The slow death of remote-only jobs

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Speaker 4 How often should publicly traded companies have to tell us what they're up to? And big AI companies share what we're getting up to with chatbots. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

Speaker 4 In Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams in for Chai Rizdahl. It's Monday, September 15th.
Good to have you along.

Speaker 4 The President of the United States, never one to shy away from challenging the economic status quo, took to his social media platform this morning to argue that companies are oversharing a bit.

Speaker 4 For decades, the Securities and Exchange Commission has required public companies to report earnings four times a year. We talk about these quarterly earnings reports all the time on this show.

Speaker 4 President Trump says that should change to just twice a year. It's something he asked the SEC to review during his first term as well.
Marketplace's Christian Schwab weighs the pros and cons.

Speaker 6 Public companies spend a lot of time filing required earnings reports and preparing for earnings calls. Those are optional, but have become common practice.

Speaker 6 Accountants, lawyers, and executives analyze every number and every word in these reports. They require a ton of resources.

Speaker 7 If you talk to most CFOs at most publicly traded companies, you know, they'd probably rather go to twice a year from four times a year.

Speaker 6 Scott Wren, senior global market strategist at the Wells Fargo Investment Investment Institute, says some execs think quarterly reports are distracting and narrow a company's focus.

Speaker 7 Many companies, you know, they're managing quarter to quarter.

Speaker 6 Instead of thinking longer term, because each report impacts stock price.

Speaker 6 Sam Stoval, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research, says an acute attention to shareholder value can dissuade companies from taking risks.

Speaker 10 But if it was open for six months, then there could be the ability to introduce new strategies and then shut them down quickly if need be.

Speaker 6 Or give new strategies a chance to succeed before the market weighs in. Now, six months could also give companies time to do a lot of damage.

Speaker 6 Imagine if a manufacturer sees a giant drop in revenue and investors only find out half a year later.

Speaker 10 The worry is that there could be increased volatility in the share prices since there's a greater lag between when actual data would be reported.

Speaker 6 The reporting lag could make investors uncomfortable buying a company's stock altogether. It could also allow companies to delay dealing with problems or just hide information.

Speaker 6 John Blink is chief economist at Zach's Investment Research.

Speaker 11 You would be pushing less information into the public space and allowing companies to basically be much more private about what they do.

Speaker 6 After all, these are public companies. Transparency is part of the process.
I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.

Speaker 4 Wall Street Today, tech stocks and movement on the China tariff talks had traders feeling good. We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

Speaker 4 Some drama is going down in the home appliance industry. Whirlpool is accusing several of its overseas rivals of evading tariffs.

Speaker 4 The Michigan headquartered company reportedly told the Trump administration that it suspects companies including Samsung, LG, and Hire, which owns GE appliances, are declaring artificially low values on their imported goods and customs paperwork so they can pay less in import taxes.

Speaker 4 Whirlpool is facing tariff pressures of its own because of the steel and aluminum that it imports for its washers and dryers and dishwashers.

Speaker 4 Right now, the company has just flagged the issue, according to the Wall Street Journal, not filed a formal complaint yet.

Speaker 4 But in general, higher tariffs can provide a bigger incentive for a form of evasion called undervaluation. Marketplace's Megan McCarty-Carino has more.

Speaker 12 There are totally non-fraudulent reasons a foreign exporter might lower the value of its goods in the face of higher tariffs, says Bernard Yaros at Oxford Economics.

Speaker 12 Companies could just be pricing their goods lower and taking a smaller profit.

Speaker 8 They are eating the cost, so to speak, of these tariffs to remain competitive.

Speaker 12 Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the price of imports in recent months suggest this may be happening in some cases.

Speaker 12 Values have fallen for some Chinese computers and apparel and European wines and spirits.

Speaker 12 But that's not what Whirlpool is accusing its competitors of doing, says Alexander Breckinridge, a trade compliance lawyer at Jones Walker.

