It's earnings season, which means our show's usual suspects are opening up the books and showing off their numbers. Unfortunately, unless your name is Upwork, Uber and DoorDash - darlings of the gig economy - the numbers aren't all that exciting. Spoiler alert: Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter and Dice disappointed pretty much every shareholder. While job sites are losing, however, labor continue to win in light of the recent UAW smackdown of Detroit's Big Three. In addition to carmakers, airlines are getting in on the act, and don't be surprised if more segments start blowing up, thanks to so much China hating going on at the moment in the West. What's more? Google for Jobs keeps evolving, RTO policies keep sucking, especially for mental health disabilities and challenges and Russia continues to ruin everything. This is why we can't have nice things, but at least we still have podcasts like this one to spread joy around the world.
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Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast.
Joel: Oh, yeah. Two guys who start every day with a green smoothie. The bartender says it's a margarita. Whatever. What's up, kids? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host, Joel "Footchball" Cheesman.
Chad: This is Chad "You've been Rick rolled" Sowash.
Joel: And on this show, Google for Jobs is not a nonprofit. HR Tech is having a hard time finding profits, and US worker's paychecks are raining profits. Let's do this.
Chad: Okay, I want to clear the air here, okay? So Jasper Spanjaart, who thinks he knows something about Portuguese, we're in Paris for Unleash. Is that where it was? It was, right. Okay. And he tells you that the way that they say football in Portuguese is, footchball. What the fuck is that?
Joel: This was an 18-minute conversation about how to pronounce football.
Chad: He comes back later and says, yeah, I was totally wrong. That's not how you pronounce it. I'm like, yeah, no shit, asshole.
Joel: It's fun to say, though, footchball.
Intro: It is very fun to say. So I have to thank Jasper for that one, because that was a funny 18-minute conversation about nothing, which is kind of like just about the length of a Seinfeld episode.
Joel: Yeah. Wasn't this before he ate some bad fish and spent like the next eight hours on the toilet?
Chad: It was not good. It was not good for poor Jasper.
Joel: Yeah, it was not good at all. Unlike the meals you're having in Portugal, by the way.
Chad: Oh, dude, yes. It is beautiful. It is like a wonderful 75 degrees. I was just on the water, kind of clearing my head before I had time with you and here we are. So yeah, let's get this over with.
Joel: Time with me. Time with me. Clearly, there's no Olive Garden in Portugal.
Chad: No. No, but we do have olive trees everywhere.
Joel: That's where the fried stuff with cheese was. So that's the whole point.
Chad: Yes, exactly.
Joel: Well, I'm glad you're having a good time. You're there through the holidays. So everyone, if you're sick of Chad living his best life pictures on Facebook, well, guess what? They're not going to stop.
Chad: Yeah, pause. Pause me on Facebook if you don't want to see my pictures, and Instagram if you don't want to see my pictures.
Joel: If you don't see them, you'll run into Cardboard Chad on a Zoom call near you, at some point.
Chad: Thanks to ERIN app. Yes. All right, let's jump into these shout outs 'cause I know everybody wants to hear them. My first shout out goes to senior recruiters who are getting Rick rolled by resumes.
SFX: Never going to give you up. Never going to let you down. Never going to run around and desert you.
Chad: That's right. Recruiters should obviously take more than seven seconds to review a resume. Why, you might ask? Why? Well, Angelina Lee, a software engineer, totally duped recruiters with a hilarious resume with bullet points that got her immediate interviews. Here are some of those bullet points. While at Instagram, she was a full stack engineer that led teams, a team of six engineers to mine Bitcoin on company servers. At Zillow, as a senior full stack engineer, she organized team bonding through a company potato sack race, resulting in increased team bonding and cohesivity. At LinkedIn as a software engineer, she connected with Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn and slid into the DMs.
Joel: That was her skill. That was on the resume. Sliding into Reid Hoffman's...
Chad: Yep.
SFX: That escalated quickly.
Chad: At the University of Berkeley, California, she set the Phi Beta Phi fraternity record for most vodka shots in one night. That is all. That's a bullet. And last but never least, all the links in her resume lead to a video of a YouTube video. Rick Astley, never going to give you up. Yes, she Rick rolled recruiters from Atlassian, GitHub, GrubHub, Bolt, scale.ai, Reddit, Airtable, and Wattpad. They all wanted to interview her immediately with these fucking bullet points on her resume.
