B Lab Forces For Good Podcast — Episode 2: What do lobsters have to do with job opportunities?
Maine’s iconic lobster industry is at a crossroads. With fewer legacy lobstermen, the state faces a growing labor shortage. But there’s hope: immigrants and young people with no prior experience are stepping in, proving that training, mentorship, and sponsorship can create real pathways to economic mobility.
In episode 2 of season 3 of Forces for Good, our host Irving Chan-Gomez speaks with Ben Conniff, Co-Founder of Luke’s Lobster, and Ryan Rippel, Director of U.S. Economic Mobility and Opportunity at the Gates Foundation, about how businesses can break down barriers to opportunity—empowering workers while strengthening industries.
Listen now to explore:
How businesses can open doors for historically excluded workers
The role of fair wages and stable jobs in building stronger communities
Why investing in people is key to long-term business success
Listen to Forces for Good and join us in rethinking how business can be a force for upward mobility: https://lnk.to/forces-for-good-economic-mobility-lobsters
TRANSCRIPT: Season 3 — Episode 2: What do lobsters have to do with job opportunities?
This is Forces for Good, a podcast from B Lab, the nonprofit network powering the global B Corp movement. I’m your host, Irving Chan-Gomez.
Forces for Good takes a hard look at how businesses are helping to solve the biggest social and environmental challenges of our time.
We're excited to be back with Season 3 to dive deep into what makes a good job.
This is a global podcast, and we'll get to the global implications of our topic, but first, I want to take you all on a quick trip to Maine.
If you're joining us from outside North America, a quick geography lesson: Maine is the northernmost state on the East Coast of the United States. It’s home to national parks, lighthouses, thousands of miles of rugged coastline—and a whole lot of lobster.
Here's Ben Conniff. He’s a Mainer who loves lobster and his home state. He’s also the co-founder of the restaurant chain and Certified B Corp, Luke’s Lobster.
Ben Conniff: The lobster industry and the broader seafood industry are critical in Maine—both to the economy, it’s one of the biggest industries we have here, and to the culture. People in Maine have relied on food from the ocean since before colonization, since time immemorial with the Wabanaki tribe, and forever since then.
But lobster fishing and processing are a young man's game.
And Maine has the highest average age of any state in the United States: 45.
Actually, let's do this by the numbers…
Maine's annual lobster yield is over 100 million pounds—that's 90 percent of the lobster supply in the United States.
But it is ranked 45th out of 50 states in the U.S. for economic outlook.
This is where today’s topic comes in: economic mobility. Income and other socioeconomic factors affect a person’s ability to improve their financial status. And in some places, earning and saving money is a lot harder than in others.
Maine is one of those places.
That’s because a labor gap is opening.
Ben: We have this wonderful tradition and heritage of many generations of lobstermen in Maine. But that also comes with some downsides. Right now, the industry is facing a workforce shortage because not enough young people are picking up the mantle and being the next wave of fishermen, which means they are not jumping on the backs of boats, taking entry-level jobs, and learning the lobster. Providing the help that the existing lobstermen need on their boat.
Along with his business partner, Luke Holden, Ben opened the first Luke’s Lobster in New York City. The B Corp now serves Maine lobster rolls across the United States as well as in Singapore and Japan. But their business relies on the viability of Maine’s lobster industry.
So Luke’s Lobster is creating a pathway into the industry with a program called Lift All Boats. They’re trying to help solve the labor gap while also providing opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach for some.
Ben: We have lobstermen in our community in Portland who are willing to serve as sponsors for students, helping to bring in a new array of young people to provide a workforce and to provide opportunity to a broader range of folks.
Then we go into public schools to educate students about the opportunities in the industry and what it takes to become a lobsterman. Ultimately, we bring folks down to the wharf and teach them how to lobster. We provide all the gear they need, take them out on the boat, and even buy their lobster at market price when they catch it in their own traps.
Ben says even the students who don’t become full-time lobstermen end up studying marine biology and staying connected to Maine’s heritage industry.
Ben: A lot of them love the experience but decide not to make it their career. Still, they walk away with a new level of confidence, a new skill, comfort being on the water, feeling like they are now part of Maine’s culture in a way that they didn’t feel before, and with a built-in set of mentors who will not just help with their career as a lobsterman, but also with their going to school and getting a marine biology degree, or working elsewhere in the blue economy, or really with any kind of career path that these kids choose, we are not there for them.
