Kristin Seefeldt: Helping across generations and impacts on retirement and retirement planning

0:00:00.6 Christie: Welcome, everyone. Thank you for making this happen on a snowy and somewhat chaotic day for everyone. Welcome to Michigan in February. I am delighted to welcome Professor Kristin Seefeldt as our Blue Bag Lunch Talk speaker for this month. And so let me tell you, Professor Seefeldt is an associate professor at the School of Social Work at the Ford School of Public Policy. She's also an Associate Faculty Director of Poverty Solutions. In short, Kristin is somebody that you wanna know, if you wanna do some interdisciplinary things that have to do with finance and also the well-being of people. So her primary research centers around exploring how low-income individuals understand their situations and particularly related to issues related to work and well-being, and she's currently doing some research about families' financial coping strategies.

0:00:57.2 Christie: She is a PI of a survey that examines the effects of the recession, recovery policies on individual well-being. And I have been fortunate enough to start working with Professor Seefeldt because she is the PI for a new project that the Center on Finance, Law & Policy is undertaking called the Community Tech Worker Project, that is a workforce development program project that will provide one-on-one technology support to small business owners in Detroit, while also through some community tech workers who will be job transitioning. So it is a big and ambitious project, and we have had a chance to spend more time together than she could have ever hoped, but it has been very fun for me.

0:01:47.4 Christie: If you were looking to sit in a class with her, you are too late. She did teach Essentials of Social Welfare Policy last semester at the School of Social Work, and now she is free for the semester to write books, do research and hang out with me. She's the author of Abandoned Families: Social Isolation in the 21st Century, Credit Where It's Due: Rethinking Financial Citizenship. And we are delighted to have her here today to talk. The title of the talk is Helping Across Generations and Impacts on Retirement and Retirement Planning. So because it's a little harder on Zoom to see hand raises, I think what we're gonna do is Professor Seefeldt is going to talk for 30, 35 minutes, and then we'll just take questions at the end. So without further delay, Kristin, thanks for being here today.

0:02:43.2 Professor Kristin Seefeldt: Thank you, and thanks, Christie. I'm also very delighted to be here and thanks everyone for coming. I know this is not... We had all the snow, the school situation is chaotic, as Christie said, so I really appreciate it. I'm just gonna share my screen and get the slideshow going. Okay, so let me just say a little bit about the kind of work that I do because it might be a little bit different than that other researchers who come to the Blue Bag talks. Like Christie said, I do work on people's finances and economic well-being. I'm really interested in understanding decision-making processes, but I am primarily a qualitative researcher. I go out and do interviews with people and do field work. So my work is really focused in on the micro level, but I'm interested in understanding how large economic changes and policy shifts really affect people at that micro-level.

0:04:04.3 PS: So when I was doing some work a number of years ago, I was talking to primarily folks who were living with pretty low incomes. And one of the things I kept hearing about was how other members in their networks, family members, friends who were unionized workers were providing help. So one woman said to me, "Some of my sisters are struggling, a couple of them are living with my mother. A lot of my family worked in the plants, they lost jobs, but they're staying with my mother, she's got a huge house." This mother also had a pension. Another woman I talked to was living in the house that her grandparents owned. Her grandparents both are retired workers from the City of Detroit. And this woman was getting paid to take care of her grandparents. She said every two weeks, she'd get paid about $250, that's coming out of her retirement and Social Security.

0:05:10.4 PS: So this led me to wonder what's exactly going on, 'cause I was hearing this a lot, and I wondered, are people with the union ties serving as private safety nets? Are they sharing their resources across households and across generations? And it wasn't just that I had this hunch that was coming out of some of the interviews that I was doing, there also are a lot of other macro-economic and demographic shifts that could be affecting this understudied but important part of the US workforce and the generations behind them. And these shifts include the nature of employer-employee contracts, with the shift away from manufacturing jobs and declines in union membership. We know that the jobs that were once able to provide a high school graduate with a middle class income have been replaced with low-paying, often unstable service sector work.