Joel: Clearly, she has cracked the algorithm code of passing the pre-screen.
Chad: Oh, it's fucking awesome.
Joel: Wow. All right. Well, my first shout out goes to Walmart, something they also probably don't have in Portugal, if I'm guessing. Well, anyway, Walmart is introducing daily sensory friendly hours. I didn't even know this was a thing, across its stores nationwide, which will involve lowering the lights, turning off the radio and replacing TV displays with static images. These hours are designed to accommodate individuals with sensory processing issues such as autism, ADHD, PTSD et cetera. Walmart sensory friendly hours will run from 8 to 10 AM At your local Walmart in the US and also Puerto Rico stores. There is no no end date that's been named. So I think this is a great thing. I didn't, I mean, like, I don't know how this came up or...
Chad: Should adopt it for everybody.
Joel: I don't feel like you need to have a disorder to enjoy this. I'd love to go to Walmart without the TVs. And if they could get rid of the greeter, that'd be great. That'd be great.
Chad: We all because of all of the, you know, all the time on our phones, as you can see on YouTube, I'm holding up my phone. We have so much information coming into us at once. Walmart could be kind of like a getaway from all of that for everybody all the time. They can just get rid of all of that shit. Always. I think it'd be great.
Joel: I think this is sexy.
SFX: Ai, papi.
Chad: So shout out to Twitter who are selling Twitter handles, which I thought was interesting.
Joel: It's called X now, Chad.
Chad: Going to continue to call it Twitter. How do you know when your business model and company is in the tank? Well, here's a key indicator. Twitter has begun work on a handle marketplace for the purchase of account names left unused by the people who originally registered them. Earlier this year, Twitter began purging defunct accounts from its site and Musk posted that he planned to free up as many. As 1.5 billion usernames soon. It seems interesting, almost like selling domains.
Joel: Oh, it's totally like selling domains. And it's also strong arming all the corporations and personalities that have said, I'm not going to buy a blue check. I'm not going to do all that stuff because to me, it's sort of strong arming people like, you could lose your stuff if you don't pay up, if you're not active anymore. If you're, I mean. So to me, it's a play to like strong arm people into paying. But yeah, there are a lot of domains or not domains, but handles that I assume that people would pay big money for. Most of them probably pornographic, nevertheless, would probably pay a lot of money. The dude needs to make some sort of return on his $44 billion. This is one way to do it, I guess. He won't make many friends, but it is one way to to make some money. Maybe not...
Chad: It just seems like he keeps... He can't see the burning forest for the flames, for me. It's just like it's crazy. It's like he's driving this business further and further into the ground. It's because to be quite frank for me, this just means that more people can buy names that aren't them and they control. I mean, just the whole validity of why would I give this guy my credit card information? This is another big fuck you. I'm not doing it. There's no way.
Joel: This is another thing. I mean, so we both are familiar with dot jobs, right? So when dot jobs came out, you had to sort of apply and they proved it and everything else. There could be a case where any new company startup, new Hollywood darling that Twitter just keeps a wrap on their handle and you got to go submit a request to have the handle. So this could be a thing going forward, like if you're famous or a company or in the public domain, that you'll have to go to Twitter, X for approval of the said handle to get it. This could be a definite whole new business for X going forward.
Chad: Yeah, I think it's going to be a business that just runs people away and they'll go to other mediums like TikTok and Threads and who knows?
Joel: Well, Elon overload warning, kids. If you thought that was too much, Elon, I've got another shout out for Elon. It may not even matter the handles, Chad. Elon sat down with Britain's prime minister this week on the BBC and talked about AI and he says universal basic income is so 2020, he's talking about universal high income. Here's the soundbite from the interview. Enjoy.
Elon Musk: We have for the first time, we will have the first time something that is smarter than the smartest human. And that, I mean, it's hard to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you want to have a job for sort of personal satisfaction. The AI will be able to do everything. I don't know if that makes people comfortable or uncomfortable. It's hard. When there's new technology, it tends to usually follow an S curve. In this case, we're going to be on the exponential portion of the S curve for a long time. And we have to actually be able to ask for anything and it won't be and we won't have universal basic income. We'll have universal high income. So in some sense, it'll be somewhat of a leveler or an equalizer, because really, I think everyone will have access to this magic genie.
