31 ms·

The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

396 points by PandaRider 5y ago

jokoon 5y ago
I recently found a job I would never have got before the COVID. Of course I was not really competent enough to deal with all that technical debt so I agreed to stop. Free money for me.
duxup 5y ago
"The Great Resignation" feels a bit like a phrase that folks have grasped on to and just attach the narrative they want to believe to it. Constant articles and such with very little data. Very frustrating as a reader. The idea that amid a pandemic and such that there are a variety of reasons seems backed up by the data, although I admit that's what I'm inclined to believe / seen.
- thechao 5y ago
  Here's my thought: most employees are quite risk averse, and businesses have been able to take advantage of that in order to negotiate better for wages (better=lower wages). The pandemic essentially forced people into being more comfortable in taking higher risks. It turns out that marginal increases in risk taking translate into wage gains.
  - stank345 5y ago
    I just changed jobs. For me it was my job pool increasing by 10x or 20x due to the normalization of remote work. It's also much easier to interview when you're WFH all the time.
  - duxup 5y ago
    I'm inclined to agree that some folks who stayed home (by choice or not) found that ... it wasn't that bad and doing so to find something else probably seems easier than it was before. My wife is possibly taking a leave to care for her father ... she's thinking a lot about if she wants to go back. If she wasn't taking a leave that first step / time might not be there to decide to do something else.
    - bachmeier 5y ago
      > I'm inclined to agree that some folks who stayed home (by choice or not) found that ... it wasn't that bad and doing so to find something else probably seems easier than it was before. There's this, but let's not forget that the S&P 500 is up about 40% relative to its pre-pandemic peak, so retirement accounts have been growing really fast. Staying home suddenly became an option for many. There were already concerns about boomer retirements. Add a pandemic most dangerous to older people, lack of concern for worker safety, and massive increases in retirement accounts, and you have a lot of people that can and do stay home.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        Also, generally, the pandemic probably led to a lot of people on something of a glidepath towards retirement to think about pushing things up some number of years.
      - vwcx 5y ago
        The stock market is an excellent point. Feels like there is lots of under-indexing (no pun intended) for the sentiment associated with 40% passive growth in one's retirement account since the start of the pandemic.
  - abofh 5y ago
    You are correct, but much like banking and other industries, as information becomes more discoverable, negotiations tend to balance more towards... Equitable? I have three contracts that drive the bulk of my revenue right now. I have a few different titles, but for simplicity, let's say Sr DevOps. As a matter of course, my oldest clients have my loyalty, but my highest bidder has my attention - work needs to be done on a Saturday night? For my oldest client, I'll do it. Conflicting deadlines come in? I'll try and take the hit (work extra hours), but the priority? The highest payer with the least micro managerial leadership. You pay me for my experience, or you pay me to attend your meeting while someone else pays me for my experience to actually do something. It's ok, I'll wait, I charge by the hour either way, and if your meeting is useless enough, I can charge you both!
  - chrisjc 5y ago
    I think you're correct, but I would add that inflation (not sure if you meant to imply that was part of the pandemic) has forced people to take higher risks as well. While in the past an employee may have tolerated below market wages in exchange for the stability (safety) provided by staying still, inflation and its effects have forced their hand. Food, gas, childcare, housing, transportation, etc... have all increased to the point that they've had to make bolder decisions. And that includes looking for better jobs (wages, benefits, work/life balance).
- nightski 5y ago
  You are doing that right here (narrative with little data). Even the NPR article says "the labor force participation rate remains significantly smaller than before the pandemic and it's still hard for employers to fill open jobs". There is data to back this up and it's not just a narrative.
  - duxup 5y ago
    The article seems to point to data that provides a variety of reasons. Having said that I'm also not writing a news article so I think the standard for not having data is a bit different. I don't expect any random person on HN to source everything ... like I would a news article.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > There is data to back this up and it's not just a narrative. The narrative is directionally correct. The issue is that the media (including NPR) has done everything they can think of to exaggerate it as much as possible. Once you look at the actual numbers it’s not the sea change we’ve been hearing about everywhere. The data is being omitted because the omission leaves more room for imaginations to run with the headlines.
    - pixl97 5y ago
      >Once you look at the actual numbers it’s not the sea change we’ve been hearing about everywhere. Ehh, that's debatable and much harder to prove either way. For years before the pandemic there have been complaints from every industry about companies trimming down teams/workforces to the smallest possible size. People were doing the jobs of 2 or 3 people were a common issue that was brought up, if anyone was sick the employer demanded you come to work anyway. And that's when things were good. Now add a large portion of employees being sick at any one time and suddenly the work machine is being driven over capacity and much like an overloaded TCP/IP network, congestion collapse occurs. Even a small change in the most productive employees moving jobs could lead to large disruptions inside of a business. Anecdotally this is something I witnessed. We had pretty low rates of employee attrition during the pandemic, but the employees that did leave were some of the most influential.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  The phrase “great resignation” also implies that people are just quitting, when in reality they’re changing jobs. The unemployment rate is lower than it’s been in a decade (except a month or two here and there), people who are resigning are getting new jobs.
  - slowhand09 5y ago
    The unemployment rate was lower in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. It went up when the pandemic kicked in. Here is one (of many) sources I found with a single google search. https://www.statista.com/statistics/193290/unemployment-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/193290/unemployment-rate...
    - aperson_hello 5y ago
      4.5% in December, which puts it on-par with 2017 and lower than 2016. U-6, which is probably a better measure of actual slack in the labor market, is lower than any time in recent history except q3/4 2019.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      The seasonally adjusted U-3 fell below 3.9% in May of 2018 for the first time since October of 2000[0]. I might’ve been a bit glib about “a few months”, it was closer to two years, but the general sentiment that the unemployment rate is extremely low right now still stands. It’s far lower than the entire period of October 2000 to May of 2018, which coincidentally covers the vast majority of my working life. There are still some issues around childcare that need to be worked out, which is probably the biggest source of the gap between U-3 and U-6 right now. But this is still one of the hottest labor markets in most of our lives. 0 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/
  - istjohn 5y ago
    The unemployment rate, by definition, wouldn't capture people who are quitting the labor force entirely.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Constant articles and such with very little data. Very frustrating as a reader. Actual resignations are up slightly, but the idea that employees are quitting in droves is exaggerated. It’s higher than normal turnover, but the stories are written in ways to suggest that companies everywhere are gutted by employees leaving in bulk. I feel like “great resignation” was deliberately chosen to mislead people into thinking people are just walking out of their jobs, which conjures images of a minor revolution. Of course, that doesn’t make sense because the employees are being hired at other companies. It’s likely that the worst of the worst companies are seeing a significant net loss of employees, but for most it just means turnover is up a tick. The problem is compounded because the “great resignation” is a narrative that people really, really want to believe. Every time I brought up the actual data on HN, it’s met with anecdotes about somebody whose friend of friend’s company lost all of their employees or something. These anecdotes seem to be the fuel keeping the narrative going far beyond what the data supports.
  - randomdata 5y ago
    Anecdotally in my business I saw effectively no churn in employment through most of the pandemic. Hiring new people was also nearly impossible. Then, towards the end of last year a significant number of workers quit. Finding new people to replace them also was surprisingly easy. I suspect a lot of people were afraid to move on to new opportunities for a while due to the uncertainty of the pandemic. Once enough confidence was restored, the job hopping we'd expect to play out over the course of a couple of years all happened in a few months.
    - InvaderFizz 5y ago
      I can certainly see this as a contributing factor. My own experience is that during the first year of the pandemic I was just cooling my heels in a stable position. Later, the prime factor for me moving on was the whole return to office narrative. I've embraced fully remote and now demand it. As such, I found a new job in Q4 and moved on, for a 25% pay increase as well.
      - 5y ago
