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> 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

> 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.
  - tombert 5y ago
    I went the opposite direction; I was at a cool hipster startup, but since I decided to re-pursue academia part time, I switched to a stable megacorp [1] so I would have a consistent bit of funding for the degree for the next 4-6 years. Roughly the same base pay, but way better stock package. I feel like for me, the boredom of COVID made online education about 10x more appealing, and with the articles about WGU popping up, I decided to finally finish my bachelors. [1] I made sure they were ok with me doing a half-time PhD before I joined.
    - hideo 5y ago
      Completely off topic from the main thread but would you be comfortable sharing how you found and/or convinced an advisor to take you on for a part-time PhD?
      - pmyteh 5y ago
        Not parent, but part-time PhDs aren't entirely uncommon (at least in the UK, where I am) and I'm currently supervising one. There are two major difficulties and one major advantage over the full-time version. The advantage is that you can work, so students aren't dependent on external funding or an ever-shortening runway of their own funds. This isn't a small thing. On the other side, though, it doubles the length of an already lengthy process (do people really want to be spending 7-10 years of all of their spare time unpaid and lonely?) and increases the chance the the candidate will drop out (in that they keep an alternative on-hand, rather than burning their employment bridges to do it full-time). Given how hard the PhD process can be, simply saying 'sod that' is always a temptation. Anyway, it'll depend on the supervisor and the university. Some have policies against it, others are happy to consider.
      - tombert 5y ago
        Completely comfortable. I spent a not-insignificant amount of time emailing professors (roughly two professors per state) across the US asking if they had part-time PhDs. Most didn't respond to me, the ones that did gave me a polite "no". I then look up "online part time PhDs" and found basically two places that offer a doctorate online, which was Purdue and University of York (England). I inquired about Purdue, and it seemed more managerial than technical, which I wasn't interested in. I find a program that seems interesting at University of York and ask them if they have any openings for a remote part time PhD. They responded back with basically "well not if you want funding." I then replied with "What if I fund myself?" Two professors working together decided to give me a shot, so they asked me to write a research proposal, which I did. I guess it was good enough, because when I emailed them back, instead of saying "thanks but no thanks", they gave me tips on how to refine it. After a few months of back-and-forth working on the proposal (and finishing my undergrad), we got the proposal into a state we were happy with. After that, I just applied on their online portal and managed to get an intake interview. The intake interview was basically "<x> is involved with this PhD. Are you OK with that?" or "What if you encounter <y>?" I guess I did well enough because I got an offer the next week. I start in April. ---- Sorry for the life story, but I figured you might be able to be able to save yourself a few steps.
- vikingerik 5y ago
  This is exactly it. The so-called "great resignation" is just pent-up delayed demand for normal job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic. It's framed this way as click-bait. Of course people click on stories about quitting work because they dream of doing that themselves.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    It also feeds into a narrative that everybody is doing fine, and the ones who aren't are just lazy and don't want to work.
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  Yup. I was working in recruiting during the early part of the pandemic, and it felt stupid reaching out to people. Even if you hated your job were you going to leave and take the chance on a new company? Who knows what could go wrong and next thing you know you don't have healthcare or unemployment during a global pandemic. But I bet everyone who hated their job before, and then suffered through who knows what god awful shit during the pandemic, starting looking as soon as they felt it was more safe.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  >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. yep that's me. I wanted to quit over a year ago but I kept putting it off due to pandemic circumstances. but now that everyone sees omicron is a wet fart and things are going back to normal, I put in my notice yesterday.
dkarl 5y ago
Anecdotally from talking to a lot of people who are hiring, people who accept the going rates for work are having no problem hiring. People who are shocked at what workers can ask for right now and try to resist the change are having very little success hiring, whether it's software engineers or subcontractors or lab assistants. With service workers, resistance to paying what it takes has a compounding effect, because being short-staffed forces people to pick up the slack for missing coworkers, and they end up burning out and quitting, or leaving for another job where the wages are better and the stress is lower.
