An American manufacturing road trip
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Upgrade today by visiting dell.com slash deals. This Marketplace podcast is supported by Commvault, helping companies discover the minimum data, apps, and functionality they need to remain viable and stay in business after an attack so they can become a continuous business. On the program today, a couple of different slices of this economy, no particular order. Manufacturing, housing, and AI from American Public Media.

This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdal. It is Monday today, June 30. Good as always to have you along, everybody. We are going to start on this Monday with a road trip of sorts, beginning in the great state of Texas, Dallas specifically, where the Regional Federal Reserve Bank there released its survey of manufacturing today. Texas being Texas, oil and gas figure prominently. Long story short, production was flat.

But there is more to the American manufacturing economy than just Texas and petroleum. So Marketplace's Elizabeth Roval took to the road, as it were. Our trip across the U.S. manufacturing sector starts with Courtney Cowley with the Kansas City Fed, who I catch up with while she's in the car driving across her district.

So I'm just on my way to Enid, Oklahoma. Home to steel manufacturing, the district also does a lot of food and petroleum-related production. In this June survey, Cowley says activity and employment is down. And then we're also continuing to see prices for both inputs and produced products or outputs increase.

Crossing state lines into Texas, the Dallas Fed's Emily Kerr reminds me that a lot more than petroleum products are made here. So we have a lot of high-tech manufacturing, quite a bit of food manufacturing. You know, we're the top cattle state. In June's survey, Kerr says though demand continues to fall, hiring actually picked up. If firms are feeling dire about the outlook, they probably wouldn't be adding to headcounts.

Now we head about 1,200 miles east to the Richmond Fed, which includes sectors like pharmaceuticals, ag, aerospace, and textiles.

Survey director Jason Kosickhaus says June showed continued softening, a trend since mid-2022. The difference now is the recent support to softness. The big concern used to be labor shortages. Now is we can't even know what to price our products at because the time it takes to manufacture our goods and get it out and to ship it out and all the lead times is

The input costs and the variable costs are just fluctuating too fast. And due north in the Empire State, the New York Fed's Rich Dietz says that tariffs, immigration fears, and other policy uncertainty have added concerns to an already weak sector, which produces a lot of electronic components, furniture, and heavy metals.

However, what was interesting is that employment itched up a little bit this month, which was quite unusual. Manufacturing activity declined in June's survey, while input costs went up. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. Wall Street today. Well, let's see. The dollar is still getting clobbered. Stock traders are still in a buying mood. Oil basically steady. Bond yields down. Details, numbers, you all know the drill.

I don't know if you caught this back at the end of May when the CEO of Anthropic, that's one of the big artificial intelligence companies, he said he figures AI could wipe out half of all the entry-level white-collar jobs in this economy in the next one to five years.

So there's that, which gets us to this. The company apparently is starting a new thing where it tracks how AI is affecting the economy in the job market. And I'll tell you, even a quick look at the job market for recent college graduates is not reassuring. Unemployment for degree holders aged 22 to 27 is almost 6%. That's the highest it's been since the pandemic and significantly above the unemployment rate for all workers, a hair better than 4%.

So Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino went looking for signs of that AI-driven white-collar apocalypse. Graduation day at Santa Clara University on June 14th was everything Yael Grimaldi could have hoped for. A beautiful California day spent celebrating his achievement with friends and family. Yael Shai Grimaldi Serrano.

Well, it was everything he could have hoped for, except one thing. I thought I would have a job lined up by graduation. Grimaldi earned a B.S. with honors from the business school, and he's been looking for a job or internship in digital marketing.

He says he's putting in about two applications a day at big companies and small ones up and down the state of California. He's had a few interviews, but no offers yet. As a first generation student, I feel like there's a lot of pressure. You know, I'm the first in my family to get a degree. And so, you know, it has a lot of value, but not as much as, you know, I thought it would freshman year.

Indeed, the labor market advantages of a college degree have been eroding for at least 10 years, says economist David Deming at Harvard's Project on the Workforce.

