Tangle - The Great Resignation.

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

On Friday, the U.S. government released its latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) data, showing an estimated all-time high of 4.4 million workers who quit their jobs in September, up from 4.3 million in August, indicating the pace of employees quitting their jobs is still increasing. The percentage of resignations relative to total employment was 3%, also the highest such figure on record.The "quits rate" data came along with a more encouraging jobs report, as September numbers were revised upward and October numbers exceeded expectations. 6.5 million new hires were made in September, and over 530,000 new jobs were added in October, but around 10.4 million jobs remained open. The pre-pandemic job vacancy high was 7.5 million. Since April, 24 million workers have quit their jobs. There are about 160 million people in the entire labor force. Quits are defined as voluntary separations initiated by an employee. Economists and analysts are calling this phenomenon The Great Resignation.You can find today's newsletter here. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.You can support our podcast by clicking here--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul. And on today's show, we are going to be talking about the great resignation. There has been a tsunami of job resignations in the U.S. workforce recently. Still, there are many workers want or need to remain in their roles. So what is the impact on those who stay on the job? All of a sudden, it seemed like everyone I know was changing jobs or stepping off the career ladder. In the month of May alone, 3.6 million Americans

quit their jobs. And that's down from the month before, with almost four million walking out the door in April, a two decade high, by the way. It's what's been as President Biden ready to sign the trillion dollar infrastructure bill. He's contending with a slew of economic issues from the pandemic fallout, including rising prices and supply chain shortages. But now there's a new snag as a record number of Americans are quitting their jobs during a nationwide labor shortage. Before we jump into that main topic, I want to do two things. First, I want to thank everyone. Yesterday, we had a little bit of an adventure. I accidentally violated some obscure Internet laws by asking people to subscribe in order to participate in a little contest, a drawing. It turns out if

you do purchase-based contests online, you're actually breaking the law. You can't ask people to pay to enter a contest, which I was kind of inadvertently doing. Anyway, it was a crazy day with the newsletter. I had to send an apology and then update people and update the raffle, whatever. But a bunch of people ended up subscribing anyway, and a bunch of people signed up for the first time all to enter this raffle, which I am going to do drawings for this afternoon. So thank you all for taking that in stride and kind of laughing along with me. And as always, before we jump in, I want to do some quick hits. First up, the United States and China agreed to ease restrictions on foreign journalists

following a series of tit-for-tat expulsions and restrictions over the last year. Number two, the State Department and NASA criticized Russia for an anti-satellite missile test that they say caused 1,500 pieces of space debris and caused significant risk to astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Number three, U.S. retail sales rose 1.7 percent overall in October, beating economists' expectations, while major retailers like Walmart, Lowe's, Target, and Home Depot all posted better-than-expected earnings. Number four, the House of Representatives will vote on a resolution to censure Representative Paul Gosar from Arizona and strip him of his committee assignments in response to a tweet he sent of an animated video

depicting himself killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat from New York, and attacking President Biden. Number five, Pfizer has asked the FDA to grant emergency authorization for its experimental COVID-19 antiviral pill. All right, that's it for today's Quick Hits, which brings us to our main topic. On Friday, the U.S. government released its latest job openings and labor turnover survey, also called JOLTS, showing an estimated all-time high of 4.4 million workers who quit their jobs in the month of September. That's up from 4.3 million workers who quit in August, indicating that the pace of employees leaving their jobs is still increasing. The percentage of resignations relative to total employment was 3%, also the highest such figure on record. The quote-unquote quits rate data came along with

a more encouraging jobs report as September numbers were revised upward and October numbers exceeded expectations. 6.5 million new hires were made in September, but around 10.4 million jobs remained open. The pre-pandemic job vacancy high was 7.5 million. Since April, though, 24 million workers have quit their jobs. There are now about 160 million people in the entire labor force. Quits are defined as voluntary separations initiated by an employee. Economists and analysts are calling this phenomenon of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs en masse the Great Resignation. Nick Bunker, an economic research director at Indeed, told The Hill that quits are up the most in sectors where work is in-person or relatively low-paying. He cited sharp jumps in quit rates across sectors like manufacturing, leisure,

and hospitality, retail, and the health and services industries. People in the southern region of the country have also left their jobs the fastest. While quits were concentrated the most in those unemployment sectors, they increased the most in sectors like arts, entertainment, and recreation, i.e. the people who staff live events, as well as local and state government jobs. The result of the Great Resignation has been one of the most competitive job markets in recent memory. On average, across the country, there are seven unemployed workers for every 10 job openings, also a record low. That leaves employers fighting over the same potential employees across sectors. The largest gap in openings versus available workers remains in healthcare, transportation, and warehousing jobs that require in-person work and where the risk of contracting COVID-19 remains the highest. That's according to ZipRecruiter chief economist Julia Pollack.

