Why workers just won’t stop quitting | Hacker News Reader

Why workers just won’t stop quitting

bbc.com

30 pointsrustoo25 comments

I think people are overthinking the problem when it is quite simple: Housing prices have put owning your own home out of reach for the vast majority of young people.

I worked hard to pay my mortgage, feeling happy that I was on my way to owning a house. With a house, I started a family and life was good. I didn't mind putting up with corporate nonsense.

Without a house, I most certainly would not done this. I probably would have kicked around doing odd jobs to save for going backpacking in Thailand. Why the hell would I want to be part of a system that doesn't reward me? There's no reason to buy in (or sell out)

Replace housing with a good QoL, and this is exactly how I think. There is no reward for hard work. stability (housing, family, career, healthcare, transport) is just not achievable with money, in the US at least. I can get a MUCH higher quality of life in SE Asia or Mexico than I ever could in America.

So why would I care about working too hard at my current job? What does working hard and sticking around buy me?

It used to be common knowledge that home ownership was the bedrock of American civil society. There's nothing like a 30 year mortgage and a couple of kids to keep a person locked in.

My editorial opinion is that rich people got greedy and stopped caring about the middle class and upward mobility. They saw houses as an investment opportunity they could sell as securitized tranches to overseas buyers. So it's grab as much cash as you can and write opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal about how this new generation is lazy and doesn't want to work.

I see it as being connected to the dynamics of empire, more generally. Property ownership - and its enforcement by the state - extends vassalage to the masses, tying them up in the system in a way that rent alone can't: too invested to skip town, too small to have a voice in the legal framework.

If you "drop out" and live modestly, there's much less coercion to be had. That means that as the empire tightens up control over its assets, it foments moments of generational revolution through exclusion. And we have a picture now of that throughout the US, but also globally: no way onto the property ladder, crumbling faith in the enforcers, an older generation exiting and leaving behind institutions in need of a retrofit. It's a good time to quit given that it's not clear what the rat race gets you now.

The cheerleaders of empire, on the other hand, are necessarily going to be the biggest and best-funded media establishments, and because they operate within imperial reality they can only use logic from within the Overton Window, ideas that do not question the system and instead provides a scapegoat for its failings. Hence we are all a bunch of avocado toast quitters now, influenced by "extremists", "radicals" and "fake news".

The ugly reality is that this new generation gets bullied by very rich tyrants who own homes. Wall Street is a mafia of warmongering tyrants who don't care about human rights and people's well-being. It's been economically proven that America has been having decreasing social mobility. America's middle class is not shrinking for no reason. Very rich tyrants have been causing this decreasing social mobility, so they can hoard money into their private banks while many people suffer and die of starvation from increasing wealth inequality. It's what causes American cilivization to collapse. Some countries' rulers are not allies to America anymore because of this. American society has become dystopian against future generations' well-being. There are many ways to prove America is no longer a great country for everyone. It's corporate oligarchy that influences mainstream media to gaslight working class Americans about how great America is. Sad to see America become a dystopian dumpster fire where working class Americans are treated like dehumanized serfs who don't have enough money to own homes.

Well said. I want to add that owning a house and having a stake in the system naturally turns people towards conservatism. People want to conserve and preserve what they have. When I owned a house and had money I became a Reagan Republican. I lost it all through divorce and other problems, so one day I was watching "Grapes of Wrath" and thought to myself "Why the f am I a Republican?" I became a Democrat.

Republicans know this and have a remedy, which they need because millions of young people are toying with ideas like Solar Punk, Socialism, Fully Automated Luxury Communism and even (gasp!) full old school Communism.

The only way Wall Street Republicans can have it all these days is to make sure elections don't count so young people no longer have a vote or say in the system. I'm a little stunned at the lengths they are willing to go and be so brazen about it. They want to create a two tiered apartheid system of the haves and the have nots. They might succeed in the short term, but unless they give people a stake in the system, those millions of people will tear it down. It won't be pretty when that happens.

There's a problem though. They might be able to convince people they have a stake in the system when they actually don't. You want real estate? How about this plot of "land' in the Metaverse. You want to own things? How about all these NFT's you can buy and feel proud to own.

Not just overseas buyers, there are many people with a lot of houses who aren’t foreigners.

For sure, like Adam Neumann, who is backed by Marc Andreessen of a16z. Marc was recently in the news for not wanting the poors in his neighborhood. They don't even try to hide it anymore.

Adam Neumann, Vibes Landlord

https://www.curbed.com/2022/08/adam-neumann-residential-real...

