The "Great Resignation" has been fueled by anecdotes and a tiny upward tick in the underlying data. If you go looking, it's not hard to find comments, anecdote

The "Great Resignation" has been fueled by anecdotes and a tiny upward tick in the underlying data. If you go looking, it's not hard to find comments, anecdotes, and stories from people whose workplaces did experience some sort of large resignation event where a lot of people went out and got new jobs. The common theme in those anecdotes is always that they were underpaid and/or mistreated to begin with. In some ways, the "Great Resignation" news stories being blasted all over the news gave a lot of people the final push they needed to go out and look for new jobs. Combined with the booming economy, it wasn't hard for these people to find better jobs. Once their coworkers realized what was happening, they also made the leap. So in a sense, it does appear that small pockets of employers who were behind the curve are finally getting what's coming to them. I half believe the news stories about "Great Resignation" stuff became a self-fulfilling prophecy where everyone who wasn't getting a new job felt left out. But if you look at any larger company data or at companies who were smart enough to keep pace with compensation and employee treatment norms, there isn't really a wave of resignations like the news stories suggest. Overall employee turnover is slightly higher than normal, unless you also factor in the decrease in employee turnover during early COVID, at which point the running average of employee turnover is all that abnormal.