0:06:18.6 PS: And there are some other trends too that we need to think about. So today's worker with a high school degree or some college, on average, earns about $4000 to $6000 less than their baby boom counterparts, and they're much less likely to be members of a union. So this chart is showing union membership from the beginning of the 20th century to about 2017. And while we've seen some upticks in union membership recently, the overall trend has been one of decline.

0:06:57.1 PS: In addition, we've seen the proliferation of right-to-work states, which make mandatory participation in unions optional, and has really eroded a lot of the power that unions have in bargaining. Oops. Well, this worked on... This trick worked on the run-through, but I'm gonna have to manually go through my slides now. Sorry about that. At the same time that all of this is happening, there's been a lengthening in the transition to adulthood with the young adults relying on their parents for longer periods of time, there's later home leaving, later marriage, and for many, later childbearing. Young adults from working class backgrounds might find this transition particularly challenging with spells of unemployment, unstable relationships, and for some, economic security may never be attained. The number of multi-generation households also grew sharply during the Great Recession, and it's continued to grow in subsequent years, although at a slower pace. Young adults ages 25-29 without college degrees are now more likely to live with their parents than to be married or living with a partner in their own home. And parents whose adult children live with them have 25% fewer assets and lower levels of savings than those whose children live independently.

0:08:37.0 PS: Additionally, the number of three-generation households, that's grandparents, parents and children, has almost doubled over the last several decades. While 2.9 million children were being raised by their grandparents in 2015, which is up from 2.5 million in 2005. Well, many of today's workers face income instability from these trends that I've described. Their parents or grandparents may have access to stability in the form of social security benefits and pensions, as well as homes that they own. Even so, increases in life expectancy mean that the retirement period now lasts... For many, lasts much longer than it did in previous cohorts. Yet over half of those age 60 and older, who are not retired, have less than $40,000 worth of retirement savings. And indeed retirement benefits were never really meant to support families with kids or three-generation households. So the generation of middle class workers in or near retirement may find themselves still supporting family and serving as a private safety net at a time in life when they should be saving for the future or when their income is fixed for many years to come. There's a large sets of literature that inform some of these questions that I'm interested in looking at.

0:10:11.0 PS: We've a large literature in economics about supports provided by parents to their adult children, but much of this is really focused in on the big ticket transfers, that is requests or a down payment on a home, college tuition, things like that. There's much less on the day-to-day, smaller type of transfers that might take place in families that have less resources. There's also a large literature in gerontology on the assistance provided by the younger generation to their aging parents, but really not very much then focused on what older generations might be providing to younger generations.

0:11:00.6 PS: And finally, there is a social support literature that really is focused on people who have few resources, but it tends to be focused on those who are receiving the help and not so much on those who provide the help. So we have some gaps in the literature that do not necessarily speak to the trends that I just highlighted. And it could be that some older adults, despite being members of unions and having access to good benefits, are facing economic challenges as they near or enter retirement. In part, this might be because of the help they provide to financially vulnerable adult children and others. And while not necessarily living below the official poverty line, these adults might be at risk of material and other hardships as their fixed income or money that they might otherwise save is used to support others.

0:11:52.8 PS: So to really better understand is this phenomenon happening and what does it mean, this project, which I wanna emphasize is very much in preliminary stages, so please don't cite anything that I'm going to say, we need to do further analysis. But I'm really gonna focus in on three questions. First, how do unionized workers balance providing help with their own economic needs, including saving for retirement? Second, how do union retirees navigate retirement and provide help on a fixed income? And third, and I'll probably spend a little bit more time on this, how do union members really make sense of the help that they're providing? 

0:12:39.1 PS: So let me talk a little bit, if it wasn't already clear, why am I focusing on unionized workers? I'm interested in thinking about a population of folks who have, at least on the face of it, more stability, have not been affected by some of the job instability that we see occurring in more recent cohorts. Indeed, unionized jobs were once the backbone of the middle class, and they're jobs that the younger generation may have less access to. So fundamentally, I wanna also understand how does the loss of these jobs and some of the other policy, economic and demographic changes that I talked about, how are these really affecting micro-level processes around finances? 