Speaker 13 The difference is actually lying about the value of what you have produced before it's imported.

Speaker 12 That's a particular risk when one company is doing both the exporting and the importing.

Speaker 13 If you're not selling it for anything different in this country than you were beforehand, then that's fraud.

Speaker 12 The Department of Justice has launched a cross-agency task force to step up tariff enforcement, but Mary Lovely at the Peterson Institute for International Economics says responding quickly is going to be tough.

Speaker 14 There's an enormous enforcement challenge given just the scale of what President Trump has done. So, you know, Customs and Border Patrol has got firefights everywhere.

Speaker 12 On top of that, a lot of customs reporting is still done on paper. I'm Megan McCarty, Carino from Marketplace.

Speaker 4 It's been five and a half years since the pandemic started, shutting down offices and abruptly sending lots of people home to work.

Speaker 4 Now, while many have since gone back to the office at least part-time, according to research from Stanford, about 35% of people are currently working from home at least one day a week.

Speaker 4 That's four times as many as before COVID. But this year has been a big one for high-profile return-to-office announcements.

Speaker 4 JPMorgan, Amazon, ATT, Dell all have told their employees they now have to come back full-time.

Speaker 4 A majority of Fortune 100 companies are now requiring people to come into the office five days a week, up from just 5% in 2023. Marketplace's Samantha Fields reports.

Speaker 5 When Zach Dawson first got hired at JP Morgan as a software engineer in 2023, the deal was he had to go to the Atlanta office three days a week.

Speaker 15 At that time, I was living close to the office. I was living about 15 minutes away.

Speaker 16 And I also didn't have a child at the time.

Speaker 5 So it felt okay. He also really liked his job and the people he worked with.

Speaker 15 A team I had was probably the, well, not probably, it was definitely the best team I've ever been on.

Speaker 5 But about a year in, while he was on parental leave this past winter, JP Morgan announced everyone would have to return to the office five days a week.

Speaker 5 Dawson had no interest, especially now that he had a baby and an hour-long commute. And he says his colleagues didn't either.

Speaker 15 Nobody wanted it at all. There were people posting like in the internal boards complaining like so many people.

Speaker 5 So many that the company locked the internal boards and shut down the discussion. JP Morgan did not respond to a request for comment.

Speaker 5 This has been a big year for companies calling people back to the office full-time, especially in finance and tech. Why now?

Speaker 4 The biggest thing is the swing from being an employee market versus an employer market.

Speaker 4 Kate Lister at Global Workplace Analytics says a few years ago, companies were desperate for people, so they were doing anything they could to keep them happy.

Speaker 5 One way to do that was to let people work from home.

Speaker 5 But now with a slowing job market, concerns about the economy, and the proliferation of artificial intelligence, many companies feel like they don't have to anymore.

Speaker 5 Nick Bloom at Stanford says for some, return to office is actually partly a way to do layoffs without actually doing layoffs.

Speaker 17 Firms will announce a five-day return to the office, and then, you know, that day or a few days later, they'll say, oh, by the way, we're thinking of trimming headcount by 5-10%.

Speaker 17 And if you'd like to leave, because you don't want to come in the office five days a week, you know, thank you very much. That would be great.

Speaker 5 About 80% of people who work jobs that can be done remotely don't want to go to the office full-time, Bloom says. But many like to go sometimes.

Speaker 17 People want to, on average, work from home about two, three days a week.

Speaker 5 And his research finds there is value in having people in the office a couple days a week. But requiring five days doesn't make any difference to a company's performance.

Speaker 5 What it does do is reduce employee satisfaction and increase turnover, especially among women and high-performing employees.

Speaker 5 Lisa Schreiber's Dorf, executive director of of the nonprofit public defender's office, Brooklyn Defender Services, says she is concerned about that.

Speaker 18 But I'm not, I can't let that be the deciding factor.

Speaker 5 She recently decided that after years of hybrid work, it was important to have everyone back in the office full-time.