A college degree for most young people who are thinking about it is still a very good investment, but it's no longer the absolute guarantee that it once was. He says the wage premium commanded by college-educated workers plateaued in the 2000s, and the edge new grads had finding work began to dissipate in the mid-2010s, partially because there are more of them. The share of young people graduating from college has increased by about a third in the last two decades. So you've got many, many more people graduating, and that's a very good thing.

Meanwhile, he says we're now seeing a slowdown in hiring that is cyclical. You want to sort of think about a young college graduate like a capital investment. And so when businesses are feeling confident about investments overall, they tend to hire more college graduates. And when they're feeling less confident, they hire fewer. Right now, things are definitely uncertain. Even if it's not a technical hiring freeze, I think a lot of companies are just kind of taking a step back.

Rosella Graham graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont in May, where she studied international politics, economics and Spanish. She interned last summer for the State Department and is looking for government jobs, which have become less numerous. She wonders if she'll end up waiting tables or making lattes for now, like some of her friends have.

Thinking about a lot of friends that are going to, I guess, wait out the kind of tumultuous job market right now by taking those other jobs, it just kind of frightens me that that is a reality. AI could be contributing, but only about 6% of firms across the economy have adopted the technology, according to Goldman Sachs.

In tech, though, it's a different story. A report from venture capital firm SignalFire found the number of new grads hired by big tech fell 25 percent since just 2023. And UC Berkeley computer science professor James O'Brien believes AI is the driving force. Take a junior developer role, which he says is mostly tedious coding.

People call it boilerplate code or, you know, you know, George work or something. But it's also a really great way to learn. Large language models can now handle that and do it a lot faster. O'Brien says big tech companies brag about how much of their code is written by AI. At the same time, they announce thousands of layoffs. Companies he advises, which used to ask him to recruit students, no longer need the help. And startups are getting smaller and smaller.

How many times do you have to get the same message where at some point you say, hey, maybe that message is the message? New grad Yael Grimaldi is still optimistic he'll get a message about a job at some point. In the meantime, he's using AI to build a website for his photography side hustle. And just in case, applying to the Peace Corps. I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace.

I say Zillow, you think home prices, right? How much yours is worth or how much a house you want to buy might cost. It's become almost synonymous with searching for residential real estate. So when Zillow changes the rules, the whole real estate market takes notice. And as of today, Zillow is changing how it lists homes. Marketplace's Samantha Fields has more on what that could mean for buyers and for sellers.

As a longtime broker in Austin, Texas, Tiffany Russell understands the importance of making sure all her listings are on Zillow. But sometimes she has clients who don't want their home listed publicly, especially now when the market's so slow. A lot of people are not wanting to sit on the market for 70, 100, 120 plus days, but they are willing to sell their home if a buyer comes along. For sellers like that, less than 10% of her clients, she'll do a private listing.

But under Zillow's new rules, Russell won't be able to list it there later. Casey Roberts, a spokesperson at Zillow, says this is about fair access. Making sure that buyers don't miss out on their dream home. They can really make sure they see every single home that could be, you know, a fit for what they need, ensuring that it's fair, open, and transparent for everyone.

Most homes are already listed publicly for everyone to see. Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS, has done research showing that keeping a sale private doesn't offer benefits to most sellers, at least in her markets in the Mid-Atlantic. Listings that are started as private exclusive listings don't bring the seller any more money, and they take on average two weeks longer to sell.

Private exclusive listings can also hurt some buyers, especially people of color, she says, who tend to have less access to them.

Generally, Logan Modishami at HousingWire says public listings have benefits for both buyers and sellers. The buyer gets to see everything that's on there, and the seller also gets to have the most eyeballs. So I'm in the general camp that the more open, it is better for consumers. But open listings may not always benefit brokers and the companies that employ them, at least not in this sluggish housing market.

When you're literally in the third straight year of the lowest home sales ever, as an industry, you're making less money. And to survive and to make sure that, you know, your agents are making enough, this is one way to help them out. By keeping listings exclusive and in-house. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. ♪♪

In order to even shop for a home, of course, no matter where it's listed, there is the usual prerequisite of being able to afford one. High and rising prices and high but steady mortgage interest rates have pushed homeownership out of reach for a lot of people, low-income families in particular.

