(our translation from) Oikonomia, 2 (2022), pp. 32-36
Indice
The “Great Resignation” phenomenon, the constant and continuous increase in voluntary resignations from work, intermittently enters the Italian debate without gathering the interest it deserves. The voluntary choice to embrace a period of “job precariousness” instead of seeking a solid existential anchor is striking in the current difficult circumstances. Economic explanations are not entirely convincing, and many questions remain unresolved. This contribution addresses these questions through a broader analysis of the phenomenon and proposes a vision for its possible future development.
The Data of the Great Resignation
On May 10, 2021, Antony Kloz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, released an interview with Bloomberg announcing: “the Great Resignation is coming”. Indeed, in the following months, as many as 47.4 million US workers resigned from their jobs, many without having alternatives ready.
In mid-September, the Harvard Business Review published an analysis of more than 9 million workers in over 4,000 companies, which showed that the strongest tendency to resign was in the 30-45 age group, with an increase of 20% compared to the previous year. This phenomenon, Derek Thompson recalled in the Atlantic, had also appeared in the 60s and 70s but in the presence of a more prosperous economy, disappearing with the crisis of the following decade due to the fear of losing social assistance benefits if unemployed.
Kathryn Hymes, on Wired, reported that 40% of interviewed workers planned to resign in the following 3-6 months, and 18% considered it certain. The survey, conducted in Australia, Canada, Singapore, the USA, and the United Kingdom, reported incredibly homogeneous results. Even entrepreneurs agreed (54%) in perceiving a higher than usual turnover, and many (64%) expected it to worsen. In general, 36% of those who thought of resigning had not yet found another job.
Italy has also been affected by this phenomenon. Analyzing the Quarterly Notes of the Second Quarter of 2021 from the Ministry of Labor, it is discovered that between April and June (the start of the Great Resignation) 2,587,000 contracts ended. 59% of these concluded with voluntary resignations by workers, marking a record increase of 37% compared to the previous quarter, 85% year-over-year, and 10% compared to 2019. The Excelsior report for October 2021 highlights that, with 2.4 million unemployed people, there are as many as 505,000 vacant positions, especially in the ICT sector, with a growth of 29% compared to 2019.
ISTAT confirms that in 2021 Italy recovered 650 thousand employed people, 60% with precarious jobs—in fact, 286 thousand are still missing to return to February 2020 levels. One should not be fooled by quantitative or statistical readings. Since the beginning of the pandemic (February 2020), Italy has lost almost half a million of its workforces (481 thousand to be precise). The return to a 59% employment rate, the same as pre-Covid, is a bookkeeping artifact: the gap has only closed at the employment rate level, not in terms of the number of people employed.
The general picture is rather fluid and contradictory: high unemployment, large job offers, an increase in job resignations, and economic growth.
What causes are hypothesized? What solutions are proposed?
An Economic Problem?
The initial reactions placed the problem within industrial and labor dynamics, proposing naive or simplistic solutions. For example, the deterioration of relationships and the poor ability of managers to engage collaborators were blamed. Thus, Jill Hauwiller of Forbes, based on a Harvard Business Review study noting the inability of 37% of managers to give positive feedback, advised expressing gratitude effectively.
Economic observers focused on the static nature of work in the last year. The phenomenon was justified by the market recovery, which, having released waiting demands, saw them overlap and add up to the normal requests of the current period. Others hypothesized a reaction to burnout, the breaking point of stress reached when daily commitment exceeds one’s strength. Attempts were made to stem the loss of workers also by increasing wages, but this created favorable conditions for people to seek new, more profitable occupations.
Finally came the criticism of social subsidies. The recurring accusation was that they discouraged the search for and commitment to work. The increase in unemployment assistance was seen by many companies as a reward for idleness. Furthermore, the fewer opportunities for spending, due to lockdown and restrictions, had allowed for an extraordinary accumulation of savings, making it easier to face periods of inactivity.
