Marketplace - Talking the (workplace) talk

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

“Act your wage,” “coffee badging,” “ghost jobs” — the internet is always vomiting up new workplace phrases. You may even use some of them to describe the bizarre job market of the past few years. So when popular work slang shifts from silly — “lazy girl jobs” — to grim — “quiet cutting” — are there hints about where the labor market is headed? Also in this episode: Tech firms ditch user counts, car sales motor on despite high costs and educators get educated about jobs at the Port of Baltimore.

All right, give me two words not having to do with politics that you might see in a headline. We'll see if we match. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdal. Tuesday, today the 23rd of July. Good as always to have you along, everybody. All right, here is a couple of words not getting a whole lot of play in news feeds of late. Corporate profits.

Not, one readily admits, especially this week, the most attention grabbing of phrases. But we on this program are going to stick with our bread and butter. Alphabet reported earnings today, $84 billion in revenue last quarter, $64 billion of that from ads. Tesla had a bump in revenue last quarter too, but car sales were off 7% from the same quarter a year ago. And elsewhere in automotive, General Motors. Cars are in theory what economists call interest rate sensitive, right? When rates go up, auto loans get more expensive, car sales go down.

Maybe not. General Motors said in its announcement today it sold more cars and trucks in North America last quarter than it did a year ago, and it was selling them at an average price of a not cheap almost $50,000. Marketplace of Matt Levin starts us off. Let's say you were already sick of your beat up jalopy back in 2022 when the Fed first started raising rates and there was a pandemic induced new car shortage.

Back then you might've thought, hey, I can stick it out a while longer until rates and prices drop. Even if my car makes that weird sound when I change gears and the stereo will only play that Shakira CD that got stuck inside it in 2009. But there's only so many times you can listen to Hips Don't Lie in your Pontiac Aztec until you say, fine, I can swallow a 7% rate on my auto loan.

When the Fed starts raising interest rates, you may think, I don't want to buy a car now is not the right time. It makes it way too expensive. But people can only hold on for so long. Jessica Caldwell is head of insights at the car sales website Edmunds. She says the rising price of keeping an old car on the road has also pushed more buyers to the dealership. They still do need repairs. They need maintenance. And some of that's really costly. Right now, buyers are paying an average of $9,300 in interest on a new car, according to Edmonds.

That's a lot. But a sizable chunk of car buyers are basically rich enough to not need a loan at all. Charlie Chesbro is at Cox Automotive. We've seen the role of cash purchases has risen quite dramatically in the new vehicle market. So folks who come in and actually just slap down $50,000 for a vehicle. As recently as a few months ago,

one in five car purchases were all cash. And while high prices and high rates aren't ending car sales, Cox Automotive projects 2024 to be the best sales year since 2020, they are changing what types of cars Americans buy. There does appear to be a shift towards smaller. So we're seeing that, for example, midsize SUV, which used to be the number one product

category, we're seeing market shares now declining. Compact SUVs and compact sedans are cheaper than bigger models, at least somewhat cheaper. I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace. On Wall Street today, sorry, hang on, just checking. Nope, nope, traders still do not care about the political headlines. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. Give me, oh, I don't know, a couple of three jobs you can do in and around a major cargo port. Tugboat captain's probably one, right? I don't know a couple of three jobs you can do in and around a major cargo port

Tugboat captain is probably one right longshoreman maybe crane operator for those big cranes The ports need civil engineers and welders and environmentalists to lots of jobs Some of which require a college degree others that don't the catch is that people young people in particular Have to know those kinds of careers exist before they can want to do them. They are trying to get the word out in Baltimore as Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes reports. Darren Fisher is giving a kind of crash course on dredging. Here in the Port of Baltimore, it means lifting sediment from the bottom of the Patapsco River, putting it on a barge. And then they bring the barge over to us and they pump that material in. It's kind of like the consistency of a Slurpee from the

7-Eleven. Fisher's talking to a vanload of half a dozen educators. They're being driven around a dredged material containment facility that Fisher manages. It's one of the spots where all that sediment's being stored and it's totally new to Mike Struzzeri. He advises high schoolers in Baltimore County. I had no idea this place even existed. That's despite growing up close by. Straseri also served as a Marine and spent a lot of time on Navy vessels. Now he wants to learn about all the jobs at the port so he can tell his students about them. Because when you think about it it's like its own little civilization right? You need your plumbers, you need your electricians, you need your

everything. Including steamship agents, statisticians, and laborers. The Maryland Port Administration says more than 20,000 people are directly employed at the Port of Baltimore, and they make an average annual salary of over $82,000. Struzzeri says his students know the ports here, but... As far as what kind of job opportunities are here, I don't think they have any clue. This is a familiar challenge to Katrina Jones. She works for the Maryland Port Administration and helped start this program more than a

decade ago to grow the port's workforce. The problem is you need to teach the teachers because they can't translate this and once they see it, it makes sense to them. And they can get excited about it. We drive over to one of the port's terminals, where Jones points out some fancy sports cars that have come off a ship. They keep some of the high-end cars outside. But most of them are inside a warehouse.

