Bye-bye Great Resignation. We hardly knew ye

Job-changing rates among Canadians are mostly similar to pre-pandemic levels

Ah, the Great Resignation, that workforce trend that has had executives and hiring managers nervously wringing their hands from mid-pandemic forward. Well, it has been pronounced dead. It was barely two years old.

Time has been called on it by the original creator of the term, Anthony Klotz (a professor at University College London), who has been looking at the data recently.

“The numbers are pretty clear that the Great Resignation is done or in its twilight across most industries,” he recently told Bloomberg. Quit rates have fallen to where they were pre-pandemic (around 2.4 percent), indicating “that the labor market cooled on its own, without a recession.”

Now, the Great Resignation looks more and more like a brief flash in the pan, rather than the tectonic shift in the workforce that inspired so much trepidation (not to mention coverage in newsletters like this).

Here in Canada, some are questioning whether this Great Resignation ever really came alive in the first place. The data offers a chance to reconsider assumptions about the labour force that have become common in the last couple year ― assumptions that have raised tensions with labour and prompted the federal government to throw open the proverbial floodgates on immigration.

A recent study by Statistics Canada found little widespread evidence for widespread quitting, writing that labour shortages “may not be as widespread as initially assumed in the early discussions about the high vacancy rates in Canada.”

Instead, they said, labour shortages were mostly sector-specific. What they also found was something that many workers have been observing anecdotally: that most of this talk about labour shortages was concentrated in jobs with low pay, and that when it came to jobs that required an education, those were still in short supply.

The curmudgeonly gripe of ‘nobody wants to work anymore,’ looks more and more to be debunked. “If anything, more Canadians than ever are either working or looking for work,” said CIBC chief economist Avery Shenfeld. “The whole idea that people have given up on working, that was a U.S. story, which is starting to reverse.”

Content written by Kieran Delamont for Worklife, a partnership between Ahria Consulting and London Inc. To view this content in newsletter form, click here.

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