Why American Workers Are Leaving Their Jobs?
Verbal abuse and harassment from customers coupled with a lack of staff and seven days of work in a row. Managers who only want results but are not interested in care and passion. These are the reasons a pet groomer in the US left her job.
She joined a freshly launched mobile pet grooming service as an independent groomer. It is, so far, still going strong.
In September, 4.43 million workers followed Caroline Potts’ example and quit their jobs, setting a new high. This equates to 3% of the American workforce quitting their jobs, up from 2.9 percent in August. In lower-wage sectors such as leisure and hospitality, food services and lodging, the figure reached 6.6 percent, or roughly one out of every 15 workers.
Things could pick up speed from there. According to a July survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, 41% of U.S. workers are either actively looking for a new job or plan to do so in the coming months. Rather than moving within their industry, two-thirds of those looking have considered a career change. According to Bankrate’s August job seeker survey, 55 percent of the workforce said they would likely look for a new job in the next year.
This phenomenon has been dubbed the “Great Resignation,” and nearly every economist and pundit has attempted to explain why it is occurring. Health and safety concerns, child care needs, a tight labour market, increased savings from stimulus funds or reduced ability to spend money on bars and movies, enhanced unemployment benefits, increased business formation, desire to work from home, early retirements, immigration restrictions, demographic shrinking of the prime-age workforce, and my personal favourite, expectations of a labour shortage creating a labour shortage
This article appears in the November/December 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
THE GREAT RESET
The Magazine says there was a shift after the pandemic hit the globe. More like a reset, workers in the low end of the salary scale has had enough of low prospects, fear of losing jobs and have decided to change that.
And the pandemic reset is now being seen among workers of higher wages. It is becoming a thing and employers are getting worried.
For 15 bucks an hour, the employers can extract the maximum from workers and exploit them to maximise profit and get more sales.
As of 2020, nearly one-quarter of U.S. jobs were low-wage, the highest percentage in the developed world.
Overfinancialization has added to the pain. More than 11.7 million U.S. workers, most of them low-wage, now work for companies owned by private equity firms. With a business model of extracting as much cash out of portfolio businesses as possible, private equity has turned even more jobs into low-wage nightmares, says the Magazine.
Reports are these companies, particularly those that employ cheap labour or pay little money during the pandemic, are putting health and safety in the workplace out of the window.
A study from the University of California, San Francisco found that the professions seeing the highest number of working-age deaths from COVID-19 were cooks, warehouse line workers, agricultural workers, bakers, and construction workers. All of them are low-wage jobs with inevitable contact with co-workers. Employers knew this and saw it as an acceptable loss. A lawsuit last year alleged that Tyson Foods managers in Waterloo, Iowa, placed bets on which of the plant’s meatpacking assembly-line workers would contract COVID.
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