Is something fundamentally changing in how Americans think about work? Jonathan Malesic on the causes and consequences of the Great Resignation.

The U.S. economy has been gripped since early 2021 by the phenomenon of the Great Resignation: American employers logged 47 million employee resignations last year, which equates to roughly 30 percent of the country’s total workforce of about 162 million people. But there’s more than just quitting: In October, workers were on strike at 235 organizations in the U.S., which is more strikes than there were in the country during all of 2020. More Americans want to retire sooner, with 50.1 percent of survey respondents saying they planned to work past the age of 62, a record low in response to a question asked by the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank since 2014. Some economists had meanwhile speculated that the Great Resignation could be explained by workers quitting to take advantage of the $600-per-week supplemental unemployment benefit approved by Congress; that extra benefit expired in early last September, but the number of people who quit jobs set a new U.S. record that month—broken again in October and then again in November. Is it possible that more and more Americans just don’t want to work anymore?

Jonathan Malesic is the author of The End of Burnout, a book that examines Americans’ relationships to their careers. In Malesic’s view, many workers’ feelings toward their jobs are shifting significantly. Discontent with work had been building before the pandemic, he says, as many employees realized their jobs were providing them with neither sufficient material rewards nor a sufficient sense of purpose. For decades, Americans had sought to find meaning in their work but worsening labor conditions, such as stagnant wages and decreasing job security, undermined that idealistic vision. These changing dispositions—and employers’ many unfilled job openings—are now giving workers a degree of power in the workplace that they haven’t had since the peak of union membership some 50 years ago. It’s a new situation, Malesic says, that might also inspire Americans to start thinking more about how to find meaning outside their jobs.

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Michael Bluhm: How do you see U.S. attitudes toward work changing?

Jonathan Malesic: It’s clear something’s changing. The unemployment rate in America is low by historical standards, but the workforce-participation rate is also low by historical standards. There are a couple of percentage points worth of people who are of working age and not in the workforce—and a couple of percentage points in the United States means millions of people. The big question is, Why?

One possibility is that we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. They may have health concerns about returning to full-time employment. They may be caring for people who are sick, or they may be continuing to play the role of unpaid teachers’ aides to children at home.

Or it could be that some have left the labor force—maybe not permanently, but on a long-term basis—because they’re dissatisfied with what work offers them.

There are also cultural phenomena that are relevant. One of those is the Reddit forum Antiwork, which is a tremendously active site of conversation online. People are complaining about their jobs, and they’re posting about their plans to quit, but they’re also engaging in radical thoughts about cutting back work’s role in their lives.

It’s a little shocking to see books discussed in that forum like the political philosopher Kathi Weeks’s The Problem With Work. It’s a book that’s really influenced my thinking, but Weeks was never writing this for lay readers. I don’t think she imagined that her book was going to be discussed in popular forums.

There does seem to be a hunger for alternatives to the standard approach to work. That Reddit forum has become such a phenomenon that Goldman Sachs recently cited it as evidence that the workforce-participation rate may continue to remain low. It’s evidence that something’s changing in America.

More from Jonathan Malesic at The Signal:

“At the beginning of the 1970s, the U.S. labor movement was at the height of its power, but there was still quite a bit of internal strife. A younger generation of factory workers was dissatisfied with what the older generation had won for them. They’d won good wages and schedules, and security and benefits, but this younger generation wanted more out of their work. The desire for purpose, meaning, and transcendence from work may primarily have been an elite phenomenon; still, it cut across the American economy.”

“But the later 1970s was the era of deindustrialization in the U.S. It was a time of massive layoffs, “stagflation,” and increasing precariousness for workers across the board. It was a moment when productivity continued to rise but wages didn’t. You had workers with higher expectations for their work—not just material but even spiritual expectations—and diminished labor conditions. This gap between the ideals and reality of work grew in America throughout the ’70s. It’s no surprise that the concept of burnout started to emerge then. Burnout is the experience of being stretched across that gap over a long period of time.”

“It may well be that Americans aren’t using new free time in a way that gives them the sense of purpose they might want. But that could just show that they haven’t yet had the opportunity to think of alternative ways to structure a good life. The economic changes that we’re discussing have happened in the blink of an eye. In the U.S., we spent the whole first year of the pandemic figuring out, When can we go back to work? People haven’t really had the space to think about how they want to find the kind of purpose that work promised but never provided. We may end up needing to use our imaginations more, to think of new social forms that will help us find that purpose, or meaning or transcendence, beyond work.”