Speaker 18 I think each year that passes, where you have people that never worked together in person before the pandemic, it gets more and more difficult to assure that the staff is getting all the skills that they need to get from us.

Speaker 5 She says many of the newer attorneys and younger employees want more in-person interaction, and she also feels like it's important for the clients they're defending, too.

Speaker 5 But the new five-day mandate has been contentious with the Brooklyn Defender Services Union. So has the prospect of having to clock in and out with a location-based app.

Speaker 5 Rebecca Orleans is an attorney at BDS, and she already spends a lot of time in court and in the office.

Speaker 5 But she also really values being able to work from home sometimes, to focus on writing motions and take sensitive calls with clients.

Speaker 19 We take a pay cut by doing this job. You become a public defender because you care about the work.
It's famously not well paid, very emotionally difficult, but you do it because you care.

Speaker 5 Being able to finish her day and just be home or make it to her favorite workout class makes a difference too. And having that flexibility taken away makes her feel disrespected.

Speaker 19 This is my dream job, but I also can't work somewhere that gives me no flexibility and that insults my commitment to the work like this.

Speaker 5 That's similar to how Zach Dawson felt when JP Morgan announced everyone there would have to start going in full-time.

Speaker 3 I was immediately looking for another job.

Speaker 5 He lucked out and found one that's fully remote, so he quit. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

Speaker 4 Speaking of how we work, and not to put anyone on the spot, but um, how are you using AI chatbots these days? Did AI whip up that cover letter you were too tired to write yourself?

Speaker 4 Was it you or chatbot that wrote that report that your boss demanded with no notice?

Speaker 4 AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic each put out research in the past few days looking at how humans are actually using ChatGPT and Claude, their respective chat bots.

Speaker 4 Marketplace's Matt Levin has some of the findings.

Speaker 21 So, pretty much every time I ask ChatGPT to do something, I start with some basic pleasantry, hey, ChatGPT, or hi, ChatGPT, or even the occasional, what's up, ChatGPT?

Speaker 21 You know, it doesn't hurt to be polite. Turns out, I am in the minority.

Speaker 16 2% of all conversations are greetings in chitchat, so not a super high share.

Speaker 21 David Deming is an economist at Harvard and a co-author of the research published by OpenAI. He says anthropomorphized ChatGPT companionships are also pretty rare.

Speaker 21 The biggest use case, what Deming calls practical guidance. Basically, personally tailored advice and instruction.

Speaker 16 You know, give me a workout routine so that I can get stronger, or help me figure out what I should plant in my garden, or make a grocery list for me.

Speaker 21 Early on, when ChatGPT came out, personal and work-related uses were split 50-50. Now, 70% of chat GPT conversations involve our private lives.
Our trust in AI also seems to be increasing.

Speaker 21 Almost 40% of the interactions with the Anthropic chatbot Claude empower the AI to fully automate a task, as opposed to interactively collaborating with the robot.

Speaker 21 Peter McCrory is an economist with Anthropic.

Speaker 9 It might be that people are becoming more comfortable using this type of technology and trusting Claude more, or it might reflect the fact that Claude is now more capable of doing a wider and wider range of tasks entirely independently.

Speaker 21 Coding is probably the best example here. Programmers can just tell Claude, hey, code this, and don't have to debug anything afterwards.

Speaker 21 Stanford Communications professor Jeff Hancock says part of the reason AI may not be advancing in the workplace as much as hoped, fear.

Speaker 8 So if you're an employee, especially a younger one, and you find that like this system can do a decent part of your job, you may be really scared to show that.

Speaker 22 Because you worry about being replaced.

Speaker 21 I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace.

Speaker 23 Coming up, we do houseplant sitting, we we do repotting, we do houseplant hospitals, we're plant doctors.

Speaker 4 Making green using your green thumb. But first, let's do the numbers.

