Marketplace - The right to disconnect

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

The legal right to ignore an after-hours call from your boss might seem appealing but unlikely. A California lawmaker, though, hopes to follow the lead of a dozen countries that have laws against it. Allowing employees to disconnect could be a plus for overall health and happiness, but not everyone supports the bill. Plus, women suffer a setback in the C-suite, economic data feels sorta choose-your-own-adventure right now, and denim is eternal.

On the show today, some mixed signals from the job market, why women are holding fewer C-suite jobs, and the right to disconnect from our jobs. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Baltimore, I'm Amy Scott, in for Kai Risdahl. It's Thursday, April 4th. Good to have you with us. The jobs data keeps rolling in. Today, the Labor Department said the number of people filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose last week to a two-month high, though continuing claims filed by people already receiving benefits fell. That follows yesterday's reading from ADP that U.S. companies increased both hiring and pay in March, and an earlier report that layoffs picked up slightly in February. As I said, mixed signals.

All for the Fed to pour over as officials ponder the big question, or questions, when to cut interest rates, how many times, and by how much. As Marketplace's Sabri Beneshor reports, Fed officials themselves are giving mixed signals. The foot is on the brakes of the economy right now as we speak, meaning interest rates are high. They're making loans more expensive, messing with investment, driving up credit card delinquencies, but also bringing down inflation. The question is, when is that foot going to ease up? We have time to let the incoming data guide our decisions on policy.

That's Fed Chair Jerome Powell yesterday speaking at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Does the data show the economy's slowing down too much? Better lay off the brakes. Does the data show the economy's slowing down too much? Better lay off the brakes. Does the data show inflation is staying too high? Slam that pedal and keep rates high. One small problem with our economy's data, though? It's kind of a choose-your-own-adventure at this point.

Brian Whalen is chief investment officer at TCW. Consumer spending rose, but the service sector slowed down. More people laid off, but also more hired. Whatever narrative you want to kind of support, there's enough data out there to do it. That extends right up to the Fed itself. I think we have heard conflicting signals from Fed officials. Matthew Luzzetti is chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank. At least one official thinks rates should absolutely be slashed this year. A couple others think they shouldn't be touched at

all. Here's Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester at the Cleveland Association for Business Economics on Tuesday. At this point, I think the bigger risk would be to begin reducing the funds rate too early. Again, it all comes down to the data. Not the data we have, but the data we will get in the next few months. One piece in particular. I think the decision to cut this summer is mostly about the inflation data. David Maracle is the chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs. The Fed wants inflation at 2%. It is now at 2.5%. It slowed way down at the end of last year, but then picked up at the

beginning of this year. Maracle says it is coming back down. It comes down to whether or not the inflation numbers come in soft enough that Fed officials feel like we're on track to keep moving enough toward 2% to get started. Miracle, and everyone interviewed for this story, and markets generally, are all betting interest rates will start coming down in June. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshour for Marketplace. On Wall Street today, stocks fell ahead of the March jobs report

coming out tomorrow. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. We're going to come back to something I mentioned at the end of the show yesterday, a report from S&P Global showing that after about two decades of growth, the share of top executive jobs held by women fell last year slightly to just under 12%. Is it just a blip or something more going on? We asked Marketplace's Kristen Schwab to look into it. When you zoom in on the data in the S&P report, a curious pattern pops out. Women's growth in the C-suite slowed in 2008 during the financial crisis, 2020 during the pandemic, and now 2023, the year of will we or won't we slip into a recession? Dan Sandberg co-authored the study. These incidents would suggest that women are hit harder by unfavorable changes in the economic environment.

An unfavorable economic environment after a brief surge in interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Mentions of DEI and earnings reports have fallen since 2020, and major companies have cut DEI jobs. Youjie Chang is a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia. Definitely with any type of business priority, oftentimes we see these ebbs and flows in how much attention is paid to a certain issue. ESG, environmental, social, and governance, is another example. Both it and DEI have become politicized. Cheng also says companies overwhelmingly promoted women at a time when

executives just could not thrive. Women in the C-suite increased most during 2021 and 22, when businesses were transitioning out of the pandemic world. Women being promoted into a situation that was characterized by so much uncertainty and so many challenges and really not having the circumstances to thrive and to show their abilities. Especially if they weren't given the support. Corrine Post, chair in business leadership at Villanova University, says it takes more than a few promotions to sustain change at a company. Are our processes fair? What are the biases that exist? How do we eradicate them? All that stuff is really hard change management work. She says that's ultimately what it takes to place more women in roles that are revenue generating,