Marco Bentivogli, former General Secretary of Fim-Cisl and now National Coordinator of Base Italia, has tried to bring the Great Resignation to the center of discussion with articles and interviews in the national press. He also addresses this topic in his latest book. Bentivogli highlights a loss of meaning in work as a tool for self-realization, noting that “the ‘value’ of work does not go hand in hand with the subjective importance of its meaning […] the real challenge is to rethink work that makes us more human”. The former trade unionist, an advocate for a new vision of the industrial world, hopes for “work with augmented humanity,” a job that “requires our most incontestable gift with machines, namely our #augmentedhumanity”. To do this, it is necessary to “value the freedom of choice of people and the motivations that guide their paths”. Noting that work is also a relationship, he states that “reweaving the work community is essential precisely to reconstruct the new meaning of work”. These are certainly valid observations, but still in the vein of economic analysis and unaware of the anthropological and social aspects of two years of the pandemic. An interdisciplinary perspective, capable of looking at the multifaceted nature of the human soul, reveals motivations and tendencies that escape economists and entrepreneurs.
Workism and Social Crisis
The explanations reported so far are certainly true and important, but they do not explain such a particular and lasting phenomenon. Great Resignation and ‘work with augmented humanity’ are definitions that describe surface ripples. What is missing is the narrative of the realignment underway between work and personal life, where the rewriting of the meaning of work is inserted. In the search for this balance, reflection must broaden and become inclusive of family, friends, and spiritual life.
As the already-mentioned K. Hymes states, we must understand and describe a new event, abandon terms and concepts that are no longer current, “we must develop a broader vocabulary on how work is evolving in light of the pandemic”. One of the words to rethink is burnout, hastily used to justify or condemn any behavior. We should broaden its concept and include the complex of feelings of angry and desperate helplessness experienced due to the death of so many people who were not strangers, but family, friends, colleagues; of the deprivation of physical contact, of crying hidden in the intimacy of an embrace, of relationships built on shared life. Unlike other dramatic and terrible events, from accidents to earthquakes, the pandemic persists over time and renews pain and suffering. Added to this are concerns about the ongoing war and its consequences. For this reason, death is perceived as so close, every day, to the point of asking ourselves about the why of our actions, the purpose, the end, the eskaton. Life reveals itself for what it is: fragile, brief, wonderful. Is it worth sacrificing it for work? What provides meaning, fulfillment, satisfaction, and happiness to existence?
With schools relying on Distance Learning (DAD), most women had to give up their jobs to be with their children. Smart working may have helped them, but if their partner was also smart working, who would have cooked, shopped, and cleaned the house? Working from home and restrictions favored the construction of an online work community, re-establishing or maintaining the bonds that physical distancing was breaking. The pandemic brought families back to a pre-industrial relational situation, where the whole group lived and worked in common spaces. The rediscovery of the family dimension imposed a personal reflection on work: is it worth the sacrifice of my family, my hobbies, my interests? If I did it for my family, what would be the point if we cannot be together? These are urgent questions for the most disadvantaged categories who must work double to obtain the benefits recognized to more privileged workers. I am talking about women with lower wages than men, migrants, and precarious workers. The state subsidy may have appeared as compensation for wrongs suffered or provided temporary security to those who wanted to leave a poorly paid or irregular job and seek a better opportunity.
These explanations are also true, yet they are still not sufficient for exhaustive motivation. In fact, they must be read against the background of the progressive abandonment of workism, a process underway worldwide, including China. Derek Thompson defines workism as “the belief that work is not only necessary for economic production but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life purpose; and the belief that any policy aimed at promoting human well-being must encourage more and more work”.
Once, work was aimed at survival and satisfying the most urgent necessities of life. With industrialization, primary needs were met, and attention turned to the production and consumption of ephemeral goods, an indicator of the level of personal realization. Work, from a means of survival, became a career, and the desk became the altar upon which to sacrifice one’s life. In doing so, the needs of the market were satisfied, leaving personal desires unfulfilled.