In Baltimore, Maryland, though, there is a rare path forward. WYPR's Wambui Kamau has more.

Vermidia Cox has just moved into her new home in Hope Village, a tiny home community in Baltimore. It's a one-bedroom, 400-square-foot house. She lives here with her husband and her mom. The only thing we added in here was television and the curtains, and then just the items on the wall. I mean, that's how they already came. The home came fully furnished with a washer, dryer, and solar power.

As we tour the home, Formidia's mom, Elise Robertson, is so happy with the new place, she breaks into song. This is a community for folks who've struggled with homelessness. Before they got married, Formidia was housed, but her husband lived in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions. He's a delivery driver, and she takes care of her elderly mom.

Famithia calls the move a fresh start. You know, it does feel really, really good to know that you have your own place. And that's what Chris and Pam Wilson intended when they built Hope Village. The couple poured some of their retirement savings into the $1.7 million project.

Pam says it's a way for low-income folks to become homeowners. And once they buy a house, and these people were so enthusiastic about that, we saw them when they got their deeds, and their faces lit up, and we congratulated them, and they have been just flying since then.

Chris spent his career as a marine insurance adjuster, traveling extensively and seeing how people lived in all kinds of conditions. It was during a trip to Nigeria that a light bulb went off. You have a mile long of container houses. That gave me the idea. Why couldn't we do something like that?

Container-style houses wouldn't fly in this eastern Baltimore neighborhood, so they came up with a design that would fit in better. The tiny homes have colorful siding and wraparound porches. The Wilsons found an architect and construction firm to do some work pro bono. Each home is valued at about $200,000, but families pay just $25,000.

This isn't a profit-making venture for the Wilsons, and obviously, not every city can rely on private donors to create affordable housing. Mack McComas at Johns Hopkins says tiny home communities do show promise, but one key step, inform neighbors early. Take into consideration neighborhood concerns, that you're not just coming in with what you think is a great idea, making sure that the community around you

is bought in. The Wilsons say they knocked on doors and heard no objections. Pam says these kind of tiny home developments can save cities money too. Because people won't have to be housed in shelters and these people are going to be paying taxes on their homes. At Hope Village, Vermidia Cox says her family's settling in, already taking on projects. It's just beautiful and I'm thankful. I'm thankful to be a part of it. So, you know,

Yeah. They're figuring out how to build a fence. Then they plan to set up a grill and spend summer evenings barbecuing with neighbors. In Baltimore, I'm Wambui Kamau for Marketplace. ♪♪

Coming up. Quarter time, part time, full, whatever you want to do, we're going to accommodate it. If you have to be a working parent, you have to be able to, you know, work. First, though, let's do the numbers.

Dow Industrial is up 275 today. That is six-tenths percent, 44,094. The Nasdaq picked up 96 points, about a half percent, 20,369. S&P 500, 31 points to the good, a half percent, 62 and four there.

The long, long saga of Boeing and subcontractor Spirit Aerosystems Holdings took a new turn today. The planemaker spun off Spirit about 20 years ago, and then last year, you might remember, it decided it wanted to bring the company back in-house with a merger. Today, the UK's top competition regulator started an investigation into that proposed deal. Boeing descended two and a third percent Spirit Aerosystems.

dropped about one and a quarter percent. Bond prices went up when that happens. Yields go down. The 10-year T-note today stands at 4.23 percent. You're listening to Marketplace. This Marketplace podcast is supported by Dell. Introducing the new Dell AI PC powered by Intel Core Ultra Processor. It's not just an AI computer. It's a computer built for AI.

That means it's built to help you do your busy work for you. So you can fast forward through editing images, designing presentations, generating code, debugging code, running lots of apps without lag, creating live translations and captions, summarizing meeting notes, extending battery life, enhancing security, finding that file you're looking for, managing your schedule, meeting your deadlines, responding to those long emails, leaving all the time in the world for more you time and for the things you actually want to do.

