Marketplace - Hiring or hunting, this job market is tough

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

The tight labor market means employers are competing for workers, sometimes strenuously. But it isn’t all smooth sailing for job searchers either — prolonged interviewing and companies’ recession fears mean scoring a job can be tough. In this episode, what’s worse: trying to hire or get hired? Plus, a website that uses “Seinfeld” to explain legal policy, a look at how immigration stabilizes our economy and a tour of zero-carbon homes in coastal California.

No, come on! This labor market? From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdell. It is Friday today, the second day of February. Good as always to have you along, everybody. 353,000 new jobs. 353,000 new jobs. What are we even supposed to do with that? The answer to that question and however many more we have time for will come today from Heather Long at The Washington Post. Also, Gina Smiley. She is at The New York Times. Hey, you two. Hey, Kai. Hey, Kai. Heather, you get to go first today. And the question is, as I said, what are we even supposed to do in an economy still creating 353,000 new jobs?

You have to cheer. I mean, this is unambiguously good news to see that level of job growth. And December was also revised up massively. You know, you sort of sit there, we can all live in a little bit of a bubble sometimes. And obviously, we just watched a ton of headlines come out of layoffs, particularly in the tech industry in January. And I think we all got a lot of really nervous. And instead, you forget, as you often remind people that there's, you know, this is an economy with 161 million workers. There's always layoffs and people leaving and also people getting hired. And we saw that today. This is a strong economy. I was really happy to see hiring across almost every industry. This isn't just being propped up by the government or healthcare, even childcare added workers, which we desperately need.

So I think there's just a lot to celebrate. The few things that, you know, you may say this isn't great, like wage growth coming in hot at 4.5 percent or the more people being unemployed for 27 plus weeks. You know, some of that is indicative of some funky measurement that happened during the snow week that many people in the United States experienced. So a lot to celebrate. Gina Smilak, let us turn to one Jerome Powell and his press conference on Wednesday for which you were, I think, were you in the front row? I couldn't really tell from the camera. I was in the front row. OK, all right. And Chair Powell said repeatedly, this data is good.

We've got confidence. We just need to see more. And you've followed up with him a couple of times. I'm not sure he ever answered your question of what more do they want to see other than more? Yeah, more, more data, more good data. Yeah, it was such it was such an interesting press conference because A, it was the most optimistic press conference I've ever been at with a Fed chair. I've been doing this for a decade now. And he said the words were good to describe economic data or the overall economy 17 times over the course of that press conference. So very, very optimistic. And he basically just told us,

I think again and again, that what they want to see is exactly the kind of data they've been seeing, but a few more months of it. So they want to see more evidence that inflation is holding at these really sort of moderate monthly increases for a couple more months before they're going to feel confident lowering interest rates. And he was very careful to, I just said couple, but he was very careful to avoid putting a specific number on it. Well, he actually did specifically, Gina, take, well, you were in the room, so you give me the tone. He made it clear that March is not really in play, right? Yes. He said that it was unlikely that they were going to be confident enough that inflation is fully under control to cut rates in March. I think unlikely was his exact word.

So it seems like March is not on the table at this moment. Okay. Speaking of confidence, Heather, consumers, hello, sentiment out today keeps going up. We now, it seems, are past the, ooh, how are consumers feeling thing, right? I hope so. It does seem like the vibe session is over. And that's good news. What you really are seeing is that people believe that inflation is under control again. And people are really starting to notice that wages are going up for most people a lot faster than inflation, you know, 4.5% wage growth in the past year and 3.4% inflation. That's a pretty outsized bump. So

people are starting to notice. Now you do sort of still sit there and scratch your head a little bit. The average for the past 40 to 50 years on those consumer confidence statistics, we are still below that long run average. So you sit here and we talk about what a strong economy is. Fed chair Powell on Wednesday said, let's be honest, this is a good economy. And yet people still rate it below average, but hopefully they will continue to feel, to really feel that they are getting better off despite all the tumble. All right. So Gina, I've got a, I've got a, I've been searching for the answer to this question. Haven't gotten it yet. You literally wrote a book on the Fed. So I'm going to ask you one of the. So the Fed is the Fed thinks the economy is good. Right. Powell said this many were that said it in that many words.

