Your Work Friends
Edgy Work Talk. Fresh Insights. We Break It Down So You Stay Ahead.
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Your Work Friends
New Week, New Headlines: Texas Overtime Rules, $270K Success Salary & Childcare Crisis | Weekly Work News Breakdown
Join Mel and Francesca, your workplace insiders, as they break down the biggest workplace news affecting your career and wallet.
This week: Major developments in overtime pay as Texas courts strike down new federal rules, shocking new data about the salary Americans say they need to feel successful ($270K!), and the latest research on paid family leave that could change your benefits. Plus, the childcare crisis hitting working parents harder than ever.
🔍 In this episode:
- Breaking: Texas federal court invalidates nationwide overtime exemption rules
- New DOL research reveals only 27% of workers have paid family leave
- The real cost of childcare vs. rent in 2024
- Why Gen Z says they need $500K to feel successful
- Which companies are stepping up for part-time workers
- Inside Portillo's innovative corporate staffing strategy
Your Work Friends delivers no-nonsense workplace news, salary insights, and career strategy you can actually use. Perfect for professionals navigating corporate and workplaces in America who want to stay ahead of workplace trends and protect their careers.
New episodes every week. Subscribe for the latest in workplace news, labor laws, salary trends, and corporate culture.
#WorkplaceNews #CareerAdvice #CorporateAmerica #SalaryTalk #WorkLife #HRNews #Leadership #WorkTrends #CareerGrowth #WorkplaceCulture"
Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.
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only 27% of civilian workers had access to paid family leave through their employer. 27%, that is low. Hey friends, this is your work, friends, where we're breaking down what's going on with work, so you get ahead. I'm Mel Plett and I'm Francesca Ranieri. Francesca, where would you do this weekend?
Speaker 2:You know, we went to one of these NBA G League games. Have you ever been to one of these? I have not. It's like a yeah, it's like farm teams for basketball teams. So in Portland, I have not. It's like a yeah, it's like farm teams for basketball teams. So in Portland. The Portland Trail Blazers G team is the Rip City Remix Super fun, every city has them. If you have an NBA team, you have a G League team. Highly recommend it. It's awesome. Just to be very close up, I don't think I realize how tall basketball players are. Yeah, man, yeah, they're super tall. Yeah I. Yeah, man, yeah, they're super tall. Yeah, I'm not short. But I was like, yes, I am, yes, I am. How about you? What'd you do this?
Speaker 1:weekend. So I spent a lot of time in home depot this weekend sawing things. Did you know that you can saw trim?
Speaker 2:oh yeah, they'll cut it for you just in the aisle.
Speaker 1:Oh no, it was a makeshift cart, two carts with some hand saws and measuring tape for you to do it yourself.
Speaker 2:That's so comical. That feels like a slight OSHA issue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was just rubbing on this aisle.
Speaker 2:Are you sure you're supposed to be using that, or were you supposed to ring the bell for an employee?
Speaker 1:No, it was set up. Employees were walking by so we were cutting the trim. Yeah, it was like a whole station set up. It was so goofy. I took the funniest picture of Ravi. I thought it was so funny, and I helped pick out paint colors, so that was exciting.
Speaker 2:Well, we're back with new week, new headlines. What are you talking about today?
Speaker 1:New research out of the US Department of Labor underscores the benefits of paid family and medical leave. Nice, and I'm also talking about the federal court strike down out of Texas for the overtime exemption rule nationwide. Oh dang, yeah, I want to talk about that.
Speaker 2:I want to talk about. The CNBC came out with an article the salary. Americans say they need to feel successful at every age. It's probably way more than you're thinking, so I want to talk about that. And then, mel, I think you and I both have some WTF news we'll close the show with. We got to talk about this.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, let's do it. Yeah, new research shows that having a national paid family and medical leave program would reduce poverty across all communities and it would diminish the poverty gap among workers, according to new research that was conducted by the Urban Institute, which was commissioned by the US Department of Labor Women's Bureau.
Speaker 2:Interesting right. We don't currently have a national FMLA law on the books.
Speaker 1:Correct For paid leave, for paid leave Paid specifically. Yes, got it, so leave's available, but paid leave is the differentiator right. Here's the so what? Only 13 states and the District of Columbia currently have paid family and medical leave programs. District of Columbia currently have paid family and medical leave programs.
