Quiet Quitting as Job Market Flashes Yellow
As inflation and rising interest rates roil the globe, the U.S. labor market has been one of the bright spots for the economy. As job growth decelerates, it is not yet flashing red recession warnings, at least among hiring managers. That said, there are some yellow flashers that indicate an employment slowdown lies ahead.
As of August, the number of job openings plunged from 11.2 million to 10.1 million, the largest one-month drop since the start of the pandemic but are still much higher from the February 2020 level of 6.9 million. Although the quits rate was unchanged from the previous month, it has also fallen back from its late-2021 peak and isn’t all that far above the 2.4 percent high seen before the pandemic.
There was more evidence that the scorching summer job market is cooling down, when the Labor Department reported that there were 263,000 positions created in September, a level that is still solid, but lower than the year to date monthly average of 420,000 and about half the 2021 monthly average of 562,000. The unemployment rate ticked down to 3.5 percent, matching the pre-pandemic 50-year low.
Wages increased by five percent from a year ago, as many large employers have announced a reduction in hiring. As an example, Walmart said it would hire “40,000 associates in a variety of seasonal and full-time roles across our business”, a big drop from last year’s 150,000. And job openings in leisure and hospitality, which still has 1.1 million fewer employees than before the pandemic, have eased to 1.4 million in August from 1.99 million at the end of last year. As the slowdown continues, it will be interesting to see whether “Quiet Quitting,” the trend that is creating workplace generational conflict, will persist.
Quiet Quitting has gained currency among 20-somethings, who are desperately trying to create boundaries between work life and real life. To be clear, the idea behind the movement is not to actually quit your job, but to stop going above and beyond at work, because according to Zaiad Khan, an early adopter of the phrase on TikTok, “work is not your life. Your worth is not determined by your productive output.”
While many in previous generations have struggled to strike an ideal work-life balance, there are some differences about the current variation on that theme. To state the obvious, COVID-19 finally proved to millions of office workers that trudging into a physical workspace was a time suck and perhaps, a productivity killer. Yet if you were lucky enough to work from home, the boundaries became blurred, leaving many overwhelmed and suffering from work/Zoom fatigue.
The World Health Organization backed up those feelings with a report that warned “without proper planning and organization and without health and safety support, the impact of teleworking on the physical and mental health and social wellbeing of workers can be significant. It can lead to isolation, burnout, depression, home violence, musculoskeletal and other injuries, eye strain, increase in smoking and alcohol consumption, prolonged sitting and screen time and unhealthy weight gain.”
As the economy opened, more employers wanted staff back in the office. The rationale seemed on one hand real (“we want people, especially those who were hired amid the pandemic, to interact with one another, get to experience some semblance of corporate culture, and allow for a more free-flowing mentorship to occur”), but to some workers, the demand to be back in person felt controlling and punishing to the very people whose productivity and hard work allowed firms to make boatloads of money amid the pandemic.
Can’t we all just get along and admit a few truths here? To those executives who are clinging to the old system: you can’t stuff the genie back in the bottle. There is no evidence that productivity suffers when you provide workers with flexibility. In fact, they are usually a lot happier and more engaged when they control their schedules. For workers, being in-person with your co-workers will remind you that you really do like some of them, and of course, showing up physically will help you get some face time with your fuddy-duddy bosses, who care about time in the office.