The Great Resignation: Why Workers Are Quitting Their Jobs

The Great Resignation, influenced by historical labor laws and modern work pressures, prompts people to prioritize happiness over work, leading to widespread job quitting.

### The Great Resignation: A Historical Perspective and Modern Analysis
* 💼  The "**Great Resignation**" phenomenon has been ongoing since 2021, with **record numbers of people quitting their jobs** each year.
* 💰  The disconnect between **productivity growth** and **wage growth** since the 1970s has contributed to **dissatisfaction in the workforce**.
* 📉  Various legislative and economic changes since the 1940s have impacted **workers' rights and job security**.
* 🌐  Globalization, technological advancements, and shifts in corporate priorities have all played a role in the **current job market landscape**.
* 😷  The COVID-19 pandemic served as a catalyst for many to **reevaluate their work-life balance and priorities**.
* 👩‍💼  The trend of quitting is particularly pronounced among Gen Z and Millennials, with **3 in 10 workers planning to quit their jobs in 2024**.
* 💡  The video suggests that switching jobs every **2-3 years** can be a strategic move for **income growth**.
* ❓  The video concludes by posing the question: **Should you quit your job?** It emphasizes the importance of **individual circumstances and financial preparedness** in making that decision.

did you guys see this article that was floating around recently from the CEO of Squarespace? Where she said gen Z job Seekers should be willing to work for free, work long hours, and willing to do anything. Now back in my day, that was called volunteering because I was always taught that if you're ever good at something, you should never do it for free, which is why I never made money as a magician. That's why I do it for free here on YouTube. But here's what's interesting. Do you remember a couple years ago, there was this massive wave of resignations? More than half of the people surveyed in 2021, for example, said that they'd be looking for a new job in 2022, and a lot of those people actually kept their promise. Because data shows that in 2021, as many as 47 million people quit their jobs, which was the highest year on record until 2022, which became known as the year of the great resignation when over 50 million Americans quit their job. Then in 2023, we

got another wave of quitting, which became known as quiet quitting, and it wasn't just regular people quitting their jobs, but it was also the SE CEOs. Even though the average paycheck of a CEO was $16.7 million a year, CEOs from companies like YouTube, BP, Walgreens also quit their positions. And that brings me to 2024, which some people are starting to call the year of the great resignation 2.0 because three in 10 workers are planning to quit their job this year. And most of those quits are attributed to Gen Z and Millennials. In fact, quitting has become so popular that even this guy was forced to quit. So in today's video, I want to help answer a couple interesting questions like what the heck is going on, why have so many people quit their jobs in the last few years, and why are we still following a law that hasn't been changed since the 1940s about the 40-hour work week. And should you quit your job? There's a lot of really interesting data that I want to share.

with you about this. So, with that said, let's get into it. Hi, my name is Andre J. Hope you're doing well. Come for the finance and stay for the jobs. Now, this video was inspired by another video that went absolutely viral about an MIT neurosurgeon who quit his job after working for 10 years, making hundreds of thousands of dollars working on people's spines and brains. And he's just telling his story way up in the mountains, and it really caught my attention because I thought, how could someone quit such a prestigious job after working so long and making so much money? And he has a super interesting story that goes back 10 years ago when he took this oath to become a neurosurgeon. And what he found out was that the surgeries would help people from time to time, but more often than not, the surgeries did not help most people. So he started to ask his patients questions about their lives, like what kind of job they had, whether they were stressed or not, whether they exercised.

