“The American Dream Is Dead”: Author Breaks Down ‘The Great Resignation’

About 4.3 million Americans left their jobs behind in August. “Quits”, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, are rising in almost every industry, especially in retail, food services, and hospitality.

We are living in what labor economist Lawrence Katz calls “a once-in-a-generation ‘take this job and shove it’ moment.”

Katz says there’s no perfect way of measuring what’s driving it but “what we do see is a lot of people asking about getting remote work, for example, and a lot of people questioning low-wage, high-turnover situations, and employers starting to respond, but pretty slowly relative to the expectations of workers.”

And while the economist thinks we still can’t know if it’s temporary or not, New York Times bestselling author, Kurt Eichenwald, believes it’s been long in the making.

In August, the number of workers who quit their job in a single month broke the all-time U.S. record

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The Great Resignation is, in fact, great

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In a recent Twitter thread, Eichenwald theorized that younger generations no longer have any faith in the idea of “the American dream” because for so many, it’s become too far out of reach.