Marketplace - Do you like your job?

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Workers are more satisfied with their jobs than they’ve been in nearly 40 years, according to a report from The Conference Board. But dig a little deeper and there are signs of rising dissatisfaction. In this episode, why workplace happiness might be plateauing. Plus, the property insurance industry faces growing climate risk, and a recreation center becomes a burden for a former boom town.

Hey Marketplace listeners, you know around here we like to think you're never too young to learn about the economy and financial basics. That's why we're bringing the Million Bazillion Live Tour to schools to teach important lessons about budgeting, investing, saving, and more. It's all the fun of the podcast, but now live, immersive and interactive. Special thanks to our tour partner, Greenlight, the debit card and money app for kids and teens. Learn more about Greenlight at greenlight.com slash million.

That is greenlight.com slash million. How was work today, dear? Would you believe more people are saying, not bad. From American public media, this is Marketplace. ["The New York Times"] In Baltimore, I'm Amy Scott in for Kai Rizdal. It's Monday, May 6th. Good to have you with us. People are pretty happy with their jobs these days.

At least that's the headline from the conference board's annual job satisfaction report out today. Almost 63% of workers said they were satisfied, the highest rate since the survey began nearly 40 years ago. Dig beneath the headline, though, and folks are less pleased with specific parts of their jobs, including wages, benefits, workloads, and that ever-elusive work-life balance. Marketplace's Samantha Fields has more. Ask people a question like, are you happy with your job?

And these days, most say yes. Alan Schweier at the conference board says this year. Overall job satisfaction was up for the 13th year in a row. But only slightly. And if you start digging deeper and asking people how they feel about things like wages, workplace culture, and work-life balance at their job, there are signs people are increasingly dissatisfied.

Last year, wages were more influential on job satisfaction than anything else. And this year, other factors like culture, the relationship with the supervisor, the people you work with, things like that came up higher this year. People who switched jobs in the last few years are more likely to be dissatisfied with work than those who stayed put, which Schweier says is a big shift. People may have left jobs during the pandemic because earlier on there were big wage gains to be had. And maybe people didn't think about some of the other elements. Like workplace culture and opportunities for growth.

A lot of people were also hired remotely and are now being required to start coming into an office, which not everyone is happy about. William Vander Bloemen, who runs an executive search firm, says that may also be partly why people are putting more emphasis on workplace culture these days. When you force people back in the office and they're making a commute, all of a sudden they're now paying attention to, I need to have a place that I want to go to. Plus, he says, we just went through a major crisis, a global pandemic. You have people coming out of that really driven by something more than just getting

through Monday to Friday. These days, Sean Higgins at the Think Tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, says people are rethinking what they want out of work. The focus on work is just something that you do to earn a living. It has changed for a lot of people, and much more people are more interested in a job that gives them some type of satisfaction.

And he says those kinds of jobs can be hard to find. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. Wall Street was pretty satisfied today. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. Chinese President Xi Jinping is in Europe this week. Today he met with the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the president of France, Emmanuel Macron. The conversation they had is one that the US has had with China as well about overcapacity, the idea that China is flooding the world with underpriced products, something China denies. Marketplace's Sabri Beneshor reports.

Overcapacity is kind of a fuzzy word, and that's saying a lot for an economic term. Jeffrey Gertz is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. At a basic level, overcapacity is really just too much production and too little demand. It's the idea that a country has subsidized or propped up its industries so much that they're drowning in products. Ilaria Matsoko is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And therefore, you tend to have a surge of exports, often at a lower cost, that are undermining basically industries elsewhere. This is what the US and Europe are saying that China is doing

with electric vehicles and a lot of other industries related to clean energy. Flooding countries with leftovers and potentially justifying US and European retaliation. I think it's an excuse for protectionism. Nicholas Lardy is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He says when it comes to electric vehicles, there isn't over capacity. China's just better at making them and the US and Europe are bitter, which is basically what China says too. They got started in the industry earlier.