and what they ate, and how long they slept. And he says that throughout all of it, he found out something really interesting. What he found was that the people that would be able to recover from his surgeries all had a couple things in common. People that got better were having a mostly plant-based diet, and they were definitely not eating salty. And they would do things that would make them sweat, like exercise, being outside, hiking, like this, going to a sauna, or they live in a warm place. They didn't smoke, they didn't drink much, usually had a good social support, like loved ones, family members, children, friends, like a way to socialize. They would sleep, they would sleep like 8 hours every day. And they weren't stressed out, or if they had a stressful job or something, they found a way to be mindful or meditate, or like just be present and release the stress back into the universe. Then he goes on to say that the people that couldn't maintain their health after the surgery were the

opposite from those people. They were people that did not get a full 8 hours of sleep. They felt stressed a lot of times. They didn't exercise much. They didn't eat healthy food. And they didn't have a lot of friends or support group to help them get through it. So surgeries for those people would help them temporarily. But then their body would go back to having pain again. And that's when he had his Epiphany, the aha moment of how to actually help people. And he said that realization became a huge problem. But the way that everything is set up in the whole country, it's not any particular Hospital. The way things are set up is that the hospital needs to make money. The problem there is that if you figure out a way to help patients heal and that way doesn't include a pill or a surgery, well then the hospital and the doctor are in big trouble. Because if you figure out a way to help people heal and you can't charge them for it, well then you've just um worked

yourself out of a job. So once he had this realization, he said that he gained a lot of weight. He became sad and angry, and he realized that he couldn't continue working for another 20 years because he didn't think he'd live that long. So last September, he quit his job. And I really resonated with his story because I know how hard it is to work for something for 20 years only to realize that maybe that's not the thing you were supposed to do. So his story really made me wonder why are people having these epiphanies and quitting their jobs. So the first place that I started looking at was at the data. And what I found was that more people want to quit their job today than ever before. Big Tech like Microsoft and LinkedIn, for example, showed that out of 31,000 people across 31 countries, 46% of them said that they want to quit. And that is a lot more people than even during the Great Resignation when only 40% said they

wanted to quit, so I put that data aside, and I wanted to look deeper at the surveys into what actual people were telling us. Why they were quitting their jobs. According to surveys from Statia, here were the top 10 major reasons why people are quitting their jobs today. Reason 10 is because employers required a vaccine. Reason nine was working too few hours. Number eight, some people wanted to relocate to a different area. Seven, some people thought they worked too many hours where the benefits weren't good or not enough flexibility. Reason number four, child care issues. Number three, people felt disrespected at work. Number two, some people felt they had no advancement opportunities. But the biggest reason is that they thought the pay was just too low. These are all really good reasons for anyone to quit their job, but the problem is they're not new. Anyone could quit their job for any of these reasons in any given year, and it doesn't really help me explain this phenomena of why so many people have quit so recently. So I decided to look

back farther into the past, and the deeper I looked, the more this picture started to make sense. Because the real problem started before most of us were even born, we have to go back to 1940. That's when the FLSA, or the Fair Labor Standards Act, was changed from a 44-hour workweek to a 40-hour workweek in order to increase productivity. It was also then when we decided for the 2-day weekend, how much someone would get paid working overtime, what it meant to be full-time and part-time. Now, those laws were based on the economic conditions and the productivity levels of that time, but here's the problem. Over the last 80 years, we've had a huge technological revolution. We invented automation, computing, instant communication, the exchange of information, the internet, AI, and all of that meant an increase to what's called productivity growth, meaning the same worker could now do way more work in a shorter amount of time. And data shows that since 1947, productivity growth has skyrocketed. So here's what all that means if we take

two people, one with access to 2024 technology, and one with access to 1947 technology. It's the person who's using modern technology who can make, on average, almost five times as much stuff as the other person, or get five times as much work done. That also means one of two things: if we can do more stuff but we're not making more money, we can maybe work less, but obviously we know that's not the case. Most people are still working 40-hour work weeks or more if they're on a salary. Or there's option two, which is we make more money. But here's the data of what actually happened. Not only are people working multiple jobs today, which was not the norm in the 1940s, but wage growth has not kept up with productivity. In fact, it split sometime in the early 1970s. The question is, why did it split? And the answer is pretty complicated because there's a lot of reasons. So I put together just a few of them. There was something called the Taft-Hartley Act.

