(Over)turning the tables in the employment marketplace

Employees have been leaving their jobs voluntarily in unprecedented droves in recent months — 4.3 million in August, 4.4 million in September — continuing an exodus that stretched throughout much of 2021 and showed little sign of letting up as the new year began.

It’s dubbed the “Great Resignation,” or the “Big Quit.”

Analysts say it started last April, the first month in a three-month span that saw an alarming 11.5 million workers quit their jobs, just as the hemisphere was reawakening from the social and economic doldrums of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet the roots of the Great Resignation reach back to worker dissatisfaction that existed long before the novel coronavirus was first detected.

Various factors have been cited as contributing to the troubling trend. Some observers point to the way the pandemic forced companies to allow many employees and managers to work remotely, and the reticence of many to return to the workplace environment after experiencing the upsides of working from home. Some workers express lingering concerns over contracting Covid-19, while many more resist compliance with workplace vaccine and mask mandates. Some experts suggest government relief payouts left many furloughed and laid-off employees with an increased sense of entitlement and reduced motivation to return to work or to seek new jobs.

“Like all well-meaning programs, there are always unintended consequences,” said Michael Naughton, director of the Center for Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN, noting that the federal government played “an important role” in assisting workers and organizations during the pandemic, including through the CARES Act and its $800 billion in extra unemployment relief. “Companies that had to furlough employees often had a hard time getting them back, in part because the unemployment assistance was equal or more than what they were getting paid by the business.”

Fueling the fire

Yet the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on employment was only “an accelerant” for the unprecedented level of job departures, according to Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University who predicted the Great Resignation last May and is credited with coining the term.

Klotz’s professional research has centered upon why and how employees quit and what happens to them afterward. “Most of your time as an employee, the corporation has the power,” he told The Verse. “When you decide to leave, that power shifts, and I’m interested in what employees do with that power when they get it.”

That power has indeed shifted. Just as the balance of housing supply and demand can create a “buyer’s market” or a “seller’s market” that tips the advantage in negotiations, the large number of vacated positions has given rise to a “job-seeker’s market” that allows prospective employees greater bargaining power with prospective employers. The availability of more attractive jobs vacated during the Great Resignation likely has encouraged workers to leave less attractive jobs in hopes of securing better situations for themselves.

Klotz saw resignations increasing already by 2019, then dropping dramatically in 2020. “I thought plenty of employees still wanted to quit their jobs, but few would quit voluntarily during the pandemic because there was so much uncertainty,” he said. “I figured if we got a vaccine and the economy improved, there could be a backlog of people who’d enact their plans for any number of reasons.”

Burnout is another broad factor in the Great Resignation, Klotz said, an emotional draining from the pandemic experience with its related restrictions and stresses. Yet spending time at home — whether while working remotely, while laid off, or while on furlough — gave people ample time to contemplate their priorities, to think outside the box about what they want from life. They enjoyed the flexibility and autonomy they experienced during their “new normal” and wanted more of it.

“During the pandemic, a lot of us have spent time doing different things, whether with family or hobbies,” Klotz said. “And I think a lot of people now realize ‘I’m more than just my job.’ … All these things came together into pandemic epiphanies, where people decided they wanted to pivot — they didn’t miss their old life and wanted to do something different.”

For many, their reflection surfaced simmering discontent over issues other than compensation, such as feeling valued, having a sense of purpose, and addressing practical concerns such as daycare options.

The pandemic affected rank-and-file workers differently in manufacturing and service industries, where slowdowns and shutdowns were common but remote work wasn’t an option.

“There were two groups of workers impacted by the pandemic: the ones who worked throughout, and the ones who didn’t have work,” said Clayton Sinyai, executive director of Catholic Labor Network, an association of the faithful in the Archdiocese of Washington that supports workers’ rights from the perspective of Catholic social teaching. “Tens of millions in the hotel and restaurant industry lost their jobs. Other essential workers risked exposure to the virus.”

Missiles of Striketober

The signs are clear in many communities where fast-food outlets, ordinarily the domain of low-paying, entry-level jobs, openly advertise wages up to twice the state minimum along with perks including daily pay and bonuses. But bigger companies likewise are sweetening their compensation packages and perks in hopes of drawing and retaining a top-shelf workforce.

Even as the quitting trend continued last fall there came “Striketober,” the name given to strikes involving tens of thousands of workers nationwide emboldened by the Great Resignation. Corporations including Kellogg, Nabisco, and John Deere were hit hard, as was the healthcare industry.

In Buffalo, NY, more than 2,000 nurses and other employees at Mercy Hospital ended a contentious five-week strike and returned to work in early November after union members overwhelmingly approved new contracts. The negotiated deal, said a union spokesman, includes “historic breakthroughs in guaranteed safe staffing ratios, substantial across-the-board wage increases, including bringing all workers above $15 an hour, and preserving health and retirement plans intact,” as well as the hiring of hundreds of new workers to alleviate staffing shortages.

“We listened to our associates, and their primary concerns were market-competitive wages and increased staffing,” said Mark Sullivan, CEO of Catholic Health System, Mercy’s parent company. “These new contracts address both and more.”

A particular concern for Catholic labor advocates has been to ensure that workers who were laid off during the pandemic receive “first dibs” on getting their old jobs back as the business ramps up operations again.

“The workers deserve respect for their work,” said Fr. Ty Hullinger, a Baltimore pastor who joined area Catholics in successfully lobbying the Baltimore City Council to pass “Right to Recall” legislation in October 2020. “We wanted to see them protected and not lose their jobs through no fault of their own. When conditions changed, we wanted them to have the right to go back to work.”

Silver Linings Playbook?

An upshot of the Great Resignation is that employers need to change their strategies in hiring and retaining employees.

“If you want your people to stick around, you’re going to have to convince them that what they’re getting from signing in each day outweighs the stress, lost time, and forgone opportunities it costs them,” writes business journalist Jessica Stillman in the online journal Inc. “That’s always the case to some extent, but after a year of looking mortality in the face, your employees are probably considering that bargain a lot more closely than ever before.”

Klotz of Texas A&M had advice both for disaffected workers and for employers seeking to improve employee retention rates.

Workers should think long and deeply before making the decision to quit. What’s better, Klotz said, is “to actually talk to your boss about how to recraft or restructure your job to align it more with what you’re looking for post-pandemic in this stage of your career.”

Employers, meanwhile, “are experimenting with different ways of working, different ways of interacting with their employees,” such as determining whether workers can be as productive working remotely or in hybrid arrangements, partly from the office and partly from home.

In the end, after the Great Resignation has subsided, we will find “a better world of work with more options and benefits for employees,” Klotz said. “At least one nice silver lining from the pandemic is improving the world of work from what it was in 2019.”

GERALD KORSON, editorial consultant for Legatus magazine, is based in Indiana.