Media is filled with articles providing a narrative for The Great Resignation. We’ve heard plenty of explanations.
People are re-assessing their lives because of COVID.
Safety fears about returning to work has motivated people to resign.
They’re excited about new opportunities in a strong job market.
Women are leaving the work force because they can’t get child care.
Generous unemployment benefits are letting lazy people quit their jobs.
There’s a cultural change and restaurant work is now unpopular.
There’s a grain of truth in some of those explanations. Here’s the explanation we don’t hear so much — the most important one:
Millions of people have always hated their jobs due to abuse, harassment, low pay, weak benefits and the fake culture of employers pretending to care about them. Once some early adapters made resignation socially acceptable, millions followed.
Insulting and abusing employees is so ingrained in the culture of corporate capitalism that it persists even after the employees are gone and the corporations want them back. That’s why those who have resigned are labeled lazy and foolish.
Oh, the employers bear some responsibility — maybe they should have been nicer and if they are nicer NOW, employees might come back. Maybe offer some more money because, you know, money solves anything. But don’t offer too much more money because the corporations want it for theme selves and the holy shareholders.
I’m astounded that HR consultants everywhere are offering such clueless advice:
When hiring now, don’t worry about gaps in employment and other irrelevant crap you normally use to screen out talented candidates.
Offer a signing bonus because they’ll trust you and you can screw them again later.
Pretend to be nice and to care. If you hadn’t forgotten that before, you wouldn’t be in this mess.
In today’s New York Times, there’s an article on how people are loudly and proudly celebrating and advertising their own Great Resignations on social media. (“Public Displays of Resignation: Saying ‘I Quit’ Loud and Proud”) Experts — “career coaches” — of course, are warning against this. Once the job market gets back to normal, you’ll have trouble finding jobs.
As if we need a reminder why we don’t like working for corporations or privately held firms that emulate their clueless cruelty. American management is hierarchical tyranny, where the clueless “managers” muck up productivity by issuing orders and abusing the people who do the actual productive work.
Nearly every American worker knows this. Nearly every American executive doesn’t know this. This is where the big disconnect looms large.
The American worker — still employed or not — faces great hardship. Employers want to pay them as little as possible, or send their jobs overseas to poor desperate workers who will work for even less. Or automate the jobs. Employers don’t want just profits; they want to maximize profits at your expense.
Now that most of us finally realize this, everything has changed. Even slashing unemployment benefits won’t get us back to the office, because the office doesn’t offer enough. Low pay and abuse doesn’t fix anything.
You know why people are resigning? Because they’ve developed pride and self-respect. And no blowhard executive, expert or pundit can take it away.
The establishment is terrified that workers are no longer afraid of them.
Maybe we shouldn’t call it The Great Resignation. Maybe we should call it The Great FU. It’s OUR resignation. Let’s take control of OUR narrative.
