Americans quit their jobs at a record rate

Americans are quit In record numbers, many people are choosing to quit their jobs rather than return to the office as companies end their telework policies introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The all-time high of 4.54 million people quit their jobs in March, far exceeding the record set in November last year and up 23% from the previous year, according to a Labor Department report released on May 3. a year earlier. The number of jobs also set a new high, at 11.5 million, as employers struggled to fill vacancies amid soaring labor costs.

March’s report marks the latest in a wave of pandemic-era labor unrest known as the “Great Quit”. By comparison, before April 2021, there had never been a month where 4 million Americans had quit their jobs. This level has been broken for 10 months in a row, and plus in March, the total number of people quitting was equivalent to about 3% of the entire US workforce.

Employers have worked hard to fill vacant positions, offering higher salaries, promising bonuses and generous benefits packages to attract workers. With Americans increasingly prioritizing time outside of work, some companies have tried to compete by offering more days off. A New York tech company is said to have given new hires two weeks of paid leave before starting work.

Businesses are also increasingly reluctant to lay off workers due to the difficulty of replacing them. For every 1 person laid off in March, 3 others quit. Layoffs were down 7.1% from a year earlier.

While most concerns about the condition labor shortage In the United States’ focus on entry-level positions, such as retail and fast food jobs, the number of white-collar workers leaving is increasing. 809,000 Americans working in professional and business services voluntarily quit their jobs in March, up 28% from a year earlier. The only segments with a dropout rate of less than 1.5% of the public sector workforce, led by the federal government at 0.8%.

Julia Pollak, chief economist at the online job market ZipRecruiter, said the dropout has been exacerbated in recent months by employers asking workers to return to the office after giving jobs. allow them to work remotely during the peak of the pandemic. A company survey found that 14% of people who started a new position in the past 6 months had the opportunity to work from home after switching jobs.

The Chairman of the US Federal Reserve (Fed) Jerome Powell called the US job market “unsustainably hot” and the main driver of inflation rising to a 40-year high. Despite the overheated labor market, the number of US jobs is still more than 1 million people below pre-pandemic levels.