All right, we're on. So you're right-handed. Yes, I'm right-handed. And are you as well? Right-handed? So do you do the grabbing with your right hand? I do. I grab it right hand, place it in my left, the majority of them. That's Jimmy Knicks and Willie Easter, talking to Uncertain Hour's senior producer, Caitlin Esch. Caitlin and I went down to Mississippi before the pandemic hit to talk to them about the work they used to do. So you're carrying like 12 chickens on one hand? Yes. And were they alive or dead? They were alive. Jimmy and Willie used to catch chickens for a living. They'd go out to farms where the chickens are raised, and they'd round them up, put them in cages, and the cages would go on trucks, and the trucks would go to the slaughterhouse. Catching chickens that don't want to be caught is harder than you might think. Catchers have to move quickly, so some of them actually grab two birds at a time. Some of them catch about two, and some of them catch about one. I know Jimmy, you always call about two, Jimmy. Two and three. Yeah, I know you call about two and three. Jimmy can hold up to seven big birds at a time, or 12 small ones, a bird or two between each free finger. In one night, each catcher scoops up thousands of birds, and they have the scars and calluses to prove it. The callus is going to come right in here and right between there, all of them are going to come right between your knuckles. This work can wreck a person's hands. It's been a few years since Willie caught a chicken, but one of his hands is still bigger than the other, like he's wearing a glove. Their knuckles are swollen like knots on a rope. They go blister up and stuff, and they swell. They swap tips for how to care for their hands. First of all, I bleach my hands for some time. Bleach. It'll soak them up for a minute, then they harden the back, then they harden the... You have that layer of skin. Bleach, Jimmy says, makes your hands less sensitive over time. Willie likes epsom salts, and some people turn to other remedies. A lot of guys urinate on your hand, all that. They don't work. They say it works, but I never tried it. I tried it, but it... In case you didn't catch that, urinate on your hands. Willie says some people swear by it to relieve swelling and tenderness. But it didn't urinate on your fingers. You were rough. Back then, you tried that thing, you tried to get the pain, you didn't matter, you said, well, it sounded crazy. But you wanted to get away, so you can go back to work. Jimmy and Willie caught chickens for many years. One of the companies they caught for was Cook Foods, one of the largest poultry companies in the country. One day, a little over a decade ago, something unusual happened. After a long shift, Jimmy remembers the crew boarded the van. Instead of taking the crew home, like the van normally did, it headed to one of the plant's offices. They told us on the van we were going to go to a meeting. And at that point, it was whispering about what it was about. Jimmy had no idea what was coming. The van arrived at the office. The crew filed off the van. Waiting for them, Jimmy recalls, was a man who was not dirty from catching chickens, wearing dress pants and a Sunday shirt, a boss from Cook Foods. And that's when they told us. They were going to contract. Contractors, they were letting the contracts handle that part, the catching part. Cook was going to subcontract out the chicken catching immediately, and Jimmy and Willie's lives were about to change. Welcome to The Uncertain Hour. I'm Chrissy Clark. And I'm Caitlin Ashe. And this season is all about this thing we used to call employment, what happened to it, and why it matters. We're looking at how companies can get around providing basic workplace protections, like health benefits, sick days, minimum wage. We talked in earlier episodes about janitorial companies that rely on independent contractors. Today, we're going to talk about another way companies can structure their businesses so that their workers are not their employees. Listeners of the show might remember we dropped in on poultry workers last season to see how they were weathering the pandemic. But we'd been talking to poultry workers before the pandemic started, talking to them about how companies use subcontracting to make the workers somebody else's responsibility, and about what that means for those workers. Caitlin's going to take it from here. Jimmy Nix was 17 years old, a senior in high school, when he got his first poultry job. My first job was hanging chickens on a back dock at a chicken plant. Jimmy would grab live chickens as they came around on a conveyor belt and hang them upside down. Hang them on a shackle, both legs on a shackle. Careful not to break the leg or a wing. From there, the chickens would go to the kill room where they're decapitated, then on to plucking and gutting. Back then, Jimmy never thought he'd end up working as a chicken catcher. When I was young, I used to watch my brother and my friends and cousins and whatever catch chickens. When they come in, they smell the stench on them and the dirt in the field. And I would say, I would never do that job. But then, in later on, later years, I noticed how much money they would bring home. And I said, I'm going to try this. And so I got out there and I tried it. Not that I liked it, but I liked the money. Jimmy thought the money back then was pretty good. It was the time we started catching. We were