SFX: All right, all right, all right.
Joel: That's right, baby. We're all getting high incomes, no education, no nothing. Just universal high income. Sounds like a good time, Chad.
Chad: It's Wally. Yeah, no, it's a great time. But I mean, until that happens, people love free stuff, so they can go to chadcheese.com/free where you can get your T-shirts, free T-shirts, kids, from JobGet. Beer, you can prospectively win beer. We give one away, not one beer, but one big pack of craft beer left. Joel and I drink the rest of it. We just give you one beer.
Joel: You know times are tough when we give away one can of beer every month, everybody.
Chad: That's from Aspen Tech Labs. Just know they are sending a big, big thing of craft beer to you. Two fifths of whiskey from Textkernel. And when it's your birthday, you know, baby, it's time for a little rum with our friends over at Plum.io. Yeah.
SFX: Did you feel the tension in the air right now? I know I can. I can feel it all the way down in my plums.
Joel: That's right. Another year around the sun for some of our listeners and biggest fans, Chad. It's a short list this week. So, you know, it'll be quick. So Alicia Bichler, Lucas Roscoe, Katie Gentry, John Tehan, Kevin Lowe, Alan Bourne and Laura Martinelli are all celebrating a birthday this week. So shout out to you guys. Have a good time.
Chad: Lucas Roscoe, probably one of the most American names I can think of.
Joel: Isn't he a senator from Mississippi?
Chad: Probably Louisiana.
Joel: Vote Lucas Roscoe for congress.
Chad: Vote Lucas Roscoe. Now that voting is over, it's time for events, kids. And when we do events, we do it with Shaker Recruitment Marketing. That's right. They fuel our travel. I'm going to be going to TAtech in Europe in London, that is. December 4th through the 6th. I'm going to be emceeing the stage for a few days with Kirstie Kelly. It's a good time. It's going to be really focused heavily on tech in our space. Going to have a lot of tech leaders from our space talking about what's going on and even sir Richard and Queen Beverly are going to be there, so I'll give them your regards, Joel.
SFX: Bros and hoes, bros and hoes, I gotta have me and my bros and hoes.
Joel: That's not just for them, also FactoryFix powered fantasy football, Chad. That's right.
Chad: Oh, that's sexy.
Joel: Halfway through the season and here is your leaderboard going into week 10, I believe. Number one, she can't be stopped, she is a juggernaut in fantasy, Michelle Sergeant slaughter at number one still. Followed by Marcy Darth maul, Joe Mason Dixon line, funky cold Medina Perro, jagged little Jill Patterson, Jasper the friendly ghost Spanjaart, Billy Joel Cheeseman, Chad so washed up, Dean Streets Osner, Brent Losi gosi, sorry Lucy goosey or something like that. I made these up at about midnight last night. Dennis Quaid Tupper and kristin urban Dana. Round out the 12 players in fantasy football. That is your leaderboard powered by our friends at FactoryFix.
Chad: I beat Michelle Sergeant, the number one team last week by 40 points, four zero. I think she has two losses. Four zero points, 40 points and it didn't even phase her. I mean, she's scored that many points she is still on top. But you know who else is on top?
Joel: Who's on top?
Chad: Data, baby. Data's on top. If you're a data geek, you gotta check out this new Youtube series that we have. It's happening monthly. Every time the jobs report comes out, the BLS spits out their jobs report, our friends over at LinkUp who have a shit ton of labor market information, we get Toby Dayton who's a CEO over there, we get him on the line and we talk about the jobs report, we talk about landscape, we talk about the economy, those types of things. We put our first one out this week and it caught fire. It caught fire. I was really excited about it.
Chad: It caught fire because we go deep, Chad.
SFX: Just the tip.
Joel: That's right. That's right, we go deep on this one. All right, Chad. A lot of companies in our space reported quarterly earnings this week and it wasn't all that pretty. Here's a quick breakdown. Revenue fell at Indeed and Glassdoor amid uncertain economic conditions and the new pricing model at Indeed that I know you love helped push down paid job ads according to their owner, Recruit Holdings. Indeed's paid job ads fell 50 year over year heading out to DHI group that stock ticker symbol DHX. Home of Dice and ClearanceJobs reported third quarter revenue fell 2.8 year over year. The stock is down a whopping 20 plus percent since reporting. Ouch. Veritone who acquired PandoLogic and Broadbean, plunged over 20%, that's their share price on Wednesday as Craig-Hallum, a Wall Street analyst downgraded the stock to a sell rating after their earnings report. Background check company, Sterling, missed on earnings and revenue estimates. The silver lining perhaps was ZipRecruiter beating on earnings and revenue, of course that's after being down over 30% year to date. Chad, it's ugly out there. Your thoughts.