- fundad 5y ago
  Demand for better pay and conditions has been bubbling for a long time, the Fight for Fifteen has been going on since $15/hr was a livable wage and then the mass layoffs of 2020 radicalized workers. And business owners are pissed. Bernie Sanders ran 2 presidential campaigns and got a lot of airtime for worker power. And layoffs screw people over for short-term gain and then incur more costs when staffing up again. It is an embarrassing place to be in so businesses jump on the narrative of a great resignation.
  - rustybelt 5y ago
    Anecdotally, the 2020 pandemic response by employers has had an huge impact on employee attitudes and loyalty. I work in healthcare and my employer made the very poor choice to do layoffs and furloughs in the summer of 2020 due to depressed demand before COVID surged in our area. This soured the relationship with staff just as we were about to get hit hard that fall and we've struggled to keep up ever since.
citilife 5y ago
> Actual resignations are up slightly, but the idea that employees are quitting in droves is exaggerated. Official numbers are up ~50% between Nov 2020 and Nov 2021. IMO official numbers dramatically increased as vaccine mandates occurred and under reported. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm Nov 2020 -> Nov 2021; percent change by region: Northeast 1.8% -> 2.5% South 2.8% -> 3.5% Midwest 2.3% -> 3.1% West 2.0% -> 2.8%
- ghaff 5y ago
  I'd add that, although I haven't really been to restaurants in the past couple of months, things were very clearly not normal in the fall. Limited seating even outside, closed for multiple days a week even though there was clearly demand, etc.
  - lettergram 5y ago
    The table appears to be “quite levels” which are not the same as “we aren’t employing you” levels. I suspect both are up higher than they were in 2019.
- ChrisLomont 5y ago
  >IMO official numbers dramatically increased By dramatically increased you mean went from 1.8% during a pandemic when people were afraid to move around to 2.5% as things eased, well in line with historical levels. I think the OP is much more accurate with the statement "the idea that employees are quitting in droves is exaggerated". In fact, if you look back more than the year you picked, you'll see there was a huge drop, and the current blip is most likely those people feeling some relief from the pandemic. The rates are no where near out of line historically. Here's historical data graphed for all 4 regions you listed. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00MWQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00MWQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00SOQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00SOQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00NEQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00NEQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00WEQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00WEQUR
chinchilla2020 5y ago
News articles written about it are full of provocative statements like "Workers are quitting in droves". "Employers are desperate for staff". Most of the examples they cite are restaurants.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Frost1x 5y ago
Behaviors often vary at different scales. At a macroscopic level you're correct, this movement is exaggerated based on the coverage to overall economic significance (most of its all inflation driven), but at, let's say, a mesoscopic scale, there are businesses feeling these very real effects. It's in specific industries and certain types of employers, I suspect largely abusive employers, where turnover is increasing significantly. And in such environments, these trends are happening the way the media is portraying it. I've seen it and I too have friends with anecdata who have experienced it. This is abnormal as prior to the pandemic such turnover and rejection was fairly rare at a given business, it usually happened on the business's terms during restructuring, rarely on the employee side outside of say unionized strikes. Taking this view that nothing is going on at a macroscopic scale is like standing in the Himalayas and shouting "but the Earth is really smooth, almost spherical." While at a macroscopic scale you'd be very correct (technically oblate spheriod), the mountains and valleys localized around you are very real challenges you need to navigate. That's important if you never travel outside the Himilayas, maybe not if you're circumnavigating the Earth (just, avoid it, you know). Not everywhere is Kansas and if you ignore very real localized phenomena that may be unavoidable, you're going to have problems navigating if your specific scale can't compensate for it.
jm4 5y ago
I think "The Great Resignation" is an excuse bad bosses use to explain why they can't retain employees. There has definitely been an attitude shift and a re-prioritization over the past couple years that I think has resulted in people being much less likely to stay at bad jobs. But like you said, they are going to other companies, and the companies that offer good jobs in a good environment are not experiencing the same rate of turnover.
