Meanwhile, the stark divide between white collar workers and those with hourly on-site jobs-grocery clerks, bus drivers, delivery people-became painfully visible. The line between work and home has been blurring for decades-and with the pandemic, obliterated completely for many of us, as we have been literally living at work.
The deep unhappiness with jobs points to a larger problem in how workplaces are structured. Becoming “a lot more introspective,” she realized she’s done with toxic workplaces: “I feel like I’m not willing to put up with abusive behavior at work anymore.” She also plans to pivot into a more meaningful career, focused on tackling climate change. Pew doesn’t have comparable earlier data, but in a 2016 survey, about 80% of people reported being somewhat or very satisfied with their jobs.Įarly on in the pandemic, Lucy Chang Evans, a 48-year-old Naperville, Ill., civil engineer, quit her job to help her three kids with remote learning while pursuing an online MBA. A third of those surveyed have started taking courses or job retraining. A Pew survey in January found that 66% of unemployed people have seriously considered changing occupations-and significantly, that phenomenon is common to those at every income level, not just the privileged high earners. This is a radical re-assessment of our careers, a great reset in how we think about work. In a surprising phenomenon, people are not just abandoning jobs but switching professions. The true significance isn’t what we are leaving it’s what we are going toward. Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, set off a Twitter-storm by predicting, “The great resignation is coming.”īut those conversations miss a much more consequential point. But now millions of white collar professionals and office workers appear poised to jump. For many more millions of essential workers, there was never a choice but to keep showing up at stores, on deliveries and in factories, often at great risk to themselves, with food and agricultural workers facing a higher chance of death on the job. During the first stressful months of quarantine, job turnover plunged people were just hoping to hang on to what they had, even if they hated their jobs. More fundamentally, the pandemic has masked a deep unhappiness that a startling number of Americans have with the -workplace. How much time do they want to spend in an office? Where do they want to live if they can work remotely? Do they want to switch careers? For many, this has become a moment to literally redefine what is work. Millions of people have spent the past year re-evaluating their priorities. But after years of gradual change in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, there’s a growing realization that the model is broken. The modern office was created after World War II, on a military model-strict hierarchies, created by men for men, with an assumption that there is a wife to handle duties at home. We’re supposed to work to live.”Īs the postpandemic great reopening unfolds, millions of others are also reassessing their relationship to their jobs. I’m closer to my goal of: I get to go to work, I don’t have to go to work,” Kari says. Now they have control over their schedules, and her mom has moved nearby to care for their son. “We are taking a leap of faith,” Kari says, after realizing the prepandemic way of working simply doesn’t make sense anymore. Today, both have quit their old jobs and made a sharp pivot: they opened a landscaping business together. “I realized working outdoors was something I had to get back to doing.” During the time I was home, I was gardening and really loving life,” says Britt, who grew up on a farm and studied environmental science in college. Meanwhile, the furlough prompted her husband, 30, to reassess his own career.
But as the baby grew into a toddler, that wasn’t feasible either. When that didn’t pan out, she took a part-time sales job with a cleaning service that allowed her to take her son to the office. A native of Peru, she hoped to find remote work as a Spanish translator. Kari, 31, had to quit to care for their infant son. Then the pandemic shutdown hit, and they, like millions of others, found their world upended. Their lives were frenetic, their schedules controlled by their jobs. Until March 2020, Kari and Britt Altizer of Richmond, Va., put in long hours at work, she in life-insurance sales and he as a restaurant manager, to support their young family.
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