Our poll reveals that 57 percent of U.S. employees say they are burnt out. Both Millennials and women report higher levels of burnout, as do employees with kids remote learning at home. Leaving is often viewed as the best option for employees to address burnout…
— from a March 2021 article by Roy Maurer, “Turnover ‘Tsunami’ Expected Once Pandemic Ends” on SHRM.org.
The London-based Daily Mail shared a TikTok video over the weekend, showing (former) Taco Bell employee Steven Pauley, from West Virginia, performing a ‘cannon ball’ dive into the kitchen sink following his final evening on the job. He made a splash, in two senses of the word. His stunt sent soapy water all over the kitchen… and also brought Mr. Pauley 17 million views on the TikTok website.
Mr. Pauley says he quit the Taco Bell job so he could focus his (abundant?) energies playing video games. Professionally.
Apparently, Mr. Pauley is unusually talented at the video game, ‘Call of Duty’, and has more than 1,000 subscribers who donate money to support his video habit on the gaming website Twitch.tv
From the Daily Mail article, quoting Mr. Pauley:
‘With Twitch, you can make money based on performance. People can hit the subscribe button and pay monthly to support you, or give you money through a virtual tip jar.
Perhaps Mr. Pauley has been wasting his true talents?
But quitting your day job seems to be a real ‘thing’ lately.
Currently, we don’t have a Taco Bell in Pagosa Springs, so we shouldn’t expect to see anyone here jumping into a kitchen sink, on their last day on the job. But I can imagine plenty of other fun things to do on your final day of employment. Letting the air out of your boss’s tires, comes to mind. Using the mustard squirt bottle to write, ‘Good Luck, Suckers’ on the restaurant window.
But simply quitting — not coming back to work — seems pleasant enough. Not something you would post on TikTok, necessarily, but still worth doing.
About 38 million employees quit their jobs in 2017, which averages out about 3.1 million quitters per month. Most moved into a different job, within a few days or weeks.
Almost 4 million employees quit jobs in April, 2021… which, if such a trend were to continue, would mean 48 million resignations over the next 12 months. 48 million people quitting, in a current US labor force of 161 million. More than one-quarter of the labor force, switching jobs… or, maybe, playing video games?
From a Slate.com article by Jordan Weissmann, June 22, 2021 (where I learned about Steven Pauley):
When lots of workers are quitting, it is usually considered a sign that the economy is doing well, since people typically aren’t willing to leave one job unless they are pretty confident that they can find another. Right now, things are slightly more complicated. With the coronavirus crisis fading and customers flocking back, businesses have been desperate to hire — job openings are hitting new records…
When I visited the Pagosa Springs SUN online “Help Wanted” classified section on Saturday, I counted 97 listings. About 26 of the ads involved the leisure and hospitality industry (27, if you include the marijuana businesses) and about 28 involved the construction industry, building maintenance or landscaping.
The town is full of tourists… and newcomers. Where are the workers, when we need them?
Achievers Workforce Institute surveyed 2,000 employed respondents in February 2021, in the USA and Canada, and published their findings in a 14-page 2021 Engagement and Retention Report. From that report:
Half of employees plan to actively job hunt in 2021 – up from one third in 2020
Could organizations see turnover of 52% in 2021? According to the latest Achievers Workforce Institute survey, that’s how many employees plan to look for a new job in 2021. That’s a 43% increase over 2019 and 2020 when just one third (35%) said they expected to job hunt. When we include those who are undecided about whether they’ll look for a new job, we see that two-thirds of employees are not committed to their current roles…
Quitters never win, and winners never quit. Or so I was persuaded… as a young man… and I suppose I pretty much accepted the idea: that quitters were ‘Losers’. Lazy. Dropouts. Failures. Deserters from the Army of Progress.
In fact, however, my life has been a long, steady process of quitting one type of job, to try something that promised more satisfaction. Or at least, some variety?
I quit college after after my freshman year at Stanford, and landed in Juneau, Alaska, to find work in the city recreation department. Quit that job to become an apprentice carpenter. Moved on to a federal job with the US Postal Service. Quit that job to try my hand at building musical instruments in the poorly-lit basement of my house. When that job didn’t pay the bills, I began painting signs, and doing graphic design and screenprinting. Left Alaska to see what Pagosa Springs might be like. Worked for the Archuleta County Education Center for a year. A short stint doing remodeling and carpentry. Gave that up to create monumental sculptures for public buildings. Played music professionally in several local rock bands. Taught myself video production and computer graphics. Accidentally became a web designer… which led to the creation of the Pagosa Daily Post and a new ‘career’ keeping tabs on local government.
Quit my marriage, after 32 years.
I could be a poster child for the art of leaving one thing behind, to take up the next.
While researching the Bureau of Labor Statistics “Quit” numbers for April — there are literally dozens of media articles online, commenting on the 4 million job-quitters that month — I found many reporters wondering if the statistics where pointing to a fundamental change taking place in American society, following, and resulting from, the 2020 pandemic year.
I found this quote in The Atlantic, in a June 21 story by Derek Thompson, which offers this thought:
On the other hand, maybe this isn’t a revolution. Maybe it’s an illusion.
The overall annual quits total plunged in 2020 by about 500,000, suggesting that a lot of people who would have quit without the pandemic instead clung to a job they didn’t like. That the number of people quitting a job is surging now isn’t necessarily proof of a paradigm shift. It’s more like evidence of an unpinched-hose effect: The pandemic constrained all sorts of normal activities — getting a cocktail, renting a car, leaving a crappy job — that are suddenly unblocked.
I suspect this is not a revolution.