Speaker 4 The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 49 points, a tenth of a percent, to finish at 45,883. The NASDAQ added 207 points, a little over 9 tenths percent, to close at 22,348.

Speaker 4 The S ⁇ P 500 found 30 points, about a half a percent, to end at 6,615. Some of that bump came as U.S.

Speaker 4 negotiators wrapped up trade talks with China in Madrid, where Treasury Secretary Scott Besant also said they agreed to a framework on a TikTok deal.

Speaker 4 Back here in the U.S., we learned today that Elon Musk purchased an additional billion dollars worth of Tesla stock.

Speaker 4 That's less than a tenth of a percent of it, but Tesla accelerated 3 and 6 tenths percent. Bonds rose, the yield on the 10-year T-note fell to 4.03%, and you are listening to Marketplace.

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Speaker 4 This is Marketplace. I'm Kimberly Adams.
Matt was just telling us about all the ways people are using AI these days and how it's changing how we live and work.

Speaker 4 Big companies like Salesforce and IBM have been pretty open about AI causing job losses in their businesses.

Speaker 4 And with the unemployment rate ticking up, a lot of folks are reasonably concerned that their jobs could be next.

Speaker 4 Jeff Dixon is a sociology professor at College of Holy Cross, and he wrote a piece for the conversation about why those AI job losses may look different here than elsewhere in the world.

Speaker 3 Jeff, welcome to the program.

Speaker 20 Thanks a lot, Kimberly. I really appreciate you having me.

Speaker 4 Let's start by getting on the same page about the term American exceptionalism, which is often used in politics to talk about America being different from other countries.

Speaker 4 When it comes to the labor force and jobs in particular, what makes America different from other similar countries?

Speaker 20 Well, Kimberly, one of the things that makes the U.S. different is its at-will employment system.

Speaker 20 The United States's labor protections just really aren't as strong as those, especially in Europe and among some of these wealthier countries.

Speaker 20 And it gives employers a great deal of power over workers.

Speaker 4 Now, in this piece, you say that, quote, even before AI came into the picture, American workers were facing a system stacked against them. How so?

Speaker 20 Well, it's really due to some of those relative lack of labor protections that I was just mentioning. And then also

Speaker 20 it's due to the fact that the U.S.

Speaker 20 has a really relatively modest welfare state compared to certainly compared to some of the Nordic countries in Europe like Sweden, where, for example, workers workers and just citizens more generally have greater protections in the case of job loss, in the case of other kind of unforeseen circumstances.

Speaker 20 Here in the United States,

Speaker 20 there's not much of a safety net, a social safety net. And it's one that's also been clawed back over the years and most recently with what President Trump has called the big, beautiful bill.

Speaker 4 So why do you think AI might make this situation worse?

Speaker 20 Really, because, Kimberly,

Speaker 20 AI has this revolutionary potential, which I think a lot of people are now coming to understand.

Speaker 20 And part of its revolutionary potential is to take on a number of the tasks that a lot of us do.

Speaker 20 That has particular implications for a number of workers whose job it is to, for example, synthesize or somehow create new knowledge. And this is also why

Speaker 20 some

Speaker 20 scholars and pundits argue that this is a different kind of transformation. And it's one that especially targets the white-collar workforce right now.

Speaker 20 Add onto that what is called agentic AI,

Speaker 20 which not only has that ability to generate seemingly new knowledge, but to plan and act autonomously.

Speaker 20 And you can imagine how a number of positions might soon fall by the wayside if they haven't already.

Speaker 4 I want to wrap up because you have laid out this really clear argument of what makes America different from other similar positioned countries in terms of wealth and infrastructure or whatever, in terms of our labor market, right?

Speaker 4 So America has a different social safety net, different labor rights, lower unionization rates. So spin that forward.

Speaker 4 If we don't change anything, if we don't end up looking like Europe, how does AI play out in our job market?

Speaker 20 This is where I guess I'm most pessimistic. Because I see some of the most recent policy changes in the direction of policy.