whiplash451 5y ago
Indeed. The Economist had a great article about this in their Dec 2011 edition. The article is behind a paywall, but the gist of it is that two effects explain the uptick in people changing jobs: (1) surges of job demand in new sectors boosted or entirely created by the pandemic (2) people who postponed job changes in 2020 (which hopefully will be considered as the worse year of the pandemic), effectively creating a backlog of job changes that got processed in 2021-2022. The economy just changed much faster in a few years. Link to the article for the subscribers: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/evidence-for-the-great-resignation-is-thin-on-the-ground/21806659 https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/evidence-for...
- soperj 5y ago
  December 2021 edition?
- fishtacos 5y ago
  Dec 2021* - 2011 changes the entire meaning of your post.
  - whiplash451 5y ago
    2021, definitely :) Apologies for the typo.
dfxm12 5y ago
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 Yes, I think this is driven by corporate friendly mainstream media to mostly drum up for support for more corporate welfare while simultaneously painting Americans as lazy and undeserving of welfare themselves. There's a lot going on: - Boomers, a huge part of the workforce, are beginning to retire, and they aren't coming back - The US is near full employment [0]. As such, workers have more power. They can "resign" and go somewhere else relatively easily, or they don't have to take poor jobs - If a business closes right now due to lack of workers, the owner might make the claim that Americans are just lazy & don't want to work, and corporate friendly media might push that idea. However, remember, we're at a time when we're approaching full employment. The business likely wasn't attractive to workers. So is it really the (lack of) workers' fault? Or was the business just poorly run? It's hard to admit that, and easy to blame others. It's OK for businesses to fail, though. Most do. I think it's really a matter of perspective. If you're used to having a lot of workers (some of whom don't have the luxury of looking for a good job and need to take any job they can get, just to qualify for stuff like food assistance) fighting each other for the same job, so you're able to pay them less, this is a bad situation. If you're a worker who now has many employers vying for your talents, it's a good situation, but you rarely see that story being told in the corporate media. 0 - https://www.axios.com/jerome-powell-full-employment-27be7355-6568-4419-9ec8-13d4d1f6e3a8.html https://www.axios.com/jerome-powell-full-employment-27be7355...
- vwcx 5y ago
  "Yes, I think this is driven by corporate friendly mainstream media to mostly drum up for support for more corporate welfare while simultaneously painting Americans as lazy and undeserving of welfare themselves." I think you are overindexing on the corporate-media outlet connection and ignoring how simple it is for a journalist to write a trend piece from personal anecdotes. All it takes is three friends of a journalist to resign before said journalist feels like this is a 'nationwide trend'.
trembonator 5y ago
jsdwarf 5y ago
I believe in the great resignation within the leisure/restaurant industry. Waiters and chefs live mostly off tips, and the COVID limitations have deprived them from those earnings.
- fundad 5y ago
  Exactly this, demand contracted, millions were laid off. Without more foot traffic, there aren't sufficient tips to keep people in those jobs especially after being burned during the mass layoffs in 2020.
beerandt 5y ago
I think a few industries are having an outsized effect on the stats, starting with hospitals. >Of course, that doesn’t make sense because the employees are being hired at other companies. I don't think this is a valid assumption. I know a lot of people shifting from dual income families to one parent staying at home with the kids. Even more wanting to go from full time to part time positions. The local regional/ trauma 2 hospital had (admittedly) lost more than 50% of nurses in a year, (unofficially) replaced fewer than half of those, and that was before any of the vaccine mandates were announced or deadlines set. Vaccine politics have silenced them since then, but work shifts that were already understaffed at the start of covid with 1 MD, 2-3 mid-levels, and 6-8 nurses are still regularly making due with as little as 1 MD and 2 nurses. Obviously nurses are a special case given... the state of things over the past 2 years. But those numbers are just absurd, even as an outlier. I think assuming any sort of (near) net-zero shift in staffing is going to be wrong, be it within a particular office, business, profession, industry, or geographic area.
hi41 5y ago
I am concerned that people have enough money for bills. How will they send their kids to college. What happens if there is a serious medical condition and they don’t have medical insurance. What happens when their savings run out after many months of remaining unemployed. I got laid off once and it was horrible being unemployed.