like operations. Which are stepping stones for the C-suite. The S&P report says it'll take longer to reach gender parity in the C-suite, up to seven years longer, putting parity as far out as 2042. I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace. Across the western United States, the traditional wildfire season is just around the corner. Across the western United States, the traditional wildfire season is just around the corner. In the last decade, large and destructive fires have been so frequent, it's easy to lose track of the names unless you live through it. One of these disasters was the Creek Fire, which ignited in central California over Labor Day weekend 2020 and burned for months. end 2020 and burned for months. News reports pegged the cost of the response at more than $500 million. From KVPR in Fresno, Keri Klein has the story of how Creek Fire survivors are

moving forward. When the Creek Fire ignited in September 2020 in the mountains outside Fresno, it engulfed 36,000 acres in just a day. It was immediately national news. But nowhere are things more dire than outside of Fresno, where what's being called the Creek Friar exploded so quickly it's being described as in a class by itself. In that wild first day, the fire trapped hundreds of people at a campground. All of them survived, with stories of incredible heroism and narrow escapes. All of them survived, with stories of incredible heroism and narrow escapes. Liz Lawrence's story involves a car crash. She was speeding away from the fire with her two daughters, who were 9 and 11.

Then she careened her Chevy Yukon into a gate. I remember the window shattering on me, and then it was this instant hate. We were completely, except for on the passenger side, completely surrounded by flames. Two of their doors were pinned shut. They managed to scramble out and flee on foot. The fire singed their arms and faces, but they made it to safety at Mammoth Pool Reservoir, a nearby lake. That's where they and nearly 250 other campers were eventually rescued by National Guard helicopters. Three years later, Lawrence is still amazed. Why did we survive that? Why did we make it out of there? Like, there's no reason we should have survived that crash. Lawrence and her daughters have been recovering with the help

of counseling and journaling. They also adopted a therapy dog. For other survivors, part of healing has come from reuniting with their rescuers. Thank you for showing up. I just want to make a couple small introductions. On the third anniversary of the dramatic rescue, an Army association held a barbecue in Fresno to honor the National Guard soldiers who flew those helicopters. The pilots made six trips through thick smoke late at night to save everyone. trips through thick smoke late at night to save everyone. Around 70 survivors showed up to thank them, including Carla Carcabo, who drove three hours from Los Angeles. During the fire, she was safe at the lake, but her younger brother, sister, and cousins were hiking in the woods and their family lost track of them. Mercifully, they survived, but with severe burns. She said she's still haunted by the trauma of those uncertain hours.

Maybe like two weeks ago, I just cried on the way to work. Nori Zeledon, also from L.A., was airlifted out with her husband and baby girl, who's now four. Zeledon says her daughter doesn't remember the fire, but they've told her the story. I showed her videos and she was just surprised. She couldn't believe it. She's like, wow. And she said she wants to say thank you to the pilots. Raul Reyes drove six hours from Las Vegas to meet his rescuers because survival wasn't just about him and his wife. A year and a half ago, they had a baby girl. Oh, it's amazing. That's another blessing in itself. In the years since the Creek Fire, Reyes' family and their friends decided to take their big camping trips where they felt safer, near the ocean, away from dense forests.

But they may be ready to go back to Mammoth Pool this fall. Liz Lawrence, the woman who fled on foot with her daughters, also hopes to bring her family back to the lake this summer. Today, she's sitting in a prayer garden near the Fresno Church where she teaches preschool. She likes to take her lunch breaks here and sometimes reflects on the fire. She thinks it actually brought her and her daughters closer together. Everybody's like, you and your girls just get each other in a different way. I'm like, well, we've kind of been through some scary stuff, guys. She now wears that mother-daughter bond on her arm. She has a tattoo of three elephants. The biggest is leading the smaller ones, guiding them wherever life takes them next.

In Fresno, I'm Keri Klein for Marketplace. Coming up... You've got to learn to clean your own romaine. That's the bottom line. It's not that hard. But first, let's do the numbers. Oh, the trombones. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 530 points, one and a third percent to close at 38,596. The Nasdaq dropped 228 points, 1.4% to finish at 16,049. And the S&P 500 slid 64 points, 1.25% to end at 51.47. Kristen Schwab was talking about the decline in the number of women in the C-suite.

