Modern Work: Monitored, Misled, and Laid Off

Do you know what it reminds me of? Fucking Febreze. What? You know what I'm s- y- 'Cause it's like instead of just keeping your house clean, you know- Oh, I hear you.

Yeah, it's like the spray is not gonna cover that up. Hello, and welcome to Your Work Friends, where we break down the now and next of work so you stay ahead. I'm Mel Klett. And I am Francesca Raneri And we're here with new week, new headlines.

Yes, we are. There's a lot to talk about. Holy shit. I have, like, eight topics, but I'm only gonna do one.

There's not enough time to cover everything that is happening- No in this fire escape of a world. All right. So what are you talking about today? So today I wanna talk about the hidden story in the labor market, which is long-term unemployment.

Ooh, okay. Yeah. We have some synchronicity happening. That's it.

I'm gonna talk about two things. Okay. The rise of emotional surveillance in the workplace. Fun times.

And is California a preview of what AI does to every state's job market? Oh, fascinating. Yeah. Fascinating.

Yeah. All right. Well, let's jump in. All right, so Right now the labor market just really doesn't make sense, and a lot of that has to do with long-term unemployment.

Last week, the jobs report came out and said that the US economy added 172,000 jobs, and unemployment held at 4.3%. Wages are still growing. And by almost every measure, that's a really healthy job market.

And yet if you talk to anyone, if you spend, like, five minutes on LinkedIn, you'll find basically recruiters, marketers, project managers, people in tech, software engineers, all basically having the same discussion, which is they haven't found jobs yet. They're open to work. They're getting laid off, I see this story, multiple times a day. I've put in hundreds of applications.

I've interviewed for months of interviews. I've been six months unemployed, nine months unemployed, a year unemployed. So, what's happening? And what's happening is long-term unemployment.

Yeah. Have you seen these? Yeah, when you and I were talking a while back, when they... when your LinkedIn pops up and it's people you may know.

Yeah. And I see so many open to work signs now that it reminded me of driving through neighborhoods in 2008 with for sale signs up with housing. Yeah. It's like that.

It's, yeah. And that's alarming, and it's... And people I'm talking to are em- underemployed if they were laid off. Mm-hmm.

So just doing anything they can, not doing the same job, or they got hired back at significantly lower rates, or they're doing anything just to make ends meet, like DoorDash. Yeah. So it's, it's wild out there. It's wild.

Let me give you some numbers just to validate exactly what you just said. Basically, 1.8 million Americans are unemployed for longer than six months, okay? That's up about 55% from 2023 and 45% from 2019.

So when you hear people be like, "Oh, we're going back to the 2019 job market"- We're not, because long-term unemployment is 45% more than it was back in 2019. That's number one. Yeah. The other stat that just dropped from the the Wall Street Journal was looking at credit card debt.

We are $7 billion more in credit card debt across all classes of folk than in this year than we were this time last year. Yeah. $7 billion more. And both of those stats really say to me, we've got a long-term unemployment issue here.

Long-term unemployment, and then the, just the cost of living has exponentially increased. Mm-hmm. Like cost of gas, cost of groceries, utilities even, being impacted with data centers being built. I'm hearing stories around water increase in pricing, electricity prices going up.

Like, people even who are fully employed are struggling. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's rough.

It's a little gnarly out there, right? Yeah. One thing to think about especially long-term unemployment, is duration really matters. I think most people think employment is binary.

You're either employed or you're unemployed. But economists care deeply about duration, because four weeks of unemployment, it's normal, right? We kind of rebound. A 40-week unemployment is literally life changing, and not in a good way, because to your very good point, you have a savings drain, your confidence drops.

I know a lot of people that, they just lose their mojo. Yeah. Your mental health goes in the tank. You get skills atrophy, and your networks weaken as well, because a lot of us, when we get laid off, we go out there and ignite our network that we haven't ignited in a really long time, and then all of a sudden you've kind of depleted all of your network, right?

Yeah. Employers begin viewing gaps really differently too, and your future earnings really never fully recover either. So the danger isn't just losing your job, it's getting stuck outside the labor market. That's what happening to a lot of people right now.

There's another dynamic happening where I'm seeing a lot of people be like, "But there's jobs out there. We created 172,000 jobs," but that's actually not the real story. Yeah. And what jobs have been created?

