The great quitting is impacting all industries
People in bad jobs have realised they are bad jobs and are not going back
People remember how they were treated before
Many business/organisations barely work even with low labour prices
This is a massive challenge to eg theatre, truck drivers, cheap food retail etc.
Well-paid jobs also have good non-monetary benefits, are basically good jobs
This strengthens the case for certain Big Businesses eg tech, high skilled services
I’m having thoughts on the great quitting. No one is quite sure what is going on. But I am moved by this idea for US (and EU) workforce that low wage workers now can see how crap their jobs were and the current level of incentives is not enough - way not enough - to induce them back to work. It combines these observations:
Status Quo bias. We get stuck in a rut until we get knocked out of this rut by an outside force.
Workers in crappy jobs did not fully appreciate how crap those jobs were until they stopped doing them.
This we can see on the study on commuting patterns. See eg economist Tim Hardford here on how people needed to be forced to change commuting patterns to realise their main commute was flawed.
Harford draws a different conclusion on remote work patterns, but he offers no comment on what I see as the potentially more major observation
“ A few hours of disruption were enough to make them realise that they had been doing commuting wrong their entire adult lives.”
This is not about “remote” but about these workers now can see how crap their jobs were and the current level of incentives is not enough - way not enough - to induce them back to work.
It’s not only pay/incentives now but how they were treated before…
You can see this in what Alice Saville has said on the “theatre hiring crisis” she writes:
As an anonymous senior backstage professional who’s struggling to hire technical roles put it, “It’s a perfect storm. People were made redundant during the pandemic and have found other roles. People have retired. And people who are still working in theatre don’t want to work the same hours as before, because the working conditions are worse and the money is less.” When the pandemic hit, theatres made redundancies swiftly and often painfully: many chose not to take advantage of the furlough scheme which would have allowed them to retain staff. And now, they’re feeling the burn. They’re committed to staging productions planned before the pandemic hit, but often with less money and less time. And their once-dedicated permanent staff have been replaced with a scramble to find workers, often on short-term contracts.
TV and film opened up before theatre, and they soaked up large numbers of talented technicians. Not everyone has fallen into new jobs they actually want to keep longterm. But workers who want to return are faced with a stark choice: stick with their secure non-theatre job, or chance it on a badly-paid, short-term theatre contract that may not be followed up by more work. One anonymous designer explained that a leading Scottish theatre can’t persuade its casuals to return after it programmed a series of short run works coming out of the pandemic: “it’s heartbreaking to me that there are workers getting more out of a full-time job in a supermarket chain than they do by going back to coming back to this industry.”
Where salaried roles are being offered, they can’t hope to compete with other sectors. Leeds Playhouse are currently advertising a senior lighting technician job at £18,000 – a surprisingly low salary for a role that requires a high level of experience and specific expertise. Meanwhile, the average salary for a professional electrician is £35,000, and a lighting technician in film or TV can hope for a similar or higher rate – as can similarly experienced staff in other departments of many theatres. As one designer said of the role: “the application package for the role talks in detail about the importance of diversity but we’ve seen again and again and again that the biggest barrier to diversity backstage is money.”
The current situation definitely isn’t the “building back better” scenario a lot of people hoped for during the pandemic.
I can also tell you that London based electricians can earn much more and have a better time than #35K at the moment.
One counter argument is… was it not the furlough money? But, this doesn;t seem to be true:
“...Earlier this year many people insisted that enhanced unemployment benefits were reducing the incentive to accept jobs. But those extra benefits were eliminated in many states as early as June, and nationally in early September; this cutoff doesn’t seem to have had any measurable effect on employment or labor force participation. …”
Possibly you can argue this:
“...Another story, which is harder to refute, says that the extensive aid families received during the pandemic left many with more cash on hand than usual, giving them the financial space to be choosier about their next job…”
If this insight is correct and not fully appreciated then this is the start of a transition in human capital…
And at least for theatre, I am not hopeful at the moment and for a whole array of industries, I am very uncertain how this pans out.