As droves of people left their jobs in the last two years, the idea of work itself facing a pandemic reckoning became awfully attractive. The real story is simpler: The Great Resignation wasn’t.
New research from the San Francisco Federal Reserve bank argues that the high rate of “quits” during the pandemic isn’t that unusual. The JOLTS dataset that contains that information only goes back to 2000, an era of relatively slow US growth. But, by looking at other measures of quitting, economist Bart Hobijn was able to find six episodes in the twentieth century when workers left jobs at similar rates—all during booms in employment like the one we are currently experiencing.
“The current level of the quits rate is at a record high since 2000 because the recoveries of the 2001 and 2008 recessions were very slow by historical standards and thus did not put the same upward pressure on the quits rate as during other recoveries,” he writes.
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