Do they match with those who are experiencing unemployment in terms of skills- Yeah industry, all of that? I mean, it, it's not a one-to-one. It's absolutely not a one-to-one. One of the things that I wanna talk about soon, and we're gonna start hearing a lot about, is skills mis- mismatch, right?

Mm-hmm. In the sense of people get laid off, they go back, they look for the same job that they had. That job either doesn't exist and/or they're not hiring for it. The other stat I wanna lay out there is 95% of the job creation last year- Yeah healthcare.

So it's growing in healthcare. It's growing in, like, very niche sectors. It is absolutely slower in corporate, in knowledge work, in professional services, in some tech roles. So there's growth, but if you don't match into that, you're kind of SOL.

So there's this huge-ass mismatch. I wanna leave folks with is a couple things. We're sitting at a 4.3% unemployment rate, right?

That has historically been healthy. If this reaches 5%, that is a, softening. And that's also gonna massively impact long-term unemployment rate. At 6%, this is no bueno.

Let me give you two facts that keep me up at night. Okay. The majority of the job creation is happening in healthcare and social services, okay? The fastest growing, the fastest growing job category is in training AI how to do your job.

Mm-hmm. Okay? Those two things are literally propping up the fricking job market right now. So if any of those things soften, i.

e., like a big beautiful bill comes in and all of a sudden healthcare jobs go away because there's no funding for it, we're hitting a really big issue, right? Yeah. If you hit 6%, the risk isn't just more unemployment, it's more long-term unemployment, and three months for most people is somewhat manageable.

A whole year of unemployment makes it very, very hard to re-enter, and this is where the skills mismatch becomes a permanent scar. And so it's something I'm watching. I also wanna just say the unemployment and long-term unemployment can wreak havoc on your mental health, and more and more people are gonna be in this category. And so, A, you're not alone, but B, this is just a question I think about a lot is I think the next workforce crisis we're gonna get into isn't necessarily unemployment.

It's a mismatch where people can't re-enter. 100%, 'cause I think there are populations that this happened to previously. Women leaving the workforce, having families, having to try to re-enter, but it felt really kind of isolated, and you definitely saw people impacted by layoffs, but now it's everybody. It's, it's a large portion- Hmm of our population now.

Yeah. Community is so important right now for people who are impacted, finding that support but yeah, I think we're gonna see a huge crisis in self-worth, happening. I already see it happening just anecdotally through conversations and people I know who've been out of work some one, two years. Yeah.

And outside of just being unemployed, they have other worries, like day-to-day stuff. The, the, and you and I talked about this in our layoff stuff, but like, yeah, it's just compounding issues piling up. Yeah. It's This is reconfiguring, right?

And It can look like it's a healthy job market, but it's not, and it feels incredibly painful to folks that are living through it. Yeah. Which also, it brings me to the California story. Let's hear it.

In Human Resource Director magazine online, the article that came out was Is California a Preview of What AI Does to Every State's Job Market? 'Cause we've seen every headline, we're letting go because of AI," which I'd like to dig into and be like, "Prove it." Yeah. Prove it.

Because the latest AI usage report came out today and said, in terms of efficiency, sure, but in terms of growth and transformation, and we've seen the numbers on ROI, recently, there are none. So explain that to me. But in this article, five things that came out of this. California's unemployment has been above 5%, above, so close to your 6% no bueno.

Yeah, that's not good, friends. Yeah, not good. No, that's not good. And California is our largest state.

Has been above 5% for more than 19 consecutive months, sitting at 5.3% against a national rate of 4.3%. There are now 1.

9 unemployed workers per job opening in the state compared to 1.1 nationally. Nearly half of the US tech layoffs in early 2026 are now being explicitly attributed to AI and automation. Meta's framing of its most recent cuts is the tell here, right?

Mm-hmm. Headcount being traded for computers. That's a structural decision. That wasn't a cyclical decision.

There's generational damage that is being underreported here as part of the story that they're calling out. Employment for software developers aged 22 to 25 fell 20% from 2024 levels. Even as headcount for old, older developers is growing, that younger group- No getting hit. They're just getting hit.

Getting hit. They have no point of entry. So AI is now hitting the point of entry for most people in their careers there in terms of And this is just one sector, right? Tech.

Yeah. It's in part of that ladder. California's governor, Gavin Newsom, signed an executive order to study AI driven workforce disruption. Love California for always being the strictest here.