Other members of the Board of Governors or the regional Fed presidents have said, Rafael Bostic, specifically in Atlanta, the worst thing we could do would be to cut rates and then have to raise them again. And here's the thing I don't understand. Why would it be so bad? The data shows things are good. You cut rates, the data changes, and you have to raise rates. Why is that the apocalypse? Two words, Arthur Burns. So during the great inflation, the really bad inflationary episode that we had that started in the 70s and continued into the early 80s, what we saw was the Burns Fed under Chairman Arthur Burns repeatedly sort of cut interest rates before they had wrestled inflation fully under control. And then they raised them again. They sort of followed the pattern that you just described. You know,

they realized that they hadn't gotten things under control and they raised them again. But what happened was this inflationary psychology took hold. And this is sort of the popular narrative. This is how we talk about it today. So this inflationary psychology took hold. People started expecting inflation to be a little bit higher over time. They didn't think that the Fed was serious about containing it. And then when gas prices took off because of oil embargoes, lots of problems happened and inflation jumped out of control. And so I think when officials talk about this as the worst thing, that is why that one episode is the thing that's sort of weighing on their minds. OK, but look, I just want to keep on this for a minute because it's been bugging me. We have been told ad infinitum by Powell and everybody that the economy is different now, that things have changed.

We are still hamstrung by things that happened 50 plus years ago, Gina? In a very different economy, too. I think it's important to note. So I think that, you know, that was a very manufacturing based economy. We were very susceptible to global oil moves in ways that were somewhat more insulated from now. If you talk to some economists today, they'll say, why is this the worst thing? Wouldn't the worst thing be causing a recession? Wouldn't that be the worst thing? And so I think this is

a conversation we're going to be having a lot this year. Is the Burns example the one that we should be allowing to haunt us? If only there was a reporter for the New York Times who could write that article for us. I'm just saying. Gina Smilak at the New York Times, Heather Long at the Washington Post. Thanks, you two. Thanks, guys. Happy weekend. It's been bugging me. That question's been mugging me. We'll see you guys later.

On Wall Street today, a little shake at the open, strong into the close. Details, numbers, you all know the drill. All the insight and analysis from Gina and Heather just now aside, there are some things the job report just can't tell us. For one thing, what it's like for companies trying to find workers right now and workers trying to find jobs. Because over the past couple of three, four years, a lot has changed on both sides of that equation. And that can make the matchmaking process tough. Marketplace's Sabri Beneshour and Kristen Schwab take it from there. For a lot of 2023, companies felt like recession was lurking around the corner, always just a few months away.

Maybe not, but maybe. Felt like we were walking a bit on eggshells, right? Everyone was holding their breath, waiting for something to happen. John Asdell is a vice president at recruiting, staffing and talent firm Robert Half. He says employers thought maybe we should not be hiring quite so much. For applicants, that can be frustrating. Take Frederique Bazin, who's 49 and lives near Boston. She was laid off from her job in marketing and commercial strategy last spring. Since then, I've applied to 106 jobs. She's gotten rejection emails from about half.

six jobs. She's gotten rejection emails from about half. A quarter of them, just they go into a deep black hole. And then maybe another quarter, there's been some level of engagement. When Bazain does get an interview, the process is long, like this one job she's a finalist for. Over months, she's met with multiple executives and given a panel presentation. Over months, she's met with multiple executives and given a panel presentation. Then last week, the company paused hiring. I may have spent in total maybe 25 hours on this role that is now pushed out another six months. It's hard to know why. She wonders if they're keeping her on the sidelines while they look for someone younger or someone who costs less. lines while they look for someone younger or someone who costs less. The sad truth is a lot of companies do not really care about how the hiring process feels to applicants. Some organizations

never have a challenge hiring. Susan Lamott is CEO of consulting firm Exactweo. Maybe they have a strong brand or just never have a lack of people applying. They're the ones that seem to deprioritize candidate experience. And some companies may have thought that as the labor market cooled, they were about to get the upper hand, says John Asdell at Robert Half. They go out into this market expecting there to be probably more applicants than there were in 21 and 22. And I think that they're somewhat disappointed. Employers with pent-up desire to hire assumed they'd have the pick of the litter this year. Turns out, they are the litter.

