For the last few years, vast amounts of research and academic reports have gone into analyzing the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on persisting economic issues, such as the ongoing labor crisis and the Great Resignation Era.
There are multiple ways of going about analyzing these issues depending on what the researcher’s or reporter’s overall goals are.
Nader Elhefnawy, an adjunct professor for Miami-Dade Community College, earlier this year published a comprehensive analysis on the Great Resignation Era, detailing post-pandemic labor market data, in particular the elevated quit rate that has led to academic discussion. Alongside a depressed labor force participation rate (in other words increased job activity) and the increasing labor strife, Elhefnawy makes the case for the current quit rate being only one dimension of the Great Resignation Era by stating how there is now a “broadly declining acceptance of the orthodox expectation of an economically individualistic work-centered life already evident before the pandemic, while still acknowledging that the pandemic has accelerated that trend” (Elhefnawy 2022).
The research paper
Elhefnawy starts his analysis by mentioning his prior work, “Are Attitudes Toward Work Changing? A Note,” to which he utilized Emile Durkheim’s concept of anomie, as elaborated on by fellow sociologist Robert K. Merton. As explained by Prof. Dr. Christian Wickert of SozTheo, an online collection of sociological and criminological resources, anomie is when most people strive to achieve culturally recognized goals, however these are blocked to particular groups of people or individuals. “The result is a deviant behaviour characterized by rebellion, retreat, ritualism, innovation, and/or conformity” (Wickert 2022).
Image ‘Rebellion Becomes Duty’ by risingthermals CC BY-NC 2.0 Flickr.
Elhefnawy used the theory of anomie to consider whether Americans’ adherence to the life goal of work was or was not giving way to other types of responses (“innovation,” ritualism, retreat and rebellion); “in brief, whether or not Americans were becoming less prone to conform [to work being top priority]”.
However, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, he devised a follow-up to that older paper’s conclusions and findings, realizing he now had to account for pandemic-related trends and issues like the depression of labor force participation (quiet-quitting) and resurgent employee strike action against their employer.
Looking at the surging quit rate caused by quiet-quitting and quiet-firing, Elhefnawy explains how from May 2001 to February 2020 the average monthly quit rate in the U.S. was steady around 2.1 percent, yet by September 2022 it reached over 3.4 percent. You might think that this is a small number, yet statistically that is an over 62 percent increase of people from the two decades prior to the pandemic!
He accredits how a great many people were saved the trouble of quitting by being laid off anyway by their employers. Changing careers has particularly been relevant as it highlights how those workers who have been quitting have disproportionately been, “those with particularly good prospects of finding other positions they can hope will be more congenial (i.e. not too young and inexperienced, but also not too old, to be attractive candidates to employers looking to fill other positions)” (Elhefnawy 2022).
Image by Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0.
However, “just as those who have been quitting seem to have disproportionately been at a point in their careers where it has been relatively ‘safe’ to do so they have also disproportionately been in lines where workers were especially subject to stress amid the recent crisis (most obviously, information technology and health care) by way of their employers transferring the pressure the situation put on their firms onto them (longer hours, more dangerous conditions), with increased ‘burn-out’ a common result” (Elhefnawy 2022).
Elhefnawy makes the dire point that burn-out in the United States has been coming for a long time. Poor employee treatment has resulted in a situation that has people feeling divorced from reality and from placing their more significant priorities first, in such respects as the length of the workday and year and limited benefits and career incentives like vacation or maternity and sick leave. In other words, people have been mistreated by their industries for a long time, and the last few years have made disgruntled workers realize what was actually more important in their lives than working their nine to five.
Another aspect that he looked at, the broad cultural shift brought on by the pandemic, shows how remote work has become so prominent and yet so vital to the current workforce of old and new employees:
Even when it was simply a matter of a period of remote work a good many found it hard afterward to go back to the old ways they experienced as the bad old ways (long and grinding commutes requiring earlier rises in the morning, the in-person supervision of bosses, work environments which may have been hostile or toxic, the reduced availability to family, etc.), with this all the more the case where pandemic conditions made people experience the old routine as especially dangerous (persons who deal at close quarters with the general public or have to ride crowded public transport for extended periods to get to and from work, for example), or where the return to the old routine employers were quick to demand what appeared unnecessary [Simply put, if their productivity as remote workers was satisfactory why should they have to go back to the old routine?]
What it means for readers
Elhefnawy’s analysis of how quit rates have risen drastically and how a cultural shift towards hybridization and life priorities has pertained to the ongoing Great Resignation Era means a lot to potential readers. The paper prioritizes the importance of workers reevaluating what is actually the most important aspect of their lives – whether it is their work or their personal lives.
Despite the complications the pandemic brought to hundreds of various work industries and businesses, some people still devote all their being to their work or their employer and prefer that, however many have begun to shift their understandings and wants/needs. This analysis, like multiple other studies, also legitimizes and highlights the Great Resignation Era as a real and ongoing issue that employers as well as employees should not act blind to.
For more, or if you may want to spark up a discussion over this paper, feel free to reach out with the Contact Me tab up above.
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