All week, we’d been rehearsing how my friend should leave her job. Specifically, where to land her resignation speech on the spectrum between a cathartic, spite-filled rant and something more businesslike. She was quitting because the money was terrible, the hours were terrible, it was incredibly stressful and she felt constantly gaslit and undermined by a boss who while giving her a dumb assignment would assure her it was consolidating her “brand”. We could rake over her motivation until the cows came home, but her reasons for quitting basically boiled down to one thing: “I’ve had a gutful,” she said (she’s Australian).
In the last year, the urge to quit has jumped from a staple background whinge to a startling mass action. In November last year in the US, the number of people leaving their jobs reached a record high of 4.53 million. These were not people working in finance. For the most part, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, the highest concentration of workers walking out of their jobs fell in the leisure and hospitality industry, shortly followed by retail workers – that is, in the middle to lower wage brackets. Surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center found the reasons people cited for leaving were low pay, feeling stuck and “disrespect”. In other words, nothing out of the ordinary. But where in previous years these kinds of discomforts might have been weathered indefinitely, or until a better option came along, now people were snapping and walking out.
