Lookahead: Will 2022 be the year of worker power?

Jordan You have heard by now about the great resignation happening in the United States.

News Clip …the great resignation. That’s what some experts are calling the growing trend of workers quitting or just changing career. In a recent study, 65% of employees say they’re looking for a new job…

Jordan There are all sorts of reasons behind the massive numbers of Americans and some Canadians choosing to just walk away from their jobs. And we’ll get into those reasons. But first, the raw numbers or the lack of them don’t tell this whole story. The story of labor in 2021 and quite possibly more so in 2022 is a workforce in public facing jobs realizing through an extended public health emergency that put their lives at risk, and forced them to deal with angry customers and dangerous situations, that they have more power than you might think.

So, yes, hundreds of thousands of people have walked away. But the rest of the story can be found in some victories. In rising minimum wages in States and in some provinces here in Canada, in massive strikes at huge corporations like Kellogg’s or John Deere. In notices hastily posted on fast food restaurant doors that say, essentially, sorry, management won’t take care of us, so we all quit. And it can be found in two movements. First, in the long dormant unionization movement gathering steam after years of decline. And second, in a movement called “antiwork”, which is exactly what it sounds like. Will any of this hold up when the pandemic ends? Some of it will, for sure some of this will be law. But how much further can it go? Can 2022 really become the year that the working class wakes up to realize that they are strong?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Juliana Kaplan is a labor and inequality reporter on the economy team at Business Insider. Hey, Juliana.

Juliana Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Jordan You’re very welcome. I’m kind of fascinated with this beat. The whole anti work thing, I think came out of nowhere for a lot of us this year. So maybe let’s rewind for those of us who are just learning about this now and start with the Reddit group, which was the most viral thing about it. What is r/antiwork and how fast is it growing?

Juliana Yeah. So that’s a great question. R/antiwork is what’s called a subreddit. So it’s a group specifically focused on one topic. How fast is it growing? I was not a math major, so I don’t want to say exponentially, but it’s been growing pretty darn fast. Almost 1.4 million followers, it looks like they’re at 1.36ish right now. The number basically doubled in October. They went from having, like, 500K or so at the beginning to about a million by the end of October, early November.

Jordan What do people discuss on anti work?

Juliana Well, basically the whole thing the official group description is it’s a subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work free life, want more information on anti work ideas and want personal help with their own job/work related struggles. Which I think is a pretty good encapsulation. So if you’ve seen those memes about people texting their jobs being like, I quit when a manager says something really unreasonable. Those originated on anti work. A lot of it, too, is also people asking questions like, can I share with my co workers how much I’m paid to which the answer is yes, people discussing interviews, discussing work conditions, the things that they want out of work.

And I would say again, the biggest genre is people quitting their jobs and quitting them in a way that I think many people find, I don’t know if satisfying is the best word, but perhaps matching the tone or level of behaviour that a manager is throwing at them. For instance, I think a pretty classic trope would be a manager saying, I know you’re supposed to be off this day, but someone called out, so you have to come in. And someone’s saying, well, that’s my day off, I’ve worked this many days or I have this appointment or I need to see my mom and then being like, well, you have to come in. And then the other person being like, then I quit and then the manager being like, wait, no, never mind. But the person has already done it.

Jordan That was a really good general description. I’m wondering if you can pick maybe just one of the ones that went particularly viral and kind of read it to us for the people who haven’t been following this. Because I will say, you’re right, this is how anti work got on my radar.

Juliana So this is a pretty big one. I think one of the top ones. The post is titled, “This sub gave me the motivation to finally quit my abusive job. I may not have health insurance, but I feel so free.” Then the post is a screenshot of a text exchange. So the manager, it seems, saying, hey, Becky canceled on Saturday, I’ll need you to come in and cover for her. The worker replies, that’s not my problem. Saturday’s, my day off and I’ve been working eight days straight and really need it. The manager says, I’m sorry, we’re short staffed, I need you. The worker says, I’m not coming in. So the manager says, you have to. I’ll see you Saturday. The worker says, no, you won’t. I’m not coming in. You can’t make me. The manager says, you sure you want to do this? You really want to put your health insurance on the line? The worker says, what are you going to do? Fire me? I know you were short staffed after Hunter and Page put last week, and you’re already short bartenders. The manager says, I don’t accept that type of attitude. Last chance, I’ll see you Saturday, or I won’t see you again. And then the worker says, Did you really just threaten me with health insurance? Whatever I’m done with this, you can consider this my notice. I’ve had enough of your… I don’t know if you’re allowed to swear in this podcast..

