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A record 4.5M workers quit their jobs in November
- Cypher 5y agoI want to quit, don't know how to get an income and support myself though
- seaman1921 5y agoby finding a new job..
- jcun4128 5y agoThe thing is after you quit you have to have the drive to keep going on your own. I'm experiencing that now. Easy to just turn a game on/procrastinate. I don't have money saved so yeah... living on debt currently. Not ideal I'm aware.
- yurishimo 5y agoApply to jobs and interview. No need to quit before you have a new job lined up.
- jabej 5y agoWhat % of this was caused by the jab mandate that was introduced around that time?
- tuckerpo 5y agoArticle doesn't seem to differentiate between people resigning and getting let go due to medical mandates. It'd be interesting to see those numbers.
- PhoenixReborn 5y agoUnlikely that it's related. For example, here's a report about the September quit rate: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/12/a-record-4point4-million-people-quit-jobs-in-september-great-resignation.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/12/a-record-4point4-million-peo... That was 4.4 million people, even before the vaccine mandate was around.
- aenis 5y agoUnrelated. Its for better pay/less miserable jobs. I work for an HR company. There hasnt been such a crazy market in modern, recorded history of our industry. Want to change jobs? Now is the time.
- encryptluks2 5y agoProb not as much as the pandemic as a whole causing stress and other issues where people are re-evaluating their careers. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a slave to a rich asshole boss who says things like, "Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me."
- nebula8804 5y agoFrom what I can tell, I don't think he has any problem finding people. From what I can see after watching teardowns of his products, the best of the best are working on his teams. Maybe the low level grunts are swapped in and out like disposable cogs but the rest of the org? I mean look at what they do compared to the competition. The engineering on their products is truly next level. Their workers are probably sacrificing a ton of their sanity and energy but still stick around.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoRegardless of your opinion of musk, this quote doesn't seem especially awful? Like, the obvious evil boss quote here is "get to work". Not "I'm going to be there with you and if there's any problems I'll take the fall personally"
- encryptluks2 5y agoExcept that isn't how law enforcement works and you know it.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoNot really. That would look incredibly bad for the police. That's a highly publicized event with outcomes way above generic officer's pay grade. In particular, we can just look at what actually happened. Nobody went to jail. The county folded and let him do it. Shrug.
- smt88 5y agoWhy ask when you can easily find out the answer? I suspect because the answer is "very, very few" and it doesn't fit with a certain narrative. > Just 5% of unvaccinated workers—and 1% of all workers overall—said they left a job because of a COVID-19 vaccine mandate from their employer, more evidence that a feared exodus of workers due to mandates isn’t as severe as some predicted.[1] 1. https://hrexecutive.com/how-many-unvaccinated-workers-have-quit-to-avoid-vaccine-mandates/ https://hrexecutive.com/how-many-unvaccinated-workers-have-q...
- obviousreason 5y ago[dead]
- shadowbanned9 5y ago
- themanmaran 5y ago> “It’s not understood in the broader public discussion, people aren’t quitting their jobs to leave the labor force they are quitting their jobs to take other jobs” Well maybe it would be more well understood if you didn't run titles like "A record 4.5M workers quit their jobs". The linked BLS report gives some more useful statistics: > "Over the 12 months ending in November 2021, hires totaled 74.5 million and separations totaled 68.7 million, yielding a net employment gain of 5.9 million."[1] [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm
- capableweb 5y agoWell, the title was not "A record 4.5 million workers stopped working" but instead "quit their jobs". That most people get new jobs after quitting is fairly obvious I think, while if they wrote "stopped/refuses to work", the other point would have been obvious.
- admax88qqq 5y agoThat's more nuance than most readers will apply. Especially with the popular conception of "nobody wants to work." If you're in the "nobody wants to work anymore" camp, this headline will confirm your belief as it is easily taken as "look at how many people don't want to work!" It's negligent reporting.
- vikingerik 5y agoIt's not negligent. It's deliberately misleading for the click-bait. They know exactly what they're doing.
- mcguire 5y ago"That's more nuance than most readers will apply." Certainly more than what's seen here in this thread.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- brink 5y agoI switched jobs in November for a ginormous pay raise. I think this is the case for a lot of these people.
- pavlov 5y agoMillions of Americans did not get a ginormous pay raise in November. Your perspective is skewed by the tech industry bubble.
- spoonjim 5y agoA lot of people went from $10 to $12 or $22 to $26.
- brink 5y agoYeah - the sign at my local McDonald's is offering jobs at $16/hr - 2 years ago it was ~$10.
- Wohlf 5y agoWhere is this happening? Even fast food places in my area are starting at $15 an hour, and paying people to show up to interviews.
