The garden centre where we buy our plants closes at five now because they don’t have enough employees to stay open until seven, as they did last year. “Before Covid,” says Sally, the centre’s manager, “we’d normally get 300 applications for summer jobs; this year we got three.”
When I took our car to our usual garage to have the muffler refastened, the clamp was put on by the owner, a Class A mechanic, because he hasn’t been able to hire enough people to keep his six lifts operating. “I advertise for mechanics,” Flo said, “and lots of people make appointments, but then no one shows up for the job interview.”
This year, wildfires have destroyed more than 16 million acres of forest in Canada. Particulates from these fires have been detected as far away as Mexico and Norway; the air quality in eastern Ontario is now worse than that of Beijing. In some places, the yellow blanket engulfing U.S. cities is being termed “Canadian Smoke,” which is eerily reminiscent of Trump referring to Covid-19 as “the Chinese flu.” There are so many fires burning that the country doesn’t have enough wilderness firefighters to contain them. Reuters recently reported that Canada employs about 5,500 wilderness firefighters, which is 2,500 short of what we need. Although the call has gone out for more workers, so far the call has gone unheeded. Canadian smoke is another product of the pandemic that brought us the Great Resignation.
“For some time,” writes Erik Baker in the May issue of Harper’s, “we’ve been told that we’re in the midst of a Great Resignation. Workers are quitting their jobs en masse, repudiating not just their bosses but ambition itself – even the very idea of work.” But recently, he continues, the Great Resignation has given way to a more nuanced change in our attitude towards work. A different kind of resignation is at play, this one termed “quiet quitting.” People are going to work, but their hearts are no longer in it. They show up, they put in their requisite hours, they fulfill their job descriptions, and they go home. They don’t work overtime, they don’t skip family dinners because of a crisis at the office, they regard work as a necessary evil they are resigned to accept in order to afford to do the things they actually enjoy doing. They do the minimum, like someone impatiently enduring their last daily grind before retirement.
It's tempting to view this workforce crisis as another aspect of a generation’s overblown sense of entitlement, as right-wing commenters have done. But Baker blames the “withdrawal of effort” on “the creeping sense of social rot, or even collapse, that has grown progressively palpable since the 2016 election” – in other words, on right-wing politics itself – “and which was supercharged by the pandemic.” George Packer, in his 2013 book The Unwinding, traces the malaise back even farther, to 1978, when it began to dawn on workers that the American Dream was never going to become reality: no matter how hard they worked, how diligently they saved, how loyal or attached they were to their jobs, they were never going to get out of debt. The realization was supercharged by the subprime mortgage fiasco of 2008: scrimp as much as they could, they would never be able to afford a new house. They might manage a bigger television, but then they’d have to watch commercials for all the other things they couldn’t afford.
It appears that the two attitudes have come together now in a kind of perfect storm, with the Great Resignation a blue-collar phenomenon, and Quiet Quitting affecting workers with office jobs that they don’t care about. The disdain for “junk jobs” is another offshoot of the pandemic. “The pandemc,” Baker writes, “…forced a wide swath of the workforce to confront, in a particularly visceral fashion, the fact that their work was ‘non-essential.’” This double whammy, with people who don’t have jobs not applying for them, and people who have jobs simply working to rule, is an escalating problem for more than the economy. As The Unwinding showed, withdrawal of effort has been going on for decades in many areas that reflect our sense of ourselves and what we think is important.
And now even essential workers, such as firefighters and health-care staff, are stepping away. In 2018, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that Canada will need an additional 78,000 nurses by 2030. Covid burnout ensured that that target is not going to be met: in 2022, a report by the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions found that half the nurses in Canada are considering quitting, citing overwork, violence and stress as the chief factors. And the American Association of Colleges of Nursing reports that enrollment in nursing schools in the U.S. this year is down 14 percent, after two decades of annual increases.
Fortunately, Canada’s 5,500 wilderness firefighters aren’t quitting; they’re working twelve- to twenty-four-hour shifts for two straight weeks, taking a few days off to decompress and then going back at it for another two weeks. They haven’t withdrawn their efforts, they’ve magnified them. It’s the people who aren’t applying for positions as firefighters, and who aren’t enrolling in medical schools, who have undergone an attitude adjustment about the value of work. And there are a growing number of them.
In the January 2023 issue of Harper’s, Mark Edmundson writes that “pragmatism guides the way many, if not most, Americans conduct their lives: with an eye to work, success, profit, achievement, innovation, and ongoing expansion.” That seems to be just the paradigm at which this workforce crisis is chipping away.
Thanks, Lia, you're absolutely right. We do have to distinguish between quiet quitters and people who just aren't comfortable going back to an office, or getting on a commuter train, until they're sure the pandemic is over. I write about that in my book, Pandexicon. And thanks for the link to Long Covid data. We're a long way from being out of the woods (and, up here in Canada, the woods are on fire).
Thanks, Lis. That's what I think of as the current malaise, which has been going on for a number of years and which I think is related to the West's gradual shift to right-wing politics. I know a psychologist in Ottawa who, during the years when Stephen Harper was prime minister, had a flood of patients who were civil servants, and were traumatized by having to carry out government policies that they personally strongly disagreed with. I think these people eventually lose faith any government's ability to reflect and support or even recognize their values. At least mentally, they drop out. And now they are starting to drop out physically, as well. On a massive scale. As Jane Jacobs put it: Dark Times Ahead.