0:13:33.9 PS: So let me talk a little bit about the project. What I've been doing is interviewing workers and retirees. And I've been recruiting people through a very incremental process, one that's been disrupted by COVID. And I can talk a little bit more about at the end. But I basically have, through some connections that I made, and I wanna thank my colleague, Larry Root at the School of Social Work, to some locals that serve retired workers and through the United Auto Workers. So these were locals that represented retirees from Ford Motor Company, Chrysler Motor Company in the state of Michigan. I also did interviews with some of our unionized employees here at the University of Michigan, primarily custodial and grounds crew staff. I went to a labor workshop hosted at U of M Dearborn and interviewed folks who were members of both the UAW and AFSCME. And I made some inroads with a retired teachers... A union representing retired teachers in Southeast Michigan and recruited folks there. I've also, through word of mouth and referrals from people, have recruited people as well. I've got a sample size of 31, which in qualitative research is considered, I'd say, respectable. I would like it to be a little bit higher. That said, a lot of what I've been hearing has been very similar.

0:15:30.7 PS: So in qualitative researcher terms, I may have actually reached what we call saturation point, in that I'm not necessarily hearing anything new. That said, I'm still actively trying to recruit more people. There's a fair amount of diversity in my sample. About 43% are retired and the rest were still working. 63% identify as female, 37% as male. Just over half were affiliated with the UAW. But again, that doesn't mean they're all auto workers or former auto workers. Some state of Michigan employees were represented by the UAW as well as some other workers that fall under their umbrella. And the age of the respondents in this study ranges from the late 40s until a couple of people who are in their early 80s. So I conducted in-person interviews lasting about an hour, mostly in people's homes, occasionally at a restaurant or a public library. Produced transcripts that we initially coded just simply using Word and Excel. And we're doing some initial coding and analysis now using a qualitative package called Dedoose, if you're interested in the logistics of this. So let me just turn to some of the preliminary findings. And again, I wanna stress the preliminary nature on that. First, I'll sort of show documents, some of the strategies that people talked about in terms of the help that they provide and its perceived consequences. And then how they are making sense of the help that they're providing.

0:17:39.0 PS: So first, people who are paying bills for others, primarily their adult children. And as I think these quotes illustrate, the reason why they were having to do this has to do with some of the failures that we have in our public safety net. So one respondent said of her daughter, "She was gonna get her electricity turned off and maybe get kicked out of her house. I couldn't say no. And she's got a lot of problems." Even though this woman attributed a lot of the issues faced by her daughter as being due to her daughter, her daughter was also unable to access any public assistance programs, anything to help her pay for her utility bills. Another woman talked about paying her mother's credit card. Her mother has a Visa, then she has her doctor's bills, her Medicare don't pay for it all. "And when she goes to a specialist or whatever, we still get doctor's bills. They're not expensive. They're like $50 or $60. I don't want them to add up. I try to take care of that. She takes certain vitamins that no insurance covers. Her telephone bill, I pay for that. I pay for all the groceries in her house." So her mother was a retiree, living on a fixed income, on Medicare with supplemental insurance that didn't cover everything that she needed, and this respondent took care of all of those bills.

0:19:17.8 PS: Another person who is working in a unionized job said, "We all have 401 [k] s. But I haven't been able to put anything into it. 'Cause I don't have enough money at the end of the day to really add anything to my account, which made me kind of sad because that would help a whole lot. I was paying my kid's insurance. So it was either that or that. We needed insurance, because right now, my daughter, she's pregnant again. She's off my insurance now." This woman had kept her adult children on her own health insurance until they turned 26, as the Affordable Care Act allows for, but at the cost of contributing to her retirement fund.