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  I think the MIT study painted an interesting picture (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toxic-culture-is-driving-the-great-resignation/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toxic-culture-is-driving...). It has the issues of small sample size and cherry-picking (i.e. the researchers tranched companies by industry and had a model of "toxic culture" that could be disagreed with if one cared to make the case), but the overall turn-head-and-squint takeaway is the pandemic forced a lot of workers to ask the question "Am I willing to risk death for the assholes I work with?" and for a lot of employees, the answer was "no." Places where the answer was not "no" had higher retention (both across industries and within industries). What they do after that is an open question... Some choose another company, some choose another non-career avenue if it is available to them. But the point is the pandemic forced a perspective shift that hadn't happened before.
- outime 5y ago
  >Constant articles and such with very little data. Very frustrating as a reader. Very personal opinion ahead (and not tailored to this specific topic): that's most journalism for you. They're not here to "inform the citizen" as a noble mission. Most of the things the press publishes are greatly exaggerated and dramatic to evoke different emotions to the reader which are closely tied to an agenda. The fix is IMHO easy: stop consuming such media once you find such disparities instead of reading again and again about the same and other topics, because they'll most likely lie/exaggerate in everything else and at the end, you'll be happier and better informed by not filling your memory with bs. Edit: typo with->which
  - jiveturkey42 5y ago
    Is it reasonable to assume that if a publishing or media company is owned by a parent company, and that parent company has financial stakes in other industries, the parent company might pressure or incentivize a specific headline narrative to benefit their other financial stakes?
  - throw10920 5y ago
    I don't think that this is a particularly controversial opinion now. A decade ago, maybe. Half a century ago, certainly. But now, in 2022, I think that you could probably find even objective evidence that the median quality of journalism has significantly declined and moved from objective facts to cherry-picking emotionally-laden stories to push a narrative. Some news companies have even started to explicitly adopt "advocacy over reporting" models, where they don't aim to be journalists in the original source of the word, but paid propaganda subscriptions. (yeah, yeah, there are economic incentives to do so - but there are also economic incentives to make shoddy, low-quality products and cheat your customers in other realms, and yet it's still wrong)
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      > Some news companies have even started to explicitly adopt "advocacy over reporting" models, where they don't aim to be journalists in the original source of the word, but paid propaganda subscriptions. This is a positive development. The problem is when motives are concealed, as in "objective" journalism.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  Yes, also I think it caught on because it sounds like people are standing up to bosses and corporations and escaping the rat race. Good for them! Good for the resigners! Of course, as the NPR article points out, people are really just scrambling to find higher-paying jobs, because of rising costs for goods and services.
softwaredoug 5y ago
> spectacles like the immense popularity of the "Anti-Work" thread on Reddit — have gone as far as to suggest this record-breaking trend is a movement of young, able-bodied Americans rejecting work altogether. I don't think this is the point of "anti work". The point is (to me) that people should be treated equitably at work and that work shouldn't be the center of our lives
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- warent 5y ago
  Yes. Admittedly on the one hand what I see a lot is people embracing victimhood, relieving themselves or responsibility and self empowerment. That's the only aspect of anti-work that I don't like. Otherwise I think their message is very fair and very clear: raise wages to keep up with inflation, and treat workers humanely so people stop dropping dead of heart attacks on the job.
  - leadingthenet 5y ago
    > raise wages to keep up with inflation, and treat workers humanely so people stop dropping dead of heart attacks on the job. ...so continue working aka the exact opposite of what anti-work seems to imply. Gotcha. Another term got co-opted for political purposes, wonderful. Nonsense that once again originates in the US, which will inevitably land on our shores in no time.
  - zanny 5y ago
    It feels like newfound indignity and the realization is that most of us are actually victims - capitalist exploitation of the working class is codified into the societies we live in, it just took people taking a break from the grind, a step back to see what they were subjected to, to realize what the exploitation is and what it feels like. Its not popular on HN but most of the libertarian tenants that belay picking yourself up by your bootstraps are not applicable to a supermajority of labor. There is no change of attitude within the framing of the economic system as it exists that individual actors take on a collective scale to suddenly stop being exploited systemically.
eric4smith 5y ago
The “great resignation” was always suspect. Think about it - who would take care of all those people in the western world. I could see it happening in Asian cultures, but in the west? Nah. It’s not in us. I mean seriously, did we ever check ourselves to think that people would just stay home? Sure a certain percentage will — and that’s actually a good thing, especially families where both mom and dad worked. Since the cost of child care the and the benefit of caring for your own child is so great. But with most government subsidies ending, I see a lot of parents getting pretty antsy with grown kids at home. Let’s get real, people are going to have to get off their tukuses that they have been sitting on over the last few years and head back to some kind of work. It’s good if they choose something more satisfying, but most people will not have that luxury and the world does not owe us anything. So back to work you lazy bums!!
- newhotelowner 5y ago
  > Sure a certain percentage will 10-15% of the workers quitting is enough! If 2 of my 13 employees quit at the same time, I will have to start working 65-80 hours a week.
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    Nowhere near 10-15% of people are quitting to stay home.
    - mlac 5y ago
      They are quitting to change jobs…
      - xboxnolifes 5y ago
        I'm aware, that's why I said what I said and not what you seem to think I said.
        mlac 5y ago
ed312 5y ago
I rarely see any mention of how just so many people dying + becoming disabled impacts the job market. Historically big drops in available labor lead to improved labor negotiation (e.g. working conditions, wages). The "great resignation" is only one facet.
- quxpar 5y ago
  Worked great during the (surviving) workers during the bubonic plague. https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-better https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-bet...
  - randomdata 5y ago
    Worked well if you liked counting money. But if you liked spending it... "Thus the undisputed rise in nominal or money wages following the Black Death was literally ‘swamped’ by the post-Plague inflation, so that real wages fell." https://ideas.repec.org/p/tor/tecipa/munro-04-04.html https://ideas.repec.org/p/tor/tecipa/munro-04-04.html
- buscoquadnary 5y ago
  COVID probably hasn't had a major impact in that respect there are a total of 859,354 deaths in the entire country which is only 0.2% of the population, but of the working population it is even smaller than that as almost half of that is in individuals who are 75 or older and unlikely to be participating in the workforce dropping us to less than 0.14% of people being effected, or slightly more than 1 in 1000 people. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
  - rob_c 5y ago
    Thanks for replying with that... there's no mass piles of bodies in the streets impacting the workforce.
  - ed312 5y ago
    That's incredibly helpful, thanks! I assumed the deaths were skewed somewhat to elderly but not to such an extreme. I wonder how this impacts calculations of e.g. social security payments and wealth transfers in the US.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rr808 5y ago
I think too its a result of 30 years where employers have had the upper hand in the job market (except perhaps 1999, 2008). Wages have stagnated during these decades, it seems finally maybe wages can catch up.
- gfiorav 5y ago
  Not a Moore fan, but I think this is his most underrated movie [0]. It became free to watch on Youtube a couple years ago. Maybe it'll pick some more traction now. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUpnFNUmfKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUpnFNUmfKw
  - rob_c 5y ago
    loving the region locked irony
- lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  Wages are going to have to go up. House prices aren't going to come down, rent isn't going to come down, used car prices may come down but not to levels in the before times and only if new car prices don't skyrocket, food won't come down. It's getting very expensive to meet the ends. Wages will have to go up. When ppl think things aren't fair, they revolt.
  - soheil 5y ago
    So.. inflation?
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      No. Because housing and healthcare costs have been outpacing inflation for years. It’s only in the past year that inflation has been on the table discussion wise, while the average home doubled in value since 2012.
    - lkxijlewlf 5y ago
      Sure, if you can afford to absorb the extra costs, then that is certainly a simple way to think about it. If you can't, it has the potential to be catastrophic. Wages being stagnant for so long, there are more ppl edging towards the latter.
howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
