Mr. PINK: What unions need to do and what many workers in this economy are crying out for are a place to learn new skills, a place to get health insurance and other types of benefits, a place to meet other people in your profession. And so that's what the building trades unions do. That's what the entertainment unions do. To a large extent, that's what the--the sports unions do. And so what I sort of had this moment in--in Terre Haute, Indiana, of all places, having visited the Eugene V. Debs Home, this great labor leader who ran for president, and also staying at the Larry Bird Motel--Larry Bird is from--Larry Bird went to college in Terre Haute, Indiana--in professional basketball labor negotiations, there's something called a Larry Bird exception, where c--where teams in--in--in--in the NBA there's a salary cap. Teams can only pay a certain amount of money for all their players. If they want to hire a free agent, they can't bust that salary cap. But they can keep one of their own players and bust the salary cap. That's known as the Larry Bird exception.
And what I realized is that more and more work is actually becoming this kind of AFL-CIO/NBA type arrangement so that I think the unions of the future, the worker groups of the future are gonna be very much like the sports unions; that is, they're going to have a union that sets a--a minimum, maybe a salary minimum, basic working conditions. And then beyond that, people are going to be represented by agents. More and more--something like 5 percent of workers who earn more than $75,000 a year are represented by talent agents.
Chris