The Great Resignation: Why are your employees so desperate to leave you?
If you somehow missed the first quarter media infatuation with the “new crisis,” the so-called “Great Resignation” is a period of excessive churn in the American labour market.
NPR’s Andrea Hsu described it efficiently back in January: “As pandemic life recedes in the U.S., people are leaving their jobs in search of more money, more flexibility and more happiness. Many are rethinking what work means to them, how they are valued, and how they spend their time. It’s leading to a dramatic increase in resignations …”
“Dramatic.” Pshaw. How about we say “appropriate” and “long overdue” instead? There isn’t a “labour shortage.” Sure, we have permanently lost nearly a million Americans to COVID-19 since the pandemic kicked off. We’ve also seen unprecedented numbers of parents and caregivers leave the job market when they couldn’t work and afford childcare, especially when schools went totally remote. Then again, we’ve also seen businesses shutter or scale back their operations. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that 6.2 million people were put out of work by business closures in 2021 alone. So, yes: there’s been churn. That’s only part of the problem.
As media “hot topics” go, this has been irritating to watch. From late 2020 through mid 2021, the go-to tempest-in-a-teapot online was the “no one wants to work anymore” argument. Pro-business and pro-owner talking heads bemoaned those lazy, greedy, and ungrateful workers were too busy gorging on unemployment and stimulus checks to put in an “honest day’s work.” I remain amazed so few pretentious windbags were guillotined for advancing this argument.
When that rhetoric didn’t get the exploitable masses queuing back up to mop their local McDonalds for minimum wage, the story changed. Instead of the “lazy poor” being responsible for too many open reqs, the new culprit was identified as “fickle, immature young adults.” Those danged millennials don’t want to work! Feel free to post your own “old man yells at cloud” meme here, as it certainly fits. Sure, Jan. An entire generation just “decided” that work was “not for them.”
I won’t belabour the history of this trend because it should be glaringly obvious that these arguments are self-serving hooey. Business owners and managers wailing that they are the innocent victims of cruel, disloyal workers isn’t a simple pot-and-kettle act of projection: it’s full-on abuser gaslighting. I counter you reap what you sow, expletive deleteds.
Let’s be clear: most workers aren’t leaving their jobs as some sort of malicious performance art or political protect. They’re leaving because it’s the only way they can protect themselves and their families during turbulent and difficult times. They know – just like their parents knew – that their “employer” doesn’t give a damn about what happens to them. They know all too well that there is nothing to stop employers from “downsizing” them on a whim. They know they have no expectation of long-term employment and can’t expect company loyalty. They know that their employers will retain and reward abusive jack-wagons so long as profits keep rolling in.
That’s why the first question I ask my organisational behaviour seminar students is “why do you work? Someone inevitably breaks the social taboo and speaks the truth: I work because I have no other viable choice. We don’t spend an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic every morning because we love to make PowerPoint slides in a noisy fabric veal pen. We work because we will die if we don’t make money. As such, the “relationship” – such as it is – between the employer and the employed is one that never stops being resented by the people holding the short end of the stick. This is not complicated; I can prove it with a truncheon and a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card.
This fundamental disconnect isn’t new. As James Hoopes wrote in False Prophets: “America’s greatest prophet of democracy, Thomas Jefferson, had a different vision – a nation of farmers living freely on their own land, answering to no one but themselves. Believing that working for others was the first step in a walk away from freedom, Jefferson hoped never to find his ‘fellow citizens at a work-bench.’ He would have hated to see us in our cubicles.”
No, what changed during the pandemic to inspire an impressive increase in voluntary resignations wasn’t a fundamental change in our collective concept of work. Rather, the comfortable lie that we’ve told ourselves to accept the status quo – that the boss is just as much a victim of “the system” as their subordinates are – has been proven to be nothing more than numbing fantasy. Gold leaf on the chains that bound us all to our desks while the people making bank off of our labour took bets on how many of us would die of the plague.
COVID-19 didn’t just force workers to realize they have no effective defence against their employer forcing them to work in dangerous workplace conditions. Management’s gleeful exploitation of workers’ desperate need for job-linked health insurance stripped away the veneer of a “cooperative” relationship between serf and supervisor. Your boss is not, and can never be, your friend by virtue of the imbalance of power between you.
Managers don’t bully us because they’re forced to; they bully us because they can. That isn’t new; it’s just new to another generation of workers who earnestly wanted to believe the “we’re more like a family than a business” schlock they were fed during new employee orientation. The pandemic has made it clear that the essential American social contract – every adult must trade their effort, health, and dignity for meagre scraps – can’t be changed. The only element of this abusive relationship that a worker can control is which abusive jackwagon they work for at any given time.
I recommend that the sanctimonious executives bemoaning their lost potential earnings from the deck of their backup yacht take note. Sure, people are leaving to get more money when they can. That’s true. People are leaving jobs that demand workers return to cubicle hell in favour of full-time remote jobs. That’s also true.
Those, however, are not the primary motivators for people looking for different employment in the first place.
People decide to leave when they can’t tolerate any more abuse from their employer ... or, to be fair, from one or more terrible bosses in their immediate work environment. Sure, they’ll take more money and better perqs … when they can get them. What’s most important, though, is getting away from a hostile, infantilizing, condescending, miserable office environment. If your people are leaving en masse it likely ain’t because the grass is greener down the street. It’s probably because your employees that are leaving are desperate to leave you.
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