Training, retraining, and mentorship are all central to economic mobility as ways to build a better life. However, many feel like economic opportunity is slipping away. Ryan Rippel is Director of Economic Mobility and Opportunity at the Gates Foundation. He says they’re not wrong.
Ryan Rippel: One of the distressing facts about the United States today is that our economic escalator—our path to upward mobility—is actually going down instead of up.
For people born in the 1940s, my parents’ generation, the chances of earning more than their parents were greater than 90 percent. For those born in the 1980s—my generation—the chances are now less than 50 percent. That’s true across the country.
Ryan’s personal story highlights the stakes of all this.
Ryan: I work in a place where everyone has a “why” for what they do and why they’ve come to devote their careers to these issues. For me, it was my own upbringing.
I grew up in a small town in Missouri. I was born into a family that was very much in the middle class, but over the last several decades, most of my family has fallen out of the middle class.
My dad died when I was young, and my mom became a single parent. She worked tirelessly, tirelessly night and day to provide for us and overcoming enormous challenges in everyday life to do it.
We made it but at a great cost. My mom ultimately died of breast cancer—because she didn’t have health insurance, she didn’t have a doctor, and she didn’t have the ability to pay for those things. She was paying for so many other things for my sister and me.
That experience and navigating that with her, and that she was fighting almost 20 years ago, has really shaped me. My thinking about this challenge and about just the complexity of daily life and the high stakes and huge consequences Everyday factors can play out for an entire family and for multiple generations of a family and it has helped me understand statistics, that the economic ladder and escalator is going down not up and that we need to mobilize and get to work To try and turn it around.
I couldn’t be more grateful to Ryan for sharing his story. His dedication to helping others is inspiring.
Mentorship is one clear way to make a difference. For example, Ben and his business partner had mentorship in the lobster industry, and it helped them grow their business very quickly.
Ben: We started as a restaurant company with very tiny, little lobster shacks in New York City, then expanded to other cities around the country. We started because Luke grew up in the lobster industry—his father was the first lobster processor in the state of Maine. So we had a direct connection to the best lobster meat in the world.
Luke had the idea to bring that meat to New York City, put it in the best lobster rolls in the world, and serve them in a casual setting at an affordable price.
Over the past 15 years, Ben and Luke have realized that they can’t expand their restaurant business without expanding up the supply chain in what’s called vertical integration.
Luke’s Lobster started buying lobsters directly from fishermen and processing them themselves.
Now, they even prepare lobsters for other businesses. But one thing they’ll never do is fish for their own lobster.
Ben: Importantly, what vertical integration does not mean to us is we do not own boats and we do not employ fishermen in the main lobster industry. Lobstermen are their own bosses. It's an owner-operator fishery. So every single boat has to be captained by a licensed lobsterman.
And that lobsterman has to be on that boat at all times when fishing. So what that means is, as big a company as we get, we can never own a fleet of lobster boats and then be the boss of the fishermen and tell them when to fish, where to fish, and what to do. We are instead, at their mercy, they make the decisions about where and when they want to fish, and we have to compete for the privilege of buying their lobster every day. That means that more of the value of that seafood goes into the pockets of the fishermen and stays in the coastal community where it benefits everybody in these mostly rural communities which really rely on the lobster industry to support themselves.
But there are fewer and fewer lobster fishermen bringing their hauls back from Maine's coastal waters. Right now, the lobstering part of the supply chain is struggling to survive.
Ben: The other folks who lose out in this hereditary industry are those who aren’t connected—people who don’t look like me and whose parents or grandparents didn’t grow up in this fishery. That includes a huge population of diverse individuals who wouldn’t even know where to begin if they wanted a career in lobstering.
The reality is that the permitting system for lobster is incredibly complex. If you want to get a commercial fishing license, you have to start a student program before turning 18 and complete 1,000 hours on a lobster boat under the mentorship of a licensed fisherman—before you turn 20 if you don’t go to college or 23 if you do.
No one who is not related to a fisherman right now knows this. That means you have this whole population of folks who are BIPOC, immigrants, and who otherwise just have barriers that keep them from being a current part of the fishery, who will never get that opportunity unless somebody goes out and educates them about what it takes, and then lends a hand to take them through that student process and teach them how to fish.
Back to our other guest, Ryan Rippel. He and The Gates Foundation are working to encourage programs like Lift All Boats across industries—creating not just well-paid jobs but also satisfying jobs.
Ryan: One part is about economic success, which is the part we often talk about most—income and wealth. But there are two other key factors that are also important:
A sense of power and autonomy in daily life—the ability to make choices and decisions.