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.
- tombert 5y ago
  I went the opposite direction; I was at a cool hipster startup, but since I decided to re-pursue academia part time, I switched to a stable megacorp [1] so I would have a consistent bit of funding for the degree for the next 4-6 years. Roughly the same base pay, but way better stock package. I feel like for me, the boredom of COVID made online education about 10x more appealing, and with the articles about WGU popping up, I decided to finally finish my bachelors. [1] I made sure they were ok with me doing a half-time PhD before I joined.
  - hideo 5y ago
    Completely off topic from the main thread but would you be comfortable sharing how you found and/or convinced an advisor to take you on for a part-time PhD?
    - pmyteh 5y ago
      Not parent, but part-time PhDs aren't entirely uncommon (at least in the UK, where I am) and I'm currently supervising one. There are two major difficulties and one major advantage over the full-time version. The advantage is that you can work, so students aren't dependent on external funding or an ever-shortening runway of their own funds. This isn't a small thing. On the other side, though, it doubles the length of an already lengthy process (do people really want to be spending 7-10 years of all of their spare time unpaid and lonely?) and increases the chance the the candidate will drop out (in that they keep an alternative on-hand, rather than burning their employment bridges to do it full-time). Given how hard the PhD process can be, simply saying 'sod that' is always a temptation. Anyway, it'll depend on the supervisor and the university. Some have policies against it, others are happy to consider.
    - tombert 5y ago
      Completely comfortable. I spent a not-insignificant amount of time emailing professors (roughly two professors per state) across the US asking if they had part-time PhDs. Most didn't respond to me, the ones that did gave me a polite "no". I then look up "online part time PhDs" and found basically two places that offer a doctorate online, which was Purdue and University of York (England). I inquired about Purdue, and it seemed more managerial than technical, which I wasn't interested in. I find a program that seems interesting at University of York and ask them if they have any openings for a remote part time PhD. They responded back with basically "well not if you want funding." I then replied with "What if I fund myself?" Two professors working together decided to give me a shot, so they asked me to write a research proposal, which I did. I guess it was good enough, because when I emailed them back, instead of saying "thanks but no thanks", they gave me tips on how to refine it. After a few months of back-and-forth working on the proposal (and finishing my undergrad), we got the proposal into a state we were happy with. After that, I just applied on their online portal and managed to get an intake interview. The intake interview was basically "<x> is involved with this PhD. Are you OK with that?" or "What if you encounter <y>?" I guess I did well enough because I got an offer the next week. I start in April. ---- Sorry for the life story, but I figured you might be able to be able to save yourself a few steps.
vikingerik 5y ago
This is exactly it. The so-called "great resignation" is just pent-up delayed demand for normal job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic. It's framed this way as click-bait. Of course people click on stories about quitting work because they dream of doing that themselves.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  It also feeds into a narrative that everybody is doing fine, and the ones who aren't are just lazy and don't want to work.
AlwaysRock 5y ago
Yup. I was working in recruiting during the early part of the pandemic, and it felt stupid reaching out to people. Even if you hated your job were you going to leave and take the chance on a new company? Who knows what could go wrong and next thing you know you don't have healthcare or unemployment during a global pandemic. But I bet everyone who hated their job before, and then suffered through who knows what god awful shit during the pandemic, starting looking as soon as they felt it was more safe.
_dain_ 5y ago
>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. yep that's me. I wanted to quit over a year ago but I kept putting it off due to pandemic circumstances. but now that everyone sees omicron is a wet fart and things are going back to normal, I put in my notice yesterday.

