On Thursday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: Tens of millions of Americans drink water from systems reporting PFAS to the EPA. How safe is your water? See a map here. Plus, listen to a special episode on microplastics. The Federal Reserve leaves its key interest rate unchanged. Plus, President Joe Biden cancels billions more in student debt. USA TODAY Money and Consumer News Editor Charisse Jones looks at pensions, and whether they could make a comeback. USA TODAY Senior Reporter Jessica Guynn talks about workers pushing back against losing their PTO. Scientists consider fighting climate change by making clouds brighter and thicker.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Thursday, March 21st, 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today, how millions of Americans are exposed to forever chemicals. Plus, what's next for pensions in America? And how some workers are pushing back against bosses who deny PTO.

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At least 70 million Americans get their water from a system where toxic, so-called PFAS Forever Chemicals were found at levels that require reporting to the Environmental Protection Agency. That's according to new data released by the APA and its ongoing five-year review of water systems across the nation. The number will almost certainly grow as new reports are released every three months.PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. They're nearly indestructible chemicals widely used across a variety of industries found in drinking water, food, and more. The substances resist degradation and build up both in the environment and our bodies. You can take a closer look at where the EPA found pollutants with a link in today's show notes.

And PFAS can show up in microplastics, a topic we took a deeper dive on in a recent episode. For more on microplastics, where they are and how to avoid them, we have a link to that episode with my co-host Dana Taylor. You can also find it in today's show notes.

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We have a few money stories to share with you this morning. First, the Federal Reserve left its key interest rate unchanged again yesterday. The Fed stuck to its forecast of three rate cuts this year, despite signs that inflation may stay elevated longer. The decision leaves the Fed's benchmark short-term rate at a 23-year high of 5.25% to 5.5% for a fifth straight meeting. After hiking the rate from near zero since March of 2022 to wrestle down high inflation, the Central Bank has stood pat since July as consumer price increases moderated substantially.

Meanwhile, the White House has announced its waving another $5.8 billion in student loans for 78,000 public service workers. The administration is also sending emails signed by President Joe Biden to another 380,000 borrowers in the public sector, telling them that they're one to two years away from getting the same debt cancellation.

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Americans love pensions. So where did they go, and could they make a comeback? I spoke with USA Today Money and Consumer News Editor, Charisse Jones, for more. Charisse, thanks for making the time today.

Charisse Jones:

Absolutely. No worries.

Taylor Wilson:

So Charisse, Americans still seem to love traditional pensions. What did we learn from this recent survey?

Charisse Jones:

Yeah, it's interesting, because though pensions are not offered that often, people do still really want them. This survey found that about two thirds of those who responded said that they felt that pensions were a better bridge to a secure retirement than a 401(k). And three quarters of the people that responded said that they felt not having access to a pension actually made it harder to achieve the American Dream.

Taylor Wilson:

And Charisse, how many people actually have pensions these days, and which types of workers, which industries still hand them out?

Charisse Jones:

Yeah. I mean, at their peak back in the 1970s, you had about 27 million Americans who had pensions, and that had dropped to less than 13 million by 2019. Nowadays, they're really hard to find in the private sector. It's primarily the public sector that has pensions. And that's because they still have unions, and the unions make a point of negotiating for pensions whenever they're renegotiating contracts. And so it's basically if you're working for the federal government or in some other kind of public service job that you have access to a pension plan.

Taylor Wilson:

You mentioned 401(k)s at the top. Why do many workers prefer traditional pensions to 401(k)s?

Charisse Jones:

Well, with a pension, you're going to have this monthly amount of money, this monthly check or deposit that's coming to you in perpetuity until you die. You don't have to oversee your own investments. Basically, the company takes on all the risk. They set the money aside, they invest it accordingly, and then they continue to pay you. And so it's something that doesn't require a lot of work on your part. It's just this nice financial cushion that you're going to be able to get regularly on top of your Social Security, versus a 401(k) where it's really your money. You're putting your money aside and then you have to decide how you invest it to get the best return and then how much to spend once you're retired. And there's always the chance that you could run out of that money, and so it doesn't feel as secure.

Taylor Wilson:

Of course, pensions are not perfect. What are some flaws to traditional pensions, Charisse?

Charisse Jones:

Well, what's interesting is that a lot of people, I mean we think about a pension as being this bygone era where everybody had one, you got that with your gold watch. At their peak, only about two fifths of American workers actually had a pension. Factory workers had them, but if you were a minimum wage worker, you usually did not get that offering, and you had to be at the company for a certain amount of time to qualify for it. So say 25 or 30 years. So if you moved around, if you got laid off, if you didn't accumulate that kind of time on the job, you weren't going to get the pension anyway. And we know increasingly today, people change jobs frequently, so they weren't always available. Again, they cost companies a lot of money. The trade-off might be that your salary is lower because you're putting aside a certain amount of money to make sure they can pay out those pensions. And so they're not perfect.

Taylor Wilson:

So might pensions ever make a comeback, Charisse, to what we saw say a couple of generations ago? What's this conversation look like going forward?

Charisse Jones:

Yeah. I mean, it's not likely. I mean, we did see a couple of glimmers of hope last year when the auto workers went on strike. One of the things they asked for were pensions. They didn't get them, but it showed that it was still part of the conversation. And IBM has actually started offering a defined benefit where instead of contributing to a 401(k), they're putting that money into a defined benefit account. But for the most part, it's probably not going to come back on a significant scale. Private sector employers haven't had to offer them in a long time. And again, they're expensive. It's a lot of risk for the company. And so they're still going to be pretty far and few between.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Charisse Jones is a money and consumer news editor with USA Today. Thank you, Charisse.