Get a new Dell AI PC starting at $699.99 at dell.com slash AI dash PC. How those ahead stay ahead. Trust isn't just earned, it's demanded. Whether you're a startup founder negotiating your first audit or a seasoned security professional scaling your GRC program, providing your commitment to security has never been more critical or more complex. That's where Vanta comes in.

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That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash marketplace PM for $1,000 off. This Marketplace podcast is supported by Greenlight. As a listener of Marketplace, you're likely already building smart money habits for you and your family, trying to instill important lessons on saving and spending and the economy overall and the younger folks in your life. But what about the older generation? Your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles? As they age, they may need more support in managing their finances too.

With Greenlight's Family Shield, you can take the next steps by protecting your senior loved ones from scams and financial fraud. Family Shield offers account monitoring, real-time alerts, and coverage, including up to $100,000 for deceptive transfer fraud and $1 million for identity theft, so you can keep your whole family financially safe and sound.

And with added safety tools like SOS and crash alerts, along with location sharing, you can keep an eye on both your family's wallet and their well-being. Take care of your whole family, from kids to grandparents, with Family Shield from Greenlight. Sign up today at greenlight.com slash marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. President Trump said over the weekend, this was on Fox News, that he wants to come up with some kind of free pass. Those are his exact words.

that would give the agriculture industry something of a break from his immigration crackdowns. Specifics notably were absent, and it is worth noting here that the president's big tax and spending bill the Senate is chewing on right now does have $170 billion earmarked for immigration enforcement. Immigration is, when you get right down to it, a labor market story. And with undocumented workers and even those with legal status fearful that their workplaces could be raided,

Marketplace's Savannah Peters reports that is going to leave a lot of food in the fields.

Warm spring weather made 2025 a pretty good year for growing cherries, says Ian Chandler, who runs a 300-acre orchard in northern Oregon. We have a pretty good-sized crop. Quality is good. It's nice fruit. The problem, Chandler says, is getting that bumper crop off the tree. He says the West Coast cherry harvest relies on farm workers traveling from California up through the Pacific Northwest as the fruit ripens in each climate. My

About 90% of the farm workers Chandler hires are immigrants. He says the rest might be American citizens, but have family at risk of being deported. Meaning?

Meanwhile, the clock for harvesting ripe cherries is ticking. Mother Nature doesn't compromise on that. When the crop is ready, it needs to be harvested. Richard Stupp heads up Cornell's Ag Workforce Development Program. He says immigrant workers, many of whom are undocumented, have allowed U.S. farmers to keep growing labor-intensive fruits and vegetables.

even as vanishingly few Americans are willing to do the work of harvesting. For us to grow and harvest and process those crops would be virtually impossible without immigrant and guest workers.

And automating that work is tricky. Ag economist Diane Charlton at Montana State University says there are robots in development. To be able to pick the fruit that's ripe and pick it gently, a lot of factors have to come together to do this as efficiently as human hands. Even if a labor squeeze spurs more investment, Charlton says that tech is a ways off.

In Oregon, Ian Chandler is hunting for secondary markets willing to process overripe cherries. But those places where you can send fruit that won't work for fresh are starting to fill up. He says some of this year's cherries will rot on the tree, and crop insurance won't cover a worker shortage. I'm Savannah Peters for Marketplace.

It's a short week this week for most of us with the holiday on Friday. The Bureau of Labor Statistics gets the day off, too, which means we are going to get the June unemployment report on Thursday this time.

That is, of course, a monthly report, but there are economic trends that play out over way longer periods of time. Our series, The Age of Work, is all about that. What demographic changes are going to mean for this economy, most particularly the fact that the percentage of prime age workers in this country, that's people between 25 and 54, is shrinking as the U.S. population overall gets older, which means that employers are going to have to dig deeper to find the people they need.

We were in Utah County, Utah last month, a place that's got one of the youngest labor forces in this country. Median age there, 25 and a half, almost 39 nationally. But even Utah County companies have themselves some labor force challenges, as Marketplace's Maria Hollenhorst reports.