Chad: It's ugly and last thing I want to talk about is Dice, for God's sakes. But Indeed, right? Let's talk about the big guys in the space. Much like Monster, Indeed hasn't evolved their revenue model with innovative products. Monster and Crew Builder didn't evolve and Indeed, a more evolved platform at that time, knocked them both off the mountain. So since Indeed's inception, they have needed to do something different. All they have done is rename the exact same goddamn products that they have so that they can raise prices on them. All that they are doing is taking a search engine and turning it into a job board with mandatory registration for job seekers, right? This is the shit that we were doing in the late '90s other than the you know the performance click piece. I mean, they're starting to look at mandatory registration which is, it was something that even was a no-no back in the late '90s so they haven't evolved and they have actually devolved and only demonstrating to us that this is not a sustainable model. They need to be able to create new products not put lipstick on the fucking pig. Create new products and evolve their model.
Chad: This to me is something that you're going to see across the board but when you see a big industry player like this, you understand that hey, that's market validation. You've got to pivot and you've got to do something new quickly.
Joel: So there was a time when Monster was a public company, Yahoo, not Yahoo but HotJobs. When the economy was good, these stocks did very well. In any given vacuum, times are good. If you watch the Chad and Cheese Does Data show with Toby, things are improving and getting better so it's kind of curious why these stocks aren't doing well or at least going sideways. They're doing pretty poorly. I think the fact is, people are finding people in different ways. There's, there are disparate ways that people are finding work, finding people to fill jobs because there clearly are jobs that need to be filled that's in the news on a regular basis.
Joel: So I have outlined what I call the four horsemen of the apocalypse to the job board or the jobs industry, job posting industry. You ready, Chad? So number one in my four horsemen of the apocalypse for the job board industry, number one is Google and LinkedIn. Google for Jobs, no matter what narrative Indeed or anyone else says, is putting a hurting on the job board industry. I mean, it is a commodity that Google has sort of figured out and we'll talk about that in our next story. But Google is a juggernaut that job boards haven't quite figured out how to leverage in any scale and LinkedIn, let's be honest, is the place where you find people. It's where you source people. They've done a great job, like it or not, of pushing out the competition.
Chad: Yeah.
Joel: Putting a walled garden around their data and they have done a really good job of doing it and now they have OpenAI thanks to Microsoft's deep pockets to now take that to another level. So the first horseman is LinkedIn and Google. The second horseman is automation. Look, you and I just talked recently about the robots at AWS moving boxes, working in the warehouse. Why would you buy stocks that are job postings to hire people when you see images about Amazon replacing everybody with robots that carry boxes, not to mention driverless cars that are eventually going to come? Look, Wall Street is a forward looking indicator and forward looking, it looks like we are going to need less people. So why would I invest in these companies? The third horseman of the apocalypse is AI. Again, if I am looking at Elon Musk doing an interview with the Prime Minister of Britain, saying that we won't even have jobs in the future.
Chad: Universal high income.
Joel: Why would I invest in companies if there is no growth prospects for people or even having jobs in the future? And the fourth horseman of the apocalypse is the gig economy. We didn't talk about those stocks. Upwork is over 20% year to date in its share price. Uber is up almost 100% and DoorDash is up 80% year to date. If I am an investor, I see people have options. I see people can do their own thing. People can gig it as a career. So those four horsemen of the apocalypse, Google and LinkedIn, AI, automation and the gig economy spell trouble for ZipRecruiter, Indeed, Glassdoor and others. And I don't see any end to the pain that they are suffering.
Chad: Pain, the pain. [laughter]
SFX: 60% of the time, it works every time.