They're far and away the largest market. The very successful firms such as BYD. Remember Warren Buffett invested in BYD more than a decade ago. He saw this coming. But Jeffrey Gertz at the Center for Enumerated Security says it's not just about electric cars. China does pump up its manufacturers with cheap credit and tax benefits and that's messing with international markets, he says.

Chinese companies may be operating at a loss for a very long time, but are not necessarily incentivized to exit the market as would otherwise happen. You have this kind of a continual sort of excess reserve, as it were, of production, and you are incentivized to continue producing even if the market is telling you there's no need for it. Overcapacity is a problem that has been identified by the Chinese government itself in official reports going back a decade, says Jeremy Chan, senior analyst at the Eurasia Group. Now that Beijing has signaled in the last six weeks or so that overcapacity doesn't really

exist, that it's some sort of myth now concocted by the West when it wasn't a myth in the government work report two months ago, I think that we're headed towards a darker or more difficult place. Expect more trade restrictions from Europe and possibly the US because what was a debatable economic question has now entered the world of politics. In New York, I'm Sabri Ben-Ashur for Marketplace. We have talked on this show about how climate change is upending the insurance market in many places, making it harder for homeowners to find policies they can afford. In California, where wildfires have cost billions of dollars in property damage, most private insurers are no longer offering new policies at all. Some proposed regulations in the state

are aimed at enticing insurers to stick around. But California is hardly the only state facing these issues. Dave Jones is the former State Insurance Commissioner of California. He's now Director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law. Dave, thanks for joining us. Great to be with you, Amy. How would you describe the property insurance market in California right now? It's under duress. What's happening is that as climate change is driven more frequent and severe weather-related events, it's killing people, damaging property, and causing more insurance losses. And insurers respond in two ways. One is they raise price and the other is they

stop writing insurance. And both those things are happening in California. Now in the past, insurance companies in California have not been able to use catastrophe modeling to set rates. The last state to not allow that, why was that and how is that changing? So under current California law, the way that rates are set is by looking at past experience. But insurers are now arguing that with climate change and the fact that the natural catastrophic events are becoming nonlinear and increasingly unpredictable, that they ought to be allowed to use probabilistic models or catastrophe models to help set those rates.

It is important to note that Florida has allowed probabilistic modeling for many, many years, has allowed reinsurance costs to be included in its rates, has raised three or four times the national average, has limited third-party lawsuits, has done a number of things the insurers have asked for for some time, and yet what we've seen is 12 or so insurance companies go insolvent. The Florida insurer of Last Resort Florida Citizens has about 1.3 million policyholders. These are people that can't get private admitted insurance. So California is considering allowing cap models to be used and allowing reinsurance costs to be included in rates and that might help in the short or midterm but I'm concerned that we're not going to be able to rate our way out

of this problem. When you say we're not going to be able to rate our way out of this problem, what do you mean by that and what do you see as some solutions? So the insurers are arguing that if they're given more rates or they're able to have higher prices and collect more premium that they'll rate more insurance and in the shorter midterm giving insurers more premium may help but in the long term it's likely to be overwhelmed by the increased risk and losses driven by climate change. And so you reach a point at which even at a higher price, it's simply not profitable for the insurance company or right insurance. And that may very well be where we are in Florida and may very well be where we're going to get in other parts of the country over time.

may very well be where we're going to get in other parts of the country over time. So does the state end up picking up more of the bill? I mean already more and more homeowners are finding themselves relegated to the state insurer of last resort both in Florida and California and other states are building these programs as well. So there are 37 states that have what are called fair plans, fair access to insurance requirements, which are 37 states that have what are called fair plans, fair access to insurance requirements, which are basically involuntary associations of insurance companies that are established by state law that are required to write insurance for those risks that the private insurers have decided it's too risky to write.

