Work Rules for the Modern World

Never heard of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938? It’s why there’s a minimum wage, overtime pay, and 12-year-olds can’t legally have a job. It’s also due for a 21st-century update. What would these “New Work Standards” include? Let’s start with the right to request remote work, part-time schedules, or non-traditional hours. This shift would be a game-changer for folks with disabilities, parents juggling young kids, or anyone going through tough personal times. This is also a way to grow the economy by keeping people attached to the workforce. Consider this part one of – if Kathryn has her way – a 63-part series on how to update the FLSA. Read More: Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/flsa1938[U. S. Dept of Labor history page] Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/10/Civil-Disobedience-by-Henry-David-Thoreau.pdf [PDF] The TurboTax Trap https://www.propublica.org/series/the-turbotax-trap [ProPublica] The 988 Lifeline https://988lifeline.org/ You can also find Optimist Economy on: TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@optimist_economy YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@optimist_economy Instagram https://www.instagram.com/optimist_economy/ Substack https://optimisteconomy.substack.com/notes Support us by becoming a paid Substack newsletter subscriber https://optimisteconomy.substack.com/ or at https://buymeacoffee.com/optimisteconomy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:28Speaker 01

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• 0:32Speaker 02

  Hello, and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine.

• 0:35Robin Rauzi?

  I'm Robin.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  On this show, we believe the US economy can be better. We talk about how to get there, one problem and solution, and heavy sigh at a time.

• 0:51Robin Rauzi?

  It's a heavy sigh kind of day.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  It's a heavy sigh kind of day, so let's start first with retcon, where we make quick reflections and adjustments from our last conversation. Our last conversation was about-

• 1:00Robin Rauzi?

  Taxes.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Taxes. My retcon is to say that the numbers that I cited were from the Congressional Budget Office. The Congressional Budget Office tells Congress how much things are going to cost. And they measure the cost of something. They call it a score. They put it in a 10-year window. And so those were the 10-year scores of the four pieces of legislation that total $7 trillion. So that's where the $7 trillion came from.

• 1:27Robin Rauzi?

  Great, great. I actually went back to find out how many tax filers are in the 0.1% that we were referring to. And our ballpark wasn't bad. In last quarter, there were 133,757 households. So when I multiplied that by 2.5 people roughly per household, that's the equivalent of Rockford, Illinois. So in the whole country, our top 0.1% could all live in Rockford, Illinois.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  And they have a ragtag all-girls baseball team.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  And they put in just an amazing performance by Gina Davis.

• 2:07Robin Rauzi?

  Exactly.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Okay, and I checked the, from the IRS Statistics of Income, that the amount of money the top 0.1% and the top 1% earn. So the top 0.1% of Americans take home 14% of all adjusted gross income. And the next 0.9%, right, so the rest of the top 1%, they take home 12% of income, which means the top 1% in the US takes home about a quarter of all income.

• 2:33Robin Rauzi?

  I haven't figured out where they could all live.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  You haven't figured, and we don't know where they all live.

• 2:36Robin Rauzi?

  Dallas.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  As far as retcon of like reflecting on optimism, you know, going back to the $7 trillion, sure, we haven't spent it well because it's gone to tax cuts that have, you know, reduced the tax bill most of people in the very top. But that should give you an extent of the potential that we have to buy all these really nice things like free school lunches and free childcare and fixed social security. Like, it's actually quite easy to purchase things if you're not giving away the company store.

• 3:06Robin Rauzi?

  You're not giving away all the money.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  We've got some evidence over the last year that the company store, we get some dollars in our pocket. Not now, we actually have an incredible amount of debt. But were we to make a few changes to the tax code, we could rake it in and afford a lot. And so what I tell people is that you should feel empowered that like we can do so much when we stop giving our money away.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  I think that's a good note.

• 3:29Robin Rauzi?

  I like how you threw a lot of math in there. Good fractions, that's good.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Fractions, decimals, percentage. Have you stopped listening? Don't turn that dial.

• 3:41Robin Rauzi?

  Are we ready for terms and conditions?

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Terms and conditions. Robin, did you look up anything else this week?

• 3:45Robin Rauzi?