We catch a glimpse of some pricey orange and blue McLarens, with doors that open upwards. Now you definitely cannot take photos here. Definitely not. One job here is fixing up any cars like these that are damaged in transit. Says Kip Snow, a community college educator who is one of the leaders of the Samuel Tour. It'll be repaired here so that as it goes back out

it's still the new vehicle. So a kid that was interested in mechanics or auto body could still find a job somewhere down here. The educators also get a bird's eye view of the port from a conference room in one of its 37 terminals. They can see containers and cranes, some as high as 165 feet. They also get some real talk about Baltimore's location from Fritz De Houda. He's with Ports America Chesapeake, a terminal operator here.

The shipping lines don't like to come here. Chesapeake Bay is 10 to 12 hours up the bay. It's a beautiful ride up the bay, but it's expensive. De Houda says it can cost up to $100,000 a day to operate a cargo vessel. So that bay ride costs the shippers real money. But he says the manufacturers of the cargo love that Baltimore is the farthest inland port on the East Coast. That just means it's a shorter distance to take those nice McLarens and other cargo

to points west. But Marta Mullen, a special education teacher, has something else on her mind. She's focused on the durability of the 300-year-old port. Climate change is in the waters or for bigger hurricanes. Climate change is something the port's taking into consideration. At one terminal, they're planning to install flood walls to deal with giant storms. The fact that the port's thinking about this gives Mullen confidence. That just means growth is going to keep happening for the Baltimore area. And we know that means that our kids are going to be able to find jobs and we're going to continue to grow and be available.

It makes sense to question the security of industrial jobs here. know that means that our kids are going to be able to find jobs and we're going to continue to grow and be available. It makes sense to question the security of industrial jobs here. Both a steel plant and car factory have left Baltimore in the last couple decades. But the port can't be moved. So logistics will likely remain a major part of Maryland's future. And the region's going to need to keep developing its workforce to get the job done. In Baltimore, Stephanie Hughes from RKPLACE. I think we told you back in April that Netflix is going to stop reporting its quarterly subscriber numbers next year. They are, of course, far from the only big name in tech and media to ditch those user

counts. It's kind of a trend in streaming and elsewhere for companies, including Meta and Alphabet, to just sidestep their raw top line user totals. John Herman wrote about it in New York Magazine the other day. John, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Why have these companies started not reporting their user numbers? Well, I think there are two answers to that question.

One is that a lot of them for a few years now have had some other great numbers to share. High revenue figures, they've become very profitable, but at the same time, they've kind of saturated the market. If you wonder how many people use YouTube, you can sort of plausibly say basically everyone. But that also means that that number, that top line number, probably isn't going up very much and in some cases might be falling. Facebook famously had a few quarters where it seemed like Facebook itself was actually shrinking.

They would much rather emphasize the fact that Metta, the parent company, is making huge amounts of money and each Facebook user is worth more to them than than they had been before Yeah, it's it's a little bit live by the sword die by the sword right live by the numbers die by the numbers. Yeah For years you had internet companies that were defined by you know fast and and Enormous growth companies that went from 1 million to 10 million to 100 million to a billion users in really staggeringly short periods of time. But for a lot of that time, they were losing money. This is sort of something that tech investors are used to, that will tolerate years of rapid

growth with the promise of future profits. Now instead of fighting with the perception of slowed growth, they can instead emphasize like look, we're getting more money out of each of our customers than we were before and that should be enough. Right. And it ought to be pointed out that early stage and even mid-stage tech investors ain't Wall Street, right? And Wall Street is a whole different animal.

Yeah. I mean, that's part of the benefit of being a privately held startup is you can tell different stories to different sorts of investors. Now many of these companies are in fact public and they have to report important figures and those investors are not especially forgiving. So you get a little bit of this fudging instead. You get family, daily, active people. You get Netflix making the case that, well, we should focus on these financial representations of our business

rather than the ones that we've been leaning on for years. Let me back you up for a second. I was going to ask what number should we be paying attention to? I don't know what a family, active, daily people is. first of all, what is it and why does it matter? Well, Meta, I think has taken a slightly unusual approach here. It's a company that has multiple products with more than a billion users. But it also has products that are monetized in really different ways. So what Meta did was said, okay, we have some products that are growing really quickly, some products that might be shrinking,

for example, Facebook. Maybe it would simplify our story a little bit to talk about the family of apps and talk about how many people use one of these many apps in a given day or in a given month. And that allows them to tell a story of both growth, of increasing revenue, of increasing revenue per user, that's, from their perspective, great and uncomplicated.