Some people discover their passions early in life. Like engineers will call it the knack. I always wanted to know how things worked and take things apart. Utah County resident Joanne Hislop, age 42, grew up to become a senior medical device engineer. I was really invested in the career. It really was a big part of who I was as a person growing up.

I couldn't really picture not having that in my life. But seven years into her career, she and her husband got some life-changing news. They did an ultrasound pretty quickly. We're like, oh my gosh, and just kept asking if we were going to pass out. They were having triplets. My career was a big part of who I was, and I had always intended to continue working. But there was also so much unknown from the health side that I

Neither one outweighed the other. It was just the phase of life that we were in. So she went to her boss. I am an international man of mystique, unknown even to myself. He likes to joke. Fred Lampropoulos is the founder and CEO of Merit Medical Systems, a company that makes products for heart surgeries, catheter tubing, and other medical devices. It has about 7,000 employees, including 2,200 in Utah. And 10 years ago, when Joanne told her boss that she was having triplets...

I mean, I kind of expected, I think at that point that they would just write me off.

But he, from the very beginning, was just really supportive and said, whatever we need to do to get you to come back. If you need a year off and then you want to work quarter time, part time, full, whatever you want to do, we're going to accommodate it. According to one study published in Behavioral Sciences, about 24 percent of new mothers in the United States exit the labor market in their first year of motherhood.

In Utah specifically, the women's labor force participation rate drops around age 25, which is when many of them start having children.

I thought, oh boy, we're going to lose one of our best engineers. Not wanting to lose Joanne, the company offered her flexibility. My kids were two pounds when they were born. They spent several months in the hospital. I spent several months in the hospital. She wound up taking a full year of maternity leave. And when she did come back to the office, it was part time. Her team worked around her schedule for years as she slowly ramped back up.

But Joanne said she realized that this issue, the flexibility that parents need, went beyond her own personal situation. I had seen several female engineers that had been here for a long time and then they just get to a certain point, start their families and just would leave industry. In the U.S., only about 17 percent of engineers are women. That's according to the Society for Women's Engineers.

So Joanne took that anecdotal data about women leaving the industry to her boss, CEO Fred Lampropoulos. And his response was, yeah, if there's anybody like that, just bring them to me.

And so for about six months, I kind of operated that way where I felt like it's OK, it's my responsibility to keep my eye out for people like this. But she says even when she talked to Expecting Mothers about how the company had worked with her. It didn't matter. It was like they would leave anyway.

And what finally clicked in my head was if we wait until they're pretty well going out on maternity leave, they've already made their decision a lot of times. And so we actually needed a program. Fred, the CEO, agreed.

With Joanne's help, the company launched a formal program last year, an institutional system designed to make work more flexible for parents. They've hired two people so far, both moms, working part-time. I would love for companies to see this as a community problem and not a problem for mothers, that they wouldn't feel as obligated to choose and have to leave one thing completely behind.

Joanne Hislop, mom of four, is still working as an engineer, like she always wanted to be. And she's pursuing an executive MBA on Merit Medical's dime. The company is working with her schedule so that she has time to do that. I'm Maria Hollenhorst for Marketplace. This final note on the way out today in which I'm obliged once again to inject some reality into how the president of the United States thinks about this economy.

President Trump again today went after Fed Chair Jay Powell for not cutting interest rates. That is not new and it is not my job to defend Powell. But in his handwritten note to the Fed chair addressed to Jerome in that oh so recognizable black Sharpie, the president said this. If they were doing their job properly, the Fed that is, our country would be saving trillions of dollars in interest costs.

Now, the central bank has, by law, two jobs. We have repeated it here often. Stable prices and maximum employment. How much the United States pays in interest is all about how much money we owe, which is entirely up to the president and Congress, which right now, as it happens, is considering a bill that would add $3.3 trillion to the amount of money that we owe.

Amir Babbawi, Caitlin Esch, John Gordon, Noya Karr, Amanda Peacher, and Stephanie Seek are the Marketplace editing staff. Kelly Silvera is the news director. And I'm Kyle Risdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM.

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