How to make switching jobs not terrifying

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

The U.S. labor market is stagnant right now, with little hiring and lots of people holding onto their jobs for dear life. In Denmark, there’s a different kind of labor system where it’s easy for employers to hire and fire, but at the same time people have a strong safety net in-between jobs. Today on the show, we learn how “flexicurity” works through the story of a Danish woman who left her job, and we ask how the model could work in the U.S.

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Ozempic's biggest side effect: Turning Denmark into a 'pharmastate'? For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Tyler Jones. Translation from Jasmine Lolila. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:11.7	This is the indicator from Planet Money.
0:13.8	I'm Stephen.
0:15.0	And I'm Darren Woods.
0:16.8	So, Stephen, there are reports showing that people are pretty worried about their jobs right now.
0:22.8	Yeah, it's this sort of labor market freeze that we're in.
0:26.3	Like, very few companies are hiring right now.
0:28.4	Workers, they're clinging to their existing jobs.
0:31.3	I believe job hugging is the word I've heard.
0:33.1	Okay.
0:33.6	Yeah, even if they don't like the job, they're holding on tight.
0:36.3	Yeah, the quits rate is really low,
0:38.4	and that is not a great sign usually. Now, there are a lot of reasons behind this freeze.
0:45.6	You've got interest rates starting to bite, uncertainty about government policy, probably even
0:50.4	artificial intelligence automating junior tasks. But whatever the cause, there is a set of policies that we in the U.S. could learn from,
1:00.7	policies that could unfreeze the labor market. It's called flex security.
1:05.3	Flex security, exactly.
1:06.4	When the economics Nobel was announced this year, this term kept coming up as a way to manage
1:11.8	a fast-changing economy.
1:13.5	The Danes, I think, have been very smart.
1:15.4	They invented a flex-security model.
1:17.6	This is economist Philippe Agion, one of those Nobel laureates.
	...

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