It is no coincidence that Millennials are the protagonists of the Great Resignation. More educated than previous generations and convinced by them that hard work would reward sacrifices, they have found themselves at the center of a continuous crisis since 2008. The prevailing feeling is one of betrayal and deception, prompting the question: “Is it worth sacrificing one’s life for all this?”
Even in China, a similar cultural movement has arisen. Lying Flat is Justice is the name of a post by Luo Huazhong, a young man from Sichuan province who left his permanent job to live on odd jobs, traveling freely through the country by bicycle. Lying Flat was immediately successful, enough to convince the New York Times to interview Huazhong and the government censorship to delete the post. The motivations are the same: an unsustainable pace of life, unfulfilled promises, and a desire for more time for oneself.
Ultimately, in the new balance between work and private life, work is no longer the centerpiece of identity. A Harvard Business School study showed that most workers are happy when they are with family and friends, and new graduates aspire to jobs that leave them enough time to pursue personal interests and hobbies.
The faculty of social sciences at Cambridge University conducted research on employment dosage, that is, the optimal amount of paid work to maintain “mental health”. Less than one day of paid work per week generates depression; more does not produce appreciable advantages, only the risk of stress and burnout. “In the coming decades we could see artificial intelligence, big data and robotics replace much of the paid work currently done by humans,” said Dr. Daiga Kamerāde, lead researcher of Employment Dosage. “If there is not enough work for everyone who wants to work full-time, we will have to rethink current norms. This should include redistributing working hours, so that everyone can get the mental health benefits of a job, even if it means we will all work much shorter weeks”.
At the beginning of 2020, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin proposed a flexible work schedule of 24 hours per week (four days for six hours), as a further reduction from the 30 hours worked then. According to the OECD, the European average is 30 hours per week, and in Italy, we work 33 hours; in Sweden and Germany, 26 hours are worked; in Holland 28, and 29 in France. Is it possible that in the future we will only work one day a week?
Crisis of Capitalism
Luciano Floridi considers the definition of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ to be equivocal because it would hypothesize some rational capacity that is completely absent in a digital technological device. The wonder, according to the philosopher, is the ability to perfectly perform tasks with ‘zero intelligence’, meaning Artificial Intelligence would be nothing more than the human capacity to make an unintelligent machine perform the work of an intelligent and expert human.
Artificial Intelligence is fundamental for Industry 4.0, and Bentivogli states that “true 4.0 companies include ‘zero-fatigue’ in their objectives, because fatigue is increasingly useless and costly, and with it excessive postural loads and poor ergonomics”. It is a process in which zero-intelligence machines replace the human worker, whether generic or specialized (certainly a resource with intelligence).
The common narrative is that technological progress creates more jobs than it destroys. Today, we are still below pre-pandemic employment levels, which in turn were below 2008 levels, and despite everything, production and gross domestic product are increasing. Thanks to technology, more is produced at less cost and fewer human workers. Technology seems to produce few jobs, which are often precarious, poorly paid, and unfulfilling. People with high levels of education and preparation are sought, who, in turn, harbor high expectations that are disappointed by the working conditions offered. Often, the saying “I cannot find suitable personnel” should be completed with “I cannot find personnel suitable for the conditions I want to pay”. It is a problem that arose long ago and is now manifesting in all its virulence.
Until the 1970s, the economic system was still able to guarantee progress, and every increase in productivity led to an increase in employment with a proportional transfer of wealth to the worker. In this phase, the trickle-down of wealth from the affluent classes to the lower social classes was still active. Industrialization allowed for an increase in the quantity of goods produced, the lowering of prices, and wage increases that allowed for the creation of new markets, i.e., the possibility of spending more and diversifying purchases. People worked hard and sacrificed, but the quality of life improved. Entire generations benefited from this development, being able to access primary goods, to the point of starting to turn their attention to superfluous ones, marking the transition from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance. Every family had the father hired with a permanent job and an income sufficient to accumulate savings, send children to school, seek medical care, own a car, and go on vacation.