0:19:56.9 PS: More than half of the folks that I interviewed were providing some form of housing assistance to members of their family. And they really talked about their own home as being the landing spot for family members. As one woman said, "We're her parents. Those are our grandkids. And when you can't go anywhere else, you should be able to go back home." I do wanna put out these two pictures, just sort of represent the housing that people were living in. And in the one hand, folks, some folks were still in the house in which they'd raised all their children in, and the house was fairly large. On the other hand, some people had already downsized and were living in smaller houses. So one can imagine when people move in that that could be a real challenge. And indeed, moving in was the predominant form by which housing assistance was provided. One person said, "My daughter, two years ago, she said, 'I think I need to come back and stay with you for a while. It'll only be a month or so.' And that was two years ago." A lot of these moves were precipitated by things like divorce of their adult children, or in a number of cases, and I'll talk a little bit more about this in a moment.

0:21:33.7 PS: Health crises that their adult children had experienced. A couple of people never actually became empty nesters, their adult children continued to live with them, and in some cases, all children and grandchildren had never lived anywhere else besides staying with the worker retiree. And two people really gifted housing to family members. One gentleman moved out of his house and into an apartment so that his grandkids could have his house. Another person gave up her rental property and moved in a relative to live into that house. As I mentioned before, some of the folks that I interviewed were dealing with some pretty significant challenges with their adult children. One woman had drained all of her savings paying for the health care of her son who had a very serious medical condition and who had been unable to get on Medicaid for quite some time. She said, "I paid a $100 and some... Well, because my savings were $175,000 a year before the previous one. I made the same $35,000 and everything was from my savings." So she actually drained her entire savings account in order to pay for the medical care of her son.

0:23:13.6 PS: Another woman, one of the older members of the sample, had her great-grandchild and... Grandchildren and great-grandchild living with her because of CPS involvement. She said, "They're living with me, because when the granddaughter was 14, she got pregnant, she had him when she was 15. CPS got involved. They got two brothers staying with their mom now, but if I hadn't taken these two girls in, then they would have been put in foster homes. So I took them in." And I mentioned before, we've seen an increase in the number of children who are being raised by their grandparents, and this is just an example of this. So what are some of the consequences then of what's happening? One, people talked about how they weren't able to downsize if they had adult children and grandchildren living with them. And it's not just the downsizing, they couldn't realize the equity that they put into their home. One man said, "When he, my son gets out, then we can do other things. I'll sell the house, downsize, maybe travel, it'll definitely be a life changer."

0:24:40.6 PS: For other folks, they were really cramped quarters. People running into each other, and this increased stress. People also talked about increased stress because of different household rules. One man said, "There's things that we wish my daughter would do without having us tell her, she won't do it, sit here and say, 'Well, does it bother me enough to say something and sometimes start a fight, or should I just shut up?'" He later said, "See old people that were like prisoners in their own house, and I don't want that happening here." And he was reluctant to really say anything, and disrupt relationships within the household. People also talked about having higher utility and food bills. One woman says, "It kind of wipes you out when you're buying food for three people, and it also changes the dynamics of your utility bills." So another way in which folks weren't able to save money because they were paying more money in their bills. That said, there was a real reluctance of people to ask for help from those who... For whom they were providing help. People talked about their adult children for example, as being in a sort of a temporary situation and just needing to get back on their feet, even though in many of these cases, they've been living with their parents or this help had been ongoing for several years.

0:26:24.4 PS: One man said, "My son has a job now, but he doesn't pay rent or anything or pay any money. That's just me supporting my kids." Another woman said, "The only thing my daughter is able to do right now is the food stamps. And that's like 244 a month, basically, I'm everything. Everything is on me. I know it's not our faults. Well, in a way it is, but I just stopped being angry with it. I go ahead and I do it." Another man said, "She just needs to get on her feet, let her save as much money as she can." Then when we look around, and we see she's buying the boys all these toys, he raised... Was raising questions about whether or not she should contribute. But at the time, he was not asking her to pay rent or help out with any of the other bills.

