The final stretch of 2023 is claiming an unexpected victim. This is the Great Resignation, that supposedly irreversible and unstoppable tidal wave that was going to corrode the foundations of corporate capitalism. An earthquake that had its first epicenter in the United States a couple of years ago, which was producing continuous aftershocks and that until just a few months ago was being exported to the European community, including Spain.
Today, in the opinion of Investopedia, the international bible of financial investors, the Great Resignation is a thing of the past. This is a thesis that is already widely disseminated in the academic environment and is supported by media such as Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg, Quartz, The Week or The Economist.The New York Timesgives him full credit in an incisive article by Ben Casselman
Even the man credited with authoring the concept, Anthony Klotz, a professor of economic management at University College London, is willing to admit that there is "no trace" of the cataclysm of unpredictable effects that he once predicted. Everything points to the fact that the labour market has behaved, since last spring, "as if the pandemic had never happened". Klotz coined the expression Great Resignation in May 2021, but today he assumes that this mass exodus of professionals willing to quit their jobs to pursue a fuller and more satisfying life has not survived the consolidation of the new post-covid 19 normal.
Business as usual
In October of this year, according to Chris Morris, editor of Fortune, the percentage of Americans who quit their jobs was at levels "very similar to those of 2019", around 0.1% that experts consider "insignificant" and, in any case, perfectly normal. It seems clear that the great desertion of those who felt ignored or mistreated in the contemporary labor trench has ended.
Just a year and a half ago, in June 2022, Beyoncé released what social media describes as her Bolshevik song, Break My Soul, the anthem of the Great Resignation. In it, as CNN Business staff writer Lucy Bayly recounts, she urged her fans not to resign themselves to the disheartening mediocrity of jobs without prospects. If your routine is nerve-wracking, overwhelming and exhausting, keeping you up at night, and separating you from your loved ones, don't hesitate: quit.
Today, the subject sounds even more opportunistic and puerile than when it was conceived. Apparently, Beyoncé read diagonally a series of articles in the progressive press and embraced the thesis of the Great Restructuring, the supposed change of system that companies were going to be forced to resort to to alleviate the effects of the Great Resignation.
If our employees are massively going to the human resources department to tell us that they are fed up and that they are leaving, we are going to have to stop the bleeding by offering salary increases, flexible working hours, reductions in workloads, greater freedom, more deferential, considerate and "humane" treatment, they proposed at the time, in a more or less resigned way. many employers. Mark Lobosco was a lecturer at LinkedIn's trend observatory proposing "a profound reinvention of corporate culture".
The Years of Mass Desertion
None of that has happened. CNN's Samantha Delouya says that in the end, as usual, "order has been restored." Entrepreneurs weathered the storm by accelerating their automation and digitalization programs, thus reducing, to some extent, their dependence on fickle and unpredictable human beings. Today, says Delouya, they "hardly have to worry about the gradual desertion of their employees." As the fog of battle lifts, "what was shaping up to be one of the main medium-term effects of the pandemic is being left behind."
In 2021, 47.7 million people quit their jobs in the United States, alleging, in many cases, chronic work stress [burnout], "demotivation, life dissatisfaction, work-life balance problems or changes in priorities," according to Delouya. This was the highest number since the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) began collecting data on the issue in 2001.
In 2022, a new all-time high was reached: 50.5 million resignations. Today we know that the deserter impulse was peaking in the summer of that year, between July and September, coinciding, if only by chance, with the commercial journey of Break My Soul. In that period, about six million resignations were being recorded monthly. But the trend began to change in October. And it was not the soft landing that some analysts predicted, but rather a sharp reversion to normality that was already beginning to be evident in the spring of this year.
To the happiness of signing. Camerique Archive (Getty Images)
Quitting a job isn't that simple. Many of those who did so between the end of 2020 and mid-2022 felt driven by a strong social and generational current that the pandemic had given wings to. They believed that they were acting in coherence with their moment in life and with the "new" values acquired or consolidated during the confinements. They aspired to a "different" life, who knows if they wanted a better job or rather a new starting point. And they were convinced that they were embarking on this journey at the right time and with their saddlebags well loaded.
Our Deserters
Among those who made such a decision in Spain, in an environment that has little to do with the traditional vitality and strength of the U.S. labor market, ICON has identified Marc A., a 43-year-old illustrator and designer. Marc quit a job on the payroll in a Barcelona design studio in 2022 to register as a freelancer and move to a town of a few hundred inhabitants in the Pyrenees of Lleida: "It was a leap into the void," he admits, "because establishing myself on my own after the age of 40 means, most likely, that I will never have a salary again, And that's a pretty delicate prospect."
He did so, he explains, because the pandemic convinced him of how unsatisfactory his life was being, "in a city that I liked less and less, with which I had lost emotional connection," and leading a routine that he perceived as "absurd and slavish." The idea of settling into a "calmer and healthier" environment and becoming his own boss began to be seductive to him as soon as several people around him simply began to quit: "I opted for a different way of living and I did it with all the consequences. Perhaps the most delicate point of what I conceive as my personal rescue plan is that, at this rate, I will retire as self-employed, so it is very likely that I will be left with a derisory pension, unless I find a way to supplement it adequately."