Well-being led to the saturation of the market for primary goods and the consequent demand for personalized and diversified products. The new demand imposed corporate restructuring processes and the containment of production costs, an objective that was achieved by resorting to mechanization and layoffs. The attempt at correction generated a model called “neoliberalism,” which, in turn, has been challenged by the progressive introduction of digital and robotic technologies. The study by Erik Bryniolfsson and Andrew McAfee demonstrates how employment in private industry no longer grows despite the increase in productivity: industries produce more but do not hire. In Italy, Domenico De Masi and Roberto Ciccarelli speak of the end of work, the disappearance of the workforce, and the need to rethink its categories.
The first step in this direction is to consider the current production model outdated and surpassable. Let us ask ourselves: are we in the best possible condition, and are there no further options? Must we accept that (neo)liberalism is the optimal economic system? If there were no alternative, it would mean that human economic evolution would have found an insurmountable limit. Formulated this way, the postulate is difficult to convincingly believe: we will colonize Mars within two centuries, we will perform cybernetic grafts, but will we not change the production system?
Josh Bivel and Lawrence Mishel have shown that, from 1980 to today, despite a 72% increase in productivity, the share of wealth transferred to producers has been 63%. In the same period, the growth in median income was 42.5%, but the increase in average income was only 8.7%. Thanks to technology, more profits are made with fewer people and lower wages. The evolution we are witnessing is pushing humans out of production, opening a new social and anthropological problem. “Without a systematic approach to building a new economy, and without the structural solidarity that would be needed to pass such a change”, workers are destined for poverty or worse, to swell the class of the working poor. Therefore, work seems to be increasingly the prerogative of technological systems, confining man to a corner of extreme poverty. If this is our future, what alternative can be hypothesized? Will there really be more employment tomorrow? Will work be more gratifying, human, and well-paid? Will it really be worth continuing to sacrifice oneself while waiting for this future? Millennials no longer believe it, and the new generations are not even able to enter the world of work.
Human Work
Not working, or worse, not sacrificing oneself in work, seems like a blasphemy, almost the desire to escape the punishment inflicted by the Lord on Adam and Eve: earning one’s living “by toil and the sweat of your brow” (Gen 3:17-19).
Rabbinic exegesis does not justify this sense of guilt. The Lord punishes the Earth for its disobedience and addresses the condemnation to it: “thorns and thistles shall bring forth for you” (Gen 3:18). Adam, hearing this, asks: “Must I eat with the animals in the same trough?”. Moved to pity, the Lord replies: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat” (Gen 3:19). It is a positive command and not a punishment. Work is oriented towards a good, capable of signifying human peculiarity and respecting human dignity. Positive work, albeit with sweat, better aligns with the true work for which man was destined: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it” (Gen 2:16). There is good work, blessed work, in which man can feel happy, in harmony and relationship with his neighbor, creation, and God. This is the model we can be inspired by for the construction of a better society.
Work belongs to the original human condition and is not a punishment or a curse. It will become toil after the sin of Adam and Eve, but the memory of the weekly rest will remain as a limit to the temptation of exploitation or enslavement to work. Human activity can also be conceived as participation in the creative work and redemption, a means of sanctification and animation of earthly realities in the Spirit of Christ. There is a nobility in work, provided that the work respects human dignity: “there is, in fact, no doubt that human work has its own ethical value, which unequivocally and directly remains linked to the fact that the one who performs it is a person”. Pope Francis has repeatedly denounced the dehumanization of work through the exasperation of profit and techno sciences, that invisible digital culture that governs the world and makes events happen, as he seems to want to tell us in Laudato Si’. The objective dimension of work changes—the conditions, techniques, and resources with which human activity is performed—and the subjective dimension also changes—the awareness of one’s actions and the meaning attributed to them.