working for the check catching for the plants. We were getting paid like $10 per load. And that was pretty good. That was pretty good because a lot of times we caught me caught from 12 to 15 loads per day, you know, and you make them get pretty good money then. Jimmy was paid by the load, not by the hour. At $10 a load, he says he could make between $100 and $150 per shift. So if you do the math for eight hours of catching chickens, he could make at least around $12 an hour. That's not including traveling to the farm or putting on gear or anything else. And that was more than he could make working a lot of other jobs in the area. In Scott County, Mississippi, where Jimmy lives, about 20% of families were living in poverty in 2019. That's about twice the national average. Poultry is the economic engine of the area. Thousands of people work in food processing. When Jimmy started out, he worked directly for the chicken plant, Cook Foods. As an employee of the poultry company, Jimmy says he got health insurance and benefits too. Pay sick days, so many pay sick days. You can even take a leave of absence. If you have personal problems or family problems or something going on, you can have a leave of absence. You got dental insurance, hospital insurance, life insurance. And see, everybody needs all this. Anything can happen at any given time. So Jimmy was glad to have a job, even though catching chickens is really grueling. Chicken catching happens mostly at night. Chickens don't move around as much in the dark as they do in the light. They're much calmer. So late at night or early in the morning, a van would pick up all the guys at their homes. Okay, after you pick up everybody, then we stop by a store and get all the supplies and whatever else we need. Gas up the van, get snacks and maybe some protective gear like masks or gloves, and then drive out to the farm. The whole pickup process can take up to two hours when you finally get to the farm. Got somebody to go in to get them off, to stir them off the wall when they want to pile it up. Someone goes into the chicken house, which are these long buildings, longer than a football field, to stir the chickens, basically keep them moving while the loader or the forklift comes in. As the loader comes in, they can't stand a lot of noise. And when the loader comes in with the noise, they'll run to the wall. And if you don't constantly keep them stirred, they'll pile up and die. And they'll smother in seconds. Chickens can easily smother this way by stampeding each other and piling up. The birds are supposed to arrive at the slaughterhouse alive and undamaged, no broken wings or anything. Jimmy worked on a crew of about nine people. One guy would stir, and the others would fan out across the chicken house and grab up birds. I wasn't allowed into the chicken houses, but I've seen videos on YouTube. The birds flap desperately as they try to get away. The catchers work as fast as they can, grabbing chickens and flinging them into cages. Jimmy says the catchers have to sign animal cruelty papers, agreeing not to harm the birds before they're slaughtered. But it's hard to be gentle when you're moving so fast. Jimmy took pride in the work. He was good at it, and he earned a nickname. He called me quick Nick sometimes. Quick because he was so fast at grabbing chickens, and Nick because his last name is Nick's. So the money wasn't bad, the benefits were decent. But like I said, the work is really hard, and it's filthy. You held a chicken alive, they pick you, they crap on you. The chicken might even squirt in your mouth if you don't watch it. So it might even swallow poop, because you were working with your mouth open, you're breathing, trying to breathe, and all of a sudden he shoots it in. I mean, it's sad to say, but it happens to some people now. This is the stuff that chicken catchers have to go through. Chicken poop releases ammonia when it breaks down, which can irritate your eyes and your lungs. You can hardly breathe now, almost to a point of passing out. They expect you to keep going. You can't just walk out and say, the ammonia's too strong. The dust mixed with sweat is so irritating that some catchers apply something like baby oil or Vaseline, and then roll stockings over their limbs to protect from chafing. It's been time, you see how dark my skin is, right? It's been time that I've gotten out of work, and I look as light as you are, because of the dust. You're totally cut with dust. Your hair, your clothes, some of them you can't tell the actual color. Just think now, what this is, it's sticking to you in your clothes, and your hair is sticking to your lungs also. Jimmy says catching chickens requires a certain steely resolve. You have to have your mind made up, you're going to do it. A lot of strong people don't last a week. It's not just a physical thing, it's a mental thing. I was out there one night, it was 11 degrees, and we caught chickens. 