The Great Resignation represents a departure from traditional forms of work organization. It calls for a new relationship between workers and work.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
It represents a singular phenomenon which had never manifested itself before. The relationship between people and work has changed. Employment in its previous form is the subject of a collective refusal. This social phenomenon first concerns young people, but it is slowly migrating to older employees and self-employed workers looking for a job offering a better quality of life.
The Great Resignation is both informal and formal.
Informally, we are witnessing a rise in the intention to change jobs. At the start of 2022, 19% of Canadians were considering finding another job during the year (Study, Bank of Canada, 2022).
Formally, this intention in Canada has not yet been translated into action, unlike in the United States. However, the shortage of labor increases the ability of employees to change companies at will. It is therefore possible that the aforementioned intention, if it persists, will materialize later.
The Great Resignation is also individual and collective.
On an individual level, young people experience a condition distinct from that of their parents or grandparents. They can now count on sophisticated technologies. This technical context relieves human effort and makes traditional work more circumventable. In addition, in a family, both spouses are generally employed. Thus, two realities are observable: first, the family becomes more complex to manage. Then, the company has to deal with less family flexibility. For example, if a child is sick, a spouse must be absent from work, which was not the case when one of the two stayed at home.
On the collective level, social law has evolved towards greater accountability of employers with regard to the family needs of the active force. Thus, citizens now have access to social or parental leave as well as an increased annual vacation plan. In addition, in Canada, approximately 30% of jobs lend themselves to telework, according to a study carried out by Statistics Canada in 2021. The use of remote work represents a balancing factor between the demands of the company and those of families. But its use is not widespread. Finally comes the labor shortage, which is essentially rooted in the refusal of baby boomers (born between 1945 and 1960) to reproduce the family sizes that gave birth to them. In fact, the birth rate, per thousand inhabitants, was 30 in 1955. This rate has gradually fallen to just under 10 – three times lower – in 2021, according to Statistics Canada. Consequently, there are not enough young people to replace the older people leaving the labor market.
But young people understood the power that this demographic reality attributed to them. It remains to be seen how they will organize themselves to assert their demands. Aware of their rarity, they practice new modes of communication with each other that make extensive use of social networks. Consequently, to create circumstantial solidarity with a view to improving their working conditions, young people may no longer need to resort to the collective struggles that made the good years of the baby boomers. Because it has already been shown that the informal nature of social networks does not limit their potential to promote collective interests.
Where have the young people gone? They are there, but in limited numbers. Thus, the generational shift is defeated. Added to this are social rights in the form of leave which, by boosting industrial absenteeism, in turn accentuates the shortage of labour.
In this ruthless context, there is no choice to resort to foreign labor if the skill sought is there or to develop robotization capable of replacing part of the human work.
There remains the difficult work, difficult to robotize, which is carried out face-to-face, such as health care, which increases in an aging society. Will young people agree to perform these demanding tasks? It is not certain that they will do so, taking into account their shortage, but also their main values based on family and leisure. If so, the consequence will be chilling. Because baby boomers have not taken care to renew the family sizes that gave birth to them. They therefore risk paying the high price of aging without adequate care, even if many of them have the financial means to seek care. Because money cannot mobilize human resources that do not exist. Hey, boomers, ahead, the “Wall”!