Bartolomeo Sorge already called for the necessity “of a new social pact, founded on a renewed sense of solidarity and participation, shared by both entrepreneurs and workers. Likely, forms of part-time work will have to be provided for; working hours will have to be reduced to facilitate the rotation of the workforce […] this means that the new economic order, to be efficient, must be ethically animated”.
In conclusion, a period of renewal of the objective conditions of work is being inaugurated. The possibility opens to abandoning an anthropocentric view of the earth’s goods and recognizes us as administrators in a vision where goods are subjected to the dual rule of personal possession and, at the same time, common use. In a world where work is quantitatively decreasing, better ways of sharing wealth and produced goods must be designed, and personal well-being must be decoupled from professional success or the possession of goods.
A Proposal for the Future
The future is an era in which we will work less. Some, like the accelerationists, want to favor this future and accelerate the digital transition plan to free man from the necessity and obligation of work. Working would become a choice or a minimal necessity, such as 8 hours a week for one’s “mental health”. We are not culturally prepared for this transition. We need to learn not to identify with or by our work and start evaluating ourselves based on the use of free time.
Social experiments are underway in Europe to test these new contexts. One of the first was carried out in Finland starting in 2017. Two thousand unemployed people between 25 and 58 years old received a guaranteed income for two years (about 50% of an average rent) regardless of whether they worked or not. In July 2021, the Icelandic government announced the results of a test defined as an “overwhelming success”: the reduction of the week to 4 working days while maintaining the same levels of pay and productivity. Unilever, the British food giant, launched an experiment in New Zealand at the end of 2020: four working days under the same conditions as the previous five. The Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg assigned a scholarship to three students to study their behavior during a period of inactivity. In August 2020, the platform Mein Grundeinkommen and the Institute for Economic Research Diw Berlin started an experiment with 122 people who will receive an income of €1,200 per month for three years without working.
What will man do without work? The liberal arts, whose origins for some date back to the times of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle in Greece, and of Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian in Rome, were activities peculiar to free men, free from the necessity (or slavery) of work. These men could dedicate themselves to the arts, letters, science, and the res publica: activities certainly not boring, whose products are still objects of study and admiration today.
The Gospel itself repeatedly invites us to better and wisely evaluate work and what we can derive from it: the lilies neither toil nor spin (Mt 6:28; Lc 12:27) ; the instability of riches (1 Tim 6:17) ; the closing of the heart (1 Jn 3:17), and especially the uselessness of accumulation (Lc 12:16-20).
The concern of current recovery policies should not be directed towards how to reorganize work, but rather how to govern the cultural revolution we are heading towards. We must free ourselves from the idea that the promotion of the common good can only be achieved through policies of encouragement, support, or development of work. We need to measure human well-being on metrics different from GDP or per capita income and rely more on measurements such as the Gini index, the Human Development Index, the Sustainable Well-being Index, the Better Life Index, and many others.
Freed from the necessity of working to survive or to give ourselves an identity, we would have eliminated numerous conflict situations. With peace and time available, we can better know and manage our feelings, commit ourselves with greater consciousness and responsibility to projects and initiatives. Today, free time is a rare resource. It becomes a source of sadness if it is not possible to share it with friends and family, if schedules do not match, and life commitments prevent it. If much personal happiness comes from sharing free time, the current state of unhappiness cannot be denied. One must be prepared for personal relationships. This is the task of this time, along with preparation for retirement from work.
We are at a crossroads in history: the collapse of mature capitalism, the entry into a historical era (the digital one), and the post-pandemic restart. A unique and unrepeatable opportunity to correct errors and repair injustices. It is not about returning to a pre-pandemic state based on an economic system that produced death, injustice, poverty, pollution, selfishness, and violence. It is not about finding adjustments or corrections, as all the political doctrines of the industrial era have tried to do. It is about entering a new time and starting over from social relationships, personal relationships, recognizing the bonds that unite us and push us towards sharing and the possibility of living together in peace. In this reconstruction, Christians are bearers of a project on humanity that deserves to be heard and brought to the discussion table.