Speaker 1:As of March 2023, only 27% of civilian workers had access to paid family leave through their employer 27%. That is low. Among our lowest wage earners, only 6% of them have access to paid leave through their employers. So think servers at your restaurant, retail workers, part-time workers. They don't have access to these things, folks, and it impacts their families, right? Other benefits of adopting a national paid leave program would include that 97% of workers would now be eligible for these benefits, which is huge, and that's if they provide up to 12 weeks of paid leave. Other benefits beyond that include further support for women in the workforce, and also, doing something like this could increase our GDP, and one of the quotes that I really loved in this article was investing in families works for everyone, it works for business, it works for them, it works for our country, so I thought that was really interesting. What are your thoughts on this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, when I think about FMLA, I automatically think about maternity leave. Now, you can use FMLA for a whole host of different things, but when I think about especially women in the workplace, you and I both have talked about women that give birth and then they need to be back at work Literally that week.
Speaker 1:Yeah my niece. She's a server. She just had a baby a year ago and she had to return within the week because she does not have paid leave options and that's that she had to pay for child care.
Speaker 2:This is the spiral that people get into. You think about all of the things that someone can experience medically or where they need to have leave. If you're in the sandwich generation, if you're just going through life, that's all FMLA.
Speaker 1:It's all FMLA. But if you're not paid for that time, you may get three months off, but if you don't get paid for three months, how many families can actually afford to not be paid for that time? They can't. They can't afford it. So it's a luxury Interesting, so I'm all for it. Friend to friend, here's what you should be watching First and foremost, your employers or your prospective employer's policy on paid leave. Make sure you're digging into that and you know what that is, and reach out to your legislators. I don't know if folks know this, but you can email your legislator every single day if there's something that's important to you. Mel does.
Speaker 1:Multiple times a day Listen there's something that's important to you. Mel does Multiple times a day. I do not, but I used to. I do not start this rumor. No, I don't, but I, as a former legislative office building intern many moons ago, that was one of my jobs answering constituent emails. So I think it's really important if you are local in your community, getting involved, if you care about these things, understand what your local legislation is around. Paid leave States may be different than even federally. What's going on with this? We'll share a link to this research in our show notes, but you can forward that along and say I'm really interested in this and care about it. What are you doing? You can ask questions. What are you doing to support this? How can we advocate for it? That's how you get the conversation started, folks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and especially locally, you have a lot of influence. I will tell you that when we did the episode on Project 2025, which is largely thought of as the Republican platform, paid, fmla is not on their docket at all, which is interesting because if they're the party for families, Are they?
Speaker 1:Listen, I'm going to go back to that quote. Investing in families works for everybody, so hopefully they'll pay attention to it. Moving on increase in minimum salary requirements in order to make sure someone is appropriately listed as an exempt employee, there's three different measurements to say whether you're exempt or not as an employee, one of them being the salary threshold. And okay, we talked about this back in January 2024. And essentially, they were going to be increasing these thresholds in two phases. Right, phase one, july 1st 2024, the first round of increases, and then phase two would have happened in january 1 of 2025. What we know, texas strikes again what is going on in Texas?
Speaker 2:Texas is just like a totally Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.
Speaker 1:What are you doing down there? Look, we covered this a year ago. We thought that this was definitely going to be challenged in the courts. We knew someone was going to do it. It took time and they did. They officially struck this down in Texas last week.
Speaker 1:Look, the final rule back in April from the Department of Labor would have raised the minimum salary requirement for exempt status to be $58,656. That's up from $35,568. The reason, folks, this is good for employees. Why Lower paid salary workers are often doing the same jobs as hourly workers, but they end up spending more time away from families, but they don't get the overtime pay or the additional pay because they're exempt. They can work 40, 50, 60, 70 hours without any of the extra pay and some of the times it's explained away, they get benefits and they get this and they get that.
Speaker 1:No, it doesn't all equal out and we know, even for exempt salaried employees who make high salaries today, they're grossly abused as well, and we did a little fun video about that a while back, so watch that if you'd like. The original order would have provided regular updates to salary thresholds every three years to reflect changes in earnings, and it also would have safeguarded against future erosion of overtime protections. So essentially, this Texas court's decision to block the increase for January 1 also invalidates the requirement from July. So what they're seeing is that some employers are exploring how they can roll things back, since they raised compensation amounts back in July. What do you think about this, francesca?
Speaker 2:I think there's two things. One of the arguments about either raising minimum wage or raising exempt status for overtime too we hear this over and over again Run the tapes decades back whenever someone has tried to lift these and get people more money especially lower income workers more money. The number one argument is that's going to hurt small business, and what we find in the data over the long arc is that's absolutely not true. It's just not right. So a the argument that they're going to start throwing at this is not, over the long arc, valid. The second I have is and this might be a really harsh thing to say, but again, if you go look at the Republican platform that was out there they're basically looking to get rid of overtime 100%, and I need everybody to know that overtime might be going away completely.
