The Great Resignation, Reexamined

Personal, post-Labor Day reflections on the untold side of the "Big Quit"

Sep 13, 2024

Say farewell to another year’s Labor Day, that bastion of picnics and parades, admonitions to pack away your whites and clearance sales that retailers market as blowout bargains for Christmas early-birds and back-to-school procrastinators. Bid goodbye to summer, as you hose down the grill, box up the badminton net and rearrange the refrigerator to make room for leftovers that you’ll barely touch. And welcome back the cultural anesthetic that numbs us to the loss of vacation season, warm weather and summer breaks from school: the kickoff of NFL season.

Labor Day is one of the holidays that doesn’t carry an expectation that we honor its origins. Numerous holidays do. At Christmas time, we are advised to remember “the reason for the season,” the observance of Jesus’ birth. Ditto for Easter and what Christians believe was his resurrection from death. The cultural messaging obviously isn’t as strong as it once was, especially for Easter, but it’s still perceptible.

Similarly, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, we are asked to reflect on the historical significance of a civil rights icon and the end of American slavery. On Memorial Day, we pay tribute to fallen American soldiers, and, on Veterans Day, we pay tribute to all American soldiers. On July 4, we give thanks for our nation’s independence, and on Thanksgiving we give thanks for, among other things, the settlement of the land that would become our nation, by recreating the settlers’ original Thanksgiving feast.

Then there are the holidays whose roots we aren’t expected to commemorate. On New Year’s Day and Halloween, we don’t give homage to the Babylonian festival of Akitu or the Celtic festival of Samhain. On Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day, we don’t pay tribute to St. Valentine or St. Patrick. On Washington’s Birthday (Presidents Day) and Columbus Day, we don’t actually celebrate the births and lives of George Washington and Christopher Columbus. And on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, we don’t dwell on those holidays’ early-20th-century origins.

Labor Day falls into the latter category. Yesterday, we simply enjoyed having the day off. We didn’t venerate the late-19th century push for a federal worker’s holiday, nor the broader fight at the time for better working circumstances such as higher pay, safer work conditions, shorter workdays and workweeks, and the end of child labor.

Implicit in the way Americans treat Labor Day is the fact that these victories were won long ago. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act established the minimum wage and a 40-hour workweek, along with outlawing child labor. And the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act established standards for safe working conditions, as well as adding federal oversight through the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

While some of these reforms may not have taken hold immediately, they eventually became entrenched norms in the American work world, leading to decades of relative equilibrium in the employer-employee balance of power. So, it’s understandable that Labor Day parades no longer evoke thoughts of the labor marches from which they descended.

But, that power balance has been challenged in recent years by a new generation of workers with new demands, backed by labor movement revivalists. In 2012, hundreds of New York City fast-food employees staged an organized walkout, demanding to be paid $15 an hour, sparking the “fight for $15,” a nationwide movement to raise the minimum wage to $15. The rest of the decade saw a proliferation of strikes and the start of the push for remote work.

The onset of Covid, of course, tilted the balance further toward employees, as many employers were forced to switch to remote work and make other concessions. And when pandemic restrictions were lifted, employees weren’t ready to give up these accommodations, particularly in what was a scorching job market, due, in part, to the hesitation of some workers to reenter to public workplaces and the extended availability of federal benefits.

The confluence of these factors led to what became known as the Great Resignation, also called the “Big Quit,” with almost 100 million Americans leaving their jobs in 2021 and 2022. The abundance of job openings combined with the shrunken labor pool provided workers with a sense of security that led them from to resign from their positions en masse to seek other jobs or pursue non-work opportunities. Social media amplified this trend, as departing employees shared their experiences and insights online, creating a sense of solidarity among those who joined, or sympathized with, the movement.

Millions of other employees who stayed in their positions were able to leverage the prospect of their leaving to attain more favorable work terms. The threat was wielded explicitly, in the form of a give-me-what-I-want-or-else-style ultimatum, or implicitly, just by employers being panicked over decimation of their workforces. Resultantly, the remainers managed to negotiate substantial pay increases and other perks.