But the immediate impact on employers is zero. There's no accountability there. You and I have talked about this and have pretty don't wanna speak for you, I have pretty strong feelings about businesses and their social responsibilities in the communities that they work in. What this does do, what this new executive order does do, is it creates a 180-day clock for potential Warn Act revisions that could require earlier layoff notices to be provided and broader disclosure about AI's role in those employment decisions.

So I really hope to see this go through and other states follow. And Gartner and Forrester both predict that many AI attributed layoffs will be reversed within the next 24 months. Can I say something though about- Yeah I'm really on the fence, really on the fence about knowing way in advance that layoffs are coming, because I've lived through this. Yeah.

And It sucks. You're like literally a sitting duck. And I would like- Yeah to see much more around like what China's doing, which is there's actual teeth here, meaning like you can't lay off all these people for a tech investment. Yeah.

That's no, you're not doing that. Or you need to submit something, especially if a certain percentage are gonna be impacted in the community, like there has to be discussions. There has to be something in the middle that happens before it ever gets to that point. Yeah.

Like a year of severance- Have a conversation guaranteed or some shit. Right. Yes, 1000%. Yeah.

There's gotta be so- more social responsibility here in terms of these decisions, because you can't pretend like you don't operate in these communities and then ignore the impact you have when this happens. Because when you think about Silicon Valley and other areas, that's a massive impact to professional lives. It- Yeah it's crazy to me. Gartner and Forrester, both predicted that rehiring in 24 months, and we've seen some of those trends coming out in headlines, right?

Like, people are hiring back because AI is not performing in the way they thought it would. However, we just talked about it, it's like a fire sale. Mm-hmm. Jobs are returning at lower wages.

They're not rebuilding entry-level pipelines, and then roles that come back under different, different titles don't have that same career progression. Yeah. So they're not getting the career progression, and someone who is maybe 20 years away from retirement, early 40s, worked their whole way up, suddenly they get laid off, and now they're back to where they were at 25- Yeah in terms of their career progression. Yeah.

That's fucking crazy. Sorry for my F-bomb. So one of the stats that really stood out to me, the medium, median time for a laid-off tech worker specifically to find a new role has stretched from 3.2 months to 20- in 2024 to 4.

7 months in 2026. Not a blip. Mm-mm. I don't know.

At what point, at what point does the AI caveat stop mattering and states getting more serious about holding employers accountable for some of the decisions? I mean, there's just not gonna be enough money to support people. Like, this is my whole thing. Unemployment runs out very quickly.

That is- Right state sponsored, right? There's not gonna be enough money. So This is why I think these conversations around UBI and dividends are so interesting. I don't think we're having them fast enough.

I am not trying to be an alarmist, but, like, that's significant. This just feels like this constant story of two different worlds. I just read this weekend, housing prices in San Francisco, luxury houses that are above $3.5 million are flying off the shelves.

Flying off the shelves. Multiple bids, all cash, but ones that are, like, a million and below are sitting. Mm-hmm. And that sounds like, why are we even talking about million dollar homes?

But let me tell you, if you can afford a $3.5 million home, it means you're in IPO money. Like, that's not everyday money. Right.

Ultra luxury through the fucking roof. Right. Anybody below that, fucked. Yeah.

The, I mean, the same thing's happening, near where I live. Tons of houses on the market. Million. 500 to a million, 1.

5 just sitting That's crazy town USA. It's crazy. This is my thing. At, some point this is just gonna There's nothing stopping this gap from getting bigger at this point.

There, yeah, there's nothing. Yeah. There's nothing. One of the things California proposed was a concept called No RoboBosses Act.

Which would, which I love could prohibit employers from using automated decision systems for certain employment functions, and require those companies to give workers 12 months of their own data upon request. I think that's the right response. Yeah, I do. Like- Why not?

we need to take action. So hurrah to California. Thank you for what you're doing, but this is not good. This is not a good indication.

No, and California's usually the front runner on a lot of legislations. If this is what they're putting forward and it still doesn't have enough teeth- Especially for workers' rights. Yeah. I know.

Yeah. And we're not alarmists. We're not against tech. I'm not against AI, but- I, me neither.

I- come on. I am against not, uh I am against organizations not taking social responsibility for some of their business decisions. We just want people to have a livable wage, It's just basic dignity. It's humanity.

