The Great Resignation

Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America

by Erik Baker  · 13 Jan 2025  · 362pp  · 132,186 words

in July 2021, even as the official unemployment rate remained significantly elevated above pre-crisis levels. Soon a label materialized for the quit wave, and the “Great Resignation” became one of the year’s great media causes célèbres. By the end of the year some forty-seven million Americans had resigned.44 One

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additional omen, a touchstone of media coverage of the Great Resignation, was the dramatic growth in the online community r/antiwork, a forum on the platform Reddit. Founded amidst the Occupy Wall Street protests of the

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from a toxic, oppressive mainstream work culture. The resignation boom, it turns out, was accompanied by a similarly unprecedented spike in applications for new businesses. “‘The Great Resignation’ is creating more entrepreneurs,” Yahoo’s news service trumpeted. NBC was even more emphatic: “The coronavirus pandemic has created a landscape in which entrepreneurs and

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We Need,” Lux 1 (Spring 2021). See also Meltzer, Glossy, part 3. 44Joseph Fuller and William Kerr, “The Great Resignation Didn’t Start with the Pandemic,” Harvard Business Review, March 23, 2022; Ian Cook, “Who Is Driving the Great Resignation?” Harvard Business Review, September 15, 2021. 45Taylor Nicole Rodgers, “Reddit ‘Antiwork’ Forum Booms as Millions of

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Creating More Entrepreneurs, Side Hustlers, and Freelancers,” Yahoo News, November 8, 2021; Martha C. White, “The Flip Side of the ‘Great Resignation’—A Small-Business Boom,” NBC News, December 30, 2021; “Is the Great Resignation Giving Rise to the Entrepreneur?” Knowledge@Wharton, October 25, 2021. 48Daisy Jones, “Yes, the Girlboss Is Dead—But Her Replacement Isn

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future

by Julia Hobsbawm  · 11 Apr 2022  · 172pp  · 50,777 words

desire to work differently, or less, or with more work–life balance. We can see the impact of this in every metric around work: from ‘The Great Resignation’ in which millions of American workers resigned en masse and the one in four workers who now imagine they might quit or switch jobs,5

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significant degree of autonomy whether managers like it or not. Then there is the old way of taking control: voting with your feet. Remember, in the Great Resignation, that one in two workers say they will move jobs within a year in the Nowhere Office.11 Staff turnover is up significantly and one

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, 5 June 2021, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/06/03/what-a-work-from-home-revolution-means-for-commercial-property 5. See ‘The Great Resignation: Why People Are Leaving Their Jobs in Growing Numbers’, NPR, 22 October 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1048332481

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/the-great-resignation-why-people-are-leaving-their-jobs-in-growing-numbers; US Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary’, 12 October 2021, https://www.

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and Job Satisfaction, Study Finds’, University of Birmingham, 24 April 2017, https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2017/04/autonomy-workplace.aspx 11. See ‘The Great Resignation: Why People Are Leaving Their Jobs in Growing Numbers’, NPR, 22 October 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1048332481

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/the-great-resignation-why-people-are-leaving-their-jobs-in-growing-numbers; EY Study, ‘More Than Half of Employees Globally Would Quit Their Jobs if Not Provided Post-

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice

by Jamie K. McCallum  · 15 Nov 2022  · 349pp  · 99,230 words

lost 650,000 workers and nursing facilities shed 20,000 care workers, the result of a historic quit wave that came to be known as the “Great Resignation.” In July, that record was broken. In August, it was broken again, when a total of 4.3 million people left their jobs.16 It

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, but that wouldn’t be a prime cause of such a huge worker shortage. Two other explanations, however, are more interesting. The first is that the Great Resignation was partly the result of a Great Reassessment. Liberals heralded the idea that the pandemic prompted a sweeping reconsideration of the role of work in

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moment of greater leverage over employers who were short-staffed. With workers harder to replace, labor seemed to be taking advantage of the bosses’ crisis. The Great Resignation helped fuel the Great Discontent. As a labor activist myself, I’ll admit that waking up each morning to new reports of workers on strike