11 degrees. It's ice, you get out the van, you lie down and brush your butt right there. It's ice all over the ground, but rain's clear, so we gotta go. At the end of the shift, the van takes the guys home. Except that, like we said, one day the van didn't go home. It took the workers to a building, and they were taken to an office. That moment when everything changed for Jimmy. The boss told the crew chicken catching was going to be subcontracted out to independent companies. We had the option of either continue catching with them, or go to the plant. If you go to the plant, you got benefits, you still got benefits, but if you continue to catch for the company, if you continue to catch for the contractors, no benefits at all. Continue to catch for the subcontractors no benefits, or take a different job at the plant and keep your benefits. The guy in the clean clothes didn't tell the workers why the company was doing this, but the chicken catchers figured the company was trying to save money. Jimmy says they were given less than a day to decide. Only overnight, that's the only time when we got off, we got time to make that decision between then and plant starting time. We were 7 o'clock that morning. I just want to pause here and say, Cook is not the only company to contract out chicken catching. It's pretty standard in the industry. We talked to an undocumented chicken catcher in Alabama. We'll call him Luis. We're not using his real name because he's worried about retaliation. He got chickens for seven years, working directly for a different major chicken company, and his experiences are really similar to Jimmy and Willys. At the time I had to work for the company, it was very good. He was paid decently, earned overtime. He got health insurance, paid vacation. He says it was a good job. It afforded him a decent life. Then one Friday, after a full week of catching chickens, Luis and the crew were told they should report to work the next day, Saturday, to work overtime. Luis likes earning overtime, so he was happy about that. The next morning, the crew showed up to work, but they never did catch any chickens. This part will sound familiar. Luis's crew was told they would no longer be working for the big chicken company. The catching crew was going to be subcontracted out. But don't worry, the bosses said. You can work for the subcontractors. Luis was devastated. He knew what this meant. He'd seen it happen to other crews. He knew his pay was about to drop. He knew he'd lose benefits. He went home to tell his fiance. Maria, also not her real name, remembers this moment like it was yesterday. Luis came home early in the morning, just a few hours after his shift started. And I remember I was still in bed. I was still just sleeping and I hear a noise, and he said, well, I'm no longer employed, you didn't say. What do you mean? Maria and Luis had just started living together. We're planning on getting married and planning their future. I left and I remember I see his face and asking in his face several times, are you kidding me? That's for real? What do you mean? Now working for the main company and working for the contractor. That means that you lose the benefits and he said, yes, honey. Yes, that's exactly what I mean. No more medical insurance, no more vacation pay, no more sick pay. And I'm like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. No, that can't happen. No, you have a job. You are a working man and you have a job, right? You kidding me? No. Maria was stunned. We in America, how can this company do that to their workers, especially if they are a good worker, big company making a big money. Signs aren't real for me. Subcontractors are supposed to follow the same laws as the bigger companies. They're supposed to pay minimum wage and overtime, but they tend to be small businesses with fewer resources, so they may not offer the same benefits. Luis ended up taking a job with the subcontractor. He says his pay fell by more than 50%. But Chimmy Nix didn't want to lose his benefits. Remember, he was given a choice between catching for the subcontractor and taking a job at the plant. That's the last time I'm going to try to plant. His new job at the processing plant was physically hard. He had to carry heavy loads weighing 40 to 50 pounds, and he struggled to complete the work. And it started to get frustrating when you're doing something. That's not right, especially when you used to doing the best you can do on a job. And then you do this and it's like, man, what am I doing? I don't want to be thought of as a weakling. He worked at the plant a little less than two months before asking for his old job back. Some people used to do a certain thing for so many years. That's the only thing you've been doing. That's the only thing you're going to actually want to do really. So I went back to catching. Back to catching. Only this time there was a subcontractor in the mix. Jimmy seemed to have two bosses. How should I say this to make it right? You're not working directly on the cooks or whatever. You're working for them but indirectly. But still, cooks is in control. Does that make any sense? This question, who's the boss, who's in control, would end up being really important later on. But at the time it was just kind of confusing. When that first payday rolled around, Jimmy saw the benefits weren't the only thing that had changed. The pay changed too. Working for Cook, Jimmy had been making $100 to $150 a shift. Working for the contractor, he was making around $60. It's not even half as much now. I mean, you just barely making it. You got to do something on the side. You know, you got a mechanic or a carpenter or robber steal something. I know something that I wouldn't advise but I'm just saying. Some people are driven to do things that they don't want to do. So the pay changed, the benefits changed, the sick days and vacation days, those went away. What didn't change was the actual work. You catch