dkarl 5y ago

Anecdotally from talking to a lot of people who are hiring, people who accept the going rates for work are having no problem hiring. People who are shocked at what workers can ask for right now and try to resist the change are having very little success hiring, whether it's software engineers or subcontractors or lab assistants. With service workers, resistance to paying what it takes has a compounding effect, because being short-staffed forces people to pick up the slack for missing coworkers, and they end up burning out and quitting, or leaving for another job where the wages are better and the stress is lower.

fundad 5y ago
Demand for better pay and conditions has been bubbling for a long time, the Fight for Fifteen has been going on since $15/hr was a livable wage and then the mass layoffs of 2020 radicalized workers. And business owners are pissed. Bernie Sanders ran 2 presidential campaigns and got a lot of airtime for worker power. And layoffs screw people over for short-term gain and then incur more costs when staffing up again. It is an embarrassing place to be in so businesses jump on the narrative of a great resignation.
- rustybelt 5y ago
  Anecdotally, the 2020 pandemic response by employers has had an huge impact on employee attitudes and loyalty. I work in healthcare and my employer made the very poor choice to do layoffs and furloughs in the summer of 2020 due to depressed demand before COVID surged in our area. This soured the relationship with staff just as we were about to get hit hard that fall and we've struggled to keep up ever since.

citilife 5y ago

> Actual resignations are up slightly, but the idea that employees are quitting in droves is exaggerated. Official numbers are up ~50% between Nov 2020 and Nov 2021. IMO official numbers dramatically increased as vaccine mandates occurred and under reported. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm Nov 2020 -> Nov 2021; percent change by region: Northeast 1.8% -> 2.5% South 2.8% -> 3.5% Midwest 2.3% -> 3.1% West 2.0% -> 2.8%

ghaff 5y ago
I'd add that, although I haven't really been to restaurants in the past couple of months, things were very clearly not normal in the fall. Limited seating even outside, closed for multiple days a week even though there was clearly demand, etc.
- lettergram 5y ago
  The table appears to be “quite levels” which are not the same as “we aren’t employing you” levels. I suspect both are up higher than they were in 2019.
ChrisLomont 5y ago
>IMO official numbers dramatically increased By dramatically increased you mean went from 1.8% during a pandemic when people were afraid to move around to 2.5% as things eased, well in line with historical levels. I think the OP is much more accurate with the statement "the idea that employees are quitting in droves is exaggerated". In fact, if you look back more than the year you picked, you'll see there was a huge drop, and the current blip is most likely those people feeling some relief from the pandemic. The rates are no where near out of line historically. Here's historical data graphed for all 4 regions you listed. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00MWQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00MWQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00SOQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00SOQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00NEQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00NEQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00WEQUR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS00WEQUR

chinchilla2020 5y ago

News articles written about it are full of provocative statements like "Workers are quitting in droves". "Employers are desperate for staff". Most of the examples they cite are restaurants.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Frost1x 5y ago

Behaviors often vary at different scales. At a macroscopic level you're correct, this movement is exaggerated based on the coverage to overall economic significance (most of its all inflation driven), but at, let's say, a mesoscopic scale, there are businesses feeling these very real effects. It's in specific industries and certain types of employers, I suspect largely abusive employers, where turnover is increasing significantly. And in such environments, these trends are happening the way the media is portraying it. I've seen it and I too have friends with anecdata who have experienced it. This is abnormal as prior to the pandemic such turnover and rejection was fairly rare at a given business, it usually happened on the business's terms during restructuring, rarely on the employee side outside of say unionized strikes. Taking this view that nothing is going on at a macroscopic scale is like standing in the Himalayas and shouting "but the Earth is really smooth, almost spherical." While at a macroscopic scale you'd be very correct (technically oblate spheriod), the mountains and valleys localized around you are very real challenges you need to navigate. That's important if you never travel outside the Himilayas, maybe not if you're circumnavigating the Earth (just, avoid it, you know). Not everywhere is Kansas and if you ignore very real localized phenomena that may be unavoidable, you're going to have problems navigating if your specific scale can't compensate for it.

jm4 5y ago

I think "The Great Resignation" is an excuse bad bosses use to explain why they can't retain employees. There has definitely been an attitude shift and a re-prioritization over the past couple years that I think has resulted in people being much less likely to stay at bad jobs. But like you said, they are going to other companies, and the companies that offer good jobs in a good environment are not experiencing the same rate of turnover.

