things. And the final point, and it's what I really need to tell myself every day, is ultimately it's all about selling. Unless you can sell stuff, it's fantastic having a brilliant idea or even a brilliant product that people love, but unless you can actually get out there and sell it enough, it's not going to go very far. So we're four years old. As you can see, we've had a bit of a roller-coaster ride. Just to let you know what we're about, the plug-in is GF Chart, which as this diagram shows, if you enter information via gravity forms, if you sell via gravity forms, if you have a booking thing, or if you're doing a survey or things like that, you can produce charts very quickly. You can get tables, or at least you can put the numbers into the tables. You want to know how many bookings you've got. You want to know how many people from China are coming, how many people have ordered gluten-free food, all that sort of thing can be done very quickly. We seem to have a lot of higher education institutions, a lot of churches, holiday resorts. We seem to be quite popular with those. During the US election, I'm not going to talk politics, I'm not going to talk holsters users. All this information is up-to-date. It allows you to put it straight on the front page or a front-facing page on your website. You don't have to log in to get the information, so it allows you to interact. If anybody's interested, we've got a special offer this weekend, this weekend only. Use the tag for this weekend without the hashtag, WCCID, and you can get our top tier $149 version for only $49 just this weekend. I have to say that building on top of Gravity Forms made me really nervous initially because I was sort of beholden to somebody else. It's actually proven to be a really good thing to do. There's a suite of really good other Gravity Forms premium add-ons around, like Gravity PDF from Port Macquarie. They do a fantastic ability to create Gravity Forms data into PDFs for all sorts of professional-looking documents, and we use them on one of our other projects. There's also Gravity View, which allows you to convert your Gravity Forms data into almost like a database, searchable database, slice and dice, print things out in all sorts of different formats. There's also Gravity Flow, which allows you to drive professional workflow type holiday approvals for things, holiday vacation requests. There's all sorts of things. So around Gravity Forms, there's a variety of different extension plugins. So it's actually proven to be a very good community to be part of. So we think we're... We've heard about big data. We like to think we're kings of small data. If you've got a website with a little bit of data coming in, you want to see the big picture. Even if you've got a contact form and you want to see what the trends are, this can do a little chart for you, trending over time. It's too early or too late. But with that, I'd like to close and see if anybody has any questions. We'll run around with the mic, so wave your hand if you've got a question for Ben. Anyone? Hey, Ben. Any chance we could see a live demo of your plugin? If we've got time? We do have time. Do we have an access here? This is one in the glasses. Show me age. Can you show the video for this? I didn't want this to be a sales thing. I wanted to talk to you about plugins, but this is a 1 minute 16 second video. It sort of gives an idea, and then I'll show you a few other bits. Is that okay? Is there audio on this? This is Mary. She has a company website, which is helping the business to thrive. So a lot of the time, the company has always been asked to take new functions. Each generation form, marketing has a satisfaction survey, and your Mr. CEO wants to impress his mates with an online buggy form for the annual Godfrey. They've been making every business brand reforms to do this quickly and easily. Job done. It's said that isn't. Lots of forms and lots of customers leave us lots of information. And although it's safely looked at, it leads us to a pile of emails and more than it is getting missed. Customers get annoyed and in exchange they lose its views. Then we discuss Pearson. GMC charts explains that visual harmony reports do not get updated automatically. Managers will now see the big picture and focus on areas that apply to the central. Customers in the Thank you to Media1 for that. I think they did a great job. So that's the sort of marketing-y bit. This is some of the things that it produces. So you can see if you move the mouse over, it will come up with information. There's a few use cases. There's various things there. And this is a very sort of very, very rough view about how it works internally. It's only very, very brief here where you just... There is a tiny shortcode, but it's a low-code, zero-code solution. So you can very quickly just select from drop-down menus the different fields that you want to slice and dice and very quickly produce a chart. So once it's installed, typically you can produce a chart within, say, 60 to 90 seconds. And there's a working demo here with a sample form. What's my name? Ben. Where am I going to be from? Iowa. Which tour am I going to? Let's go for Bolivian poetry somewhere. And let's say I'm going to have coffee. I'm going to bring my pet with me. Do I believe it's important to brush my teeth after every meal? Views, please? Yes. Right. Strongly agree or just agree? Strongly agree. So that's going to cost me five bucks.  