Really talented candidates are getting multiple offers when you're trying to hire them. It's still competitive. But it's more competitive for job seekers, too. With remote work, there are more opportunities, but that means going up against more people. Career coach Eliana Goldstein says when that happens, employers can make remote work work for their bottom line. So you're based in New York and I'm going to hire someone in Birmingham, Alabama and be able to pay them a potentially lower salary. That's going to be advantageous. So in some ways, it sounds like both employers and job seekers feel a little powerless. We can't measure feelings, but we can

measure who technically has the upper hand, at least very broadly. Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, has a number for it. It's called the labor leverage ratio. You take the number of employees who quit, who are saying, take your job, I don't need it, and divide it by the number of employees who are fired, where the employer is saying, we don't need you. And that ratio is sort of at a record high. Meaning employers need workers more than workers need employers. But looking for a new job, trying to hire a new person, these are just things that are hard, maybe even unpleasant parts of life. No matter what the labor market numbers

say. In New York, I'm Kristen Schwab. And I'm Sabree Beneshour. For Marketplace. A lot of what's going on in the still oh-so-tight American labor market is demographics. Baby boomers retiring, Gen X, it's coming for you soon enough, and not enough of their kids or grandkids to take their place in the labor force. The historic safety valve, if you will, that's kept this economy going in times of demographic change? Immigration. Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval has that one. If you look at the last 120 years or so, the rate of U.S. population growth has had its ups and downs, says Brookings Institution demographer William Fry. Close to 1 percent, sometimes even 2 percent a year. The 2 percent was during the baby boom years of the 1950s. During the pandemic, that number dipped to a low point, just 0.16 percent. And the census projects stagnant growth in the U.S.-born population

in the next decades. What are we going to do with so few people and maybe a decline in our labor force population? That's the issue now, and that's where immigration comes in. Immigration is what drove the population growth to inch back to pre-pandemic levels in 2023 to 0.5%. But why do we need the population to grow anyhow? It has to do with maintaining a healthy balance between workers and retirees, says UC Davis economist Giovanni Perry. So a big imbalance there will generate more burden and cost per worker to support a retired person. And retirees have money to spend on things like hospitality and health care.

But those sectors need more workers. So if 500,000 people retire every year, an inflow of 500,000 immigrants per year will just keep the labor force where it is. Really, the American economy will have to absorb the shrinkage if there is nobody who comes. He says immigration stabilizes the economy and can keep employers from having to compete for workers by increasing wages. Economist Jose Buccelli is with UT El Paso. What most businesses do sometimes is they will move those extra costs to the consumer and that creates inflation. He says the U.S. economy would benefit from policies like increasing caps on work visas.

I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. Coming up. It's the show about nothing, but it's really the show about just how everything in your life can be funny and comedic. Seinfeld and the law. But first, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial is up 134 points today, 4 tenths percent, 38,654. The NASDAQ jumped 267 points. That's 1 3 quarters percent, 15,628.

The S&P 500 increased 52 points, just over 1 percent, 49 and 58 there. For the five days going by, the Dow gained 1.4 percent. The NASDAQ lifted 1 and 1 tenth of 1 percent. S&P 500 also up 1.4 percent. Today is Groundhog Day. Today is Groundhog Day. Today is Groundhog Day. Today, no, I won't do it again. And the renowned punk's Tony Phil has forecast an early spring. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,

he's been right about 30% of the time in the last 10 years. But let's be optimistic here, shall we? Look at some spring-related stocks. 1.800 flowers. Speed expectations on earnings wilted four-tenths percent today. Sprout Social, which develops social media management software and tools, dripped a quarter percent. Fuel distributor Sunoco, ticker symbol SUN, S-U-N. Get it? Shined up one and a tenth percent. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl.