Magda López, 29, joined the Great Resignation to "get off the wheel" that she feels she got on prematurely: "I had been doing more or less rubbish jobs since I was 19 and I hadn't had time to complete my training or stop to think about how I wanted to orient the rest of my life." She is now studying audiovisual production and alternates it with sporadic ("and quite poorly paid") self-employed jobs.
Magda is part of that meager 14.9% of Spaniards under the age of 30 who do not live with their parents. She had settled in the apartment of her partner, a few years older than her and with a "somewhat more comfortable" economic situation, but her commitment to a "sincere and profound" life change led her to leave that relationship behind as well. Today, she shares a flat with two childhood friends, a temporary and rather "precarious" solution, but one that is bearable for her because she describes herself as "disciplined and very frugal", rather than used to "having a hard time". He knows Beyoncé's song, and thinks it's "disgustingly frivolous that a billionaire as disconnected from reality as she allows herself to give her followers condescending advice on how they should live their lives." Beyoncé, after all, is "the paradigm of those who will never have to consider giving up anything."
Finally, Laia P., a 37-year-old separated translator and interpreter and mother of twins, also turned her back on a salary and a "more than dignified" salary in those first months of 2022 when the seed of resignation seemed to float in the air: "Confinement was a traumatic experience for me," she tells us, "But it also gave me a fresh perspective on how I want to live my life. I'm no longer willing to submit to a routine that keeps me away from my children almost all day and forces me to lock myself in an office and live very intensely with people who don't contribute anything to me on a human level."
The company where I worked tried to adapt to this change in life perspective: "I admit that they were flexible and reasonable with me. They offered me a reduction in working hours, work-life balance options, the possibility of alternating presence and teleworking. But my tolerance for working as a salaried employee in a large company had plummeted. In the end, they ended up telling me: 'Nothing is enough for you, we think the problem is that you have much less desire to work now.' And I guess they were right. So we agreed to a dismissal and now I have returned to translating at home and going from time to time to interviews, conferences and congresses, as I did in the early years of my professional life."
The balance of this new lifestyle motivated by "a profound change of priorities" seems very positive to him: "I am disappointed, in any case, that the Great Resignation has been nothing more than a false alarm, especially in Spain, a country with a very high unemployment rate and, consequently, with conservative-minded workers. willing to live almost any way to maintain a paycheck." Laia hoped that "the impact of the pandemic and the life lesson it meant for many of us would be deeper and more transformative", but, in the end, "reality has imposed itself and the vast majority have ended up choosing to live more or less the same as before, perhaps even with fewer illusions and hopes".
Standing Up
Madeline Klass, an expert on industry trends at the corporate newsletter Hierology, believes that the end of the era of the Great Resignation "most likely occurred already at the end of 2022 and became more than evident in May of this year". However, The New York Times did not announce the "event" until July, and "it is already known," Klass quips, "that things do not end up happening until The New York Times confirms in its pages that they have happened."
A strike at the Spratts food factory in east London over a dispute over a new "clocking" system. October 1945, what a time it was. Mirrorpix (Mirrorpix via Getty Images)
Klass adds that the definitive shelving of what she considered an "anomalous" situation is still good news. In his view, the mass exodus and consequent shortage of labour talent that companies were beginning to suffer from had led to a "remarkable empowerment of workers, who were in a position to demand pay rises, flexibility and incentives". With the restoration of the "natural" order of labour relations, employers regain the initiative, but Klass believes that they will only retain it if they "continue to offer their professionals conditions that make it worth staying with". In other words, this dynamic of ebb and flow would have resulted, for the time being, with the arrival, at least in the United States, of an optimal equilibrium point.
Brigid Kennedy, in The Week, attributes the change of third to "a growing pessimism among workers regarding the evolution of the labor market in the medium term." The United States, and the planet as a whole, is facing a period of uncertainty and volatility. "Quitting a job is much less attractive now than it was a year and a half ago." Jumping into the pool is much more unsettling when you perceive that there could be very little water in it. In the labor market game of chairs, says ADP analyst Nela Richardson, "the best positions seem to be filled right now," so there are fewer and fewer practical incentives to stand up when the music plays.
Jo Constantz, in Bloomberg, assumes that the era of large labour migrations has passed, that a sedentary professional lifestyle once again seems to be the best option for the vast majority and that the time has come to review and "learn" from what has happened in the last three years. For Constantz, it is clear that the era of unconditional devotion to work is also behind us. One in two workers would still consider quitting their job if their employers forced them to spend more time in the office, and that is a lesson that cannot be ignored.
As much as the evolution of their careers concerns the most qualified millennials and Z, they are not as willing as those over 40 to submit to suffocating work routines incompatible with a "normal" life. The companies that best understand this mental paradigm shift among their workers, Constantz believes, will be the ones that have the easiest time attracting and retaining talent and, consequently, the ones that are most competitive.
The temptation to get off the wheel may have gone out of fashion, but the job market is now dominated by a generation willing to work for a living, but perhaps no longer to live to work. If that were true, the Great Resignation would have gone down in history, but not without leaving a deep legacy whose proper distribution will have to be negotiated by workers and companies in recent years. It may not be the Great Restructuring that voluntarists like Mark Lobosco were talking about a few months ago, but it may end up being something similar to some extent.
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