The Great Resignation gave rise to other Internet-driven, workplace trends whereby employees flexed their newfound muscle. “Rage quitting” became a fad, as people would abandon jobs with zero or minimal advanced warning, often in a highly dramatic manner, lambasting their bosses in person or in writing on their way out. Rage quitters often subsequently shared the experience on social media in the form of a “quit-tok,” posting their screeds, making a video discussing their departure experiences, or even recording them live.

“Quiet quitting,” on the other hand, was a tactic developed by employees who declined to leave their jobs and instead expressed their work-related resentments by performing at the lowest competency level required to remain employed. Workers were emboldened to adopt this tactic by widespread staffing shortages, as well as social media reinforcement. The same was true of “bare minimum Mondays,” a lite-version of the tactic in which employees start the week in quiet-quit mode.

Mainstream media responded to these work world developments with its usual, evenhanded disposition, reporting them dispassionately and analyzing them deliberatively….

Just kidding! That was the kind of sentence emojis are made for.

The press responded to these developments the way it always does, by framing them within its preferred storylines and breathlessly championing its favored side (much like partisans). Our addicted-to-narratives news media reduced the intricately complex work-sphere of the early-2020s, in which employers and employees alike were just trying to survive, to its go-to story of the people vs the powerful, the little guy vs. the fat cats. Reporters regaled us with tales of erstwhile employees who found better compensated and more fulfilling positions, started their dream businesses, retired ahead of schedule or took advantage of pandemic benefits to further their schooling or skills training. Analysts credited the Big Quit with across-the-board wage gains. And journalists uniformly celebrated fads like rage quitting, quiet quitting and bare minimum Mondays and, moreover, blamed bosses for making workers to resort to them.

As is often the case with stories that they shoehorn into their treasured “justice narratives,” journalists didn’t process the second order effects (and beyond) of what was happening. They couldn’t see past the momentary, so-called comforting of the afflicted and afflicting of the comfortable that was happening (to put it terms of the historical, industry quote that journalists misread as a mission statement).

One example was the effect that large-scale pay increases were having on inflation. As wage expectations zoomed upward, businesses had to find a way to meet them. In order to afford to pay their employees, employers had to raise prices. And, while the wage-price correlation is a normal economic reality, when prices were already experiencing inflationary pressure from supply chain interruptions and an abundance of pandemic relief money, sizable pay raises were going obviously going to increase that pressure.

A second example was an omnipresent feature during the Big Quit, though it was the subject of startlingly little public discourse: long lines. In almost every service establishment that Americans entered, lines got increasingly longer, contributing to people’s overall dissatisfaction with national conditions.

Of course, the reason customers had to wait longer was right in front of them: fewer workers. When employees quit and businesses can’t quickly replace them, there are fewer staff members to wait on customers. Further, long lines shorten the patience of both those who stand in them and those who attend to them, which leads to less friendly interactions between employees and customers and, ultimately, declining customer service.

Staffing a business when leaving them is a nationwide trend

Because of the virality of the Great Resignation, small employers have been operating in a state of constant, personnel-related state of anxiety for the last several years. That has led them to offer their employees generous pay increases and other new benefits in order to stop them from following exiting co-workers.

But, employers also faced risks of losing staff if they were unable to quickly fill positions left by quitters. Because, getting back to the idea of second order (and beyond) effects, when someone quits, it leaves a hole in both the business’ operations and schedule. And, while that hole remains open, the business is forced to shift these task and scheduling burdens on to its existing employees, increasing the physical demands placed on them, as well as their feelings of burnout.

In our business, these feelings were especially justified, as we were front-line essentials and, since the start of the pandemic, we never stopped working. We worked long hours with short staffs. We worked ourselves to the point of exhaustion, illness and injury.