Chad: What Indeed has been trying to do is obviously raise prices and everybody at this point is trying to do what marketing has been doing for about 10-15 years, which is the qualified marketing light or MQL. That's what everybody is trying to do. I think that's the next pot of gold. But again, that's going to go away. So automation, I agree 100% on being able to get incredibly targeted. We just talked about in the shout outs where a resume was fooling recruiters. We need to be able to actually have proof positive that these individuals can do the job. Just because they say they can, doesn't mean they can. So for companies like Indeed to just continue to do the exact same thing over and over and over and call it something new, I think the market is starting to understand it's all bullshit.
Joel: Well, I mentioned Google in my summary and Google is in the news. Google is in the news. They're making changes to their free service, Google for Jobs, which may impact organic traffic to job postings in favor of sponsored jobs by some accounts. The alterations have been observed in Germany, the Netherlands and parts of the US and they involve reducing the prominence of Google for Jobs in search results. The modifications could lead to a decrease in free traffic to job boards, aggregators, ATS operators, and employers. Some experts believe this is in preparation for the launch of Google job ads, aiming to direct more traffic to paid ads while others think it's intended to enhance the user experience. Chad, you were interviewed for the AIM Group story. I assume you have some thoughts on Google's move on Google for Jobs.
Chad: Yeah, so I'm here in Portugal and I'm not seeing any changes. Even when I VPN into the states or even parts of the EU, I haven't seen any changes. So this is obviously still somewhat in beta, maybe A/B testing. But regardless, Alex Tchaikovsky actually did a video which showed the changes that they don't seem like an effort to slow organic traffic personally, although we will see in the numbers as it's rolled out. It seems like a more streamlined approach because Google for Jobs is ugly as fuck in the first place, right? So them to try to streamline it, to make it look better, more aesthetically pleasing, I think is incredibly smart. Plus, we're not 100% sure just how they're going to roll out paid ads. We think we know, but we really don't know yet. So personally, I see the changes, maybe the A/B testing, no matter whether it means that they're spending time to try to figure out whether these changes, these tests are better for job seekers and or the actual ads. When they start rolling out paid ads, I think we're really going to understand how this looks, feels, and there's going to be a lot of adjustments that are made. And with the Indeed and Glassdoor numbers down, it will be incredibly interesting to see how Google paid ads impact the entire market.
Joel: Yeah. I mean, the pay-per-click thing is going to happen. I think we've been predicting that for like three or four prediction shows. It's going to happen. Look, we talked about stock price. Google has been sort of under pressure to monetize. They're sort of getting AI a little bit weird and investors are asking questions. An easy billion dollars is getting into this job posting space in a big way and making Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter all pay a nice little tax to get their jobs on Google because they're all going to pay that tax, just like all the job boards and niche sites back in the day had to pay Indeed a tax to get their jobs on Indeed. The monetization thing is definitely going to happen. Google's really good about looking at user behavior, what people do, streamlining stuff. They cut out stuff that people aren't using. So the little tabs on the top, Google probably knows people aren't using those. So let's get rid of them. I think part of the commentary was that, oh, they've gotten rid of bookmarks and they've gotten rid of the email alerts. Well, Google might know that no one uses those. Such a small percentage get job alerts that why even have them. And frankly, I think we have overestimated the value of email alerts for job postings.
Joel: I remember back in the day where I was like, everyone's always looking for a job. They want to get that email every day about all the new jobs. Well, it turns out they're not that excited about a new life insurance sales position or being a state farm agent every day. People just tune that shit out and we've gotten a lot better at filtering out stuff. So Google may just know like, this is not that important. Let's get rid of it. It's getting people away from what we want them to do in the process. The other thing is it shows that Google cares. Google wants to make this work. Google isn't just throwing spaghetti at the wall and like, oh, maybe this will happen. This is 2007, I think they launched this. So this is over five years that they've been doing this. It works. They clearly are on board with job postings. Now they're going to monetize this thing. They care. That's what this move tells me about what Google did. Then the last thing is Google tests a lot of stuff. Certainly search results in my old SEO days, there would be, oh my God, in the wild, Google has different search results. Or, oh my God, they're putting a new story in the regular search results. Or, oh my God, they put in a YouTube video. Google tests this stuff to see how people respond to it. Do people use it?
Joel: So I wouldn't necessarily say this is gospel that this is what Google's going to do. They're probably in the testing phase. They may go back to certain things. They'll look at user activity. Don't get too excited that this is the end all of what Google for jobs is going to be. It may just be a test that they're running in a few countries and they may revert back to other stuff that they've done before.