> The Great Renegotiation is also a byproduct of inflation. Workers are seeking better pay to keep up with the rising cost of living. Keeping in mind small business is collectively the largest employer and contributor to US output... let's remember the coming rate hikes will greatly reduce available cash to small businesses that operate with credit lines, credit card debt or via home equity lines. That is a LOT of US businesses. Now add to this increased input costs due to inflation. Now add increased tax rates. You can also expect lending requirements will tighten. So, it's worth considering the odds of worker prosperity (vs) the odds of a wave of business failures and associated unemployment/underemployment in many (but by no means all) sectors. Personally, I think the Fed & Treasury will continue fiscal stimulus and capitulate hard in the face of a deep recession. More of the same can kicking, and we'll see what seems like prosperity. In reality, it's a delay of an inevitable downturn unless some magical productivity innovation or goods/services advance emerges to rescue the US economy.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >In reality, it's a delay of an inevitable downturn unless some magical productivity innovation or goods/services advance emerges to rescue the US economy. That sounds kind of like a plan. Delay until something random happens.
  - speed_spread 5y ago
    Unfortunately, War is not that random nor is it magic.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      Nor is it good for the economy (see: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, Iraq...).
      - elif 5y ago
        that depends on which metrics you care about.
manuelabeledo 5y ago
I think it's a bit of both. It's not only about the money. Many people are realising just now that they don't get paid enough to take all the crap they get from work. Anecdotally, I know a handful of engineers who quit their jobs because of this. They were making good money, just not good enough for the number of sleepless nights and stressful days they were going through.
- chasd00 5y ago
  what are they doing now though? Eventually, the student loan repayment delay expires, the covid unemployment goes away, any eviction moratoriums expire, and on top of it everything is more expensive than it was. I hope people who are leaving their jobs for less stressful or more accommodating jobs are increasing their income levels as well. There's going to be a big bill due when all the covid relief measures and savings evaporate.
  - manuelabeledo 5y ago
    > what are they doing now though? They are working in the same field, just different companies. > I hope people who are leaving their jobs for less stressful or more accommodating jobs are increasing their income levels as well. Again, sometimes wages are not worth the loss in health.
    - chasd00 5y ago
      I understand about wages not worth the loss in health but the bill comes regardless. I guess what you're saying is they were so far above day to day expenses (even adjusted for no pandemic relief and the current inflation) that a the decrease in pay will still put them in the black.
curiousllama 5y ago
I like this framing. This is 10+ years of pay and quality of life increases for many, all coming at once. Or, at least, the improvement is just now restarting. Folks should renegotiate. Good on them.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
Business owners will continue to be oblivious to this and hope it blows over even as their expenses increase due to the sheer amount of employees who will find better opportunities elsewhere.
pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
Non-cookiewalled: https://text.npr.org/1075115539 https://text.npr.org/1075115539 (Wow, it’s like free karma to post these.)
newsclues 5y ago
The social contact has been rewritten multiple times in the favour of elites during crises. The people are rebelling against the reality of the new social contract.
- president 5y ago
  You wouldn't know it if you only followed mainstream media. I think the corruption of media has been the downfall of our society.
bjourne 5y ago
"Yet, despite all the quitting and renegotiating, the real wage for the average American worker — meaning the true value of their paycheck after taking into account inflation — fell by 2.4% in 2021." All while the world's elites have doubled or tripled their fortunes. Great Robbery would be a more apt name than Great Resignation.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I would be interested to see the difference between those who did switch and those who didn't. It could easily be 20% raises for those moving and 1% for those who are not.
  - PascLeRasc 5y ago
    I received a 1% raise at my current job. My coworkers who worked evenings and weekends received a "100% positive adjustment of their raise" (2%).
    - root_axis 5y ago
      A 1% raise seems insulting imo.
      - Ancalagon 5y ago
        It is
        mgkimsal 5y ago
        I started at a company in mid January, and they did annual reviews in June/July. After review, I 'merited' a 4% raise. But... because I'd only been there since January, they prorated the 4% raise to 2%. I never quite understood their logic, but also didn't stay through the end of the year. EDIT: this was... 2004/2005 era.
        5y ago
latexr 5y ago
Text version without “Cookie Consent and Choices”: https://text.npr.org/1075115539/ https://text.npr.org/1075115539/
MattGaiser 5y ago
> "Yet, despite all the quitting and renegotiating, the real wage for the average American worker — meaning the true value of their paycheck after taking into account inflation — fell by 2.4% in 2021." Because most are still not moving. If a worker won't leave under these conditions, there is no reason to ever give them a raise as you don't need it to retain them.
- Liquix 5y ago
  Should it be the worker's duty to constantly be searching for better opportunities and interviewing for new jobs while working - or the employer's duty to provide reasonable CoL raises so employees aren't driven away from the company?
  - paxys 5y ago
    The only "duty" your employer has is to extract as much value out of you for as cheap as possible. If you expect anything different then you are going to be taken for a ride.
    - openknot 5y ago
      An employer at a for-profit company is responsible for maximizing the company's profits, but that doesn't mean it has a duty to extract as much value out of an employee for as cheap as possible. Such an adversarial relationship with employees causes them to leave, or at least avoid initiative or innovative solutions that are mutually beneficial to the employer and employee.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        The recent Thedacare (a non profit organization) debacle in Wisconsin shows this is not limited to for profit companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThedaCare_Regional_Medical_Center–Appleton#2022_lawsuit_against_Ascension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThedaCare_Regional_Medical_Cen...
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
fvavsc 5y ago
Exactly, I asked my manager for raise to match market rate. I received meh in response. It was great motivator to start job search. I don't blame her though. It is just how it is, ignore employees while chasing birds in bush lol
- wombat-man 5y ago
  Especially in large companies HR dgaf until attrition rates hit a certain percent. Then all of a sudden we're bumping bonuses and ticking up the annual step raise a couple points. It is exhausting.
Waterluvian 5y ago
It feels fundamentally wrong that my employer cares at all about where I live when determining my 100% remote salary. Can anyone offer me rational arguments for why they shouldn’t just pay people based on what they offer the job rather than where they choose to live? Because it makes me salty to be paid half of what a colleague does because I’m in rural Canada and not San Francisco.
- mehphp 5y ago
  The simple answer is because they can and people still accept the positions. Why would they pay you twice as much when you accepted half?
  - Waterluvian 5y ago
    Yup. Because I didn’t have all the information such as what others were being paid. I only knew that they were offering double what my current employer was offering to keep me.
    - bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
      So at that moment, all parties involved made rational decisions. Now that more information has come to light, you're fighting for what you feel is equal compensation. Sounds like the "system" working.
- vlozko 5y ago
  I think it comes down to an ability for a company to recruit. They can't recruit someone in SF with a salary based on rural Canada's cost of living. The justification is that it's in the company's best interest to reduce costs as much as it's in yours to get top dollar. A somewhat parallel example is whenever someone tries getting a car repaired or plumbing work done. They may all charge their own flat rate for labor but they almost always exorbitantly overcharge for parts. Why? Because if everyone else does it, they can too. It's money on the table they would be missing out on otherwise. It's an infuriating situation (I was charged $30 for 2 $4 gaskets on my repair yesterday) but it's a pattern that's been quite commonplace.
nikkinana 5y ago
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
asoneth 5y ago
Anecdotally I know several people who retired in the last couple of years. One who had been working past their planned retirement date but had been coasting on inertia and a few who moved their timeline up to retire a little early. (Though some of them still seem to do part-time consulting.) Apparently there are also fewer immigrant workers due to immigration changes during the Trump administration and the pandemic.[1] It’s not surprising that a shrinking labor force (relative to demand) causes ripple effects. As good positions open up it triggers a musical chairs cascade as everyone else trades up for better jobs. When the music stops it seems pretty obvious that the lowest-paid and/or worst jobs are the ones that will be empty. [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/12/22/1063104262/immigrant-workers-us-economy-key-jobs https://www.npr.org/2021/12/22/1063104262/immigrant-workers-...
zitterbewegung 5y ago
My brother resigned from his job and got another one in 6 months and doubled his income.
jonnycomputer 5y ago
Beware simple narratives. They almost always lie.
TedShiller 5y ago
The Great Whining is another way I’ve seen it described
asow92 5y ago
I would like to renegotiate reality.
curiousllama 5y ago
