Global Citizens Are Quitting Their Jobs: Don't Try The Great Resignation Trend Before You Understand It

JAKARTA - The trend of quitting work or resigning globally is increasingly widespread. The most obvious occurred in the United States (US) and England. What really happened?

In the US, local Labor Department data recorded 4.3 million people had left their jobs as of August 2021. The resignation wave of 2.9 percent of the US workforce population was the highest ever recorded in the United States.

Meanwhile in the UK, last August, the number of job vacancies exceeded one million jobs. The number broke the record for the first time. And according to a Microsoft study, 41 percent of the global workforce plans to move offices next year.

Great Resignation or what is also known as big quit is the phenomenon of resigning that many workers do almost simultaneously. The COVID-19 pandemic is often considered the culprit.

The term Great Resignation was coined by Texas A&M University professor of management, Anthony Klotz. According to Klotz, as quoted by Bloomberg, this phenomenon is a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, many people began to rethink the purpose of life, including work.

However, Klotz and several other experts said that it was too early to conclude that the Great Resignation phenomenon was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers are still skeptical. It's possible that the mass resignation explosion had already been nurtured before the virus from Wuhan spread throughout the world.

Much of the discussion around Great Resignation focuses on finding out why they want to quit their jobs. But uncovering it is not a simple matter. The numbers used to analyze this are not entirely straightforward.

For example, a senior lecturer in public policy and law from Boston University, Jay Zagorsky, explained that at the BBC we don't have enough data to calibrate the Great Resignation scale. The US government itself has only recorded data on workers who have resigned since 2000. Meanwhile, data on people who have stopped working has been recorded high since 2019, before the pandemic.

Maybe in 2020 the wave of resignations will set a new record. However, this cannot be directly linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. Because in general, Zagorsky said resignations generally increase when the economy strengthens.

Zagorsky said, the phenomenon of mass resignations occurred during the Great Recession in 2009. At that time, when the economic storm was almost over and the economy was strengthening again, the resignation rate also skyrocketed.

Although in general, many workers in various sectors resign. But the number of resignations is not always evenly distributed.

Indeed, in the US Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the sector with the most resignations as of August 2021 was in the food and hospitality sector. The number is about 157,000 out of a total of 242,000 resignations. In the food service sector, 6.8 percent of workers quit, then the second highest was the retail trade sector at 4.7 percent.

According to Zagorsky, we are not entirely wrong to say that many people have stopped working during the pandemic. For example, health workers who flocked to stop working because of exhaustion and dissatisfaction after they experienced burnout while being on the front line in facing a pandemic.

In the UK, according to a survey presented by Julian Sheather and Dubhfeasa Slattery in the British Medical Journal, it showed that half of the doctors in the study sample planned to work less. Meanwhile, 21 percent of health workers are considering leaving the world of medicine.

"If the need for physicians is not addressed immediately, drugs run the risk of losing highly trained physicians... Burnout is the strongest factor associated with physicians' plans to withdraw from the clinical workforce," wrote Sheather et al.

But in general, Professor Anthony Klotz, said there is not much solid data confirming that job cessation is certain to occur in certain sectors. "I have seen reports that those who resigned were middle class people, in other reports I saw that they were Generation Z, and also saw that people who retired early were boomers," Klotz wrote.

Apart from the debate as to which faction is the main contributor to the Great Resignation, it is clear that they are the people who have a choice. Martha Maznevski, professor of management from Western University, Canada, said there were two broad categories of people who participated in the Great Resignation.

"One of them are professionals who are looking for a better life. And those who make decisions based on terrible experiences, unhealthy and toxic environments, and for survival," wrote Maznevski.

In other words, maybe we can only see people who follow the Great Resignation trend voluntarily are those who have privileges such as executive level workers or workers who have high financial security. For this reason, it is important to know that the Great Resignation trend is not generally accepted. How dangerous it is for people who do not have these privileges to join the Great Resignation trend.

"You can only resign if you have a choice," Maznevski said. Choice is a luxury here. And this luxury is shared by wealthier and more senior workers in their careers.

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