  I did, because I was still thinking about taxes. I was thinking about like tax revolts when people have used taxes to register their displeasure with the government. What I was sort of thinking about initially was how hard it is to say not pay your taxes as a form of revolt when tax cuts are the policy you're trying to object to. But it did lead me to look up kind of some of the history of tax revolts. And I went back and I reread Henry David Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government. He wrote this in 1846. He refused to pay a poll tax and he was angry specifically about slavery, but also

• 4:30Robin Rauzi?

  the expansionist tendencies of James Polk, lesser discussed president, who annexed Texas and other things. But he was angry about the Mexican-American War and the idea of expanding slavery into these new territories. He spent one night in jail.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Dined out on it for a long time.

• 4:48Robin Rauzi?

  But, but, but there is a lot in that piece that, you know, has resonated with generations and indeed centuries of people who have had moral opposition to what's happening in their government.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Is that where, when the law is unjust, the only place for a just man is in prison? Does that come from that?

• 5:06Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. It does, yeah. Did you look anything up this week?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Did I look anything up?

• 5:10Robin Rauzi?

  Behind the seven trillion?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  I don't think anything of note. I mean, I looked up a lot of like, basically like I should have a subscription to People Magazine, kind of like trash tidbits. I'm always a fan of looking at like the celebrity divorces and who got what, you know, those are the types of things I've been looking up, not necessarily relevant for staying optimistic in today's economy.

• 5:34Robin Rauzi?

  Well, marry, marry rich, divorce well.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Marry rich, yeah, marry rich.

• 5:39Robin Rauzi?

  It's good strategy.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  All right. All right, pitch meeting. I'm pitching you. So we have rules that govern how workers are treated by their employer. It's called the Fair Labor Standards Act. It was enacted in 1938 and it has had a pitiful amount of updates in the nearly century since then. But if we were to update the Fair Labor Standards Act, we could do some pretty remarkable things for workers in the United States. And one in particular is that we could enshrine in law the right to request flexible work arrangements.

• 6:14Robin Rauzi?

  Explain to me what flexible work arrangements are, or could be.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Or could be. So we don't have them, so they could look like whatever we want. But for people for whom working from home or working asynchronous hours is possible, they basically have the right to request them.

• 6:30Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  So, you know, wouldn't work if you say work a shift job. If you're in person, say like a clerk or cashier, you wouldn't really be able to request like work from home or part-time work. I have a whole other set of policies related to shift work in the Fair Labor Standards Act. This is, this is like the high-end intervention in the Fair Labor Standards Act. There's a lot more we can do for people who work in shifts. But this would basically say like, okay, you work for an employer for a certain amount of time. You can request various arrangements to meet your schedule. So you can request to go part-time. You can request to work from home a certain number of days. And you can request to have part of your hours completed in the evening or morning.

• 7:11Robin Rauzi?

  Outside the nine to five.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Outside the nine to five. So it kind of builds in the expectation that if your employer is, we work nine to five in person, five days a week, this gives you the legal right to request basically exceptions to that.

• 7:24Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm. It would not obviously require your employer to say yes to that?

• 7:29Speaker 02

  No, it wouldn't require them to say yes. I think it depends on how the law is written. So you could put something with a lot of teeth of like, if someone is in good standing and they work in a computer, you have to meet their request. Versus like you have to take it into consideration. And if you say no, they get to report it.

• 7:44Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Of like, you don't have to say yes, but if you say no, the Department of Labor publishes the denial rates on flexible work arrangement requests at every company.

• 7:54Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  You're, you're kind of like leaving it to the market of, of what happens. There's, there's other things you can build into this too. So you could build into the right to flexible arrangements that there's a non-discrimination clause. So you can't discriminate in firing or promoting or pay raises. You can't discriminate between them. You could also say that you can't pay people less if they work remotely. All of this is kind of on the table for what the law can do.

• 8:17Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  I think there's a few questions I have. Flexible work arrangements is an awful catchphrase if you are for this.

• 8:24Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  I think, I think something like. Something tighter, something that's that conveys that this is about, it's about people who want to do work and life can make it very hard. So it's really about keeping workers attached to the workforce. The question is, what is the best version of this for workers in the United States?

• 8:45Robin Rauzi?

  Well, I mean, I think that there's a legit question about what could also be a good version for employers in the United States. Because, you know, what we have now is not particularly good for either.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, antagonism in mercurial policymaking.

• 8:59Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, I mean, was it Goldman Sachs where the CEO just?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Oh, Jamie Dimon was caught on, or someone leaked the audio of him saying like, "Don't give me that bullshit about working from home. I call on Fridays, they don't pick up." And it was like really derisive of people who were

• 9:15Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  working from home.