Fair plans rates, though, are typically required to be set based on risk and since they're ensuring the most challenging risks their rates are even higher oftentimes than the private market. And so that is where I think things are going to go and then we're going to see increasing numbers of people that simply can't afford that and maybe having to go without insurance. I think when I talk to folks who've had their premiums go way up, there's this impression that insurance companies are just protecting their profits and that they're raking in money.

Are these companies hurting as much as they claim? So I think it depends upon the particular market that they're in, the particular state that they're in. But there's no question that in California, for example, in 2017 and 2018 when we had the severe catastrophic wildfires, that they had substantial losses in the area of $15 billion each year. That far exceeded the premium they were collecting that year. Although in subsequent years, the premium they've collected has been sufficient to cover their losses. So you know, they're not magicians. At the end of the day, insurers are seeking to make

profits and they're going to try to price or limit their exposure accordingly. And that's what's going on. So what do you see as some solutions to this problem if we can't just rate our way out of it, as you said? So first and foremost, we have to move faster and more aggressively to transition from fossil fuels, which are the major contributor to greenhouse gases that are driving climate change. Second, we need to make more investments in mitigation at the property, community, and landscape level.

But we also need to make sure that insurance models account for that. And that's currently not the case. And so that will probably require state legislation, certainly as in California, to make sure that insurers are accounting for these mitigation efforts. Third, as more people are thrown onto fair plans,

each state's gonna have to look at ways to shore up its fair plan. Some ideas include giving fair plans the ability to sell catastrophe bonds or other bonds as a way of raising capital. There are other suggestions as well to try to make sure that the fair plans are better likely to be able to have sufficient funds to pay out in the event of catastrophic events.

Dave Jones is director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley School of Law and former insurance commissioner of California. Thank you so much. Thanks, Amy. Dave Jones mentioned catastrophe bonds as part of the solution. The team and I from our podcast, How We Survive, did a deep dive on cat bonds and the troubled Florida insurance market. You can listen to that on our website, marketplace.org or wherever you go for podcasts. Coming up...

There were people everywhere, people were spending money everywhere, every bar in town was open. I mean, there were several places even to stop and eat. Sounds like the place to be. But first, let's do the numbers. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 176 points, just shy of half a percent to close at 38,852. The Nasdaq added 192 points, one and two tenths percent, and it's 16,349. And the S&P 500 picked up 52 points, a little over 1 percent to finish at The FAA has opened another investment in the U.S. to help the economy grow. The FAA has also opened another investment in the U.S.

to help the economy grow. The FAA has opened another investment in the U.S. to help the economy grow. The FAA has opened another investment in the U.S. to help the economy grow. The FAA has opened another investment in the U.S. to help the economy grow. The FAA has opened another investment in the U.S. since. Now the same economists say it's all gone and that in fact our savings are a bit below the pre-pandemic level. The FAA has opened another investigation into Boeing according to the Wall

Street Journal. The paper reports that the planemaker has told the aviation regulator that employees may have skipped some inspections on some 787 Dreamliners. Boeing descended eight-tenths percent. You're listening to Marketplace. With access to so much information, it's hard to feel like an informed, discerning citizen. That's why on Make Me Smart, which is a podcast from Marketplace, we make it easy for you to stay in the know. Hi, I'm Kai Rizdal. Every weekday, Kimberly Adams and I unpack the latest from Washington, DC. The Senate minority leader has announced that he will step down as a Republican leader.

What's happening in AI? I mean, don't buy at the top, but holy cow, artificial intelligence and all the companies related to it are the hot new thing. And we do the numbers. So as a refresher, inflation is the rate of increase in the prices of things. It's not just sort of things getting more expensive. It's a speed at which things get more expensive. Because in a world that's constantly changing, we all need to stay smart. Listen to Make Me Smart wherever you get your podcasts. This is Marketplace. I'm Amy Scott. Way back in time, okay, about eight

years ago, Uber, the ride-sharing company, made a big splash with a research paper that envisioned a world where people could hop into small electric aircraft in big cities and fly over traffic, cutting time off of their commutes. I mean, haven't we all dreamed about doing that? Since then, though, a whole bunch of companies have sprouted up with the aim of making that vision a reality. By developing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, EVTOLs for short, all of them will need to clear a big hurdle—certification from the Federal Aviation Administration. Marketplace's Henry Epp reports.