So let's check in on some stocks of companies that do have women at the helm. The Hershey Company sweetened up 0.5%. Progressive Corp was off seven-tenths percent. CVS Health slumped nine-tenths percent. And Best Buy shed four-tenths percent. Bonds rose. The yield on the 10-year T-note fell to 4.31 percent. You're listening to Marketplace. I'm Amy Scott. Imagine it's nine in the evening. You've just put the kids to bed or finished the dishes,

and you're ready to put your feet up. Maybe watch that new soccer documentary when your phone goes off and it's your boss. What do you do? Well, if you were in France or any of about a dozen other countries, your right to ignore that call is protected by law. And now a California lawmaker has proposed to give workers in the state the same right to disconnect. It would be the first of its kind in the U.S. Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino has more. If you've ever fantasized about throwing your boss in jail for interrupting your precious TV time, that's not really how these laws work, says Mark Bell, a law professor at Trinity College Dublin, where there's been a right to disconnect on the books since 2021.

I reached him just after 5 p.m. local time. We're towards the end of the books since 2021. I reached him just after 5pm local time. We're towards the end of the working day here. Am I breaking any laws right now? Well, the law leaves it pretty flexible, so we don't have any rigid start times and finish times. He says companies must create clear policies around their working hours and try not to encroach on off hours. I think it has really encouraged a change in culture. So maybe just people pausing and thinking about their ways of operating.

I think it is an understandable pushback to something that we should have been regularly clarifying. Callie Williams-Yost is a business strategist who focuses on flexible and remote work. It's really been a very undefined 24-7 free-for-all, and it's not sustainable. Especially for parents and other caregivers. A growing body of research shows that workers' inability to disconnect is damaging their health, happiness, and productivity. The California Chamber of Commerce opposes the proposed legislation. Will Reinhart, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says it could be a particular challenge for tech startups

with their culture of working for a share of the company. You work hard and then either you sell out an equity share or you get acquired. And that really has, I think, been a pretty successful model. The California legislation proposes a $100 fine each time an employer violates a worker's right to disconnect. I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace. Yesterday, Levi Strauss reported a loss for its first quarter, though earnings were better than analysts expected. And the company said its own stores and website now account for nearly half of its sales, focusing more on direct-to-consumer sales as opposed to selling through big department stores like Kohl's or Macy's, is one example of how the business of selling jeans is changing.

Levi's has been making jeans, once called waist overalls, since the 1870s. And denim, generically speaking, has had remarkable staying power throughout the decades. Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval has this story on the enduring appeal of jeans. It's hard to think of anything quite as American as a pair of blue jeans. They were first sold to folks out West, miners, ranchers, farmers. That's why they used to call them farmer jeans or farmer overalls. Sean Green Carter is with the Fashion Institute of Technology. But in the 70s, denim became a designer commodity for the masses. Thanks to brands like Calvin Klein.

And jeans appealed to different age groups. Take this old Levi's commercial featuring a boy and his dog. Part of denim's staying power comes from its ability to adapt to the trends of each generation. You can see seniors, baby boomers, Gen X, as well as millennials, Gen Z, and Alpha all wearing some type of denim fashion today in 2024. Whether dark wash, light wash, skinny, ripped, distressed, stretch, there's always a new twist. These days?

stressed stretch, there's always a new twist. These days, people want the baggy, wide, kind of luminous look on the bottom in terms of silhouette. So you're starting to see that reflect in jeans. But that doesn't mean demand for denim doesn't fray from time to time. Jessica Ramirez is an analyst with Jane Halley & Associates. She says lately, There has been a slowdown with denim. We've had more excitement or more of a trend, especially with the younger consumer, lean towards softer bottoms. Like cargos or a tailored pant in a softer fabric. But jeans aren't going anywhere. Trends will be recycled and so will the textile itself

as the industry has become more environmentally sensitive. It is more of a fabric that lends itself towards sustainability. Whether thrifted, upcycled, or recycled, blue jeans have proven to be quite durable. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. The many problems with plastic are getting a lot of attention these days, from the climate and environmental impacts to health concerns about microplastics in our bodies. But in the food business, ditching plastic packaging isn't as simple as you might think. ditching plastic packaging isn't as simple as you might think. Kim Severson wrote about plastic's stranglehold on produce in the New York Times and joins me now. Kim, welcome back to Marketplace.