There was a period of more than a month in 2021 when our seven-person capacity enterprise, which operates from early morning to early evening, was staffed by a team of three. Another manager and our one other employee at the time opened in the morning, and I joined them by mid-morning, working until close by myself, after their shifts ended mid-afternoon.

My enduring memory from that period was a comment from a visiting, Australian customer, as he observed me zooming around the shop, trying to do the work of an entire crew, as a line of customers stretched out the door and curled around the building. “You look like you could use about 10 more people, mate,” he sympathized. I agreed, before sheepishly adding that it was hard to find people to work at that time.

This was less than a month after I had sustained a work-related back injury, which was attributable, in large part, to having had to operate the business half-staffed. The damage is permanent. My back will never be the same.

But, you heard never heard tales like mine during the celebrated pandemic labor revolution. They didn’t fit with the glorious story of worker emancipation that the press wanted to tell.

The previously referenced employee, the one who did stick with us during that time, may eventually require surgery for her own back problems. You never heard her story either. Her condition was preexisting, but having to do the work of two or more people for protracted periods of time couldn’t have helped it. Mercifully, and with our blessing, she has now moved on to a less physically demanding occupation.

For the sake of both our businesses and our employees, then, employers found ourselves with a constant, frantic need to hire. But, it wasn’t any easier to get workers to start than it was to get them to stay. We hired numerous people who didn’t show up on their first day. Many more skipped scheduled interviews. No-shows for interviews and first days were so common that we would make bets about whether interviewees and new hires would come in, basing our predictions on things such as what day of the week it was and what the weather was like.

The media touted this behavior on the part of workers too, comparing it to the practice of “ghosting” (i.e. disappearing without notice) in contemporary dating culture and citing statistics that show about 90% of Generation Z has no-showed both interviews and first days of work, as have smaller numbers of millennials, Generation Xers and Boomers. The defense that is trumpeted by their apologists: doing so “makes them feel in charge of their career.”

So, akin to ditched suitors who invested numerous hours cultivating a connection only to be abandoned without so much as a perfunctory text, employers, who may have spent hours screening, interviewing and doing post-interview reference, background and social media checks, get the same treatment. And just like a jilted romantic, the ghosted employer may have to start the whole search process over, especially when the pool of qualified candidates is shallow.

The Fight for $15 was a textbook case of moving the Overton window, the range of policies acceptable to the average person. The idea seemed outlandish at a time when the highest state minimum wage was $9.04, in Washington. But, gradually, as the demand went viral, public opinion began to move in workers’ direction.

During the pandemic, due to the difficulty in attracting workers, corporate owned stores in our region began to offer salaries that were several dollars higher than the average. While we couldn’t match them, as small businesses typically have narrower margins than larger employers, each time surrounding businesses raised rates, we had to raise ours. Every year, more than once, I found myself pulling aside our bookkeeper and asking, “Can we afford this?”

The “this” in this case was an across-the-board pay increase. Because, far from the heartless misers, who needed to be taught a lesson in the form of the Big Quit, that the media portrays us as, most owners and managers actually have a basic sense of fairness, at least at the small business level. In other words, we understand that, if we raise the new hire rate, we have to raise everybody else’s rate by the same amount.

The net effect was that, by 2023, our family-owned business, with a full-time staff of seven, had hit the $15 threshold. We’ve always proudly been well above both the federal and state minimum wages, but now we, too, had reached the magic number, which represented a 50% increase in five years.

Of course, the corporate stores around us are now offering $17 or more, and the Fight for $15 supporters now want $20. But, the thing that will trigger our next company-wide increase is the fact that, in 2025, our state minimum wage will also be set at $15. And, monsters that we are, we recognize that, for what they do, our people deserve to be paid more than the minimum. As one of the owners put it, “we are not a minimum wage business.”

Fortunately, our company has several things working in its favor that should help it withstand the evidently escalating wage-price spiral. Some other small businesses that operate on thinner margins won’t be as fortunate.