Speaker 1:It could If they decide to get rid of the Department of Labor, which there has been talk about them completely gutting it right. Yeah, employee protections are at risk, including overtime pay, and again, we did a deep dive of this last year to cover kind of the abuse of exempt employees. Today, including these lower salaried worker, but also higher salary earners are being abused when it comes to being exempt. It's just a space to watch folks and, friend to friend, here's what you should look out for. Okay, the Department of Labor may appeal this decision. However, we have that upcoming transition in our new administration coming in January, so be on the lookout. Subscribe to Google alerts if you need to.
Speaker 1:This is interesting for you, and some States may already have a threshold in place that is actually much higher than what was proposed federally anyway. So you want to understand what is at your state level, what they propose, what they require. It may be slightly different from the federal mandate. It may even be better than what was under the federal mandate, so become familiar. I guess what we're saying here is make sure that you're aware of not just what's happening federally but what's happening locally. Good rule of thumb Overall. Yeah, just understand where you live.
Speaker 2:CNBC came out with this article the salary Americans say that they need to feel successful at every age. So they basically dumped a bunch of generations in a bucket and said give me the dollar amount you need to make as an individual every year to feel successful. What do you think that average number was?
Speaker 1:I'm going to go with 150.
Speaker 2:The annual salary average is verbatim $270,214 to feel financially successful. This was a survey done by the group called Empower. I think what's interesting is, on the one end of the range, baby boomers said it's $100,000 a year.
Speaker 1:I'm not a boomer.
Speaker 2:No, boomer said 100, gen Z said $500,000. Holy shit, $500,000.
Speaker 1:Okay, can we get real a little bit? Just a little bit, because I'm a fan of facts and feelings. Not facts or feelings, but facts and feelings. I like it. I like it, yeah, because I live in the New York City tri-state metro area, one of the highest cost of living locations in the country. There are families surviving on much less yeah, families, entire families much less than 500K.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying they're thriving. I do think you need a significant amount more per household. If it's a one person household, you probably do need closer to 150, 200 K. If it's a two person household and everyone's bringing home the 150, that's 300 K for two people. I don't know, I think there's a lot of. It depends and it's on your personal circumstances. 500 K seems like someone just threw something out there and was like hell, yeah, I want a half a million dollars a year with no, with no thought process behind it. I think there needs to be a salary increase for sure, and everyone should have a livable wage. I also think there needs to be more regulation around the greed of organizations that incredibly impact our cost of living and our ability to thrive. So insurance companies, the cost of healthcare, the cost of groceries, the disgusting price gouging.
Speaker 2:I do want to talk about the facts and then I do want to talk about the feelings too. The facts on the board is the median household income in this country is $80,000 and $80,610. That's according to the US Census Bureau from last year. Wow, Around $80,000. Okay, so that's the median income.
Speaker 2:When you look at the livable wage, it differs from state to state. But just to give everyone an example here livable wage in Mississippi it's $80,766. Massachusetts, $128,000. And so when you think about we're saying this is livable at the highest end of the range, let's say it's 150 in New York City, highest end of the range is livable At the highest end of the range. Let's say it's 150 in New York City, Highest end of the range is livable, Right. And then you have folks saying, yeah, but to feel successful this is where the feelings come in I need to feel like this 270, this 280, to feel like I am not living paycheck to paycheck, that I can take my kid on a vacation, that I can buy a car paycheck, that I can take my kid on a vacation, that I can buy a car.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's a difference between minimum wage, livable wage and thriving what I think people are talking about here is.
Speaker 2:This is what I need to thrive. Yeah, this is what you need in order to go into Target and not give a shit about what you're putting in your cart. You know what I'm saying, or?
Speaker 1:your grocery list for the week. You don't even think twice that you're buying two dozen eggs. A thousand percent yeah.
Speaker 2:A thousand percent, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think this is so-. I'm still going to question that 500K, though. Come on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm like I appreciate Fall in I guess you're thriving as-.
Speaker 2:Damn dude. Yeah, a couple of things here that I would love for folks to keep in mind. One is that it takes a lot of years to get to the level of 270 in a lot of organizations, so if you're not making that, that's not something to feel badly about at all. That is a very high income. Actually, only 10% of workers make that or above it's, so that's not a lot of people make that. So, again, just keep all that in mind. The other is Mel. Have you seen this? I am seeing a ton of jobs opening for recruiters.
Speaker 1:I am. I'm seeing that a lot recently, which, as a former recruiter, that's a good sign.
Speaker 2:Mel, what does it mean?
Speaker 1:More jobs, more hirings about to pick up, yeah.
Speaker 2:Hiring is about to pick up. The need for talent is about to pick up. The need for talent is about to pick up. So if you're thinking about making a hop, or if you're thinking about increasing your salary, hopping a job is probably one of the best ways to do it. Absolutely All right, mel, yes, f, yeah, wtf. Should we end on a high or end on the funny? Let's end on a high, all right. What's your WTF?