• 9:16Robin Rauzi?

  Yes, that's it. But I do think that there's also a real question about, like, I've lived in places that are more expensive and less expensive just in the last few months and made the same salary, you know? I don't know if that's fair to me, fair to my employer, to the economy in Spokane.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  There are three key constituent groups with this policy. There's the employers.

• 9:40Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  There's the workers who want to take advantage of it, and there are workers who don't want to take advantage of it. So I think the easiest, you know, sell.

• 9:49Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, is to the people who want to take advantage of it.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, the people who want to take advantage of it. And then there's just kind of, there's like the permanent fourth constituency, which is the economy overall. I'm still on flexible work arrangements. I don't know, I don't like flexible work arrangements because it implies that it's, I don't know, there's something about like rigidity and the deviation from the norm and that you're just making it okay to not be different, when I think

• 10:12Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  what I see these laws doing is essentially changing what is normal.

• 10:17Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  And what is a typical culture around work in the United States. And so I almost see it as like work standards.

• 10:25Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, it's like a reset of work standards.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Okay, new work standards. I mean, I would say one of the biggest reasons economically for wanting new work standards is that workers who could take advantage of it would be people who are on the cusp of dropping out of the labor markets.

• 10:41Robin Rauzi?

  That's interesting, because I think so much of what's been written about flexible work arrangements is that it's people sort of at the, at the top of the worker pyramid, right? People who have skills that are in demand and who could compete for other jobs and that they sort of have the, I don't know, the power to demand that flexibility from their employer. I mean, I'm not saying that that's true, I'm saying that that's the conversation that I'm seeing in the news media.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Okay, it is, it's true, but not complete. So, workers who would take advantage of new work standards, survey data of workers and their preferences for work from home show that it is an amenity they value.

• 11:20Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  I mean, this is something that workers like and they enjoy, and people who have valued it the most have like a high correlation of people who are at the top of the skill distribution, people who have been working for a long time, and because this is a very highly productive set of workers that would be valuable to any firm, it's not wrong that the news media is like, alright, so where are these like best and brightest gonna go if they want to work from home and JP Morgan's CEO is laughing at them as they do it? That group of where does this highly productive set of workers, these best and brightest, end up, given how valuable, like, these workers can be to a firm, I mean, I think that's a fair question. You know, the group of workers that has been most positively affected by it, however, are people who have a disability.

• 12:05Robin Rauzi?

  The people who've been most positively affected by the ability to work from home.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Is people who have a disability.

• 12:10Robin Rauzi?

  Disability, got it. And how do we know that?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Their work rates are at all-time highs.

• 12:14Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, interesting.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  The labor force participation rate, which you can think of as the work rate, but it includes people who are also looking for a job, the labor force participation rate of people who have a disability, especially if it's a work-limiting disability, like, they can't do certain types of labor. They have a very hard time finding a job. They can have a hard time keeping a job, and they don't participate in the labor force to a great degree. Their all-time high in labor force participation has just passed because they benefited so much from the ability to work remotely.

• 12:43Robin Rauzi?

  Interesting.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  So, yes, if I think of this, workers who will take advantage of it, you end up with classes within these. So, yes, one class will be the people who are just really productive and really love it, and it's just a preference that they want to have met.

• 12:57Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Then you're kind of on the other, like, opposite end, or the people for whom, without which, they wouldn't be able to work at all. And in between, you'll find workers who are in some type of, say, like, long-term or short-term duress. So certainly, parents of young children.

• 13:12Robin Rauzi?

  I like that you call that duress.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  It is absolutely duress from the point of view of your employer. Working nine to five in person, like, y'all, my daycare, I have to be there by 5:20. That's when the doors close.

• 13:23Robin Rauzi?

  And then they just leave your child out on the curb.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  I can't teleport there. Like, if I didn't work from home, I'd have to find a new daycare. Finding a new daycare can be a six-month endeavor. And kids are sick all the time.

• 13:36Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  So being able to work remotely or work, now, this new work standards includes working fewer than full-time hours. So, say, I work 20 hours a week instead of 40, and I do that for the three years my kids are not school age, and then I go back to work full-time.