0:27:18.4 PS: The other concern that folks voiced was, what would happen when they were no longer around? One woman said, "What are you going to do when we're gone? You gotta get balanced, so you can hold the line because I can't come back here." She was talking about what happens when I die. The woman who was taking care of her great grandchildren, her grandchildren and great-grandson said, "I just worry if I pass away, I don't know what's gonna happen with them. I want to make sure he's taken care of." Another woman said, "I'm praying to God that the longevity of women in my family extends to me. I need to be around a long time," to take care of her daughter who is disabled and could not work and but yet was having trouble keeping her Social Security disability benefits.

0:28:14.1 PS: So what I think are some of the potential implications from some of these interviews. I think, at least for some set of folks who have income from good jobs, Social Securities and pensions, that money is being used to support others outside of the households, including those who have moved back home. So right now, we're not in a period of hearing a lot about so called entitlement reform. But most likely that will come back into policy discussions again. But we need to be thinking about if we're talking about cutting retirement pensions, if we're talking about retirement benefits, if we're talking about eliminating pensions, this could have ripple effects across multiple generations. As one woman said, "They cut Medicare, Social Security, I'm really gonna be hurting."

0:29:09.0 PS: Additionally, transfers might not just be for one time, big ticket items like down payments on houses and college tuitions. We need to be thinking about transfers as the cumulative effect of daily assistance and explore the ramifications for that. Paying for additional groceries over the course of the year can really add up, particularly when no one else is helping to offset the costs. So let me just wrap up and then we can move to questions and discussions. Like I said, I have been trying to continue recruitments, that kind of has stalled out due to COVID. A lot of the union meetings that I had previously been trying to attend have actually stopped, a few have started. I have though been doing a second round of interviews with people who are already in the sample and looking at any changes that have occurred over time, and particularly focusing in on what's been happening in these households with COVID.

0:30:28.8 PS: And before I stop, I just want to provide a quick thank you to Poverty Solutions and the Russell Sage Foundation for funding they've provided to this project. To Erica Ratliff and Nicole DuBois for their research assistance, and in particular to Bob Bowen, who is the president of UAW local 849 Retirees chapter in Ypsilanti for really supporting this study and helping me make connections. So I'll stop with that, and I look forward to our discussion.

0:31:09.7 Christie: That is great. Can we have a quick moment before we answer questions to ask questions to acknowledge professors Seefeldt really quickly.

[applause]

0:31:18.2 PS: Thank you.

0:31:19.1 Christie: Some people have to drop off early, so I wanna make sure you get a chance for that. Okay, Professor Chris, why don't you start? 

0:31:27.4 Chris: Thanks, Christie. And thanks, Kristin, for being here and sharing this research. I was wondering if you spoke with your research subjects about non-monetary help. I'm thinking, for example, of child care. You can imagine two different models, where, say, a grandparent pays for a grandchild's daycare, so that the parent can go to work, or the grandparent provides the childcare directly. It seems like union membership, and having a pension, and being able to retire so that you're available to work, that's all tied up there. I just would be interested to hear your comments on how different generations are helping in non-monetary ways.

0:32:24.6 PS: Yeah. No, and there certainly was a lot of that as well. A number of people providing childcare, particularly providing childcare when their grandchildren were co-residents with them. Transportation help was another big piece, taking their adult children or grandchildren in some cases to and from work or to and from school. That was... Childcare also consisted of having a lot of responsibility for the arrival and drop off responsibilities during the school day.

0:33:08.3 PS: And then I would say more, certainly emotional help was a big factor. Although a lot of times when I was talking to people that that piece of help was the... Or that part of the helping system, I think, was the most frayed, because I think of the reasons I talked about a moment ago. Because of living in cramped quarters, because of having to deal with different household rules. But certainly there was a lot of in-kind help going on, in addition to the financial help.

