Joaquín Estefanía: The resignation of employment | Ideas

There is no shortage of work, but of decent work. Some have retired early; Others have found a way to make ends meet without staying in jobs they hate; many just don’t want to go back to shitty low-wage jobs… This is how Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, describes a relatively new phenomenon in the US, which is becoming a trend: millions of salaried workers leave their jobs and they change their lives. This is called “the great resignation” (“the big quit” or “the great resignation”).

Social scientists are amazed at this realignment of the labor market, and although there are specific factors and many differences with other places, they wonder if this propensity will not reach the rest of the world. The Nobel Prize in Economics Paul Krugman affirms that, unlike in the Great Recession, a supply crisis is now being experienced: goods do not reach consumers and many employers do not find the right workers to carry out their activity. After the confinement with which the covid was fought, an average of four million employees leave their jobs each month, around 3% of the American workforce. Remember that the official unemployment rate in the US does not reach 5%, which technically means full employment.

Why is this happening and, above all, why is it happening now? Krugman advances his opinion: The pandemic has led many workers to rethink their lives “and wonder if the horrible job that many of them had was worth continuing.” The United States is a rich country that treats many of its workers extraordinarily poorly, with stagnant wages, long hours, unstable contracts and few vacations. In many cases this generates episodes of anxiety and frustration.

But all this was already present in the last decades. Today it is joined by the job exhaustion of a long pandemic of many wage earners and the flexibility that they have experienced in many cases when teleworking at home (although this has meant an excessive availability at the service of the company), which implies that they resist return to the headquarters. Also the fact that they have been able to save or because there was nowhere to spend or because they received the Administration checks (the “helicopter money”); furthermore, because investors in the stock exchanges have seen them rise; and so on.

During confinement, many citizens have been more aware that their jobs were bad or lousy, and they believe that they have endured too much. A study commissioned by Microsoft concludes that more than 40% of the global workforce would like to change employers this year. The sectors most affected are the hospitality industry, transport (attention to the lack of truck drivers), health and the care industry, and even “white collar” wage earners who do not want to join their offices and offices. Summary: those below endure exploitation worse than before, and those above plan the getaway.

Some employers seek out workers by raising wages more than their competition (Biden’s “Pay them more,” “pay them more”). This entails two types of situations: the first, that the unions have another opportunity to assert themselves and become protagonists of the negotiation; Reich mentions in his article of The Guardian the outbreak of strikes in all kinds of sectors. The second situation has to do with inflation (which in the US has reached 6.2%, according to the latest available data): as wage costs rise, prices rise again. Until now, there was a consensus in multilateral organizations and in most of the reference economists that current inflation was a transitory phenomenon, but wage increases generate what is called “second-round inflation”, which was not contemplated.

The phenomenon of quitters Americans would mean a structural paradigm shift, if generalized. The feasible utopia of working to live, and not living to work.

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