Chad: Yeah, I think it was 2017, not 2007 for Google for jobs.
Joel: '17 is what I meant. It's too early, Chad. The coffee's wearing off. [laughter] The coffee's wearing off.
Chad: The thing that is going to be interesting is that Indeed won the SEO battle early on because it was easy. They gave Google exactly what they wanted. I know that as we tried to fight Indeed with dot jobs and launching 40,000 domains of pure corporate content against their single site of content. Google was looking for easy. There are some other things there too. The big question is going to be for me is that, can Indeed come back in like they did in the early days and find a way to game the system? Ones that Google likes and which will give them a rise in the search engine rankings, in the Google for Jobs search engine rankings. We will see. Hopefully, we will finally get to see corporate jobs rise organically because that is the source of truth. That is where the job starts. That's where it ends. There are no purveyors at that point. It's exactly what it is. We're going to see. There's still a lot to be shaken out here.
Joel: It is really interesting. I occasionally just look at search results just to see what's what and who's there. Maybe I didn't notice. It's just kind of a curiosity for me. I will say that corporate jobs are creeping up into higher rankings. Part of that might be...
Chad: Time, time in history?
Joel: All the niche boards are gone. That might be part of what this is. But these corporate sites that have been around since the dawn of the internet, they're starting to figure out optimization, the Targets of the world, the Walmarts, the UPSs. The big brands that we know are starting to creep up in some of these results. And I think they're creeping into the Google for Jobs stuff. Anyway, you're right. I think ultimately, Indeed, Glassdoor, they're all going to have to pay. They're already paying anyway to be above the Google for Jobs listings. That's not cheap. They're pricing themselves out a lot of this. I haven't seen an Indeed commercial in I don't know how long, so they're clearly shifting money. Or a ZipRecruiter ad. Now, I know I don't live in a big metro area, but those ads used to be really common and they're not anymore. Take that for what it's worth, but they're going to have to pay Google if they want to be found on Google. Otherwise, they're going to keep paying a lot of money on ads, which they don't want to do either.
Chad: Yeah. I think domains have had the time and trust, which is one of the things that have been like the recipe or the biggest ingredients for the recipe of good SEO is time and trust. Do they trust the domain? How much time? How much history is within the domain? Hopefully, we will see that shift because again, in the early Google days, they really had nothing to balance out against. Now, I think they know better, but we shall see. Who knows? They can still fuck this up.
Joel: The wild card is employers/ATSs need to make it a lot easier to apply to jobs because I think users know if I go to XYZ Inc., I got to go through 45 minutes of bullshit, apply to a job. If I go to Indeed or LinkedIn, they already have my profile, I can easily apply. Yeah, so until the corporation, if the corporation's figured it out and their ATS is figured out, then it's probably game over from an organic search result, but it still is a pain in the ass to apply to most jobs.
Chad: We shall see.
Joel: I need coffee. Everybody, listen to our sponsors. There is no show without them. We'll be right back. All right, Chad, can I interest you in some return to office news?
Chad: Oh my God, so many fights.
Joel: And some discrimination, a dash of discrimination. Yeah, I know this is one of your favorites. All right, the battle over the return to office between workers and employers is intensifying as more workers are filing charges of disability discrimination to federal and state agencies. A growing portion of these charges is related to mental health conditions like anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The increase in such charges is in part driven by employers requiring employees to return to the workplace and denying some of their requests for accommodations. The return to office policy has become a contentious issue in workforce management with potential discrimination claims arising from denying accommodation requests related to mental health diagnoses. Chad, your thoughts.
Chad: So, we actually talked about this a couple of weeks ago and this article came out in the Wall Street Journal like the very next day. So I said it then, I'm going to say it again, the Jamie Dimons, the David Solomons of the world, they just don't give a flying fuck about diversity, equity, and inclusion. So this is really not, this is going to fall on deaf ears to the likes of them. But I believe there are many CEOs that really do care and they want to understand the consequences of jamming everyone back into fucking cubicles, especially after we're seeing historic record lows of unemployment for people with disabilities and even women who can get back to full-time work because they have the autonomy to work from home. Earlier this week, I actually spoke with a CEO that specifically wanted to talk to me about this topic. He didn't even think about the impact of forcing people back into cubicles that would have on his workforce. And then we talked a little bit about the article where Brittany Lenhart, she was actually a face that you could put to it. Not to mention, it's very scary because then these four letters come into play. The EEOC and EEOC discrimination cases around this topic are exploding.