- tester756 5y agoI tripled my salary with one job change (but I've been underpaid, so probably doesn't count that much)
- irateswami 5y agoGet while the gettin' is good, people! You now have power over that caviling, micromanaging boss of yours. Or the job that doesn't pay you enough. Or the gig that makes you come in the office when you can work perfectly fine from home. Remember that productivity in America has doubled in the last 40 years, but wages have only risen by half. So sit on your ass a bit, get paid, then get a gig that respects your worth.
- astrea 5y agoI feel as though the average HN user (CS cluster or adjacent) already had this luxury.
- MattGaiser 5y agoEh, even bootcamp grads are getting multiple offers these days. I wish I had graduated in this market.
- nickysielicki 5y agoIf you have less than 5 YoE the market is not nearly as hot as it is for seniors, not many teams want to onboard a junior remotely.
- orzig 5y agoSure, but few comments are useful to a full 50% of readers. Bottom Decile: This is your moment!
- jzig 5y ago> You now have power over that caviling, micromanaging boss of yours. Or the job that doesn't pay you enough. Or the gig that makes you come in the office when you can work perfectly fine from home. What about when I have all those things and still hate my job?
- willcipriano 5y agoNegotiate less job for the same pay.
- apalmer 5y agoI am only perplexed by this in regards to how workers are surviving without jobs? Usually many brackets of workers live check to check to the degree they have no choice but to continue working despite all other concerns. Is it the gig economy setting a bottom line ‘might as well do Uber’ level? I am not so sure but it’s the only major change in the last couple years ago I can think of? From a straight economic perspective REAL compensation of lower skill workers has been sliding for decades so not really surprising it eventually reached a’might as well quit’ point.
- sokoloff 5y ago> From a straight economic perspective REAL compensation of lower skill workers has been sliding for decades Has it? I’ve seen that claim a lot, but every time I look at the data, it shows growth across all quintiles. https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2021/10/25/updated-u-s-household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2021/10/2...
- convolvatron 5y agoI just looked at this and while there is no sliding, the bottom 3 have been really quite flat
- sokoloff 5y agoYes, my main point is that very modest growth over decades is quite different qualitatively from "been sliding for decades".
- aaomidi 5y agoThis graph has a weird starting position. If this graph started, maybe 30-40 years before that, you'd see it telling a very different story. The reason it's sliding for decades is that the purchasing power of that same money has gone down. Why? Housing. Housing is not calculated in inflation rates, annnnd everyone needs a house. So yeah, the REAL compensation has been sliding down due to no real growth there while housing has skyrocketed. AND that before 1965, we actually did have significant wage growth. So, this is one of those cases where the data is misleading.
- rubiquity 5y agoI'm not surprised to see three industries at the top of the list where interfacing with the general public is the main part of your job. I worked in retail as a full time job for five years on my way to becoming a programmer. The verbal abuse you can receive from people on a daily basis was rough. Nearly every interaction involves putting yourself in between a company's policy and the person in front of you. You're sort of being paid to be a sacrificial lamb for the company's policies. A decade or so later I imagine it's even worse given how emotionally charged people have become due to this era of politics and how everyone is coping with lack of leisure during COVID. I remember how nearly all of my friendships were with people I immediately worked with or who also worked in retail/restaurants and in hindsight it's obvious we were bonding over something other people couldn't relate to. Getting together typically involved a lot of alcohol.
- munificent 5y agoI follow a few subreddits dedicated to service industry jobs and the stories you hear there are just absolutely insane. COVID has taken a deep emotional toll on everyone. Then you factor in that the kind of people still going out to restaurants and such during the pandemic are also often the most entitled, least thoughtful segment of the population, and you get some real horror stories. It used to be "here's a story of a shitty tip I got". Now, it's like "I had to call the cops on someone who started throwing chairs when I told him he had to weak a mask." Healthcare is the same. Just story after story of burned out nurses having patients dying of COVID screaming in their face about it being a hoax. I feel so sorry for anyone who's job forces them to deal with people so decoupled from reality.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI assume many people also looked around at friends and family with computer friendly jobs and saw them be able to work from the comfort of their own home in the event of a public health emergency, while they had to still go out and deal with the public face to face. If I was in their position, I would be demanding a hefty premium for having to leave my house to earn money.
- thenerdhead 5y agoIt's probably better to report this as "reshuffling" than quitting. People are quitting jobs for new ones. Better pay, less legacy, new opportunities, and more autonomy. Everyone is taking advantage of the market conditions. In the end, I think this will be a good step for humanity. More people will find their passion/calling and take risks they normally wouldn't.
- candiddevmike 5y agoI have an unproven theory that the need for more workers stems from administrative bloat. There's not enough people doing actual work in companies anymore, everyone is a thinker/staff culture change agent/product|project manager/architect/"thought leader"/"I don't touch production, I'm researching new technology". This causes the people actually doing work to search for these positions because they're gravy compared to dealing with the schizophrenic requests of the admins, and the cycle continues.