> But there are growing fears of a wage-price spiral in which workers, seeing rising prices, demand higher pay — and companies, having to pay their workers more, start charging higher prices. These higher prices lead workers to demand even higher pay, leading companies to charge higher prices, and so on. It's the inflationary cycle of nightmares. Can someone explain to me how this works? I'd assume wages to prices are a bit asymmetric. E.g., McD's sells 100 burgers per employee per hour at $2 each. It raises wages from $10 to $15/hour. To keep margin, it now needs to charge $2.05 - which is an increase, sure, but asymmetric: a 50% increase in wages implies a 2.5% increase in prices. Assuming that occurs everywhere - why do workers need to now demand still-higher pay?
- carapace 5y ago
  > Can someone explain to me how this works? It doesn't work. Labor is a tiny fraction of the total cost of most products. We could double wages at the low end ($30 minimum wage) and not affect inflation significantly.
  - rsanek 5y ago
    Source? In particular for restaurants and other businesses that rely on service jobs, I've typically read the opposite.
    - carapace 5y ago
      I said "products". Service industries with razor-thin margins like restaurants are more affected by labor costs, sure.
      - curiousllama 5y ago
        To be fair, service industries are the most likely to pay low wages
        carapace 5y ago
brianjlogan 5y ago
Shouldn't this be a part of a healthy functioning economy? Shouldn't labor be free to move where demand is? Demand represented by fairer compensation. I have a hard time believing these people are permanently quitting work. Rather think of it from the point of a business trying to attract new customers. I can see the inflation affecting me in my purchases and it's not breaking me. Restaurants are charging more and it's making me re-evaluate how important dining out is if it means trapping people in a low wage job they hate. Do I really wish for someone not to move up the ladder into a better position just so I can choose from some 50 restaurants in my area? Would my life still not support the indulgence of being able to eat out with say 25 restaurants instead of 50? And with a heftier bill but less frequently going out to eat? I think America is finally exercising some of the benefits of capitalism for the lower class and not just for the elite.
- tuckerpo 5y ago
  Anecdotal - myself and most of my peers (software, EE) have moved onto new jobs during the pandemic for gargantuan raises. I don't know anyone in a white collar field who quit and is just chilling now. Old friends who work retail also quit for other retail jobs with slightly better pay, more hours, etc. It brings me joy to see the average person finally realizing their worth and leveraging a little bit of personal risk for better compensation.
papito 5y ago
I am reading Davos Man, and all of this is how it's "supposed" to work.
sleepingadmin 5y ago
Why is the central bank inflation target typically 2%? Well if you target 0% and any actual result below 0% happens, that's deflation which is a disaster for economies. If inflation is say 10%. Maximum employment is near certainly impossible. Debt will be expensive and the economy crawls to a halt. Who wants to pay 10% interest on their student debt? So where in between do you have a good price stability? It tends to be around 2%. It allows for error in measurement, it provides safe cushion. The USA is at 7% inflation. This means the central bank is not doing their job. They by mandate should have drastically increased interest rates. Inflation almost certainly is out of control now. Looking at central bank balance sheets that are very far from balance, and looking at money supply M2. There's a solid 40% inflation coming. Lets say it sticks to 7%, this inflation will last probably 4 years. When inflation is so high and interest rates are not. The people winning are those in debt. Which is the government and youngins. However, it also means you cant save money. You must spend money as soon as possible. Tourism is dead for many years. Flipside, what does this also do? It pressures salaries. You are making 7% less this year but you're making 115% less the next year. So anyone in demand will be in demand and be able to buck the inflation curve. The people most hurt by high inflation are those who just retired. They no longer can demand more $ for their productivity. Their 'safe' investments are way below inflation. They don't realize yet they cant afford to be retired.
- nickff 5y ago
  >"Well if you target 0% and any actual result below 0% happens, that's deflation which is a disaster for economies." It's not actually clear that deflation causes economic problems for the commonly cited reason (decrease in consumer spending). I think you're right about most of what you say concerning inflation. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/111715/can-deflation-be-good.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/111715/can-def...
  - 015a 5y ago
    The bigger issue isn't just a decrease in consumer spending; it's a decrease in investment (public markets, private equity, consumer loans, etc). If a bank can just sit on their dollars, and see a guaranteed rate of return potentially higher than a risk-adjusted rate of return after investment, that will happen more often. It trades a reduction in the long-term health of the real economy for an increase in the short-term health of the currency, but over a long enough period of time all currencies are a projection of the health of their real economy. The Swiss example is a poor one, given the makeup of their economy is nothing like most of the rest of the world, with its bias toward the finance sector. The finance sector would love deflation; they can take no risk and win, or they can take risks (issue consumer loans) and also increase their probability of winning. All that being said: there's a "correlation not causation" issue in that, the US originally set its "inflation as a target" policy back in the late-60s/early-70s. Ever since then, it doesn't matter what metric you look at, they've all gone sour [1]. Theoretically, causatively, some inflation is good for consumers; but correlatively, its difficult to ignore it as a potential cause for why everything sucks. It's moreso a matter of figuring out... why. [1] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
encryptluks2 5y ago
I would argue that there is actually a lot more recession and unemployment happening, and that the numbers provided are not an accurate representation of what is actually happening due to market manipulation and the government and fed artificially pumping the markets... hence the inflation and market instability.
makecheck 5y ago
At least two things happened here: - The pandemic gave most people an unusually-long period of time at home to help them realize all the things they could have been doing (e.g. spending more time with family, not being stuck in a commute), if only their work had not been sucking up all their time and energy. - Income vs. expenses changed to the point where people couldn’t hope to pay off their debts even if they worked. Work has not been paying anywhere near enough. At that point, what is there to lose: if you will be swamped and in debt with work, and you will also be swamped and in debt without work, at least the 2nd option means finally not having to put up with the crap from many workplaces. Also, it has just become clearer and clearer where all the lies were told. Society did not treat “essential” workers that way at all. There was all kinds of prioritization of bottom line over employee health, especially early on. We all assumed that governments could/would do a lot more to help. Heap on all the unfilled promises for promotions, raises, etc. and many workers just have no reason at all to give a crap anymore.
- Flankk 5y ago
  There has been a massive psychological shift too. Everyone suddenly realized life is short and you need to take action before it is too late. Starting a business has risk and there is fear associated. All that goes out the window when you realize you have nothing to lose.
  - c1sc0 5y ago
    Realising you have nothing to lose is liberating & a strong motivator to discover and spend time on the things that matter in your life. Between taxes, healthcare and inflation there’s nothing left at the end of the ride anyway. So why would you conform to the norms? Why play the game? Especially when it’s becoming abundantly clear that our society won’t be able to tackle the much larger problems looming ahead when we can’t even handle a minor inconvenience like a pandemic. So yeah, sure, I don’t blame anyone for “checking out” of the rat race.
- astrange 5y ago
  > We all assumed that governments could/would do a lot more to help. They did. The US gave out trillions in aid, more than any other country except Japan (by GDP). If you were unemployed this was at least $2400/month and more if you had children - the end result is that poverty and child hunger went down in 2020 and 2021, not up like you seem to think, and everyone went shopping so hard while they were home it brought inflation back. The reason people don't seem to know this is that journalists weren't unemployed and so have spent the last year tweeting "the government only gave us $1400 because they want us to die".
glonq 5y ago
I'm at the point where I would sacrifice $$$ for a better work-life balance. Unfortunately my boss just gave me a raise (boo-hoo, right?) so that he could do less work and I could do more. My goal this year is to fuck off and live in another country for 4-6 weeks, as vacation and/or as remote work. Then extend that to 2-3 months next year and ~6 months thereafter. I'm pushing 50 and aware that I've only got so many "good" years left.
blobbers 5y ago
I am part of this resignation wave, and quit (retired?) last spring with no intention of going back to work. I managed to do this in my 30s, but I do feel slight FOMO of people with high paying tech jobs. Part of me says, am I missing out on my highest earnings years? I'd like to sit on a beach but with a family, most of my days are getting groceries, doing dishes, folding clothes and driving kids around. It's not glamorous but it feels better than work life.
standardUser 5y ago
I still have not had recent inflation change my budget my any noticeable amount. I simply do not see if in my every day life, or on my budget spreadsheet. I have to wonder how much of this is media obsession and how much is truly impacting household budgets.

