Year of Discovery (Week 24: The Great Resignation and Labour Laws)
This last week continued to be eventful — from celebrating a friend’s marriage proposal to eye-opening, heart-expanding and mind-bending meetings that built more awareness of my core to a half-day Buddhist empowerment.
My days are spent gaining more clarity on my pathways (research/reading, conversations and prototyping through consulting or building) and learning from and gaining inspiration from the way others live and organize their lives with intention. From one meeting, I learned about the power of regular step backs with a small community where each member opens up their beliefs/assumptions/hypotheses about the world and has them questioned to be reflected on and further refined — with the goal to stay grounded and to not let the ego and pride drive beliefs and decisions. Through my consulting, I’m learning about what I enjoy vs I don’t and where I want to continue strengthening my toolkit.
This last week, I also mapped out different pathways for myself that I began sharing with people I respect and trust to get their feedback on my assumptions for the pathways. And I’m starting to feel more directionally grounded and excited about where the next few years can lead to. For example, this might look like a book on Buddhism, peace and purpose in the next few months, TBA.
Today, I’m writing about The Great Resignation and labour laws.
The Great Resignation of 2021
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4 million Americans quit their jobs in July 2021. Resignations peaked in April and have remained abnormally high for the last several months, with a record-breaking 10.9 million open jobs at the end of July.
This is even after the US spent 1.8 percent of its 2019 GDP from March to May 2020 on job retention schemes. Contrast that to France‘s chômage partiel (partial unemployment) scheme and fonds de solidarité (solidarity funds) for SMEs, which cost a combined 1.4 percent of its 2019 GDP. Higher US spending did not significantly slow the unemployment rate, which increased by almost 10 percentage points over March to May 2020. By contrast, the French unemployment rate increased by less than 2 percentage points in that same period.
There are a number of reasons for why Americans are resigning. People are leaving their jobs in search of more money, more flexibility and more happiness. Many are rethinking what work means to them, how they are valued, and how they spend their time.
- Some 56% of those surveyed said that flexibility was their primary reason to look for a new job, topping higher pay and job security.
- This trend was the same even for the lowest-paid workers — 52% of those making $30,000 or less still put flexibility as their top reason to look for a new job, over higher pay.
Some other interesting stats:
- Employees between 30 and 45 years old have had the greatest increase in resignation rates, with an average increase of more than 20% between 2020 and 2021
- Resignations are highest in the tech and health care industries (fields that had experienced extreme increases in demand due to the pandemic)
As Amercans resign in hoards, US employers needs to grapple with how their policies and practices today are preventing them from hiring and retaining the people they need.
How else do you think the labour market will change for the better or for the worse, and what is your role in that? With every crisis comes an opportunity to unravel, observe and rebuild a better world. What will that world look like?
Labour Laws and the Societies We Live In
In understanding unemployment and the causes of resignation, I took a further look into labour laws and what it says about the values of society.
While the US has labour laws that are more employer-friendly (meaning faster termination laws, fewer holidays and benefits, etc which they balance with higher pay), France has labour laws that are more employee-friendly (more holidays, tougher termination laws, more robust benefits).
In France:
- it’s hard and expensive for employers to fire employees, which also makes it hard for employees to be hired.
- retention is high because when employees find full-time and long-term work, they tend to stay, think twice before switching companies and can become too risk-averse to start companies. 95 per cent of employees in France are covered by collective bargaining agreements (even in non-unionised industries), so the rules in the Labour Code are supplemented by more generous rules in areas such as paid leave, maternity leave, medical cover and even working time.
- employers struggle with finding mid-level and senior level talent (which I’ve heard similarly from other places globally) and find training solutions that will grow their talent quickly from more junior to mid-level to senior (even if though the government provides L&D budgets to their citizens).
Being on opposite ends — French socialism and US capitalism — is fascinating to compare and contrast. While the French government continues to try to shift French labour laws to be more similar to the UK and US’, they are continuously met with widespread protests. Similarly in the US, when Bernie Sanders (who could be considered a more conservative socialist in Europe) pushes for a stronger welfare state, Americans say he is too extreme.
There are a number of extrapolations that can be made from the type of society that the French and Americans live in. In France, people tend to stay in school much longer (and need multiple Masters degrees before they can move into their first paid job). There is a culture of ‘slowing down’ and ‘being thoughtful’ while the US has a culture of ‘speeding up’ and ‘being efficient’. “Hire and fire fast is a motto in the US” while “Hire slow and fire rarely” is more the motto in France.
At the end of the day, as citizens and workers/contributors to the society we live in, choosing what type of society we want to support is important to knowing what type of world we want to live in. Understanding how other cultures work can give us a clue into the culture we want to work to build in our own homes and societies and knowing that fundamentally at the end of the day, we are all just experimenting and every society has its strengths and weaknesses.
So what type of society do you want to build?
What I’m listening to: You Can’t Always Want What You Like