Speaker 1:My WTF news this week is the National Database of Child Care came out with a report and the price of child care in the US for families. Want to take a guess what that is?
Speaker 2:$1,000 a month per kid.
Speaker 1:Close, probably. Their new research shows the price of child care for US families is more than a month's rent for most families. Yeah, I have friends They've had to make a choice where one parent stays home because it just didn't make sense for one of them to be working for it all to just go to child care. Yeah, or the majority of it goes to child childcare. So it was like, why would I pay for that? And so they've had to now make a career decision and the long-term impacts of earning potential and all of those things over the cost of childcare. So that's my WTF news. What are we doing here? And they mentioned in this article that it's really a crisis intervention point.
Speaker 2:I covered this a couple months ago too. The amount of childcare centers is in the red. We need more childcare opportunities out there. That's number one. Also this is one of the most needed benefits is onsite childcare for corporations, and we're seeing a slow uptick of corporations offering that. But fully paid, or at least highly subsidized onsite childcare. I would love to see it, but yeah, that is expensive as hell.
Speaker 1:Expensive.
Speaker 2:What about you? All right, mine is the Doge administration, the department of governmental efficiency that is going to be headed up by Vivek and Elon. Here's my thing with this right. They're coming in and saying one of their first orders of business is remote work, and one of the reasons why is because they're saying that, look, they know that there are 2 million government workers out there. That excludes post office, that excludes the military, so we have 2 million workers that are in the government. They want to use RTO as a mass layoff feature and ideally, they're trying to operate the government with 20% of the workers that are there now.
Speaker 1:Good luck. What an insult to government workers. Come on now.
Speaker 2:Totally agree. First of all, like every single organization, there are amazing, incredible people, and then there are people that aren't. Tell me any organization out there and I will show you all sides of the story, absolutely. The other thing I'm why I'm saying a WTF, move is move is you know this and I know this. But whenever you go into an organization, even if it's an organization that's in your industry that you have been a thought leader in, you don't know what you don't know and you should not be making any massive moves or any massive proclamations before going in there.
Speaker 1:A hundred percent. Your first three months at a minimum is just a listening tour. If you're lucky and you get six months to do that, great. But you really just have to get in there and it's like listening, digging into the details, digging into the data, to really understand the full picture before you make any sweeping changes. So that just shows me incompetent leadership.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look at, he walked into Twitter with a kitchen sink and then I would argue that it's operating.
Speaker 1:It is not the same product, not the same product, and it's also a failing business. So hemorrhaging yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what the fuck? All right, wtf, wtf, all right.
Speaker 1:What is your FIA? Something from the US news highlighting organizations that are doing more for part-time employees when it comes to benefits, and so I was like, yes, I want to see more of this. People that are offering more benefits to our part-timers. For example, costco they're offering health benefits. Costco man Kirkland Kirkland they're offering health benefits for part-time hourly workers after 60 days of continuous service. And Ikea offers full benefits for those working 20 hours per week, and they also help pay for the cost of coverage, which is really nice. There's a whole list of other orgs. We'll link to it in the show notes, but love to see it. Keep it going. What about you? Amazing.
Speaker 2:Okay, this is from HR brew hotdog chain Portillo's. So if you're in the Chicagoland area at Portillo's it's a near and dear to my heart Hotdog chain Portillo's staffs it's restaurants with corporate employees during the holiday season. So they take corporate office employees C-level on down and then between November and January they take short staffed stores and put corporate employees in there and they have to work several weeks basically.
Speaker 1:I love to see it. You and I both worked in retail for a long time. It makes a world of difference in terms of decision-making, being on the floor, understanding what your employees go through and experience your customer base all of those things that's real training, talk about on the job training and understanding your business. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you really can't understand your consumer unless you are with your consumer, and if you have stores, that's absolutely where you want to be. I love this move. I also think you and I have talked about this. I think everybody should work food service or retail at least one time in their life, if not multiple times in your life, and especially as you move up the ranks, to continue that continuity or understand what it's like to be in another seat. But I will tell you, as someone who's had to do this, one of the worst days to work is Black Friday. So, friends, please be nice, if you're going out into the malls, don't be an a-hole, please. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Be nice to service workers, please. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for joining us today. This episode was produced, edited and all the things by Mel and myself. Francesca, our music is from Pink Zebra. We love that you joined the conversation today. Join us on all of the socials, especially the LinkedIn community of your work. Friends, we're over there with a bunch of people. Come and talk to us and if you liked this episode, please like and subscribe. Bye, friends, bye.