396 points by PandaRider 5y ago

I recently found a job I would never have got before the COVID. Of course I was not really competent enough to deal with all that technical debt so I agreed to stop. Free money for me.

duxup 5y ago

"The Great Resignation" feels a bit like a phrase that folks have grasped on to and just attach the narrative they want to believe to it. Constant articles and such with very little data. Very frustrating as a reader. The idea that amid a pandemic and such that there are a variety of reasons seems backed up by the data, although I admit that's what I'm inclined to believe / seen.

thechao 5y ago
Here's my thought: most employees are quite risk averse, and businesses have been able to take advantage of that in order to negotiate better for wages (better=lower wages). The pandemic essentially forced people into being more comfortable in taking higher risks. It turns out that marginal increases in risk taking translate into wage gains.
- stank345 5y ago
  I just changed jobs. For me it was my job pool increasing by 10x or 20x due to the normalization of remote work. It's also much easier to interview when you're WFH all the time.
- duxup 5y ago
  I'm inclined to agree that some folks who stayed home (by choice or not) found that ... it wasn't that bad and doing so to find something else probably seems easier than it was before. My wife is possibly taking a leave to care for her father ... she's thinking a lot about if she wants to go back. If she wasn't taking a leave that first step / time might not be there to decide to do something else.
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    > I'm inclined to agree that some folks who stayed home (by choice or not) found that ... it wasn't that bad and doing so to find something else probably seems easier than it was before. There's this, but let's not forget that the S&P 500 is up about 40% relative to its pre-pandemic peak, so retirement accounts have been growing really fast. Staying home suddenly became an option for many. There were already concerns about boomer retirements. Add a pandemic most dangerous to older people, lack of concern for worker safety, and massive increases in retirement accounts, and you have a lot of people that can and do stay home.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Also, generally, the pandemic probably led to a lot of people on something of a glidepath towards retirement to think about pushing things up some number of years.
    - vwcx 5y ago
      The stock market is an excellent point. Feels like there is lots of under-indexing (no pun intended) for the sentiment associated with 40% passive growth in one's retirement account since the start of the pandemic.
- abofh 5y ago
  You are correct, but much like banking and other industries, as information becomes more discoverable, negotiations tend to balance more towards... Equitable? I have three contracts that drive the bulk of my revenue right now. I have a few different titles, but for simplicity, let's say Sr DevOps. As a matter of course, my oldest clients have my loyalty, but my highest bidder has my attention - work needs to be done on a Saturday night? For my oldest client, I'll do it. Conflicting deadlines come in? I'll try and take the hit (work extra hours), but the priority? The highest payer with the least micro managerial leadership. You pay me for my experience, or you pay me to attend your meeting while someone else pays me for my experience to actually do something. It's ok, I'll wait, I charge by the hour either way, and if your meeting is useless enough, I can charge you both!
- chrisjc 5y ago
  I think you're correct, but I would add that inflation (not sure if you meant to imply that was part of the pandemic) has forced people to take higher risks as well. While in the past an employee may have tolerated below market wages in exchange for the stability (safety) provided by staying still, inflation and its effects have forced their hand. Food, gas, childcare, housing, transportation, etc... have all increased to the point that they've had to make bolder decisions. And that includes looking for better jobs (wages, benefits, work/life balance).
nightski 5y ago
You are doing that right here (narrative with little data). Even the NPR article says "the labor force participation rate remains significantly smaller than before the pandemic and it's still hard for employers to fill open jobs". There is data to back this up and it's not just a narrative.
- duxup 5y ago
  The article seems to point to data that provides a variety of reasons. Having said that I'm also not writing a news article so I think the standard for not having data is a bit different. I don't expect any random person on HN to source everything ... like I would a news article.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > There is data to back this up and it's not just a narrative. The narrative is directionally correct. The issue is that the media (including NPR) has done everything they can think of to exaggerate it as much as possible. Once you look at the actual numbers it’s not the sea change we’ve been hearing about everywhere. The data is being omitted because the omission leaves more room for imaginations to run with the headlines.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    >Once you look at the actual numbers it’s not the sea change we’ve been hearing about everywhere. Ehh, that's debatable and much harder to prove either way. For years before the pandemic there have been complaints from every industry about companies trimming down teams/workforces to the smallest possible size. People were doing the jobs of 2 or 3 people were a common issue that was brought up, if anyone was sick the employer demanded you come to work anyway. And that's when things were good. Now add a large portion of employees being sick at any one time and suddenly the work machine is being driven over capacity and much like an overloaded TCP/IP network, congestion collapse occurs. Even a small change in the most productive employees moving jobs could lead to large disruptions inside of a business. Anecdotally this is something I witnessed. We had pretty low rates of employee attrition during the pandemic, but the employees that did leave were some of the most influential.
ashtonkem 5y ago
The phrase “great resignation” also implies that people are just quitting, when in reality they’re changing jobs. The unemployment rate is lower than it’s been in a decade (except a month or two here and there), people who are resigning are getting new jobs.
- slowhand09 5y ago
  The unemployment rate was lower in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. It went up when the pandemic kicked in. Here is one (of many) sources I found with a single google search. https://www.statista.com/statistics/193290/unemployment-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/193290/unemployment-rate...
  - aperson_hello 5y ago
    4.5% in December, which puts it on-par with 2017 and lower than 2016. U-6, which is probably a better measure of actual slack in the labor market, is lower than any time in recent history except q3/4 2019.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    The seasonally adjusted U-3 fell below 3.9% in May of 2018 for the first time since October of 2000[0]. I might’ve been a bit glib about “a few months”, it was closer to two years, but the general sentiment that the unemployment rate is extremely low right now still stands. It’s far lower than the entire period of October 2000 to May of 2018, which coincidentally covers the vast majority of my working life. There are still some issues around childcare that need to be worked out, which is probably the biggest source of the gap between U-3 and U-6 right now. But this is still one of the hottest labor markets in most of our lives. 0 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/
- istjohn 5y ago
  The unemployment rate, by definition, wouldn't capture people who are quitting the labor force entirely.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Constant articles and such with very little data. Very frustrating as a reader. Actual resignations are up slightly, but the idea that employees are quitting in droves is exaggerated. It’s higher than normal turnover, but the stories are written in ways to suggest that companies everywhere are gutted by employees leaving in bulk. I feel like “great resignation” was deliberately chosen to mislead people into thinking people are just walking out of their jobs, which conjures images of a minor revolution. Of course, that doesn’t make sense because the employees are being hired at other companies. It’s likely that the worst of the worst companies are seeing a significant net loss of employees, but for most it just means turnover is up a tick. The problem is compounded because the “great resignation” is a narrative that people really, really want to believe. Every time I brought up the actual data on HN, it’s met with anecdotes about somebody whose friend of friend’s company lost all of their employees or something. These anecdotes seem to be the fuel keeping the narrative going far beyond what the data supports.
- randomdata 5y ago
  Anecdotally in my business I saw effectively no churn in employment through most of the pandemic. Hiring new people was also nearly impossible. Then, towards the end of last year a significant number of workers quit. Finding new people to replace them also was surprisingly easy. I suspect a lot of people were afraid to move on to new opportunities for a while due to the uncertainty of the pandemic. Once enough confidence was restored, the job hopping we'd expect to play out over the course of a couple of years all happened in a few months.
  - InvaderFizz 5y ago
    I can certainly see this as a contributing factor. My own experience is that during the first year of the pandemic I was just cooling my heels in a stable position. Later, the prime factor for me moving on was the whole return to office narrative. I've embraced fully remote and now demand it. As such, I found a new job in Q4 and moved on, for a 25% pay increase as well.
    - 5y ago
shadowgovt 5y ago
I think the MIT study painted an interesting picture (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toxic-culture-is-driving-the-great-resignation/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toxic-culture-is-driving...). It has the issues of small sample size and cherry-picking (i.e. the researchers tranched companies by industry and had a model of "toxic culture" that could be disagreed with if one cared to make the case), but the overall turn-head-and-squint takeaway is the pandemic forced a lot of workers to ask the question "Am I willing to risk death for the assholes I work with?" and for a lot of employees, the answer was "no." Places where the answer was not "no" had higher retention (both across industries and within industries). What they do after that is an open question... Some choose another company, some choose another non-career avenue if it is available to them. But the point is the pandemic forced a perspective shift that hadn't happened before.
outime 5y ago
>Constant articles and such with very little data. Very frustrating as a reader. Very personal opinion ahead (and not tailored to this specific topic): that's most journalism for you. They're not here to "inform the citizen" as a noble mission. Most of the things the press publishes are greatly exaggerated and dramatic to evoke different emotions to the reader which are closely tied to an agenda. The fix is IMHO easy: stop consuming such media once you find such disparities instead of reading again and again about the same and other topics, because they'll most likely lie/exaggerate in everything else and at the end, you'll be happier and better informed by not filling your memory with bs. Edit: typo with->which
- jiveturkey42 5y ago
  Is it reasonable to assume that if a publishing or media company is owned by a parent company, and that parent company has financial stakes in other industries, the parent company might pressure or incentivize a specific headline narrative to benefit their other financial stakes?
- throw10920 5y ago
  I don't think that this is a particularly controversial opinion now. A decade ago, maybe. Half a century ago, certainly. But now, in 2022, I think that you could probably find even objective evidence that the median quality of journalism has significantly declined and moved from objective facts to cherry-picking emotionally-laden stories to push a narrative. Some news companies have even started to explicitly adopt "advocacy over reporting" models, where they don't aim to be journalists in the original source of the word, but paid propaganda subscriptions. (yeah, yeah, there are economic incentives to do so - but there are also economic incentives to make shoddy, low-quality products and cheat your customers in other realms, and yet it's still wrong)
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    > Some news companies have even started to explicitly adopt "advocacy over reporting" models, where they don't aim to be journalists in the original source of the word, but paid propaganda subscriptions. This is a positive development. The problem is when motives are concealed, as in "objective" journalism.
phendrenad2 5y ago
Yes, also I think it caught on because it sounds like people are standing up to bosses and corporations and escaping the rat race. Good for them! Good for the resigners! Of course, as the NPR article points out, people are really just scrambling to find higher-paying jobs, because of rising costs for goods and services.