of 1947, for example, which restricted the activity and power of labor unions. That led to the decline in Union membership and Union power. This law stopped allowing unions from making donations to Federal political campaigns, which meant less representation for the workers. Then in 1962, there was the investment tax credit, which encouraged businesses to invest in new machinery and technology, which increased the development of Automation and efficiency. Then we got 1974 and the trade Act of 1974, which encouraged companies to relocate their manufacturing overseas. Manufacturing overseas meant more jobs went overseas, which also lowered wage growth here in the United States. Then in the 1970s, there was the oil shock, which led to high inflation and an economic slowdown that created something called stagflation, which slowed the wage growth and decoupled it from productivity even more. Then there was even more inflation thanks to Nixon's wage and price controls, and in 1978, there was the airline deregulation act, which increased competition in the industry and lowered job security and benefits for workers. Then there was a

huge shift towards maximizing shareholder value, and that's when companies started to prioritize profit-making over workers and their wage growth. Then in the 1980s, there were the right-to-work laws, which allowed people to not pay their union dues, and that made the unions less money, which made them less effective. After this law, some studies show that wages dropped 1% 5 years after the law was passed, and it keeps on getting worse. In 1980, the same thing that happened to the airline industry happened to the trucking industry with the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which led to deregulation, which increased competition and lowered job security and benefits for workers. And then we got the 1990s, and the world became more globalized. The nations of North America are ready, strengthened by the explosion of growth and trade, to recognize that there is no turning back from the world today and tomorrow. The North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, lowered trade barriers between the US, Canada, and Mexico, which increased competition from lower-wage countries.

then in the 2000s, China joined the World Trade Organization, which increased imports from China and put a huge pressure on American wages because of the lower labor costs. Then in the 2010s, we got the rise of the gig economy. We got apps like Uber and Lyft, and those apps were great in allowing people to make more money, but it also led to the gig economy, which came without the wage protections and the standard employment benefits. Combine all of that with the crazy growth we've seen in the stock market and in real estate due to liquidity as a means to pay the debt from our past, and you get the world as we know it today. All in all, these are some of the reasons why workers today can get a lot more work done, but why they get paid less for it, and the expectations for workers are higher than they've ever been before, and that has led to burnout. But I also think there's one more thing. Like I said, this has been building for 80 years now. And what's led

people to the edge of this burnout to quit was the pandemic. But really, the best answer that I could find that helps explain all of it is this: people have been living to work for a very long time, and I think the pandemic brought that moment of reflection for everyone. What do I want to do? What makes my heart sink? And people are thinking, if not now, then when? And I think she's absolutely right. Before, the mentality was we should live so that we could work, so that we can pay our bills, and that was the illusion that we all believed in, as long as the times were good, back when cars and houses were more attainable, when food was a lot cheaper, when gas prices weren't so high, when utility bills were more reasonable, when restaurants didn't ask for a tip for every single transaction. And then we got the pandemic, and the global economy was shut down, and everything was brought to a standstill. So, the Government tried to bail us out by printing trillions of dollars and causing an excess of 20% inflation over

the last few years, and that was the moment when there was this mental shift in how we thought, not just about our jobs, but about our lives, because we went from living so that we can work to working so that we can live. Because if the jobs we work impact our mental health, which has a direct effect on the quality of our lives and how long we live for. I think that's why people are rethinking everything and prioritizing and maximizing for happiness instead. And I think those are the reasons for why these changes are taking place in the last few years. And I think you're going to see a lot more of these stories about more and more people wanting to quit their jobs. A recent survey, for example, noticed that out of a thousand people polled, roughly a third said they'd be looking to quit and start a new job soon. And the highest percentage of those people came from people between the ages of 18 to 34. And that makes perfect sense to me because when you're younger, you tend to move around a lot.