whiplash451 5y ago

Indeed. The Economist had a great article about this in their Dec 2011 edition. The article is behind a paywall, but the gist of it is that two effects explain the uptick in people changing jobs: (1) surges of job demand in new sectors boosted or entirely created by the pandemic (2) people who postponed job changes in 2020 (which hopefully will be considered as the worse year of the pandemic), effectively creating a backlog of job changes that got processed in 2021-2022. The economy just changed much faster in a few years. Link to the article for the subscribers: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/evidence-for-the-great-resignation-is-thin-on-the-ground/21806659 https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/evidence-for...

soperj 5y ago
December 2021 edition?
fishtacos 5y ago
Dec 2021* - 2011 changes the entire meaning of your post.
- whiplash451 5y ago
  2021, definitely :) Apologies for the typo.

dfxm12 5y ago

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 Yes, I think this is driven by corporate friendly mainstream media to mostly drum up for support for more corporate welfare while simultaneously painting Americans as lazy and undeserving of welfare themselves. There's a lot going on: - Boomers, a huge part of the workforce, are beginning to retire, and they aren't coming back - The US is near full employment [0]. As such, workers have more power. They can "resign" and go somewhere else relatively easily, or they don't have to take poor jobs - If a business closes right now due to lack of workers, the owner might make the claim that Americans are just lazy & don't want to work, and corporate friendly media might push that idea. However, remember, we're at a time when we're approaching full employment. The business likely wasn't attractive to workers. So is it really the (lack of) workers' fault? Or was the business just poorly run? It's hard to admit that, and easy to blame others. It's OK for businesses to fail, though. Most do. I think it's really a matter of perspective. If you're used to having a lot of workers (some of whom don't have the luxury of looking for a good job and need to take any job they can get, just to qualify for stuff like food assistance) fighting each other for the same job, so you're able to pay them less, this is a bad situation. If you're a worker who now has many employers vying for your talents, it's a good situation, but you rarely see that story being told in the corporate media. 0 - https://www.axios.com/jerome-powell-full-employment-27be7355-6568-4419-9ec8-13d4d1f6e3a8.html https://www.axios.com/jerome-powell-full-employment-27be7355...

vwcx 5y ago
"Yes, I think this is driven by corporate friendly mainstream media to mostly drum up for support for more corporate welfare while simultaneously painting Americans as lazy and undeserving of welfare themselves." I think you are overindexing on the corporate-media outlet connection and ignoring how simple it is for a journalist to write a trend piece from personal anecdotes. All it takes is three friends of a journalist to resign before said journalist feels like this is a 'nationwide trend'.

trembonator 5y ago

jsdwarf 5y ago

I believe in the great resignation within the leisure/restaurant industry. Waiters and chefs live mostly off tips, and the COVID limitations have deprived them from those earnings.

fundad 5y ago
Exactly this, demand contracted, millions were laid off. Without more foot traffic, there aren't sufficient tips to keep people in those jobs especially after being burned during the mass layoffs in 2020.

beerandt 5y ago

I think a few industries are having an outsized effect on the stats, starting with hospitals. >Of course, that doesn’t make sense because the employees are being hired at other companies. I don't think this is a valid assumption. I know a lot of people shifting from dual income families to one parent staying at home with the kids. Even more wanting to go from full time to part time positions. The local regional/ trauma 2 hospital had (admittedly) lost more than 50% of nurses in a year, (unofficially) replaced fewer than half of those, and that was before any of the vaccine mandates were announced or deadlines set. Vaccine politics have silenced them since then, but work shifts that were already understaffed at the start of covid with 1 MD, 2-3 mid-levels, and 6-8 nurses are still regularly making due with as little as 1 MD and 2 nurses. Obviously nurses are a special case given... the state of things over the past 2 years. But those numbers are just absurd, even as an outlier. I think assuming any sort of (near) net-zero shift in staffing is going to be wrong, be it within a particular office, business, profession, industry, or geographic area.

hi41 5y ago

I am concerned that people have enough money for bills. How will they send their kids to college. What happens if there is a serious medical condition and they don’t have medical insurance. What happens when their savings run out after many months of remaining unemployed. I got laid off once and it was horrible being unemployed.