Exactly why workers are quitting their jobs, though, and how to get them back is a topic of much debate. Historically poor working conditions, low wages, unaffordable child care, the risk of COVID-19, vaccine mandates, government assistance in the form of stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment, and the child tax credit, and a more abstract emotional reaction to the pandemic have all been pointed to as contributing factors. In a second, we're going to take a look at some of the thoughts about what is going on. In a fascinating show of just how complex this issue is, there does not really seem to be a neatly formed team or staunch polarization on this issue between the right and left.

Obviously, folks on the right have tended to emphasize government handouts, while those on the left have focused more on working conditions and increased employee opportunity. But I think it's more instructive for this issue just to explain and lay out the central theories out there without classification. So I'm just going to share some of the most compelling analysis I've seen, and then I'll give you my take. All right, so here are the opinions, the unlabeled opinions. In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson explained the strangeness of this economic moment. He said the answer might seem obvious, the pandemic. It's still killing 10,000 people a week and people are scared.

But when you look more closely, the direct effects of COVID-19 don't explain very much, Thompson wrote. Most pandemic deaths have been among the elderly, not Americans of prime working age, and COVID-19 fears have lessened over the past few months. Even so, the number of Americans under 65 looking for work is still shrinking. The most complete explanation is that the massive fiscal policy response to the pandemic reduced the urgency of looking for a new job. The United States has spent trillions of dollars to help families get through the economic deep freeze via stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits, and the moratorium on student loan interest payments. National eviction bans have taken pressure off renters. Then there's the

record high surge in savings among families who haven't gone on vacation or splurge on experiences in more than a year. Add to that the fact that job openings have hit record highs, which means people know if they wait a month or three, there will still be jobs aplenty to apply to. Seeing this whole picture, more Americans clearly feel like they can take a more leisurely approach to going back to work. Surveys bear this out. approach to going back to work. Surveys bear this out. A monthly questionnaire by the hiring company Indeed found that the most common reasons given for not looking for work right now are having an employed spouse and having a financial cushion, followed by care responsibilities and then COVID fear. In Forbes, Jack Kelly wrote that the reawakening of the economy left employers scrambling. Tired of the stress of the pandemic, annoyed by irritating

bosses, frustrated by low wages and lack of future growth, workers decided that they'd quit, even if another job wasn't lined up, Kelly said. It was important to their mental health and emotional well-being to extricate themselves from a toxic, dead-end job. Fortunately, in a hot job market, there are enough opportunities available that people don't have to worry about finding a new gig. There are other reasons why people quit, he added. Working mothers had the challenge of juggling their jobs and also finding child care. Unfortunately, unable to procure any or reasonably priced child care options, they temporarily left the workforce. Workers who had to regularly interface with customers were concerned about contracting and spreading the virus, electing to quit and find a different and safer type of job. Warehouse fulfillment centers

and manufacturing saw staff leave as demand surged and supply chains disrupted, causing workers to feel overwhelmed. In an October editorial, the Wall Street Journal editorial board said one possible culprit is the government and employer vaccine mandates that set ultimatums for workers. President Biden's vaccine order first applied to nursing homes, which lost jobs in the month, the board said. Many states and local school districts have also imposed mandates, and state and local education employment fell 161,000. The White House claims its vaccine mandates will boost job growth, but not if unvaccinated workers quit. Democrats have also made quitting an easier economic option.

Pandemic-enhanced unemployment benefits ended in early September, but that was only one week before Labor's monthly job survey ended. Next month might provide better data on that score. But there are still many other federal financial payments that don't require work, including a $300 monthly allowance per child, food stamps, and rental assistance. Many people have saved some of their transfer payments, and now Democrats are promising more. In Business Insider, Bonnie Marcus wrote that companies are focusing too much on trying to hire millennials. Burned-out Gen Zs and millennials are leaving the workforce for many reasons. Many of those reasons are pandemic-related. Working remotely, trying to balance the stress of holding on to jobs along with domestic responsibilities

has led to not only burnout but mental health issues and a serious re-evaluation of what they want and need from their employees, Marcus said. However, there may be an easy fix. According to my research, there is an untapped talent pool of highly qualified women age 45 to 50 and above who are available and eager to keep working. So why are companies pushing these women out and not leveraging their talent and experience? The answer is gendered ageism, the intersectionality of gender bias and ageism, which affects women as they approach 50 and beyond and show visible signs of aging, Marcus wrote. This pervasive bias results in women in this age demographic being perceived as less valuable and competent and contributes to their marginalization and subsequent premature dismissal.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot.

Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. Bloomberg columnist Alison Schrager, Alexis Leondis, and Aaron Lowry recently held a Twitter chat about the Great Resignation and the Lie Flat movement, a labor protest movement that started in China and spread to the U.S. The quitting is definitely a bit of a mystery, Schrager said.

Initially, everyone thought it was because of high unemployment benefits and all the money we sent people. Some people are still coming back to the labor market, but if you crunch the data, you're still seeing elevated rates of people leaving the labor force and not getting a new job right away. I was surprised to see that almost all the high quit rates have been among people with a high school education or less. Some are actually re-skilling, using this time and money to gain new skills to get a higher paying job, rather than just quitting because they're burned out. And a lot of women in particular still have huge child care issues. Liz Elting said the reason is actually incredibly simple and

everyone's just overthinking it. All you need is one number, three million, she wrote. That number is the difference between the number of open jobs, 10.4 million as of August, the last month we have data for, and 7.4 million the number of unemployed workers. Put bluntly, there are far more open positions than people willing to work them and have been for some time. The confusion so much of the commentator class seems to evince as to what could possibly be driving the ever-increasing number of voluntary resignations depends entirely on an almost willful ignorance of market conditions. Their rethinking their relationship with employment is all well and good, but it's meaningless in a condition where workers lack the flexibility to do so.

Their chasing higher wages doesn't say a single thing about why, of all times, they're doing so now. They want a better work-life balance just relates to the sentiments of workers for the whole post-war era. No, the reason is actually quite simple. Employers must compete for workers because there are far more open slots than job applicants, and workers are smart enough to recognize that, she said. Yes, they're voting with their feet in favor of more flexible work hours, continued availability of remote work, higher wages, and better treatment, but the context that makes that possible, the basic calculus of supply and demand in the labor market, goes ignored. In Business Insider, Dominic Reuter said employers aren't doing enough for parents.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many parents have had their already complicated lives further disrupted by having to juggle at-home lessons and Zoom meetings with work, email, and meal prep, Reuter said. Roughly 70% of respondents in a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, who were either parents or caregivers, reported poor mental health during the pandemic, more than double the rate of those who did not have those responsibilities. The rate for those who were both parents and caregivers was a whopping 85%. Nearly 10 million working mothers in America suffer from workplace burnout, according to research by Maven, which also found that mothers were 28% more likely to experience burnout than fathers. Rates of burnout were also higher among Black, Hispanic, and Asian women, Reuters said. While employers say they can't find people to hire, 309,000 women have left the labor force in September, which means they are no longer looking for work, and as many as 5 million fewer people have jobs now than in February 2020. A few adjustments from employers could help that story story turn around. All right, so there's some opinions on this, which brings us to my take.

My question is, where's the button for all of the above? I mean, really, anecdotal stories in my own life seem kind of relevant here. I quit my full-time job in April, making me one of the first wave of the 24 million people in the now off-sited statistics of the great resignation trend since that month. When I think about what helped contribute to that decision, it's remarkable how many things listed above were at play. For one, I was working a job as an editor that I no longer loved. Remote work caused by the pandemic took two commuting hours off my day, which I used to invest in this modest side project called Tangle. I was incredibly fortunate to have a full-time job and a side income, and every stimulus dollar I got immediately went into my savings account or was invested into Tangle. Meanwhile, my wife also had one of the now

classic pandemic experiences, deciding she was going to apply to law school when she finished her undergraduate degree and do a complete career change. She had been in theater and the restaurant industry for all of her 20s. Meanwhile, 95% of my disposable income since I started having disposable income gets spent on travel and nice restaurants. I've never cared about new clothes, nice cars, the latest technology, or fancy furniture, or any retail stuff. So the experience economy for me is always where I put my money. This is a recreational rule in life I suggest for anyone who will listen. That meant during the pandemic, there was nowhere for all of my disposable income to go, so it was just being saved. As I saw the cushion build, watched Tangle grow, and felt the burnout of a job I no longer wanted, the decision

to quit and go all in on Tangle became obvious, and so I did. I'm 30 years old. I watched this play out across a spectrum of people in my quote-unquote age group. Chefs quitting their jobs to go to programming boot camp. Friends who hit the lottery with a crypto investment moving to Thailand to start a tea company. Cashiers who didn't want to be exposed to COVID-19 taking their unemployment and jumping back into school. Uber drivers who found new work when driving dried up. Someone quitting a new job a week after they got it because a better offer showed up right after. All of it is happening just in my direct social group.