Here's a data point on climate change and how hard it's going to be to really get a handle on it, but how easy some of the steps might be. More than a third of this country's greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings, among which buildings is your home. That's one reason why there's money from the Inflation Reduction Act for homeowners to replace gas appliances and install solar panels and replace old windows with more efficient ones. But there's also a movement to cut those emissions in home construction using eco-friendly building materials and methods.

And some developers are now in the business of creating net zero homes, homes that produce as much energy as they consume. KCRW's Kaylee Wells toured a couple of very different houses in California to see what that looks like. Let's start with the luxurious home. Behind the drought-tolerant gardens on this Malibu property, the Zero Carbon Home is a 16,000-square-foot mansion. Floor-to-ceiling windows, ocean view, infinity pool. It could be yours for just under $29 million. Here to show it to me is a man who's made a career out of this Zero Carbon Home thing. Oh, it's so important to me. The developer,

Scott Morris. He starts out showing off the climate-friendly concrete used for the foundation. A lot of the low-hanging fruit items, such as the concrete, is cost-neutral. Meaning this planet-friendly material doesn't cost extra. And it's stronger and better than conventional concrete. There's also higher-hanging fruit. The ceiling and decks are made from sustainably sourced recycled or reclaimed wood. The fireplace is special too. The flames are a convincing display of LED lights and water vapor. So can I just put my hand in there and nothing bad's going to happen? Absolutely. So kids love this. The home itself is net zero because it's next to impossible to build anything that releases no greenhouse gas emissions. But some parts of the house, like this wood and the ceiling and decks, store carbon, canceling out the emissions.

It should altogether equal zero. OK, innovative, sure, but a Malibu mansion? It's not exactly in budget for most of us. So let's check out house number two. In a quiet, middle-class neighborhood 40 miles up the California coast in Ventura, there's a much humbler 2,000-square-foot home that's just as eco-friendly. Do you want to see the rest of the house? Sure.

Sometimes a net-zero home can actually be less expensive to build than a typical single-family home. We wanted it to look as normal as it could, to essentially appeal to anybody that would want to live in a neighborhood like this. Dylan Johnson is the design architect who built it. He opens up a tiny peekaboo door in the hallway wall. Behind it is a small glass pane. Yeah, so this is what we call a truth window. Inside the wall, there's no wood, no metal studs, no cotton candy looking insulation, just...

Rice straw from the Sacramento Valley about a day's drive away. That's right. Bales of straw. Inside and out, it looks like a typical stucco and plaster house. Straw bale houses are eco-friendly for a few reasons. The straw stores carbon, and it makes for great insulation, so the energy bills are cheaper. Johnson wouldn't say exactly how much it costs to construct, but says it's roughly the same price as a standard home of the same size. The idea for this house came from its owner. I don't know. I've had an idea about straw since the 60s. Yvon Chouinard. He's most famous for founding Patagonia, the clothing company that says it's on a mission to save the planet. And that includes cutting down fewer trees.

These forests are our lungs. He believes one of the biggest problems in construction is the inertia to change what we've done for so long. So he had this parcel of land and he thought... we've done for so long. So he had this parcel of land and he thought, let's build one out of straw bale and prove what a good house it is. And maybe we can encourage other people to do the same and stop cutting trees. The home's architect, Dylan Johnson, says there's often less engineering in a straw bale house. We kind of need to open our eyes to simple, low tech, already existing things you can do. If anything, this house is lower tech in many ways,

the construction of it, than a new stick-framed home. Johnson says using the basic tools in nature can be the key to making a climate-friendly home. In Ventura, California, I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace. As happens every January, a bunch of new laws went into effect last month in a bunch of states, including one in New Jersey that's become known as the Seinfeld law, as in that Seinfeld. I'm sorry. Excuse me one second. Hello?

Hi. Would you be interested in switching over to TMI long distance service? Oh, gee, I can't talk right now. Why don't you give me your home number and I'll call you later? Well, I'm sorry. We're not allowed to do that. Oh, I guess you don't want people calling you at home. No.