It's- Yeah. Yeah. And that's where it's just like, y'all, come on, man. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Another feel-good story Yeah.

Coming out in the headlines. Came out of The Atlantic early in May, so I've been holding onto it 'cause I've just been like, "Ugh, all right." The article was from Ellen Cushing out of The Atlantic called The Rise of Emotional Surveillance, and look, emotional surveillance in the workplace is not new. This has been ha- if you ever worked in a call center- Mm-hmm I did in college, you had floor managers monitoring calls, hear- listening in, they're listening to tone, they're listening to how you talk, blah, blah, blah.

This has been around forever. Back in the early 2000s, people started tracking keystrokes, what are you typing, all of that stuff. So this has been around forever, but what came out of this article was really alarming, and again, coming off the spring conference season and the vendors Francesca and I were exploring, in between sessions. So emotion AI is already deployed at scale.

We know this. We saw it in COVID, that little Teams, your light went to, to away- even though you're sitting there 'cause your stupid mouse wasn't moving. Facial scanning, I saw this several years ago at South by Southwest even, talking about eye move- eye movements as you were taking training to track whether you actually were paying attention in a training session, and I'm like, "What if you're an auditory learner?" Mm-hmm.

Like, give me a break. Face scanning, voice tone analysis, chat sentiment monitoring Biosensors in your chairs. This isn't coming, it's here already. It started with low-wage workers, as I talked about, call centers a million years ago, truck drivers tracking their mileage, how they're driving, fast food.

Now it's targeting our Slack messages, our Zoom meetings, job interviews. Every professional that works in white-collar work, for sure, 100%, this is being monitored, no matter what your role is within an organization. The science behind it is built on real shaky things. Many of these products are basing their rubrics on a theory of six universal basic emotions that have been widely challenged as over-simplistic and methodol- methodologically...

Methodologically? Am I saying that correctly? Methodically? No.

Method- No methodologically. Methodologically. That's what it said in the article. Can I - am I saying this correctly?

I think so. I'll go with it. The method, you could also just do, like, the method is... Yeah.

Anyway. Yeah. Whatever. Widely challenged on over, I can speak today, over-simplistic methods, that's been labeled as flawed for decades.

Okay? Fantastic. It's like... Yes, and real problem for someone like me who has the TIS in my facial expressions and everything else.

I really do, I'm not joking. So, sorry. I'm not trying to be- Don't, don't come after Mel I really have been diagnosed. Okay.

Even when the tools misfire in ways that cost people jobs and promotions, nothing is stopping the usage of them. A deaf employee at Intuit was denied a promotion after an AI interview system failed to provide her with adequate subtitles. The follow-up advice that she received was to practice active listening What the f- I don't even know what to say to that. That's like The Onion this is super flawed, super biased, and causing a lot of issues, the author's real fear in this article that she expressed is not that tech is bad.

Again, none of us think tech is bad. It's that it gets good. In a world where we're looking insufficiently cheerful on Zoom, it affects your ability to keep your job. So if you're not cheerful enough- Mm-hmm if you're not expressing the right way, suddenly that becomes part of your performance.

And we're just coming off a conversation around friendships at work, and there are many different categories, including non-socializers. We know there are introverts. We know there are neurodivergents. Everyone operates a little bit differently.

Do we need to be dissecting people this much? Additionally, there's an entire trust and engagement issue, and psychologically safety issue within organizations right now. Are we driving those stats further down that road to be super negative with this type of surveillance? Like, when are you going to just trust your employees?

I thank you. Why? I think that's the whole thing. It's just like, honestly, I've always been, whenever I've ran teams, I'm always just this type of person that's like, "Did you do what you needed to do?

I don't care if you're in like fricking Hawaii on a beach. If your output's amazing- Mm great. Good. Good.

Shit. Exactly. Like- Exactly. It is this what a good team player.

Are you decent to people? At some point it's just- Gottaling people you know? Why are we being over-analyzed to death? Thousand percent.

And, and also this is where we're spending our money? Okay. This was in the article. She talked about how people scowl when angry only about 35% of the time, meaning if a system is only scanning for a scowl, it misses roughly 65% of actual anger cases when someone's angry.

Half the time someone scowls, they're not angry at all. So the AI is confidently wrong most of the time. Yeah. I will tell you, when I'm angry, I don't scowl.