Jordan Please do.

Juliana Yeah, I’ve had enough of your bullshit. So this kind of has the quintessential, like, overworked worker, you got the short staffing in there, that’s kind of exacerbating a lot of what’s happening right now. And managers kind of in response to that, having other employees work harder. The manager threatening this person’s health insurance and then the classic anti work, I quit.

Jordan So this is why we wanted to talk to you, in particular, because you’ve been covering this for Business Insider. And I think those of us who have seen the viral stuff are like, ‘great, go workers.’ It is very satisfying, I think. But we’ve also heard a ton about the great resignation in the United States and a little up here in Canada, too. And what I’m trying to get a sense of is what are the actual numbers? And do they bear out the idea of anti work, that there are more people like this who are just walking away?

Juliana I feel like this is a very classic economics answer. Yes, but there are some caveats. So workers in the US have been quitting at pretty much near record rates for seven months now. We’ve called this officially the year of quits. In October alone, which is the month we have the most recent data for, 4.2 million Americans quit. And the month before, I believe, was 4.4 million. So for like, seven months now, records getting shattered for the number of workers quitting in one month. And we crunched the numbers that’s over 38 million quits during the year. And then an important caveat of that is some of that is what one economist I’ve talked to you termed missing quits, which is basically the idea that a whole lot of people have been quitting their jobs in the past few months, but it’s still lower than the number who would have quit in a pandemic free world. Obviously, naturally, people are going to always be quitting their jobs. Otherwise, people would never start a new job or get hired out or whatever. So some of that has been playing catch up.

And what’s also really hard for us to tell, are those people just leaving the workforce, or are they job switching? And that’s not something that we can directly know because we don’t know every single person’s situation based on these big national surveys. But we also saw 6.5 million people getting hired in October. So there is still a good amount of hiring going on as well. And Incidentally and anecdotally there’s been many tales of job switching. So people quitting might not just be like, peacing out, like I’m going on vacation, ‘bye everyone’. A lot of them are leaving for higher wages and going into places where there is opportunity.

Jordan That’s what I was going to say is that if I look at anti work and I look at a lot of the stuff going around on Twitter and other places on social media, the people doing this are the people you would expect to have had it kind of the worst for the longest, right? Like hospitality staff, minimum wage workers, factory workers in non-unionized factories, and that kind of stuff. And what I’m trying to get a sense of is are these workers gaining any power by doing this for others in their position, or are they just walking away for better things? Like is it having an actual impact on the businesses they’re leaving? Are wages going up, are workers getting treated better?

Juliana So I think you touched on kind of the big things that are happening here. Are workers getting more power? A lot of people would say yes, but there have been decades of workers losing powers. Like to your point about non-unionized warehouses, union membership has been on the decline for decades, and it seems like anecdotally it might be starting to pick up right now, but that’s still a structural factor for instance.

Are wages going up? That one is easy to answer. Solidly, Yes. I believe it was 4.8% year over year growth in November, which is the month we have the most recent data for. And leisure and hospitality, which you called out, 12.3% year over year growth. But then, the caveat is wages just have been really stagnant and not keeping pace with productivity for five or so decades. So yes, there is wage growth, but some economists would say, well, it’s just catching up to where it should have been. And even in the case of leisure and hospitality, wages would have grown naturally were there not a pandemic. So it’s important to caveat that yes, wages are growing and that is good for workers. But if wages had kept up with productivity, if there hadn’t been a pandemic, for instance, that’s probably not where the wages we have right now, that’s not where they would have been. They likely would have been higher.

One of my colleagues reported on a bunch of Chipotle workers who all walked out together, sort of these like guerrilla actions. The other side of that is organized labor strikes as well. And there’s been a lot of coalescing around that. So I think that the big question here. And the one that everyone is asking is okay, we have this moment. Will it yield any structural change? I am not able to predict the future. I am not a psychic. So the answer is I don’t know, but a lot of people would like it to. And then a lot wouldn’t.