anyway, because you're still trying to figure it out. But I also think there's this effect that the younger generation sees the outcome of the older generation. They look at the economy and everything that's going on, and they make the choices that they do. Which isn't to say that they're good or bad, that's a separate discussion. But one thing that I think is true is CEOs are not going to watch this video and be like, This young man has a point here, let's pay them more and allow them to work less. So I think the only other question that I want to help explore is, should you quit your job? And the answer, of course, is that it depends. I actually took a quiz from The Washington Post about my job making videos here on social media. I'll leave a link for it down below. But I consider myself to be extremely lucky because even though these videos take a lot of work to make and I'm a one-man team, I don't have any editors. I'm the only person that scripts and shoots and edits.

and plans for these videos, and answers the comments, and everything else. I think it's extremely rewarding, and I think the thing I look forward to the most is knowing that at least one of my videos helped someone out there with something. I think validation goes a long, long way, but so does making money, which is why experts say you should have anywhere between 6 months to 1 year for emergency expenses if you do decide to quit. And studies also show that switching jobs, especially early on, is the fastest way to grow your income. In fact, it's actually recommended that you should switch your job every 2 to 3 years, which is the best strategy to grow your income. And I wish I did that with my last career, but you know, I never said I was any good. But I'd love to hear your thoughts. Are you staying with your job, are you quitting, and if you are, why? And do you still think we should be working a 40-hour work week? As always, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Smash the

like button subscribe if you haven't already. Don't forget to grab your free stocks. Links are down below. Go track them automatically with a spreadsheet link Down Below in my patreon. Thank you so much for watching this video. I'd love to see you back here next week. I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.

Why Everyone Is Quitting The 40 Hour Work Week

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Andrei Jikh

CEOs and workers, especially from Gen Z and Millennials, have been quitting their jobs in record numbers since 2021, leading to multiple waves of resignations.

The trend of mass resignations has been influenced by a desire for better work-life balance and a reevaluation of the traditional 40-hour work week.

The high-profile resignations of CEOs, along with the inspiring story of an MIT neurosurgeon quitting his prestigious job, have brought attention to the reasons behind this phenomenon.

The Impact of Lifestyle on Recovery and Career Choices

A plant-based diet, regular exercise, and adequate sleep were common factors among people who recovered well from surgery.

On the other hand, those who struggled with recovery often had poor sleep, high stress, lack of exercise, and unhealthy eating habits.

A surgeon's realization about the importance of non-traditional healing methods led to a career change, reflecting a larger trend of people wanting to quit their jobs for various reasons.

The Major Reasons Behind the Recent Increase in Job Quitting

Surveys show that the top reasons for people quitting their jobs include low pay, lack of advancement opportunities, feeling disrespected, and childcare issues.

The problem of job quitting, however, has roots dating back to the 1940s when the Fair Labor Standards Act was changed, leading to a significant increase in productivity growth.

This growth has not been matched with wage increases, leading to a disparity that has continued to the present day.

Key Economic Policies and Their Impact on American Workers

The decline in union membership and power was caused by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which restricted union activity and political donations.

Economic policies in the 1970s, such as the investment tax credit and trade agreements, led to job relocations overseas and slowed wage growth.

The rise of the gig economy in the 2010s, along with a focus on maximizing shareholder value, has increased worker expectations and productivity while decreasing wage growth, leading to burnout.

The Pandemic's Impact on Work-Life Balance

The pandemic prompted a shift in mindset from living to work to working to live, as people reevaluated their priorities for happiness.

This shift has led to a growing trend of people, especially those aged 18 to 34, looking to quit their jobs and pursue new opportunities.

The economic impact and the younger generation's observations are contributing factors to this trend, as people prioritize their mental health and overall quality of life.

The Impact of Job Changes on Income Growth

Switching jobs early on is recommended as the fastest way to increase income, with experts suggesting a job change every 2 to 3 years.

Having 6 months to 1 year of emergency expenses is advised before quitting a job.

The video creator also asks for the audience's thoughts on sticking with a 40-hour work week and their plans for staying or quitting their current job.