Chad: In September, the EEOC sued a Georgia employer for declining to allow a digital marketing manager with anxiety and other mental health disorders to work remotely three days a week. The company fired the employee soon after she requested the accommodation. We've become so used to a culture of control that it's hard for leadership to understand that you can actually manage and lead people from afar. And not everybody can do that. So it's going to take special managers. Not every company can do it. Not every company is not going to be able to do it, especially if they're very sales-focused and they need to have that control, let's say. But there are many companies that are out there that I think that will be able to get an amazing talent that is remote and even hybrid talent that are going to be just fleeing away from companies like this.
Joel: The harsh reality is most employers, they want you to show up, shut up, and buck up. Most of them are from a generation like us where the mentality is like, rub some dirt on it and fucking get back out there. Mental health is going to be a tough one. Look, if I'm hearing impaired, I'm visually impaired, I've been blind my whole life, that's easy to prove. That's visible to everyone. That is a much cleaner decision or debate to have. When you throw mental health in it, it's a really gray area right now. My guess is, companies don't want to deal with it. That's why your case study was fired. To go to court on that, to go EEOC on that, proving that is tougher, I guess, I would guess, than I have a hearing disability or I have a disability that is sort of culturally known, acceptable as a disability. There's a certain mentality of people in America, certainly, that will not embrace mental health issues as a thing to be accommodated by employers. The EEOC, we have to have some really strict rules, some really clear rules around what is mental health, what is a disability, is it a doctor's note, is it something more clinical? I don't know. This is more your lane than mine. Until we start treating mental health disabilities like we do hearing, visual, mobility, et cetera, this is going to be a really gray area and most companies aren't going to be really open to addressing the issues of mental health with workers.
Chad: Instead of just focusing on, well, are they really disabled? Other than them getting accommodations and needing accommodations, then we give them that, but who cares? The person, the human, they're doing a job. Moms who are working from home, that's not a disability. Being a mom is not a disability, but guess what? We're treating them like they have a disability because they're being mommy-tracked because they have to be there to pick the kids up or they have to do X, Y or Z. It's total bullshit. We need to understand that the great talent is out there and being able to provide them a little autonomy and treat them like fucking adults is where we need to be, whether it's disability, diversity, gender, doesn't matter. That's where our head needs to be. A lot of these discussions really tend to focus on one specific area. Fuck all of that. We need to focus on performance.
Joel: Yeah. One of the great tragedies of the return to office is the folks who were super happy and productive and content doing their job from home and taking care of kids, they're not dealing with exterior issues, those people are so screwed in this return to office trend that's happening. It's unfortunate.
Chad: And again, whether you have a disability or not, it doesn't matter. Just the human themselves, can they perform?
Joel: Well, from kind of a bummer conversation, let's talk about some winning.
SFX: Perhaps winning.
[laughter]
Joel: All right. Labor continues their winning ways. We've talked about the UAW and the big three. Toyota Motors said this past week that it is raising the wages of non-union US factory workers just days after the UAW union won a major win against that big three. Members at the General Dynamics plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have voted to ratify a new tentative agreement for salary increases. How's this for a little worker leverage, Chad? American Airlines is now offering $250,000 cash bonuses to poach FedEx and UPS pilots to join their ranks. So much winning, Chad. I can't stand it.
SFX: Perhaps winning.
Joel: What are your thoughts?
Chad: [laughter] So I watched an interview with Shawn Fain, the head of the UAW this week, and he mentioned this as the UAW bump, which I think is pretty cool because, again, GM is bumping non-union wages. Not to mention, they're doing a company match increase from 4-6% on 401K plans, right? Toyota 9% wage bump, General Dynamics, UAW, Stellantis, they're actually building new plants in Illinois, right? So as we were talking about this months ago, it was like, well, shit, they're just going to move everything away. Well, the UAW is like, no, nothing's getting done. We're doing more here in America. And from an optics standpoint, nobody has gotten this done right over the past 40 years. Shawn Fain and the UAW have done it. Not only are we seeing wage gross, but they're also planning, again, on building more in the US. So I'll say it again. I love this. I love this. As CEOs received 1500% increases while American workers turned in to the working poor with 18% increases that, for the most part, was less than inflation in many parts of the United States. While guys like Milton Freeman and now Josh Berson and Johnny Taylor are a proxy mouthpiece for the rich, we finally have a mouthpiece. We have a mouthpiece for the people who are doing the work on the front line. So these moves are a collective middle finger to those assholes saying, fuck you, I deserve more.