- hotpotamus 5y agoYou and David Graeber both. His book about it is "Bullshit Jobs". Certainly seems like a valid theory to me.
- willcipriano 5y agoMy experience in firms is that managers tend to create more managers and large firms buy up all the successful little ones. This leads me to believe that the final form of the economy will be a single worker surrounded by a few hundred million managers, who themselves have a series of managers. So on and so forth.
- mjklin 5y agoThe Onion once ran a headline: “All Corporations Merge Into OmniCorp”
- vsareto 5y ago"Human species becomes oligarchic mega corporation on financial bet that undiscovered aliens also love capitalism" and other Stellaris playthroughs
- Apocryphon 5y agoSchismatrix by Bruce Sterling must've been a best-seller in the future history of that play through timeline.
- swarnie 5y agoThis weekend i watched a podgy McDonalds shift manager shout at a teenage Wagie until he cried. The conditions are poor and the compensation isn't adequate, no wonder people are leaving their roles and the younger generations don't fancy it.
- smm11 5y agoMight be retiring early this summer, a few years ahead of schedule. The math is looking good. Two open jobs for all you who can't find one.
- fasteddie31003 5y agoI'm one of them. The remote grind was getting to me. I was doing very little actual work, but when I had to do something it was such a pain. The company was experiencing massive turnover with new employees being clueless oh how things got done. Everything started to be 10x as difficult as it used to be. Taking time off now to work on a startup. Already got my first two paying customers.
- athrowawayguy 5y agoYour story is very similar to mine. It's not that the job itself was grueling by most standards, but the little work that was involved was unreasonably difficult because so many wrong things were done and no one was interested in solving systemic issues. Tasks that should have been very simple were monumental because of colossally bad decisions. I of course had some time to address a few long standing issues, but like at most companies management didn't see the value in scheduling these fixes in relation to features they wanted churned out, so most of that just got put on the sidelines. This company's solution to inefficiencies was to hire more programmers. Of course that's not how management sees it; when the business is booming, hiring lots of people is just seen as a necessary evil that doesn't need to be tied to specific needs. I realized that life was too short to deal with that shit for years, so I walked. In another time, I might have put up with it because there'd be people to see and things to do. Now with my usual conventions and meetups being indefinitely closed, paranoid friends and family members, and some challenges with traveling, I don't have the motivation to put up with corporate BS anymore.
- voz_ 5y agoThis article, sadly, is rather shallow. That being said, the link within the article: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm is full of somewhat difficult to parse (not the best presentation) but overall interesting information. Googling the name of some of the tables led me to this site, which appears to use the same terms but plots them to show trends. ex: https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_quits_rate_total_nonfarm https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_quits_rate_total_nonfarm
- MangoCoffee 5y agohttps://www.businessinsider.com/boomer-retirement-catastrophe-us-economy-mcdonalds-ed-rensi-2022-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/boomer-retirement-catastroph... boomers retiring and people switching job. there will be less money for start up when boomers money is going to retirement instead investment.
- bluedino 5y agoIf I leave for a new job making 30% more, and my company pays my replacement 30% more, he has to be replaced for 30% more... Nobody new is entering the job market. Nobody's leaving. Just shuffling around. We're still all doing the same work. These companies are paying 30% more for labor. Aren't prices just going to go up and we're basically in the exact same spot?
- pantulis 5y agoLooking at the demand side, I feel that there are not that many new jobs created, not even by a long shot. So mostly everyone is shuffling their chairs, and getting a raise. Employers lose here. If I am right, I'm curious to know why this is happening now. The pandemic should have something to say: people would prefer remote jobs now that most companies have been forced to allow for that job model. But is this enough?
- lotsofpulp 5y ago>If I am right, I'm curious to know why this is happening now. Sometimes, you need a shock to the system to precipitate change. In the US, I was seeing labor supply was getting tight throughout the 2010s, and labor prices were rising for years, but the pandemic shutdown and benefits provided a great catalyst to spur the change that needed to happen to force a change in the price negotiations of labor sellers and labor buyers. I can only hope this change continues and we see more labor price transparency, and more movement in labor markets eventually resulting in reduction of income/wealth gaps.
- medvezhenok 5y agoPart of it might be transfer payments, part of it might be the wealth effect (stocks, house prices etc and everything bubble might have pushed people into retirement earlier). Probably affects behavior on the margin and has people pull away from the work force (and I think the Federal Reserve might be starting to realize that). Also about half of the boomers have / are hitting retirement age and are retiring en masse, which will shrink the available labor supply quite drastically (especially since they were very productive workers in late career stage)
- neom 5y agoDW the German public broadcaster did a really interesting 15 minute mini doc on this "great resignation" thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR5XaparSAo&ab_channel=DWNews https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR5XaparSAo&ab_channel=DWNew...