I have like a, I will full-on death look you. Like there's no like- Right, or- I will cut you. Who's to say someone's not like in a meeting scowling at some bullshit outside of the view of that thing, or they're annoyed with oh, j- a message popped up, and it's, has nothing to do with what's happening. That's happened to me before.

I'm like, "Ah." Yeah, 1000%. Like somebody's, you're like- There's nothing to do with the meeting, and then now it's gonna get judged for It's so crazy. Do you know what it reminds me of?

Fucking Febreze. What? You know what I'm s- y- 'Cause it's like instead of just keeping your house clean, you know- Oh, I hear you. Yeah, it's like the spray is not gonna cover that up.

Just- The sp- clean it. Y- just clean it. And every time you walk in somebody's house and they've used Febr- Febreze, I'm just like, A, not only am I getting cancer, but B, I'm just like- What is this needed for, by the way? The, the EU has banned this in the workplace.

Fucking EU. And the US- This is why people don't move to Europe. The US, of course, has no prot- listen, they're selling dollar villas. We've talked about this.

Let's go start- I know our flower farm. And we'll run workshops and sell beautiful flowers. Uh- This is my thing. I feel like it's a multi-dimensional portfolio life we could lead easily now.

I think so. I don't know why we haven't pulled the trigger yet. We gotta do this. Yeah.

We gotta do this. And I'm just curious about the motivations of organizations here. How is this really helping you in anything? Especially that talent acquisition example.

I've worked as a recruiter, I've led talent acquisition. I'm horrified by that. Just have a human conversation with someone about their experience and give them the courtesy, going back to humanity earlier in our conversation, can we just not? Can we go back to humanity?

It feels like a lazy leadership. It's very lazy leadership. Yeah. I remember giving a presentation once, and I was so nervous.

This was, I was a manager, and it was like an executive team, first big presentation. And I'm in the middle of the presentation. I can't see my facial expressions. And again, I'm, I am autistic, so I'm presenting.

And in the middle of it, one of the leaders that I was working for re- sends me an IM and says, "What's wrong with your face?" Do you So- I'm like trying not to pay attention to this IM, and then I'm like, "What is wrong with my face?" As I'm trying to continue the presentation. Well, that's- And it just makes me think of that, like, one, you and I talk about this and you make fun of me for it, and I appreciate it 'cause you're my friend, but I'm like, I don't like the thought that I'm perceived.

And then two, I don't know. I can't see my face, and I'm expressive and, and she's like, "Oh, you just looked really concerned." And I'm like, "Okay. Well, there's nothing I can do about that.

I, I, I'm talking. I don't know what you mean." And I get it. It's good feedback to be aware and da, da, da, da.

But I can't see my own face as I'm presenting this. I'm also not looking at myself in the camera. But it makes me think of this, like all of the people who maybe struggle with awkwardness or struggle with anxiety and, and they're trying to work through all of those things, and knowing that you're in this microscope. God, that just- There's also the reality that sometimes at work- What's happening deserves a scowl, deserves a tone of voice that is like- I mean, it's- WTF.

And if we always have to be, you know, pretty, pretty princess, pleasant- Yeah I, I, I mean, you think about all the things when we think about the art of pushback and the art of innovation, and how you have to have failure, you have to have dissent. Tough conversations. Yeah. Yeah.

And if that is being monitored out- Yeah yowza. Or just decisions made on this information when the science is flawed, and it can damage people's ability to get a job, get promoted, all of these things. It just feels obnoxious. Just to correct, I think what I said earlier, she said she's more scared of this getting so good- Mm-hmm and this working more than it does right now, and I'm just as scared as she is.

We don't need it. Why do we Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Why? Yeah, like is this- Why?

There's this amazing, like, uh, John Mulaney bit where he's talking about he's Catholic, goes back to church from not being at church for a long time, and they changed the prayer, and he was still saying the old prayer. And he's like, "Yeah, 'cause that's what we needed to fix in the Catholic Church." And I'm sitting there like, yeah, 'cause that's what we needed to fix. You know what I'm saying?

Thanks for joining us today. Music was by Pink Zebra. This episode was produced, recorded, and edited by yours truly, Francesca and I of "Your Work Friends." And we're an indie pod, folks.

We drop new episodes each week on Tuesday, so please come back to check them out. Like, subscribe on the platform of your choice, and if you want one big meaty insight about work every single month, subscribe to our newsletter on yourworkfriends.com. Bye, friends.

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