0:33:51.1 Christie: Kristin, I don't know if you've gotten this far yet. You mentioned several times that some of the stories, that people couldn't access disability benefits, or other kinds of benefits. I'm just wondering if you... Based on your preliminary data that is not to be cited, if you have any thoughts about some of the public policy suggestions for improving this.

0:34:17.1 PS: Yeah, no thanks. And I have. And I think some of the other work that I've done in the past has really looked at difficulty accessing public benefits. And so a lot of what I've seen really, I think, falls in line with that. We know that social security disability benefits, which some of these... At least, a handful of the adult children that folks were caring for really needed, but it takes years to get on SSI for many folks. And then once on, it can be really hard to stay on. So we certainly need to think about if we're gonna make... If SSI, is gonna be so difficult, do we need Rebecca Blank, or the former Dean of the Ford School at one point had been saying, maybe we need a temporary disability program that can sort of tide people over until they are either able to return to the workforce or transition onto a more permanent form of disability.

0:35:36.1 PS: In a couple of cases, food stamp benefit receipt, which for households in which an adult child could get food stamps was important, but that was very unstable. And so thinking about some of the reasons why we make it so difficult to stay on food stamps, some of that I think is due to challenges we just have with the workforce issues in public benefit programs. We don't staff them up to the levels we need to to keep up with demand. I think there's also some technological infrastructure problems too, that I've heard a lot over the years, about computer glitches happening to people and resulting in them losing their benefits. So these things are then having ripple effects upward. They're affecting the older generations who then become the private safety net. So I think a lot of... To the extent we can make our public system more accessible, it would take off some of the strain that's placed on family members.

0:37:01.3 Christie: Okay, you all know by now that if you don't ask questions I'm gonna keep going 'cause I always have questions. Alright. Don't say you weren't warned. I'm curious, you mentioned that... At the outset of this, I thought you were gonna be mostly focusing on... I'm curious about if the... As you look to... If the focus is primarily on the union members themselves or on the folks that they're helping, but then it seems like the helping goes both ways. And so I'm trying to figure out what your book is gonna look like, and I can't figure out who the... Maybe that's part of the challenge 'cause I can't figure out who the primary people are, 'cause it seems so multi-directional.

0:37:50.0 PS: Yeah. And I think that is part of the challenge. When I first started, I thought about trying to... Could I interview both generations? And that became really clear that it was gonna be really tricky because of these really difficult relationships that were going on. Is the help going both ways? It's somewhat going both ways, but it's primarily... At least in the small number of people I've talked to, is more coming from the unionized folks to adult children and grandchildren. There's, right, a couple of instances where people are providing food stamp benefits to help offset grocery bills, but that's not the norm. I also do... And I didn't talk about this, I have a lot of information too, about the role of the union in these folks' lives, and how that shapes their sense about why it's important to help. I haven't analyzed that data well enough to really be able to say anything about it. So I see this as being more about the older generation, using the word older very, very loosely.

0:39:35.4 Christie: Right, to include people within a 40-year span. Marianne, you want me to... Do you wanna ask your... Unmute and ask your question, or do you want me to ask it for you? I'll ask for you. Marianne's wondering, are you only focusing on UAW members and are you looking at immigrants at all? 

0:39:54.4 PS: So...

0:39:55.4 Marianne: I just unmuted myself here because... Are you looking at families? I'm an immigrant, and obviously, I have done things that I could have never done in Germany, and not having a high school education, two masters degree and money, but I don't have children. So were you looking just at children, families, or also... I'm a retired person, I'm 77 years old and don't have to worry about anything. So for me, it was a totally different story. So that's why I'm saying are you just... And also culturally, I've worked in China. And there the parents is kind of... That's what they do, take care of their grandchildren. Did you look at different cultures as well, culturally, ethnically? Was there a difference? 