This is a live demo, so we hope that it works. And so here, this is now produced as a total sales. You can see according to the type of tour or over all time or just units, units this month. So that's units. This is dollars. What else have we got? This is over. This is by time, showing for each month. And there's some other ones here with various other sort of parameters. So you need a progress bar. This is good for nonprofits who've got campaigns coming up, either for money raising campaigns or they want to get a certain number of people. And then there's some drink choices and operations reports. So that was a long answer to a quick question. Ben, I have a question, if you don't mind one. I noticed when you were telling your story, you said that you just popped it straight up and started selling it as a premium plugin. So is that continues to be a sales model? Like a lot of in the plugin business, in the WordPress ecosystem, typically you'd have the freemium model where you have the free version in the dot org repository. Then you have the upgrade to pro and that's proven very successful in a lot of cases. Then you have subscription models. Have you always just had the pro only version? That's a really good question. We have always had the pro version, only the pro version. About once a year we have the should we go on the WordPress repository type discussion. And every year so far we decided against it. I have to say that in my mode of experimentation I'm tempted to have a go. The thing that does put me off it is the feedback I'm getting is once you're on there you can't ever come off.  I understand once we've made that step we can't ever step back without the risk of our brand looking a bit tarnished but perhaps others in the room may have views about that. Hi, I'm Jason. I'm wondering how you avoid people forking your software. Is it open source and can people fork it? It is open source. Yes people can fork it. In fact, every so often we have a competitor that starts up. But it's not, it worried me to start off with but it doesn't need to worry me now. I realize we've actually, we've discovered it's not actually that easy to do what this does. Trying to get the JavaScript charts to marry up with what's quite a complicated data structure in gravity forms actually requires a lot of effort and we seem to have worked out how to do that. So it's not actually that easy to copy. Because gravity forms keeps on moving forward, wordpress keeps on moving forward we do need to keep up to date. And the other thing I think, and this is my hypothesis is that most developers actually want a professional solution for their clients they can rely on going forward. They don't want something that works today and doesn't work tomorrow. So it's a really good question, perhaps by turning up here saying I'm not worried people will then think well it's a good challenge but so far it's been alright for us. Feels like first to market, Councilor in Plugin World as well. I guess so, yeah. Thank you. Hi, I have a comment and a question. So a comment on that first question. I think an interesting model with premium plugins is because you can obviously fork it and it's open source and anybody can do it what you often sell is not so much the plugin but the support for the plugin. And I think since you say you now have support that's probably what people are paying for not the code base that anybody can use anyway. So yeah, just a thought interested in your thoughts. The other thing is it's more about a technical side of it so sorry if this is not your side of it but I love charts and I like what you're doing is I was just wondering I assume you're not doing the JavaScript charts from scratch you're probably using some kind of library. So what are you using and why are you using that other than a different library? It's something I'm interested in so I just wanted to... It's a really good question. Just as we were a bit nervous when we went for Gravity Forms as the platform to build on we had to make a similar decision when we went for a chart library and chart libraries are coming and going all the time so we for better or for worse made a decision a few years ago to go with the Google Charts library. Frankly, I think it's a bit daggy. It's a bit scientific and the colors are a bit... I mean you can change the colors but they're a bit... There is a segment of our customer base that wants a lot more pastel shades with gentle flowing curves. It's a long thing to be from Italy and I guess that doesn't surprise me but what have you. But in terms of your question, we made the decision for that. In the background we haven't said we're going to do that forever we've tried to build it in a way so that if we do want to bring in a different chart library in future or even swap out chart libraries and give people the options that can be done it's actually easier said than done because they all have their own undocumented features and challenges and personalities. And it's a live issue for us because at the moment due to the way that JavaScript works you can't easily insert these things into PDFs or