Name: People are sick of Airbnb chore lists. What does it mean for hotels?
Uploaded: 2022-09-13T17:25:46.000Z
Duration: 14 min 26 s
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Hey Youtube john Saarland here with night cap.

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The first mortgage rates are sky high, then your employer probably knows you're watching this episode.

We talked to jodi Kantor about how companies are spying on their employees and last we look into the backlash to Airbnb fees and chores, click on the time code below.

But first housing and the Fed this week, the Federal Reserve raised rates again with a third straight 75 basis point hike.

Fed Chief jerome Powell emphasized the importance of slowing inflation but also acknowledged the cost, higher interest rates, slower growth and a softening labor market are, are all painful for the public that we serve, but they're not as painful as failing to, to restore price stability and then having to come back and do it.

So with higher interest rates come higher, mortgage rates, the 30 year fixed is now the highest in 14 years.

And with those higher rates were finally starting to see a cooling real estate market here to discuss this.

Daryl Fairweather, chief economist for Redfin Darryl, we're seeing these higher mortgage rates right there.

If you bought a house a year ago, you pay around 2 88 for a 30 year fixed rate.

Now, it's 6 29 how high do you think rates are gonna go up?

It really depends on where inflation goes from here.

So right now, the market is predicting that inflation is going to get worse before it gets better.

That's why we've seen mortgage rates move up in recent weeks and as long as that perception is out there or gets worse than mortgage rates could continue to rise, it's not inconceivable that they could get close to 7%.

But I think as soon as we do start to get some good news on inflate.

Which I think should be around the corner, mortgage rates will drop back down, they're not gonna drop all the way back down to 3% without us, without us entering into a recession, but they could drop it back down to more of a 5% range high 4%.

So I think we're in for a long bout of just really expensive home buying and that's put a major cool on home sales.

But the housing market is pretty resilient.

The collateral damage is really just gonna come in terms of sales, it's going to take these interest rates affecting people's pocketbooks even outside of the housing market for inflation to really start to slow down.

I mean, we have these higher mortgage rates right, and now we're finally starting to see a cooling real estate market, Do you think that prices are going to go down anytime soon?

Prices are already going down on a monthly basis.

So you will be able to sell your home for less now than you would have been able to sell it for in, say March or February back when rates were closer to three or 4%.

But the thing is that a lot of homeowners don't want to sell now that prices are even just a little bit lower, they're pulling their homes off the market, they're not selling at all, they're just bunkering down and waiting for the market to have a rebound.

So as long as homeowners are able to hold out, we're not gonna see prices decline in any major way, they're probably not going to increase either.

But it's just kind of this staring war between buyers and sellers until buyers come back to the market with more money because rates come back down.

What what would your advice be to a potential home buyer right now, The hardest part for buyers right now is just getting to the point of being able to afford the kind of home that they want because buyers budgets have been really constricted by these higher mortgage rates.

The median priced home is now 40% more in terms of your monthly mortgage payment than it was a year ago.

So a lot of buyers are moving down the price ladder to be able to afford at least a starter home.

Some buyers who could barely afford to start a home to begin with are now being pushed into the rental market, which puts more pressure on rents, which is a which is a factor into housing inflation.

So I think buyers right now if you can afford it, it's a great time to buy.

You can still refinance that mortgage later.

It's just really hard to get to that point of being able to afford what you want for someone who's a renter who missed the bottom interest rates.

So next up the rise of workplace surveillance is your employer tracking your every click.

So since the pandemic and the rise of remote working, many employers across various industries are tracking, recording and electronically ranking their workers through surveillance soft for employers.

But the critics, it's an unethical breach and a buggy one at that.

Here to talk about this is jodi Kantor, the Pulitzer prize winning reporter for the new york Times who wrote this article, the rise of the worker productivity score Jodie.

Can you walk us through some of the ways in your reporting that you found that employers are monitoring their workers?

It's so much more common than I think any of us have realized.

One is that, you know, we said to ourselves what is actually the scope of these things.

So my colleague Aria Sundaram did a study of the top 10 employers in the US by volume by the number of employees they have and she found that eight out of the 10 of those employers are doing some sort sort of individual productivity monitoring and in many cases that's in real time.