- yalogin 5y agoIt's unfortunate that they did not just say "changed jobs" in the title. However, as someone who doesn't know how employees leaving is handled by the HR, can someone tell me what happens when an employee leaves or joins? Does the company report it to the government, if so which branch of the government and why? Also how quickly after an employee leaves will the reporting to the government happen?
- mcguire 5y agohttps://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/29/job-market-2021/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/29/job-marke... Demand for workers has recovered, but the number of willing workers has not. The 2020 recession had one of the fastest (the unemployment rate) and slowest (labor force participation) recoveries of any recession since World War II. Government payments helped build and sustain savings, especially for lower-income people. Personal consumption spending rebounds past pre-pandemic high. Main reason for not working in the last seven days, among respondents under 75. (Retired is up, Other is up, the pandemic is way down.) Over 1.5 million more people are retired than would have been expected before the pandemic. Wage growth rises among low-income workers (5.1%).
- nevinera 5y agoI get tired of headlines talking about 'record numbers' of people - a record number of people existed this year, so talking about any other metrics in those terms is kind of pointless. Any time I see a headline of this form, my first thought is always "what narrative are they trying to sell?".
- ravedave5 5y agoIt's not like box office returns where nearly every year they are broken. This is a new trend. Check out the graph here - https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/live-markets-pmi-jolts-is-economy-changing-its-tune-2022-01-04/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/live-markets-pmi-jolts-...
- nevinera 5y agoI don't see anything in that article indicating that this is an unprecedented event, which is what the language suggests. And I do see a _number_ of places where they use the same "record numbers" text. Certainly something interesting is going on, but this type of language is just a way to sensationalize something - to a journalist, "an unusual surge in employment churn" can be written "record numbers of workers are leaving their jobs" and the bulk of the readers will be like "holy cow, RECORD NUMBERS? What will we do?" I find it interesting also that the graph you pointed me to only shows a couple years of data. If you look back further, is this a novel situation, or something that only comes up every few decades, or a situation encountered multiple times each decade? I have no idea, because the journalists weren't interested in my knowing that.
- lettergram 5y agoWait until they see December... There’s a lot of things going on, I think a large part of it is regulations. Another part has to do with politics and yet another has to do with inflation. - switching jobs means more pay; it’s a workers market. Particularly with the governments current policies causing inflation. - The jobs aren’t evenly distributed, there are job shortages in many states (particularly states implementing vaccine mandates) - there are many factories and in person jobs moving to non-mandate states - after years of being remote, people are switching to remote first companies and / or refusing to return to offices - others are moving to states / regions where they can be in person - I know a lot of nurses, firefighters, etc who were fired / quit hospitals and went into smaller practices or moved cities.
- dfdz 5y agoI really dislike how this data is presented. Trying to imagine 4.5M workers quitting their job is really difficult since it such a big number and lacks context. I think it would be better to say "about 3% of US workers quit their jobs in November" For context, from Jan-2000 to Jan-2020 the average monthly percentage of workers quitting was x%" Can anyone find a reference for x? I am having trouble.
- ravedave5 5y agoThis is a giant hermit crab shell move (I get this boomers job, you get my job, next person get your job) spurred on by massive wave of boomers retiring. Hopefully this ends up helping those at the bottom of the ladder the most as the current minimum wage is not acceptable.
- gnicholas 5y agoCompanies haven't given sizable COLA raises in decades, but with current inflation rates this will become more common again. Until COLA raises become standard, employees will be more likely to switch companies to get better pay pegged to today's buying power. Companies that start giving COLA raises quickly and assure their workers this will continue into the future will fare better. Employees will be less likely to jump to a new company if they understand that their current employer won't let inflation erode their real salary.
- trizic 5y agoIt is clear that higher salaries isn't necessarily helping companies hire. I wonder for things to go back to normal if companies need to start offering extremely generous 6-12 weeks of vacation.
- pbmango 5y agoFrom my fairly large sample size talking to colleagues, friends, and our users, perspective is an extremely important component to the decision making here. The context in which people work and perspective on their impact/earnings/learning has shifted, and I don't just mean remote work. Things have been moving pretty fast for the past two years no matter what corner of the uni/meta-verse you are in. Like many things your work, work routine, and everything built around it can be a fine balance of avoiding disruptions while you charge ahead in whichever track you are on. An opportunity to take a step back is likely prompting a lot of second guessing. The number of opportunities to do so are increasing. Competitor wages make headlines, opportunities change and maybe most importantly, your friends are no longer in another office building but messaging you just like your coworkers. So much of current the BigCorp HR playbook came out of post WWII "sign-up and fight with us for your whole career" model. It will be interesting to see this evolve through a new cycle - and even more interesting to see if it continues into a major downturn.