• 13:52Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  It's funny you bring up Jamie Dimon, because the new CEO of Citi is a woman, and she worked part-time when she had young kids. And she has said, "Citi is going to be a place where remote work and hybrid work stays an option, because I would not have had a career. If they had made me work full-time when I had young kids, I would have had to have quit. And I don't know if I would have ever come back."

• 14:11Robin Rauzi?

  So we know where everybody from, uh, is gonna go.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Not that I love these banks, but, um... When I saw that, I was like, finally. Although I didn't realize she's the first female CEO of a financial institution in the United States in the entirety of its history. But she's very much the typecast of who you would expect to be in these classes of people that benefit from new work standards. You know, yes, there's people who prefer it. Yes, there's people who can't work without it. And then you're going to have people who are like, I don't need to do this.

• 14:41Robin Rauzi?

  I just need to get through.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  I just need to get through this. Like, my parent is sick. My spouse is sick. I have really young children at home. You know, I'm moving. That type of thing, like, it's, it's a really good way, an effective way, to keep people from quitting work.

• 14:56Robin Rauzi?

  Right, right. And especially because I feel like sometimes we have these, these policies that are short term, right? They're like six weeks. They're designed around emergencies, but not, as you said so eloquently put it, periods of duress.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Periods of duress. For me, having young children, I should say, is not a duress of like my actual life, but it is absolutely a duress from the point of view of trying to be a worker. You know, my young children are another person's, you know, dying elderly parent. People have these things that come up in their lives, and too often in the labor market, the consequence is we'll just have to quit.

• 15:31Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  That is catastrophic for the labor market, to force people out who want to work because you have rules that don't let them. Rules that don't necessarily come from evidence or productivity. But from the curial whim of a CEO who says, whatever, I call people on Friday and they don't pick up, so no one's allowed to work from home anymore.

• 15:47Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, he didn't call me.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  He didn't call, he didn't call me. So these, that's the first beneficiary group, and I think part of making these policies something that people are, in general, supportive of is, I think, one, one part is kind of making sure that, like, look, it's not just these, like, people who like working from home because it's, fits their lifestyle preferences, and then they get to, like, leave and go work out every day. Although that should be nice, too. I mean, new work standards are about Who gets to access the labor market? I mean, for me, this is somewhat of a conservative argument that in the history of the world, the most incredible engine of income and wealth is the US labor market, and it has doors around it. And they will slam in your face and kick you out, and you don't get to participate anymore.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  I mean, I, this to me is about giving, like, making sure those doors are open, that people get to access the labor market, because it can create incredible income, but not if you don't get to have a job.

• 16:42Robin Rauzi?

  Right, right. That's the way that you need to frame this, because the people who need to be convinced are, again, not, not me, who works part-time and loves working part-time, but the people who are the gatekeepers, who have deliberately set up various gates and traps and mazes for workers to go through in this economy through their laws and public policy.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's coworkers and employers that-

• 17:04Robin Rauzi?

  That you have to convince.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  That you have to convince. And I, the coworkers, I don't know. So, part of me thinks that there's, this is a little bit of a like, there but for the grace of God go I. Right, like, I know you think you work full-time and you'd never take advantage of it, but like, are you sure that for the rest of your life, you will never need a year that you keep your job and work part-time because something happens? Like, it seems, it seems like a little bit, a little bit of hubris-

• 17:31Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  To say like, "I'll never need it." But maybe someone would, wouldn't ever need it. I, I do wonder what the argument is for them to say like, "Here is why you want one of your coworkers to be able to go home half-day."

• 17:45Robin Rauzi?

  I mean, obviously, those are really narrow circumstances, probably. I mean, meaning, you know, you don't want to lose institutional memory. You don't want to lose the particular expertise that that person brings to your team. You know, I, it's hard on a grand scheme to make sweeping generalizations about why people would want, want their coworkers around more or less, or have, to have more flexible arrangements. But I do think that yourself, you know, it's self-preservatory, because at some point, something happens to everyone.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Well, and I also go back to like, if you work full time in the office and you work with someone who doesn't, and you have a fractious relationship with them, I mean, there's one person who's clearly at fault, and it's whoever is your collective manager. I mean, it's so easy to blame a colleague when the manager does a very bad job.

• 18:31Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  It's part of this like knee jerk reaction to take the problem down instead of up. You need to take that problem up. Wouldn't you know, many people who are managers in the US are no good at it.

• 18:41Robin Rauzi?