You know that's that's giving numbers as you go about your day minute to minute.

The other thing I'll tell you is that, you know this is something we generally associate with warehouse work with lower paid jobs.

If you look at people who work at a pharmacy is people who work at insurance companies, academic administrators, even people who have M.

These are people who are having much more productivity monitoring than ever before and they're saying things that lower income workers said for years, I've lost control.

I feel I feel that this is relentless and I feel that micromanagement has become the norm.

We associate these analytics with like amazon warehouse workers and delivery workers.

This is what your article showed is that it's coming now for white collar workers knowing what we've known about this history of how employers are monitoring their workers.

Can you tell me how, you know, how are they using these analytics to both reward and punish workers?

You know, part of what's so important here is that there are real consequences and impact.

Sometimes when we say surveillance, it just sounds so broad like okay, I'm being watched whatever I have nothing to hide in.

We found cases where this was affecting both pay and firing and the biggest problem is that workers felt the software was not accurate.

So, you know, health is, you know, a health insurance giant, they employ hundreds of thousands of people and they were using this idle time system that basically dinged you every time your computer was idle and that had real consequences that affected pay, it affected bonuses.

But what workers told us is that they were really working during that time, they just weren't doing it on the computer.

For instance, we talked to therapists and social workers saying that in fact they were having very sensitive conversations, they were doing some of the hardest parts of their job and yet they were being marked idle, which is a very judgmental word, for lack of keyboard activity.

The idea that the therapist should be on their computer at all times is kind of absurd.

It shows how how these can be used in these ways that maybe they aren't, you know, designed for, I want to ask you about what the companies themselves are saying, What's the rationale for putting the software on, you know, a worker's laptop.

You know, the most, the most interesting part of the article was talking to the people who really believe in this, whether it was the technology makers, the companies or even some workers who are pro monitoring what they essentially said is that this is a force for fairness in the workplace, that, you know, we've all been in situations where there's somebody who talks a good game but doesn't do much and gets more credit and then you have kind of a workhorse in the background who is carrying a heavy load, but you know, doesn't get the internal hype.

They said these systems are designed to correct that and re really reward people who are doing the work and give managers insights to making things that are more fair.

We even talked to people workers who said they craved more tracking in their workplace because they had sneaking suspicions that other people were slacking off and they resented the fact that they were being so dutiful and weren't necessarily seen or rewarded for it.

What kind of rights do employees have when it comes to this kind of monitoring?

You're asking the right question because part of what's going on here is that this is just not very regulated.

There's very little oversight our labor laws in this country where they were founded like 100 years ago before anybody could conceive of this kind of tracking technology.

And part of why it it's so hard to understand.

And it took it took us months of digging to figure this stuff out is that disclosure requirements are very uneven.

So I'm not trying to make anybody paranoid, but it is very possible that your company is recording the fact that you are watching CNN right now instead of working well, that puts into perspective.

Thank you Jody, I really appreciate you Coming on.

Next up the battle over Airbnb fees this week.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the backlash against excessive cleaning fees and the chore list that some Airbnb owners insist.

People follow things like doing the sheets running the dishwasher before you go.

Alison, we've seen this kind of growing backlash online to Airbnb s.

I've seen it on Tiktok Online specifically to these cleaning fees and the chores that some people have to do.

The Wall Street Journal had the story, they mentioned a $299 a night.

Airbnb in Sedona that comes with a $375 cleaning fee and the host piled on a laundry list of chores, which yes, okay is ridiculous.

How bad do you think this is a problem for Airbnb?

Yeah, john, it's really more of a pr blow than an existential threat.

I think, you know, we've all had these stories of like Airbnb s that weren't what they seemed to be when we book them online.

There's a weird getting in the door process or weird like chores that you need to do.

Um, but I think the reason it's getting a lot of attention right now.

The underlying thing, like so many things right now in the consumer economy is inflation.

People don't want to have to pay more for a stay that used to cost less, but you know, in fairness to the hosts who are renting out their homes, cleaning costs are going up, utility bills are going up everyday expenses are going up, so they have to raise prices in order to keep this a viable business.

That's kind of always been the tension with Airbnb model where it's the hosts who set the prices well.

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People are sick of Airbnb chore lists. What does it mean for hotels?

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