50 Time November 8/November 15, 2021
can’t afford to stop working, she says, they’ve drawn
a line in the sand, thanks to the light-bulb moment
of pandemic-precipitated challenges accessing un-
employment assistance, worsening income inequal-
ity and newfound leverage due to staffing shortages.
There is a distinction between the experiences of
Ezimako and Green. But both are part of a broader
societal shift, wherein young workers are prioritiz-
ing their self-worth.
Now, for the first time in their careers, young peo-
ple have the ability to do so. Workers like Green, who
had well-paying jobs leading into the pandemic, have
a greater sense of financial comfort after spending less
and saving more during the past 19 months, says Har-
vard economist Lawrence Katz. Plus, the abundance
of open jobs may—counterproductively—make work-
ers feel more confident dipping out of the workforce.
Katz cautions that this is less about young workers
leaving the labor market entirely, but instead about
“trying out new things, and taking advantage of new
opportunities and not sticking with the old bargain.”
The pivot to remote work has also made possible a
level of work-life balance that those in their 20s and
early 30s—the first generation where half of kids had
two parents working full-time—had never imagined.
That’s especially true for millennials; a 2020 Gal-
lup poll showed 74% did not want to return full-time
to offices, the highest of any age cohort. Millennial
women are particularly likely to stay home given the
need for childcare flexibility. Over 309,000 women
dropped out of the workforce in September alone.
“Childcare is a piece that people have been underes-
timating for a while,” says Alicia Sasser Modestino,
an economist at Northeastern University. Even be-
fore the pandemic it was a crisis; now, with day-care-
center closures and—ironically—staff shortages for
these very jobs, women may have no choice but to
stay home, indefinitely.For others, remote work just isn’t fulfilling
enough. When Emma Grace Moon quit her market-
ing agency job in June, she was ready to disentangle
herself from a structure that held her back. “I felt like
I could exceed my trajectory way faster if it was in my
hands, rather than reporting every year, every month,
with a quarterly check-in. I felt like I could be mak-
ing more and also growing way faster if I just did it
myself,” she says. These days, Moon—who is just 22,
having skipped college—goes it alone as a consultant.
She’s making three times her former income, she says
from her Brooklyn apartment; her area of expertise,
working with direct-to-consumer brands, was primed
for pandemic-era growth. She now also has the flex-
ibility to travel and make her own hours, even if that△
Over 10 million jobs
are unfilled in the
U.S.; signs like these,
in New Jersey and
Pennsylvania, paper
the country