0:40:50.5 PS: I don't have much ethnic variation in my sample. I have somebody from a Southeast Asian country, but it is primarily a sample of white folks and black folks. And that definitely reflects, I think, a limitation of my study, but I think... What I'm hoping I can be able to say is something that is... I think it is particularly relevant and salient to the experience of Rust Belt areas like Southeast Michigan although I hate that term, Rust Belt, I should not maybe even have said it. Looking at what this larger issue of what happens when these jobs start to go away. In the context of a safety net, that's hard to access, what does this actually mean for the financial lives and the emotional lives of the families who still live in the region? But I take your point, and I think if I had a larger, more diverse sample there'd be some real differences. And I would say too, even folks that I interviewed for this study, really would say too, "This is what family does, you just... You have to do this, you have to help. Families do this." And I don't wanna ever suggest that providing the help is a bad thing. I think that what I was hearing from folks is having to provide help because there are no other options. And that can be very stressful and have some real ramifications on people's finances.

0:43:09.7 Marianne: Thank you.

0:43:11.5 Christie: I'm gonna read Ethan's question from the chat. He says, "Hi Kristin, thank you for the important and informative work. I'm curious how your informants talked or did not talk about financial issues with their children and grandchildren. I also wonder whether any of the retirees you interviewed mentioned any supports or guidance training that they received from local human service non-profits on the financial issues they struggle with."

0:43:43.5 PS: I would say that the word I would use to describe people, the way they talked about they've helped their family was just one of frustration, mixed in with real concern. Frustrated that they weren't being able to do what they thought they should be doing, whether that was saving money for their retirement or whether that was living the life of retirement they had envisioned for themselves previously. But as I think that the slide that I showed you and this real concern of what's gonna happen when I'm gone? That's where the real worry came in. This group of folks really was not accessing... With a couple of notable exceptions, wasn't accessing much in the way of help from non-profits and community organizations. A couple exceptions though, were folks who've been really drained, and they were reporting going to food pantries, finding back-to-school giveaways that organizations would do around the beginning of the school year. But those were a couple of cases where, like I said, the loss of money that they'd experienced was pretty extreme. I feel like I'm forgetting part of the question now.

0:45:36.8 Christie: I think just whether I even... The first part, I think you kind of covered it, but just whether they talked about their financial issues with their children and grandchildren.

0:45:47.4 PS: Yeah, I do have data on that. I haven't looked at that as carefully, off the top of my head, which is always a dangerous place to be. There were some who said they really had really wished they had spent more time talking about finances, a lot of people who thought that this was something that needed to be taught in high school... Financial management needed to be taught in high school and grade school, and wasn't, but really we should be doing this, but that's something I could definitely look at more carefully.

0:46:27.6 Christie: Jeremy.

0:46:31.0 S5: Kristin, I was interested if you observed intergenerational union membership or perhaps more interestingly, generations that worked at the same UAW plan, for example, but the older generation was part of the union and the younger generation didn't have that option. I have an impression that these union jobs used to be handed down from generation to generation, is that not happening as much any more, and does that create unique dynamics within families? 

0:47:09.4 PS: Yeah, that's a really great question. And one, again, to where I think I've got some really rich data on this. So there was a set of folks who very much their goal for their children and grandchildren was to make sure that they had options beyond going into a factory job, so they wanted their kids to go to college. And in many cases, those... At least some of their children had. So, a dynamic that often happened in these families is you'd have a couple of kids who had done pretty well, and then one child who just was really, really struggling. A few cases where an adult child also was a union member, but I know in one example, the son who was in the job, didn't have access to a pension and the pay was a lot less. But I'd say more common was this desire to have their children be able to do something outside of a factory setting, and sometimes that worked out and sometimes that didn't.

0:48:44.7 Christie: Anyone else? Okay, in that case, I want to, again, say thank you Professor Seefeldt, for spending this snow day with us. Thanks to all of you for coming. And next month, next month's talk, come back next month for our Blue Bag Lunch Talk, and we will Casey Pierce from The School of Information, continuing our interdisciplinary trend around the excellence of the University of Michigan. So that'll be on March 10th. So come back y'all thanks so much.

0:49:30.4 S5: Thank you, Kristin.

0:49:31.7 Marianne: Thank you.