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The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

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Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#101

The “great resignation” was always suspect. Think about it - who would take care of all those people in the western world. I could see it happening in Asian cultures, but in the west? Nah. It’s not in us. I mean seriously, did we ever check ourselves to think that people would just stay home? Sure a certain percentage will — and that’s actually a good thing, especially families where both mom and dad worked. Since th…

> So back to work you lazy bums!! IMO most people want to work and be productive, but they don't want to be exploited.

I wonder how that compares to ant colonies where we know this isn't the case.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#102
post #26
post #20

I think too its a result of 30 years where employers have had the upper hand in the job market (except perhaps 1999, 2008). Wages have stagnated during these decades, it seems finally maybe wages can catch up.

Not a Moore fan, but I think this is his most underrated movie [0]. It became free to watch on Youtube a couple years ago. Maybe it'll pick some more traction now. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUpnFNUmfKw

loving the region locked irony

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#104
"Yet, despite all the quitting and renegotiating, the real wage for the average American worker — meaning the true value of their paycheck after taking into account inflation — fell by 2.4% in 2021."

All while the world's elites have doubled or tripled their fortunes. Great Robbery would be a more apt name than Great Resignation.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#105
post #17

> spectacles like the immense popularity of the "Anti-Work" thread on Reddit — have gone as far as to suggest this record-breaking trend is a movement of young, able-bodied Americans rejecting work altogether. I don't think this is the point of "anti work". The point is (to me) that people should be treated equitably at work and that work shouldn't be the center of our lives

No, you are wrong. It is exactly what it says, these redditors do not want to work, at all . Not for good pay, not for shitty pay. Just zero work. It becomes obvious once you read through several threads. They believe life shouldn’t be wasted slaving away for a paycheck so you can pay bills until you die. The subreddit is mostly about people languishing the fact they cannot escape this cycle and day dreaming about ho…

Just think of ant colonies and how productive they are for so few working workers...

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#106
post #2

"The Great Resignation" feels a bit like a phrase that folks have grasped on to and just attach the narrative they want to believe to it. Constant articles and such with very little data. Very frustrating as a reader. The idea that amid a pandemic and such that there are a variety of reasons seems backed up by the data, although I admit that's what I'm inclined to believe / seen.

> Constant articles and such with very little data. Very frustrating as a reader. Actual resignations are up slightly, but the idea that employees are quitting in droves is exaggerated. It’s higher than normal turnover, but the stories are written in ways to suggest that companies everywhere are gutted by employees leaving in bulk. I feel like “great resignation” was deliberately chosen to mislead people into thinkin…

Indeed. The Economist had a great article about this in their Dec 2011 edition. The article is behind a paywall, but the gist of it is that two effects explain the uptick in people changing jobs: (1) surges of job demand in new sectors boosted or entirely created by the pandemic (2) people who postponed job changes in 2020 (which hopefully will be considered as the worse year of the pandemic), effectively creating a backlog of job changes that got processed in 2021-2022. The economy just changed much faster in a few years.

Link to the article for the subscribers: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/evidence-for...

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a fairly good point here that when people argue that politician X is defunding the military or defunding schools, nobody assumes that they mean that they've ended public education or disbarred the military. We have a general social understanding of the word "defund" that also encapsulates "moving money/responsibilities from one department to another one." So it feels a little bit like a double standard to in…

Because people that work in the industry want to exaggerate the issue to try to get more funding and support.

Oh sure, I get that. Any effort to change policing in America is always going to be treated like it's extreme, period. I've seen press reports arguing that merely holding police funding steady and not increasing budgets is "defunding" them.

But I think thesuitonym is still right to point out that this is inconsistent with how these words are regularly used in other contexts. There are people directly under their post arguing that no, defund literally means removing all money, the dictionary says so -- and that's just a really silly argument if we look at how the word is used most commonly in politics.

When people across multiple political parties are arguing about defunding everything from schools, to the IRS, to NASA, to the military, to the Post Office, it's just not honest for people to argue that in this specific case we should should look at the first result in Webster and ignore everything else.

Re: The Great Resignation? More Like the Great Renegotiation

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally in my business I saw effectively no churn in employment through most of the pandemic. Hiring new people was also nearly impossible. Then, towards the end of last year a significant number of workers quit. Finding new people to replace them also was surprisingly easy. I suspect a lot of people were afraid to move on to new opportunities for a while due to the uncertainty of the pandemic. Once enough confid…

I can certainly see this as a contributing factor. My own experience is that during the first year of the pandemic I was just cooling my heels in a stable position. Later, the prime factor for me moving on was the whole return to office narrative. I've embraced fully remote and now demand it. As such, I found a new job in Q4 and moved on, for a 25% pay increase as well.

I went the opposite direction; I was at a cool hipster startup, but since I decided to re-pursue academia part time, I switched to a stable megacorp [1] so I would have a consistent bit of funding for the degree for the next 4-6 years. Roughly the same base pay, but way better stock package.

I feel like for me, the boredom of COVID made online education about 10x more appealing, and with the articles about WGU popping up, I decided to finally finish my bachelors.

[1] I made sure they were ok with me doing a half-time PhD before I joined.

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