From time to time, I sort employees into three categories: those who suffer from angst, those who suffer from ennui, and those who suffer from neither. As readers might expect, I’m suspicious of that latter group. But this time, I’ll do something a bit different with the topic. I’ll say a bit about how all this relates to the ‘Great Resignation.’
For anyone living under a rock, lots of people quit their jobs this year. More than any other year on record! Are they bored? Did a collective brush with mortality last year push them to make a change? Or are workers simply getting tired of low wages and inadequate benefits?
So, what’s going on with the workforce? What spurred the Great Resignation? And does Striketober represent a reaction to the forces of the Great Resignation?
The Great Resignation
In a big surprise, I learned some things from the coverage NPR provided of the Great Resignation. At least, it provided a great overview of the reasons people give for quitting.
NPR presented it as something more existential in nature. The thought goes something like this: we experienced a collective brush with death starting in March 2020. That pushed us to rethink what we want from our work lives. It pushed workers to desire something more from it. Something more satisfying, perhaps. Work that helps the world, perhaps. But, overall, it seems people just want something different.
At times, NPR even hints at a link between the Great Resignation and trauma research. This takes things to a new level. Did the experience of the pandemic – especially the early pandemic – imprint workers in some way?
NPR and Meaning
What should we make of this? In short, I think most of the NPR coverage makes more sense for white-collar workers than for blue-collar workers. NPR writes about workers who identify strongly with the details of their work and the need for that work to be ‘meaningful.’ It all ties in quite well with the ideology of the corporate workplace.
I’ve done both white-collar and blue-collar work in my life. And I’ve always found the blue-collar world a lot different. In that world, I think we find people creating meaning in different ways. It’s less about any intrinsic meaning to the work itself and more about the fact that one works – that one can provide for one’s family. And it’s about the skill involved in the work. In short, I don’t think these existential issues hit blue-collar workers in quite the same way. They don’t suffer from the same kind of ennui.
However, in NPR’s favor, I think their coverage makes more sense for rank-and-file white-collar workers than for corporate leaders. Leaders are surprisingly good at assigning meaning to their work, even when there’s little or no reason to believe the work is meaningful.
Regular workers simply aren’t as deeply steeped in corporate ideology as leaders. The pandemic got to them. They examined the ennui and the angst. And, to some extent, the Great Resignation came out of it.
Striketober?
And then there’s a common view on the left. It’s one that mostly concerns blue-collar workers. Readers can find it in a number of sources, but I think Jacobin covers it most clearly. Here’s how this thought goes: the pandemic produced a wave of worker discontent, especially in low-wage, private sector work. We find this most clearly in pink- and white-collar work. The workers without unions simply quit. And the unionized workers went on strike for their collective interests.
Hence, we have not just a Great Resignation, but also a Striketober. For most readers, I suspect I hardly need to post Striketober links. Most know about it.
The Left and Worker Militancy
Is the left correct about this? Did Jacobin and others find a piece of the puzzle missing from the NPR coverage? The quick answer: mostly, yes. Or, perhaps to put it better, sort of.
Jacobin’s right that we find a Great Resignation concentrated almost entirely among workers not in unions. Unionized workers tend to stick around and fight. Sometimes they do it because the union provides them with a way to fight. However, probably far more often, the union provides them with a way to get what they need without fighting. Many union workers were under contract through the pandemic. Their employers weren’t able to screw them over or lay them off. Striketober was almost totally isolated to workers whose contracts happened to expire this year.
And so, Jacobin tends to over-estimate worker militancy. In fact, there’s not much reason to think Striketober lessons will carry very far. At least not without serious efforts at movement building and political education. It won’t happen naturally.
Blue Collar and White Collar Workers
The reasoning in Jacobin is limited in a parallel way to NPR’s coverage. That is to say, the Jacobin reasoning applies mostly to the blue-collar world. In the white-collar workplace, I doubt unionization on its own would solve the core issues involved in the Great Resignation. At least, nothing like conventional unions would settle those issues.
Unions usually focus on wages and benefits, and almost always focus only on the narrow self-interest of their members (who usually make up a small and non-representative sample of the working class). This won’t get at the more existential issues NPR identifies.
Leftists have long understood that white-collar workers often don’t consider themselves workers. And that this plays a role in the lack of white-collar unions. But it’s not just that they don’t consider themselves workers. They also look for meaning and purpose – even identity – in the role their jobs play in the world. We see this most prominently in non-profits, of course, but we even see it in the for-profit corporate workplace.
For a union to work in that environment, we’d need to see a lot in the way of political education and formulation of the union around things other than wages and benefits. All unions should think more about workplace democracy and control. But that’s especially important in the white-collar workplace. You’re just not going to solve ennui with money.
It won’t happen.
The Great Resignation and Building a Majority
And so, the NPR coverage helps the left fill a key gap in its analysis. Not only does our approach miss the concerns of rank-and-file white-collar workers, but we need those workers if we want to build a majority.
Workers in blue- and pink-collar industries can learn a lot from Striketober about how to organize for the demands they want. But the lessons apply less well to the white-collar workers tempted to take part in the Great Resignation. They’re more difficult to unionize. They’re less likely to think of themselves as workers and see their collective interests, even with a bit of prodding from Striketober. Instead, they tend to place everything into the bucket of individual skill and initiative.
Yes, the left has talked about some of these things for decades. But for rank-and-file white-collar workers, it all extends a bit further. They want the workplace to fulfill them in a deeper, almost spiritual sense. We see this, for example, in young workers who demand that their (usually for-profit, sometimes downright evil) companies address the social issues of the day. And we see it even among workers who earn solidly middle, and even upper-middle, salaries.
How do you organize dissatisfied white-collar workers? Even those on salary? And what would the organizing look like? The left hasn’t had much to say about that. But it needs to have something to say.
