I’ve been wondering how the great resignation narrative will fare with the looming recession.
From my perspective, I'm seeing the last 6-or-so months of the Great Resignation as a zeitgeist of irrational optimism. Money was cheap, "post-COVID repairs" were a goldmine of opportunity, and companies were thriving regardless of their actual performance. If the burnout is catching up to people, it is probably because "returning to normal" no longer seems so palatable. So why not try a new normal in a fresh environment?
If we see a 2001-level decline, I can only hope that a desire for the good old days helps people get their priorities straight and figure out a way to balance happiness, dignity, and success that doesn't involve LinkedIn recruiters.
Q1 real GDP growth in the US was negative. It seems quite likely that we're in the start of a recession by either of the definitions above, but we'll know with greater certainty in a little over a month when the advance estimate of the Q2 figure is released.
I think the term recession was not being used in the sense of "two quarters of real negative GDP" but in the more colloquial sense.
"The NBER's definition emphasizes that a recession involves a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months. In our interpretation of this definition, we treat the three criteria—depth, diffusion, and duration—as somewhat interchangeable. That is, while each criterion needs to be met individually to some degree, extreme conditions revealed by one criterion may partially offset weaker indications from another. For example, in the case of the February 2020 peak in economic activity, the committee concluded that the subsequent drop in activity had been so great and so widely diffused throughout the economy that, even if it proved to be quite brief, the downturn should be classified as a recession."
It's good for cappie PR to create a narrative of empowered, entitled workers. It's just not true, though. Most of the current worker attrition has to do with COVID-related disability (long COVID), gas prices, and displacements caused by rising rents. It's not that people are suddenly deciding not to work because the Capitalism Fairy is putting seed capital under their pillows--it's that people who had few options now have even fewer.
https://money.yahoo.com/older-americans-head-back-to-the-wor...
Heaven help us :)
The only reason we haven't seen 85% of society give up all at once is that some people still hold out hope that the BoomerJobs, once vacated, will be given to them. That isn't going to happen, though.
People work "hard" in our society, because they have no other choice, since there is no social safety net and employers can do whatever they want in this country, but no one really cares anymore. This has manifested itself as survivable mediocrity for quite a while, but as soon as our society finds itself in any kind of serious crisis it will collapse. It almost did, during COVID.
Yes, boomers had better pay where a middle class blue collar job could afford you a nice house and kids in the suburbs, but this idea you quote, I'd need much more data on because the entire culture of being a boomer is much more top down, listen to your boss, do what your told then the modern culture.
My experience of Boomers (my parents and their friends are early Boomers) is that most of them were working as two-income families, whereas my granparents' generation (late Greatest and early Silent), it was much more common for there to be only one outside income coming into the household.
If anything the reverse is true, and a general message that it's hard to find a job is much more benefecial for the capital/employer class, who would then find laborers who are happy to accept anything they can get and have no interest in taking the risk necessary to start or join a union
PS: The last time unions started doing well in the US was also a time when labor was in scarce supply just after WWII. Europe had been destroyed and the USA was the China of the day, but even moreso, in that almost the entire surviving industrial capacity of the world was in the USA. A laborer in the USA, able and willing to operate a factory machine, was thus in terrific, just terrific demand. Unionization happens in good for labor times, to prepare for bad for labor times, not the other way around.