The Coping Mechanisms of the Precariat: Prelude To The Great Resignation

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity and the precariat.  In the last post in this series, I introduced the concept of a social nonmovement.  To quickly review, a social nonmovement is the spontaneous, unplanned emergence of a set of social practices among a large number of people, among whom these practices begin to encroach upon and ultimately disrupt an existing status quo.  The concept of the social nonmovement is introduced and explored in Asef Bayat's book Life As Politics.  What is especially relevant to the precariat is the emergence of social nonmovements among the poor and powerless in response to the pressure inflicted on these people by the rich and powerful masters of an existing status quo.  These social nonmovements encroach upon and weaken the power of the masters of the existing status quo, yet they frequently operate outside the notice of these masters even as they weaken the power of these masters.  However, sometimes a social nonmovement catches the eye of a large number of the privileged members of a society - especially when the social nonmovement appears suddenly, spreads quickly, and achieves a massive amount of disruption in a short amount of time.

Such a social nonmovement is the Great Resignation - a time in which massive numbers of people decided that their jobs were such a royal pain that they refused to take anymore, and quit.  Most scholars and journalists consider the Great Resignation to be one of the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic which shut down much of the American economy in 2020 due to the failure of then-President Donald Trump and his Republican Party to effectively prepare for the pandemic.  These scholars and journalists consider 2021 and 2022 to be the peak years of the Great Resignation, and some of these even say that the Great Resignation is now largely over.  However, there are minority voices such as journalists at the Harvard Business Review who say that the Great Resignation is actually a long-term trend which began at the beginning of the last decade and is still continuing.

Most people who have been alive for any length of time realize that throughout history, worker attitudes have fluctuated between job satisfaction or dissatisfaction in cycles that are reminiscent of the alternation of yin and yang in ancient Chinese philosophy.  In today's post I hypothesize that the 1960's in the United States were a time of increasing job satisfaction for an expanding number of people.  However, in making such a hypothesis, I am confronted by the difficulties which social scientists have had in defining what exactly is job satisfaction, let alone in figuring out how to measure it.  (See, for instance, "What is Job Satisfaction?", Edwin A. Locke, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1969.)  Nevertheless, a 1982 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics supports my hypothesis, noting that in 1973, 87 percent of workers were either very satisfied or moderately satisfied with their jobs.

Yet that picture has obviously changed over the years.  In 2017, an organization called the Conference Board provided a chart outlining the historical measurement of U.S. worker job satisfaction from 1987 to 2016.  According to that chart, worker satisfaction was at or below 50 percent during five of the eight years of the presidency of Republican George W. Bush.  According to the 2022 "Job Satisfaction Chartbook" from the same source, job satisfaction "is the highest it has been in a decade" at 60 percent.  Yet according to the Achievers Workforce Institute, two-thirds of employees are thinking about leaving their jobs in 2024.  This was also true in 2022, according to the Institute. This is yet more evidence that the Great Resignation is an ongoing trend.  (Maybe the people who answered the Conference Board surveys in 2022 weren't fully sharing their feelings...)

Now declining job satisfaction can be tolerated by workers for a time, yet as it intensifies, it leads to a point in which people decide that the pain of staying in an existing intolerable situation exceeds any potential suffering involved in making a change to that situation.  And workers have from time to time reacted explosively to their workplaces as illustrated by songs like "Oney" (written by Gary Chesnut and sung by Johnny Cash) and "Take This Job And..." (written by David Allan Coe and sung by Johnny Paycheck), as well as idioms such as "going postal."  (By the way, I do not condone or encourage workplace violence!)  But stories about successful quitting have been made to seem like the sort of rare events that are beyond the reach of most working stiffs.  Yet the undeniable fact is that during the last years of the last decade and the first years of this decade, a huge number of people found themselves pushed into quitting.  It is natural to ask what factors pushed so many into quitting at around the same time.

I will not definitively answer that question today.  However, I will suggest what I consider to be the likely factors.  Treat my suggestions as hypotheses, if you will.

