Discontent, Occupational Change, and the Roles Workers Are Leaving amid the Great Resignation

Workers are dissatisfied with the world of work and are holding out for flexible and worker-centric opportunities. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity (CWEO) has been hosting conversations with workers who have expressed displeasure with on-the-job treatment from both customers and management, inflexible work schedules, poor work-life balance, inability to work remotely or with a hybrid schedule, inadequate pay and benefits, limited opportunities for growth and training, and pay raises that are not keeping up with inflation. In fact, the Pew Research Center found low pay, limited opportunities for career growth, poor workplace culture, and childcare issues among the top four reasons workers left their jobs in 2021. Online therapy company TalkSpace says that 53 percent of workers are burned out and 46 percent find work too stressful. Workers have been expressing their discontent by quitting, retiring early, staying unemployed longer, and switching jobs. A larger share of workers are even quitting to start their own businesses, and a larger share of retirees, who normally return to work in some capacity, are staying out of the labor force. The author used Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata to determine whether worker discontent is resulting in an increased rate of occupational change and to find which occupations workers are leaving. An occupational change is not simply a job change—it is a change to a new line of work. The data also indicate that workers are reevaluating their participation in the labor market. At the outset of the pandemic, 53 percent of workers surveyed had more than once changed occupations from 2019 to 2020 (chart 1), a 6-percentage point increase from the previous year. Before the pandemic, the trend was virtually flat. The percentage returned to the prepandemic levels in the following survey period, 2020–21, but only when controlling for unemployment (chart 1). In fact, workers’ interactions with unemployment remain at postpandemic highs. The findings in chart 1 suggest that workers are not currently switching occupations at an outsized rate (within a one-year period) but are taking longer to reexamine their interaction with or place in the labor market.