into emails so we're looking at using an external rendering service to allow this to be inserted into PDFs and emails and that will necessitate probably some slight change of chart library. Hi, how's your affiliate program going? Is that important to your business model? Another good question. It's going well but I can't rely on it. We've got one particularly good affiliate in Holland, in the Netherlands who's a real enthusiast on the plug-in and I think that's probably why we seem to have got a disproportionate number of Dutch customers but it's, I don't know what the percentage is it's certainly a quite distinct minority of sales so it's not something we can rely on. There's a lot of people that signed up for affiliates who never ever sell you anything. This one, one or two, got a reasonable volume from. It's worth doing I think but I wouldn't focus on it. Any others? Just a quick question. I just wanted to, I'm happy you're hiding. Hiding from Cory down the front down there. But I just wanted to ask what have been your most successful sales kind of techniques and that what do you find the most and also too how you're saying now that you kind of sales are slumping what's your kind of next step to address that. So those are two questions in one. Another great question. Most successful sales thing. I think it's been the completely surprising ones which won't be any help to you. It's like a very, very, very large American company contacted us early this year and said we want to use your plug-in across all of our WordPress sites but we don't want to have to pay you all of our people going $49. Please will you give us a really expensive package to cover all of our licenses. So that's when we launched the, I think it was the $399 or $499 thing which I didn't really want to do but I did it anyway for then and then we made two sales that month and it's like wow, but we haven't made one since. So I guess that was a listening to a customer need and acting on it. What I have discovered is whenever you work on it at some stage in future it will grow but you won't ever be able to link up what it was that led to what which is why I put that chart up earlier to show that it's clear that actions do lead to results but one to one the biggest driver of revenue is to increase price. We seem to get a different customer base every time we increase price so one thing we could do going forward is to become a very premium type thing and only focus on the top tier of customers but to answer your question about what next we're planning on writing a recipe book so saying if you want to do this and this is how you want to do it both go on the site but also will become sort of tweetable social media material so that we'll have a lot more content to put out into different channels. Hi, I was just curious about what effects of GDPR and international laws and taxes is that a lot of grief or is that something you just come to terms as you have to. Another good question, you know I talked about energizers and de-energizers. That's a big de-energizer. I'm devoting time on to that and it's like... Any further questions? Ben, you mentioned you pretty much outsourced most of the company in terms of the plug-in development and the support. How does that affect your overall profit margins? That's some fantastic questions today. My mentality around the company is almost like a big revenue share. One of the reasons I charge in US dollars rather than Aussie dollars even though I'm an Australian based organisation is most of my costs are in US dollars. So I think about what the top line is and almost like a value chain what you take off down that. So I guess I'm not... I probably don't think of it in the way a traditional business person would with a factory that has lots of fixed costs although my costs are sort of semi-fixed. They're fixed months a month, they're not fixed long-term. I'm not sure I'm answering your question very well, Jake, but that's just the way I view it. I mean my consulting business I view very different. I have another WordPress business that's in training for a very narrow niche. Each has a very different business model behind it. I guess that's part of the experimentation I'm doing here. I think we developers do tend to forget sometimes that our time is worth something. So when you're paying someone else to do your development you're very aware of the value of that service and of those costs. When you're working on your own plugin you're often doing it in your free time and you don't really consider it a cost per se. So it might look like your profit margin is higher but maybe it's not. And Ben, great presentation. You can't possibly do all those things and so I find myself, and I might be working on the back end of the website or something where really what I want to be doing is the content. A couple of times when I'm thinking, well, I've got two keyboards here. Can I possibly be typing in with my left hand the content and coding with the right hand at the same time? It's not possible. So sometimes you've got to take that hit in order to be able to really focus on that area of business, especially if you've got a couple of other businesses going. Yeah. This conversation is about the opportunity cost of your time and leverage.  