• First, there is the erosion of the power of organized labor, an erosion which actually began with Republican President Richard Nixon's wage and price controls in the early 1970's.  This erosion kicked into high gear under the Republican presidency of Ronald Reagan and has not slowed down since.  The power of unions to protect their workers from low wages and excessive work demands was thus eroded.
• There is also the removal of the guarantee of lifetime employment for good and loyal employees of large corporations.  This was pioneered by such CEO's as Jack Welch of General Electric and was a direct contributor to the economic precarity suffered by a majority of working Americans today.
• There were the stresses imposed by globalism as wage and labor arbitrage.  This globalism was championed by right-wing, conservative executives of major corporations - the same sort of executives who are in many cases supporting the MAGA hostility to open borders championed by Donald Trump, as they see that sometimes smart people from poor countries can turn the tables on economic systems that are rigged against them.
• Consider also the removal or weakening of workplace protections against employer abuse.  Many employers (as well as business customers), thus unhindered from having to be humane toward their employees, turned some of those employees into metaphorical toilet paper, doormats, and punching bags onto whom these bosses could project their unresolved and unjustified hostility.
• Lastly (at least for today's post), there is the rise of the toxic workplace - a workplace in which bosses either perpetrate or enable bullying and mobbing behavior by popular workplace staff against those who are deemed to be scapegoats.  

Note that the last two factors are the direct result of the creation of a massive power imbalance between employers and employees over the last four decades.  The employees, reduced to a state of naked dependency on capricious bosses and a capricious labor market, were thus exposed to the prospect of either starving or having to meet unreasonable and destructive demands from these employers.  This made the management ladder a very attractive place for abusive, psychopathic, sociopathic, and otherwise personality-disordered people to take root.  Now here's an interesting perspective on the reason why leaders and managers allow abusive workplaces to continue: their continuance satisfies the ongoing psychological cravings of such managers.  A parallel to the abusive workplace is the abusive church.  As "Captain Cassidy" pointed out in a recent post on her blog Roll to Disbelieve, the whole point of creating an abusive power structure is so that the masters of such a structure (and those who are their special pets) can enjoy the psychological thrill of owning such a power structure.  And what is the best way to experience that thrill?  Why, to abuse the people at the bottom levels of such a structure, of course!  Consider Captain Cassidy's third and fourth points from the post I have cited:

• "Nothing is ever off-limits for those who hold power. More to the point, following the group’s rules is for the powerless. The powerful not only do not follow those rules, they flaunt their disobedience."

• "The powerful delight in the most potent expressions of power: forcing people to do things they don’t want to do; rubbing their own disobedience in the noses of the powerless. If power is not flexed, the powerful might as well not have it at all."

Captain Cassidy's perspective echoes what Chauncey Hare and Judith Wyatt wrote in Chapter 4 of their 1997 book Work Abuse: How To Recognize and Survive It.  But just as abusive churches (and abusive white American evangelicalism) have begun to suffer a loss of social power as their abuse has been exposed, abusive workplaces throughout the English-speaking world have begun to suffer an erosion of economic power.  Consider that workplace mistreatment cost U.S businesses between $691.7 billion and $1.7 trillion in 2021, according to a 2021 article in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.  A 2023 Forbes article puts the cost of toxic workplaces to U.S. businesses at $1.8 trillion annually.  According to a 2019 SHRM report, the cost of employee turnover in 2019 due to job dissatisfaction alone was $223 billion.  No matter what number is used, we're not talking chump change here.  What's more, toxic workplace culture has been a key characteristic of companies that either recently underwent scandals or were driven out of business, companies such as Volkswagen, Theranos (and its jailbird ex-CEO), and WeWork, to name a few.

The pinnacle of ecstasy for abusive employers seemed to come in the early months of 2020, in which powerful employers were able to bully their staff (many of whom were stuck in low-wage "service" jobs) to show up for work during the COVID-19 pandemic.  It was that pressure and the resulting threat of actual physical death which proved to be the final straw for many people who had hitherto surrendered themselves to enduring toxic workplaces.  This is also what pushed the upward trend of the Great Resignation into something of a landslide-in-reverse and which catapulted the Great Resignation into the forefront of the American public consciousness.  The next post in this series will examine the paths taken by workers from various sectors of the American economy after they quit their jobs from 2020 onward.

P.S. While I have enjoyed many of the posts on Captain Cassidy's blog Roll to Disbelieve, I can't say that I agree with everything she has written.  For instance, I am still a Christian, whereas she has deconstructed to such an extent that she has rejected Christianity altogether.  However, I can't say that I blame her as I look at the sorry legacy of white American evangelicalism and its marriage to secular earthly economic and political power.

P.P.S. I have mentioned Donald Trump a few times in today's post.  Some from the Right may assert that I should not speak critically of him since he supposedly recently survived an "assassination attempt."  And I must say that while I despise Donald Trump, I do not condone any attempt to assassinate him.  However, when I read that his injuries were not life-threatening (in fact, some reports state that he was not actually hit by a bullet at all), I have to wonder if the whole "assassination attempt" wasn't some kind of publicity stunt or false-flag operation designed to boost his media profile and polling numbers.  I don't have much sympathy...