Jordan One of the things that we’ve seen here in Canada, where we haven’t had quite the numbers in terms of resignations, but certainly have been having the income inequality and hospitality job conversation, is a lot of businesses complaining, essentially, that the benefits workers received during the pandemic are keeping them from going back to work. They otherwise would have come back to their jobs, but it’s just too easy for them to not work. And is that sentiment the same in the United States? I’m guessing it is. And what do we know about whether or not it’s true?

Juliana That is a great question. And this is something that I covered a lot. So certainly that sentiment exists here in the United States. And pretty much all of the research done on what we had in the US in particular were these enhanced unemployment benefits that both gave workers first, an extra $600 at the start of the pandemic, and then an extra $300 a week in unemployment pay. But also importantly, it made a lot of people newly eligible for benefits. So, for instance, freelancers, gig workers, none of them had been eligible for unemployment under the traditional unemployment system, and then they were brought into the fold.

Jordan That’s a very similar system, for what it’s worth, to what we had up here.

Juliana Yeah. I can imagine. I know we share a lot of similarities. And the other one was basically extending how many weeks you were eligible. So basically all the research done on these benefits was because, and I don’t know if jurisdictions in Canada have the same discretion, but a whole bunch of governors over the summer kind of did their own little experiment, and they ended these unemployment benefits early. And it was in the interest of, quote, unquote getting people back to work. And did it do that? No, not really. So all the research showed basically, like, little to no impact, although there were all these projections that people would come back. And we have not really seen all those people come back en masse. But on the other hand, you have a whole lot of people who lost their source of earnings, which is a whole other thing.

I think one line of thinking that I’m sure is true to some degree, is that people were able to accrue savings. I talked to a lot of people who said that this was the first time they really felt financially stable in their lives and perhaps having that stability and those savings mean that people are being a little bit more guarded. They’re not coming back and taking the first job that’s offered to them. But I think that narrative kind of neglects a few important things. We are still very much in a pandemic. And when the unemployment benefits here ended, that was in September, and that was when our good friend, the Delta variant, was really peaking. So the thing that kept a lot of people out of the workforce and that people were eligible for benefits under, hadn’t gone away. It seemed like it was getting worse. If this sounds familiar. It is happening right now as well.

And also everyone thought in September a big thing would be childcare returning. Because all these things are connected. The fact that many children just recently became eligible and a lot of younger children are still not eligible for vaccines. So I personally am not a parent, I don’t know if you are, but I know many people have dealt with oh, no, one kid in the class has been positive, we’re all home for two weeks. And that is really hard if you want to take a job, especially since we don’t have paid leave, universal paid leave here in the US. So there’s a lot of mitigating factors. And also, a lot of people retired early, like 2.5 million people retired. And I believe about a million of them were early retirement. And that’s because say it with me, older people experience the virus more. So if the virus abates, they would come back. But then you can kind of see the cycle we get into.

Jordan Well, that’s my real question. I don’t think you can answer this, but it’s worth discussing, is how much of this is rising worker power and workers feeling advantaged for the first time in a long time, and how much of it is when we talk about the kind of jobs that people are quitting, they’re jobs that would suck during a pandemic? You’ve got to be indoors dealing with people who may not want to wear masks or you have to be in a badly ventilated factory, like these are the jobs that put you at risk for COVID. So it’s kind of easy to understand from that point of view.

Juliana That is a really big question, too. And that is one that I wish I had the answer to you. I think it’s like all of the above. And I think that in low wage professions, like the people who are working in them now and the people who are leaving them, I think, are exerting a certain degree of power just because we have seen huge wage pressures there. I just had a piece come out over the weekend, there’s a push to raise the minimum wage in California to $18 an hour. And one service worker advocate I spoke to was saying to me that raising the minimum wage is probably the most surefire way to get people back into the service industry, because if there’s not that sort of universal wage standard, like yeah wages are higher right now, but if it’s at your employer’s discretion, and especially if you work in the service industry, where in the US, it’s so dominated by tipping, that’s not a surefire thing. So why would people come back if in a year that could just go back down again?

Jordan Is this an American thing only, or is this happening elsewhere around the world?

Juliana Obviously, I’m America based, and I’m mostly reporting on it in America, which I think is where the big story is right now. But we are seeing there’s the “laying flat movement” in China.

Jordan What is that?