VC Billionaire Marc Andreessen and Ultra-Wealthy Neighbors Thwart Housing in California Town

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-05/vc-marc-a...

I would say they should try listening to workers about what's bothering them but in general there's not enough trust for that to happen honestly. Lots of companies have tried using anonymous surveys but very few trust that they're actually anonymous. They've tried using "independent third parties" but since those companies are paid by the employer, there's very little trust that identities will be protected, which could lead to retaliation. The irony is that there does exist a type of entity that could get to the heart of what's causing so many workers to leave: the union. Of course, the union discussion involves many more issues than just being a place where workers can be honest about their issues with the employer, but if employers want to stop the bleeding of labor, they're going to have to figure out what's really the issue. Not sure how they accomplish that without trust.

Unions are not the salve for this.

The great resignation is in effect an existential crisis for the working person. People are questioning their life values and gut checking their work prospects against it and making a change when necessary. The pandemic was a watershed moment for everyone to kind of wake up and say, “is this right for me?”

Is it actually a crisis of values?

I rarely see talk of a crisis of values on any of these forums.

Every time I see a forum discussion, it is about pay and work from home. We didn’t all move to the public service to make social services work great. We didn’t resign big tech by the thousands to allow solar startups to be slammed with applicants.

We just all shuffled our current jobs because those who shuffled got stuff those who didn’t shuffle were refused.

Yes, sort of, mostly because people were offered more money in unemployment than to stay at their jobs, which probably reduced the value of work itself in many's eyes.

But can someone explain how these people can afford to quit?

I’d quit too if I was independently wealthy. What are all these kids doing to feed themselves and pay rent?

It’s not just quitting. It’s quitting after finding a better opportunity. And there are lots of opportunities right now.

I agree these articles loosely mentioning “the pandemic” seems more like hand-wavey excuses from top management. I think many blue collar workers I know doing day in day out had a jolt that made them realize they were over-prioritizing their company that didn’t prioritize them.

Are you saying unionized workers aren’t leaving their jobs?

No they go on strike and punish everyone else instead of just their boss.

This "great resignation" thing is a fake story, a forced trend mainly created by the media after so many people were made redundant during the early days of the pandemic. What happened across the U.S. is that millions of people were paid more money in unemployment than they would have from working. Bartenders refrained from taking more hours because they could get partial unemployment. Not in every state, mind you, but most of them. So, when I say this is a fake narrative, I mean that it's written to convey it from an angle of volition and choice, when the primary factor in the "great resignation" is that it was governments, states, and cities that haphazardly shut things down and disrupted work. And I suspect stories like these are a way to retroactively shuffle off the blame, considering the general public has lost so much trust in traditional media.

I'd be working if it wasn't for Long Covid that ripped me out of the workforce at least a decade before I would have thought possible in 2019. The segregation of society into "essential" and other workers didn't help matters either. We all saw that the essential workers who actually keep the lights on, store stocked, etc... get paid shit wages and are not shown any respect.

We also learned that it's no necessary, and for the most part, a huge counterproductive scheme to have people crammed into offices after hours of commuting. So much wasted life force, money, fuel, all propping up a system that is infested with layers of grift.

On top of this, as mentioned, the demographics are such that a lot of people were about to retire anyway. This just accelerated the timelines a bit. We're going to be in permanent labor shortage in the US for a few decades now, especially as deglobalization hits and we're rebuilding our manufacturing base here at home.

You get paid extra to leave and nothing to stay. Why I feel comfortable just fucking around and interview prepping between jobs.

An important factor for people to quit their jobs is to choose a higher income so as not to affect their quality of life in the face of rising prices. At the same time, corporate culture is also an important factor. If they are unhappy in the place where they work, many people will choose to quit. https://www.couponbirds.com/research-center/data/an-unpreced...

In many cases, companies need to consider not only paying their employees, but also providing them with a good working atmosphere and proper care.

With inflation running at circa 10% and most people only having received a circa 3% payrise this year, the easiest way to make sure your salary keeps up with inflation is to jump roles and take a decent uplift in pay.

That’s the situation I found myself in this year. Thankfully finding a new job was pretty easy.

I wonder if some of this might be the effects of long covid...

If workers used to work long hours, but then caught long covid that made them feel exhausted and foggy all the time, they might decide to switch to part time, or shift the focus of their life from work towards family life.

It looks pretty similar to 'burn out'... But would be triggered by disease.

I read a study over two thirds regret quitting.

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