  Well, yeah. And I think, you know, we're seeing the real strains of that around hybrid work in general, right? That managing a hybrid workforce are a different set of skills than people needed before. And it turns out, we haven't really been training a lot of people for it. We're selecting for it.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Management is so important to how a company runs, and I don't think it's worth, I don't know if I'm going to use this phrase correctly, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Where on earth does that come from?

• 19:11Robin Rauzi?

  Redcon.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Redcon. We'll find out next time. It's, it's kind of like, I can see the argument so clearly, and it probably doesn't sound ridiculous to someone saying it, to say, "Well, it's really hard to manage people who don't have the same schedule, so we're actually going to throw away all the benefits from it and just not do it because it's hard on me." Like, it's hard on me-

• 19:33Robin Rauzi?

  And I'm already not good at my job.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  I'm already not good at my job, and this makes it harder, so we're just gonna, "Mwah, bum bum, bye."

• 19:41Speaker 02

  The coworker argument is, you know, one, you don't know that you'd never take advantage of it, and two, like, don't blame your colleague that you're poorly managed.

• 19:50Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  And think for a second that like, this could open up work in so many ways for creativity, and your employer's knee jerk response is, "You're not allowed to do it." Like, do you really think that's a problem with the person who wants to work 30 hours a week instead of 40, or do you think it's the problem with the manager? You know, you should demand better management for your employer. This is on them. They want to manage like it's 1955. I didn't want to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it's not just like, married men, and that's it, and no black people, and no women, and that's your workforce, and they all can be at work until 10:00 PM at night, and that's it. And I'm sure that that, honestly, that's, what an incredibly easy group of people to manage, like, no sexual harassment.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Everybody drinks.

• 20:34Robin Rauzi?

  Did you see Mad Men? Come on.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, no reported sexual harassment.

• 20:38Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, there you go. There you go.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Wouldn't it be easy to be a manager of Mad Men? No rules.

• 20:44Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Nothing.

• 20:45Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  But it's 2025. We have very diverse workplaces, whether or not we kill DEI or not. And, you know, it's more challenging to manage people who look different, people who have different backgrounds, people who have different needs in order to perform their work. Yes, it's more challenging, but that should be about you becoming better and not about you stuffing progress in a box and going the other way.

• 21:08Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. And I hate to say this, but I think sometimes, you know, people are in full-time jobs and they maybe aren't operating at full-time capacity because they can't. And wouldn't it be better for the company if they were actually working 32 hours a week or 20 hours a week? I, as you know, work half-time and that allowed me, for instance, not to take time off work to take my ailing in-laws to the doctor. I could do that on my time, not as sick time, that my company would have been paying for. The part of your Venn diagram that we haven't touched on is the economy overall. And you were talking about how the labor force, the American labor force is, you know, an income and wealth generating force in general.

• 21:53Robin Rauzi?

  And I don't think that I understand how important growing the labor force is for the overall economy. Can you?

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:02Robin Rauzi?

  Can you make that argument?

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Okay, so.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Okay, so the size of the US economy is very well predicted by the number of people working in it. So our labor force participation rate is basically the bellwether of economic growth. Part of that is because if you were to divide the economy into pieces, the largest piece of the US economy is household spending. So it's somewhat translated from both what workers produce for the economy and then what they use their income to go out and buy. So having workers is the most important part of an economy.

• 22:37Robin Rauzi?

  Full stop.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Full stop. If your labor force participation rate falls, that means that your potential GDP is lower than it would be. So for every million people who drop out of the labor market, you go from having a million workers to a million non-workers. That shortens your GDP potential. So every so often, there'll be like an institute or a think tank that will do some report about like how much larger the US economy would be if women were working. This is all they're basically using is they're throwing like the number of women who could be working into per-worker GDP and showing that the economy would be 5% bigger.

• 23:13Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  And historically, I mean, this goes backwards as well. The women entering the labor force, they doubled their labor force participation from 1950 to 2000. That absolutely grew the economy. The US economy is larger because those women joined and they brought home income for their families and they raised the income of their families. And all of that is like very well documented. Women entering the labor force en masse was a massive windfall for the US economy and kept us growing even through bad periods. So recessions of the 70s and 80s, if you look at the share of like job loss by men and women.

• 23:50Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  There's like three or four recessions where female employment doesn't go down because so many women are joining the labor force that even as the economy is shedding jobs, they're still picking up jobs and they're growing the economy.