softwaredoug 5y ago

> spectacles like the immense popularity of the "Anti-Work" thread on Reddit — have gone as far as to suggest this record-breaking trend is a movement of young, able-bodied Americans rejecting work altogether. I don't think this is the point of "anti work". The point is (to me) that people should be treated equitably at work and that work shouldn't be the center of our lives

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
warent 5y ago
Yes. Admittedly on the one hand what I see a lot is people embracing victimhood, relieving themselves or responsibility and self empowerment. That's the only aspect of anti-work that I don't like. Otherwise I think their message is very fair and very clear: raise wages to keep up with inflation, and treat workers humanely so people stop dropping dead of heart attacks on the job.
- leadingthenet 5y ago
  > raise wages to keep up with inflation, and treat workers humanely so people stop dropping dead of heart attacks on the job. ...so continue working aka the exact opposite of what anti-work seems to imply. Gotcha. Another term got co-opted for political purposes, wonderful. Nonsense that once again originates in the US, which will inevitably land on our shores in no time.
- zanny 5y ago
  It feels like newfound indignity and the realization is that most of us are actually victims - capitalist exploitation of the working class is codified into the societies we live in, it just took people taking a break from the grind, a step back to see what they were subjected to, to realize what the exploitation is and what it feels like. Its not popular on HN but most of the libertarian tenants that belay picking yourself up by your bootstraps are not applicable to a supermajority of labor. There is no change of attitude within the framing of the economic system as it exists that individual actors take on a collective scale to suddenly stop being exploited systemically.

eric4smith 5y ago

The “great resignation” was always suspect. Think about it - who would take care of all those people in the western world. I could see it happening in Asian cultures, but in the west? Nah. It’s not in us. I mean seriously, did we ever check ourselves to think that people would just stay home? Sure a certain percentage will — and that’s actually a good thing, especially families where both mom and dad worked. Since the cost of child care the and the benefit of caring for your own child is so great. But with most government subsidies ending, I see a lot of parents getting pretty antsy with grown kids at home. Let’s get real, people are going to have to get off their tukuses that they have been sitting on over the last few years and head back to some kind of work. It’s good if they choose something more satisfying, but most people will not have that luxury and the world does not owe us anything. So back to work you lazy bums!!

newhotelowner 5y ago
> Sure a certain percentage will 10-15% of the workers quitting is enough! If 2 of my 13 employees quit at the same time, I will have to start working 65-80 hours a week.
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  Nowhere near 10-15% of people are quitting to stay home.
  - mlac 5y ago
    They are quitting to change jobs…
    - xboxnolifes 5y ago
      I'm aware, that's why I said what I said and not what you seem to think I said.
      - mlac 5y ago

ed312 5y ago

I rarely see any mention of how just so many people dying + becoming disabled impacts the job market. Historically big drops in available labor lead to improved labor negotiation (e.g. working conditions, wages). The "great resignation" is only one facet.

quxpar 5y ago
Worked great during the (surviving) workers during the bubonic plague. https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-better https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-bet...
- randomdata 5y ago
  Worked well if you liked counting money. But if you liked spending it... "Thus the undisputed rise in nominal or money wages following the Black Death was literally ‘swamped’ by the post-Plague inflation, so that real wages fell." https://ideas.repec.org/p/tor/tecipa/munro-04-04.html https://ideas.repec.org/p/tor/tecipa/munro-04-04.html
buscoquadnary 5y ago
COVID probably hasn't had a major impact in that respect there are a total of 859,354 deaths in the entire country which is only 0.2% of the population, but of the working population it is even smaller than that as almost half of that is in individuals who are 75 or older and unlikely to be participating in the workforce dropping us to less than 0.14% of people being effected, or slightly more than 1 in 1000 people. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
- rob_c 5y ago
  Thanks for replying with that... there's no mass piles of bodies in the streets impacting the workforce.
- ed312 5y ago
  That's incredibly helpful, thanks! I assumed the deaths were skewed somewhat to elderly but not to such an extreme. I wonder how this impacts calculations of e.g. social security payments and wealth transfers in the US.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rr808 5y ago

I think too its a result of 30 years where employers have had the upper hand in the job market (except perhaps 1999, 2008). Wages have stagnated during these decades, it seems finally maybe wages can catch up.

gfiorav 5y ago
Not a Moore fan, but I think this is his most underrated movie [0]. It became free to watch on Youtube a couple years ago. Maybe it'll pick some more traction now. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUpnFNUmfKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUpnFNUmfKw
- rob_c 5y ago
  loving the region locked irony
lkxijlewlf 5y ago
Wages are going to have to go up. House prices aren't going to come down, rent isn't going to come down, used car prices may come down but not to levels in the before times and only if new car prices don't skyrocket, food won't come down. It's getting very expensive to meet the ends. Wages will have to go up. When ppl think things aren't fair, they revolt.
- soheil 5y ago
  So.. inflation?
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    No. Because housing and healthcare costs have been outpacing inflation for years. It’s only in the past year that inflation has been on the table discussion wise, while the average home doubled in value since 2012.
  - lkxijlewlf 5y ago
    Sure, if you can afford to absorb the extra costs, then that is certainly a simple way to think about it. If you can't, it has the potential to be catastrophic. Wages being stagnant for so long, there are more ppl edging towards the latter.

howmayiannoyyou 5y ago

> The Great Renegotiation is also a byproduct of inflation. Workers are seeking better pay to keep up with the rising cost of living. Keeping in mind small business is collectively the largest employer and contributor to US output... let's remember the coming rate hikes will greatly reduce available cash to small businesses that operate with credit lines, credit card debt or via home equity lines. That is a LOT of US businesses. Now add to this increased input costs due to inflation. Now add increased tax rates. You can also expect lending requirements will tighten. So, it's worth considering the odds of worker prosperity (vs) the odds of a wave of business failures and associated unemployment/underemployment in many (but by no means all) sectors. Personally, I think the Fed & Treasury will continue fiscal stimulus and capitulate hard in the face of a deep recession. More of the same can kicking, and we'll see what seems like prosperity. In reality, it's a delay of an inevitable downturn unless some magical productivity innovation or goods/services advance emerges to rescue the US economy.