Joel: Yeah. Shawn Fain has made the rounds on TV. You being in Portugal maybe don't get as much as we do, but he is a popular guy on the news shows. And his new statement is, the next time we do this, it won't be the big three, it'll be the big five or six, which is a shot across the bowel of Toyota, Honda, the German car company, and...
Chad: Tesla.
Joel: Maybe most importantly, Tesla. And those companies are going to have to either you know, get ahead of this, raise salaries now. I imagine at some point Tesla is going to use their stock leverage to keep workers happy or keep them from striking or unionizing. Salary increases will probably be part of that, but they're going to make the stock options really juicy, I think, on Tesla workers. Also being in Europe, you probably don't get quite the attention to the Republican debate that happened this week. And let's say anti-China sentiment and anti-producing things outside of the US and our allies is a very popular topic amongst the Republican candidates. And it is with Joe Biden who...
Chad: It's popular with everybody.
Joel: Had the great photo op with UAW. Like look, the sentiment, the rhetoric for the next year is going to be America, America, America, China bad, rest of the world bad, we need to build stuff here. The Intel chip, you and I, hearts are close to Ohio. Ohio is going to benefit greatly from this move, the Intel plan in Columbus. Yes, workers are going to win for the next decade because industry, production, everything is coming back to our shores. Globalization is like so last decade. The airline thing is really interesting to me. We can't just pull pilots out of the sky like we can probably auto workers. So these certain degrees and certain professions are going to be super hot. I have a 17-year-old at home. He'll hear about this 'cause I'll talk about it. You don't think a lot of kids now are going to want to go to flight school knowing that they're getting quarter of a million dollar bonuses for coming to work there. So really great time to be in labor. Capital is going to have to kind of suck it up and figure stuff out. Automation will be part of that. But anyway, let's enjoy the moment. Workers are winning. And maybe the biggest win is we get to play Charlie Sheen.
SFX: Perhaps winning.
Joel: We'll be right back. Chad, the Russians have finally gone too far. [laughter] A Russian doctor claimed in a TikTok video this week that oral sex poses a greater risk of causing throat cancer than smoking or drinking alcohol.
Chad: Bastard.
Joel: To support the argument, the CDC notes that HPV can be transmitted during oral sex with men being more likely to develop cancer from the disease while women are more likely to carry the virus. What's more, Michael Douglas, yeah, Gordon Gekko, previously claimed that oral sex caused his throat cancer. Chad, this is why we can't have nice things. What are your thoughts?
Chad: Everything kills us. We're all here on this planet for a short amount of time. Do the things that make you happy, just as long as they're not illegal. Come enjoy some sunny shores somewhere, whether it's on the US, it's in France, it's in Italy. It doesn't matter. You get one of these, kids. Enjoy every single bit of it. And if it has to do, some of it has to do with some oral sex, have at it. Please enjoy yourself.
Joel: Party at Casa de Sowash, everybody.
SFX: What are you doing, stepbro?
[laughter]
Joel: Okay. So, Chad, you and I are proud Gen Xers. You and I grew up with sex is going to kill you because of AIDS. Drugs are going to kill you. Remember this is your brain on drugs, the frying egg. Smoking obviously is going to kill you. How many ads of throatless people and lung, black lungs do we see? Drunkenness is going to kill you. Remember, mothers against drunk driving. Everyone's going to die from drinking, sex. Everything fun is going to kill you. What's next? Listening to podcasts are going to kill you?
[laughter]
SFX: Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Joel: But like, throwing oral sex will kill you is not going to move the needle for Gen X. And I doubt that it's going to do much for the millennials or the Zs.
Chad: No.
Joel: And the boomers really don't give a fuck at this point. So look, kids, like Chad said, we're looking at Biden versus Trump 2.0. We're looking at World War III. And more than anything, we're looking at more annoying pictures of Euro Chad enjoying his best life. We can all use a little more oral sex. We out.
Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now, go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap, because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.