Well, now you know how I feel. The Seinfeld Law requires telemarketers, like the one calling Jerry in that clip, to provide the name, the mailing address, and the telephone number of the person calling within 30 seconds of a call. But it turns out that Seinfeld laws are kind of all over the place, if you know where to look. Here's today's installment of our series, My Economy. My name is Aaron Schreiber. I am an attorney in New York City, and I am the co-creator of Seinfeld Law. Seinfeld Law is a blog that my brother and I started in law school that takes Seinfeld episodes and uses the wacky plot lines to break down legal issues and

also uses our legal knowledge to break down all the wacky adventures of the Seinfeld characters. Nobody remembers the exact timeline of the story, but the general consensus is that my brother and I and a few friends in law school were joking around one day and started just messing around with using Seinfeld plot lines to try to figure out some of the legal issues that we were learning about. And then somebody had the idea of actually putting it down on paper and starting a blog. One of our first posts was about the puffy shirt. Oh, a puffy shirt.

Puffy, yeah. See, I think people want to look like pirates. In the puffy shirt episode, Kramer starts dating what they call a low talker who talks in such a low voice that nobody can hear what she's saying. What's that? Excuse me? And because of that, Jerry says a lot of yes and mm-hmms when she starts asking him to wear this ridiculous puffy shirt that looks like a pirate shirt that she's been designing. And he accidentally agrees to wear this shirt on the Today Show when he has an appearance with Brian Gumbel. You know, since you agreed to wear the puffy shirt on the Today Show,

she's getting all these orders from boutiques and department stores. Uh-huh. Since I won. And so he agrees to it without really knowing what he's agreeing to. And so we analyzed whether this would be considered an oral contract under the rules of New York law. Well, you got to wear it now. All those stores are stocking it based on the condition that you're going to wear this on the TV show. There's a lot of different legal elements, which I don't want to bore all the listeners with.

I don't want to bore all the listeners with, but basically it comes down to is that Jerry probably did have to wear the puffy shirt because Kramer's girlfriend had taken all these steps about producing all of the shirts out in the factory and spending all this money. And so he really did have to wear the shirt on the Today Show. This project definitely helped us think through the different legal issues in like quote-unquote real life. I know they're fictional, but like real life settings. And Seinfeld's a really great medium for doing that because it's the show about nothing, but it's really the show about just how everything in your life can be funny and comedic. And so here it also shows how everything in your life could be the source of a legal issue. And so here also shows that everything in your life could be the source of a legal issue. And so seeing that play out was super valuable, especially when it came down to bar study. And when you're studying for the bar exam, it is just like the worst journey that any lawyer is going to take in their life.

And to have this to be able to joke around with and see it through something that we love was just really valuable and concretizing. And then it turned out that it was also valuable for other lawyers or other students as well. People from across the country who were studying for the bar exam would email saying, hey, could you write about this? Or I saw this episode, I was wondering how you think it would play out. To be creative with the law has been really fun and self-affirming. Aaron Schreiber, SeinfeldLaw.com. You can tell us about the laws of your economy.

Marketplace.org is where you do that. This final note on the way out today, which comes with the observation that shares of Spotify, the streaming service, were up about a percent and a half today. Why, you ask? Well, near as I can tell, it's because traders were okay with the company throwing another $250 million at Joe Rogan. throwing another $250 million at Joe Rogan. The announcement came today. Said Rogan in a Spotify blog post, I can't even do this justice, cool conversations are a kind of mental nourishment.

Never ceases to amaze me, and it never will, that he is the guy from Fear Factor. Our theme music was composed by BJ Lederman. Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargali. Donna Tam is the executive editor. Neil Scarbrough is vice president and general manager. I'm Kai Risdell. Have a great weekend, everybody. We will see you right back here on This is APM. literacy. We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation. And it's happening because of a podcast. I think your podcast has changed my life. And I'm going to share this podcast with everyone I meet. Sold a Story investigates how teaching kids to read went wrong. New episodes of Sold a Story are available now.