Kyle Clark steps onto the manufacturing floor of his company's brand new production facility in South Burlington, Vermont. He's the founder and CEO of the electric aircraft manufacturer Beta Technologies. We've got people over here building the structures of the aircraft and the far side building the battery and propulsion and upstairs in all the clean rooms building the sensitive electronic components. And in a far corner of this hangar-like room there's a dark gray prototype of the electric aircraft that beta is developing. It looks kind of like two big drones carrying a futuristic minivan with a propeller on

the back. The finished version will be gleaming white. So what you're looking at here right now is actually a complete mock-up that's been put together and torn apart numerous times. As the company tries to work out the exact instructions for how to assemble one of them. The fact that Beta has gotten to this point in about seven years is a testament both to how fast the EVTOL industry has developed and how far it still has to go. Matthew Clark is a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, no relation to Kyle Clark. He compares the industry's progress to a loading bar on an old computer. It started out moving really fast. It was like, and then we're here. Here, he says, is about 80 percent.

That's going to stick there for a long time until it gets to 100 percent. That's because that last 20 percent includes the huge hurdle of getting the OK from regulators to manufacture, sell and fly these futuristic electric aircraft. And this is an insanely rigorous process that has only gotten more rigorous in recent years. Elan Head is senior editor of the aviation industry publication The Air Current. She says the certification process is rigorous because the FAA wants to ensure these aircraft are safe. Which is difficult to do when you have a lot of new technology that doesn't have a long

track record that you can point to for determinations about reliability. And getting through the FAA's hurdles is expensive. A few years ago, funding wasn't a problem. Some EVTOL companies went public during the booming market of 2021. Others, including Beta, got private investments and government grants. But we're in a different investment landscape now, Head says. The higher interest rates has given investors more things to do with their money versus invest them in flying cars.

And getting through certification is proving more costly than some companies expected. Matthew Clark at the University of Illinois says the reality is. Most of these companies don't have that financial backing to get through that certification hurdle. And that means out of the hundreds of companies in the sector, Clark expects that most won't make it. And I think what is gonna happen is that they're gonna have a few companies,

maybe five to 10, that actually have viable business products. Beta Technologies in Vermont is hoping it's one of them, but its first aircraft won't be a self-flying air taxi that takes off like a helicopter. CEO Kyle Clark says about a year ago, the company decided to start with certifying the prototype in its factory, an electric aircraft that just takes off and lands like a normal plane and

mostly carries cargo. I think maybe it's a Yankee pragmatism. Beta already has deals to sell their planes to UPS and other companies. Eventually, it does envision making a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle to carry people. So we end up at the same place and my contention is that by taking this stepwise approach and generating trust within the public and the FAA we actually end up at the finish line faster. And perhaps with a bit more cash on hand. I'm Henry Epp for Marketplace. place.

The classic story of the boom bust economy has played out in towns across the West. A mining company discovers a valuable vein of coal, where an energy developer starts tapping into a store of natural gas. And suddenly, the town is happening. Workers with good paying jobs are flush with cash, and the community suddenly has money for libraries, roads, or recreation centers. But what happens to all those community resources when the boom is over? From Southern Wyoming, Will Waukee reports.

Will Waukee At the recreation center in Hannah, Wyoming, John Ostling shows me a big, empty swimming pool. There's no water here, just a slide that leads to hard concrete. The white paint on the side of the pool is chipping away. Right now we're scraping, you know, to get ready to paint it. Even though we may not use it, it's not necessary for us to make it look in disrepair. Osling is the mayor of Hannah, a town of around 700 on the remote high plains. The closest city, if you can call it that, is Laramie, 70 miles away.