And everyone, I mean everyone, has been talking about whether they want to stick it out at their current job. Which is another thing. Economist Aaron Dubé refers to this as a social multiplier, which basically comes down to workers underestimating how bad their jobs are. When they get forced out of work, they realize what they've put up with all this time, and so they decide to find something new. Their co-workers see this, and soon others follow suit. There are, of course, arguments I find less convincing than others. A lot of people have pointed to the enhanced unemployment benefits as the reason workers aren't coming back,

but they expired in September, and data on the states who ended them earlier than that, as early as June, don't show a major uptick in new workers. I'm certain that enhanced unemployment benefits helped prompt people to quit or left them more comfortable with losing their job, but they don't fully explain why they aren't coming back now. Suspending student loan payments and the child tax credit probably played a role too. This is a developing story though, and we're still seeing workers trickle back in over the next few months. The benefits just ended in early September, and so we need to see what happens with the potential savings and the deferred payments with student

loans and just get a better understanding of the data and how it's going to play out. Maybe when that happens, the argument will look a bit stronger. I'm also not entirely sold on the fear of COVID-19 being a contributing factor. Over 70% of U.S. adults are fully vaccinated, and over 80% are partially vaccinated. COVID-19 fears are cited by less than 20% of unemployed workers not searching for jobs. Generally speaking, the vaccinated seem to have a great deal of trust in the vaccines, and the people who are most fearful, rightly so, are elderly folks who aren't necessarily the ones looking for jobs. Now, the noisiness of this debate

obscures what I think is obvious, which is that everything everyone is arguing about is actually the answer. It's all of it. Each issue is playing some fractional role, creating a collective shift to more worker power, lower incentives to take a job someone doesn't want. We see it in the massive labor demonstrations happening across the country, the increased wages and benefits, and of course, this willingness to just quit your job. The leverage has changed. As Liz Elting argued, convincingly, it may just be as simple as a numbers game, the surge in demand for workers that caught employers flat-footed, unlocking all of this. But there's also something that is the opposite of numbers, something that's kind of

nebulous, hard to grasp, emotional, a mentality shift spreading across the country, one caused directly by the shock of the pandemic that has forced people to re-evaluate, re-prioritize, and apparently resign. All right, that's it for my take. We are skipping the reader question today because this issue is getting a little bit long as it is, so we're going to jump to our story that matters. Economists and analysts at the leading rating agencies told Reuters that President Biden's infrastructure and social spending plan would not add to inflationary pressures. The legislation should not have any real material

impact on inflation, William Foster, vice president and senior credit officer at Moody's Investor Services said. The sentiment was echoed by Charles Seville from Fitch Ratings. You can expect Biden, whose social spending legislation is currently on the ropes, to use these comments to boost support among moderate members of Congress. Inflation has become a leading issue for voters, and Republicans have said the threat of rising inflation will be increased with more government spending. Other economists have argued the bills would slow inflation in the long term, but raise it in the near term. How this debate plays out is going to have a major impact on whether Biden's

social spending plan for parental leave, child tax credits, free pre-K, and climate provisions all become law or not. I'd keep an eye on it. All right, that brings us to our numbers section. First up, 43.7% is the percentage of unemployed workers who are passively searching for a job in September. 11.8% is the percentage of unemployed workers who were actively looking urgently for a job in September. 34.4 million is the number of people who have quit their jobs so far in 2021. 36.3 million is the number of people who have quit their jobs so far in 2021. 36.3 million is the number of people who quit their jobs in all of 2020. 531,000 is the number of jobs that were added in October.

And 55 million is the approximate number of people who are working in the gig economy. All right, that brings us to our have a nice day section. This one is a great story I came across on CNN. A few years ago, Debbie Blunt had lost her husband. The two had been avid golfers, and when he died, she lost her passion for the game. After a few years of mourning and feeling adrift, Blunt decided to enroll at Reinhardt College at the age of 62. She became the first person in her family to go to college, and then she decided to do something else. She joined the college's golf team as a walk-on. Now, Reinhardt is 63 years old, a sophomore in college,

and a vital member of the golf team. At the TWU Fall Invitational, she became one of three golfers to be named all-tournament. CNN has a tremendous story about her and how she's inspiring some of her teammates today. You can find the link in our newsletter. If you'd like to support us, please go check out the link in the podcast description. If you want more information or you want to get our newsletter, you can go to retangle.com. And if you want to reach me to complain about something, give some positive feedback. Tell me how much you like me. Isaac, I-S-A-A-C at retangle.com. All right. Thanks, everybody. And we'll see you tomorrow. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman,

and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. We'll see you next time. becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluSylVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu.

It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.