the same number of chickens. On the different fields, you might have been working a little faster. You have to work a little faster with the contractor. And it's more hard on you. It's more wear and tear on the body actually and the mind trying to keep up. Jimmy says the chicken catchers weren't paid wait time for the hours spent working but not catching chickens. Time spent riding in the van, going out to the farm, putting on gear, even waiting on the equipment when it broke down. I remember a time when the van quit and we sit there and had to wait on somebody else to come and pick us up. But the people that wanted to come pick us up, they were on a job and miles and miles away. So we sit there for hours. We don't get paid for that. This wasn't new under the subcontractors, but Jimmy hadn't minded so much before when he was working directly for the company because he made enough when he was catching chickens to make up for it. Under the subcontractor, he didn't. Jimmy says sometimes the pay came out to less than minimum wage. I want to talk for a minute about minimum wage. In Mississippi, there's no state minimum wage law, but employers have to pay at least the minimum wage set by federal law, which is $7.25 an hour. It hasn't gone up since 2009. And even though the chicken catchers are paid a peace rate, that is, they're not paid by the hour, but rather by how many thousands of chickens they catch in a night, it still has to even out to at least minimum wage. And if they work overtime, they're still supposed to get time and a half based on average earnings. If employers don't do this, they can be sued or fined up to $1,000 per violation. There's a whole unit within the Department of Labor called the Wage and Hour Division that's supposed to investigate claims, but the chance of a workplace being investigated is pretty slim. As of recently, there were only about 1,000 federal inspectors, and they're supposed to be keeping tabs on more than 7 million workplaces. Jimmy would try to keep track of how many thousands of chickens the crew caught and how many hours he worked, but his pay rarely came out to what he thought it should be. You ain't getting paid for something. Something's not right. When it happens over and over and over, you know, that's the thing. And I would like for him to recognize us for what we're worth and make us feel like, yeah, I'm going to work tonight. I want to get on that van. I'm going to jump. I'm going to go, you know, instead of waking up, dang, there's the van out there now. You know, you don't want to feel like that. You want to feel like you're anxious to go out there because you're going to make good money. Shoot, I might make $130 tonight. You know, I might make $140. You're anxious to go and see what you're going to make. But the way it is, you don't want to go because you know you're not even going to make $100. When you're on a job, you're supposed to want to go to that job. But catching chickens, you got to make yourself want to. Jimmy says it seemed like everybody was making money except the catchers, the chicken company, the subcontractors. Meanwhile, he was barely getting by. It's no good. I'm just going to put it like that. It's no good. It's not for the workers at all. It's not for the workers. It's just for the contractor themselves and the plants. You know, in the chicken business, it's for the contractors. They making the money and the plants are spending less money. You know, that's the way it is. Jimmy figured the company subcontracted out the chicken catching to save money. But there are other reasons poultry companies outsource and subcontract. The catchers may have gotten caught up in some much larger changes. That's after the break. Outsourcing and subcontracting are not new ideas. It's been happening for many decades across industries. It's extensive. It tends to affect more often low-paid workers, very often black, Latinx, immigrant workers. David Weill is a professor and dean at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. He used to lead the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division under the Obama administration. Quick story about David. Years before he came to lead the Wage and Hour Division, he had this moment of discovery. My aha moment. His aha moment. What happened was he got funding to do a study, looking at why some companies failed to follow labor laws and how the DOL could investigate them more effectively. And I started seeing these patterns of non-compliance like companies not paying minimum wage and overtime. And it was happening in a certain kind of workplace where you had the increasing use of third-party management companies or staffing agencies or temp firms. He coined a term for this kind of fractured work arrangement where people don't work directly for the companies that need their labor. He called it fissuring. He took the term from geology. He says it's like a rock with a fracture that deepens and spreads with time. David wrote a whole book about it called The Fissured Workplace. He's one of the biggest experts on this topic. And as we learn from Jimmy and Willie and Louise, when the subcontractors came in, their wages went down. David has seen the same thing happen to other workers across industries. The reason that workers earn less money in a subcontracted relationship is they are being paid by a subcontractor who is trying to get a margin, is trying to pay the workforce and also get some kind