Some analysts thought that as Joe Biden’s government assistance package to stimulate economic activity (such as the weekly $ 300 bonus that boosted unemployment benefits, which ended in early September) was reduced, many Americans would return to the job. job market, but that is not happening.
On the contrary, specialists warn that a combination of factors triggered dissatisfaction with their employment situation in millions of people, with a special incidence among middle-aged workers, between 30 and 50 years old, who do not see prospects for progress or horizons for improvement in their jobs or who experienced extreme work stress due to Covid-19.
This dissatisfaction that runs through the daily lives of millions of wage earners after the experience of having gone through the pandemic is summarized in a phrase that the American academic and activist Patricia Campos-Medina (Cornell University, New York state) pronounced when consulted by the Spanish newspaper El País: “Many workers saw that they were mortgaging their lives for miserable wages,” he described.
This discomfort is perceived above all in activities that had an excessive workload as a result of the pandemic, such as health-related jobs (where worker resignations grew 3.6%) and in the technology sector, whose employers – paradoxically – they greatly benefited from electronic commerce that was forced by the quarantine.
Other areas that show a general resignation, with workers who left their jobs with the illusion of changing their lives, are those that require presence most of the time, such as the entertainment industry, recreation, commercial activity, as well as gastronomy and hotels, sectors very affected in the first stage of the pandemic.
In all these activities, which according to official US statistics record an unstoppable wave of wage earners who decide to leave their jobs (in August, 892 thousand workers resigned in hotels and gastronomy; 721 thousand did the same in retail), what is the premium is the combo of low wages and long hours of work.
A former official in Bill Clinton’s administration, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, described the scene to Time magazine: “Employees don’t want to go back to tiring or boring, low-paying jobs. They’re burned out, fed up, fried. Afterward. with so many difficulties, illnesses and deaths during the past year, they will not take it anymore, “he observed in his photo of the post-pandemic workplace scene.
Reich’s description has points of contact with the experience of the soldiers upon their return from a war, the difficulties in returning to the supposed ‘normality’, a phenomenon that was experienced in some historical circumstances but which at this moment is putting – according to some US researchers – “the traditional work culture.”
However, the motivations that lead to quitting work do not come only from dissatisfaction with pay, precariousness or work hours.
Many Americans in the liberal professions are leaving work in the format they knew – especially face-to-face – in search of quality of life; others do it because they want to “reformulate their existence”, or because they assume that personal fulfillment no longer involves developing in the trade or career.
Observed from Argentina, the phenomenon shows in some aspects a close reality and in others an indisputable distance.
What is clear is that “the Great Renunciation” -definition coined by the American academic Anthony Klotz, from Texas A&M University- is a process that “is neither homogeneous nor universal”, as the specialist Valeria Carbone underlined in dialogue with Télam, professor of the chair of US History at the UBA and member of the Institute for Latin American Studies and Research.
“The Great Renunciation – developed Carbone – is occurring among those who could not appeal to the virtual in their work experience, such as restaurants, or people who work in the many plants that Amazon has, but also in the health sector and in others areas in which the virtualization of work was absolute and whose workers want to maintain that virtualization of work but are required to return to the previous context, before which they ask themselves: why do it? “
For the academic, who is part of the editorial committee of the Huellas de Estados Unidos portal (specialized in studying that country from a critical perspective), the Amazon case reflects some of the reasons why millions of men and women decide to leave their jobs, as a greater demand in the “production times” or the “work rhythm”, based on the hyperactivity that the pandemic produced in this area.
“The workers of Amazon (the technology company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos) were able to keep their jobs while in the US there was an exponential increase in unemployment, but their working conditions suffered greatly. Amazon had a profit of billions of dollars, but that is not known. it reflects in wages, “said Carbone, who later considered it” logical “to ask why these wage earners” are going to continue working in a workplace where their working conditions worsened and their salary did not have any improvement. “
A similar diagnosis – regarding the heterogeneity of the phenomenon – was made by the UBA consultant professor Pablo Pozzi, who for 30 years taught at the chair of US History at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters.
“Assuming that the data they are pulling from people who aim to change jobs are not false, we would have to see what social sectors we are talking about and what trades”, he observed at first and later argue that, in his vision, “the Great Renunciation has to do with professional sectors that can find a job or a niche to work from home. “
Pozzi concluded that the labor reality in the US is immersed in a country with “very strong and very large conflicts and fractures”, “levels of poverty and social differentiation” along with “a growing level of conflict and a very low level of unionized people.” which translates into “hundreds of strikes” carried out by the workers, “although no one mentions – he noted – that the vast majority of them are lost.”
Source From: Ambito
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