For the better part of three years, one question has dogged the post-pandemic economy: Where are all the workers?Corporate recruiting difficulties have been blamed on a host of ills: Too generous Unemployment benefits; too many stimulus checks; not enough immigrants;too many workers with long COVID, finally, simple laziness.
Now, a recent study suggests a different answer: The workers are still there, they just don’t work as hard.
Three researchers at Washington University in St. Louis analyzed federal data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey and found that the decline in hours was driven mostly by people who were still working but working fewer hours.Their findings were recently published in a working paper Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
“It’s not that there are fewer people willing to work. If anything, there are more people willing to work than before the pandemic,” co-author Yongseok Shin, a professor at the University of Washington, told reporters. wealth. “But some people are working fewer hours.”
Shin and his co-authors, doctoral students Dain Lee and Jinhyeok Park, found that 55% of the decline in labor supply since the pandemic was due to a reduction in hours worked, while the remainder came from people dropping out of the labor force. It’s not like people retiring early are cutting back on spending, either: Most of those cutting back are men with higher education and working intensive jobs, 50 hours a week or more, Shin said.
“In fact, young people between 25 and 45 who used to work long hours are now working less hours,” he said, noting that “it’s all men, not women.”
Quiet Resignations and “No Work Fridays”
The data help explain why even as the labor force participation rate approaches pre-pandemic levels, job openings remain near record highs and hundreds of thousands of jobs are being added each month. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate is just 3.8%, a rate that a few years ago would have been considered incredibly low.
Sheen believes the pandemic has forced millions of Americans to reassess what is important to them in their lives and has also sparked an epidemic of “quiet resignations,” perhaps better described as salaried workers’ refusal to work overtime or be overly busy. .
“Everyone is re-evaluating their work-life balance, and maybe they’re saying, ‘I don’t have to work 55 hours, I want to spend more time with my family,'” Shin said.
In other words, the “quiet exit” previously blamed for costing the global economy billions of dollars has also managed to prop up the tightest jobs market in a generation and an increasingly emboldened workforce.
Crucially, while many quiet quitters may have wanted to work less before the pandemic, the emergence of hybrid or remote work in white-collar fields has given them the leeway to do so. Even in some offices that are bringing back employees, “no work Fridays” have become a thing, with empty offices, few meetings and significantly fewer emails — something Xin said he’s seen among his friends, too This situation.
“That’s the dimension of technology that allows (workers) to do this,” Xin said. “Assuming you’ve done all your work for Friday morning, and you know your colleagues aren’t at their computers either – this allows people to move back a little and not work when they’re not working.”
Less commonly, work cuts come from above—like Shopify’s elimination of nonessential meetings from employee calendars earlier this year. “No one schedules meetings for Friday afternoon, or almost any Friday. We all agree, ‘Let’s get everything done by early afternoon,'” a staffer at an advertising agency told the outlet. Lifestyle publication InsideHook.
Many companies are now trying to claw back some of their employees’ newfound free time, whether by mandating three days a week in the office, rewarding employees who put in more face-to-face time, or simply telling determined remote employees they can go elsewhere. because Amazon Chief executive Andy Jassy has impressed this summer.
But if the “new normal” is hybrid work, Shin hopes white-collar workers won’t return to overwork.
He sees this trend not as an escape but as a realignment of people’s workdays with the vagaries of knowledge work. “Sometimes you just sit in the office for no apparent reason — it’s not like a production line, where the workflow is constant,” he said.
Shin believes that in fact, a “quiet exit” is a good thing for all parties involved, because it brings the famously overworked American professionals closer to their counterparts in Europe and other developed countries, who take more vacation time than in the United States. People are longer and work fewer hours. It’s also good for employers because employees who aren’t burned out can continue to work later in life if they choose.
Although Shin’s study only runs through 2022, this year’s data shows the trend is continuing, Shin said. The share of Americans working has surpassed its pre-pandemic high, but the number of hours worked per person has remained unchanged.
“This seems to be a collective decision,” he said. “People seem to like it. If this is the new normal, hopefully it continues.”
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