of level of profitability. The amount they're being paid is very often dictated by competition with a bunch of other subcontractors so that if they don't get the work, someone else is going to take that job. David says it's not that subcontracting is inherently bad. Some jobs require specialization. A subcontractor might have expertise that another company doesn't, or it might have really expensive equipment that the other company doesn't want to invest in. A construction company, for example, is probably not going to hire a permanent electrician for a job that takes a week. But it's a problem, David says, when a job that used to be done internally, a job that's central to a company's business, is suddenly outsourced. And the work largely stays the same. And that's where you go from legitimate subcontracting that's the part of any industry to the kind of really problematic subcontracting that's really a mechanism to get around the kinds of rights and responsibilities we've decided are important as a society through our laws. David says when he was at the Department of Labor, he saw a lot of wage and hour violations in the poultry industry, including in chicken catching, in part because the industry is so fissured. That fissuring, David says, is for several reasons. For one, the business theories we talked about last episode that encouraged companies to focus on core competencies, leading some to outsource everything else. Also, subcontracting helps companies avoid unionization efforts and shed legal responsibility for workers, particularly in industries like chicken, that rely on undocumented immigrant workers. It's hard to know exactly why the company Jimmy caught chickens for, Cook Foods, decided to subcontract out its catch crews. But it happened shortly after Cook had gotten into some trouble for the way it was treating its employees. The Department of Labor investigated Cook's Mississippi operation in 2006 and 2007, so before it subcontracted out all of its catchers. And it found that Cook owed 174 catchers that it employed, more than a total of $325,000 in overtime. Cook had apparently not been paying the catchers time and a half when they worked more than 40 hours a week. After that, Cook subcontracted out all of its catch crews to third-party companies. We, of course, wanted to talk to Cook, to ask if that decision was made to avoid problems with the Department of Labor, or was it because the company wanted to save money, or was there some other reason? But Cook wouldn't give us an interview. In court documents, Cook denied the decision had anything to do with dodging legal responsibilities. I'll tell you about that court case later on, by the way. The reason Cook gave was that it needed help finding workers. One Cook manager said in a deposition they decided to subcontract out 100% of the catching around 2012, because, quote, we were having trouble getting labor to catch the birds. So trouble finding labor was one reason poultry companies began to use subcontractors. But they may have had other reasons to want to shed employees too. It's illuminating to look at what was happening when outsourcing really started accelerating more than 30 years ago. And that reporting took me on a bit of a journey to understand more about why companies started using subcontractors in the first place, and why subcontractors would take on the responsibility of those workers too. In 1986, Congress passed, and President Ronald Reagan signed, the Immigration Reform and Control Act. People call it IRCA. It was difficult legislative undertakings in the last three Congresses. Reagan wasn't kidding. It took more than five years for the final version of the bill to get through all the hoops. It was known in Congress as the corpse that would not die. It's an excellent example of a truly successful bipartisan effort. IRCA was a compromise between those who wanted amnesty for undocumented immigrants, and those who wanted to come down hard and stop unauthorized immigration altogether. So IRCA granted one-time amnesty to about three million immigrants. It also beefed up border security and made it illegal for employers to knowingly hire undocumented workers. Employers that did would face fines and sanctions. And one way that employers have gotten around IRCA, or have tried to get around IRCA, is by outsourcing that sort of HR personnel piece of hiring to third-party contractors. Angela Steece is an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She spent a lot of time with chicken plant workers in the 2000s. She wrote a book about her experiences there called Scratching Out a Living. Angela says IRCA led to a couple of big consequences. It created a market for fraudulent documents and led to a boom in subcontracting as companies that relied on undocumented workers tried to distance themselves from those workers. The idea is that they're insulating themselves from any legal accountability for having hired those undocumented workers. Those big consequences of IRCA, that market for fraudulent documents and subcontracted workers, you might remember how they played out a couple of summers ago in 2019. That's when several chicken plants in central Mississippi, including Cook Foods, were raided by federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Now to a massive ICE raid. 680 immigrant workers were caught up in the suite. And what officials are calling the largest single state operation in the country? The massive