For the astute observer of these things, not the Wall Street analysts, but the astute layperson who wants to know how a given company is doing, what do we look at? Well, I mean, financial filings as public companies are useful. I don't mean to say that these companies are deliberately and profoundly misleading people, but they are emphasizing the numbers they're most comfortable with. And I think it is fair to ask for these top line numbers because they do mean something.

If Facebook starts losing users or Instagram starts losing users, they actually risk a death spiral. It's something that's actually fairly fragile, even when your user base contains most people on the internet. John Herman, Covers Technology at New York Magazine. John, thanks a bunch. I appreciate your time. Thanks a lot. Coming up!

Selling raw goat milk, making goat milk soap, showing goats, breeding goats and selling babies. Gets my goat, I'll tell you that. First though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial is down 57 points on this Tuesday at 10%. 40,358. The NASDAQ gave back 10 points. That's less than a 10%.

Closed at 17,997. The S&P 500 subtracted 8. The NASDAQ gave back 10 points, that's less than a tenth percent, closed 17,997. The S&P 500 subtracted 8, that's points, almost two tenths percent, finished at 55.55. Matt Levin was telling us about auto sales earlier, GM off six and four tenths percent. Today the company said it's slowing plans for all electric vehicles and is not going to meet its earlier target of having production capacity for a million EVs by 2025. That's kind of a big deal. Ford Motors gave back 2.1% Tesla which I also mentioned declined 2%. Spotify tuned up 12% today. Music Streaming Service posted better than expected and said a core

profits and said its focus on premium subscribers and bundles has been paying off. You are listening to Marketplace. Hey everyone, it's Rima Grace, host of This Is Uncomfortable, here to let you all know about our summer book club. Every other week, we're going to recommend a book that our team loves that gets at some uncomfortable topic around money, class, our relationship to work. We'll feature a wide range of recs, including classics like E.M. Forrester's A Passage to India, page turning novels like Naomi Alderman's The Future,

and personal finance books like Paco de Leon's Finance for the People. Join This Is Uncomfortable's Book Club by signing up for our newsletter. Be sure to sign up today at marketplace.org slash book club. This is Marketplace. I'm Kyle Rizdal. The labor market has come a long way since the beginning of the pandemic. Almost 15% unemployment in this economy early on, then a boom that had millions of people quitting their jobs in the almost certain expectation that they would get something better. You remember that? It was a lot. And those ups and downs have led to some interesting dynamics, shall we say, between companies and their workers, as in who has the upper hand.

Data can tell us a lot, right? We talk about that, job openings and the quits rate, low unemployment. Language though, too, literally what we say and how we say it, the jargon and the buzzwords that people use to talk about life at the office. Marketplace's Stacey Vanick-Smith has more on that one. Back in the before times, it was a company's world and workers, we were all just living in it. You could hear this in the phrases we used when we talked about work. Multitasking, working vacation, inbox zero, bossing up.

People used to brag about the number of hours they worked, almost like a badge of honor. Eric Anisich is a professor at USC's Marshall School of Business. He says this was hustle culture. The language reflects a very management-centric view where the power dynamic heavily favored employers. And as we all remember, that power dynamic changed pretty profoundly during the pandemic. There were suddenly two open jobs for every available worker. Wages soared, perks were plentiful, Dunkin' Donuts was offering signing bonuses. Workers felt confident, even cocky. And language around work changed a lot. It was all over social media. Quiet quitting makes sense because giving 110% to your employer is a bad bet. You've heard of bare minimum Mondays, the idea that you should ease into the work week

with this healthy. Why are you putting so much time in? You are just a number, so act your wage. Eric Anisich says the cultural narrative around work was changing. These phrases communicate very different concerns and aspirations. For the first time in decades, workers were questioning the hustle. And it wasn't just talk. They were quitting in record numbers and working fewer hours.