Yeah, I think the question is that do you allocate to the development of funding and also for the support, like, you know, is it 10%, 20% and the overall sales? What's the percentage that you actually get from it? Yeah, I over-invest in development at the moment. Yeah, because it's really important without the product that you sell really. Well, yes and one thing I could do would be to turn off development or at least turn it down very significantly and move the funding entirely towards marketing and then presumably as sales grow potentially put money back into development again because development has a maintenance approach like Gravity Forms 3.3 came out so we had to do that. We've got a Gutenberg block coming up so we've got one of those in beta. There's all this background stuff you need to do just to stay standing still and then you've got the adding new features. We're doing both at the moment. The maintenance mode. So far we haven't done that. Did you have one, Ricky? Yeah, I think we're probably out of time so thank you so much to Ben for sharing so many details about the plug-in business with us and Ben's available throughout the rest of the day. I've got another conference I've got to go to. He's not available for the rest of the day so if you have more questions rush down the front and mob him. No. Can I say thank you so much for your engagement and your questions. It's superb so thank you and if anybody's got any suggestions to me offline I'd love to hear them. So thanks so much, Ben.


Welcome back to another product review and today I'm going to take a look at the art of Maya and the three Very excited to look at this actually haven't looked at is yet This just arrived is a bit delayed because it has a signature in it as well So it's kind of lost in all the the shipping delays and all that stuff, but I am very pumped It's a fantastic show if you haven't seen it. I highly recommend it on Netflix. It's such a great show It's fantastic now before I continue. Hi, my name is JD and I do product reviews like these and I do a bunch of stuff on the Channels a quick little pitch I do animation lectures and there's a bunch of stuff check it out If you like it subscribe if you don't maybe I'll come into you later But that's what I'm doing for the channel for a quick little pitch, but let's get to the books of Maya and the three Here's the back beautiful art already. It's your spine That is the book and it's glory There you go. I am so pumped because I love the art style and I can't wait to see more of this There you go. This is Signed this is why it took a bit longer and look at this already The designs the colors cinematography just everything the renders were great Forward here we got cast old photos the creator Introduction Sorry, I should go through this faster, but I haven't looked at this yet and I am I'm already uh Oh, I want to read through all of this character. So this is what I was excited about So you get to see the evolution turn tables. I love stuff like this. So this is already my jam princess Maya Look at that. I love this here that shield there such great design Love this already and I'll always love this here seeing like early sketches not the final polished stuff or even this I love when you see the very first explorations That's what I'm looking for in art of books, but I do love this Absolutely, this goes back into what I was saying before if you as a as an animation student Look at these and then scan this keep this This is your reference library for mouth shapes and eyes and eyebrows and hairs is everything Look at that. Keep that for inspiration. It's great. Also fun character Rico here Same thing here. Look at that massive massive mouth opening And facial expressions great Also great. I mean this basically this book is going to be It's going to be me saying great all the time. I do love this though. I'm going from this The monkey mask not wearing here, but it's great These are cool. Super cool. That's what I love. I love stuff like that such good reference Even this here. I just look again the renders and the look Cracks me up to here. Love this. I love that they're including this everywhere Facial expressions. That's great too. That's great for posing reference. Come on. We got the dad here Okay, I gotta go through this a bit faster. I am too Fascinated by this already. This is a flip through not a Live reading, but come on Love this. That's basically yes that whole page double pages. Yes Love this character too Nice. I love this But come on Great posing great face Also cool. Look at that creature. Yeah That is cool Okay, this is not me stalling. I can't get that page But I am looking at every single thing here These were so great. She was great too. I really couldn't recommend the show more Lots of action lots of heart great pacing Look at this Definitely busy in its design, but to me it was never overwhelming or in a way distracting where you didn't know where to look Oh, she was so great. Look at this. Come on Yes, man. I love this already. This goes into my Facial reference library right away. These will be separate scans Let me go through this a bit faster. There's so much. Come on. We're just at the beginning. Oh Yes Wait, is that an arm coming out of the mouth? Come on Great Let's flip through a bit faster because