Hi, how are you? Great. So when I go shopping for produce, I have noticed that everything pretty much seems to be wrapped in plastic. Why is that? Well, plastic works really well in a lot of ways, right? It keeps your food from spoiling. And if you think about Peru and blueberries, where much of America's blueberries come from, you've got to get those blueberries from Peru to your local store in some decent shape, right? Well, plastic is really the way that that happens. But we're also seeing the downsides of plastic. It's choking the oceans. The carbon footprint is enormous. But you write that it's a little more challenging to move on to a different kind

of packaging than we might think. Why is that? Right. I mean, I think even people who traffic in plastic agree that plastic has choked our planet. But really, we're starting to see that it does have some good applications. For example, you know, those cucumbers that go bad quickly in your refrigerator, when you throw them out, they go into the landfills. And food waste is a big contributor to the methane, which is contributing obviously to climate change. And the other thing about food waste, you have to think about the amount of money and energy it took to farm that cucumber, to transport it. All of that impacts the climate too. So if we're wasting 30% of our food by throwing it away, that's essentially 30% of the inputs it takes to create that food too. So what alternatives are out there that could preserve freshness and maybe the convenience

that consumers really seem to want to have, including myself, but aren't so harmful to the environment. There are a whole lot of different materials being worked on. One thing I kind of like is the idea of using orange peels or shrimp shells or other kinds of waste to get turned into a plastic film that can be used kind of like cellophane was or made into bags. And of course, they're all kind of containers from when rice is harvested, the leftover straw from grass, sugar cane, all of this is being turned into trays and boxes in an attempt to make them biodegradable.

This seems like one of those, you know, putting the genie back in the bottle situations. But, I mean, is some of this going to take consumers giving up having blueberries in the winter, for example, or maybe buying more carefully and not letting things sit in their fridge for two weeks and turn into mush? Well, you are a dreamer. Let's think about this. But I'm not the only one. But you are not the only one. American shoppers bought $4.3 billion worth of bag salads last year, right? So the bag salad industry, the clamshells or the bags, I don't think that is really going to go away. But I think in the same way that we all started to carry our, you know, public radio tote bags to the grocery store instead of using plastic bags. Thank you for that, by the way.

Thank you very much. You know, I think that consumer behavior changed. And I think people are increasingly not happy that they have to buy 12 jalapenos in a styrofoam plastic covered container when they really just need two and those peppers would get wasted. But people are starting to actually push back and make the choice. But the fact of the matter is these regulations and these changes are going to come. The Biden administration has a food waste plan that it's putting out that is calling for innovations in packaging as well as limiting food waste. So I think the tide is turning, but you've got to learn to clean your own romaine. That's the bottom line. We have to make some sacrifices.

Right. And that leads me to the last question, which is the cost. I mean, as these changes happen, whether we push for them or not, do you expect we'll pay more for produce as a result? I think that there will be a shift to people wanting to buy less produce because they don't want to buy the big amounts you would have to. So that would save the consumer some dollars. But listen, prices are up all over the place. Inflation is happening at the grocery store. And the bottom line is it's going to cost more to have your fruit packaged in something other than plastic. So yeah, I think it's going to cost consumers at the grocery store.

But I also think there are ways that we can limit how much money we're spending by being a little more thoughtful about saving those scraps and cooking with them, about making sure you eat what's in your refrigerator instead of going out. So I think there's some ways that we as consumers and cooks can make a difference too and save ourselves some money. Kim Severson is national food correspondent at The New York Times. Thanks so much. You're welcome. This final note on the way out today, Kristen Schwab talked earlier about gender parity or the lack of it in the corporate world. So how about in sports? CNN reports that tickets to see the women's final four basketball games on Friday are fetching higher prices than the men's.

The average ticket price for the women's NCAA semifinals per StubHub is $726, compared to $710 for the men's games on Saturday. Part of it is the stadium size. There are a lot fewer seats at the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland, where the women are playing. But also, Kaitlyn Clark, breaking records for the Iowa Hawkeyes. John Buckley, John Gordon, Noya Carr, Diantha Parker, Amanda Peacher, and Stephanie Seek are the Marketplace editing staff. Amir Babawi is the managing editor. And I'm Amy Scott.

We will be back tomorrow. This is APM. A lot of people spend a lot of money on things like skin care, fast fashion, and even surgery, all in the name of self-improvement. But as the price of perfection rises, when is it time to call it quits? I'm Rima Kheis, host of This Is Uncomfortable, a podcast from Marketplace. This season, we dig deep into the financial trappings of self-care and the real motivations

behind our spending choices. Listen to This Is Uncomfortable wherever you get your podcasts.