• 24:03Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Incredible tailwind to have people join the economy. We have large groups still that sit out from the economy. Workers with a disability and women with young children at home are probably two of the largest.

• 24:16Robin Rauzi?

  The biggest, yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Two of the biggest. There is another very large group that has its own set of labor force issues, which is workers who have a felony history.

• 24:24Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  And they have a very special type of discrimination and problem when it comes to the labor market that even new work standards could have a hard time.

• 24:32Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Solving.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  But what's interesting about this is that when employers are against things like this, for me, it evinces an incredible amount of lack of creativity. In England, you have a year of maternity leave.

• 24:48Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  And so they have, very common in their labor market, to have mat leave positions, where they will hire someone for a year, knowing that it's just a one-year position while someone is on maternity leave. And it's not necessarily a one-for-one replacement, it's someone to help out. And these mat leave positions can be really useful for people who are trying to like, switch careers, trying to switch industries, you know, are willing to try something else. You know, it's kind of like a constant opening up of positions

• 25:16Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  that are unrelated to flows in the economy. So it can lead to a lot of creativity on the employer's side, but they might not get there on their own.

• 25:25Robin Rauzi?

  Right. You mean, employers might not get there on their own?

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, they might, like, they would like, fight it tooth and nail and be like, oh, no, we could never do this, and then it became law, they're like, we've got so many great ideas. Like, we fought this hard, but we are ready. I can kind of shape up all these arguments of like, this is why it's good for you. The very, very difficult burden with the new work standards is who gets benefits.

• 25:51Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. I wasn't gonna bring it up.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  You weren't gonna bring it up?

• 25:54Robin Rauzi?

  But I was thinking the same thing, that, that we've entangled benefits to, to full-time work specifically. But I do feel like, have states experimented with some of that in terms of, but that still doesn't deal with things like flexible, remote requirements, and you work for a company in Wisconsin, and everybody's insured through a company that's in Wisconsin, and you want to live in Ohio.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, sometimes when I think of policies that characterize, like, me, optimist economy, of like, this is all this good stuff that we can do, some of them are very much like, you could just drop it into the labor market now, and it would be no problem. Like, paid sick days, just drop them in.

• 26:33Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  We'll be fine.

• 26:34Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  This is one that I think its success would hinge on. How well the benefits question is answered and it's the best version of this policy is one in which, at the very least, health is de-linked from employment.

• 26:51Robin Rauzi?

  Right, and that's a much bigger.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  And it's a much, which is a much bigger problem. And so maybe this is in some way, like, if you build a constituency around new work standards, you could say like, and oh, by the way, maybe we should de-link health and work. Because you could come up with some kind of rule, but whatever rule you come up with, like, they will do N plus one to get around it. Like, if it's 20 hours of work to be part-time, then everyone will work 19. And that's the only option you have. Or if it's 30 hours to be eligible for health benefits, congratulations, you worked 29 hours a week. Like, whatever it is, they'll skirt by it, because they don't want to pay it, especially if you're not working full-time. And I, and I do understand, health insurance is so expensive for them. There's always this question about building policy for the future of how constrained do you need to be

• 27:37Speaker 02

  by the terrible policy of the present?

• 27:40Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. The retirement one is very easy to solve. So, right now, your employer gives you retirement benefits. I would say odds are in 10 years, they're not going to come from your employer anymore. Employers are already pulling back on 401Ks, and that's basically all they offer. So, having a, like, you get to opt into a savings account that is universal, that's actually quite easy, and I think that would be no problem. Health insurance is the hardest one. And I think you would essentially write the new work standards in two ways of like, here's new work standards, given that we have made this horrible decision to link health insurance to work. And then here's the new work standards from whenever we emotionally and logistically moved beyond that, and here's how they would work. And you'd have to, it would just, all of the benefits of part-time work, of working

• 28:23Speaker 02

  from home, of hybrid work, of being able to, like, work after 10pm when your kids are in bed, or like, after you get back from a doctor's appointment, all of those benefits would still be there. This is more just like, the knife under the ribs. It wouldn't change all the really good dividends you would get from everything else. It wouldn't change the dividends you have for the employer, or the colleague, or the other, or the person who benefits it from having these people. And it would really only affect people who wanted new work standards to work less than full-time, not people who wanted flexible arrangements or asynchronous work. So, it's a subset of them, but I think that that subset is incredibly important.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  And that subset, I think, is the hardest to manage with the health insurance.