whatshisface 5y ago
>In reality, it's a delay of an inevitable downturn unless some magical productivity innovation or goods/services advance emerges to rescue the US economy. That sounds kind of like a plan. Delay until something random happens.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  Unfortunately, War is not that random nor is it magic.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Nor is it good for the economy (see: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, Iraq...).
    - elif 5y ago
      that depends on which metrics you care about.

manuelabeledo 5y ago

I think it's a bit of both. It's not only about the money. Many people are realising just now that they don't get paid enough to take all the crap they get from work. Anecdotally, I know a handful of engineers who quit their jobs because of this. They were making good money, just not good enough for the number of sleepless nights and stressful days they were going through.

chasd00 5y ago
what are they doing now though? Eventually, the student loan repayment delay expires, the covid unemployment goes away, any eviction moratoriums expire, and on top of it everything is more expensive than it was. I hope people who are leaving their jobs for less stressful or more accommodating jobs are increasing their income levels as well. There's going to be a big bill due when all the covid relief measures and savings evaporate.
- manuelabeledo 5y ago
  > what are they doing now though? They are working in the same field, just different companies. > I hope people who are leaving their jobs for less stressful or more accommodating jobs are increasing their income levels as well. Again, sometimes wages are not worth the loss in health.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    I understand about wages not worth the loss in health but the bill comes regardless. I guess what you're saying is they were so far above day to day expenses (even adjusted for no pandemic relief and the current inflation) that a the decrease in pay will still put them in the black.

curiousllama 5y ago

I like this framing. This is 10+ years of pay and quality of life increases for many, all coming at once. Or, at least, the improvement is just now restarting. Folks should renegotiate. Good on them.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

Business owners will continue to be oblivious to this and hope it blows over even as their expenses increase due to the sheer amount of employees who will find better opportunities elsewhere.

pwdisswordfish9 5y ago

Non-cookiewalled: https://text.npr.org/1075115539 https://text.npr.org/1075115539 (Wow, it’s like free karma to post these.)

newsclues 5y ago

The social contact has been rewritten multiple times in the favour of elites during crises. The people are rebelling against the reality of the new social contract.

president 5y ago
You wouldn't know it if you only followed mainstream media. I think the corruption of media has been the downfall of our society.

bjourne 5y ago

"Yet, despite all the quitting and renegotiating, the real wage for the average American worker — meaning the true value of their paycheck after taking into account inflation — fell by 2.4% in 2021." All while the world's elites have doubled or tripled their fortunes. Great Robbery would be a more apt name than Great Resignation.

MattGaiser 5y ago
I would be interested to see the difference between those who did switch and those who didn't. It could easily be 20% raises for those moving and 1% for those who are not.
- PascLeRasc 5y ago
  I received a 1% raise at my current job. My coworkers who worked evenings and weekends received a "100% positive adjustment of their raise" (2%).
  - root_axis 5y ago
    A 1% raise seems insulting imo.
    - Ancalagon 5y ago
      It is
      - mgkimsal 5y ago
        I started at a company in mid January, and they did annual reviews in June/July. After review, I 'merited' a 4% raise. But... because I'd only been there since January, they prorated the 4% raise to 2%. I never quite understood their logic, but also didn't stay through the end of the year. EDIT: this was... 2004/2005 era.
        5y ago

latexr 5y ago

Text version without “Cookie Consent and Choices”: https://text.npr.org/1075115539/ https://text.npr.org/1075115539/

MattGaiser 5y ago

> "Yet, despite all the quitting and renegotiating, the real wage for the average American worker — meaning the true value of their paycheck after taking into account inflation — fell by 2.4% in 2021." Because most are still not moving. If a worker won't leave under these conditions, there is no reason to ever give them a raise as you don't need it to retain them.

Liquix 5y ago
Should it be the worker's duty to constantly be searching for better opportunities and interviewing for new jobs while working - or the employer's duty to provide reasonable CoL raises so employees aren't driven away from the company?
- paxys 5y ago
  The only "duty" your employer has is to extract as much value out of you for as cheap as possible. If you expect anything different then you are going to be taken for a ride.
  - openknot 5y ago
    An employer at a for-profit company is responsible for maximizing the company's profits, but that doesn't mean it has a duty to extract as much value out of an employee for as cheap as possible. Such an adversarial relationship with employees causes them to leave, or at least avoid initiative or innovative solutions that are mutually beneficial to the employer and employee.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      The recent Thedacare (a non profit organization) debacle in Wisconsin shows this is not limited to for profit companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThedaCare_Regional_Medical_Center–Appleton#2022_lawsuit_against_Ascension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThedaCare_Regional_Medical_Cen...
- MattGaiser 5y ago

fvavsc 5y ago

Exactly, I asked my manager for raise to match market rate. I received meh in response. It was great motivator to start job search. I don't blame her though. It is just how it is, ignore employees while chasing birds in bush lol

wombat-man 5y ago
Especially in large companies HR dgaf until attrition rates hit a certain percent. Then all of a sudden we're bumping bonuses and ticking up the annual step raise a couple points. It is exhausting.

Waterluvian 5y ago

It feels fundamentally wrong that my employer cares at all about where I live when determining my 100% remote salary. Can anyone offer me rational arguments for why they shouldn’t just pay people based on what they offer the job rather than where they choose to live? Because it makes me salty to be paid half of what a colleague does because I’m in rural Canada and not San Francisco.

mehphp 5y ago
The simple answer is because they can and people still accept the positions. Why would they pay you twice as much when you accepted half?
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  Yup. Because I didn’t have all the information such as what others were being paid. I only knew that they were offering double what my current employer was offering to keep me.
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
    So at that moment, all parties involved made rational decisions. Now that more information has come to light, you're fighting for what you feel is equal compensation. Sounds like the "system" working.
vlozko 5y ago
I think it comes down to an ability for a company to recruit. They can't recruit someone in SF with a salary based on rural Canada's cost of living. The justification is that it's in the company's best interest to reduce costs as much as it's in yours to get top dollar. A somewhat parallel example is whenever someone tries getting a car repaired or plumbing work done. They may all charge their own flat rate for labor but they almost always exorbitantly overcharge for parts. Why? Because if everyone else does it, they can too. It's money on the table they would be missing out on otherwise. It's an infuriating situation (I was charged $30 for 2 $4 gaskets on my repair yesterday) but it's a pattern that's been quite commonplace.

nikkinana 5y ago

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

asoneth 5y ago

Anecdotally I know several people who retired in the last couple of years. One who had been working past their planned retirement date but had been coasting on inertia and a few who moved their timeline up to retire a little early. (Though some of them still seem to do part-time consulting.) Apparently there are also fewer immigrant workers due to immigration changes during the Trump administration and the pandemic.[1] It’s not surprising that a shrinking labor force (relative to demand) causes ripple effects. As good positions open up it triggers a musical chairs cascade as everyone else trades up for better jobs. When the music stops it seems pretty obvious that the lowest-paid and/or worst jobs are the ones that will be empty. [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/12/22/1063104262/immigrant-workers-us-economy-key-jobs https://www.npr.org/2021/12/22/1063104262/immigrant-workers-...

zitterbewegung 5y ago

My brother resigned from his job and got another one in 6 months and doubled his income.

jonnycomputer 5y ago

Beware simple narratives. They almost always lie.