Young Suk Shin is an economist at Washington University. He decided to measure exactly how much less we were all working. The number of hours people working has gone down 2 percent. This is a fairly big number. And it was an even bigger number, more than double, for many top-earning white-collar workers who started working remotely during the pandemic. These are the people who realized that they could be doing about the same amount of work without spending all the hours in the office. Workers were working less and companies were fighting over them. Pay was

soaring and so were perks. You want to work from home? No problem. I mean, if you do want to come in, there's free pizza and a meditation lounge. This was the corporate carrot era. But about a year ago, the sticks came out. USC's Eric Anisich says, you can sum it up in three little words. Return to office or RTO, right? And it's like an imperative sentence. It sounds like a command, like, you know, you're being scolded, like, okay, playtime is over,

return to office. Meditation lounge? Oh, right. No, we turned that back into the copy room. Last year, the job market cooled a bit. Unemployment is still really low, but it is rising and the number of people quitting has plunged. It does feel like we're kind of at a crossroads and I think both sides are starting to recognize the power that the other side has. It's like high noon in the American workforce.

Yeah, yeah. A very passive aggressive high noon. Workers are resisting hustle culture, but they are also staying in their jobs. Companies are putting back-to-office mandates in place, but enforcement is spotty. Anasich says some of the new phrases around work reflect this stalemate. Need to get away, but your boss says no? Try quiet vacationing. They will never know in your Zoom meeting.

Furious over the return to office mandate, but too scared to ignore it? Try coffee badging. So coffee badging is really the art of showing up in the office to check a box because your company has some sort of return to office mandate. Frank Wiseopt is the CEO of Owl Labs, a workplace technology company that coined the term coffee badging after they found nearly 60% of workers said their response to the back to office

mandate was to badge in, get a coffee, say hi to everybody, and leave. The term went viral, along with some more ominous terms like quiet cutting. That is the current trend of companies cutting workers' hours and replacing full-time positions with part-time. We're still in the middle of this tug of war between employees and employers, right? Especially large companies are setting these return to office mandates and employees don't want it.

They want flexibility. So, who will bend the knee? That depends on the economy. If unemployment rises, back to office mandates will probably get tougher. Quiet cutting will probably get louder and hustle culture could rise again. If unemployment stays low, though, those return-to-office mandates will probably soften. And who knows? The copy machine might even get wheeled back out of the meditation room.

In New York, I'm Stacyacey Vanik-Smith for Marketplace. There is, in this 25 or so trillion dollar economy, an industry group for everything. Case in point, the American Feed Industry Association, which estimates about 284 million tons of animal and pet food is produced in this country every single year. 284 million tons of feed that gets sold, distributed, and eaten bag by individual bag. Here's today's installment of our series, My Economy. My name is Jody Gabrowsky and I live in southeast Idaho, very small town. First off, I've always recycled, reused, and reduced. I mean, I get it from my grandma.

She's 93 years old. I love her to death. So growing up with her, she always did that. So just as I turned into an adult, I just started reusing cool whip containers, reusing this, reusing jars. I mean, I never threw anything away. In 2018 is when we started venturing into goats. Selling raw goat milk, making goat milk soap, showing goats, breeding goats, and selling babies.

In dairy goats, you use bag feed. A lot of bag feed. A lot of the feed bags are recycled plastic already, and then it's woven. That gives it all its durability and its stability. And I was throwing it away and I'm like, looking at it, I'm like, this is the same material as a reusable bag. I'm like, hey, I have a sewing machine downstairs and made my first bag.

And then I just showed it to the whole community. So it turned into what it is now. Year to date in the last six years, I have collected over 20,000 empty feed banks and we turn them into a reusable bag. When I first started making the bags and selling them to friends, I was like selling them for $3.50 and they're like, you need to charge more. And then we bumped it up to $5 and they're like, you need to charge more. It's been a whole learning curve. you need to charge more. It's been a whole learning curve.

I work about four to six hours a day. I converted my whole 1800 square foot basement into sewing, packaging, and we built custom shelves where each individual bag sits on the shelf itself. where each individual bag sits on the shelf itself. I have sold, I think we're coming up to 8,000. It just makes me feel really good. Like I didn't even think that recycling a feed bag, that this could be into a business what it is today. My grandmother, she absolutely loves it. That was Jody Gebrowski at Little Skis Dare in southeastern Idaho. You can tell us about your economy, maybe something you're upcycling at marketplace.org

slash my economy. All right this final note on the way out today it's a real estate roundup of sorts. This came from the National Association of Realtors this morning. Sales of previously owned homes, used homes, that is, were off almost 5.5% May to June. Prices meanwhile? Up. The median price in June, almost $427,000. That's better than 4% higher than a year ago.

Our digital and on-the-band team includes Carrie Barber, Jordan Mangy, Dylan Mienten, Janet Nguyen, Olga Oxman, Ellen Rolfes, Virginia K. Smith, and Tony Wagner. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital and On Demand. And I'm Kyle Rizdal. We will see you tomorrow everybody. This is APM.