Time - USA (2021-11-08)

49

By Raisa Bruner

YOUNG PEOPLE ARE

LEAVING THEIR JOBS IN

RECORD NUMBERS—AND

NOT GOING BACK

Economy

Life for Whitney Green Looks a LittLe dif-
ferent these days. She wakes up to the sounds of
Rome: scooter engines echoing off cobblestones, the
lilting chatter of café patrons collecting their morn-
ing espresso shots. She goes to Italian classes in the
afternoons. She eats bowls of pistachio gelato and
handmade pasta, and watches tourists congregate at
the Trevi Fountain and Piazza Navona. She’s teaching
herself to play keyboard and building a website for
her dream job—her own telehealth practice. It’s a far
cry from her past life as a community mental-health
therapist for at-risk youth in San Francisco, a job she
quit in June to move to Italy with her girlfriend.
Green is one of millions of Americans leaving tra-
ditional jobs this year—and choosing not to recommit
to clocking in at all. This is the highest mass resigna-
tion the U.S. has seen since 2019, pre-pandemic, and
the numbers are still rising. In June, 3.9 million quit.
In July, it was another 3.9 million. In August, 4.3 mil-
lion. The numbers are even more notable for young
workers: in September, nearly a quarter of workers
ages 20 to 34 were not considered part of the U.S.
workforce—some 14 million Americans, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who were neither
working nor looking for work. For some, it’s burn-
out. For others, the timing was ripe to refocus on
side projects as the stresses of the pandemic started
to wane. And for many, especially in a service sector
dominated by “zillennials” (those in their late 20s on
the border of Gen Z and millennial), poor treatment

and low wages became unsustainable. Green repre-

sents one slice of that: she’s a 31-year-old with a mas-

ter’s degree who decided to step back from earning

income to take a self-imposed sabbatical and live off

savings before working for herself one day. Mean-

while, there are an estimated 10.4 million jobs in the

U.S. that remain unfilled, as this exodus—dubbed

the Great Resignation—offers young workers time to

nurse the wounds of pandemic burnout and unten-

able working conditions with dramatic life changes.

“This is a revolution, not a resignation,” says

Ifeoma Ezimako, 23, who resides in Washington, D.C.

A former hospitality worker and bartender, Ezimako

was fed up with ill-tempered patrons and extra-low

wages while working her last service job in March

2020; she had worked in service for five years, but

enough was finally enough. As the behavior of cus-

tomers deteriorated during the pandemic, she and her

co-workers opened their eyes to the daily injustices

of tipped work, she says. (A common experience:

being asked to pull her mask down so patrons could

see her face “to decide how much to tip.”) To her, the

money just wasn’t worth the stress. She quit to refo-

cus on herself, studying for a sociology degree with

her family’s support. Now she volunteers with One

Fair Wage, an activist organization that helps service

industry employees organize for better standards.

The leisure and hospitality sector has the low-

est median age of any industry, at 31.8 years, and

today, Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage,

says about half of surveyed service-industry work-

ers say they plan to quit in the next year. Jayaraman

is cautious in aligning this movement with that of

white collar workers trading jobs for “funemploy-

ment.” “Maybe among white collar workers, it’s just

people quietly resigning, but among service workers,

they are organizing,” she says. “They are saying, I love

this industry, but I will not come back unless there

are permanent wage increases.” Even though many

They quit.

Now what?

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHANIE GENGOTTI FOR TIME