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About 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs in January, the eighth consecutive month in which resignations topped four million, the U.S. labor department reported.
The number dipped slightly from December’s 4.4 million and November’s record 4.5 million, but remains near a record level.
Monthly quits before the COVID era averaged about 3.5 million, Business Insider reported, putting January’s level 20 percent above that norm.
Also in January, employers posted 11.3 million open jobs, the department said.
Transport, utilities, and warehousing added 132,000 workers; businesses in lodging and food service picked up 288,000 new employees but 781,000 left.
About 717,000 retail workers clocked out in January and business services saw 697,000 workers put in their papers.
The number of open jobs rose in manufacturing and in the service sector generally.
However, most people are not leaving their jobs to retire, stay home with children, or follow their bliss, chief economist Jeffrey Roach at LPL Financial told The New York Times.
“People are staying within their industry” but landing jobs with better compensation, he noted. “We’ll continue to see really high churn rates.”
Workers’ search for greener pastures will continue to drive wages higher, helping workers make up for lost income during the COVID War but pushing costs higher still for businesses, the NYT said.
Employers are “very concerned” about steadily climbing wages, Steven Wyett, chief investment officer at Oklahoma’s BOK Financial, said in an NYT interview.
“What does it mean to their margins,” he said. “What kind of pricing power do [employees] have?”
Employers wonder, “‘How do we protect ourselves against this?’,” Wyett said.
Workers who leave one job to take another receive larger pay boosts than employees who stay where they are, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta reported.
Much of the job-switching is in lower-paid industries, such as restaurant work or hotel services, the NYT noted.
Although wages grew again in January, initial February data showed pay flattening for the month, with pay rising only a penny from the previous month (see related story in this issue).
Also, wage gains in recent months have averaged 3 to 7 percent, a typical annual boost that prevailed from the 1980s to the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007, according to data from the U.S. Federal Reserve.
A large proportion of workers leaving their jobs cited low pay, little chance of advancement, and feeling a lack of respect, quitters told a survey this month by the Pew Research Center.
TRENDPOST: Have the serfs of Slavelandia had enough?
As noted in the TRENDS-EYE VIEW section of this week’s Trends Journal and previous issues, the general workforce is no longer willing to settle for menial work at unlivable wages with no chance for growth.
Now they are unionizing and reclaiming their power, as we have documented in “Starbucks Store to Unionize: A Top Trend for 2022?” (14 Dec 2021), “Activision Studio Group Will Form a Union, Solidifying Trends Journal Forecast” (25 Jan 2022), “Politico Journalists Form a Union, a Trend of the Times” (2 Nov 2021), and “REI: Unionization Trend Expands as Forecast” (1 Feb 2022).
Salaried workers also are using their leverage in a tight labor market, particularly in their demands to continue working from home, as we report in “Remote Work is Bottom Line for Third of Salaried Workers” in this issue.
TREND FORECAST: The U.S. labor market has tightened and 11 million open jobs were posted last month. Workers’ newfound leverage will remain strong for the foreseeable future.