there's so much to look at. I love this Because that's the cool thing about the show. There's so many characters So an art book that definitely focuses on the characters facial expressions. Yes poses All right, we're getting into chapter two environments, which are just as impressive as the characters Love seeing stuff like this here too That especially like a simple thing. Anyway, this will be I need to do like a separate F&A or something about set design composition and just balance of adding Environments and then your character and how environments can I love this how environments can can inspire you in terms of your animation and what to do. Look at that Love it That's cool Can you imagine how much fun it must have been designing and creating all this? I love that second-aid characters It's almost like bosses in a in a game level That's cool. Love seeing this here So much. Ooh little islands That's cool. I love anything.  Just little details I still would have loved to see like, you know, I know this probably no one cares about the very first scribble sketches of Little plants and stuff like that. I just love seeing the very rough form to the final form And come on who approved this design? It cracks me up and it works so well in the show I thought that was a skateboard at first. A longboard It's great Love this Every single character. These are super cute too That's so great It's like every character that's been designed.  Like how can we plus this? How can we make this even more awesome? That was great too. Yeah Look at that. Just that. I mean imagine you'd have this in CG like, oh, what do you could do to animate climbing up or running around? Or I mean, you can see at the scale. I would probably Scale the characters up a little bit, but so cool. Oh, love these. Look at that posters on the world awesome Look at this here. Awesome Hold on. I gotta go back here This guy's here So great. I mean these are great. I would love a poster with just that those kind of drawings Super cool. Sorry. I know this is not a way to flip through but I had to look at how this guy hangs out there. This is so great So cool Love this Storyboards awesome Inclusion of that. I mean if you do check out the creators I was I would feel hesitant in the in the pronouncing bitters You know foreign names. I don't want to butcher them, but if you follow him on twitter Posted so much stuff That will add to this book Designs and explorations and his ideas and thoughts and references Highly highly recommend you don't just go with this book, but follow the creator So great. I got a ton of them. I love this Please chapter. That's so great Spoilers Continues on with awesomeness. That's cool. Love this Color scripts are great It's rarely, I don't know. I'd say rarely focused on but there's so much that goes into production That doesn't get like the full exposure and making ofs So cool. Look at these are awesome And then you get the afterward And that is also awesome at the end. Everything is awesome Different franchise, but come on There we go. Maya and the three the art off Okay, definitely have to go back and read through this and go really page by page Like some of those artworks are great Look at that's cool Put them back and then every now and then take them out again This again for any animation soon. Look at these Whatever you can find online if you can't afford this But and or any other art of books really make sure that you do keep a reference library I mentioned this because I mentioned that yesterday in the q&a from the class But it's so important to look at that not just go Oh, that's cool and then put it away or really take scans Look at them put that into a library of only facial expressions or eye expressions or environments or like ideas for your shots This is why love art of books that gave me so much inspiration for shots and this ideas that you can You know plug from different books and different franchises different movies or whatever into a different idea That's then yours definitely influence But still yours and and that to me is so important when you start as a student to have creative ideas But you still have to have a certain influence and see what's out there So you don't copy things by accident But I think that is such a great resource in terms of coming up with ideas and kind of pushing your animation So definitely always study from life film yourself a reference, but it's still important to look at what's out there What are the creatives are doing so inspiring? I love it. Anyway enough gushing. I love the show watch the show It's so great. That is that for me not a quick flip through. There will be more. I got a bunch of books in the back There's so much more coming. I can't wait. There's another one actually hold on this one Very excited to go this one. This might be next The designs are so great. I can't wait to go through this one, too Anyway, lots to come and that's it tune in to I don't know whatever I'm uploading this week Again, if you haven't subscribed yet, maybe that will push you over the edge to subscribe and not miss any of those uploads It's the typical youtube pitch that we all kind of do right the like and subscribe type of thing Anyway, that's it for me. Thank you for watching and hopefully I'll see you in my next upload