raid involves several hundred federal ICE agents. Comply with the law or we're coming after you. There's just like a big field back here with tons of cows. We visited another one of the plants that was raided called Anbee Inc. In a rural town, one county over from Cook Foods. There's a padlock on the door. It was eerily quiet. Oh well. It just looks like an office that's sort of just been left. It's a little bit of a mess. ICE agents detained so many of Anbee's workers, the plant actually had to close. Anbee turned around and blamed its labor broker, a small company called Southern Knights. According to court documents, Southern Knights had a contract with Anbee. It was supposed to staff, manage and supervise employees at Anbee's plant in exchange for a 15% service fee. Anbee sued Southern Knights for breach of contract, arguing that the labor broker falsely and knowingly misrepresented that employees had been fully screened and were eligible to work. And it ended up costing the company a lot of money. We reached out to Anbee through its lawyer, the company declined to comment. I really wanted to talk to the owner of Southern Knights. Southern Knights has been sued by workers in another poultry plant in the past, alleging wage violations and sexual harassment on the job. I wanted to ask the owner why she would take on the risk that other bigger companies might want to avoid. Are some subcontractors taking advantage of vulnerable workers? Or were they just struggling businesses trying to do their best? The owner didn't seem to have an office. So we stopped by her one-story house in a modest neighborhood on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Me and our video producer, Ben. Hi, my name is Caitlin. I'm sorry to bother you. She was nice. Said she had to check with her lawyer before talking to us. We followed up, but we never heard from her again. Months later, she was charged with three felonies for harboring an undocumented immigrant, making false statements and causing false quarterly wage reports to be filed using fake social security numbers. Do you understand what you're charged with? Yes, ma'am. If convicted, she faces up to $750,000 in fines and 20 years in prison. Do you understand the penalties? Yes, ma'am. As to each of the counts? At her arraignment last summer, she pleaded... Not guilty. Not guilty. A manager at the plant was also charged, along with dozens of workers from A&B and from other chicken plants that were raided. It's worth pointing out no executives from A&B face charges. Oh, summit. Summit, Mississippi. I had struck out with Southern Knights, so we went on a little road trip, ending up from the coast to the flat, wintry, gray landscape of central Mississippi to where the chicken plants are. Crossing train tracks, oh look, there's a pig. We dropped by the businesses and sometimes the homes of subcontractors in rural small towns. Modest operations for the most part. Onto the next. Yes. And sometimes there were dogs. Hey, buddies. Hi. Five huge dogs. Three, four. A lot of dogs. Are you afraid of dogs? No, I'm not afraid of dogs. But they were like surrounding us up there. We found Jimmy's employer, Jett. Where's the front door? Front door, I think it was around this way. Hi, is this Armco? But the owner wouldn't talk to us on the record. None of the subcontractors would. So I never got to ask why subcontractors do what they do. If big companies are trying to shed responsibility for workers, why would these little companies agree to take on that responsibility, along with all of the risk? Well, very often because it's important for their economic survival. And that's not to excuse violation of the law, but it certainly explains it. That's David Weil again. He says subcontractors tend to be small businesses, often operating with tight margins. Because they are economically, you know, really on the edge to begin with, you frequently find those subcontractors going out of business, either going out of business or if they are found in violation, they shut down under one name and then they reconstitute themselves as a new business with a new name shortly after. The owner of Jett is connected with more than a dozen other businesses. Many are in poultry and many have been dissolved. Jimmy Nix has worked for a few of them. He says the conditions are pretty consistent. And so what did happen to Jimmy Nix? After decades catching chickens, he decided he'd finally had enough. And the point is, is we're trying to make them do better and treat us better too. And pay us for what we're worth. And for the time lost, the time, the wait time, the old time, which is all basically the same, it boils down to the same thing. We want to get paid. Next week, the story of how the chicken catchers fought back. That's it for this episode of The Uncertain Hour. Thanks for listening. And if you like the show, please tell a friend, leave a review, send us a note. We love hearing from you. And if you've ever been a non-employee, tell us about it. Our email is uncertainhour at Marketplace. This episode was reported by Caitlyn Esch. Our producers are Chris Julin and Peter Balanon-Rosen. Our editor is Catherine Winter. Research and production help from Muna Danish, Daniel Martinez, and Marquet Green. Our media producer is Robin Edgar. Our digital team is Tony Wagner, Erica Phillips, Donna Tam, and Ben Hefkot. Satara Nevis is the executive director of On Demand at Marketplace. And I'm Chrissy Clark.