• 29:02Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, you know, you can't solve everything in one go. You know, but I do think you're gonna have to acknowledge it because everybody, anybody who's worked part-time knows exactly what you come up against in terms of benefits.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  The other part-time work issue is the people and the employers who still treat you as if you're full-time.

• 29:19Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  So you just end up making part-time pay for working at a full-time job that makes you more stressed.

• 29:23Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  The, again, none of those are insurmountable. So this essay, the, a case for new work standards. I mean, what is

• 29:32Robin Rauzi?

  I like that you've really latched on to that new name.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  I just, I hate flexible work arrangements.

• 29:37Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, no, it's fine.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Flaws, if you will.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Flaws ain't my jam because I, because it just makes the person who takes them seem less than. I'm like, well, I don't need flexibility, but she does. Like, I don't like it.

• 29:51Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  We're not doing this. Like, that's, we're not creating a hierarchy of best worker. Where the best worker is the one that doesn't have to take advantage of flexibility.

• 30:00Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  The best worker is the one that can show up and do the job. And if you are in this economy and you're out there trying to work, we shouldn't have our labor laws decide that you get to sound worse than other people. So, listeners, you tens and tens of optimists who join us, if you come up with something better than new work standards, I would absolutely last on to it. But I think the essay from this is, here is this thing. I can take any constituency and explain to you why they would benefit from it. You know, what is the like, I mean, maybe it's, what is the hook versus what is the long sell? How do you make people care about this? Especially if they don't maybe think if they would want to take advantage of it.

• 30:38Robin Rauzi?

  I mean, the overall growth of the economy and the strength of the American economy is the long game, right? I feel like people had this little tiny window into this during the pandemic where the recovery from the shock Was slowed by the fact that there weren't enough workers. And now, at the current moment, I don't know that most people on the street feel like there aren't enough workers. So you have to make them understand that growing the number of available workers is still a good thing to do. It's still an important thing to do. It's not going to make it just harder for you to get a job.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  So, so that's the pitch. Like, you know, there are two paths going forward. One in which we try to include workers into the labor market and one in which we don't. And we've turned from one path to another.

• 31:25Robin Rauzi?

  You and I have talked about this before, the number of workers that, you know, the, the kind of going off of a cliff of, of the number of workers from the baby boom generation. And our population isn't growing and apparently we're, we're not feeling particularly welcoming towards immigrants at the moment as a nation. So, we are going to need these workers.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  We are going to need workers. So I, so, so that's the pitch of like, we have two paths of who gets to benefit from our labor market? And what does that mean for the economy? The more people benefit, the bigger the economy is. And this is the path we want to be on. The path where the economy gets to generate more income for more families. Maybe this gets back to optimism. Of like, you have the choice between two economies. One in which more people work and have income for their family.

• 32:16Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  In which we don't punish people for getting sick or having things happen in their life that makes them less than a full-time worker for a period of time. There's an economy that includes them and capitalizes on them, and then there's one that shoves them out. Like, one of them is clearly better than the other.

• 32:33Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  And if the only difference is your manager doesn't know how to work with hybrid people, like, y'all, that is an excuse, but not a reason. I need a reason to exclude people from the labor market, not an excuse about why it makes your job harder.

• 32:46Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Okay, I'll do excuse versus reason, and then I'll do the path of growth. Of, why would you ever turn away from a larger economy?

• 32:56Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  I think this is optimistic, too. Y'all, we can have a bigger, better economy.

• 33:00Robin Rauzi?

  More people can have jobs.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  More people can have jobs. This is all good. Okay.

• 33:04Robin Rauzi?

  We rule the world. Okay.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Pallet cleanser, executive orders.

• 33:08Robin Rauzi?

  So I'm still on the tax thing.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  You're so, you're so, you're defund taxes.

• 33:13Robin Rauzi?