Charisse Jones:

Thank you.

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Taylor Wilson:

Workers are pushing back against bosses who veto paid time off, also known as PTO. I spoke with USA Today Senior Reporter, Jessica Guynn, to learn more. Jessica, thanks for hopping on The Excerpt today.

Jessica Guynn:

Thanks so much for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

So Jessica, can you just start by telling us a bit about Cari Garcia and her experience with PTO?

Jessica Guynn:

Well, Cari Garcia is a food blogger who runs her own business and shares mostly Latin American recipes. But this was, in fact, her second career. She started out as a licensed clinical social worker and she worked in a number of facilities, including a psychiatric unit in a Florida hospital. And the unit was really understaffed, and getting paid time off approved could sometimes be tricky. And she knew this. So when she submitted the request in writing, she knew that these requests sometimes got lost. So she took a picture of the request, she sent it in six months in advance, because this was a big deal trip for her. She was going to Spain for two weeks. And she says one week before she was about to get on a plane, her time off was revoked. Rather than cancel her vacation, she told me she quit her job. She basically told her supervisor, "This wasn't a request."

And that experience was one of her big motivators to go into business for herself and set her own hours. And she's apparently not the only one, because she recently shared her experience on social media and she got a ton of responses from workers who say they found themselves in similar circumstances.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah, I'd imagine just a very powerful decision that Cari made there. Jessica, what else are we hearing on social media? I know there's a popular meme out there, for instance.

Jessica Guynn:

There is a popular meme. It's PTO. Meaning, not paid time off, but prepare the others. And it was really clear from the response to Cari on social media that there's nothing more triggering for folks with heavy workloads, especially in post-pandemic world, than to get their PTO rejected or to get it yanked at the last minute, no matter what the business reason is. And this is especially prevalent among younger workers who have a very different idea about work-life balance than their older peers. So they've coined this internet meme, which basically means, "This is not a request." It may say a request, but it's really, "Get ready to do without us."

Taylor Wilson:

So what does data show, Jessica, about this gap between how much time off workers ask for and how much they're actually getting?

Jessica Guynn:

Well, there's always been a gap between how much vacation employees ask for and how much they actually get. And there are all kinds of reasons for this. People often ask for the same weeks off during the holidays, school breaks, the summer. Organizations are more leanly staffed and have a harder time covering if multiple people, especially on one team, are out. But what was really interesting to me here is that lately that gap is getting wider. And so, I looked at some data from BambooHR, which is a cloud-based HR software company. And they found that employee PTO requests have increased 11% on average annually since 2019, but approvals have only increased 9%. And when I asked them about this, they said that in the first two months of this year, PTO requests jumped 9% year-over-year, but approvals rose by just 3%.

Taylor Wilson:

And Jessica, you touched on this a bit, but a lot of folks do seem to be prioritizing a better work-life balance these days. How does that fit into this?

Jessica Guynn:

Well, so on the one hand, you have organizations that are getting slammed with requests. On the other, you have workers who feel like they are exercising a fundamental human right to take a break from work. And that's really a significant shift that I think we've seen take place in recent years. And you can credit the tight labor market. Workers feel more comfortable these days asking for time off than they did before when they were worried about not getting that promotion or being replaced if they took time off. They worried there might be a recession. They also just crave more time away from work after the pandemic and the shutdown. They're probably being influenced by younger workers who just have a very different attitude about what work-life balance really means.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. And Jessica, you wrote in your piece that some bosses really are just these kinds of PTO tyrants. Right? I like that phrasing. How can workers, Jessica, better deal with these situations?

Jessica Guynn:

First step, you should read your agreement with your employer very carefully and make sure you understand what your rights are, and then you should take it up with Human Resources.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Jessica Guynn is a senior reporter with USA Today. Thanks, as always, Jessica.

Jessica Guynn:

Thanks so much for having me.

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Taylor Wilson:

Scientists keep getting creative when it comes to finding new ways to fight climate change. And yesterday, they highlighted another possibility, making clouds over the oceans thicker and brighter. Doing so would involve a fleet of ships which would travel the world's oceans, spraying seawater up into the clouds to thicken them, therefore, also cooling the atmosphere underneath. The theoretical technique is called Marine Cloud Brightening, or MCB, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The idea has been around for about three decades, but what's new is a study published yesterday in the journal, Science Advances, that lays out how viable the technique is, and also proposes a program of research that includes laboratory studies, field experiments, and cloud modeling.

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And Happy March Madness. The men's college basketball tournament tips off with the first round today, and the women's tournament will get into full swing tomorrow. You can follow along with USA Today Sports. And remember, you have until midday Eastern Time today to get your bracket submitted for the men's tournament.

Be sure to stay tuned to The Excerpt later today for a special episode as my cohost, Dana Taylor, speaks with polyamory expert Leanne Yau. Why is this relationship style so talked about right now? You can find the episode right here on this feed, beginning at 4:00 PM Eastern Time.

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And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio. And if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. As always, if you have any comments, you can reach us at [email protected]. I'm Taylor Wilson, back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA Today.