From the big resignation to quiet quitting, work in the US continues to heat up

It’s not uncommon to see “hire” signs on the facades of bars and restaurants in the capital of the United States, and it is in one of these that Getzy Hernández, 24, says he is in his third job this year.

“The first one was terrible, we weren’t treated like people and I left right away because I had no reason to put up with it. I quickly got an opportunity at a bar, which I even liked. But then I found out about this vacancy here, where the salary was the same, but you can earn more in tips, so it was more worth it,” says the waitress at a Mexican food restaurant who pays $16 an hour (minimum wage in Washington) plus tips.

The US economic news was surprised during the pandemic with the “great resignation”, the mass resignations of employees safeguarded by government aid. This year, the trend was “quiet quitting”, as the TikTok chain was baptized (or “trend”, in the social network’s slang), in which workers reported how they did the minimum required by their employers and did not bother to look stand out—about half of Americans adopt the strategy, according to Gallup.

The background to all of this is the buoyant American job market which, even with the forecasts of recession for 2023, has been showing month-by-month resilience with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country’s history.

The US jobless rate is at 3.7%, just above the low of 3.5% recorded in September, the lowest level in 50 years. Since January this index has been below 4%. In November, the most recent data available, the country opened 263,000 new jobs, above forecasts of 200,000 jobs.

This heated market also comes with wage increases, which grew by an average of 5.1% in the same month.

What at first is good news has alarmed economists and the Fed, the country’s central bank, given inflation of 7.1%, below the peak of 9.1% in July, but still much higher than the ideal of 2% of the government.

“Without price stability, the economy doesn’t work for anyone. In particular, without price stability, we will not achieve a sustained period of strong job markets that benefit everyone,” Fed chairman Jerome Powell said at an event in late November.

He indicated that the resilience of the labor market and rising wages should lead to further increases in interest rates, in an effort to slow down the economy.

For Hoyt Bleakley, a professor at the University of Michigan and an expert on labor economics, “There’s a fundamental tension between these two factors: How can companies have such robust demand for labor, but at the same time worry about a recession?” , he asks.

“The account does not close. But I believe that we have not yet reached the finish line”, he says, evaluating that the market can continue heated.

Bleakley claims that the market can expand even more with the so-called “reshoring”, the resumption of jobs in the industry that had gone abroad, in an attempt to reduce dependence on China, today the biggest economic adversary of the USA.

An important measure to fill open positions in the country could be hiring immigrants, he argues. Data from the US government’s Office of Labor Statistics point out that the US currently has 29.6 million employees born outside the country, a historic record.

Another way would be to hire seniors. The rate of people aged 65 or over employed today is 22.8%, the only age group still below the pre-pandemic period, when it reached 25.2%,

The total data, however, do not account for all the details, and a scare came from the technology sector in recent months, with news of mass layoffs in bigtechs.

Meta, which owns Facebook, laid off 11,000 employees at the end of the year, equivalent to 13% of the company’s workforce. Twitter, after being bought by billionaire Elon Musk, laid off about half of its employees, and Amazon has plans to close 10,000 posts, according to the specialized press.

The numbers are impressive due to the size of the companies, but they are not very representative in the universe of 153.5 million employees in the USA.

The hottest sector in the US market today is “leisure and hospitality”, which opened 88,000 jobs in November, 62,000 of them in bars and restaurants alone. Trade is one of the most impacted, with 30,000 jobs less in November and 62,000 less since August.

With such an offer, the “great waiver” continues in full swing. From January through October of this year, 43 million Americans quit at some point, up from 40.1 million in the same period last year.

That’s why waitress Getsy Hernández doesn’t hesitate to leave her job if she finds another, better job. “There’s no such thing as being badmouthed if they need someone to work with. It doesn’t make sense for me to stay in a bad job if I can earn more elsewhere,” she says.