The Great American Resignation

WORK FROM HOME 

We all keep hearing the Great Resignation, and we start to wonder what are all these people doing now.

It is not that the government is mailing out weekly checks to survive. The latest news today was 4.5 Million Americans have quit their jobs. 

An abrupt shutdown of the US economy. This started due to the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. The employers in the service industry were the first to lay off their employees. The business could not make payroll with a loss of income. People were left with a stark reality and looked for stimulus checks which were hardly enough for anyone. This wasn't a volunteered American resignation but become one.

Other sectors turned to remote work where possible. Each and every single one of them. The most significant resignation started with working moms. Schools closed, daycares shut, and no option to handle job and childcare responsibilities.

This was the state of the workforce until Dec 2020. Vaccines finally arrived with a promise to get things back to normal, but as we all know, the entire 2021 flew by, and here we are in Jan 2022 with no hope in sight; this pandemic is going to be behind us. 

One significant impact in 2021 was the supply chain issue and inflation, which put more people out of work. Not enough materials in the market to keep jobs running and sustain business income. If you don't have the inventory, you can't sell it to make money and pay your employees. 

Remote work opened the door to interview on Microsoft Teams and get a job in Hawaii with the option to work from home for life. Now we have the white-collar workforce enjoying the most extraordinary work-life balance at home. Here comes mass resignation in corporate America. The best part is for more money.

Now you have a record number of job openings, but where is everyone? The job hiring is the same job you were forced out of. No one wants to go back to that job now. A full-time job in Mcdonalds' is not the job anyone wants due to the long hour's pay scale. I can make double the money with half the number of hours elsewhere. You go to Starbucks and see a sign only drive-thru; we have no staff. People reevaluated their life and discovered plenty of options to make more money.

Don't forget the mass retirements. Now you have millions in the workforce who had one, two, three years left before retirement. Mindset, the pandemic has made my work life too stressful I don't like this new way of working; I will just retire now. I have enough money to enjoy my life starting now. 

There are plenty more examples to keep writing, but this brings some perspective.

The New Vocabulary of 2021:

"Great Resignation"

Texas A&M Management

Professor Anthony Klotz

In a Bloomberg Business-week

article May 2021 warned:

"The Great Resignation is coming."

Return to Top