  So TurboTax, you should not have to pay a third-party company so that you can pay the government, either what you owe or to get what you have overpaid back. And I don't know if people have read it, but ProPublica has done this just ongoing series for years about TurboTax. And there's also a pretty great episode that sums up a lot of that work from Reply All. I've got links to both of those that we will put online. But the government should provide free tax software at a very minimum.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. And if they mess up, it's on them. Uh-uh. Yeah, yeah. I couldn't agree with this more. TurboTax, and they also are very good at lobbying against the development of a free software, because their whole livelihood is built on you having to pay someone to do your taxes. It shows you just how complicated and in desperate need of reform our income tax system is, that even for someone who just has a job, one source of income didn't change for the entire year, they still need to pay someone to do their taxes because the tax code is so complicated. That's because of the tax code. That's not because of the person. You shouldn't have to be smart to file your taxes or be tax code sophisticated. I'm with you on this one.

• 34:31Robin Rauzi?

  You're with them. You're with me on all of them.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  I'm with you on all of them.

• 34:34Robin Rauzi?

  Are you gonna veto?

• 34:35Speaker 02

  I could.

• 34:35Robin Rauzi?

  Are you gonna veto?

• 34:36Speaker 02

  That won't happen here, not in the Edwards Republic. Okay, so my executive order is a bit of a downer, which I apologize for in advance, but I need to give the origin story for my executive order. I was watching Shrinking, the season finale of season two. If you don't watch, you don't need to know the story. The very end of season two ends with someone who is about to kill themselves. It's averted. The episode ends, the season ends, and a title card comes up that says,

• 35:08Speaker 02

  If you need help, go to apple.com/here to help. If you or someone you know is in trouble, go to apple.com/here to help. And I mean,

• 35:19Robin Rauzi?

  Not dial 988.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Yes, thank you, thank you. I mean, I, I must have jumped a foot in the air and screamed at the TV, "Fuck you, Apple." I was so mad. Here's the thing, 988 is so incredibly good at what it does, and it is effective. And they were right to put up a title card because suicide is a copycat crime. And the Public Health Service has been, you know, moving mountains to change the way that suicide is talked about and reported on in journalistic outlets, in news media, to always have the suicide hotline printed, to never give details of what happens in a suicide. So my executive order is if your work of fiction depicts suicide or talks about suicide, you have to put 988 up on the screen.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  I don't care if it messes with the aesthetic. Like, it is, it is such a beneficial public service. Everybody is in crisis at some point. Not everybody has someone next to them. And not everyone is going to remember to go to apple.com/here to help. Oh, I was so mad. So that's my executive order.

• 36:22Robin Rauzi?

  I'm for it.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't think you'd be against it. But 988 is a good service. It doesn't need to be duplicated. You need to direct people to the health service that helps them.

• 36:33Robin Rauzi?

  I, I mean, the, the truth is that I actually find the creation of 988, which is pretty recent, I actually find that a kind of a miraculous turn of events from, you know, calling basically the police. I think that 988 is a, is a constant reminder to me that we can, in fact, change things and do it better.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Before we end our show, we would, of course, like to thank our sponsors who are not financial but spiritual and get us through this life as well as this podcast. The sponsor I'd like to thank for this week is Angelica Huston's portrayal of Carrie Cat in the early 2000s movie, Iron John Angels. It's a good movie, it has flaws, but her performance is incredible. And she definitely starts as the, you know, kind of the antagonist of the women's suffrage movement because she's a conservative member within it. And then she really does kind of help carry the day. And it's Angelica Huston in early 1900s outfits. She looks so cool. Then we get to vote. Oh, it's great.

• 37:33Robin Rauzi?

  I gotta put that on my watch list. Okay, my spiritual sponsor in the last week has been Kerry Russell in The Diplomat. Great suits and just that frazzled but competent and focused ability that she has. It's just been, you know, thank you for that.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  As we turn a corner on Optimist Economy, where we go from recording shows to actually publishing them.

• 38:03Robin Rauzi?

  Letting people listen to them.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Letting people listen to them who aren't just my mom, who was appreciative. She likes them.

• 38:09Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, good.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  As people who aren't my mom get to listen to this show, this is when we need to extend the biggest thanks to our producer, Sophie, who is an absolute miracle worker, who gives us confidence, who helps us stay poised, who makes sure the show comes together. And if we publish this and people like it, she's who we have to thank first.

• 38:32Robin Rauzi?

  Absolutely.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  So, snapping out Sophie.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  This is Optimist Economy. You can find us on all the platforms at Optimist Economy. You can email us your questions, which we would love to hear, at [email protected]. You can find me, Keds Economist, on all the platforms, and you can find Robin Rousey nowhere.

• 38:53Robin Rauzi?

  Nowhere.