TedShiller 5y ago

The Great Whining is another way I’ve seen it described

asow92 5y ago

I would like to renegotiate reality.

curiousllama 5y ago

> But there are growing fears of a wage-price spiral in which workers, seeing rising prices, demand higher pay — and companies, having to pay their workers more, start charging higher prices. These higher prices lead workers to demand even higher pay, leading companies to charge higher prices, and so on. It's the inflationary cycle of nightmares. Can someone explain to me how this works? I'd assume wages to prices are a bit asymmetric. E.g., McD's sells 100 burgers per employee per hour at $2 each. It raises wages from $10 to $15/hour. To keep margin, it now needs to charge $2.05 - which is an increase, sure, but asymmetric: a 50% increase in wages implies a 2.5% increase in prices. Assuming that occurs everywhere - why do workers need to now demand still-higher pay?

carapace 5y ago
> Can someone explain to me how this works? It doesn't work. Labor is a tiny fraction of the total cost of most products. We could double wages at the low end ($30 minimum wage) and not affect inflation significantly.
- rsanek 5y ago
  Source? In particular for restaurants and other businesses that rely on service jobs, I've typically read the opposite.
  - carapace 5y ago
    I said "products". Service industries with razor-thin margins like restaurants are more affected by labor costs, sure.
    - curiousllama 5y ago
      To be fair, service industries are the most likely to pay low wages
      - carapace 5y ago

brianjlogan 5y ago

Shouldn't this be a part of a healthy functioning economy? Shouldn't labor be free to move where demand is? Demand represented by fairer compensation. I have a hard time believing these people are permanently quitting work. Rather think of it from the point of a business trying to attract new customers. I can see the inflation affecting me in my purchases and it's not breaking me. Restaurants are charging more and it's making me re-evaluate how important dining out is if it means trapping people in a low wage job they hate. Do I really wish for someone not to move up the ladder into a better position just so I can choose from some 50 restaurants in my area? Would my life still not support the indulgence of being able to eat out with say 25 restaurants instead of 50? And with a heftier bill but less frequently going out to eat? I think America is finally exercising some of the benefits of capitalism for the lower class and not just for the elite.

tuckerpo 5y ago
Anecdotal - myself and most of my peers (software, EE) have moved onto new jobs during the pandemic for gargantuan raises. I don't know anyone in a white collar field who quit and is just chilling now. Old friends who work retail also quit for other retail jobs with slightly better pay, more hours, etc. It brings me joy to see the average person finally realizing their worth and leveraging a little bit of personal risk for better compensation.

papito 5y ago

I am reading Davos Man, and all of this is how it's "supposed" to work.

sleepingadmin 5y ago

Why is the central bank inflation target typically 2%? Well if you target 0% and any actual result below 0% happens, that's deflation which is a disaster for economies. If inflation is say 10%. Maximum employment is near certainly impossible. Debt will be expensive and the economy crawls to a halt. Who wants to pay 10% interest on their student debt? So where in between do you have a good price stability? It tends to be around 2%. It allows for error in measurement, it provides safe cushion. The USA is at 7% inflation. This means the central bank is not doing their job. They by mandate should have drastically increased interest rates. Inflation almost certainly is out of control now. Looking at central bank balance sheets that are very far from balance, and looking at money supply M2. There's a solid 40% inflation coming. Lets say it sticks to 7%, this inflation will last probably 4 years. When inflation is so high and interest rates are not. The people winning are those in debt. Which is the government and youngins. However, it also means you cant save money. You must spend money as soon as possible. Tourism is dead for many years. Flipside, what does this also do? It pressures salaries. You are making 7% less this year but you're making 115% less the next year. So anyone in demand will be in demand and be able to buck the inflation curve. The people most hurt by high inflation are those who just retired. They no longer can demand more $ for their productivity. Their 'safe' investments are way below inflation. They don't realize yet they cant afford to be retired.

nickff 5y ago
>"Well if you target 0% and any actual result below 0% happens, that's deflation which is a disaster for economies." It's not actually clear that deflation causes economic problems for the commonly cited reason (decrease in consumer spending). I think you're right about most of what you say concerning inflation. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/111715/can-deflation-be-good.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/111715/can-def...
- 015a 5y ago
  The bigger issue isn't just a decrease in consumer spending; it's a decrease in investment (public markets, private equity, consumer loans, etc). If a bank can just sit on their dollars, and see a guaranteed rate of return potentially higher than a risk-adjusted rate of return after investment, that will happen more often. It trades a reduction in the long-term health of the real economy for an increase in the short-term health of the currency, but over a long enough period of time all currencies are a projection of the health of their real economy. The Swiss example is a poor one, given the makeup of their economy is nothing like most of the rest of the world, with its bias toward the finance sector. The finance sector would love deflation; they can take no risk and win, or they can take risks (issue consumer loans) and also increase their probability of winning. All that being said: there's a "correlation not causation" issue in that, the US originally set its "inflation as a target" policy back in the late-60s/early-70s. Ever since then, it doesn't matter what metric you look at, they've all gone sour [1]. Theoretically, causatively, some inflation is good for consumers; but correlatively, its difficult to ignore it as a potential cause for why everything sucks. It's moreso a matter of figuring out... why. [1] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

encryptluks2 5y ago

I would argue that there is actually a lot more recession and unemployment happening, and that the numbers provided are not an accurate representation of what is actually happening due to market manipulation and the government and fed artificially pumping the markets... hence the inflation and market instability.

makecheck 5y ago

At least two things happened here: - The pandemic gave most people an unusually-long period of time at home to help them realize all the things they could have been doing (e.g. spending more time with family, not being stuck in a commute), if only their work had not been sucking up all their time and energy. - Income vs. expenses changed to the point where people couldn’t hope to pay off their debts even if they worked. Work has not been paying anywhere near enough. At that point, what is there to lose: if you will be swamped and in debt with work, and you will also be swamped and in debt without work, at least the 2nd option means finally not having to put up with the crap from many workplaces. Also, it has just become clearer and clearer where all the lies were told. Society did not treat “essential” workers that way at all. There was all kinds of prioritization of bottom line over employee health, especially early on. We all assumed that governments could/would do a lot more to help. Heap on all the unfilled promises for promotions, raises, etc. and many workers just have no reason at all to give a crap anymore.

Flankk 5y ago
There has been a massive psychological shift too. Everyone suddenly realized life is short and you need to take action before it is too late. Starting a business has risk and there is fear associated. All that goes out the window when you realize you have nothing to lose.
- c1sc0 5y ago
  Realising you have nothing to lose is liberating & a strong motivator to discover and spend time on the things that matter in your life. Between taxes, healthcare and inflation there’s nothing left at the end of the ride anyway. So why would you conform to the norms? Why play the game? Especially when it’s becoming abundantly clear that our society won’t be able to tackle the much larger problems looming ahead when we can’t even handle a minor inconvenience like a pandemic. So yeah, sure, I don’t blame anyone for “checking out” of the rat race.
astrange 5y ago
> We all assumed that governments could/would do a lot more to help. They did. The US gave out trillions in aid, more than any other country except Japan (by GDP). If you were unemployed this was at least $2400/month and more if you had children - the end result is that poverty and child hunger went down in 2020 and 2021, not up like you seem to think, and everyone went shopping so hard while they were home it brought inflation back. The reason people don't seem to know this is that journalists weren't unemployed and so have spent the last year tweeting "the government only gave us $1400 because they want us to die".

glonq 5y ago

I'm at the point where I would sacrifice $$$ for a better work-life balance. Unfortunately my boss just gave me a raise (boo-hoo, right?) so that he could do less work and I could do more. My goal this year is to fuck off and live in another country for 4-6 weeks, as vacation and/or as remote work. Then extend that to 2-3 months next year and ~6 months thereafter. I'm pushing 50 and aware that I've only got so many "good" years left.

blobbers 5y ago

I am part of this resignation wave, and quit (retired?) last spring with no intention of going back to work. I managed to do this in my 30s, but I do feel slight FOMO of people with high paying tech jobs. Part of me says, am I missing out on my highest earnings years? I'd like to sit on a beach but with a family, most of my days are getting groceries, doing dishes, folding clothes and driving kids around. It's not glamorous but it feels better than work life.

standardUser 5y ago

I still have not had recent inflation change my budget my any noticeable amount. I simply do not see if in my every day life, or on my budget spreadsheet. I have to wonder how much of this is media obsession and how much is truly impacting household budgets.