Juliana Yeah. So it’s basically this concept of especially younger people deciding to lay flat and find happiness in what they already have, to sort of shut down this ambition and you should always be working, you should always be trying to strive for more. But rather, instead, you should take a beat, enjoy what you have in life and not necessarily feel the need to constantly be on this ever increasing treadmill.

And then Politico Europe was reporting that Western Europe, there are still millions fewer people working than there were before the pandemic. And then this is not evenly felt in not as developed economies. The big economy that’s grown throughout a few different countries is what’s called the informal economy, gig work, for instance, where recovery has been a lot harder and those jobs don’t have legal protections or the benefits of a full time job. So that’s also been sort of an uneven recovery there as well.

Jordan Just to bring it back to where we started with the antiwork subreddit. The reason I led off with that is because what I really want to get at here as we look ahead to 2022, we’ve talked about wage growth, which is great, workers having more power, where does the real momentum and organization come from? Because anti work is like the most organized thing I’ve seen, and it’s obviously not very organized. It’s a collection of people giving each other advice and sharing stories and everything. And you’ve mentioned a couple of organized strikes at various companies. But in order for this to kind of really gather momentum and really lead to change, where could the organization come from? And is there any right now that could lead to that?

Juliana Yeah. I think those are all great questions. Minimum wage is something that does come up a lot because I think it is powerful when you have a wage standard. And at this point with how low the federal minimum wage is in the US, and economists will tell you that it basically does not act as a wage standard in a lot of places compared to cost of living. And the federal minimum wage hasn’t gone up in twelve years. That’s something that a lot of people have been advocating for for a very long time. I think that that is one area that there is interest in. Will there be political action? I could not tell you. But I think that that’s one I’m keeping an eye on for sure.

I also think that the labor movement has said they’re really trying to take advantage of this moment. So I interviewed the AFL-CIO President, Liz Shuler, a little while back, and that’s basically the largest Federation of labor unions in the US. And she basically said they’re trying to seize upon the momentum because support for unions is basically at a really historic high. I think it was the highest since like 1969 among Americans. So translating that into action, there is organizing happening all over the place. But on the other hand, you also have President Biden saying he wants this to be the most pro labor administration in history. So what will also be really interesting with the infrastructure bill here in the US, the build back better act, is there are some labor provisions in there that are meant to help organizing. So if that passes, I think that’s something to keep an eye on. But again, it’s important to know in historical context, Union membership is still really low, but it could grow. People seem very interested in it.

It’s hard when it’s such a very broad coalition of people trying to figure out what comes next. So I think those are kind of the political factors there. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if you see more and more companies sort of expanding how they think about benefits and working conditions as well. And that’s something that’s already happened. One of my colleagues over here did a really good analysis about how it’s time to start offering retail workers the same benefits that white collar jobs have, things like paid leave and knowing your schedule ahead of time, things that we have seen the importance of during the pandemic with the precarity that some people are in.

Jordan I mean, even just anecdotally it sounds like that would be a huge change. Just the few people that I know who work in the retail sector, that is the biggest difference Besides the pay.

Juliana Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s also a push for universal paid leave in the US right now, also in the Build Back Better Act. And that has been pretty contentious. So I think at this point, we’re seeing a lot of this uneven, businesses raising wages or benefits on their own, sort of outside of these frameworks. So I think it will be really interesting, as the Biden administration is aiming to those frameworks actually get implemented on a federal level, but we’ll see.

Jordan It’ll be fascinating to watch. Juliana, thank you so much for taking us through this.

Juliana Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Jordan Juliana Kaplan of Business Insider.

That was The Big Story, the last of our 2022 Look aheads. As I’ve said, we’re taking a couple of much needed weeks off right now. But first over the next couple of days, we have some surprises for you, and we’ll have a bonus episode or two over the holidays. So please keep attuned to this feed. And of course, anytime you can find us at thebigstorypodcast.ca, you can talk to us on Twitter, at @TheBigStoryFPN, and you can write to us, thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. You can find this podcast in any podcast player. If you get a smart speaker for Christmas, ask it to “play the Big Story podcast.”

Stefanie Phillips is the lead producer of The Big Story. Joseph Fish and Braden Alexander are our associate producers. I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings, stay safe this holiday season, be kind to one another. We’ll get through this and we’ll talk soon.

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