IT’S NOT JUST QUITTING TIME — Headlines about the Great Resignation have conjured images of people leaving jobs en masse, destroying printers “Office Space” style on their way out the door with government checks that they use to vacation in Mexico. It’s true that a record number of people have quit their job this year: About 4 million people have done so every month since April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it’s a fantasy that these Americans have given up on work in 2021. More than 6 million people a month are being hired right now, too. “The quits are people who are quitting their job to take another job,” Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank and a former Labor Department economist in the Obama administration, told Nightly. Back in February 2020, before we knew we were about to be hit with business and school closures, the labor force participation rate — the proportion of people working and looking for work — was 63.3 percent, according to the BLS. By April 2020, after tens of millions of Americans were fired or quit, it plummeted to 60.2 percent. During the summer, as shutdown orders lifted and businesses reopened, the rate crept back up, reaching 61.7 percent in Aug. 2020. And that’s where it’s more or less been since then: November 2021’s rate was 61.8 percent. That missing 1.6 percent is a lot of people — about 5 million. Many of them are workers, largely women, who left their jobs back at the very start of the pandemic because they were fired or because they didn’t want to get Covid or because they had to care for a child or other family member. And they have yet to come back. But they’re also not the people who are quitting right now. It’s hard to know what, if anything, will get this group back to work. Employers weren’t flooded with new resumes when enhanced unemployment benefits ended, nor when schools reopened. Cheaper child care options or paid leave policies could convince more people to start looking for work, Shierholz said. Women’s employment began to catch up in March of this year, but dropped after that even though a worker shortage helped people negotiate better benefits like paid leave and remote work, Heritage Foundation economist Rachel Greszler told POLITICO’s labor reporter Eleanor Mueller. And some people are never coming back. In addition to retirees, about 200,000 people between the ages of 18 and 64 have died from Covid. Immigration is also lower now than it was before the pandemic, according to a Brookings analysis of the labor market. Employers — and customers — may have to get used to an overall smaller workforce, Eleanor said. The Great Resignation isn’t about white-collar burnout or lazy Americans. It’s about workers, mostly those who work in restaurants, hotels and the rest of the hospitality sector, leaving their jobs for better or higher-paying ones. Employers are having to work harder to entice staff. The industry’s wages have risen 22 percent since March. If we’re living in “Office Space,” the Great Resigners aren’t the three guys who destroyed their printer. They’re more like Jennifer Aniston’s Joanna, a server who quits her job at Chotchkie’s to work in another restaurant because it has less flair and better uniforms. Shierholz doesn’t believe these lower-paying jobs will see continued strong wage growth. Eventually the pandemic will end and things will start to level off. But Eleanor told Nightly that she does sense a permanent change in labor markets. Kellogg workers just ended a nearly three-month strike that saw some consumers boycotting the company’s products. She said she plans to spend the next year reporting on this pandemic-driven shift in worker power. For this year at least, she said, “workers are calling the shots.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @RenuRayasam. A programming note: Nightly won’t publish from Friday, Dec. 24 to Friday, Dec. 31. But don’t fret: We’ll be back and better than ever on Monday, Jan. 3.
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