And Hannah is struggling to keep this recreation center open. It's huge and expensive. Last year we had one month, I think one of our gas bills was 12,000 bucks. The entire town has a budget of just a few million dollars. Maintaining the rec center costs around $300,000 a year. The entire town has a budget of just a few million dollars. Maintaining the rec center costs around $300,000 a year. It has a racquetball court, sauna, weight rooms, and a sports court that doubles as event space. But fewer than 40 residents pay to be members.

And what the town has done over the years to maintain this is actually we haven't put money in streets. We haven't put money in streets. We haven't put money on other services. In recent years, the rec center has decreased hours to keep costs down, but that hasn't cut it. It's a tough reality for a community that once supported facilities like this and much more. Hannah started off as a company town and hundreds of millions of tons of coal have been mined around here. Falcorco Black is a local rancher and remembers Hannah in the 1980s.

There were people everywhere. People were spending money everywhere. Every bar in town was open. I mean, there were several places even to stop and eat. The school had a temporary modular classrooms. There was a bowling alley, soda fountain, and movie theater. This happens a lot in energy towns. The mining or oil and gas economy booms, and local leaders think, what should we build to attract more workers and their families? Back in the 80s, when

Hannah's tax coffers were flush and coal companies had money to give, the town built the rec center. They'd have the pool open for the kids all day long, and you were there from 10 o'clock in the morning until 8 o'clock at night. But almost as quickly as things went up, things went down. As the mines gradually shut down, the town's population dwindled. Another local, Pam Paulson, says when the job opportunities dried up, a lot of workers just bailed.

Some of them, they just left their keys on the counter and locked out the door. Today, Hanna is mostly a bedroom community and a quiet place to retire cheap. And the recreation center is a huge headache. Not just paying staff to say wipe down the gym equipment, but the huge cost of heating the sprawling facility. But Hanna's mayor, John Ostling, doesn't want to close it

even if it's expensive. He says it's critical for the health of the community. Let's get the public forum started. This spring, he led a town meeting to talk about ways to save the rec center. He has looked into federal grants, adding solar panels. There's an old mine shaft under the facility. There's even talk about tapping into that again to burn coal for heat. Resident Rose Dabbs had an idea to attract more members. Have you tried sending out a flyer saying what the prices are to draw the people in? Someone else in the back yelled, give Bill Gates a call.

Resident Jim Noah was wondering about the wind energy companies nearby. Is there any way to try talking them into donating electricity to us? The town council postponed closing the rec center, even though there is no solution at this point. The main thing keeping the facility open right now is the hope that something will turn around. In Hannah, Wyoming, I'm Will Waukee for Marketplace. This final note on the way out today, the real estate brokerage Redfin says low-income Americans made up a smaller share of homebuyers last year, taking out about 20% of mortgages, down from 23% in 2020. That's thanks to both higher prices and higher mortgage rates. In

other housing news, the same Redfin has agreed to pay $9.25 million to settle lawsuits alleging that brokerage firms and the National Association of Realtors conspired to inflate real estate commissions. In a filing with the SEC, the company said the settlement does not concede or validate any of the claims asserted against us. Our Daily Production team includes Andy Corbin, Elise Hassan, Maria Hollenhorst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, and Sophia Terenzio. I'm Amy Scott. We'll be back tomorrow. This is APM. With access to so much information, it's hard to feel like an informed, discerning citizen.

That's why on Make Me Smart, which is a podcast from Marketplace, we make it easy for you to stay in the know. Hi, I'm Kai Rizdal. Every weekday, Kimberly Adams and I unpack the latest from Washington, D.C. The Senate minority leader has announced that he will step down as the Republican leader. What's happening in AI? I mean, don't buy at the top, but holy cow, artificial intelligence and all the companies related to it are the hot new thing. And we do the numbers. So as a refresher, inflation is the rate of increase

in the prices of things. It's not just sort of things getting more expensive. It's the speed at which things get more expensive. Because in a world that's constantly changing, we all need to stay smart. Listen to Make Me Smart wherever you get your podcasts.