Speaker 20 I believe that very much we have an AI-friendly environment here in the United States.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 given a qualitative break in AI and labor policies, this is just going to set the stage for rising insecurity in the United States.

Speaker 20 And what I mean by that is, like, at the very least, people feeling fearful of their jobs.

Speaker 20 That, in combination with AI and its rapid advances, I do believe spells quite a bit of trouble for workers here in the United States.

Speaker 20 But what can be done?

Speaker 20 I

Speaker 20 am

Speaker 20 really

Speaker 20 at a bit of a loss.

Speaker 4 Well, on that pessimistic outlook, I'm going to leave it there. Jeff Dixon is a sociology professor at the College of Holy Cross, writing about AI and the labor market.
Thanks so much, Jeff.

Speaker 20 Thank you, Kimberly.

Speaker 4 Of the economic releases we'll get this week, one will be the August retail sales out tomorrow.

Speaker 4 And so, ahead of that, we were able to get Johanna Dominguez on the phone. She sells plants at her shop, put a plant on it in Buffalo, New York.

Speaker 23 Right now, this is kind of our slow season, but it gives us a chance to run inventory, do projects that we've been meaning to do.

Speaker 23 Like I have a wall I need to repair that I've been needing to repair for months, and it's just a nice time to slow down and do all the projects that need to be done.

Speaker 23 Our inventory right now, so we get plants from Canada and we get plants from Florida.

Speaker 23 We have four different growers that we work with in Canada, and only one of them have passed the tariff cost onto us so far, and that person is splitting it.

Speaker 23 So, instead of putting the 25% tariffs on us, they're eating 12.5 and then they're raising 12.5,

Speaker 23 which, you know, it's better than 25.

Speaker 23 We only raise things a little bit, not too much to cover those costs. So no one's ever really said anything or complained about something like that.
And that is mostly on our basic plants.

Speaker 23 So a $5 plant, we

Speaker 23 raise it a dollar, six to seven dollars.

Speaker 23 We are sustaining, but not growing. And

Speaker 23 so I would say, yes, maybe the biggest challenge is growing. I would like to see like a 20 to 30 percent increase in sales in general.

Speaker 23 And I know a lot of people can't necessarily afford to buy more, which is kind of why we're trying to push more of our services instead.

Speaker 23 We do house plant sitting, we do repotting, we do houseplant hospitals, we're plant doctors.

Speaker 23 And so that's kind of where I'm at right now is trying to push more of our services and something that you can't get anywhere else but us,

Speaker 23 and try and get the growth there.

Speaker 23 I would say I feel still kind of a little bit more of a trepidation about the future.

Speaker 23 I do feel like Buffalo is such a great community of people who support small businesses, and that's part of the reason why I ended up here as opposed to the many of the other places that I could have ended up.

Speaker 23 So I'm hoping maybe that it's it's going to be, you know,

Speaker 23 it's going to encourage people to shop more locally, kind of like it was during the pandemic.

Speaker 23 But that's kind of, I guess, where I'm kind of hoping things end up.

Speaker 4 Johanna Dominguez running put a plant on it in Buffalo, New York.

Speaker 4 This final note on the way out today: anime fans flex their economic muscle this weekend. The latest movie in the hit Demon Slayer franchise broke records at the box office, earning $70 million.

Speaker 4 The Crunchyroll Sony Pictures film Demon Slayer Infinity Castle was the number one movie this weekend and set a record for the biggest opening ever for an anime film.

Speaker 4 It was a surprise for many entertainment industry analysts, but among those of us who are actually anime fans, we're not surprised at all.

Speaker 4 Amir Babawi, Caitlin Esch, John Gordon, Noya Carr, Amanda Peacher, and Stephanie Seek are the marketplace editing staff. Kelly Silvera is the news director, and I'm Kimberly Adams.

Speaker 4 We'll see you tomorrow, everybody.

Speaker 4 This is APM.

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