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the Industry, and What Would Make Them Stay, May 2021, https://onefairwage.site/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/OFW_WageShortage_F.pdf. 16. Derek Thompson, “The Great Resignation Is Accelerating,” The Atlantic, October 15, 2021, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/great-resignation-accelerating/620382/; Josh Eidelson, “‘Suicide Shifts,’ 7-Day Weeks

Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization

by Harold James  · 15 Jan 2023  · 469pp  · 137,880 words

effects of the outbreak.”8 Business activity closed down, both because of official lockdowns and because many employees withdrew from contagious and dangerous work environments. The “Great Resignation,” in which in the summer of 2021 some four million U.S. workers were leaving their employment every month, appeared to be becoming a long

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there appears to be slack in the labor market.”61 In fact, the slack was a sign of a profound shift: the Great Lockdown and the Great Resignation were producing the Great Dislocation. Elevating Competence and Control Covid posed a profound test of competence: what kind of government could deliver most competently? In

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It

by Erica Thompson  · 6 Dec 2022  · 250pp  · 79,360 words

scenarios exist, the many and varied downstream impacts of the pandemic that are emerging, from supply-chain disruption and Long Covid to accelerated digitisation and the ‘Great Resignation’, are potentially major economic changes that will not have been factored in. Stress tests in banking are less colourful but include scenarios for economic downturn

Working Identity, Updated Edition, With a New Preface: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

by Herminia Ibarra  · 17 Oct 2023  · 200pp  · 67,943 words

better off than the ones who stayed put? Ever more relevant today, when our patience for lengthy transitions seems to be on the wane—witness the Great Resignation, when millions of people quit work during and after the pandemic without a next job lined up (instead of taking the safer and more common

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future

by Jean M. Twenge  · 25 Apr 2023  · 541pp  · 173,676 words

of Boomers, born in 1957, turned 65 in 2022. With life spans lengthening, many will work past that age; others retired early as part of the “Great Resignation” during the COVID-19 pandemic, creating widespread staffing shortages. It was the first sign of the coming storm: Over the course of the 2020s, for

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with them for the rest of their lives. The constant back-and-forth of school closures and event cancellations may have taught them greater flexibility. The Great Resignation of workers in 2021 improved the number of jobs available to them, which could pay off for Gen Z economically for years into the future

Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

by Rose Hackman  · 27 Mar 2023

,” BLS Reports, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 2018, accessed June 16, 2020, https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2016/home.htm. 13.  “The Great Resignation: Why People Are Leaving Their Jobs in Growing Numbers,” NPR.org, October 22, 2021, accessed February 12, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22

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/1048332481/the-great-resignation-why-people-are-leaving-their-jobs-in-growing-numbers. 14.  “Men Have Now Recouped Their Pandemic-Related Labor Force Losses While Women Lag Behind,” National

Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)

by Rachel Slade  · 9 Jan 2024  · 392pp  · 106,044 words

an hour and be a part of this right now,” Ben said. “We don’t have that. There’s no desire.” The media called it the Great Resignation. Ben called it apocalyptic. “It has nothing to do with people staying home collecting unemployment,” he said. “Something else happened. I think Americans are tired

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full-day retreats, Taco Tuesdays, and meditation pods. At the end of the day, though, these perks didn’t make workers any happier. No doubt, the Great Resignation was fueled by anger and resentment against poorly managed companies where Americans felt exploited—underpaid, overworked, and dog-tired. *2 Health care is so expensive

The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life

by Sahil Bloom  · 4 Feb 2025  · 363pp  · 94,341 words

?,” Hire a Helper (blog), June 3, 2021, https://blog.hireahelper.com/​2021-study-do-people-actually-regret-moving/. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Eleanor Pringle, “The ‘Great Resignation’ Is Now the ‘Great Regret,’ ” Fortune, February 9, 2023, https://fortune.com/​2023/​02/​09/​great-resignation-now-great-regret-gen-z-wish-they-had

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport  · 5 Mar 2024  · 233pp  · 65,893 words

The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy

by Nick Romeo  · 15 Jan 2024  · 343pp  · 103,376 words

Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life

by Scott. Branson  · 14 Jun 2022  · 198pp  · 63,612 words

Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge

by Ian Kumekawa  · 6 May 2025  · 422pp  · 112,638 words