A sense of belonging—feeling valued and connected in a community.
And so we think about all of that together, economic power and autonomy and belonging as the ingredients of economic mobility. And that's how we built a lot of our programs.
The Gates Foundation is focused on developing a Good Jobs Framework for small and medium-sized businesses to implement. (Second to last or last take, Darrin to splice ‘its.’)
Ryan: Small businesses don’t have HR departments or the resources to research best job practices or adopt new things, or do things because they’re philanthropically oriented. Their bottom line is really important and their margins are very thin.
And so we’ve been working very hard to identify practical, high-impact job practices that are strongly linked to economic mobility—practices that small businesses can adopt that we know are highly correlated with economic mobility and help define what a good job is for a worker.
There are things like stable scheduling. The idea that workers should know their hours more than a day or a week in advance—especially for those folks juggling childcare and a whole range of responsibilities outside of their job, or doing multiple jobs. Wages are also important for businesses to consider.
All of those things are part of a set of practices that we've been working to document and then share widely with people. Many of them can be adopted at very low cost and also have the potential for very high returns for the business as well as the worker. It's good for the business's bottom line as well as the worker.
Remember that labor gap we were talking about before? It may seem counterintuitive that people are struggling to find work while companies struggle to find workers. But quality jobs and the small changes—like those Ryan just mentioned—benefit both businesses and workers.
Ryan: We believe that there is a real willingness among many of these small businesses to try and pursue many of these practices, especially given the labor shortages in recent years. And so the ability to find workers, but also retain them and have them grow with the company, is a huge benefit to the bottom line in many cases, and we’ve seen these strategies work across the country.
Back at Luke’s Lobster’s processing plants, immigrants are filling many of the jobs that Maine natives can’t.
Ben: The fact is we have an aging population, and we’re not replacing the folks aging out of the workforce by folks born here. That means we need an influx of workers from outside the state to help our businesses succeed and to help grow the business community here. The best way for us to get the support we need in our workforce is to be welcoming to immigrants from other states, from all over the country, and all over the world.
For decades, these folks have been the backbone of some of Maine’s most important industries and they continue to do the essential work that makes it possible for us to pay fair prices to lobstermen at the dock—because someone has to process that lobster into the products that get sold to the end consumer.
Ben says bringing in this diversity can only strengthen the industry.
Ben: When an industry lacks diversity—whether in perspective, experience, or background—That industry is inevitably going to be less successful at navigating new challenges because everybody thinks the same way and comes from the same experience. They just don't have as wide a range of ideas and ways to respond to challenges.
When you bring diversity of thought and experience into an industry or into a business, that business is bound to do better because there are more diverse ideas to choose from and to learn from when you face challenges. And the lobster industry is facing challenges—climate change, bait shortages, rising fuel costs. We need diverse perspectives to tackle these problems effectively.
But Ben says you can’t just hand someone a job and expect them to succeed without support.
Luke’s Lobster invests in translating training materials, teaching employees and their families English, and supporting them through their transition to Maine. Sometimes, that support means they move on to bigger and better things.
Ben: And that’s okay. But while they’re with us, we don’t just see them as cogs in the machine making lobster mean—but as individuals who really have a lot to bring to our community and whose pride and engagement will really result in that best end product and the best overall for the company.
The conversation happening across the country—where we demonize the very people we rely on for essential work—is completely counterproductive.
Because this isn’t just true in Maine. It’s true nationwide. Some of the most critical jobs in feeding our country and producing the goods we use are done by folks who come from elsewhere and who are giving their all to make our economy go and to contribute to society here.
We need to stop looking at those folks as though they are outsiders, as though they’re doing anything other that build here and contribute here. And instead, we need to welcome them into our community, not ask them to assimilate to what we think should be American, but to broaden our scope of what American means so that these folks who are so critical to our economy and our culture really feel safe here.
If you’d like to learn more about B Corps and purpose-driven companies, visit BCorporation.net.
And be sure to listen to the rest of our season! Please subscribe, rate, and review Forces for Good on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your ratings and reviews help us reach new audiences, and we appreciate your support.
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The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the interviewees and do not reflect the official positions of the producers or affiliated organizations.
This podcast was brought to you by B Lab in partnership with The Gates Foundation. Special thanks to Sherri Jordan for coordination.
Forces for Good is produced by Hueman Group Media.
I’m your host, Irving Chan-Gomez. Thanks for listening—I’ll catch you in the next episode!