Great Resignation: here’s how it was born and what it tells us about the future

Great Resignation heres how it was born and what it

(Finance) – “I want to go and live in the countryside … But I live here in the city and I don’t like it anymore”. So sang Toto Cutugno in the early 90s, a primordial desire that returns to be felt today in the post-pandemic period, but with an increasingly technological home, between a yoga class and homemade bread. A place, a space, a time in which work no longer enters unless it is smart.

It was called “Great Resignation” or “Big quit”. It was born in the United States, during the pandemic, which seems to have consolidated, and has also resulted in Europe, albeit on a smaller scale. Italy did not stay out.

The phenomenon – explains Mattia Granata, President of the Centro Studi Legacoop – consists of an increase in voluntary resignations by workers who do not necessarily pass directly to another job and therefore, substantially, give the impression of having decided to change their radical life, starting from one’s work “.

Abandon the certain for the uncertain

But to what extent has this phenomenon taken hold in Italy? The Great Resignation motivates about 1.3 million resignation requests from people who give up a more or less stable job and choose an uncertain path full of unknowns.

The photograph is that of a labor market subjected to a certain vitality, albeit with the usual light and dark. After the collapse of the activations of new employment relationships recorded between 2019 and 2020 (-23.7%), the labor market has restarted. In this dynamic scenario, however, there is an increase in the resignations of employees, which in the first nine months of 2021 increase by 31.6% compared to the same period of the previous year, going from 1 million to over 1 million and 300 thousand.

“Obviously this is the basis of a completely new phenomenon, on which it is difficult to carry out qualitative analyzes at this stage. – specifies Granata – It must be said, moreover, that the recovery of employment was based for 60 years. % on precarious jobs, that self-employment has also decreased, and that women and young people, previously more affected by the crisis, have been much less involved in the recovery “.

Pandemic stress

It is useful to ask what this trend has come from and what are the factors that have fueled the explosion of voluntary resignations.
“The phenomenon is still to be studied”, admits the President of the Legacoop Studies Office.

“The hypothesis on which we are moving, and that we are all actually experimenting with ourselves, is that the pandemic lasted a long time, two years, enough to question one’s own normality. under stress people, human and social relationships, families, and obviously work, a crucial element of times, places and conditions of life “.

“All these aspects seem to have come under scrutiny and have inevitably been questioned; it can be assumed that this increase in resignations falls within this sphere: it is a social consequence of the pandemic”.

The art of being satisfied or …

For Italy, among the explanations that have given impetus to the phenomenon of “mass resignation” there could also be the arrival of the citizen’s income. “This could be one of the interpretations, the one so to speak to the downside – admits Granata – that people have preferred to resort to the RdC to work that is perhaps unpaid or unsatisfactory. After all, the combination of low wages and price increases could push in this direction “.

“On the other hand, on the other side, one might think that the rapid economic recovery has pushed people to leave their jobs with confidence to relocate themselves even not directly, in sectors that are currently draining the workforce and, indeed, not they are finding enough for the well-known phenomenon of mismatch between supply and demand.

And now we change!

Factors of an economic nature or related to the quality of life may have weighed on the desire to leave the job, but according to the President of the Legacoop Studies Office, “in both cases the starting point of the analysis is the same, namely that the pandemic has changed everyone’s lives and probably not only the way of life but also the priorities, hopes, objectives and economic and social behaviors “.

In the United States, where the phenomenon has shown itself earlier and on a large scale, it seems that the overriding reason for resignation is not pay. “Almost everywhere, in this period, other aspects are emerging – explains Graata – the quality of work and life, the need for satisfaction, self-fulfillment, social and personal growth, greater ‘freedom’. the concern of the past months, remote work, the dad, have pushed people to seek a new ‘meaning’ to what they do and to their lives “.

From a recent research by AreaStudi Legacoop-IPSOS it emerges that more and more personal stability, growth and fulfillment are required of one’s work, in addition to income obviously. The moments of crisis are precisely those in which we ask ourselves questions about our own happiness, perhaps that is what is happening.

The future has a thousand facets

Looking to the future means having exposed the defects of our labor market and its distortions to correct them. A quarter of the cooperatives belonging to Legacoop, for example, complain of a “shortage of manpower”, but this percentage is close to half in regions such as Emilia Romagna or in sectors such as social services, construction and logistics. “It is obviously the peak in a country that suffers from our unemployment rates”, comments Granata.

According to experts, today a more comprehensive, “holistic” approach is needed: minimum wages, education and training, active labor policies, raising wage levels, universal services for people and welfare. “If we want to involve all the forces and talents this country has at its disposal – underlines the expert – it is clear that we need to act on all the conditions that have so far worked the other way around, to exclude rather than include. Now the PNRR can and must be the same. tool for resolving many long-term structural distortions “.

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